“You knew her pretty well, then?” I suggested.
“Not to say I knew her well, but we’re a small community up here. Everybody knows everybody else’s business, and people talk. I work for a family called Gordon, and, a long time back, maybe twenty years, Steve did a big job for them. Little Miss Frannie, she used to stand on a ladder next to him handing him nails. It was a pretty picture.”
She sighed. “Everything changed when the Kystarniks bought that big old mansion. They had a lot of work done, rebuilding the stables, putting in new bathrooms, kitchens, who knows what all. But that was how the two girls got to know each other. Zina and Frannie, they were the same age, same year in school, see.
“I never did know which was the one leading the other into trouble, but by the time they was teenagers trouble was pretty near all they knew. The Kystarnik girl, I heard she had two abortions before she was ever even sixteen. And the drugs! Well, these rich kids with too much money and not enough to do, that’s what they do. And, what I heard, Francine and Zina were selling anyone pretty much anything.”
“Lela!” one of the other maids protested. “You don’t know that, do you?”
“Don’t I just? Noel Gordon was in school with Zina and Frannie. And when those girls came over to party, it wasn’t Pepsi, let alone beer, they had in their cute little pink makeup kits.”
The two baristas had given up any pretense of work. The man went to the door and put the CLOSED sign up.
“And then the girls OD’d?” I asked.
“It was an ugly scene,” Lela said. “Zina died, Francine came close. And the cops found all the stuff in Steve Pindero’s basement. Why they didn’t arrest Frannie as she lay in her hospital bed, I’ll never know, but she recovered. And Steve? Oh my, I guess he tried to convince the cops it was him that had bought the drugs. But you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Steve didn’t know word one about what Francine was up to. While he was trying to get himself arrested, Frannie took off. No one ever saw her again. Steve took to drink, and that’s what killed him. Drinking on the job. Fell to his death two or three years after his girl disappeared.”
We were all silent for a moment, respecting the tragedy of the Pindero story, and then I asked whether young Frannie had shown any gifts as an artist.
“Funny you should say that. I forgot all about that part of her. She could draw pretty much anything. Got the gift from her daddy, I guess. He was always drawing up these designs, these plans for stuff he was building. He was in high demand in all the big houses around here for what he could design and build.”
“Would there be anyone Frannie might seek refuge with? An art teacher? What about Noel Gordon?”
Lela shook her head. “I’d be surprised. Noel, he straightened himself out after Zina died, went on to medical school, works at some clinic in Texas, down on the Mexican border, where he treats poor immigrants. I can’t think Frannie would know where to find him, even. And I don’t know any family up here that wouldn’t turn her right over to the authorities if she showed up.”
It was my turn to sigh: one dead end after another.
“But you said you found her,” another maid ventured. “Where has she been hiding all this time?”
“The times I talked to her, I didn’t know her real name. She was calling herself Karen Buckley. And now, as I said, she’s disappeared.” I looked at the wall clock: long night ahead, with Tim Radke coming to look over the Body Artist’s computer. “Thanks for talking to me so frankly,” I said. “I’m headed back to the city. Anyone need a lift?”
The two baristas lived in Waukegan to the north, but the maids all lived in the city. They crammed into the Mustang, a tight fit for the two in my small backseat, but better than the three buses they told me they took to get from the far northern suburbs down to their homes on Chicago’s West Side.
When I finally returned to my office, Petra was still there, calling hospitals to see if anyone named Karen Buckley or Frannie Pindero had sought care for deep cuts. I was so tired that I just shook my head when she asked me if I’d found Steve Pindero. I went into my back room, where my portable bed is. My jeans and socks were wet from the snow. I took them off and flung them on a radiator and collapsed on the bed.
I was on a freight train, rocking along. The tracks were badly scarred, and the train kept bouncing, jolting me from side to side.
“Vic! Wake up, why can’t you? Mr. Vishneski’s on the phone.”
It wasn’t a train, just my cousin shaking my shoulder.
“I said he could leave a message with me, but he wouldn’t.”
I staggered upright, pulled on my jeans, and padded out to my desk in my bare feet. There was still an inch of cold cappuccino in the cup I’d bought this morning. I swallowed it, trying to clear the thickness of sleep out of my voice.
“Mr. Vishneski. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
He was too intent on his story to care. “We have good news. My boy came to for a minute. He’d been restless all night, and the docs said that was a good sign. And then he opened his eyes.”
“That’s wonderful news,” I said. “Did he seem to know you?”
“We couldn’t tell, his eyes weren’t focusing that great. He said a couple of words, then he passed out again.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“She says it’s a good sign, and maybe he’ll make a full recovery. But it could be days or a week before he really regains consciousness for good.”
So we couldn’t ask him any questions.
“What did he say? Anything about the shooting? Or if someone came home from Plotzky’s bar with him?”
“He wants a vest. Mona and me, we both agreed that that was what he was saying. The nurse, she heard it, too. But we don’t feel like we want to leave the hospital right now, so we thought-we hoped-we want you go to Mona’s place and bring it here to the hospital for him.”
“A vest?” I said blankly. “What does it look like?”
“We don’t know,” Vishneski said. “Neither Mona nor me gave him one, so we’re thinking one of his buddies, or maybe a girlfriend. If you find any vests, bring them all over, and we’ll see which one he wants. Could be he left something in a pocket, a good-luck charm or something.”
I started to say I’d come to the hospital to collect keys, but then I imagined the drive through snow-packed streets to the hospital, parking, waiting while someone fetched Mona out of the ICU, and her haphazard search through her giant bag for her keys. It would be easier for me to pick the lock, but I didn’t share that thought with the client.
Before I left, I went over Petra’s work for the hour I’d been sleeping. She’d finished checking hospitals, but no one who sounded like the Body Artist had come in to have cuts treated.
“Peewee, it’s been a long day, but I need you to stay here until I get back. Tim Radke is coming to see if he can find out who’s blocking the Embodied Art website. He’s probably not going to have a computer with him, which means he’ll use mine. There’s too much confidential data on the Mac Pro-I’ll want you to hover to see what files he looks at.”
“What should I tell him you want him to do?”
“The Artist said her hosting service told her the site was being blocked from her computer, but she claims not to know who’s doing it. I want to know if Tim can verify that one way or another.”