Body Work (42 page)

Clara hesitated, then nodded. Behind us, the grandmother had dozed off in her chair, even though Ernest was yelling, “Way to go, Curly! Way to go!”

“Nadia didn’t track down the Body Artist until this past Thanksgiving,” I said, “but Alexandra has been dead for nearly two years now. When did she actually get the journal?”

“It came about six months after Allie died,” Clara said, “but it—at first, Nadia said she didn’t want to read it. It was too hard, what with Allie dead and the fight with Mom over the insurance, so she made a little shrine for Allie instead and locked the journal in a reliquary. She made it especially so it would be the right size, out of papier-mâché, painted with roses and other symbols of Allie’s beauty.”

I nodded. Relatives of Holocaust victims sometimes lived for decades with precious diaries or recipe books from their dead, unable to read them. It wasn’t so surprising that Nadia had waited over a year.

“So Nadia finally read Alexandra’s diary,” I said.

“Right before Thanksgiving, it was. It was so shocking, so hurtful, that Nadia felt she had to tell me. She couldn’t bear the knowledge all by herself, that’s what she said. How could Allie? How could she betray us all? And with a
Muslim
?”

I imagined Amani’s sisters—
How could you—and with an American? And a Catholic?
—but I only said, “That Muslim woman befriended your sister and kept her from feeling so lonely in a strange country.”

“You don’t understand!” she protested. “Allie told me she was going to Iraq to make more money so I could go to a good college. Then it turned out it was an act of penance for her—her week in Michigan with that body painter.”

“Nadia was a painter,” Ernest announced, catching part of our conversation, “before she went to heaven.”

“Nothing is ever just one thing,” I suggested. “It was penance, it was good money, she believed in you. The smartest of the Guaman sisters, she called you. She did love you, you know. She did want a bright future for you.”

Clara played with the zipper on her sweater, but some of the tension in her face eased.

“And then you went to Nadia’s apartment when?” I asked.

“Right after we left the cemetery. Everyone came back here for food and drinks, and I just went out through the alley and caught the Blue Line up to Nadia’s place. Everything was fine—I mean, everything was awful—but you said there’d been a break-in and her apartment had been trashed. Well, that hadn’t happened when I was there. Everything was just like she left it, except the little box was gone, and so was the journal.”

Her amber eyes were clouded with fear.

The front doorbell rang. After a glance at her grandmother, who woke up with a start, Clara went to the door. I peered around the corner. It was Cristina Guaman, waiting for someone to undo the chain so she could get in. Mother and daughter spoke, and then Cristina came into the living room, eyes flashing, chin thrust out.

“You have no right to be here. Leave now!”

The grandmother said something in Spanish, an apology to Cristina for letting me in, but her daughter-in-law ignored her. “You take advantage of my daughter’s trusting nature, but I know your kind, feasting on the bones of the dead. Leave now!”

I got to my feet and picked up my coat. “When Alexandra died,” I said, “you threatened Tintrey with a wrongful-death suit, didn’t you, Ms. Guaman? And then Rainier Cowles came along and offered you a settlement. Ernest needed extra care, his bills were killing you, you didn’t have a choice, you took the money.”

“Who’s been talking to you? Clara, what have you told this . . . this parasite?”

“Please, Ms. Guaman, it’s not a big secret. Why turn it into one? What kind of threat did Rainier Cowles hold over you? If it was to reveal Alexandra’s private life to the world, it’s not a world that cares very much about that kind of secret.”

“None of this is your business. If you think you know something that we will pay you to learn, think again. We’re not buying anything you might be selling.”

Clara murmured a protest, but it died in the face of her mother’s molten glare. Even though the accusation was unjust, it still embarrassed me, and I buttoned my coat without saying anything else.

Ernest looked from the television to me and suddenly made a connection of his own. “Puppy!” he cried. “This lady has my puppy!”

He ran from the room and came back with the picture from the pet store I’d handed him in the rehabilitation hospital. It was grimy now from much caressing.

“Allie, she’s my Allie. Big Allie is a dove, she flies with Jesus. Little Allie is my puppy.” He kissed the page, then suddenly turned red and shouted at me, “Where is she? You’re hiding little Allie. Give me little Allie!”

He grabbed my briefcase and dumped the contents on the floor. When he didn’t see a puppy, he sat on the floor and began to tear up one of my documents. Clara bent over and snatched it from him.

I gathered up my laptop, my wallet, and the rest of my possessions. Clara hunted under the couch for a lipstick that had rolled away. By the time I’d put everything away, Ernest had forgotten his outburst and was watching the Three Stooges again. I left without saying another word.

45

It’s Dangerous to Know V.I.

I
sat in my car for a time trying to remember why I’d thought it was a good idea to visit the Guamans or why I’d thought I had a right to intrude on the elder Ms. Guaman when she was at the hospital with Ernest, or even why I thought I should be a private eye at all instead of a street cleaner. At least at the end of a day’s work, a street cleaner left things better than she found them.

I finally turned on the engine and drove up to my office, wondering what crises might await me there. Petra, for instance, had not been in touch. I owed Darraugh Graham a report. Terry Finchley still wanted to try Chad Vishneski for Nadia’s murder. I didn’t know where Rodney Treffer was lurking. Karen Buckley/Frannie Pindero had vanished. Plenty for the dedicated PI to do without tormenting a brain-damaged youth and his family over a nonexistent dog.

When I pulled into my parking lot, I saw Marty Jepson’s beat-up truck. I hurried into my office, imagining disasters, but Petra was there with Jepson. She’d dragooned him into helping her sort the mail.

“Vic!” she said. “What a day! So much happened!”

“Too much excitement even to contact me, O Texting Queen?”

“I dropped my phone in the slush when Marty and me were roping my car up to his truck,” she explained, “and that seemed to kill it, and don’t worry about Marty—about paying him, I mean—because I know you didn’t authorize me putting him to work. I’ll split my check with him, only, I couldn’t have managed the day without him!”

“Staff Sergeant,” I said, “if you’ve spent the day with Petra, you probably deserve some kind of battle pay.”

He blushed, and said, “Uh, ma’am, uh, Vic, it was a pleasure to help you out. Uh, I wonder if you can call me ‘Marty.’ I’m not really a Marine anymore, you know.”

“People get to be called by the highest rank they ever achieve,” I explained, “even if they’ve retired. Like, right now, Petra could be called ‘pest’ by anyone who’d like to know why she couldn’t pick up a landline.”

“Oh, Vic, don’t be such a crab cake! Your phone numbers, they’re in my cell-phone memory, which is as dead as my poor old car. You cannot believe how much they’re going to charge, although, of course, I have insurance. At least, I’m on my mom’s policy.” She stopped, sticking her lower lip out as she always did when she was thinking seriously. “Maybe I shouldn’t allow her to pay for it. But, gosh, with all my bills, and only this temp job for you—”

“I think your mother would be pleased to know you still rely on her,” I interrupted. “But I’m the one who wrecked your car, so I’ll take care of the repairs that your insurance doesn’t cover.”

“Vic, you’re an angel. I’m sorry I called you names last night.”

She launched back into a high-octane account of her day’s adventures: Destroyed cell phone! Towed car! Spilled soup on new jacket! Although the stain on the cuff maybe was the pizza they’d had at Plotzky’s last night—what a cool bar!

The avalanche of information was making me reel. I went to my back room, where I keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for emergencies. I don’t approve of drinking on the job, but responding to Petra right after my painful meeting with the Guamans felt like a medical emergency to me. I offered the bottle to Petra and Marty, but neither liked whisky.

“It’s like drinking gasoline, Vic” was the fetching way my cousin put it. “Don’t you have any beer?”

The whisky washed through me, and I felt warm for the first time since I’d left Mexico City at New Year’s. I sat at my desk and smiled sweetly at Petra. “You’ll have to buy your own beer. You towed the Pathfinder . . . Then what?”

“Oh, well,” she said, “then we came here to see if you, like, needed anything done. And there was a message from Cheviot labs. Mr. Rieff, he called to say they’d found something really amazing when he ran his tests for you. Guess what they found?”

“The codes for the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” I suggested.

“Oh, Vic, nothing that amazing. Just—the stuff that was supposed to be in the body armor—the, uh, ceramic or whatever it is—someone took it out and replaced it with ordinary beach sand. Can you believe that?”

I put my whisky down.

“Did he say . . . Could he prove that it was inside the shield to begin with? I mean, Chad had poked a bunch of holes in the shield. How do we know what was in it first?”

Petra hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know.”

“Uh, ma’am . . . Uh, Vic . . . We did get the report. Since we didn’t know where you were or what you needed, we drove up to Northbrook and picked it up from Mr. Rieff.”

Marty handed me a sealed envelope with the familiar crest of the Cheviot rams in the corner. I slit it open and scanned the pages, which bristled with “moieties,” “van der Waals forces,” “carbon 60,” and other arcane phrases that I should have paid more attention to in Professor Turkevich’s chemistry lectures when I was an undergraduate, but it was too late to fret about that now.

I called up Cheviot labs. Sandy Rieff was working late. That was one good thing.

“This ratio you have in the report,” I asked, “seventy-five percent sand mixed with twenty-five percent fullerene, how is that different from what it should be?”

“It should be a hundred percent gallium arsenide fullerenes,” said Rieff.

“And how sure are you that this diluted mix was in Chad’s shield from the get-go?”

“My best materials engineer, Genny Winne, did the analysis. Winne says that she’s prepared to testify on both those points. And she doesn’t say that unless she thinks her results are unimpeachable.”

I thought back to the
Fortune
article, to Tintrey’s rush to get their Achilles body shield to market, to take advantage of all those juicy Iraqi war contracts. “So Tintrey basically put out a shield that wouldn’t stop a bullet. I wonder if that was a temporary thing to grab market share or an ongoing policy. Can you order some Achilles armor from several different production runs and get your Ms. Winne to analyze the content?”

“Will do,” Rieff said. “What kind of priority?”

“Priority service, but not premium.”

“Have you read the whole report?” Rieff asked. “One of the oddities Winne found was scorching around the holes in the mitt. That fabric is too tough to cut without a special blade, so he must have burned it to get into it. That’s the one thing a defense lawyer could jump on in claiming the contents had been tampered with.”

He hung up, but I held on to the receiver, staring at the desktop. If Chad knew that his buddies had died because their armor didn’t protect them, no wonder he’d freaked out when he saw Nadia paint the Achilles logo on the Body Artist. He’d accused Nadia of spying on him. He must have thought she worked for Tintrey.

I looked up to see Petra watching me anxiously.

“Vic,” she said, “is there some kind of problem?”

“Not a problem,” I said slowly. “Just—I think I understand what happened, but not how to prove it. Not who pulled the trigger on the gun that shot Nadia Guaman but why they did, and why they framed Chad. Marty, how much did Chad say about the body armor?”

Jepson frowned. “He never stopped talking about it, ma’am—Vic. We knew he was angry. But he was always angry about the way him and his men had been treated generally.”

“But did he talk about the armor malfunctioning?”

“He said his men should be alive, that their armor didn’t protect them. But, ma’am, no disrespect, you get these IEDs, and nothing can protect you.”

“So he didn’t say the shields were full of sand instead of the nanoparticles they were supposed to contain?”

He shook his head, trying to remember. “I know he said he was going to tell the whole world how his squad got butchered, but, you know, that was just talk. It was his way of letting off steam. Least, that’s how Tim and me and the other guys took it. I don’t remember him ever saying he did like you did, sent the armor to a lab to get it analyzed.”

“No: I think he tested it by shooting at it.” That explained the burn marks around the holes in the mitt as well as the holes in Mona’s bedroom wall that had bothered her so much. Chad had attached the shield to the wall and shot at it. The bullet went through the armor and destroyed the drywall behind it. That was his proof. But how had the men at Tintrey known what he was doing?

“His blog,” I said. “The sections that got erased, I bet those were where he described the mitt. We need Tim. We need to see if he can resurrect Chad’s blog.”

I got up. “Jake’s leaving for Europe this evening. I want to see him before he takes off. Can you two track down Tim and see if he’ll come up to my place when he gets off work? In the meantime, make two copies of this report, will you? Send one to Murray Ryerson at the
Star.
The other goes to Freeman Carter.”

I’d offered to drive Jake to O’Hare, but the packing of his basses for international travel was a painstaking, if not heart-stopping, business. With a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of instruments, he bought tickets so that they could ride in the plane with him, but they required extra scrutiny and careful repacking once he’d been through security. The manager of his chamber group was bringing a roadie just to oversee the luggage.