“What does Vesta say?” I asked Rivka.
“She doesn’t care! She just says Karen’s a big girl, she knows how to land on her feet! It’s all part of the jealousy and small-mindedness that surrounds Karen’s art. I need to know she’s safe. Why can’t you do that for me? You’re involved even if you didn’t set the club on fire. You have to do something.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, Rivka was still sitting there, her small face swollen with worry and anger.
“Okay,” I said. “Call Vesta. And the burka dancers. You get them here this morning, right now. We’ll all talk. We’ll figure out where to look for Karen. Until then, you sit here and keep your mouth shut, because I’ve got a wheelbarrowful of work to do.”
Rivka wanted to argue the point, but I told her I wasn’t in the mood. “Get your pals or go home. No other choices.”
Petra had finished her call with Olympia and came to me, head hanging. “Sorry, Vic, you were right about Olympia. I did let her get under my skin.”
“Not to worry, it was a tough first assignment. Anyway, the Warshawski Agency is famous for the crankiness of its operatives. I want you to start on some of the backlog of paper until Rivka gets the rest of her gang here.”
I showed my cousin where the office essentials were—the bathroom and kitchenette at the end of the hall that I shared with my leasemate—and the importance of cleaning up instantly since it’s shared space. Refreshments for clients or ourselves in the little fridge. We have a good-quality coffeemaker and an electric kettle for tea, but I still use the coffee bar across the street for espresso.
By the time we’d finished and I’d shown Petra how to send messages from my computer phone log to my cell phone, Vesta and the burka dancers had arrived. The dancers were well swaddled in sweaters and coats, one with a big fur hat pulled so far over his ears it covered his forehead. I asked Petra to get everyone set up in the client corner while I made one last effort to log on to embodiedart.com.
The site was still down. This time, the message announced, “We’re rethinking our site. Come back soon, and thanks for visiting.”
When I joined the group, the two dancers were on the couch, with Vesta half sitting on one of its arms. Rivka had pulled up a straight-backed chair; an armchair might make her seem relaxed, and her business was too urgent for that. Petra was prim in the corner of the couch, a notepad open in her lap.
I reminded the dancers that we’d spoken backstage a few weeks ago. They’d called each other Kevin and Lee then. Their full names were Leander Marvelle and Kevin Piuma. Kevin the Feather. What was on their birth certificates, I wondered.
The dancers shed their coats, but Leander had a heavy sweater-jacket zipped up to his chin while Kevin remained swathed in a long scarf. Even so, I could see they were painfully thin, cheekbones jutting, mouths extra-wide because there was too little flesh along the jawline.
“How did you two hook up with Karen?” I asked.
Leander looked at Kevin. “The Hothouse?”
“No, no, that’s where we found Jerome. He told us this chick was trying to put an act together and she was usually at Frida’s.”
Frida’s was a club in the west Loop—not far from Plotzky’s where I’d drunk with Tim Radke, but part of the hip wave that was flooding the neighborhood.
“See, we’d just come back from a road run of Chorus Line. We needed a gig. The Body Artist dug our act. And it was kind of cool, you know, the disguised, gender-bending thing. But it’s old now.”
“Yeah,” said Leander. “Time to move on.”
“You can’t!” Rivka cried. “The Body Artist needs you.”
Kevin looked at her coldly. “She needs to update her act. It’s old. It’s stale.”
“She’s only done it for six months. How can you—”
“Six months!” Leander flung up his arms. “That is beyond stale, it’s rotting!”
“Right,” I said. “Where does Karen live?”
Kevin’s wide mouth gave an exaggerated grimace of contempt. “We weren’t dating the chick. We worked with her on her act.”
“Did you rehearse the act outside the club?”
Leander explained that one of his ballet teachers was on the faculty at Columbia College and let him and Piuma use one of the practice studios when they were in town.
“If you want to call the Body Artist, what number do you use?”
“E-mail. She didn’t give us a number.”
I looked at Rivka. “What about you?”
She bit her lips. She wanted to claim some special inside knowledge of Karen Buckley but couldn’t. The Body Artist always phoned Rivka, but she blocked her own number.
Vesta nodded agreement. “Girlfriend liked her secrets.”
Vesta had met Karen at the dojo where she trained. “She wanted to study self-defense. She took about four months of classes. That’s when we . . .”