13
A Show for the Dead
Despite the storm, the Club Gouge parking lot was crowded. Olympia’s marquee announced that the Body Artist was back for a special memorial performance in honor of Nadia Guaman, killed so tragically five days earlier. Olympia had put it out on Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, wherever the Millennium Gen gathers, and they’d responded in force. Oh, the dead do us so much good from the other side of the grave!
The room was almost full when I got inside. Rodney was planted in his usual spot, two-thirds of the way back from the stage. I squeezed into a spare seat at a crowded table near the back of the room where I could watch people as they came in. I didn’t see any of Chad’s Army buddies, which was a pity. I’d hoped they might show up to save me the trouble of trying to find them online.
Tonight, perhaps because of the short notice, there wasn’t a live act as a warm-up. The sound system was turned up loud, but we were listening to Enya’s Shepherd Moons, whose haunting melodies conveyed a suitable sense of mourning.
My cousin, working the far side of the room, caught sight of me. She hurried over with a glass of whisky. “Johnnie Walker Black, Vic, it’s on me. Thank you so much for coming.”
Olympia, standing next to the bar like a captain on the bridge of a ship, saw me then and swept over to my table. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought the object of a club was to invite customers, not drive them away.”
“You’re not a customer. You’re a detective, and detectives are bad for business.”
“Now, that very much depends on the kind of business you’re conducting, doesn’t it?” I watched her face, but she played poker with bigger gamblers than me; she showed no signs of any emotion besides impatience, so I added, “I went to Nadia’s funeral this afternoon. Karen came, but I guess you were too busy setting up here.”
“Karen went to the funeral?” Olympia lost some of her commanding poise. “Why?”
“Better ask her. I was trying to figure out why she kissed Nadia on the lips in front of the altar. I couldn’t decide if they had been lovers or if Karen was asking forgiveness of the dead.”
“What would she need forgiveness for?”
“Creating the situation in which Nadia became the target for a shooter. Or maybe someone shot Nadia by mistake. Maybe the person who put glass in Karen’s paintbrush a few weeks back was trying to do the job right this time and missed a second time. You got any security in place here besides your bouncer? And that guy?” I nodded toward Rodney.
“My insecurity, you mean.” Olympia gave a laugh with an edge to it. “Besides, the police caught Nadia’s murderer, as you know very well.”
“The police made an arrest,” I acknowledged, “but that isn’t the same thing as catching Nadia’s murderer.”
“Are you saying that the vet isn’t guilty?” Her eyes widened with alarm, dismay, or even pretense—hard to read in the dimly lit room.
“The setup calls for further exploration,” I said primly. “Chad Vishneski was asleep in his mother’s apartment with the murder weapon—the alleged murder weapon—on the pillow next to his head when the cops picked him up. Who phoned them? Why was the gun there? If it was, in fact, his gun, why didn’t he stow it with his other weapons? How did he know Nadia? That’s a raftful of unanswered questions. Come to think of it, Olympia, that wasn’t you or Rodney here who phoned the cops, was it?”
She sucked in a sharp, harsh breath and looked involuntarily at Rodney. In another moment, she’d taken off. She stopped at the bar to check on her staff, paused at Rodney’s table with a glance at me, and then worked her way through the crowd, stopping to banter with regulars or to check on people’s orders, just the good host, making sure her guests were happy.
I sipped my whisky and pretended not to be watching her. In a moment, she slipped across the small stage and disappeared behind the curtain that led to the changing rooms. I waited thirty seconds, then snaked my own way through the crowd to the back of the stage.
Olympia was standing in the dressing-room doorway, hands on hips, talking through the half-open door. My hiking boots made it hard to tiptoe, but I moved as close as I could.
“Your contract requires that the audience be able to put their art on your body.” That was Olympia. “If people walk away disappointed, they won’t come back. And we’ll both suffer.”
“I’m not the person who got into debt, and I don’t care about your suffering any more than you care about mine. For once, you and your precious investor will have to appreciate real art instead of kindergarten doodles. I spent four days on these stencils. It took Rivka six hours to paint me. I’m not wiping all this off so you can titillate people with death. Or save your club.”
“Damn you, Karen, you know damned well you have to do something. And not just to save—” Olympia spun around to bare her teeth at me. “What the f*ck are you doing here?”
In my effort to eavesdrop, I’d kicked a screw so that it banged against the dressing-room wall. “I wanted to make sure Karen was all right.”
“She’s not. Or she won’t be if she doesn’t remember that we’re here to please our public, not ourselves,” Olympia said. “Get back to the theater, Detective, or I’ll have Mark throw you out.”
She went into the dressing room and shut the door before I could follow her. I heard a bolt snap into place. I put my ear shamelessly against the door but could only make out the angry rise and fall of Olympia’s voice.
The door to a smaller neighboring room opened, and I saw two slim young men peer into the hall. I realized with a jolt that these were the dancers who gyrated in burkas during Karen’s performance.
“Is Olympia murdering Karen?” one of them asked.
“Or Karen killing Olympia?” Both laughed.
“I’m V. I. Warshawski,” I said. “I’m a detective, and I’m investigating Nadia Guaman’s murder. What did you see the night that Nadia Guaman was killed?”
“Nothing,” the first one said. “Kevin and I were long gone.”
“We don’t do makeup for this gig. As soon as the Artist finishes, back we come, dump the rags, hit the road.”
“Did you leave through the back door here? Did you notice anyone in the alley?”
“We steer clear of the alley. Drunks, smokers, druggies, not our scene. Time to stretch, Lee.”
The two disappeared, shutting the door firmly in my face. I hate it when people do that. I made a ferocious face—that would teach them a lesson—and went onto the stage. The crowd noise dipped for a moment as people thought I might be the start of the act, but when they saw I was just inspecting the equipment the babble rose again.
I touched the mike and didn’t get electrocuted. I inspected the webcam and wasn’t sprayed with noxious gases when I pressed the ON button. I turned it off and moved to my position at the back of the room.
Petra zipped by with a trayful of drinks. She shot me an anxious look.
“I haven’t killed Olympia,” I assured her. “Yet.”
A moment later, Olympia herself appeared onstage carrying a tray of paint cans and brushes. The crowd noise grew more intense again. Catcalls began rising, demands for the Artist to get onstage at once.
The lights dimmed, went out for the usual thirty seconds. When they came back up, the Body Artist was on the stage. She was, as always, nude, but I joined in the gasps and applause from the audience at the artwork covering her. No wonder it had taken the unknown Rivka six hours to paint her. A lily stem grew from the Artist’s vulva, but instead of a flower it sprouted Nadia Guaman’s head, which covered Karen’s breasts. Karen’s left arm was painted black, the right arm white: colors of mourning in the West and the East. A cypress branch drooped along her white shoulder; on the black shoulder a field of poppies grew.
The Artist stood and turned around. An angel covered her back, its wings spread across her shoulder blades. Its head was bent in grief; in one hand it held a pomegranate, but the other carried a sword.
I looked at Rodney, who was scowling. He snapped his fingers in Olympia’s direction. She went to his table and bent so that the feathers at her cleavage brushed his ear—an erotic gesture that seemed wasted on both of them. He was angry; the club’s owner was trying to placate him.
On the stage, the Body Artist stood with her back to us, her head lowered. She must have had a mike in her upswept hair because her voice carried easily through the room.
“A beautiful, tormented spirit went home today. To Jesus, if you believe He’s the Resurrection and the Life. To the great goddess, if that’s how you think of life beyond these frail coverings of skin and bones. Nadia Guaman, who briefly honored my body with her art, was slaughtered last Friday night. Tonight, I offer up my body in tribute to her.”
The Artist held her arms wide. The angel’s wings lifted, their feathers flowing down her arms. The young men, now anonymous, feminine, in their burkas, each took one of her outstretched hands.
No one in the audience moved or spoke until Rodney pushed his way to the stage. He grabbed the paint cans and with large strokes began to put his usual work, letters and numbers, on Karen’s buttocks. His gestures were so aggressive that his painting looked like an assault.
“S-O,” he wrote. “1154967 !352990681 B-I 50133928! 405893021195.”
I copied the codes into my handheld, even though I didn’t expect to decipher them. As Rodney painted, Karen said, “In today’s news, the Taliban in Pakistan publicly flogged a seventeen-year-old girl. Her brother was among the floggers. She was accused of using her body as she chose, not as the men around her wished. In other news, two hundred twenty thousand girls under the age of eleven were raped in America last year. If Nadia is in heaven now, or someplace like it, we know she will intercede on behalf of all assault victims.”
The audience began to stir restively, and some people booed. It wasn’t clear whether they were booing the Artist or Rodney. When Rodney finished his work, he threw down his brush.
Karen came to the lip of the stage. “For those of you who come regularly, you know that I don’t interfere with your art. I respect all sincere efforts at self-expression through painting. Tonight is different. Rivka is going to clean the canvas and re-create our work.”
“Just as long as you broadcast my painting first, bitch.” Rodney grabbed the Artist and dragged her across the stage to the webcams.
Rodney couldn’t hold her and operate the cameras at the same time, and the two dancers refused to move when he commanded them to photograph his work. Olympia pushed through her audience to the stage and held Karen while Rodney operated the camera.
Rodney nodded in satisfaction and left the stage. Karen wrenched herself free of Olympia. She grabbed a brush and painted a long red stripe that ran from Olympia’s nose, down her cleavage, and onto the black leather jacket that opened below Olympia’s breastbone. The Artist dropped the brush on the floor and strode to the back of the stage, where she disappeared behind the curtains.
The crowd cheered and yelled, so Olympia pretended to take it in good humor. She signaled to someone behind the bar to turn up the houselights.
“We never know what the Body Artist will produce for us when she appears, but we all know by now it will be entertainment we won’t see anywhere else in Chicago. We here at Club Gouge respect art and artists, and we’re contributing tonight’s profits to a scholarship that Columbia College has set up in Nadia Guaman’s honor.”
The images of death and innocence disappeared from the plasma screens on the stage. They were replaced by blue-and-white shadowy dancers, as a hot beat began pounding through the speakers. As always, the end of the Artist’s performance signaled a frenzy of drinking. For ten minutes or so, the waitstaff were moving like crazed ballerinas from table to bar to table. Several couples hopped on the stage and began to dance. Olympia quickly directed her staff to move the paints and webcams out of the way. Whatever kept the customers happy . . .
I scanned the room, hoping to spot some of Chad’s buddies in the mob. As far as I could tell, none of them had come. Rodney was still at his solitary table, working on what looked like his seventh beer. Although the room was so crowded that thirty or forty people were standing along the perimeter or even on the stage looking for seats, Rodney’s sullenness created a force field that no one wanted to cross.
Beyond him was a table of men who looked incongruous in this club setting—four men in their forties, in well-cut business suits. As I stared, I realized one of them looked vaguely familiar. And he was watching me in turn. Of course: Prince Rainier Cowles, the lawyer who’d been at Nadia’s funeral—had it been this afternoon? It felt like a hundred years had passed. I squirmed through the bodies around me to his side.
“Mr. Cowles! V. I. Warshawski. We met at Nadia Guaman’s funeral this afternoon.”
His brows contracted. “What are you doing here?”
I smiled down at him. “It’s a cold night, on top of a cold and stressful day. I thought an evening at an art club would cheer me up. How about you?”
A man at his table laughed. “Is that what you call this place? I would have said skin joint. I thought about sticking a twenty up that girl’s sunshine, but no one else was doing it.”
“That would have been artistic and creative of you,” I said. “And a bold statement of leadership.”
The speaker frowned at me, but before he could fire back, one of his tablemates said, “That’d be good for the annual report, Mac. We go into danger zones that no one else dares enter.”
“We should buy a piece of her tail.” Mac looked at me as if to emphasize that he was directing his crudeness at me. “Did you write down the Web address, Cowles? I’d like her tits where I could look at them from time to time.”
This caused not just another outburst of laughter but some congratulatory high fives. I dug my hands into my pockets to keep from flinging their drinks in their faces.
I grinned down at Cowles. “This is the kind of evening that the Guamans would enjoy, isn’t it? Witty banter about women’s bodies right after burying their daughter.”
He got to his feet. “Anyone who comes into a place like this can expect to hear that kind of comment and more besides. If you can’t handle it, then you shouldn’t be here.”
“Are you saying that Nadia deserved to be shot?”
He made an angry gesture. “Of course not. But this is a rough place. I don’t want to cause the Guamans more pain than they feel already, so I’m going to whitewash my report of what goes on in here. But you know as well as I do that it’s a strip joint going under a classier name. Look at that guy there—” He pointed at Rodney. “You can’t tell me he’s the kind of person a woman who respects herself would hang around.”
“You’ve got me there, Mr. Cowles,” I admitted. “He looks like a Class X felony waiting to happen.”
“What was all that about, his painting on that woman’s ass?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t want to join him, Cowles,” one of his friends said.
“What would you have put there?” the man they’d called Mac said.
“Maybe the same numbers,” the first man said. “They’d be his billable hours for the last month.”
The three who were sitting down all laughed, and Cowles, after a brief hesitation, joined in, but he said to me, “If you’re here because of Nadia Guaman, I’d advise you to leave her and her family strictly alone.”
“Whoa, Mr. Cowles! You told me you were their honorary uncle. You didn’t say you were their legal guardian or their mouthpiece. If they want to talk to me, they have a right to. And vice versa.”
“Just who are you, anyway?”
I smiled again. “I am V. I. Warshawski. Good night, Mr. Cowles.”
I returned to my own chair, which had been taken over by a couple who were sharing the small seat. As I extracted my coat from beneath them, I saw Cowles flag down a server and point at me. The server smiled and gestured. Within a few minutes, Cowles probably knew I was a private eye. There wasn’t any real point in my keeping my identity a secret, after all.