“Bunter!” I cried. “Bunter, get that cappuccino machine fired up. And look smart about it!”
What a strange fantasy, to imagine someone who was dressed and ready to do your bidding at whatever hour it pleased you to bid him. So very obviously politically and socially incorrect, and yet how much I longed for my own Bunter. I flung the covers back and ran across the cold floor to the kitchen, where I put on my espresso maker, before tiptoeing to the bathroom.
I turned the thermostat up to sixty-eight before collecting the dogs from Mr. Contreras.
When I got home and thawed out, I sat at my laptop with my second espresso. LifeStory, an innocuous-sounding outfit, for whose detailed searches into everyone’s lives I pay eight grand a year, had sent me a profile of Nadia Guaman.
Guaman had gone to Columbia College in the south Loop after a childhood in Pilsen and high school at St. Teresa of Avila. Her father, Lazar, worked as a baggage handler up at O’Hare; her mother, Cristina, was a cashier at a Pilsen hardware store. They still lived in the bungalow on Twenty-first Place where Nadia had grown up.
Nadia had been the oldest of Lazar and Cristina’s three surviving children; another daughter, Alexandra, had died three years ago. The youngest, Clara, a high school senior, was also at St. Teresa. Their only son, Ernest, had been training as an electrical engineer when his motorcycle flipped him onto Cermak Road two years ago. His brain injuries left him unable to work.
I squeezed my eyes shut. The pain the Guamans lived with every day, one child already dead, their son terribly disabled, and now a daughter murdered-I couldn’t imagine how you survived such losses and kept any vestige of your sanity or humanity.
I returned to the screen and studied the financial details another of my subscription databases, the Monitor Project, had dredged up. Nadia’s bank account was modest; she had earned about forty thousand in a good year. Her rent on the one-bedroom on the fringe of Humboldt Park-the part where gangs and gentrifiers lived in uneasy proximity-ran just under nine hundred a month. She didn’t own a car. The computer hadn’t come upon any financial instruments, if such things still existed, in her name.
Nadia hadn’t been party to any lawsuits. LifeStory and the Monitor Project aren’t a substitute for routine surveillance. They didn’t give me any details on Nadia’s private life-who she dated, how well she’d known Chad Vishneski, if she and Karen Buckley or Olympia had been lovers. All I could tell was that she’d never filed an order of protection or complained of stalking or harassment.
The reports did give other, more intimate information, the kind you assume is private to you alone. I felt filthy, exploring Nadia’s medical history, but I wanted to know if she’d had any treatment that might imply an abusive relationship. No recent broken bones, no STDs. By the time I’d been through the whole file, I just had time to shower and change for my first appointment of the morning. I’d look at the reports on Chad, Olympia, and Karen Buckley later.
Now that the police had identified her killer, they’d released Nadia’s body to her family. The funeral was scheduled for this afternoon at Ayuda de Cristianos, in Pilsen. I put on my tailored black suit so that I could go directly to the church from my downtown meeting.
10 A Kiss in the Coffin
Nadia’s family was gathered around her open coffin, the parents in black, the surviving daughter defiantly flaunting turquoise eye shadow and a pink jersey minidress. Their son, Ernest, was wearing a black suit and tie, but he was twitching and shaking his arms and occasionally letting out little yipping noises. An older woman, perhaps a grandmother, was scolding him.
I joined the obligatory parade up to the family. Lazar Guaman stood like a statue, unable to respond to anyone who spoke to him, seemingly unaware of his son. For Cristina Guaman, Ernest seemed to provide a welcome distraction. Rubbing his neck, or taking his hands when he started sticking them down his trouser front, or hushing his shriek of a laugh seemed to calm her, to give her a kind of purpose.
I murmured condolences, and Ms. Guaman directed me to the coffin.
“Our Nadia looks like the angel in heaven she’s become.”
I moved reluctantly to the open coffin. I’d last seen their daughter in Club Gouge’s parking lot, in pain and covered in blood, but here she lay as calm as if she were in a tranquil sleep. Her face, stripped of the tormenting anger I’d witnessed at Club Gouge, looked heartbreakingly young in death, almost a child’s face. The effect was heightened by the lacy white pillow on which she lay.
The funeral people had covered her torn-up chest with a pale blue frock, a girlie outfit very different from the jeans and outsize shirt she’d worn for her Body Artist painting. Was it good, was it bad, to turn the dead into dolls like this?
Someone who seemed to know the family was speaking to Ms. Guaman, when Ernest shouted, so abruptly that I jumped, “Nadia flew, she flew to Jesus! Allie is a dove, flying around and around and around!” and he started to laugh.
The outburst didn’t startle his family. “Your sister is an angel, not a dove,” scolded the woman who’d been speaking to Ms. Guaman, while the daughter said, “Not in church, Ernie, don’t yell in here.”
Ayuda de Cristianos was one of those cavernous old churches that dated to the time when Czech immigrants settled this part of Chicago. Back then it was known as St. Ludmila’s, and the grim details of the saint’s life still filled the narrow stained-glass windows. The nave was made of concrete, with a vaulted ceiling that must have stretched a good hundred feet above us. Everyone’s footfalls echoed and re-echoed; each time the street door slammed, Ernest roared with laughter and imitated the noise.
As more people came up to the coffin, I retreated to a pew near the back of the church. The building was bone-chillingly cold. We should have all huddled together in a few pews.
I didn’t see anyone I knew among the few dozen mourners who dotted the space. No one from Club Gouge, for instance, and none of Chad’s Army buddies. Nor Rodney, the heavy from the club. Most of the people looked like relatives or perhaps coworkers of the Guamans. A man in a black cashmere coat, his hair cut strand by strand, the way they do in those Oak Street salons, stood to one side until he could speak to the family alone. Their doctor, perhaps, or someone from the airline where Lazar worked as a baggage handler. I built a fantasy for the family that the airline, saddened by all the Guamans’ losses, was setting up a college fund for the remaining daughter.
The priest appeared from a side door, and the family moved to the front row.
“Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,” the priest began.
In my childhood, although I wasn’t a Catholic, I attended a lot of funeral masses for classmates-one of the by-products of growing up in a rough neighborhood. The mass was said in Latin then, and I’m still disconcerted to hear it in English.
I joined the congregation in a mumbled response to the prayers, our voices swallowed by the building before they could travel to the altar. We had reached the homily, where the priest was explaining what a devoted daughter and sister Nadia had been, when a door slammed and footfalls echoed hollowly through the nave. Everyone turned to look, and Ernest once again jumped excitedly and shouted an imitation of the sound.
I didn’t recognize the woman at first. In a navy wool coat and furry boots, she looked like every other cold person in the church. Her brown hair hung below her coat collar; a lock fell across her eyes, and she pushed it aside as she marched up the aisle. It was only when she passed me that I realized who it was: Karen Buckley, the Body Artist. For her act, she pinned her hair up on her head, and her heavy foundation drained all expression from her face. Now I saw the muscles around her mouth and eyes quiver.