As soon as I got home, I ran inside to turn on the shower. While I waited for the water to heat, I inspected myself in the mirror. I did have blood in my hair.
I stripped and dropped my clothes in the tub. I didn’t know if it would ruin the sweater to get it wet like this, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel able to wear it again, anyway.
I climbed into the shower and shampooed my hair twice. I used a coarse brush to scrub my fingernails. I climbed out and put my sodden clothes onto the radiator, but I felt a trickle on my spine and shuddered. It was only water—I was sure it was only water—but I couldn’t stop myself. I climbed back under the shower. I understood Lady Macbeth’s fetish now: every time I got out, I would feel blood on my scalp again. It was only when the hot water ran out that I finally dried off and went to bed.
Nadia and Karen Buckley, the Body Artist, filled my unquiet dreams. Buckley was in the parking lot, painting the ice-packed ruts under the blue strobes of the cop cars. When I bent to see her work, the ruts filled with blood. Olympia was trying to scoop it out with her hands before I could see it, and as she paddled it between her legs, it covered my cousin. I tried to call a warning to Petra but couldn’t speak. In the next instant, Rodney had grabbed Petra and was forcing her face down in the blood.
“Alley,” Nadia cried, as she had in my arms. “Alley.”
I woke, soaked in sweat and shivering. Nadia should have had a mother or a lover with her at her end. She should have died in her great old age, surrounded by her grandchildren. Her last thought shouldn’t have been that she was dying in an alley with a stranger.
I got out of bed, pulling the comforter around me, and went into the kitchen. It was six-thirty Saturday morning, the winter sky still black as midnight. I sat cross-legged at the table, staring sightlessly out the window. The air gradually lightened to a ghostly gray-white, but I couldn’t see anything: another snowstorm was slamming the city. I went to the window, searching for signs of life but couldn’t see even across the alley to the apartments beyond. Finally, hoping Mr. Contreras would look after the dogs, I went back to bed and slept until noon.
By Sunday, the storm had passed, leaving eight inches of new snow and a bright, bitter day in its wake. After taking the dogs for a long, exhausting walk, I spent the afternoon with Jake. We watched Some Like It Hot, which inspired him to rummage through his storage closet for a ukulele. He put on one of my sunhats and a skirt and preened around like Marilyn Monroe, so effectively that I laughed away some of the horrors of Friday night.
We were walking up Racine for a late supper when Olympia called me. “Have you seen the news?”
“What, Club Gouge is doubling its space in the wake of Friday’s homicide?”
“You have a weird sense of humor, Warshawski. No, the police found Nadia’s killer. That huge tattooed guy who kept tearing up the club. They picked him up with the gun used to shoot Nadia. Such a relief. They’ll let us open on Tuesday!”
“That is a relief, Olympia. And wonderful that you could keep such a focused perspective on Nadia’s death.”
I hung up on her demand to know “Just what do you mean by that?”
7
No-Smoking Zone
Olympia’s call effectually ended my brief sense of well-being. When we returned from dinner, while Jake practiced I looked up the news of Nadia’s killer. Web news sites can be as obnoxious as any tabloid—maybe more so, since it’s so easy to play with images.
“From War Hero to Club Killer” screamed the Herald-Star’s blog.
An anonymous tip led police to an apartment on a quiet street in Lakeview, where the troubled vet who allegedly murdered Nadia Guaman was living. Chad Vishneski, awarded the Bronze Star for valor in Iraq, couldn’t take civilian life. He returned with a ferocious anger that moved him from random acts of vandalism to the sinister, when he began stalking and finally murdered a young graphic artist at Club Gouge on Friday.
The Chicago native was a Lane Tech football star, who went to Grand Valley State on a scholarship, but dropped out to join the Army, where he served four tours before his discharge last summer.
I clicked on a link to a video report and saw footage of a woman, her face swollen with fury.
“The police broke down the door,” she said.
The video showed a door with the wood splintered behind a yellow crime scene banner.
“When I heard the noise, I thought it was Chad. He was so angry all the time since he got home, so I went in the hall to look. Only it was the police come to arrest him. Mona, that’s his mother, she’s out of town. She let him sleep there, even though everyone knows how unstable he is. The condo board is going to have to take action, maybe evict her—we could all have been murdered.”