I pulled one of my cards out of my bag.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you at work, Ms. Guaman, but I’m the woman who was with your daughter when she died. Is there a place where we could talk?”
“We can talk here.”
She folded her hands on top of the keyboard, not the gesture of a woman at ease, but to create a barrier between herself and me.
“I don’t want to broadcast your family’s business to the whole store. Isn’t there someplace private?”
“My family has no business that the whole world cannot attend to. Are you the owner of that terrible place, that club where women take off their clothes so men can draw nasty pictures on their bodies?”
I wondered if family ties would make her unbend, so I explained my role as Petra’s cousin, my desire to protect her, my observation of Nadia and Nadia’s anguish or anger. “She kept drawing a face, the face of a beautiful young woman with short curly hair, and then she would slash a line through it. I’m wondering if that might have been her sister.”
“Clara’s hair is long and it is almost blond.” Cristina Guaman’s eyes were wary.
“Alexandra. Do you have a photograph of her? It was her name Nadia was calling as she died.”
At that, Cristina sucked in a breath. “Alexandra has been dead a long time. Nadia couldn’t let her rest in peace.”
“So she was painting Alexandra’s face?”
“I have no desire to know what pictures Nadia might be painting on a woman’s body. She knew how strongly I felt—her father, too—about her going to that place.”
“When did you last talk to her?”
Cristina Guaman looked around to see if anyone was in earshot. “Many months went by. Nadia was angry, always, for the last two years, so angry she would not speak to her father or me. My heart is broken at her death, but she cut herself away from her family. She moved into that apartment in a dangerous neighborhood, she stayed away from mass. Even though I knew she would pay no attention to my words, I had to call her when she started making a spectacle of herself in that degenerate club.”
I asked how she had learned Nadia was painting on the Body Artist, but of course people had been using their phones to take video footage of the performances. These inevitably ended up skipping around the World Wide Web, where more than one neighbor had shown them to the Guamans.
“The picture was poor, the light was bad, but everyone could see that woman sitting there naked, showing off her breasts, and people could easily see Nadia’s face. Can you imagine how you would feel when your daughter has flaunted herself in public for the whole world to see? I had to call her. I had to try to tell her how very worried I was to see her in such a corrupt place.”
“And was it Alexandra’s face she was painting?”
Cristina’s nose twitched as if she were smelling something bad. “It was enough to see Nadia together with a naked woman. If she was involving her sainted sister, then I am thankful to God that I was spared that sight.”
“How did Alexandra die?”
Cristina backed away from me. “In a painful, hard way that I prefer not to discuss.”
“Did she have a boyfriend, a girlfriend, anyone I could talk to?”
“What are you trying to ask?” Cristina hissed.
So she knew her daughter had women as lovers. Alexandra wouldn’t come out of the closet for fear her mother would learn, and her mother had known all along. Had Alexandra committed suicide because of the pressure? Had Nadia known and moved out after fighting with her mother over Allie’s sexuality?
I couldn’t think of any good way to ask these questions, so I asked in a bad way. “Who told you that Alexandra was sleeping with women?”
Cristina gasped. “If you came here to slander my saint, my angel, I will call the police. Leave!”
“I’m not trying to upset you, Ms. Guaman, just to figure out who killed your beloved daughter Nadia.”
“They arrested a man. It’s enough, enough that we’re dragged through the dirt by Nadia, without you coming to me and pouring it over me.”
“I went to Nadia’s apartment this morning,” I said. “Someone had broken in, had stolen her computer and all her discs. All her artwork is missing.”
At that, she became very quiet. She shook her head slowly as if unhappy at whatever she was thinking, but even though I tried several different gambits, she wouldn’t share her private thoughts with me. I told her about Nadia’s conviction that someone was spying on her.
“Who would that have been, do you think?” I asked. “The person who murdered her?”