Body Work

29 Stale Act

When I got to my office, Petra was sitting in the lot in her silver Nissan, the motor running. She climbed out as soon as she saw me pull up and started talking before I was out of my car.

“What happened last night? Olympia just called to tell me I’m fired! She said it’s because you burned down her club, and I couldn’t be trusted as long as you were in my life. You didn’t really, did you?”

“And the top of the morning to you, too, my little chickadee.”

Lack of sleep was making me dizzy. I forgot about my sore palm and picked my gun up from where I’d left it on the car seat. Cold metal on open wound made me cry out involuntarily.

“Don’t snarl at me-thanks to you, I’m unemployed.”

“Thanks to Olympia, you are unemployed,” I snarled. “I haven’t had breakfast. Olympia kept me up late, and another crisis got me up early. You can come to the diner with me or wait in my office.”

Petra trudged down the street with me, everything in her body, from the jut of her lower lip to her hunched shoulders, designed to tell me how big a burden I was in her life. I didn’t even try to make conversation. Let her sulk.

At the diner, I thought about the healthy option-oatmeal, fruit, yogurt-but I needed protein. And I was craving grease. Fried eggs and hash browns. Petra petulantly told the waitress that she wasn’t hungry.

“What did you do to Olympia and why is she taking it out on me?”

I shut my eyes and leaned back in the booth. “Not until I get food.”

As soon as my breakfast arrived, Petra repeated her plaint. She, un-hungry cousin, also helped herself to my hash browns. I ate the eggs, trying to pretend I was alone, or with Jake, perhaps in a luxury suite at the Four Seasons. Finally, though, I told Petra what had gone on last night after the thugs had sent her and the rest of the staff away.

“Olympia is playing a very dangerous game if she’s playing with Anton Kystarnik,” I said. “Frankly, since you wouldn’t quit, I’m glad she fired you.”

Petra took a piece of my toast and spread jam on it. “But you said you weren’t sure who those guys were.”

“I’m not sure what makes the sky blue, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe it is.”

“But-”

“Rodney, the guy who stuck his hand in your pants, works for Kystarnik. Olympia gives him the run of the club. She forced Karen to let him put his cryptic messages on her butt when she was doing her mourning piece for Nadia. Look up Kystarnik. He is one scary dude.”

I glared at her and snatched the last piece of toast before she could get it. “Order your own damned breakfast.”

“So how come you set the stage on fire?”

“Collateral damage.” I explained how it happened and showed her the purple mess in my palm. Not that it was relevant, just that it hurt, and I wanted Petra to see that I’d been wounded in the line of duty.

“Olympia is scared. She’s thrashing around, she’s blaming me for her troubles, and she’s taking it out on you as a way to hurt me.”

“But what am I going to live on?” my cousin cried. “I lost my day job. Now this. Don’t tell me to beg my folks, that’s what my friends are saying, but I just can’t, not now that I know how they got their money.”

“Petra, I need help.” I wondered if I was insane or just too tired to think straight. “You can work for me for a bit. Not anything glamorous, and definitely not anything dangerous, but I’d pay you fifteen an hour to start.”

“Really?” Her face instantly lost its sullen pout and came to life. “Oh, Vic, you’re the best. I’m sorry I called you names!”

“A few provisos,” I said in my driest voice. “Everything I do is confidential. Everything. People who come to a detective have problems that they can’t solve any other way. If you text or blog or phone or communicate anything about any client without my permission, I will fire you that minute. Got it?”

She looked instinctively at her phone, which had been Tweeting at her while we talked. “Gosh, Vic, there’s no need to look like Darth Vader. I know how to keep a secret.”

“Good,” I said, although I didn’t really believe her. “The other thing is, you aren’t licensed, you don’t have the experience or the credentials for a license, so there’s a limit to the kinds of tasks you can undertake. But the state will view everything you do as happening on my orders, so don’t, under any circumstances, start imagining a better way to handle a tricky situation. If it backfires, I could lose my license, and then we’d both be in the gutter, living on Peppy’s leftover dog food.”

“This doesn’t sound like fun,” Petra grumbled.

I put twelve bucks on the check and got to my feet.

“You don’t have to do it. I can get someone from an agency.”

“I will, I will,” my cousin stood up, too. “Just don’t be a bully. I work best when I’m part of a team, not a robot.”

“There’s a certain amount of robot to the assistant job,” I warned her. “You’ll have to pretend I’m not your cousin, that this job is as important as, well, as keeping Olympia’s customers happy. There’s filing, there’s keeping track of e-mails, phone messages-a lot of all investigative work is sheer, unmitigated, boring routine.”

Petra nodded. “I will be the unbullied gofer to end all unbullied gofers, as long as you don’t hog all the good stuff.”

I smiled at her. “I promise I will let you take the next metal shard to the hand.”

As we waited at the long light on Milwaukee, I asked if the Body Artist had ever said anything that suggested she knew Rodney Treffer as more than one of Olympia’s customers.

“Why?”

“When I was trying to help her escape last night, she fought me, screaming that I’d totally messed things up. So even though she fought back against the guys who were pounding her on the stage, she didn’t want me to save her from them. Which makes me wonder.”

Petra shook her head. “She likes being mysterious. And she likes, well, fucking with the waitstaff. That’s about all I can tell you.”

“Fucking with the waitstaff?”

“Oh, you know, she’ll ask for a drink after her show, and you know who she is screwing by who was willing to take it in. It was, like, some kind of initiation rite when I started work there, to answer the call. And then she’d be, like, ‘Oh, Petra-is that your name?-just get this makeup off my ass,’ and she’d see how far you’d go with her.”

I made a sour face but changed the subject. “You know, by the way, that Chad Vishneski’s father is my client. And that means the Warshawski Agency is committed to Chad’s innocence.”

Petra grinned. “I love being part of the Warshawski Agency. I renounce all other loyalties. I am one hundred percent behind Chad.”

We’d crossed the street and made it to my building, where another surprise visitor waited. Rivka Darling was pacing the sidewalk outside my front door. When she saw me, she burst out, “Where is she?”

“Where’s who?” I asked.

“The Artist!”

I typed in the code on the door keypad. “Darling Rivka, Rivka Darling. What makes you think Karen is missing?”

“Because she is. You knew she was when you called last night, and she never did come home-”

“Does she live with you?”

Rivka paused. “She’s been staying with me. While her life is in danger. And-”

I ushered her and Petra down the hall to my office. I sat Rivka on a couch in the client alcove and turned to my cousin. “Petra, this is a potential client. She also is a potential suspect in a murder inquiry. So we ask questions and take notes, but we won’t volunteer information. Although we will tell her what we know about last night.”

Rivka gasped as if I’d stuck her headfirst in the icy lake. “What do you mean, I’m a suspect? I came here for help. You have to find Karen. They could have killed her-”

“Who are ‘they,’ Rivka?”

“The people who attacked her last night.” Rivka was shrieking with fury at my refusal to join her in hysteria. “I called over to the club this morning, looking for Karen. Olympia was there. She told me you set the place on fire, and-”

I turned to my cousin. “Petra, your first assignment is to phone Olympia and tell her that we are making a note of every time she says I set her club on fire and that these statements will form the basis of a lawsuit for defamation.”

Petra’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”

“Yep. Don’t argue with her, just tell her you’re calling to give her information. I’m sure she’s scared. But being scared should make you smarter, not stupider. Call from the landline on my desk. The law requires you to tell her you’re recording the conversation; you’ll see a RECORD button on the phone. Olympia will try to get under your skin. Don’t let her.”

Petra moved toward my desk but slowly, nervous about making the call. I turned back to Rivka, who’d been shocked into silence.

“I helped your friend escape from the club last night,” I said, “which made her furious. It was as if she wanted to sit there and take the beating. Why?”

“You’re wrong!” Rivka blazed. “You just hate her because she makes you look stupid.”

“I don’t have the time or energy for histrionics this morning,” I said coldly. “If you know where the Body Artist lives, if you’ve been there and she’s vanished, tell me. Or leave.”

Rivka started to storm out, but at the door she changed her mind. “I don’t know where she lives. That’s what I want you to find out. And to make sure she’s not in any danger.”

“Do you know who’s blocking her website?”

“What does blocking her website have to do with-”

“It’s why they were beating her up last night. They need the codes Rodney keeps painting on her. What do you know about those?”

“Nothing! I keep telling her she shouldn’t let them desecrate her art. And she just laughs, and says it’s all about making art accessible even to cretins so that America becomes an art-friendly country.”

I could hear Petra starting to lose her cool, saying that since Olympia had fired her, she didn’t have a right to dictate to Petra.

“What does Vesta say?” I asked Rivka.

“She doesn’t care! She just says Karen’s a big girl, she knows how to land on her feet! It’s all part of the jealousy and small-mindedness that surrounds Karen’s art. I need to know she’s safe. Why can’t you do that for me? You’re involved even if you didn’t set the club on fire. You have to do something.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, Rivka was still sitting there, her small face swollen with worry and anger.

“Okay,” I said. “Call Vesta. And the burka dancers. You get them here this morning, right now. We’ll all talk. We’ll figure out where to look for Karen. Until then, you sit here and keep your mouth shut, because I’ve got a wheelbarrowful of work to do.”

Rivka wanted to argue the point, but I told her I wasn’t in the mood. “Get your pals or go home. No other choices.”

Petra had finished her call with Olympia and came to me, head hanging. “Sorry, Vic, you were right about Olympia. I did let her get under my skin.”

“Not to worry, it was a tough first assignment. Anyway, the Warshawski Agency is famous for the crankiness of its operatives. I want you to start on some of the backlog of paper until Rivka gets the rest of her gang here.”

I showed my cousin where the office essentials were-the bathroom and kitchenette at the end of the hall that I shared with my leasemate-and the importance of cleaning up instantly since it’s shared space. Refreshments for clients or ourselves in the little fridge. We have a good-quality coffeemaker and an electric kettle for tea, but I still use the coffee bar across the street for espresso.

By the time we’d finished and I’d shown Petra how to send messages from my computer phone log to my cell phone, Vesta and the burka dancers had arrived. The dancers were well swaddled in sweaters and coats, one with a big fur hat pulled so far over his ears it covered his forehead. I asked Petra to get everyone set up in the client corner while I made one last effort to log on to embodiedart.com.

The site was still down. This time, the message announced, “We’re rethinking our site. Come back soon, and thanks for visiting.”

When I joined the group, the two dancers were on the couch, with Vesta half sitting on one of its arms. Rivka had pulled up a straight-backed chair; an armchair might make her seem relaxed, and her business was too urgent for that. Petra was prim in the corner of the couch, a notepad open in her lap.

I reminded the dancers that we’d spoken backstage a few weeks ago. They’d called each other Kevin and Lee then. Their full names were Leander Marvelle and Kevin Piuma. Kevin the Feather. What was on their birth certificates, I wondered.

The dancers shed their coats, but Leander had a heavy sweater-jacket zipped up to his chin while Kevin remained swathed in a long scarf. Even so, I could see they were painfully thin, cheekbones jutting, mouths extra-wide because there was too little flesh along the jawline.

“How did you two hook up with Karen?” I asked.

Leander looked at Kevin. “The Hothouse?”

“No, no, that’s where we found Jerome. He told us this chick was trying to put an act together and she was usually at Frida’s.”

Frida’s was a club in the west Loop-not far from Plotzky’s where I’d drunk with Tim Radke, but part of the hip wave that was flooding the neighborhood.

“See, we’d just come back from a road run of Chorus Line. We needed a gig. The Body Artist dug our act. And it was kind of cool, you know, the disguised, gender-bending thing. But it’s old now.”

“Yeah,” said Leander. “Time to move on.”

“You can’t!” Rivka cried. “The Body Artist needs you.”

Kevin looked at her coldly. “She needs to update her act. It’s old. It’s stale.”

“She’s only done it for six months. How can you-”

“Six months!” Leander flung up his arms. “That is beyond stale, it’s rotting!”

“Right,” I said. “Where does Karen live?”

Kevin’s wide mouth gave an exaggerated grimace of contempt. “We weren’t dating the chick. We worked with her on her act.”

“Did you rehearse the act outside the club?”

Leander explained that one of his ballet teachers was on the faculty at Columbia College and let him and Piuma use one of the practice studios when they were in town.

“If you want to call the Body Artist, what number do you use?”

“E-mail. She didn’t give us a number.”

I looked at Rivka. “What about you?”

She bit her lips. She wanted to claim some special inside knowledge of Karen Buckley but couldn’t. The Body Artist always phoned Rivka, but she blocked her own number.

Vesta nodded agreement. “Girlfriend liked her secrets.”

Vesta had met Karen at the dojo where she trained. “She wanted to study self-defense. She took about four months of classes. That’s when we…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but I assumed from Rivka’s scowl that Vesta meant when she and Karen had been lovers.

“What about Olympia?” I asked. “How did all that get started, the act at the club and so on?”

“Karen goes to all the clubs,” Vesta said. “She studies other people’s acts. She had this thing she wanted to do with body art; she pitched it to Olympia, who thought it was enough of a novelty to bring in a crowd. Nothing happened for a few months, and then suddenly, around Thanksgiving, the act took off.”

“Why?”

“People realized they had the chance to see an extraordinary artist for free,” Rivka said.

Vesta said, “It was more that people took video footage with their cell phones and put it out on the Net.”

“When did Rodney start taking part?” I asked.

Leander and Kevin looked at each other again as if they could only think in tandem, but it was Leander who spoke. “Rodney’s the big thugly guy, right? We’d been doing the act for about six weeks, maybe two months. At first, it was all about Karen painting on herself and we’d hold mirrors for her, but that was way too hard. Then she started this public art idea. About a week after that, Rodney the Rod Man arrived. Raw sex. Not a nice man.”

The last phrase hung in the air for a moment, allowing us all to wonder if he’d had raw sex with Rodney or if that was just his way of describing a brutish person.

“I’m assuming it was Anton Kystarnik who was at the club last night,” I said. “If he’s not the person blocking her website, who is? And why?”

The four of them looked at one another and then at Petra, obediently quiet in her corner of the couch. None of them had any ideas.

“Rivka,” I asked, “do you have a picture of Karen? Do any of you?”

“She hated being photographed except when she had her full body art on,” Rivka said. “The one time I took her picture, she grabbed my camera and erased it.”

“You’re a good artist,” I said. “Can you draw her from memory? I’m going to need a picture if I’m going to canvas for her.”

“She won’t like it if I do.” Rivka’s face was flushed.

“There’s no point to my asking around about her if I don’t have a picture. This is the last discussion we’ll have on the subject. Either draw a picture of Buckley for me or go home and don’t bother me again.”

Rivka started another protest, but Vesta shook her head at her. “You’re the only one who pulled the detective into this. Do like she says-put Buckley’s face onto a piece of paper or go on home.”