28
Mourning Coffee
When my cell phone rang four hours later, at first I incorporated it into my sleep. I was in Kiev, and the Body Artist, painted like a Russian Easter egg, was madly pulling ropes to ring church bells all across the city. The ringing stopped, then started again almost at once.
“I know the Bottesini,” Jake muttered. “I don’t have to rehearse it.”
“Neither do I,” I said, but I got up and found my phone, in the pocket of the jeans I’d dropped on the floor last night.
My call log showed the same person had called three times. The phone was chirruping to tell me I had new voice mail, new text messages. r u there? ansir!
My head was too blurry from a short night on top of a gun battle to call back. I stumbled, shivering, down the hall to the bathroom. Seven in the morning, still dark. I didn’t think winter would ever end.
I stood under the shower, washing sleep out of my face, while my phone rang again from the towel shelf. On the caller’s fifth try, I answered before it rolled over to voice mail.
“Who is this?” It was a husky whisper.
My least favorite conversational gambit. “V. I. Warshawski. Who is this?”
“I . . . Clara. I’m supposed to be at mass in fifteen minutes. I need to see you. There’s a coffee shop on Blue Island a block from the school.”
A truck or bus roaring by made it hard to hear her; I shouted over the noise that I’d be there in twenty minutes. Jake didn’t wake up as I banged drawers and doors open and shut, pulling on sweaters, jeans, my practical heavy boots. For a perverse moment, I wanted to yank the blankets off, freeze his toes, force him to wake up, but he’d done surgery on me that turned him green, he’d spent the night, he’d made me feel less alone and more beautiful than I usually do.
My right hand was swollen, the palm a purply brown. When I couldn’t get a glove over it, I stuffed it into an oven mitt, grabbed my coat and gun, and ran down the back stairs to the alley, where I’d parked last night. Once I was in the car, I put the Smith & Wesson on the seat, under my coat, wondering how well I’d aim if I had to shoot left-handed.
Lake Shore Drive is a parking lot this time of day, but the side streets weren’t much better—parents dropping kids off at school blocked most of the roads. It took half an hour to reach the coffee shop, a franchise of one of the big chains, on Blue Island. I didn’t see Clara Guaman at first and thought she’d gotten fed up with waiting. However, while I stood in line for the espresso I urgently needed, Clara emerged from the shadows at the back.
“I thought you’d never get here. I have to get to class before they miss me.”
“I’ll walk up with you. We can talk on the way.”
“No! I don’t want anyone to see you with me. Come over here where it’s dark.”
She headed toward the back, to an alcove near the doors to the toilets. I collected my drink and joined her. This was the only coffee shop close to her school, and it was filled with kids on their way to class, so I didn’t think she’d be particularly anonymous. At least so far no one had called out to her.
Once we were in the alcove, she couldn’t seem to get to the point. She fiddled with her phone and kept peering around the corner to see who was standing in line.
“What’s going on, Clara?” I tried to keep irritability out of my voice, but my short night made me not only foggy but grumpy.
“Did you go to—did you ask—were you talking about Allie with Prince Rainier?”
“No,” I said. “I went up to Tintrey’s headquarters in Northfield yesterday. Did Rainier come around?”
Like so many chains, this place had overheated the milk for the cappuccino, which ruins the taste. Caffeine is caffeine, though. I poured some into the lid to cool and swallowed it, wincing at the bitterness.
“Did you go up there to spy on Allie? Why can’t you let her and Nadia rest in peace?”
“The soldier who’s accused of shooting Nadia lost his whole unit in Iraq. I was trying to find out if Alexandra had died in the same attack.”
“Why do you care?” she said in a fierce whisper.
“I’m trying to understand where Nadia and Chad Vishneski’s lives connected. It seemed to me that Iraq was a place—”
“Leave Allie alone. What don’t you understand about that?”
“Everything. Why can’t I talk about Alexandra?”
“Because we’re not supposed to.” Clara peered around again. “She did something awful in Iraq. The company won’t publish it as long as we don’t talk about her. But if we do, they’ll put it online. They’ll put it everywhere.”
“The company? Tintrey?” When she nodded, I asked, “What did she do?”
“I don’t know! Mamá and Papi won’t tell me. Ernest, he knew, but look at him now. He doesn’t remember, he just starts waving his arms and saying Allie is a dove with Jesus when I ask him.”
“This doesn’t make sense.” I tried to force my sleep-deprived brain to work. “What difference does it make if anyone knows?”
“The company paid us her insurance,” Clara muttered. “Even though they shouldn’t have—at least, that’s what Mamá says—because Allie had gone off on her own. Whatever she was doing when she got killed, it wasn’t part of her job.”
“That shouldn’t affect her life insurance. Maybe it was workers’ comp?”
“What difference does it make?” Clara cried, and then looked around again, afraid her outburst had attracted attention.
Someone asked if we were waiting for the bathroom and pushed past us to use it. We moved deeper into the alcove, farther from the noise at the front of the shop.
“It doesn’t. You’re right, it doesn’t matter. At least, from a legal standpoint. The insurance company could demand their money back if they thought they’d paid a fraudulent claim. Is that how Rainier Cowles got involved?”
“I hate him.” Clara’s voice was savage. “Mamá and Papi were beside themselves when Allie died. They wanted to sue. They said the company was to blame for not taking care of Allie, but then he started showing up.”
“Cowles?”
She nodded.
“And what did he tell your folks?”
She grimaced. “I didn’t really know what they were talking about. These horrible arguments started, round and round, I wasn’t sure who was on whose side, but Ernie, he’d just been in his accident, and finally Papi said we’d better take the money or we’d never be able to take care of him. Nadia, she was furious. She said Allie’s life shouldn’t be for sale. In the end, she promised Mamá not to talk about Allie, not to talk about how Allie died. But Nadia never stopped being angry. So she moved out. And then we just went on and pretended like it was all normal, Ernie flapping his arms around, Nadia never coming home, me going to St. Teresa of Avila’s.”
“It sounds like your home life is a nightmare.”
“It is!” she burst out. “You don’t even know, you can’t imagine. But it’s worse now because of Nadia dying. And what if Mamá finds out—”
She cut herself short.
“What if Mamá finds out what?” I asked.
“Nothing. Nothing!”
“That Allie was a lesbian?” I suggested.
“She wasn’t. She wasn’t, you can’t be saying things like that. She was so beautiful, every boy who ever saw her fell in love with her, but she never dated. She was saving herself for marriage!”
I sighed. “Oh, Clara, it’s not a sin, let alone a scandal, for a woman to love another woman. How did you find out? Did Allie tell you herself?”
“Nadia,” she muttered after a pause. “Right before she died, she told me that Allie was—that Allie, that she’d met this woman, this Artist, who—who, I guess she seduced Allie and made her do—”
“Clara, the Artist didn’t seduce your sister. Or, if she did, your sister was a willing partner. The only sad and shocking thing is that Alexandra felt she had to keep her life a secret from her family. When did she tell Nadia?”
Clara looked around the alcove, seeking inspiration. “I don’t know how Nadia knew.”
I bit back a sharp retort. “Clara, you trusted me enough to get me out of bed and down here. Can you trust me enough to tell me the truth?”
She scowled, not so much in anger, perhaps, as some way of holding back her fears.
“It wasn’t Rainier Cowles who told Nadia, was it?”
“No, although I guess he knows somehow. Someone in Iraq, they knew. They—I don’t know—they wrote Nadia because she was the one Allie was close to.”
“Someone in Iraq wrote Nadia about the Body Artist and the women’s music festival?” This time, I couldn’t keep the scorn out of my voice.
“Believe me or not, I don’t care. But Prince Rainier came over last night—it was awful how he talked to Mamá and Papi! He knows you were asking questions up at Tintrey. You have to stop! He thinks we told you to ask questions, and if you don’t stop, he’ll . . . he’ll—”
“He’ll what?”
There was another long pause, and then she mumbled, “I’m not
sure.”
“What hold does he have over your family? If it’s Alexandra’s sexuality, that means your parents already know about her.”
“They don’t! They don’t!”
I couldn’t budge her, and I tried for several fruitless minutes. I couldn’t put together a plausible story about why Tintrey was giving money to the Guamans in such a secretive way. If it was some kind of compensation for Alexandra’s death, that would be a straightforward workers’ comp payment.
Maybe Tintrey had done what so many companies do these days, namely, taken out a life insurance policy on a high-risk employee, with the company, not the family, as beneficiary. Maybe the Guamans had threatened to go public with that information. Or maybe Tintrey was splitting the insurance payout with them but threatening to reveal Alexandra’s sexuality if the Guamans said anything.
“It’s my fault that Allie died,” Clara burst in on my convoluted thoughts.
I was too tired to deal with an adolescent’s wild mood swings—one moment attacking me for ruining Alexandra’s reputation, the next drowning in fear and remorse over crimes she hadn’t committed. I took a breath and tried to speak in a warm and compassionate voice.
“What can possibly make you say that? You just said you were a kid. I don’t believe you were in Iraq putting your sister in harm’s way.”
“Allie, she wanted me to go away to college, someplace special. That’s why she took the job in Iraq, because Tintrey pays people in war zones, like, four times what they pay here. Allie wanted me to go someplace grand, Yale, or somewhere like that. If it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have gone off to war. And now? With Nadia gone and Ernie hurt, I have to do something big with my life or they’ll all be dead for nothing!”
“That sounds like a terrible burden to carry around.”
“I have these dreams,” she whispered, “where Nadia and Allie push me off a cliff, and Mamá and Papi are holding out their arms like they’re going to catch me, only they disappear, and I’m still falling. I wake up just before I hit the ground.”
Her shoulders began to shake, and she was suddenly sobbing—those heaving, gut-wrenching sobs that make you feel your whole body will rip apart. That’s what it means to cry your heart out. I put an arm around Clara.
“Tough road you’re on, kid, tough road,” I murmured into her hair.
People kept coming to the back of the shop to use the toilets. They stared at us, and one of them started to call Clara’s name but backed away when Clara glowered at her. Eventually, her sobs died down. I made her swallow some of my cold, overboiled coffee and handed her a napkin to blow her nose.
“What did Nadia tell you about Chad?”
“Just that he scared her. She thought first he was from Prince Rainier and that he was going to beat her up for drawing Allie’s picture. But Chad thought she was making fun of him, that’s why he was so angry. It doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
“None of this makes any sense. Not the insurance money. Or why a lawyer like Cowles cares. Although Chad has PTSD, and things set him off that might not seem logical.”
“I have to get to school,” Clara said. “I left before mass, but now I’m late for first period. What are you going to do?”
I made a face. “I don’t understand anything right now. But, I promise, I will act with your safety in mind. If you do start feeling scared”—I pulled out one of my cards and wrote my home address on it—“go to this address, ring the first-floor bell. An old man named Mr. Contreras will let you in and look after you. He’s my neighbor. I’ve known him for years. Believe me, there’s no one more trustworthy in this city.”
The pen pressed against my swollen palm and made it hard to write clearly, but I added CONTRERAS in block letters under my address on Racine and handed it to her along with a twenty.
“That’s for a cab if you need to run fast. Don’t spend it on eye shadow or coffee drinks. It’s your bolt-hole money.”