“Did you come here tonight because you thought there would be an attack on someone?”
“It’s a club. I came because I wanted to see the acts.”
“You’re a private investigator. They tell me you’ve been involved in a lot of high-profile investigations.”
Someone had ID’d me to the police. I wondered if it was the club’s owner, out of malice. “Thank you,” I said.
Milkova pushed her short hair back behind her ears, a nervous gesture-she wasn’t sure how to proceed. “But don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence, you being here the night someone got shot?”
“Cops have days off. Even doctors. And PIs have been known to take them, too.” I didn’t want to throw Petra to the wolves, and that’s what would happen if I said anything about wanting to keep an eye on my cousin’s workplace.
No one had bothered to turn off the Body Artist’s computer, and the plasma screens on the stage kept flashing images of flowers and jungle animals. It made a disturbing backdrop to the interrogation.
“Vic, what are you doing here?”
I looked around and saw Terry Finchley, a detective I’ve known for a long time. “Terry! I might ask you the same question.”
Finchley’s been out of the field for five or six years now, on the personal staff of my dad’s old protégé, Captain Bobby Mallory. I was surprised to see the Finch at an active homicide investigation.
He gave a wry smile. “Captain thought it was time I got my hands dirty again. And if you’re anything to judge by, they’re going to get mighty dirty indeed on this investigation.”
I looked again at my stained hands. I was beginning to feel twitchy, covered in Nadia’s blood. Terry climbed the shallow step to the stage and told Milkova to get him a chair.
“What have you learned, Liz?” Finchley asked Officer Milkova. So the E stood for Elizabeth.
“She’s not cooperating, sir. She won’t say how she knew the vic or why she was here, or anything.”
“Officer Milkova, I’ve told you I didn’t know the victim,” I said. “It makes me cranky when people don’t listen to me.”
“Pretty much any damn thing makes you cranky, Warshawski,” Finchley said. “But, out of curiosity, how did you get involved?”
“I was leaving the club, I heard gunshots. I ran across the parking lot and saw a woman on the ground. She was bleeding; I tried to block the wounds, so I didn’t take time to follow the shooters. But on the principle that no good deed is left unpunished, I’m being treated as though I had something to do with the dead woman’s murder.” My voice had risen to a shout.
“Vic, you’re exhausted. And I don’t blame you.” Terry’s tone was unusually gentle, the sharp planes in his ebony cheeks softening with empathy. He’d felt angry with me for a lot of years-maybe I was finally forgiven. His voice sharpened. “The techs are annoyed because you took evidence from the crime scene. And, for that, I not only don’t blame them but need you to turn it over to them.”
Okay, not forgiven. He was just doing good-bad cop all in one paragraph.
“It wasn’t evidence: these were my personal belongings that I dropped when I tried to administer first aid. I picked them up when Officer Milkova told me to leave the scene. I think your techs would be grateful to have extraneous items removed. Although I did abandon my coat.”
My throat contracted, and I looked involuntarily at my hand, my right hand, which had been pushing my coat against Nadia’s bleeding back. “You can keep the coat. I’ll never wear it again.”
Finchley paused briefly, and decided to let my handbag ride.
“Did you know the dead woman?”
“No.”
“Why were you here?”
“It’s a club. You can come in if you want a drink and want to see the show. I was doing both those things.”
Finchley sighed. “You know, anyone else in this town, I’d nod and take your name and phone number and urge you to wash the blood off and try to forget the horrors you witnessed. But V. I. Warshawski chooses to come to a club the one night in the year a woman gets murdered at their back door? You know what the captain’s going to ask when he hears that. Why were you here tonight?”
2 Performing Artist
Why had I been at Club Gouge the night Nadia Guaman took two bullets? Terry’s question kept running through my head as I drove home. The simple answer had to do with my cousin Petra. Except Petra had been in my life less than a year, and I was rapidly learning that there are no simple answers where she’s concerned.
In a way, that was unfair. It was really Jake Thibaut who first took me to Club Gouge, right after Thanksgiving. Jake’s a bass player who moved into my building last spring; we’ve been dating for a few months now. He plays with a contemporary chamber group, as well as the early-music group High Plainsong. Trish Walsh, a friend of his from High Plainsong, was doing a strange blend of medieval music with heavy metal lyrics, accompanying herself on electric hurdy-gurdy and lute.
When Trish Walsh, singing as the Raving Renaissance Raven, got a gig at Club Gouge, Jake put together a party to hear her. A number of his musician friends joined us, but he also invited Lotty Herschel and Max Loewenthal, along with my downstairs neighbor, Mr. Contreras.
My cousin Petra wheedled her way into the invitation. “The Raving Renaissance Raven!” Petra’s eyes glowed. “Jake, I didn’t realize how totally cool you are. I have the Raven’s Ravings on my iPod, but I’ve never caught her act!”
Club Gouge itself was one of a string of new nightspots that had taken over the abandoned warehouses under the Lake Street L, just west of downtown. Somehow, it had become the hippest scene on the strip, mostly because the owner, Olympia Koilada, apparently had a sixth sense for knowing when to book performers right before they became big.
The Raven, who was opening for an act billed as the Body Artist, sang and played for about forty minutes. Max was intrigued by her hurdy-gurdy, which was handmade of beautiful woods. The Raven had attached an amplifier to it, and the sound filled the club.
Jake and his musician friends didn’t like the distortion that the amp brought to the musical line. Between sets, they argued about whether their friend could have achieved a better effect with a local mike. Petra and Mr. Contreras argued about the lyrics: she thought the Raven’s songs were awesome, he found them disgusting.
It was Max who put my own reaction into words. “She perhaps never has had a wide audience in her early-music performance. Now she can show a young generation that even a gifted musician can shock, and thus build a market for herself.”
“That’s so cynical,” Petra protested. “She’s just being brave enough to put herself out there.”
“Where art and commerce intersect,” Jake said. “You make art, you sell it-to make a living, to get some validation-you make compromises with your art to make a living-why not go the whole way? Which isn’t to say she doesn’t believe as deeply in heavy metal as she does in early music.”
We had planned to leave before the Body Artist came onstage, but the lively arguments in our party-accompanied by the amount of beer and wine everyone was putting away-went on until the houselights were dimmed again for the evening’s main event.
Young men at tables around us gave catcalls and stomped their feet in anticipation. During the intermission, I’d been watching a table in the middle of the room. The five young men sitting there were all drinking heavily, but two in particular had been banging their beer bottles on the tabletop, demanding that the Body Artist get going. When the lights went down, theirs were the shrillest whistles in a noisy room.
We sat in the dark for perhaps thirty seconds. When the lights came back up, the Body Artist had appeared onstage.
She sat on a high stool, very still. She was naked except for an electron-sized thong, but cream-colored foundation covered her body, including her face. Only her brown hair, swept up from her neck in a jeweled clip, belonged to the world of the living.