Body Work Page 4

  “I will if I have to. But, Vic, it’s almost four hundred a week in tips I’m getting there, pretty much tax-free. And my day job, I don’t know how much longer they’ll keep me on. Would you-I know it’s a lot to ask-but could you-”

  “What, shoot him?” I asked when she broke off.

  That made her laugh.

  “If you could do it and not get caught, I’d be your slave for life! No, but could you check him out, do you think, see who he is, see if there’s something you could do to make him stop?”

  “Do you have his name?” I asked.

  “Olympia calls him Rodney. I’m not sure what his last name is-Stranger-Danger, maybe.” She scrolled through her cell phone and held it out to me. “This is what he looks like.”

  She’d taken his picture from above, when she was passing his table. It wasn’t a good likeness, but it didn’t surprise me to see it was the guy I’d pegged as an off-duty cop. Petra wasn’t working tonight, but she said she’d be at the club the next night. I promised to stop in, although it bugged me that my cousin insisted on staying on at the joint.

  Petra zipped up her ski jacket, her face brighter now that she’d unburdened herself and gotten a promise of help. Even her hair, matted down by her ear warmer, seemed to be springing up.

  “Vic-don’t tell Uncle Sal, okay? He’s already on me about the club being so degenerate and all, and-”

  “Sweet Pea, I’m not so sure he’s wrong. If I see coke or ecstasy or some damned thing passing between Olympia and Mr. Stranger-Danger, you are quitting on the spot, you hear?”

  “Sure, Vic, I promise.” She held up three fingers in the Girl Scout salute and danced out the door.

  I finished my number crunching for Ajax Insurance. The claims manager seemed to have the intelligence of an eggplant. He should have been able to generate the report himself, but a hundred fifty an hour-I wouldn’t complain.

  5 What on Earth Is Going On?

  I returned to the club the following night. The Body Artist was appearing, and the joint was alive, practically shaking with twenty- and thirtysomethings. Rodney was there, and so were Chad and his friends. I didn’t see Nadia.

  I took a table near the back, but Olympia swept over as I was pulling out a chair at one of the rear tables. Tonight she was wearing a black sweater with a deep cleavage over black velvet pants; her touch of white was a corsage of feathers that brushed the swell of her breasts.

  “That table’s reserved, Warshawski. I don’t have a free seat in the house. You’ll have to stand.”

  “Not a problem, Olympia.”

  I got up and moved to the railing that created a kind of foyer between the audience space and the club entrance. I wasn’t going to give her an excuse to throw me out by losing my temper.

  “And there’s a twenty-dollar cover on the night the Body Artist appears. All drinks are six dollars, more for name brands.”

  I stuck a hand inside my sweater and pretended to be fumbling with my bra. “Want the money now?”

  She frowned. “A private eye is bad for business, Warshawski. If you interrupt the show or harass the Artist, I’ll see that you’re thrown out.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s bad for business, Ms. Koilada: you dealing drugs, or laundering money, or whatever you and Rodney are up to. I want you to know that my cousin Petra’s safety is very important to me.”

  She flicked her eyes across the room again. “Petra is safe here. No one will hurt her. She’s popular with my customers and with the staff. She has the kind of good-natured high spirits that make a server popular. Some of our customers may get overenthusiastic in their reaction to her, but she seems levelheaded. I’d be surprised to know she was blowing up something trivial into something major.”

  “Me, too. That’s why I took her reaction seriously. Olympia, even if I’m not a good-natured, high-spirited kind of gal, you could do worse than trust me with your problems. If this guy Rodney is posing a threat-”

  “Maybe being a detective makes you think you can pry into people’s affairs, whether they want it or not, but my club is my business, not yours.”

  “Who is Rodney?” I asked. “Is he a cop?”

  “Are you deaf? I told you to mind your own business.”

  She turned on her heel. The club needed too much supervising on a packed night like tonight for her to waste more time arguing with me.

  I didn’t see her stop to talk to Rodney, but she must have because he got up from his table and came over to me.

  “Girlie, you put one foot wrong here, and I’ll personally stuff your body in a snowbank.”

  “‘Girlie’? You sound like a bad movie script, Rodney.”

  His lips curved into something like a sneer. “Maybe, but you could look like part of a bad movie yourself if you try to mess with me. Got it?”

  I leaned against the railing and yawned. “Go put on a sheet and dance around a cross if you want to scare people. That how you got Olympia so rattled?”

  He pulled his hand back as if he were going to hit me but thought better of it in the nick of time.

  “No one messes with me, girlie. Not you, and not that smart-mouthed cousin of yours, either.”

  “People who mess with me or my cousin tend to spend a lot of years in Stateville, Rodney, when they aren’t picking themselves out of gutters-or snowbanks. Ask around, anyone will tell you the same. Now, go back to your chair. The band is packing up, the Artist will be onstage soon, and the rest of the audience will be peevish if you block their view.”

  His face scrunched together in ugly lines like a thwarted toddler’s. He flipped his coat open so I could see the outsize gun in his shoulder holster, but I pretended to be looking at the stage.

  He finally hissed, “Just watch yourself, girlie,” and swaggered back to his seat a few seconds before the houselights went down.

  I made a face in the dark. Maybe I hadn’t changed so much from those days of trailing around South Chicago with Boom-Boom, looking for fights.

  The lights came back up, and the routine followed its usual course, with the Artist appearing magically on her stool. The audience reacted in their usual way, gasping with amazement at the intricacy of the work on the plasma screens, shifting nervously with sexual excitement at the more graphic imagery.

  Rodney, at his central table, was staring moodily at his sixth bottle of beer. He didn’t seem to be in the mood to paint tonight. Nadia had appeared without my noticing, perhaps when the lights were down, or maybe when Rodney was threatening me. She was at a table near the front, twirling her hair around her fingers. She didn’t wait, as she had the first time I’d seen her, for the rest of the room to paint. I studied Chad while Nadia painted, but he seemed to have himself under control. Maybe he was getting used to her. Or maybe his friends had persuaded him to stay calm. He seemed to be more intent on Nadia’s drawings than on Nadia herself-he was watching the screens onstage where the webcams were broadcasting her work.

  Again, she was creating her intricate design. I’d remembered them as pink hats, but they were pink-and-gray scrolls. When she finished covering the Artist’s back with them, she began drawing a woman’s face, a beautiful young woman with dark curly hair, and then she took a palette knife and slashed it.

  I looked over at Chad. He was sweating, and his tattooed arms were shaking. His buddies were holding him, but he didn’t make any effort to get out of his chair.

  As soon as Nadia had finished, she went back to her table and gathered her coat and backpack from the floor. She skirted the back of the stage and disappeared. Chad suddenly broke away from his friends and followed her.

  Most of the club, including the waitstaff, was focused on the Artist, who was stretching and preening to make Nadia’s work as visible as possible. Those who saw Chad might have assumed he was heading for the men’s room, since the toilets were along a narrow corridor that also led backstage. I pushed my way through the crowd at the back as fast as I could.

  A young man in a worn Army
windbreaker hurried after me. He’d been with Chad at their table. His face, pitted and craggy despite his youth, was unmistakable. We got backstage just in time to see the alley door shut behind Chad.

  “Man! Don’t be doing something stupid now.”

  The guy seemed to be talking to himself more than me, but we sprinted together to the door.

  So many cars filled the area that we couldn’t see Chad or Nadia at first, but we heard Chad shouting, “Why are you doing this? Who sent you here?” as we slipped and stumbled along the icy gravel of the parking lot toward his voice.

  Chad, under one of the streetlamps, was standing over Nadia. He wasn’t touching her, but he was leaning down so his face was close to hers. He’d left his coat in the bar, and the lamp picked up the tattoos along his bare forearms. He was holding a black object, something that looked like an outsize oven mitt, under her face. Even in her bulky parka, Nadia looked frail next to him.

  We reached them in time to hear Nadia say, “Who sent you? Are you spying on me?” while Chad was yelling, “Don’t pretend you don’t know what this is! Why are you doing this to me?”

  Chad’s friend sprinted to his side and wrapped an arm across his neck, affection and restraint in one gesture. “You don’t want to be out here in the cold, man. Come on. Let’s go back inside, warm up, get another beer.”

  I pulled Nadia away, leading her across the parking lot toward Lake Street. “Nadia, what’s going on here? Why is Chad so upset by your painting?”

  “Who are you?” She blinked at me.

  “My name’s V. I. Warshawski. I’m a private investigator, and if there’s something-”

  “A detective? Go to hell!” She wrenched free of my hand. “I’m sick and tired of people spying on me. Tell them that!”

  “Tell who that? I’m not spying on you. I just want to know-”

  “I’ve seen you in the club. I know what you’re doing there. No one is going to stop me from painting-”

  “I don’t want to stop you. Please, Nadia, can we talk where it’s warmer? It’s brutal out here.”

  “We can’t talk at all. If you come near me again, I’ll… I’ll spray pepper in your eyes.”

  She broke away from me, stomped down Lake Street to the L stop. I watched as she climbed up to the platform, puzzled by the whole exchange. Chad’s and Nadia’s accusations of spy versus spy made them seem like a married couple in the middle of a bad divorce. But what was the black oblong Chad had held under her nose?

  When I returned to the club, the Body Artist was finishing her act. No one had painted over Nadia’s work, but the Artist’s front and arms were covered with crude drawings, stripes, a tic-tac-toe board, and a few sunflowers.

  “All of you are amazing, amazing artists. Feel good about who you are in the world, how creative you are, and come see your work on my website, at embodiedart.com. Remember, it’s a cold, cruel world out there, but art can keep you warm even if it can’t keep you safe.”

  She held up her hands in a peace sign, and left the stage. Olympia kept the images running on the screens while she turned canned music back on, and the audience relaxed into explosions of laughter. The release of sexual tension made everyone order drinks, and my cousin and the rest of the waitstaff were running around madly for the next twenty minutes.

  I’d had enough of everyone at Club Gouge, but I went back to the Body Artist’s dressing room thinking I should at least talk to her. Olympia’s bouncer was standing outside her door.

  “Sorry, but she doesn’t want to be disturbed after her performance. It takes a long time for her to clean up, and she’s exhausted.”

  “I know just how she feels.”

  I smiled and ducked under his arm and was in the dressing room before he could grab me. He followed me as the Artist started squawking in outrage.

  I’d wondered if she wanted privacy to do drugs after her act, but she was, in fact, putting some kind of paint-removing cream on her arms and legs, then wiping it off with hand towels. The floor around her was littered with paint-smeared towels. I wondered if she was a big enough star that someone cleaned up after her or if she had to do her own laundry.

  “Ms. Artist, did you tell Nadia I was in the club to spy on her?”

  The Artist kept wiping herself off with towels and refused to say anything, but her flat, almost transparent eyes studied me in the mirror.

  “She’s sure she’s being spied on,” I said. “Is she paranoid or is someone really after her?”

  “You’d have to ask her, wouldn’t you?” the Artist said.

  “Nadia waits in here, doesn’t she, while the band plays? She gets special treatment from you, and that annoys Olympia. But it makes me think she’s told you why she’s so nervous. Are she and Chad in the middle of a bad divorce?”

  The Artist smiled for the first time. With contempt, not good humor.

  “I’m not going to help you build a dossier on anyone,” she said. “Now it’s time for you to leave. Unless you want to clean my cunt for me.”

  She used the shocking word deliberately, as if to goad me into blushing or flinching. I looked at her steadily until she bit her lips in discomfort and turned away.

  “Mark, get her out of here. Or call the cops.”

  Mark took my shoulder. “You heard her. Don’t make me break your arm or something.”

  “Or your hand,” I said, “or the mirrors in here. I’m not going to fight you, Mark, at least not tonight.”

  I let him escort me out of the room, feeling grumpy with everyone including myself. I had been an ineffectual cousin with Petra and a lousy detective. I felt even worse the following night. That was when Nadia was murdered. That was when I was up past two a.m. talking with Terry Finchley and his team.

  6 Blood, Blood, Blood

  By the time I finally finished talking to Terry Finchley, to lesser cops, saw my cousin safely into her Pathfinder, and argued with Olympia, it was almost three. None of us got much out of our night together.

  I learned from Finchley that Nadia’s last name was Guaman. I learned she had been a graphic designer-hence, her skill with the paintbrush-and that she had turned twenty-eight this past fall. I learned that she had died from the massive bleeding caused by two bullets entering her chest, and that she had been shot at a range of about fifteen feet-the distance from the back door of the club to the alley, where the shooters had waited.

  While I was talking to Terry, one of his team came over with a report about Chad and his friends. No one could provide a last name for any of them, but Finchley took their descriptions and put out an alert. They hadn’t been in the club tonight, but that didn’t mean Chad hadn’t been lying in wait for Nadia.

  When Terry asked me what I knew about Chad and his friends, I only shrugged. I don’t know why I didn’t tell him about the heated exchange I’d heard between Chad and Nadia the previous night. Maybe it was Nadia’s vulnerability, or the fact that I’d cradled her in my arms as she died. Or the discomfort I’d felt when she accused me of spying on her. She thought someone was after her, and I’d thought she might be paranoid. Now she was dead. I didn’t feel like discussing it with the police.

  I told Finchley most of the rest of what I knew, including finding the glass in the Body Artist’s paintbrush. He demanded that I retrieve it from the Cheviot labs, but he also revealed that he’d been able to pry the Body Artist’s name out of her.

  “Karen Buckley. Not a very jazzy name for a stripper. Maybe that’s why she wouldn’t let anyone around here know it,” Finchley added.

  “She’s not a stripper,” I said. “She’s an artist, and a fine one.”

  “A woman who takes off her clothes on a stage for men to drool over is a stripper, in my book.”

  “Bobby’s right,” I said. “You’ve been breathing the rare air on South Michigan way too long. You need to buy yourself a new book. What about this guy Rodney? You find anything out about him?”

  “What guy Rodney?” Finchley demanded.

&nb
sp; “Didn’t anyone here mention him? Big guy with a gut, looks like an off-duty cop, with a big old nine-millimeter under his jacket. It looked like an HK when he shoved his armpit in my face.”

  “And why did he do that, Vic?” Finchley said. “You weren’t in his face, by any chance, were you?”

  “I was telling him to stop sticking his hand into my cousin’s pants when she’s waiting tables. Does that constitute being in his face to you? And whether it does or not, does that mean he gets to wave a gun at me?”

  Finchley pressed his lips together. He’s a good cop, and a good detective, but he’s close to a police sergeant I used to date. He still holds it against me that Conrad Rawlings got shot while he was involved with me. The human heart, or thyroid gland, or whatever it is that controls our emotions, is too tangled for me to understand. Conrad survived, but our affair didn’t, and I’ve never been sure which the Finch blames me for more-the breakup or the shooting.

  Finchley sent an underling to fetch Olympia to the small stage, where the police were conducting interrogations. She looked briefly frightened, or maybe angry, when he asked her about Rodney, but then gave him her brightest smile and said, “I’m sure I know who Vic means. He’s a regular, he loves Karen’s show, but-are you sure his name is Rodney, Vic? I thought it might be Roger, or Sydney.”

  I gasped at the brazenness of her lies, but before I could speak, Finchley was asking if she had had any complaints from her staff or from other customers.

  “I gave one of Vic’s cousins a job here, and Vic is a mite overprotective, maybe jumps too fast to conclusions. If Petra can’t handle a little good-natured kidding with the customers, then I’m afraid she shouldn’t work in a club.”

  “Is that why you comp his drinks, Olympia?” I asked. “To encourage the good-natured kidding? And why you offered Petra a bonus if she’d overlook His Gropiness?”

  Olympia’s eyes seemed to glitter, but that might just have been the bright lights on the stage. “Your cousin needs to get a handle on her imagination. I don’t comp drinks here. I know she’s young, but this is a bad economy. I can take my pick of waitstaff-I don’t need Petra Warshawski.”