Body Work

51 Mad Preparations-Then What?

Looking back, that meeting with Sal in her bar seemed to be the only time I sat still for a week. Organizing the performance, keeping Clara and her family safe, watching my own back, trying to stay in touch with my regular clients while doing business on the fly at Internet cafés, I felt like a hamster on a jet-propelled treadmill.

For our initial meeting, Darraugh’s assistant, Caroline, supplied us with food and drink and sat in for several long stretches to help move us along when we got bogged down. Darraugh himself wisely steered clear. He was going out on a very long limb letting us use his corporate headquarters. If his directors learned about it, they might have a few words with him.

Petra thought it was all a great game. Staying at Tim Radke’s place made her feel safe and therefore cocky.

“Don’t worry, Vic,” she assured me. “Me and Tim, we’ll take care of publicity. We’ll Tweet and network and get this all over town. I still have some media contacts left over from when I worked on the campaign last summer.”

“Let’s take this a step at a time,” I said. “We need to figure out who we want to reach out to. We aren’t selling Wheaties here, hoping everyone in the world gets our message.”

“The Glow holds a hundred thirty-seven, tops,” Sal added. “And I need serious crowd-management help if it gets up to that many.”

Tim Radke assured me that his and Marty’s friends would turn up in good numbers to make sure no one got too violent.

“We don’t want a free-for-all,” I said, “with arrests and broken heads. The whole purpose of getting the Body Artist back onstage is to stop the torment of the Guaman and Vishneski families.”

“How can you be sure she’ll come?” Rivka said. “You haven’t been able to find her. I don’t think you’ve even been looking.”

“I’ve been searching like mad,” I assured Rivka. “I even found her apartment.”

Rivka’s face lit up. “What did she say?”

“She’d fled before I got there, but she’ll show up Sunday night. No artist wants to be plagiarized or have her work attributed to someone else.”

I spoke with a confidence that I was far from feeling, but the whole scheme wouldn’t work without someone like Rivka, who was both talented enough and experienced enough to re-create the Artist’s images.

Most anxious was John Vishneski, who felt I was giving his son short shrift. “I’m the client here, the one paying your bills. And it’s my boy who’s still on the critical list at the hospital-my boy, who someone tried to kill two days ago. But this seems to be all about that gal who died in Iraq.”

I nodded sympathetically. “There are two halves to the story, your son and Nadia Guaman. I need the real killer to make a move in public, and focusing on the Guamans seems to me the best way to force the murderer out into the open. But if you have a better plan, please, let’s hear it now. No Monday-morning quarterbacking. Too much is at stake.”

Mona patted her ex-husband’s arm. “John, you know you don’t mean to be selfish. That poor family, losing two daughters. And who knows what will happen to the third girl!”

The Guamans’ situation had me badly worried. The day of our first meeting in Darraugh’s offices, Tom Streeter had called to say that Lazar Guaman had come to St. Teresa’s and insisted that his daughter and wife return home.

I took a cab to the school and found Lazar in the principal’s office with Clara. Dr. Hausman seemed worried, even frightened, when she introduced us.

“Perhaps you mean well, Ms. Detective-I can’t say,” Lazar Guaman said. “Clara seems to think that you do. We won’t try to stop you. But we do belong under our own roof.”

“Why not let her be safe with your wife and mother?” I suggested. “For just a few days. All this should end on Sunday.”

“We are a broken family,” he said, “I know that. My girls have been killed, I could not protect Clara when those men beat her up. But I won’t cower in my cousin’s home while she’s in danger here in the city.”

I tried to argue with him, but his mind was made up. He insisted that Clara call the unlisted number at Arcadia House so he could speak with his wife, and the family returned home. My one hope was that Rainier Cowles would leave the family alone now that he knew they didn’t have Alexandra’s autopsy report. Caroline told me at the meeting that Darraugh’s agent in Beirut had duly delivered the message. Still, I had to take Vesta off bodyguard duty. It was just too much to ask of an amateur in case Cowles-or, even worse, Kystarnik-wanted to attack the family.

I bought several disposable phones for my outgoing calls while my answering service was fielding all incoming ones. As long as no one could find me, they couldn’t deliver threats. Turn over the report or we will hurt Petra-or Clara-or Lotty-or Mr. Contreras-or the dogs. I was a Swiss cheese of vulnerability, thankful that Jake was on the other side of the world.

Although I didn’t hear from the Body Artist, I knew word about the performance was getting out around town. For one thing, we had a lot of hits on our website. For another, I got a call from Olympia. Actually, I got many calls from her. After her third, and most emphatic, message, I called her back, sitting in a window seat in Darraugh’s Hancock Center apartment.

“What are you doing?” she said. “Advertising the Body Artist’s final Chicago appearance?”

“Olympia! How are you? How are repairs to Club Gouge coming along?”

“Never mind the club. What the hell is the meaning of this announcement I saw?”

“I don’t know what you see or where you look,” I said, “so you’d better give me a hint.”

I thought I could hear her teeth grinding on the other side of the ether.

“I’ve seen the advertisements that the Body Artist is going to be at Sal Barthele’s joint on Sunday. What is the meaning of this?”

“Gosh, let me look at some tea leaves. Yep, here it is. It means that the Body Artist is going to be at the Golden Glow on Sunday.”

“Buckley is under contract with me,” she said, “and any bookings she makes-”

“Talk to the Artist or her agent. Don’t talk to me. If she has to wait for you to fix up Club Gouge before she can perform in public again, it seems like a mighty poor contract, but, not my business.”

“It’s your business if you put Sal Barthele up to it. I’ve been asking around, and everybody who knows Sal says you two are really tight.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you and I need to talk about it,” I said.

Olympia was silent. A field of gray-white clouds floated around Darraugh’s sixty-seventh-story apartment so that the city, with all its art and music and corruption and gang wars, seemed as silent and distant as if it existed only in a child’s pop-up book. Open the cover, and the characters and their world spring to life. Shut it, and you float off into your own private space.

When Olympia still didn’t say anything, I added, “By the way, I drove by the club last night, and it didn’t look to me as though anyone was doing any work. Did you know that? Or has Kystarnik cut off all your cash until you jump through some big hoops for him?”

“Where is Karen Buckley hiding, Vic?”

“Don’t you think she’d be in touch if she wanted you to know, Olympia?”

Some swallows had ventured up as high as our windows, looking for the insects sucked toward the building by the wind currents. Funny how much of nature there is to see, even from a skyscraper.

I said, “What did Anton offer you in exchange for getting her location from me? To cancel all your debts? To repair the club?”

She hung up with a bang. I laughed to myself, but not for long. I had too much work to do.

I had called Trish Walsh, the Raving Renaissance Raven, to see if she would play music as a warm-up for the show. It was her performance back in November that had brought me to Club Gouge the first time, and it seemed fitting, somehow, for her to open for the Body Artist on Sunday. I knew Trish was flying over to London to join Jake’s early-music group, but she wasn’t leaving for almost a week.

Trish readily agreed, but I had to warn her that I didn’t know what to expect-there might be a hundred people or five, the crowd could turn violent, but I hoped not.

“Vic! You’re making this sound like a Buffy melodrama. I’ll play for this event-I can’t wait to tell the rest of the group that I’ve been close to bloodshed-but you’ll have to write in a guarantee for my instruments.”

Her lute and hurdy-gurdy were valued at twenty thousand, for insurance purposes. I gulped, but told her to add the guarantee to the contract.

Tim Radke and Sanford Rieff from Cheviot labs were creating high-quality images for the slide show that the Body Artist had always run on big screens during her performances. Tim called in sick to his day job to help us out, and he wasn’t letting me pay him for his time. He insisted he was doing it for Chad, that I shouldn’t worry. Still, I felt a bit guilty.

Rivka was creating stencils for use in the show, although it took Vesta’s and my combined efforts to keep her working on something the Artist had never authorized. “She won’t be happy when she sees these,” Rivka grumbled every time I asked her to prepare a new figure.

She was working in the basement of the Golden Glow, where Sal stored her overstock. Marty Jepson and Mr. Contreras had moved all the cases around to create room for Rivka to spread out her materials. They’d installed floodlights and a mirror, so that the space could be used as a dressing room.

Even with Darraugh’s help providing me a place to stay, the expenses were staggering, and I knew I could pass very few of them on to the Vishneskis. They were uneasy enough with what I was doing without my suggesting they pay for messenger service between the Gold Coast and the northern suburbs, rental of the Glow, insurance on the Raving Raven’s hurdy-gurdy. I entered the figures by hand on a spreadsheet, and the totals made me feel faint.

Every morning that I woke up without anyone on my team having been shot or stabbed, I was relieved. And every night when we’d made it through yet another day intact, I had a moment to relax, however short, before the next day’s maniacal routine began again.

Chad Vishneski’s welfare was a big worry, too. John and Mona Vishneski decided to take him to John’s apartment for the weekend. Chad was definitely on the mend. He was alert for as long as fifteen minutes at a stretch now. But he had no recollection of the night of the murder, and there were big gaps in the rest of his memory, too.

John and Mona wanted to see the show, and two of John’s construction buddies agreed to stay with Chad, but it made me nervous to move a vulnerable man away from a doctor and closer to killers. Lotty wasn’t happy, either: although she didn’t want the burden of his protection falling on Beth Israel, she also didn’t want him far from medical help at such a fragile stage in his recovery.

When Sunday afternoon finally arrived, when the webcams and the security cameras were in place, the microphones set up, the screens for projecting the images hung over the shuttered windows, I couldn’t sit still.

Rivka didn’t help: she kept saying, “I told you she wouldn’t come. I don’t know why I believed you and did all this work when it was all just a big con job.”

By eight-thirty, when the doors opened, I felt as though every nerve in my body had pierced its sheath and was dancing naked on the surface of my skin.

TONIGHT and TONIGHT ONLY

At the

GOLDEN GLOW

***

The Body Artist

***

in her FINAL CHICAGO APPEARANCE

THE RAVING RENAISSANCE RAVEN at 9

THE BODY ARTIST at 10!

Doors open at 8:30 P.M.

$20 COVER