31
Searching for an Artist
At my office, I left Petra with a list of five or six hundred Chicago-area hospitals and picked up my car for the drive to Roehampton. It was after five p.m. when I got to the little coffee bar I’d visited the previous week. The couple behind the counter were cleaning their machines while a trio of women sat slumped at a table, drinking coffee. Their clothes and general fatigue suggested they were maids warming themselves before their long bus ride home. The two baristas were exhausted, too, but tried to pretend pleasure at seeing a customer.
“I don’t need anything,” I said, “and I won’t keep you from locking up. I was up here last week, and a guy named Clive was talking about Steve Pindero and his daughter, Frannie. I need to find Steve Pindero. If you don’t know him, maybe you can tell me how to reach Clive.”
The baristas looked at each other and slowly shook their heads.
“I remember you,” the male barista said. “You were asking about Melanie Kystarnik. We can’t share information about our customers with you.”
I shut my eyes and thought for a longish moment: it was time to put some cards on the table.
“Everyone is tired and wants to go home after a hard day’s work,” I said. “Including me. My hard day’s work yesterday ended at three this morning after I fought a bunch of thugs who were beating up two women in a nightclub. It began again four hours later with a call from a terrified teenager whose family is being harassed by these same thugs.”
The three maids were looking alert. Someone else’s troubles, danger faced by a remote party, good news all the way round. The young man behind the counter kept rubbing a cloth over the steaming spout for the big cappuccino machine, but he was paying attention. The young woman had stopped rinsing milk pitchers.
“My name is V. I. Warshawski, I’m a private investigator, and I’m trying to find out who shot and killed a young woman outside a nightclub right after New Year’s.” I took out the laminated copy of my license, and the couple behind the bar gave it a cursory look.
“Oh my, yes,” one of the maids said softly. “I read about that shooting. It was some crazy vet, wasn’t it, some poor boy who got his mind taken to bits fighting over there in Iraq.”
“That’s who the police arrested,” I agreed, “but I don’t believe he killed Nadia Guaman. I had never heard of Steve Pindero before I came in here the other day, but either his daughter, or someone using Frannie’s name has been performing as Karen Buckley at the nightclub where Nadia was murdered. Whoever she really is, she vanished last night. I’m hoping you can give me some ideas on how to trace Frannie, or maybe her dad. I looked up Steve Pindero online, but I couldn’t find him listed anywhere.”
The maids murmured among themselves, and then the oldest of the trio said, “Oh, no, miss, you wouldn’t find him. He died years ago. After his girl had the overdose and Zina died, it took the stuffing out of him. He was a cabinetmaker, see, living over in Highwood. His wife died when Frannie was a child, and he loved that girl like he was her mother and father both. Francine, her name was, but they called her Frannie, see. Steve, he used to take her with him in the summer when he was working on a job. She was so cute, tagging after him with her own little hard hat. Hard to remember now what a bright little girl she was after everything that happened later.”
“You knew her pretty well, then?” I suggested.
“Not to say I knew her well, but we’re a small community up here. Everybody knows everybody else’s business, and people talk. I work for a family called Gordon, and, a long time back, maybe twenty years, Steve did a big job for them. Little Miss Frannie, she used to stand on a ladder next to him handing him nails. It was a pretty picture.”
She sighed. “Everything changed when the Kystarniks bought that big old mansion. They had a lot of work done, rebuilding the stables, putting in new bathrooms, kitchens, who knows what all. But that was how the two girls got to know each other. Zina and Frannie, they were the same age, same year in school, see.
“I never did know which was the one leading the other into trouble, but by the time they was teenagers trouble was pretty near all they knew. The Kystarnik girl, I heard she had two abortions before she was ever even sixteen. And the drugs! Well, these rich kids with too much money and not enough to do, that’s what they do. And, what I heard, Francine and Zina were selling anyone pretty much anything.”
“Lela!” one of the other maids protested. “You don’t know that, do you?”
“Don’t I just? Noel Gordon was in school with Zina and Frannie. And when those girls came over to party, it wasn’t Pepsi, let alone beer, they had in their cute little pink makeup kits.”
The two baristas had given up any pretense of work. The man went to the door and put the CLOSED sign up.
“And then the girls OD’d?” I asked.
“It was an ugly scene,” Lela said. “Zina died, Francine came close. And the cops found all the stuff in Steve Pindero’s basement. Why they didn’t arrest Frannie as she lay in her hospital bed, I’ll never know, but she recovered. And Steve? Oh my, I guess he tried to convince the cops it was him that had bought the drugs. But you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Steve didn’t know word one about what Francine was up to. While he was trying to get himself arrested, Frannie took off. No one ever saw her again. Steve took to drink, and that’s what killed him. Drinking on the job. Fell to his death two or three years after his girl disappeared.”
We were all silent for a moment, respecting the tragedy of the Pindero story, and then I asked whether young Frannie had shown any gifts as an artist.
“Funny you should say that. I forgot all about that part of her. She could draw pretty much anything. Got the gift from her daddy, I guess. He was always drawing up these designs, these plans for stuff he was building. He was in high demand in all the big houses around here for what he could design and build.”
“Would there be anyone Frannie might seek refuge with? An art teacher? What about Noel Gordon?”
Lela shook her head. “I’d be surprised. Noel, he straightened himself out after Zina died, went on to medical school, works at some clinic in Texas, down on the Mexican border, where he treats poor immigrants. I can’t think Frannie would know where to find him, even. And I don’t know any family up here that wouldn’t turn her right over to the authorities if she showed up.”
It was my turn to sigh: one dead end after another.
“But you said you found her,” another maid ventured. “Where has she been hiding all this time?”
“The times I talked to her, I didn’t know her real name. She was calling herself Karen Buckley. And now, as I said, she’s disappeared.” I looked at the wall clock: long night ahead, with Tim Radke coming to look over the Body Artist’s computer. “Thanks for talking to me so frankly,” I said. “I’m headed back to the city. Anyone need a lift?”
The two baristas lived in Waukegan to the north, but the maids all lived in the city. They crammed into the Mustang, a tight fit for the two in my small backseat, but better than the three buses they told me they took to get from the far northern suburbs down to their homes on Chicago’s West Side.
When I finally returned to my office, Petra was still there, calling hospitals to see if anyone named Karen Buckley or Frannie Pindero had sought care for deep cuts. I was so tired that I just shook my head when she asked me if I’d found Steve Pindero. I went into my back room, where my portable bed is. My jeans and socks were wet from the snow. I took them off and flung them on a radiator and collapsed on the bed.
I was on a freight train, rocking along. The tracks were badly scarred, and the train kept bouncing, jolting me from side to side.
“Vic! Wake up, why can’t you? Mr. Vishneski’s on the phone.”
It wasn’t a train, just my cousin shaking my shoulder.
“I said he could leave a message with me, but he wouldn’t.”
I staggered upright, pulled on my jeans, and padded out to my desk in my bare feet. There was still an inch of cold cappuccino in the cup I’d bought this morning. I swallowed it, trying to clear the thickness of sleep out of my voice.
“Mr. Vishneski. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
He was too intent on his story to care. “We have good news. My boy came to for a minute. He’d been restless all night, and the docs said that was a good sign. And then he opened his eyes.”
“That’s wonderful news,” I said. “Did he seem to know you?”
“We couldn’t tell, his eyes weren’t focusing that great. He said a couple of words, then he passed out again.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“She says it’s a good sign, and maybe he’ll make a full recovery. But it could be days or a week before he really regains consciousness for good.”
So we couldn’t ask him any questions.
“What did he say? Anything about the shooting? Or if someone came home from Plotzky’s bar with him?”
“He wants a vest. Mona and me, we both agreed that that was what he was saying. The nurse, she heard it, too. But we don’t feel like we want to leave the hospital right now, so we thought—we hoped—we want you go to Mona’s place and bring it here to the hospital for him.”
“A vest?” I said blankly. “What does it look like?”
“We don’t know,” Vishneski said. “Neither Mona nor me gave him one, so we’re thinking one of his buddies, or maybe a girlfriend. If you find any vests, bring them all over, and we’ll see which one he wants. Could be he left something in a pocket, a good-luck charm or something.”
I started to say I’d come to the hospital to collect keys, but then I imagined the drive through snow-packed streets to the hospital, parking, waiting while someone fetched Mona out of the ICU, and her haphazard search through her giant bag for her keys. It would be easier for me to pick the lock, but I didn’t share that thought with the client.
Before I left, I went over Petra’s work for the hour I’d been sleeping. She’d finished checking hospitals, but no one who sounded like the Body Artist had come in to have cuts treated.
“Peewee, it’s been a long day, but I need you to stay here until I get back. Tim Radke is coming to see if he can find out who’s blocking the Embodied Art website. He’s probably not going to have a computer with him, which means he’ll use mine. There’s too much confidential data on the Mac Pro—I’ll want you to hover to see what files he looks at.”
“What should I tell him you want him to do?”
“The Artist said her hosting service told her the site was being blocked from her computer, but she claims not to know who’s doing it. I want to know if Tim can verify that one way or another.”
Petra looked doubtful, not wanting to be left in charge. “Won’t he need her computer?”
“I don’t know. If he does, I think she left it at Club Gouge last night. Which means checking at the club, if it’s open. While you wait for him, can you start viewing some of these discs I took away from Frannie Pindero’s place? I don’t know what you might see on them, but I’m curious about Rodney’s codes. Pay special attention if you find him in any of her videos.”
I hesitated. “Don’t let anyone in except Tim Radke, okay? Or the Vishneskis, if they show up for some reason.”
“You think we’re in danger?”
I bunched up my mouth. “I don’t know. But if anyone gets hurt in the line of duty, it’s me. Got that?”
Petra saluted. “Yes, ma’am! I want it to be you, too!”