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.
She paid no attention to the priest, or even to Ernest, but walked up to the coffin and stared down at Nadia. The priest interrupted himself to demand that she sit down, that she not disrespect the service. Karen treated him as if he were a heckler at her body art act: he didn’t exist. After a moment, while we all watched in silence, Karen bent to kiss Nadia. The people closest to the coffin gasped, and Ms. Guaman half rose in her pew, but Karen turned and left, her furry boots squeaking slightly on the stone floor. When the street door shut behind her, the sound vibrated through the building like thunder.
I got up from my pew and hurried out after her, while Ernest shrieked, “They’re shooting. All the girls are dying. You’re next, Clara. Better get down. You’re next.”
The great door shut behind me as Ms. Guaman and one of the older women tried to hush Ernest. Karen Buckley was already opening the door to her car, a Subaru with the Zipcar logo painted on the side. I sprinted to the curb, skidding in my dress boots, calling her name.
“Ms. Buckley! I’m V. I. War—”
“I remember. You’re the detective.”
She had a lot of practice keeping her face neutral, and her eyes gave nothing away. They were a blue so pale that they seemed transparent in the winter light.
“I want to talk to you about Nadia. Where can I meet you?”
“Nowhere. I don’t want to talk to you.”
She started to get into her car. I moved quickly and braced myself against the open door.
“You knew her well, I gather, and I need to find out more about her. Did she ever talk to you about Chad Vishneski?”
“Chad Vishneski? Oh, the crazy vet who shot her. I hardly knew her.”
She tried to pull the door shut, but I’d wedged myself into the opening.
“Then why are you here? And why did you kiss her so dramatically?”
“I came for the same reason you did: to pay my respects to the dead. Perhaps my respects take a more dramatic form than yours.”
I shook my head. “If you came for the same reason I did, it’s because you have unanswered questions about her murder. It’s not at all clear that Chad was her killer or even that he’s crazy.”
She turned her head so that her long hair brushed the steering wheel. Her voice, when she again spoke, was barely audible. “I feel responsible for her death, that’s all. Something about the painting she did on my body stirred up Chad, and I came here to ask her forgiveness.”
She shot me a sidelong glance. “Does that satisfy you?”
“I almost believed you,” I said, “until you put in the coda. I’m in the phone book when you start feeling like telling me the truth.”
She flushed and bit her lip, but she wasn’t going to give herself away any further. I slammed her door shut and headed back to the church, but it wasn’t until I reached the big bronze doors that I heard her start her car.
When I got inside, communion was being distributed. I stood in the rear until the mass ended and the coffin was finally sealed. I moved to the side while the pallbearers carried the coffin down the aisle, the family in its wake. The rest of the mourners straggled to the exits. The subdued chatter, the relief of still being counted among the living, began to grow as the coffin left the building.
I stood on the steps and watched the undertakers bend over the family. One man helped Cristina Guaman settle Ernest into the backseat; a second gently shepherded the numb and gray Lazar through a door on the other side. Clara, the surviving daughter, was standing by herself, scowling. Despite the cold, she wasn’t wearing a coat over her pink jersey minidress.
I walked over to her. “I was with your sister when she died. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Under the outrageous makeup, Clara’s eyes were wet, but she held her head defiantly.
“How come?”
I was briefly confused.
“It’s a hard loss—”
“No, no.” She gave me the look of withering contempt that only adolescents seem able to produce. “How come you were with her?”
“The woman who came into the funeral to kiss your sister good-bye, her name is Karen Buckley, she performs at Club Gouge. Karen Buckley’s safety had been threatened. I’m a detective. I was trying to see that she didn’t get hurt.”
“You did a good job, didn’t you? It was my sister who got killed.”
I smiled painfully but held out my card. “Would you talk to me if I came to your school or your home?”
Clara’s eyes slid past me to someone behind me. The man in the black cashmere coat appeared next to me.
“Clara.” He took one of her bare hands between his two gloved ones. “This is no time to be standing around without a coat!”
She pulled her hand away and gave him the same angry stare she’d turned on me a minute earlier, but didn’t say anything.
“This is a hard time for your whole family,” the man said. “Your mother needs to be able to count on you. So get into the car before you add to her worries by catching cold, okay?”
He put a hand on her neck to shepherd her to the car, but she twisted away from him. She climbed into the limo, and the man in black cashmere leaned in over her head to say something to the Guamans. He spoke so softly I couldn’t hear him, but Cristina replied loudly, “I do understand. You don’t need to repeat yourself.”
He shut the door and slapped the car’s top a couple of times, I guess as a signal to the driver to take off.
“Clara’s a tough kid to talk to.” He had a light, pleasant baritone.
“All kids that age are. Or can be.”
“You a family friend?”
“I was close to Nadia at one time.” I didn’t feel like explaining my connection as a private investigator. “And you?”
“I’m sort of an honorary uncle to all of them, especially since poor Ernie had his accident.” He stuck a hand inside his coat and pulled out a card: Rainier Cowles, Attorney.
“They seem dogged by misfortune; they’re lucky to have an honorary uncle who’s a lawyer.” I didn’t give him a card of my own; a La Salle Street lawyer like him probably wouldn’t take kindly to a PI sniffing around the Guamans. “I don’t know the family well. Can Ernest be left alone?”
“Not really. It’s not that he’s dangerous, but his impulses are out of whack. Cristina worries about him leaving the stove on, that kind of thing. Lazar’s mother lives with them, helps keep an eye on Ernest.”
“So how do they manage?”
I tried to imagine what home life must be like for Clara and her parents: hard work for the parents, but painful for a teenager who had to put her own life on hold.
“Are you a social worker looking for a customer?” His eyebrows were raised.
I smiled. “Like you, I was worrying about the Guamans’ welfare, wondering how they cope. And I gather there was another sister who also died—Alexandra.”
“They don’t like to talk about her.” His voice was bland, but all the muscles in his face tightened.
“How did she die?”
One of Ernie’s outbursts came back to me: Allie. Allie is a dove. When Nadia lay in my arms, her last word had been “Allie.” Not bitterness at ending her life in an alley—she thought my face bending over hers was that of her dead sister. My insides twisted in an involuntary spasm of grief.
“You don’t know?” Cowles said. “It doesn’t sound to me as though you ever knew Nadia at all.”
“We were close once,” I repeated, “but not for long. She let me know Allie was very important to her, but she didn’t spell out why.”
His face relaxed again. “I’d let that dead dog lay, then. It’s too painful to Cristina and Lazar—you’ll never hear them talk about Alexandra. By the way, who was the woman who interrupted the service? She knocked poor Father Ogden off balance.”
I shrugged. “Her name is Karen Buckley.”
“And what was she to Nadia?”
I shook my head. “Anybody’s guess.”
“What’s yours?”
I smiled again. “Not enough data to begin to guess.”
“So you’re a careful woman, are you? Not a risk taker, hmm?”
For some reason, the time I’d swung from a gantry and landed in the Sanitary Canal flashed through my head, and I laughed but didn’t say anything.
He eyed me narrowly, annoyed at my frivolity but smart enough not to expose himself to possible ridicule. He looked at his watch: the conversation was over. He asked perfunctorily if I was heading to the cemetery, and when I said no, he strode briskly down the street to his car. It was a BMW sedan, which looked a bit like him—expensive cut, shiny black exterior, sleek lines.
I moved slowly to my Mustang. This was its third winter in Chicago, and it didn’t look sleek at all. It looked like me, tired and even confused, since the front and rear axles seemed to be pointing in opposite directions.