I wondered if they might be phone numbers, perhaps for disposable phones in an overseas market. Europe doesn’t share our fixation with the ten-digit phone number. Or perhaps Rodney was a spy for a burglary ring and used the Body Artist to broadcast safe combinations. Or he’d picked pockets at the club and was relaying credit card numbers. No matter what he was transmitting, why do it like that at all? In an era of instantaneous communication, this was incredibly cumbersome. The only thing he really seemed to gain was a sense of power over the Body Artist, and over Olympia.
Before I left embodiedart.com, I looked again at the changing images and captions on the home page, stopping each slide to study it more closely. Many of the pictures were overtly crueclass="underline" The Hind at Bay, for instance, showed dogs mauling a deer that had a woman’s face. Crucifixus Est depicted a woman on a cross, a spike hammered through her vulva. Her face was divided in two, one side expressing bliss, the other agony.
As I went through the exhibit, I realized I’d misread one of the captions: “Deader than the Male,” it said, not “Deadlier than the Male.” And the face was the one Nadia had been painting on the Body Artist, a young woman with curly dark hair, her face cut in two where Nadia had sliced it with the palette knife.
I found myself shivering. Women savaged by dogs. Women crucified through the vagina. Women with their faces slashed. It was horrible and horrifying. If a man had done these paintings, I’d say he hated women. What was going on with Karen, that she hated other women, or hated herself so much she had to dismember her female body? And Nadia Guaman-was that what had drawn the two women together? Slasher art?
I rubbed my arms and got up to walk around the room, trying to dispel the images, or at least push them far enough away that I could think. I needed human company. I crossed the hall to see if my leasemate was willing to be interrupted, at least for five minutes. Tessa was hovering over a steel bar with a blowtorch, her dark face wet with sweat underneath her protective eyewear. She looked up at me briefly, continued her work until she’d finished the cut to her satisfaction, then turned off the flame and came over to me.
“I need someone alive and wholesome for a minute before I go back into my computer.” I explained what I’d been looking at.
Tessa was interested enough to wipe her face and neck dry and come across to look at the Body Artist’s slide show. She went through it twice, pausing at several of the images, before she said anything.
“She’s a skilled representational painter, no doubt about it, and she knows her art history. The Hind at Bay, it’s constructed like The Stag at Bay, even if Landseer’s dogs were more genteel and not actively attacking the stag. And the crucifixion, that’s modeled on one Michelangelo painted.” She brought up a new window and found reproductions of both paintings so I could see how similar they were to Karen Buckley’s work.
“I see why you find them disturbing,” she continued. “There’s no life here. There’s a kind of rage under these, and a kind of exhibitionism, but not vitality. I’d rather see something like these uncertain lines.” She pointed at one of the slides of customer art from a Club Gouge night. “The person who held that brush was willing to take a risk.”
“You don’t think it’s a risk being naked on a stage, letting strangers put paint on you?”
“I think it’s an extreme form of self-indulgence,” Tessa said. “Every time you put paint on canvas, or flesh, you’re taking a risk, but your Body Artist isn’t doing that. Come to think of it, I’m surprised she isn’t cutting herself onstage. I don’t like the performance art of people like Lucia Balinoff, but she works along the same themes: the savaging of the female body. Your performance artist isn’t doing anything new and she’s not taking any risks. She’s exposing herself, but not her self.”
Tessa left on that stern note. A moment later, I heard her blowtorch fire up again.
9 The Dead-Before They Got That Way
I tried to map out a course of action. The most important thing seemed to me to get the client’s son better care. That meant I needed sophisticated medical as well as first-class legal help. I started with Freeman Carter. He had been in court all day and wanted to get away; he had tickets to the opera and wasn’t going to miss the curtain on my account. I gave him a thirty-second rundown and told him I wanted a court order ASAP so we could move Chad-I hoped to Beth Israel, Lotty’s hospital.
“I’ll get a doctor over to Cermak tomorrow morning if you can organize the legal side.”
“Are you being Donna Quixote,” Freeman asked, “or do you really have evidence that the wrong person is in custody? From everything I’ve read, this was a PTSD vet who lost control. Not that it matters, you understand. I’m used to the odd alignment you make between the law and facts.”
“Vishneski is a PTSD vet, but I’m beginning to think he was framed. I’ll tell you why when you have more time.”
“And is this on your tab, or can your client pay?”
Freeman’s bill is one of the things that keeps me from ever getting ahead of the game financially. But the alignment between the law and me is such that I need the best defense lawyer in town. Even though my outstanding balance right now was close to sixty thousand, I assured Freeman that if the client couldn’t pay him, I’d take care of it. I hung up knowing that the phone consult itself had just added a hundred dollars to my bill.
I called Lotty, who was also going to the opera, but who gave me a little more attention.
“Eve Rafael is a very fine surgeon, new to our practice, but she has a lot of experience with head trauma and coma. I’ll see if she’s free. But the billing is going to be complicated, you know. And it would help if I could tell her what your young friend had ingested.”
“I won’t know that for a few days, but Chad’s been at Cermak since Saturday morning. I hope it’s not too late for a world-class neurosurgeon to rescue his brain.”
“Medicine, Victoria-not a science, not an art, somewhere in between. How badly Chad Vishneski wants to recover will also play a role in this. But I’ll talk to Eve on my way to the opera.”
“As long as someone else is driving, Lotty!”
Lotty’s driving, on a sunny day and with no one else on the road, was still a fine test of anyone’s nerve endings. In the snow, with a cell phone in her ear, I wouldn’t want my life to depend on her.
“You worry too much about trivialities, Victoria: that will shorten your life as much as fried food.”
As she hung up on that crisp note, I realized I should have talked to the client first before making all these arrangements for his son. Fortunately, when I reached John Vishneski, he was so grateful for my arrangements that he didn’t question my protocol. I gave him Freeman’s number.
“Call him first thing in the morning. He’s going to get a court order to allow him to move your son, and either Dr. Herschel or Dr. Rafael will be on hand to oversee his care.”
“I have to be at a jobsite at seven,” Vishneski said.
“It’ll be best if you let someone else take care of that. You told me yesterday that Chad depended on you to look after him, and this is one place where you can do that. Even if he’s unconscious, your voice in his ear will reassure him.”
He agreed after a moment of rambling talk-how he’d have to talk to someone named Derek, how Mona needed to know-should he call her or would I? Before we hung up, I told him I was sending him a form to sign that would give his and his ex-wife’s consent to my talking to Chad’s doctors, and he agreed to that as well.