Body Work

by Sara Paretsky

  “Who are you?” he asked. “Miss Nadia isn’t at home, and she doesn’t live with anyone.”

  “I’m a detective. You know Miss Nadia is dead-her family buried her yesterday. I want to look for evidence in her apartment.”

  He shook his head. “You’re too late. Someone else was in here yesterday, and they said the same thing, that they were detectives looking for evidence. I saw them going in, and when I asked them for identification, they showed me their guns instead.”

  “Did you call 911?”

  “Why, when everyone knows the police themselves are operating burglary rings in this neighborhood? And you? Are you also a detective whose identification is a gun?”

  I fished my wallet out of my briefcase and showed him the laminated copy of my PI license. “I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to uncover the reason for Miss Nadia’s murder.”

  “They made an arrest. I saw it was some lovers’ quarrel.”

  “They make wrongful arrests every day,” I said.

  The neighbor nodded, and started an involved story about his sister’s second son. I went into Nadia’s place and found a light switch. The neighbor, still talking, followed me in, but he fell silent when he saw the chaos created by yesterday’s “detectives.” Whoever had been searching, whatever they’d been looking for, they’d done a thorough job of tossing books from shelves and DVDs from their cases.

  Like every artist I’ve known, Nadia covered her walls with pictures, masks, unusual found objects. Most of these had been flung to the floor, the hooks and the dust outlines on the walls showing where they’d once hung.

  “Have you been in here before?” I asked the neighbor.

  “I didn’t take anything,” he said. “You can’t accuse me of that.”

  I looked at him closely. “So you have been in here. That was you in here yesterday, not people pretending to be detectives.”

  “That isn’t true!” he cried. “They really came. I only wondered why. And they hadn’t locked the door when they left.”

  “So you locked up behind them? How did you have a key to Ms. Guaman’s dead bolt?”

  “She gave it to me. In case there was an emergency. Or to feed her cat when she was out of town.”

  I had a hard time picturing the shy, intense Nadia with a life that took her out of town. Although maybe she’d gone around the country hunting for her dead sister’s lovers. People do odd things when they’re gripped by an obsession.

  I walked through the apartment’s three rooms. In the bedroom, I found the one piece of art left on the walls: a crucifix, where the head of Jesus had been replaced by the head of a girl taken from an old doll. The hair had been pulled from the doll’s head and wrapped around the hands of the crucified Christ. The image was profoundly disturbing, not what I would want to wake to.

  I realized there were no signs of a cat, no litter box, no food or water dishes. “Where is the cat?”

  “In my home. When I learned Miss Nadia was dead, I took in the cat. She called it Ixcuina, after some old goddess. A strange name for an animal, but it is a strange animal.”

  I looked from the dismantled apartment to his flushed face. I didn’t believe that he hadn’t been here yesterday, but I also didn’t think he would have destroyed the apartment if he’d been inside surreptitiously.

  “So, Mr.-?”

  “Urbanke,” he muttered, defensive.

  “So, Mr. Urbanke, as a frequent visitor to Ms. Guaman’s, can you tell me what yesterday’s fake detectives might have taken with them? Can you tell if any of her art is missing?”

  He looked around slowly but shook his head. “It-I can’t tell, with everything on the floor like this. Maybe if I put the pictures back on the wall…”

  We spent the next hour or so matching artwork to dim outlines. We worked our way through the apartment’s three rooms, but at the end, even though there were still some gaps on the walls, Urbanke couldn’t tell what was gone.

  “Besides,” he added, “she was always bringing in something new, taking down something she was tired of. It was like a museum, her private museum, where the exhibits were always changing. The one thing I don’t see is her computer. She kept it here.”

  He pointed at a worktable in the corner of the apartment’s big front room. The table was built for artists or drafters; one half could be lifted up and down at different angles, depending on how the person liked to work, while the other half remained flat. The flat space, Nadia’s office worktop, held bills and a scattered pile of sketches. The charger for the computer was still plugged into the wall, but of the computer itself there was no trace.

  Urbanke stood next to me looking through Nadia’s sketches. “Who knows if this artwork is valuable. Those detectives didn’t take it, but her computer, definitely you could sell it for drugs.”

  We walked out together. I left Mr. Urbanke to lock Nadia’s door since he had a key, no matter how he’d gotten hold of it. I wanted to know what he’d taken besides the cat Ixcuina. I wondered, too, why Lazar and Cristina Guaman hadn’t come, but maybe collecting their daughter’s belongings was too much for them right now. In the entryway, I stopped to look at the mailboxes. Urbanke’s first name was Julian.

  I bumped across the slush-packed roads to my office. My leasemate and I contribute to a service that shovels the walks on our street, along with the parking area that we share with the other two buildings abutting it. I thankfully abandoned my car in the small lot and went into my office to catch up with my messages.

  Now I felt bewildered, almost split in half, by the two lives I was looking at. Did Chad Vishneski and Nadia Guaman have anything at all in common? Had her killer trashed her apartment? And if her killer wasn’t Chad, why was he being brought into her story at all?

  All I could do was plod forward with what little I had to go on. The beer cans, pillowcase, and guns I’d collected from Mona Vishneski’s were still in my car, and I had Chad’s girlie magazines in my briefcase.

  I had taken these things yesterday for no good reason except trying to put on a show for the client and his ex-wife-the ghost of Sherlock Holmes dictates that the detective sees something in the detritus of everyday life overlooked by ordinary mortals.

  I packed up the guns and the empties and pillowcase and called a messenger to carry them to Cheviot labs. “There may be nothing here,” I wrote in my cover letter, “but please check to see whether anything besides beer was in these cans. And see if you can trace the purchase history on these guns.”

  I didn’t include the magazines-I didn’t think I needed a comparative analysis of Arabic and British porn directed at U.S. servicemen. I put them into the Vishneski case file, to keep until the matter was resolved.

  Once the messenger had left, I leaned back in my desk chair and studied my mother’s engraving of the Uffizi. Someone had gone through Nadia Guaman’s apartment. I didn’t trust her neighbor; he had Nadia’s keys, he’d helped himself to her cat. But he hadn’t needed to point out that her computer was missing. And he could have searched her place at his leisure, no need to turn it upside down. It was possible that she’d stiffed advances from him and that he’d murdered her himself and then trashed her apartment to finish off his fury-but even that meant Chad Vishneski wasn’t the killer.

  The story was too complicated for me to follow without a chart. I drew one up on a big piece of newsprint and taped it to my wall. Rodney, the thug who had the run of Club Gouge, I needed his last name. I needed to know who he was, what hold he had on Olympia.

  Then there were all the murky sleeping arrangements among the Body Artist, Nadia’s dead sister, Olympia, and the two women I’d met last night, Rivka and Vesta, whose last names I’d also need to get. Vesta, a black belt, had once been one of Karen Buckley’s lovers. When we’d spoken last night, she’d seemed calm, dispassionate even, in discussing the Body Artist. It was hard to believe she might have killed Nadia in a jealous frenzy.

  Besides, according to the Artist, there’d
been nothing in her relations with Nadia to make anyone jealous. I didn’t believe much of what Karen Buckley said, but her account of Nadia’s advances and retreats had a ring of truth to it.

  The younger woman, Rivka, was a different story. She didn’t have much skin between her feelings and the world. Judging by last night’s behavior, she was jealous of everyone who captured the Artist’s attention. She could have believed there was more between Nadia and the Artist than ever really took place. And what about Alexandra? I needed more information about her, that was clear. If Nadia had known about the Artist’s private life, would the youngest sister, Clara, have known as well? Or would the two older girls have protected the baby of the family? I toyed with a fantasy in which the Guamans murdered their daughter so that her sexuality would remain a deeply buried secret.

  Speculation is the detective’s enemy. Facts. I needed facts about the Guamans and about the Body Artist.

  I tried to put together a list of questions about the Artist. Vesta and Rivka believed she’d run away from home as a teen. Maybe she’d changed her name to protect herself from a violent father/brother/lover. I looked for legal name changes to Karen Buckley during the past decade but drew another blank.

  She seemed to think that her performances gave her power: You can get this close, as close as my skin, but you can’t get inside me. I control the boundaries. I imagined standing naked in front of an audience, and my skin crawled. It felt like a horrible kind of exposure. I flung my pen down. I couldn’t find anything out about Karen’s past, so I needed to concentrate on what I knew about her in the present.

  Her relationship with Olympia, who had financial woes, that bore more exploration. Somehow, Olympia had established a modicum of control over the Body Artist. And the Artist was a woman who definitely liked to be in control of her relationships.

  The biggest questions had to do with the outbursts Nadia, or Nadia’s paintings, had provoked in Chad Vishneski. And neither the Artist nor Nadia’s family was giving me any insight into what that was about. Maybe Chad had written his buddies or his parents explaining why Nadia’s paintings had gotten so deeply under his skin.

  I called the client. John Vishneski was in the Mercurio office on Huron going over drawings; no one was out on a building in this weather, of course. I asked if Chad had said anything to him about Nadia or the Body Artist.

  “I never heard of those two women until they came and arrested Chad. I guess he thought the idea of a club like that would shock me, or disgust me. Kids have such funny ideas about parents, don’t they? Like, we don’t have basic human feelings or needs or something. I expect I was the same way about my old man.”

  I thought of my own mother, how painful I’d found it to think she might have the sexual impulses common to us all. Parents aren’t supposed to operate in the world of desire. Perhaps that’s the only way children can grow up feeling safe.

  “What did Chad do for e-mail? His phone? A computer?”

  “Computer, I guess. His phone-he’s like all the kids his age-mostly he texts. He has a Lenovo ThinkPad; I bought it for him when he first shipped out. He took it all over Iraq with him. He even kept a blog, the way so many folks do these days.”

  “The computer isn’t at your wife’s place… your ex-wife’s. Do you have it?”

  I knew the answer would be no before he gave it. Mona hadn’t imagined seeing her son’s cell phone; someone had been in the apartment ahead of us the previous afternoon. Someone had helped themselves to Chad’s phone and his laptop.

  I hung up. I was starting to feel as if I were in one of those dreams where you are running from some menace you can’t see and the whole time the menace is shutting every door you turn to. Someone with a lot of organizational talent was running faster than me, cutting in ahead of me at every exit.

  I looked at my hands. “I am a street fighter,” I said. “No one can stop me.” Trouble was, I didn’t really believe it.

  16 Nada About Nadia

  I had to go downtown for a meeting, a routine inquiry where I’d been able to do all the work without any shadowy menaces blocking my path. I pulled my documents together, put on some makeup and my dressy boots, and went back out into the bracing winter air. The snow had stopped after a mere four inches-nothing, really, to a third-degree street fighter.

  As I rode the L down to the Loop, I knew I needed to talk to the Guamans. I’d only been on the case for two days, but it had been five days since Nadia had died. It was strange that they hadn’t sought me out, the woman who’d been with their daughter when she died. I decided to go over to Pilsen to try to speak with Cristina Guaman at the hardware store where LifeStory told me she worked.

  As soon as my Loop meeting ended, I took the L west and south to Damen and Cermak and walked the three blocks to the hardware store (¡Sopladores de nieve! ¡Palas! ¡Todo para el invierno! ¡Se habla inglés!).

  The placard in the window had advertised “Everything for Winter,” but the store really had everything period. Snow shovels, ice melt, mittens, space heaters, fans, kitchen utensils, TVs, microwaves, coloring books. It was a small space, but not only was every surface covered, long hooks dangling from the ceiling held dried tomatoes and garlic, DVDs, dog collars, trusses.

  The place wasn’t well lit, and I didn’t see Cristina Guaman at first, but after stumbling against a rack full of hard hats I found her near the back at a computer. Someone was talking to her in Spanish, but the conversation was apparently desultory because Cristina only nodded her head while she typed.

  I stood next to the woman who was speaking to her, waiting for a lull, but the woman saw I was a stranger, perhaps a customer, and asked in Spanish if I needed help.

  “I need a word with Ms. Guaman,” I said, hoping she really did know English. My Spanish is pretty rudimentary.

  The woman moved away from the counter, and Cristina Guaman stopped typing to look at me. “Yes?” she said. “What do you need?”

  I pulled one of my cards out of my bag.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you at work, Ms. Guaman, but I’m the woman who was with your daughter when she died. Is there a place where we could talk?”

  “We can talk here.”

  She folded her hands on top of the keyboard, not the gesture of a woman at ease, but to create a barrier between herself and me.

  “I don’t want to broadcast your family’s business to the whole store. Isn’t there someplace private?”

  “My family has no business that the whole world cannot attend to. Are you the owner of that terrible place, that club where women take off their clothes so men can draw nasty pictures on their bodies?”

  I wondered if family ties would make her unbend, so I explained my role as Petra’s cousin, my desire to protect her, my observation of Nadia and Nadia’s anguish or anger. “She kept drawing a face, the face of a beautiful young woman with short curly hair, and then she would slash a line through it. I’m wondering if that might have been her sister.”

  “Clara’s hair is long and it is almost blond.” Cristina Guaman’s eyes were wary.

  “Alexandra. Do you have a photograph of her? It was her name Nadia was calling as she died.”

  At that, Cristina sucked in a breath. “Alexandra has been dead a long time. Nadia couldn’t let her rest in peace.”

  “So she was painting Alexandra’s face?”

  “I have no desire to know what pictures Nadia might be painting on a woman’s body. She knew how strongly I felt-her father, too-about her going to that place.”

  “When did you last talk to her?”

  Cristina Guaman looked around to see if anyone was in earshot. “Many months went by. Nadia was angry, always, for the last two years, so angry she would not speak to her father or me. My heart is broken at her death, but she cut herself away from her family. She moved into that apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, she stayed away from mass. Even though I knew she would pay no attention to my words, I had to call her when she started making a spectacle
of herself in that degenerate club.”

  I asked how she had learned Nadia was painting on the Body Artist, but of course people had been using their phones to take video footage of the performances. These inevitably ended up skipping around the World Wide Web, where more than one neighbor had shown them to the Guamans.

  “The picture was poor, the light was bad, but everyone could see that woman sitting there naked, showing off her breasts, and people could easily see Nadia’s face. Can you imagine how you would feel when your daughter has flaunted herself in public for the whole world to see? I had to call her. I had to try to tell her how very worried I was to see her in such a corrupt place.”

  “And was it Alexandra’s face she was painting?”

  Cristina’s nose twitched as if she were smelling something bad. “It was enough to see Nadia together with a naked woman. If she was involving her sainted sister, then I am thankful to God that I was spared that sight.”

  “How did Alexandra die?”

  Cristina backed away from me. “In a painful, hard way that I prefer not to discuss.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend, a girlfriend, anyone I could talk to?”

  “What are you trying to ask?” Cristina hissed.

  So she knew her daughter had women as lovers. Alexandra wouldn’t come out of the closet for fear her mother would learn, and her mother had known all along. Had Alexandra committed suicide because of the pressure? Had Nadia known and moved out after fighting with her mother over Allie’s sexuality?

  I couldn’t think of any good way to ask these questions, so I asked in a bad way. “Who told you that Alexandra was sleeping with women?”

  Cristina gasped. “If you came here to slander my saint, my angel, I will call the police. Leave!”

  “I’m not trying to upset you, Ms. Guaman, just to figure out who killed your beloved daughter Nadia.”