I scanned the room, hoping to spot some of Chad’s buddies in the mob. As far as I could tell, none of them had come. Rodney was still at his solitary table, working on what looked like his seventh beer. Although the room was so crowded that thirty or forty people were standing along the perimeter or even on the stage looking for seats, Rodney’s sullenness created a force field that no one wanted to cross.
Beyond him was a table of men who looked incongruous in this club setting—four men in their forties, in well-cut business suits. As I stared, I realized one of them looked vaguely familiar. And he was watching me in turn. Of course: Prince Rainier Cowles, the lawyer who’d been at Nadia’s funeral—had it been this afternoon? It felt like a hundred years had passed. I squirmed through the bodies around me to his side.
“Mr. Cowles! V. I. Warshawski. We met at Nadia Guaman’s funeral this afternoon.”
His brows contracted. “What are you doing here?”
I smiled down at him. “It’s a cold night, on top of a cold and stressful day. I thought an evening at an art club would cheer me up. How about you?”
A man at his table laughed. “Is that what you call this place? I would have said skin joint. I thought about sticking a twenty up that girl’s sunshine, but no one else was doing it.”
“That would have been artistic and creative of you,” I said. “And a bold statement of leadership.”
The speaker frowned at me, but before he could fire back, one of his tablemates said, “That’d be good for the annual report, Mac. We go into danger zones that no one else dares enter.”
“We should buy a piece of her tail.” Mac looked at me as if to emphasize that he was directing his crudeness at me. “Did you write down the Web address, Cowles? I’d like her tits where I could look at them from time to time.”
This caused not just another outburst of laughter but some congratulatory high fives. I dug my hands into my pockets to keep from flinging their drinks in their faces.
I grinned down at Cowles. “This is the kind of evening that the Guamans would enjoy, isn’t it? Witty banter about women’s bodies right after burying their daughter.”
He got to his feet. “Anyone who comes into a place like this can expect to hear that kind of comment and more besides. If you can’t handle it, then you shouldn’t be here.”
“Are you saying that Nadia deserved to be shot?”
He made an angry gesture. “Of course not. But this is a rough place. I don’t want to cause the Guamans more pain than they feel already, so I’m going to whitewash my report of what goes on in here. But you know as well as I do that it’s a strip joint going under a classier name. Look at that guy there—” He pointed at Rodney. “You can’t tell me he’s the kind of person a woman who respects herself would hang around.”
“You’ve got me there, Mr. Cowles,” I admitted. “He looks like a Class X felony waiting to happen.”
“What was all that about, his painting on that woman’s ass?”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t want to join him, Cowles,” one of his friends said.
“What would you have put there?” the man they’d called Mac said.
“Maybe the same numbers,” the first man said. “They’d be his billable hours for the last month.”
The three who were sitting down all laughed, and Cowles, after a brief hesitation, joined in, but he said to me, “If you’re here because of Nadia Guaman, I’d advise you to leave her and her family strictly alone.”
“Whoa, Mr. Cowles! You told me you were their honorary uncle. You didn’t say you were their legal guardian or their mouthpiece. If they want to talk to me, they have a right to. And vice versa.”
“Just who are you, anyway?”
I smiled again. “I am V. I. Warshawski. Good night, Mr. Cowles.”
I returned to my own chair, which had been taken over by a couple who were sharing the small seat. As I extracted my coat from beneath them, I saw Cowles flag down a server and point at me. The server smiled and gestured. Within a few minutes, Cowles probably knew I was a private eye. There wasn’t any real point in my keeping my identity a secret, after all.
14
And Besides, the Wench Is Dead
As I handed two twenties to Petra for my drinks, Rodney got to his feet and swaggered to the exit. I told Petra I’d be back for my change and hurried behind the stage, down the corridor that led past the toilets and dressing rooms to the rear exit. I reached the alley just in time to see Rodney climb into a Mercedes sedan. I squatted behind another car and managed to copy his license plate before he bounced out of the lot.
When I’d corralled Petra and gotten my change—fifteen dollars, more than I wanted to leave her, or anyone, on a twenty-five-dollar tab—I went backstage again, this time to the star’s dressing room. Two women were with Karen. One, very young and white, was sponging the angel from the Artist’s back. The second, an African-American with a soft short Afro, was perched on a stool, playing with the paintbrushes.
The Artist looked at me and said to her companions, “The detective I was telling you about.”