30
Deserted Home—or Whatever
Vesta and the dancers left while Rivka was working on the Body Artist’s portrait. Whatever Rivka’s more tiresome qualities, she was a skillful artist. In less than an hour, she put together a couple of sketches that captured the Artist’s elusive quality. Working only in ink, Rivka showed the transparent, expressionless eyes and the sternness around the mouth that kept people at a distance.
“Where are you going to search?” Rivka asked.
“Maybe I’ll throw a dart at the map.” I pointed to a big map of the city that hangs in my main workroom. “They say if you pick stocks that way, they perform as well or better than a financial adviser’s portfolio. Maybe it will lead me to the Artist as well.”
“I’m staying with you.”
“No, you’re not. Not unless you’ve been lying and know where the woman is. Or what name she might be hiding behind.”
Rivka started to argue the point, but I shut her up without finesse. “You want to find Karen Buckley, but you’re wasting my time. Which I bill at a hundred fifty dollars an hour.”
Her jaw dropped. “I don’t have that kind of money!”
“Then you’d better get out of my way before I decide to start charging you, hadn’t you.”
She scurried out the door so fast that Petra burst out laughing.
“But why aren’t you charging her?” my cousin asked when I’d made sure Rivka had gone out the front door.
“Because I want to find the Body Artist myself. And these pictures may help us.”
“Where are you going to start? At the club?”
“If Vesta and Rivka don’t know where she hangs out, no one at the club will, either. Nope. We’re going up to Irving and the Kennedy, where Karen abandoned that SUV. I’m going to assume she raced home, picked up what she thought she needed to survive on the run, and hopped on the L.”
“Then you won’t find her up there,” Petra objected.
“If we can discover where she’s been living, we may find the name of someone who knows her well enough to tell us where she might go next,” I explained. “She is a remarkably invisible person, considering how much she exposes herself. And considering how hard it is to hide your life in the age of the Internet. You make copies of these sketches while I get my maps out.”
I’ve got those apps on my cell phone that guide you around the streets, but I still prefer seeing the big picture—How many blocks did we have to cover? And how long might it take?—although the apps would come in handy when we needed to find a bathroom.
The first challenge was to make sure no one was after us. If Anton was trying to find the Body Artist, he could get Rodney or one of his other minions to stake me out, knowing I might be looking for her, too. I made Petra pull a wool cap over her halo of hair—it was far too recognizable. Her height I couldn’t do much about.
We went by L, changing trains and directions four times at less-used stops to make sure the same people weren’t getting on or off with us. Finally, we picked up the O’Hare train and rode to Irving Park. The L runs alongside the Kennedy Expressway here, and traffic was heavy.
The Irving Park stop served K-Town, so-called because it’s a corridor where all the street names begin with K. We would treat the search like all canvassing, going door-to-door, looking at the names on the buzzers if there were any, seeing who was home, showing a picture of Karen, seeing if anyone recognized her.
We started at the L ticket booth. The woman in the booth shook her head over the two sketches: the customers who stood out were the ones who complained or who chatted with the agent on duty.
“I see so many people,” she apologized. “I’m real sorry you’re having trouble finding your sis. If I see her around here, you want me to call you?”
Our story was that our sister was developmentally disabled and that she’d wandered off. She’d last been seen here two nights ago, and the police said that was too soon to file a missing person report, so if anyone knew who was giving her shelter, we’d be grateful.
We gave the ticket agent Petra’s cell phone number and moved on to the local laundries, a deli, a grocery store, a coffee bar. If Karen lived up here, she did so as invisibly as she did everything else. The manager at the Laundromat thought she recognized the picture but wasn’t a hundred percent certain. I even asked the homeless guys sleeping under the expressway.
That was the easy or, at least, less hard part. When we’d exhausted the public places, we moved on to the grim business of going door-to-door. I decided arbitrarily to limit the search to a half-mile radius around the L stop. Petra went east, and I took the west stretch.
It was a long, cold day. By the time I’d covered Karlov and Kedvale, I’d found two German shepherds, five terriers, three Labs, two Rottweilers. Petra and I met briefly to warm up at one of the coffee shops near the L. She wasn’t as discouraged as I because it was her first real detecting job. And also because she herself has the eager personality of a Labrador.
The area was mostly a collection of houses and two- or three-flats, which at least meant we weren’t trying to get into the lobby of big apartment complexes. Even so, we faced a lot of doorbells, with no guarantee that we were even in the right neighborhood.
By midafternoon, as snow began to fall again, I was so tired and so numb that I almost overlooked the name on the bell. It was a workman’s cottage on the west side of Kildare, divided into a two-flat. I was halfway down the walk before the second-floor name registered with me: F. Pindero.
F. Pindero. When I’d been in the coffee shop in Roehampton and the regulars had been talking about Kystarnik’s daughter, someone said Steve Pindero had been a good guy and it broke his heart when his Frannie OD’d along with Zina Kystarnik. I’d assumed Frannie was dead, too. But maybe she’d survived, and resurrected herself as the Body Artist.
I called Petra to tell her where I was, and went back up the steps to ring the bell again. A terrier, number nine for the day, began hurling itself at the ground-floor door, but no humans answered either bell. A curtain shifted in the house across the street. I walked over and rang the bell.
A woman about my own age came to the door and opened it the length of a chain. Fortunately, I hadn’t worked the east side of Kildare yet, so I could switch my story from the developmentally disabled sister to one who was married to an abusive husband.
“She thought she was safe here,” I said, “but he tracked her down somehow, and she called me about two this morning really scared. Have you seen her today?”
“You mean the gal across the street? If she acted as stuck-up around her man as she does to the neighbors on the street, no wonder he hit her. I wanted to myself.”
“No woman deserves to be beaten. Surely you believe that! Have you seen her today?”
“I believe a woman’s duty is to make a good home for her man. If she acts like a person who says hello to her on the street is dirt beneath her feet, then maybe she earned a black eye or two.”
“Are you always this warmhearted or does the cold weather bring out the best in you?”
“I can see how you’re related. You’re just as stuck-up as her. I hope you’ve got a man like hers waiting for you at home!”
She slammed the door in my face.
I walked back across the street, seething. So what if my story was fictitious? To believe any woman deserved a beating—I serve on the board of a domestic violence shelter, and it hurt to know there were women in the community who believed their battered sisters got what was coming to them.
My hands were shaking with anger and stiff with cold, so by the time I worked the picklocks into the cylinders and got inside Pindero’s house, Petra had joined me. I could feel the woman across the street watching. If she called the cops, I’d—I broke the ugly thought off mid-sentence. I was as bad as she was, thinking of beating her up.
The terrier barked hysterically as Petra and I climbed the stairs to the second floor. The stairwell was dark, but it was warm and out of the wind. I leaned against the wall, rubbing the circulation back into my fingers. Petra also seemed glad of the chance to catch her breath. Finally, as I knelt to pick the lock on Pindero’s door, I explained how I’d learned her name.
“Why would Karen use a fake name?” Petra asked.
“I don’t know. But if she was Zina Kystarnik’s friend, maybe she was scared Anton would be after her for letting Zina OD.”
“I guess,” Petra said doubtfully. “Karen doesn’t do drugs, you know. I mean, she never acted like she was getting high, and she didn’t have stuff in her dressing room.”
“If she was Frannie Pindero, she OD’d ten or fifteen years ago. Could have been her wake-up call to sobriety. Here, hold my phone so the light shines on the lock. Let’s see if we’ve found the Body Artist before we speculate too much. It will be embarrassing if it turns this place belongs to Felicity Pindero, a sober bookkeeper.”
The door opened directly into a small square room. It was impossible to see any details in the gray light coming through the window. When I found a light switch, a spartan industrial fixture with a single bulb gave some meager light. The room was bare except for two large exercise balls.
A cold draft was blowing into the room from our left. We followed it down a short corridor to the kitchen. Karen, or Frannie, or maybe a burglar, had hurled a brick through a window and climbed in over the kitchen sink. Glass and puddles of congealed blood covered the floor. The brick had landed in the sink.
Petra peered over my shoulder. “Gosh! Looks like there was a bar fight in here.”
The back door boasted an array of bolts and chains, but it wasn’t locked. I walked out onto a narrow platform that served as a back porch. Stairs had been built onto the house when it was converted to a two-flat; they were made of rough, unfinished wood and probably didn’t meet city code. Several large Rorschachs of blood stained the ice on the porch and stairs, but the snow, now falling more furiously, was covering the trail.
“She left her keys in the dressing room, Finch said last night,” I told Petra. “So she picked up a brick—you can see where they’re stacked by the back gate—came up these stairs, came in through the kitchen window. She had on her coat and her boots, but she was probably so wound up she flailed around and cut herself. There’s blood in the sink besides what’s on the floor and the stairs. She parked in the alley, came here to collect who knows what, and fled again, leaving the door unlocked because she didn’t have her keys.”
Petra followed me back into the kitchen and solemnly inspected the sink, where blood had pooled around jagged glass fragments. I found a roll of aluminum foil and tore off enough wide pieces to cover the hole in the window. In this weather, the radiator would freeze and burst, and why should P & E Loder, who occupied the ground floor, suffer.
We followed the blood to a bathroom, which lay just beyond the kitchen. Karen, or Frannie, or whoever, had cleaned herself in the shower; a damp towel and the bathmat were both stained reddish brown.
A giant jar of makeup remover and a bag of cotton balls stood on a glass shelf over the sink, but I didn’t see a toothbrush or a comb. She had left a tube of shampoo and a bottle of liquid soap in the shower, but no body lotion or moisturizer.
I began to look around, for any evidence that pointed to who Karen or Frannie knew, people she trusted enough that she might flee to them.
It was the barest dwelling I’d seen in a long time. The kitchen held a table and a chair, a coffeemaker and two cups and plates. I looked in the cupboards and found a few odds and ends, plastic salt and pepper shakers, a freezer-to-microwave dish, but no food except a half-empty box of cereal.
The room with the exercise balls didn’t hold anything else, no furniture or boxes, not even a philodendron on the windowsill. In the front room, which faced the street, the windows were so heavily curtained that no outside light came in. When I’d groped my way to a light switch, I found myself face-to-face with dark-haired woman in a navy coat. Petra gasped. I reached for my gun—and realized I was about to shoot my own reflection. The walls were lined with mirrors.
“Vic, this is totally creepy! What does she do in here?”
I waited for my heartbeat to steady before I answered. “I guess it’s the studio where she practices her art. See—she’s got a set of paints, a set of stencils. This looks like part of Nadia’s memorial.”
I held up a piece of the angel’s wing, which had instructions on the colors she wanted to use.
“She must carry her cameras to the club and back,” Petra said. “She doesn’t have a computer here, either.”
Paints, photographs, palette knives, and several slitter blades were tidily arranged on a plastic cart. A black drop cloth in the middle of the floor had dried paint on it, but the rest of the room was clean. Besides the cart, the only thing in the room that might be considered as a kind of furnishing was a DVD player, with a handful of discs scattered around it. When I knelt to inspect them, Petra wandered into the bedroom.
A minute or so later, she called out to me, “Oh my God, Vic, this is so amazing!”
I scooped the discs into my bag and went in to join her. Like the rest of the apartment, the bedroom was almost unfurnished: a futon, with the covers tidily arranged, a narrow chest with three drawers, and a bedside stand holding a clock and a book, which was what had grabbed my cousin’s attention.
Called (Re)Making the Female Body, the cover showed a naked anorectic woman with multiple piercings and even, as I saw when I looked closer, stabbings. The material inside was just as disturbing, ranging from Hannah Wilke’s efforts to use her body as a canvas for responding to her cancer, to Lucia Balinoff, who slashed herself onstage. Along the way were women who used plastic surgery to add animal features to their faces or bodies, women who pierced their lips and hung fetishes from them.
“What kind of person would watch a woman cut herself open onstage?” Petra asked.
“No one I know, I hope! Maybe the same person who’d go to a dog-fight or bear-baiting.” I handed the book back to her. “I have to confess, it makes me queasy.”
“The slashing, for sure,” Petra said. “But the animal surgery—it’s, like, being free to decide about your own body. How it looks, I mean. And how you want people to react. Do you know what it’s like to be me? Guys always saying, ‘How’s the air up there,’ and then they laugh like they’ve made the funniest joke anyone ever heard. And being blond—”
“It’s a burden, but you carry it well,” I suggested.
“See? That’s just it! Even you, mega-feminist, you’re laughing at me because I’m young and blond. If I put one of these horns on my head, people would think twice before they treated me like I have the brain of a two-year-old.” She flipped through the pages to a picture of a woman who’d had something resembling a rhino horn grafted onto her forehead.
I squeezed her shoulder. “Petra, I apologize, you’re right. If I promise to take you seriously, will you promise not to mutilate your face?”
“It’d be worth it just to see Uncle Sal’s expression, you know. Or when Daddy is on trial, it could freak out the jury, confuse them into acquitting him.” She bit her lip and looked determinedly through the book. “I don’t see anything about Karen in here, but you know, her stuff looks pretty tame compared to this.”
Petra was right. It made me wonder about the slitter blades in the living room. Had Karen decided she had to up the stakes in her act so she could grab more attention? A woman with a hidden identity and a thirst for attention. Strange combo. Unstable combo.
“She’s gone, don’t you think?” I said to my cousin. “No toothbrush, and although she’s obsessionally tidy, the drawers are open in here—she snatched socks and underwear, and whatever else she needed, on the fly. I’m guessing she took the discs she wanted and left the others thrown every which way. And there isn’t a piece of paper in the place. If she owns a bank card or any document with a name or a picture on it, she’s taken them with her.”
“To where?” Petra asked.
“I’m hoping she’ll go to her father. I’m going to drive up to Roehampton after we get back to the office and see if I can find him.”
“All that blood, you don’t think she got shot, do you?”
“I think it was from coming through the window. She didn’t have her jeans on when she left the club—maybe she was too rattled to put them on before diving into the kitchen. But we’ll check with hospitals, see if she might have gone in for an expert patch-up.” I grinned at Petra. “I’m so glad to have my high-rise assistant to off-load these tasks to. You’re going to have a fun afternoon on the phone.”
We walked back to the L stop. The snow wasn’t heavy, but we could see the traffic on the Kennedy going about ten miles an hour. Petra wasn’t the only one with a fun afternoon in front of her: I was going to have a great time on the Kennedy myself.
“I don’t get it,” Petra said as we got on the train. “If Frannie Pindero knew Anton Kystarnik, why didn’t she say something last night when those guys were beating her up?”
“Hard to say without talking to her. The other big question is, if Kystarnik isn’t blocking her website, who is? You any use as a hacker?” I asked my cousin.
“Sheesh, Vic, I’m not a geek!”
“You can be a fashionista and still know how to hack,” I objected. “What about your friends or lovers? Did you completely waste your time in college?”
She pulled a face. “You’re the crime expert. Don’t you know anyone?”
“Tim Radke,” I finally said. “He told me he was a systems something in the Army but hasn’t been able to find civilian work using his training—right now, he’s installing consumer electronics.”
I called his cell phone and asked if he’d be interested in a freelance systems job, something that might help prove Chad’s innocence.
He was out in the western suburbs again today, but he said he could make it to my office by eight-thirty or so.