was a cashier at a Pilsen hardware store. They still lived in the bungalow on Twenty-first Place where Nadia had grown up.
Nadia had been the oldest of Lazar and Cristina’s three surviving children; another daughter, Alexandra, had died three years ago. The youngest, Clara, a high school senior, was also at St. Teresa. Their only son, Ernest, had been training as an electrical engineer when his motorcycle flipped him onto Cermak Road two years ago. His brain injuries left him unable to work.
I squeezed my eyes shut. The pain the Guamans lived with every day, one child already dead, their son terribly disabled, and now a daughter murdered—I couldn’t imagine how you survived such losses and kept any vestige of your sanity or humanity.
I returned to the screen and studied the financial details another of my subscription databases, the Monitor Project, had dredged up. Nadia’s bank account was modest; she had earned about forty thousand in a good year. Her rent on the one-bedroom on the fringe of Humboldt Park—the part where gangs and gentrifiers lived in uneasy proximity—ran just under nine hundred a month. She didn’t own a car. The computer hadn’t come upon any financial instruments, if such things still existed, in her name.
Nadia hadn’t been party to any lawsuits. LifeStory and the Monitor Project aren’t a substitute for routine surveillance. They didn’t give me any details on Nadia’s private life—who she dated, how well she’d known Chad Vishneski, if she and Karen Buckley or Olympia had been lovers. All I could tell was that she’d never filed an order of protection or complained of stalking or harassment.
The reports did give other, more intimate information, the kind you assume is private to you alone. I felt filthy, exploring Nadia’s medical history, but I wanted to know if she’d had any treatment that might imply an abusive relationship. No recent broken bones, no STDs. By the time I’d been through the whole file, I just had time to shower and change for my first appointment of the morning. I’d look at the reports on Chad, Olympia, and Karen Buckley later.
Now that the police had identified her killer, they’d released Nadia’s body to her family. The funeral was scheduled for this afternoon at Ayuda de Cristianos, in Pilsen. I put on my tailored black suit so that I could go directly to the church from my downtown meeting.
10
A Kiss in the Coffin
Nadia’s family was gathered around her open coffin, the parents in black, the surviving daughter defiantly flaunting turquoise eye shadow and a pink jersey minidress. Their son, Ernest, was wearing a black suit and tie, but he was twitching and shaking his arms and occasionally letting out little yipping noises. An older woman, perhaps a grandmother, was scolding him.
I joined the obligatory parade up to the family. Lazar Guaman stood like a statue, unable to respond to anyone who spoke to him, seemingly unaware of his son. For Cristina Guaman, Ernest seemed to provide a welcome distraction. Rubbing his neck, or taking his hands when he started sticking them down his trouser front, or hushing his shriek of a laugh seemed to calm her, to give her a kind of purpose.
I murmured condolences, and Ms. Guaman directed me to the coffin.
“Our Nadia looks like the angel in heaven she’s become.”
I moved reluctantly to the open coffin. I’d last seen their daughter in Club Gouge’s parking lot, in pain and covered in blood, but here she lay as calm as if she were in a tranquil sleep. Her face, stripped of the tormenting anger I’d witnessed at Club Gouge, looked heartbreakingly young in death, almost a child’s face. The effect was heightened by the lacy white pillow on which she lay.
The funeral people had covered her torn-up chest with a pale blue frock, a girlie outfit very different from the jeans and outsize shirt she’d worn for her Body Artist painting. Was it good, was it bad, to turn the dead into dolls like this?
Someone who seemed to know the family was speaking to Ms. Guaman, when Ernest shouted, so abruptly that I jumped, “Nadia flew, she flew to Jesus! Allie is a dove, flying around and around and around!” and he started to laugh.
The outburst didn’t startle his family. “Your sister is an angel, not a dove,” scolded the woman who’d been speaking to Ms. Guaman, while the daughter said, “Not in church, Ernie, don’t yell in here.”
Ayuda de Cristianos was one of those cavernous old churches that dated