“You can’t be putting out lies about me,” she interrupted. “I’ll sue you.”
“And then you’ll have to tell the truth in court, and everyone will know your real name. So why not do it here and now?”
She looked around the cold basement as if hunting for an escape route. The service door to the stairs leading up to the street was behind me. The stairs going up to the bar were behind her, but she knew Marty Jepson and Tim Radke were waiting there.
“Let me tell you a version,” I suggested, “and you tell me where I’m wrong. You recovered from your overdose all those years ago and knew Anton was out for your blood because his kid had died, so you took refuge in a second identity. Leaving your dad with a basement full of drugs.”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!” The last “wrong” came out as a scream, and her transparent eyes flooded with color as violent emotion swept through her. “My dad—I would never have done that to him. It was Anton. Where do you think Zina and I got the drugs? Anton thought it would be good fun for us to sell them to our friends, and their parents. Why do you think we got away with it for two years? Because he was covering for us!”
She began to pace the small basement, frenzied, a panther in a cage. “I got out of the hospital, and cops were waiting to talk to me, and Dad, he was shaking, he looked like an old man. I see him in my nightmares to this day—not just how afraid he was for me, whether I’d ever recover, but because he hadn’t known what Zina and I were doing. He was so disappointed in me. He had big hopes for me, I was going to go to college, I was going to be a painter—I was going to be his special success in the world! And then the cops got a tip, probably from Anton, and suddenly this whole pharmacy appeared in our basement.”
She gulped back hysterical laughter. “And then Anton showed up. He waited till Dad had left for work, then he beat me up and said I was lucky he didn’t kill me. He said it should’ve been me who died, not Zina, and if I told anyone where we got the drugs, he’d see that my dad was arrested, not him.
“I didn’t know what to do. But—my mom was dead. Her name—before she married, she was Karen Buckley, and my dad still had her old high school yearbook and her old high school ID. I took them and ran away, and called myself Karen Buckley.”
She’d spent so many years with her story locked inside her that once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. I sat quietly on the stool in front of the space heater.
“I couldn’t even tell my dad what I’d done because I was afraid he’d try to go after Anton, and Anton would have killed him, like swatting a fly. So I disappeared. I bummed around the country just living on what I could live on. I cleaned houses, I did some carpentry—I learned how, working with my dad in the summers—but I couldn’t get a regular job, I couldn’t do anything where they needed a Social Security number because then Anton would know where to find me, and I didn’t want to ever see him or hear from him again. I took some painting classes at local community colleges and worked on my art, but nothing was right in my life.
“Then I came back to Chicago and started this body art gig. I thought, I can be anonymous here behind all this paint, so I started doing it in public.”
“How did Anton find you?” I asked when she paused.
“Because my life is crap and nothing turns out right! It was that idiot bitch, Olympia. If I’d known she’d borrowed money from him, I never would have set foot in her goddamned bar! But she always did these kind of edgy acts, music and performance both, and when I pitched my body-painting idea she thought it would work because it was novel. That’s what you need in the club business, something new all the time. And it was starting to work, except Rodney came around. By now, he was Anton’s enforcer, but he’d been strictly junior grade when I was in high school. He recognized me from the sex parties.”
“Sex parties?”
“Oh, you know, Anton liked Zina and me to help entertain his friends. His wife was usually pretty stoned by the time night rolled around, and we thought at first it was fun. We made so much money, you can’t imagine—for a teenager to have a thousand dollars in cash—but sex with those guys—it’s why Zina and me, why we started using. Had to be high to get through the night. Anton, he had pictures, that’s why I couldn’t move without being afraid of him and blackmail.” She began chipping at her fingernails, tearing off little pieces and throwing them to the floor.
“So it must have been horrible when you saw Rodney at Club Gouge,” I said.