Body Work (30 page)

Petra followed me back into the kitchen and solemnly inspected the sink, where blood had pooled around jagged glass fragments. I found a roll of aluminum foil and tore off enough wide pieces to cover the hole in the window. In this weather, the radiator would freeze and burst, and why should P & E Loder, who occupied the ground floor, suffer.

We followed the blood to a bathroom, which lay just beyond the kitchen. Karen, or Frannie, or whoever, had cleaned herself in the shower; a damp towel and the bathmat were both stained reddish brown.

A giant jar of makeup remover and a bag of cotton balls stood on a glass shelf over the sink, but I didn’t see a toothbrush or a comb. She had left a tube of shampoo and a bottle of liquid soap in the shower, but no body lotion or moisturizer.

I began to look around, for any evidence that pointed to who Karen or Frannie knew, people she trusted enough that she might flee to them.

It was the barest dwelling I’d seen in a long time. The kitchen held a table and a chair, a coffeemaker and two cups and plates. I looked in the cupboards and found a few odds and ends, plastic salt and pepper shakers, a freezer-to-microwave dish, but no food except a half-empty box of cereal.

The room with the exercise balls didn’t hold anything else, no furniture or boxes, not even a philodendron on the windowsill. In the front room, which faced the street, the windows were so heavily curtained that no outside light came in. When I’d groped my way to a light switch, I found myself face-to-face with dark-haired woman in a navy coat. Petra gasped. I reached for my gun—and realized I was about to shoot my own reflection. The walls were lined with mirrors.

“Vic, this is totally creepy! What does she do in here?”

I waited for my heartbeat to steady before I answered. “I guess it’s the studio where she practices her art. See—she’s got a set of paints, a set of stencils. This looks like part of Nadia’s memorial.”

I held up a piece of the angel’s wing, which had instructions on the colors she wanted to use.

“She must carry her cameras to the club and back,” Petra said. “She doesn’t have a computer here, either.”

Paints, photographs, palette knives, and several slitter blades were tidily arranged on a plastic cart. A black drop cloth in the middle of the floor had dried paint on it, but the rest of the room was clean. Besides the cart, the only thing in the room that might be considered as a kind of furnishing was a DVD player, with a handful of discs scattered around it. When I knelt to inspect them, Petra wandered into the bedroom.

A minute or so later, she called out to me, “Oh my God, Vic, this is
so
amazing!”

I scooped the discs into my bag and went in to join her. Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom was almost unfurnished: a futon, with the covers tidily arranged, a narrow chest with three drawers, and a bedside stand holding a clock and a book, which was what had grabbed my cousin’s attention.

Called (
Re)Making the Female Body,
the cover showed a naked anorectic woman with multiple piercings and even, as I saw when I looked closer, stabbings. The material inside was just as disturbing, ranging from Hannah Wilke’s efforts to use her body as a canvas for responding to her cancer, to Lucia Balinoff, who slashed herself onstage. Along the way were women who used plastic surgery to add animal features to their faces or bodies, women who pierced their lips and hung fetishes from them.

“What kind of person would watch a woman cut herself open onstage?” Petra asked.

“No one I know, I hope! Maybe the same person who’d go to a dog-fight or bear-baiting.” I handed the book back to her. “I have to confess, it makes me queasy.”

“The slashing, for sure,” Petra said. “But the animal surgery—it’s, like, being free to decide about your own body. How it looks, I mean. And how you want people to react. Do you know what it’s like to be me? Guys always saying, ‘How’s the air up there,’ and then they laugh like they’ve made the funniest joke anyone ever heard. And being blond—”

“It’s a burden, but you carry it well,” I suggested.

“See? That’s just it! Even you, mega-feminist, you’re laughing at me because I’m young and blond. If I put one of these horns on my head, people would think twice before they treated me like I have the brain of a two-year-old.” She flipped through the pages to a picture of a woman who’d had something resembling a rhino horn grafted onto her forehead.

I squeezed her shoulder. “Petra, I apologize, you’re right. If I promise to take you seriously, will you promise not to mutilate your face?”

“It’d be worth it just to see Uncle Sal’s expression, you know. Or when Daddy is on trial, it could freak out the jury, confuse them into acquitting him.” She bit her lip and looked determinedly through the book. “I don’t see anything about Karen in here, but you know, her stuff looks pretty tame compared to this.”

Petra was right. It made me wonder about the slitter blades in the living room. Had Karen decided she had to up the stakes in her act so she could grab more attention? A woman with a hidden identity and a thirst for attention. Strange combo. Unstable combo.

“She’s gone, don’t you think?” I said to my cousin. “No toothbrush, and although she’s obsessionally tidy, the drawers are open in here—she snatched socks and underwear, and whatever else she needed, on the fly. I’m guessing she took the discs she wanted and left the others thrown every which way. And there isn’t a piece of paper in the place. If she owns a bank card or any document with a name or a picture on it, she’s taken them with her.”

“To where?” Petra asked.

“I’m hoping she’ll go to her father. I’m going to drive up to Roehampton after we get back to the office and see if I can find him.”

“All that blood, you don’t think she got shot, do you?”

“I think it was from coming through the window. She didn’t have her jeans on when she left the club—maybe she was too rattled to put them on before diving into the kitchen. But we’ll check with hospitals, see if she might have gone in for an expert patch-up.” I grinned at Petra. “I’m so glad to have my high-rise assistant to off-load these tasks to. You’re going to have a fun afternoon on the phone.”

We walked back to the L stop. The snow wasn’t heavy, but we could see the traffic on the Kennedy going about ten miles an hour. Petra wasn’t the only one with a fun afternoon in front of her: I was going to have a great time on the Kennedy myself.

“I don’t get it,” Petra said as we got on the train. “If Frannie Pindero knew Anton Kystarnik, why didn’t she say something last night when those guys were beating her up?”

“Hard to say without talking to her. The other big question is, if Kystarnik isn’t blocking her website, who is? You any use as a hacker?” I asked my cousin.

“Sheesh, Vic, I’m not a geek!”

“You can be a fashionista and still know how to hack,” I objected. “What about your friends or lovers? Did you completely waste your time in college?”

She pulled a face. “You’re the crime expert. Don’t you know anyone?”

“Tim Radke,” I finally said. “He told me he was a systems something in the Army but hasn’t been able to find civilian work using his training—right now, he’s installing consumer electronics.”

I called his cell phone and asked if he’d be interested in a freelance systems job, something that might help prove Chad’s innocence.

He was out in the western suburbs again today, but he said he could make it to my office by eight-thirty or so.

31

Searching for an Artist

A
t my office, I left Petra with a list of five or six hundred Chicago-area hospitals and picked up my car for the drive to Roehampton. It was after five p.m. when I got to the little coffee bar I’d visited the previous week. The couple behind the counter were cleaning their machines while a trio of women sat slumped at a table, drinking coffee. Their clothes and general fatigue suggested they were maids warming themselves before their long bus ride home. The two baristas were exhausted, too, but tried to pretend pleasure at seeing a customer.

“I don’t need anything,” I said, “and I won’t keep you from locking up. I was up here last week, and a guy named Clive was talking about Steve Pindero and his daughter, Frannie. I need to find Steve Pindero. If you don’t know him, maybe you can tell me how to reach Clive.”

The baristas looked at each other and slowly shook their heads.

“I remember you,” the male barista said. “You were asking about Melanie Kystarnik. We can’t share information about our customers with you.”

I shut my eyes and thought for a longish moment: it was time to put some cards on the table.

“Everyone is tired and wants to go home after a hard day’s work,” I said. “Including me. My hard day’s work yesterday ended at three this morning after I fought a bunch of thugs who were beating up two women in a nightclub. It began again four hours later with a call from a terrified teenager whose family is being harassed by these same thugs.”

The three maids were looking alert. Someone else’s troubles, danger faced by a remote party, good news all the way round. The young man behind the counter kept rubbing a cloth over the steaming spout for the big cappuccino machine, but he was paying attention. The young woman had stopped rinsing milk pitchers.

“My name is V. I. Warshawski, I’m a private investigator, and I’m trying to find out who shot and killed a young woman outside a nightclub right after New Year’s.” I took out the laminated copy of my license, and the couple behind the bar gave it a cursory look.

“Oh my, yes,” one of the maids said softly. “I read about that shooting. It was some crazy vet, wasn’t it, some poor boy who got his mind taken to bits fighting over there in Iraq.”

“That’s who the police arrested,” I agreed, “but I don’t believe he killed Nadia Guaman. I had never heard of Steve Pindero before I came in here the other day, but either his daughter, or someone using Frannie’s name has been performing as Karen Buckley at the nightclub where Nadia was murdered. Whoever she really is, she vanished last night. I’m hoping you can give me some ideas on how to trace Frannie, or maybe her dad. I looked up Steve Pindero online, but I couldn’t find him listed anywhere.”

The maids murmured among themselves, and then the oldest of the trio said, “Oh, no, miss, you wouldn’t find him. He died years ago. After his girl had the overdose and Zina died, it took the stuffing out of him. He was a cabinetmaker, see, living over in Highwood. His wife died when Frannie was a child, and he loved that girl like he was her mother and father both. Francine, her name was, but they called her Frannie, see. Steve, he used to take her with him in the summer when he was working on a job. She was so cute, tagging after him with her own little hard hat. Hard to remember now what a bright little girl she was after everything that happened later.”

“You knew her pretty well, then?” I suggested.

“Not to say I knew her well, but we’re a small community up here. Everybody knows everybody else’s business, and people talk. I work for a family called Gordon, and, a long time back, maybe twenty years, Steve did a big job for them. Little Miss Frannie, she used to stand on a ladder next to him handing him nails. It was a pretty picture.”

She sighed. “Everything changed when the Kystarniks bought that big old mansion. They had a lot of work done, rebuilding the stables, putting in new bathrooms, kitchens, who knows what all. But that was how the two girls got to know each other. Zina and Frannie, they were the same age, same year in school, see.

“I never did know which was the one leading the other into trouble, but by the time they was teenagers trouble was pretty near all they knew. The Kystarnik girl, I heard she had two abortions before she was ever even sixteen. And the drugs! Well, these rich kids with too much money and not enough to do, that’s what they do. And, what I heard, Francine and Zina were selling anyone pretty much anything.”

“Lela!” one of the other maids protested. “You don’t know that, do you?”

“Don’t I just? Noel Gordon was in school with Zina and Frannie. And when those girls came over to party, it wasn’t Pepsi, let alone beer, they had in their cute little pink makeup kits.”

The two baristas had given up any pretense of work. The man went to the door and put the CLOSED sign up.

“And then the girls OD’d?” I asked.

“It was an ugly scene,” Lela said. “Zina died, Francine came close. And the cops found all the stuff in Steve Pindero’s basement. Why they didn’t arrest Frannie as she lay in her hospital bed, I’ll never know, but she recovered. And Steve? Oh my, I guess he tried to convince the cops it was him that had bought the drugs. But you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Steve didn’t know word one about what Francine was up to. While he was trying to get himself arrested, Frannie took off. No one ever saw her again. Steve took to drink, and that’s what killed him. Drinking on the job. Fell to his death two or three years after his girl disappeared.”

We were all silent for a moment, respecting the tragedy of the Pindero story, and then I asked whether young Frannie had shown any gifts as an artist.

“Funny you should say that. I forgot all about that part of her. She could draw pretty much anything. Got the gift from her daddy, I guess. He was always drawing up these designs, these plans for stuff he was building. He was in high demand in all the big houses around here for what he could design and build.”

“Would there be anyone Frannie might seek refuge with? An art teacher? What about Noel Gordon?”

Lela shook her head. “I’d be surprised. Noel, he straightened himself out after Zina died, went on to medical school, works at some clinic in Texas, down on the Mexican border, where he treats poor immigrants. I can’t think Frannie would know where to find him, even. And I don’t know any family up here that wouldn’t turn her right over to the authorities if she showed up.”

It was my turn to sigh: one dead end after another.

“But you said you found her,” another maid ventured. “Where has she been hiding all this time?”

“The times I talked to her, I didn’t know her real name. She was calling herself Karen Buckley. And now, as I said, she’s disappeared.” I looked at the wall clock: long night ahead, with Tim Radke coming to look over the Body Artist’s computer. “Thanks for talking to me so frankly,” I said. “I’m headed back to the city. Anyone need a lift?”