We walked out together. I left Mr. Urbanke to lock Nadia’s door since he had a key, no matter how he’d gotten hold of it. I wanted to know what he’d taken besides the cat Ixcuina. I wondered, too, why Lazar and Cristina Guaman hadn’t come, but maybe collecting their daughter’s belongings was too much for them right now. In the entryway, I stopped to look at the mailboxes. Urbanke’s first name was Julian.
I bumped across the slush-packed roads to my office. My leasemate and I contribute to a service that shovels the walks on our street, along with the parking area that we share with the other two buildings abutting it. I thankfully abandoned my car in the small lot and went into my office to catch up with my messages.
Now I felt bewildered, almost split in half, by the two lives I was looking at. Did Chad Vishneski and Nadia Guaman have anything at all in common? Had her killer trashed her apartment? And if her killer wasn’t Chad, why was he being brought into her story at all?
All I could do was plod forward with what little I had to go on. The beer cans, pillowcase, and guns I’d collected from Mona Vishneski’s were still in my car, and I had Chad’s girlie magazines in my briefcase.
I had taken these things yesterday for no good reason except trying to put on a show for the client and his ex-wife-the ghost of Sherlock Holmes dictates that the detective sees something in the detritus of everyday life overlooked by ordinary mortals.
I packed up the guns and the empties and pillowcase and called a messenger to carry them to Cheviot labs. “There may be nothing here,” I wrote in my cover letter, “but please check to see whether anything besides beer was in these cans. And see if you can trace the purchase history on these guns.”
I didn’t include the magazines-I didn’t think I needed a comparative analysis of Arabic and British porn directed at U.S. servicemen. I put them into the Vishneski case file, to keep until the matter was resolved.
Once the messenger had left, I leaned back in my desk chair and studied my mother’s engraving of the Uffizi. Someone had gone through Nadia Guaman’s apartment. I didn’t trust her neighbor; he had Nadia’s keys, he’d helped himself to her cat. But he hadn’t needed to point out that her computer was missing. And he could have searched her place at his leisure, no need to turn it upside down. It was possible that she’d stiffed advances from him and that he’d murdered her himself and then trashed her apartment to finish off his fury-but even that meant Chad Vishneski wasn’t the killer.
The story was too complicated for me to follow without a chart. I drew one up on a big piece of newsprint and taped it to my wall. Rodney, the thug who had the run of Club Gouge, I needed his last name. I needed to know who he was, what hold he had on Olympia.
Then there were all the murky sleeping arrangements among the Body Artist, Nadia’s dead sister, Olympia, and the two women I’d met last night, Rivka and Vesta, whose last names I’d also need to get. Vesta, a black belt, had once been one of Karen Buckley’s lovers. When we’d spoken last night, she’d seemed calm, dispassionate even, in discussing the Body Artist. It was hard to believe she might have killed Nadia in a jealous frenzy.
Besides, according to the Artist, there’d been nothing in her relations with Nadia to make anyone jealous. I didn’t believe much of what Karen Buckley said, but her account of Nadia’s advances and retreats had a ring of truth to it.
The younger woman, Rivka, was a different story. She didn’t have much skin between her feelings and the world. Judging by last night’s behavior, she was jealous of everyone who captured the Artist’s attention. She could have believed there was more between Nadia and the Artist than ever really took place. And what about Alexandra? I needed more information about her, that was clear. If Nadia had known about the Artist’s private life, would the youngest sister, Clara, have known as well? Or would the two older girls have protected the baby of the family? I toyed with a fantasy in which the Guamans murdered their daughter so that her sexuality would remain a deeply buried secret.
Speculation is the detective’s enemy. Facts. I needed facts about the Guamans and about the Body Artist.
I tried to put together a list of questions about the Artist. Vesta and Rivka believed she’d run away from home as a teen. Maybe she’d changed her name to protect herself from a violent father/brother/lover. I looked for legal name changes to Karen Buckley during the past decade but drew another blank.
She seemed to think that her performances gave her power: You can get this close, as close as my skin, but you can’t get inside me. I control the boundaries. I imagined standing naked in front of an audience, and my skin crawled. It felt like a horrible kind of exposure. I flung my pen down. I couldn’t find anything out about Karen’s past, so I needed to concentrate on what I knew about her in the present.
Her relationship with Olympia, who had financial woes, that bore more exploration. Somehow, Olympia had established a modicum of control over the Body Artist. And the Artist was a woman who definitely liked to be in control of her relationships.
The biggest questions had to do with the outbursts Nadia, or Nadia’s paintings, had provoked in Chad Vishneski. And neither the Artist nor Nadia’s family was giving me any insight into what that was about. Maybe Chad had written his buddies or his parents explaining why Nadia’s paintings had gotten so deeply under his skin.
I called the client. John Vishneski was in the Mercurio office on Huron going over drawings; no one was out on a building in this weather, of course. I asked if Chad had said anything to him about Nadia or the Body Artist.
“I never heard of those two women until they came and arrested Chad. I guess he thought the idea of a club like that would shock me, or disgust me. Kids have such funny ideas about parents, don’t they? Like, we don’t have basic human feelings or needs or something. I expect I was the same way about my old man.”
I thought of my own mother, how painful I’d found it to think she might have the sexual impulses common to us all. Parents aren’t supposed to operate in the world of desire. Perhaps that’s the only way children can grow up feeling safe.
“What did Chad do for e-mail? His phone? A computer?”
“Computer, I guess. His phone-he’s like all the kids his age-mostly he texts. He has a Lenovo ThinkPad; I bought it for him when he first shipped out. He took it all over Iraq with him. He even kept a blog, the way so many folks do these days.”
“The computer isn’t at your wife’s place… your ex-wife’s. Do you have it?”
I knew the answer would be no before he gave it. Mona hadn’t imagined seeing her son’s cell phone; someone had been in the apartment ahead of us the previous afternoon. Someone had helped themselves to Chad’s phone and his laptop.
I hung up. I was starting to feel as if I were in one of those dreams where you are running from some menace you can’t see and the whole time the menace is shutting every door you turn to. Someone with a lot of organizational talent was running faster than me, cutting in ahead of me at every exit.
I looked at my hands. “I am a street fighter,” I said. “No one can stop me.” Trouble was, I didn’t really believe it.
16 Nada About Nadia
I had to go downtown for a meeting, a routine inquiry where I’d been able to do all the work without any shadowy menaces blocking my path. I pulled my documents together, put on some makeup and my dressy boots, and went back out into the bracing winter air. The snow had stopped after a mere four inches-nothing, really, to a third-degree street fighter.
As I rode the L down to the Loop, I knew I needed to talk to the Guamans. I’d only been on the case for two days, but it had been five days since Nadia had died. It was strange that they hadn’t sought me out, the woman who’d been with their daughter when she died. I decided to go over to Pilsen to try to speak with Cristina Guaman at the hardware store where LifeStory told me she worked.