26
A Show in the Dark
Back in my office, I wrote up my conversation with Scalia and the odd reaction of everyone I’d met at Tintrey to Alexandra’s name. I left out the tampon—why include that in a document that might get subpoenaed for a trial?—and threw out the notebook that Scalia had damaged. The last column in my investigator spreadsheet was labeled “Dead Ends.” Jesse Laredo, Chad’s buddy from Iraq, was dead. Jesse’s mother had called while I was out to say she couldn’t find any trace of Chad’s blogs or e-mails among her son’s things. The message wasn’t a surprise—it would surprise me if I learned one reliable thing in this wretched case—but it did depress me further.
I looked up [http://embodiedart.com] embodiedart.com again to see if there were any new postings, but the site was still down “out of respect for the dead.” I took out my notes where I’d copied some of Rodney’s code. There were several L’s but no Q’s. I rubbed my eyes. Kystarnik had to know he was under surveillance. He had to realize he needed multiple avenues to communicate with his thugs. So it seemed reasonable to assume that Rodney’s scribbles were some means of communication. Even so, the feds could also be watching the Body Artist, so it wasn’t exactly a secret code. So why was he doing it?
Maybe Rodney’s mission was simply to taunt Olympia about the money she owed Rest EZ. When she’d been so angry with Karen Buckley the other night for refusing to let Rodney write on her buttocks, Olympia had told her they were in the same boat together. But Karen said it wasn’t any of her business if Club Gouge went under. I turned the argument this way and that in my mind, but couldn’t come up with any compelling reason Karen had for doing what Olympia and Rodney wanted.
I looked at the column I called “Key Players” and added Gilbert Scalia. I couldn’t see any place that Tintrey and Rest EZ intersected except at Olympia’s club. Rodney, Rainier Cowles, Scalia, and Tintrey owner Jarvis MacLean had all been there on the same night. But what did that prove?
Olympia knew things she wasn’t telling. So did the Body Artist. All I needed was for one of them to open up, and the whole house of cards would fall neatly around me.
I dug deeper into Rainier Cowles’s biography and found that he had handled litigation for Tintrey. As I’d suspected, Palmer & Statten was Tintrey’s outside counsel. But so what?
I flung a pencil at the wall in frustration. As if on cue, John Vishneski called to say that Mona hadn’t printed out any of Chad’s blog postings, either.
“The docs say he’s holding his own still,” he said. “What have you found out?”
“I’m trying to see where his life and Nadia Guaman’s intersected, and I’m assuming it had to be in Iraq, where Nadia’s sister died, so that’s the lead I’m working right now. I’ll call you when I know something definite. Or if Chad regains consciousness and can talk, let me know. Meanwhile, keep playing your clarinet for him.”
I hung up before he could criticize my lack of progress or pry more deeply into what I was or wasn’t doing. Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I looked up Ernest Guaman’s motorcycle accident. Of course, injuries like his are routine in a city like Chicago. Like Chad Vishneski’s squad—eight men dead and only three mentioned by name—there so many accidents in Chicago that you’d have to be in a spectacular one for anyone to care.
Finally, in the Hispanic newspaper, I found a brief paragraph on Ernest Guaman. That gave me the date—seven months after Allie’s death—but no details. “He was alone on his Honda at two in the afternoon, but no one has come forward to say how the accident took place,” I translated laboriously. I guess I’d been imagining someone forcing him off the road to try to silence him. I’d wanted said the article to say, “Ernest Guaman, crusading for justice for his sister Alexandra, was forced off the road today by ________,” and the blank would be filled in with the name of the person who’d gone on to shoot Nadia for drawing her sister’s portrait on Karen Buckley’s back.
It was Friday night, and I’d had a long week. Jake had decreed a moratorium on rehearsals. I declared a similar moratorium on the Vishneskis. I put on makeup and a formfitting sweater, and we went to an old-fashioned night club, one where everyone kept their clothes on. Jake knew the bass player, so we got a table up front. We stayed until the club closed at three, dancing and drinking. We spent Saturday catching up on sleep, taking a lazy walk along the lakefront with the dogs, watching an old Alec Guinness movie.
On Sunday, the brief honeymoon was over. Jake’s early music group came by at four for a rehearsal. I headed back to Club Gouge, in the hope of finding a way to get the Body Artist or Olympia to talk to me.
I’m not much for disguises, not like Sherlock Holmes or Aimée Leduc, but I did put on makeup using a heavy hand with the eyeliner and mascara and dug through the junk in my hall closet for a pink plastic wig I’d worn at Halloween. With that and the Smith & Wesson in my tuck holster, if I didn’t fool anyone with my getup, at least I could shoot my way past Olympia’s bouncer.
It was just after nine when I reached the club, and excitement was building as the Body Artist’s performance time drew near. I parked down the street and attached myself to a high-spirited group waiting in line. Everyone had to show IDs to make sure the drinking age limit was met. The crowd was large enough that one of the bartenders was helping the bouncer. The two were shining flashlights on the birth dates only, not bothering to check pictures against faces, so I held my driver’s license out to the bartender, thumb casually covering my photo, and slipped inside.
It felt like old times. Rodney at his spot, glowering at a bottle of beer. My cousin swooping around with drinks, laughing and flirting equally with men and women. Olympia, tonight wearing skintight white leather with a trailing black scarf, behind the bar, captain on the bridge, surveying the deck.
Finally, the lights went down, then came up on Karen Buckley naked on her stool. The two figures in burkas appeared at the edge of the stage, miming longing and fear.
I couldn’t take another show. I worked my way through the crowd to the edge of the room and went into the corridor where the toilets were. I’d planned on going through the door between the public space and the dressing rooms to wait for Karen there, but Olympia, or perhaps Karen, had posted a guard at the door, a stocky, scowling man in black. In my role as Pink Plastic Bubble Hair, I smiled and waggled my fingers at him. He scowled even more thoroughly.
I went into the women’s toilets, where I amused myself by answering e-mails, and finally heard the eruption of laughter that announced the end of the show. In a few minutes, the bathroom was full of women, laughing with embarrassment or chattering excitedly about Karen’s performance. I went back into the corridor, where a long line was waiting to use the facilities. A much shorter line, naturally, stood outside the men’s room.
The lights suddenly went out again. People screamed, pulled out cell phones to light up the hallway, jabbered in confusion. A man’s voice, heavily accented, boomed through the sound system. “We’re experiencing electrical problems. I’ll have to ask everyone to leave, guests and staff. We have a crew with flashlights to help you find your coats and personal belongings. If you haven’t paid your bill yet, the last round was on the house. See you Friday, and our apologies for the inconvenience.”
I flattened myself against the wall as the crowd pushed toward the exits. Panic seemed to infect people in the dark. No one seemed to wonder how the electricity could be out while the mike onstage worked perfectly.
Inside the club’s main room, powerful flashlights played around. I couldn’t see who was wielding them, but a man appeared next to a table where a couple was still seated and urged them to their feet—and not in any gentle way. As the lights shone on the bar, on the tables, on the exit, I saw another man in black outside Olympia’s cube of an office.
I thought Olympia would stick around to go down with her ship but couldn’t locate her in the crowd. I did see my cousin’s feathery halo of hair heading toward the exit and breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever was going on, I didn’t want Petra to be part of it.
While the flashlights were focused on the middle of the room, I slipped behind the curtain at the back of the stage. A door behind the stage that led to the corridor was partly open. I stood flat against the wall and peered between the door’s hinges.
Karen’s dressing room was directly across the hall. A man in black, wearing a black ski mask, stood there making sure everyone moved down the corridor to the rear exit. And making sure no one could leave Karen’s dressing room.
I dropped to the floor so that my silhouette wouldn’t show. I felt a draft and realized that the stage back here was raised, that there was a gap of about a foot between it and the floor. I wriggled underneath, dislodging my pink wig. Any noise I was making was masked by the tromping of feet toward the exit. That wouldn’t go on for long. I took my gun out of its holster and felt for the safety. I didn’t want to shoot it by mistake in the dark.
In a surprisingly short time, the room was cleared. Voices called to each other, male and female, affirming that everyone had left. The lights came back up.
“Bring them out.” It was the sound of authority, a man speaking with the rumbling r of a Slavic accent.
I heard someone open the dressing room door. I couldn’t see anything, only heard a cry of pain suppressed and footfalls overhead. One set was heavy, boots, the other almost noiseless, perhaps the Body Artist’s bare feet.
From the other end of the room, I heard Olympia snap, “Let go of me, damn you!” Then the horrible sound of hand on skin, a noisy slap, and a woman, also with a rumbling Slavic accent, saying, “You speak when we ask questions. Otherwise, you are quiet.”
“You’ve no right—”
Slap. “This is not an American courtroom. You are not having rights. You are having only responsibilities, and these you are not meeting.”
I fumbled in my pocket for my cell phone and typed a text to Petra, begging her to call the police and get them to the club. I didn’t know Terry Finchley’s number by heart, so I put in the number for his friend Conrad Rawlings, who works now in South Chicago. tell Conrad 2 call Terry. thugs r beating Olympia.
Above me, I heard another slap, and a man’s voice saying, “Go to the computer, bitch, and turn your gallery back on.”
That was Rodney.
The Body Artist said, “I didn’t shut the site down. I thought you did. I can’t get access to it.” Her voice was a little wobbly, but she was maintaining an admirable level of control.
The thugs hit her again, and then I heard a crash, cascading metal, amplified by the wooden floorboards. Loud cursing in a language not English. A paint can rolled across the stage and bounced to the floor near me. A scuffle, more metal flying about, and then another smack of hand on flesh and a high-pitched yelp.
“Hold that stupid bitch.” The master voice, maybe even Anton Kystarnik himself. “You know our agreement, Olympia. I don’t want to burn your pretty little club down. So no more little-girl lies. And you, you no-good whore, no more little-girl tricks from you, either. Fix your website. Then we all can go home happy.”
“But I don’t know why my site is—”
Again someone hit her, harder this time.
I slid out from my hiding place. The man who’d been guarding the door to the corridor was gone—they figured they had control of the premises. I moved to his spot behind the curtain and peered through the gap.
The thick wires connecting the plasma screens to the mains came through here and went under the door to a wall outlet in the corridor. I stepped carefully so I wouldn’t trip and betray myself.
The stage was covered with paint. I saw now what the noise had been: Karen had hurled the contents of her cart at her attackers. Brushes and palette knives were scattered wholesale. One knife had landed near me. I slid a hand through the gap in the curtain and picked it up. Its blade was too pliable for use as a weapon.
The thugs all had on those black ski masks so popular with bullies. I thought I could tell Rodney by his beer belly, but the others were indistinguishable. One figure had a gun trained on Olympia, another on the Body Artist, who was still covered in her performance paint. Someone with red paint all down the front of his jacket forced Karen to sit, smacking her hard, and brought the laptop she used with her slide show over to her.
“Open the website,” he growled.
Karen, her fingers shaking, typed in the URL. Lights shifted and flicked in the house, and I realized the computer was still attached to the plasma screens on the stage. By craning my neck, I could see the same message I’d been getting: Out of respect for the dead, we have temporarily taken the site off-line.
“Now you put online,” he said.
“Someone got into my system and changed the password,” Karen said. “I can’t open it.”
“Liar,” the head man growled. “Log on.”
Karen typed something, and, on the screen, we could all see the message come back.
“Invalid password. Try again.”
She tried again and got the same message.
The man giving the orders nodded and the thug holding Karen slugged her jaw. I couldn’t stand and watch, and I couldn’t take them all on, either. I knelt and gouged at the insulation around the thickest of the wires snaking through my feet, peeled it back. My hands were trembling in my panicky haste. I finally loosened a strip, pulled it away from the wires, and stuck the palette knife in between them.
A crack like thunder, an arc of lightning, and the theater went dark again. The knife blade splintered in my hand, and the shock knocked me backward. Sparks sizzled and spat from the exposed wires. I scrambled under the curtains onto the stage on my hands and knees.
The room was briefly quiet: no one knew what had happened. Then shouting and cursing began, in Russian or perhaps Ukrainian. People crashed across the room, scattering tables, falling. Someone fired a shot, and I could see the spurt of flame. The master voice bellowed in Russian or Ukrainian, and no one else fired. I ran onto the stage and tried to grab Karen, but she swung a fist at me and started kicking.
“It’s V. I. Warshawski,” I panted. “Come along, damn it!”
She flailed at me even harder. I pulled her from the stool, tried to orient myself to the back of the stage. One of the thugs had found a flashlight and pointed it at the stage. Another gun went off, this time aiming at us. I let go of Karen’s arm and dropped to the floor. I rolled over and fired back, but my shot went wide.
“Karen! Karen, where are you? We need to get out of here!”
The curtain dropped against the fused wires. I could smell charring. If the curtain caught, the wooden floor and chairs would feed a fire in no time.
I pushed through the curtains, looked down the corridor, saw movement in the dressing room. Karen had put on her coat and boots and had her jeans in her hand. I slung my left arm under her armpits and hefted her over my shoulder before she realized what I was doing.
“Put me down, damn you!”
She drubbed on my back as I jogged down the hall to the back exit. Pushed open the door while she kicked at me. I was panting now from the load and from her fighting me, and I still had to circle the building to get to my car out on Lake Street. Before I’d gone more than a few steps, she managed to break free.
She ran to an SUV parked near us and opened the door. She was in luck: the keys were in the ignition. She got the engine going as I ran to her side. I yanked the door wide, but she punched at my head.
“You interfering, ignorant, stupid bitch, now you’ve really f*cked me over. Get out of my way or I’ll run you down!”
She roared out of the lot, the still-open door swinging on its hinges. I just had time to read the plate number before she turned onto Lake Street.