have the run of your club, or at least let his chief enforcer have the run, because he’d bailed you out. What other favors are you doing for him?”
“Where is Rodney now?” Olympia didn’t seem to have heard me. “Did he follow you here?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care, but you apparently do. Don’t tell me you’re sleeping with him—that’s so disgusting, I can’t bear to think about it.”
“If Anton and Rodney think I’m helping you,” she said, “I might as well jump off the roof right now and end everything the easy way.” Her words were melodramatic, but her tone was matter-of-fact.
“Hey, that’s no way to talk,” Mr. Contreras reproved her. “If you’ve gotten yourself in trouble and you’re too scared to talk to the cops, talk to Vic here. She’s helped people in worse trouble than you are in.”
Olympia flicked a contemptuous glance at him: no one had ever been in worse trouble than she.
“So,” I said, “Rodney telegraphed bank codes to Anton’s overseas pals via the Body Artist’s butt. What else? You slipped Petra extra money to pretend she hadn’t noticed him copping a feel. Don’t tell me you let him sleep with your staff.”
“Not everyone thinks her body is as sacred as you seem to.” Olympia shrugged. “If the money was right . . . It’s a bad economy . . .”
I thought I might throw up again. My neighbor, as her meaning dawned on him, started a furious protest—directed against me—for letting Petra work in such an environment.
“Later,” I said to him. “Rodney had the hots for Petra, so you kept her on, but I was too close to her for his comfort. He told you to give her the ax, right?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like, then?”
I didn’t keep the contempt out of my voice. She flinched but didn’t speak.
“Let’s see,” I continued. “You provided Rodney with sex partners and set up Anton’s message board. That doesn’t seem like enough to offset a million dollars of debt. What else? Could it be—money laundering? Anton paid off your debts, right? So that while you used to bleed money like scarlet, your books are now white as wool. And, in return, for whatever businesses he’s involved in where he doesn’t want the feds to see his cash flow, he can funnel money through Club Gouge.
“No wonder your business began to take off last fall when the Body Artist appeared on your stage. You suddenly had money to burn. At least, it was Anton’s money, but you could advertise in the important places, you could invest in that shiny set of plasma screens and that really cool sound system. What was the Artist’s role in all this? Did she sleep with Rodney?”
Olympia made a sour face. “It was all I could do to get her to sit still when he was painting her. That was Anton’s idea, when he first heard about her act. He thought it would be a good way to keep the feds from tracking his offshore accounts. Now that you’ve ruined that, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Say it more plaintively,” I suggested. “Make me care. Karen Buckley has disappeared, by the way. Any thoughts on where she’d go? On who would take her in?”
“That stupid girl who drools on her, I suppose,” Olympia said.
“Rivka Darling? Think harder, dig deeper in your brain.”
“I don’t care,” Olympia shouted. “She was a royal pain to work with, a fucking prima donna! If Anton hadn’t told me—”
“Told you what?” I said when she bit the statement off. “What her real name was?”
“I knew it couldn’t be Karen Buckley! What is it, really?”
“How did you know?”
She looked sulky but said, “You’re not the only detective in Chicago. I saw Anton had some kind of hold on Karen, so I hired Brett Taylor to run a background check. He dug deep, but he couldn’t find word one about her. And then he charged me a bundle!”
Brett Taylor was another solo op in town. Our paths crossed occasionally.
“What a happy little band you are at Club Gouge,” I said. “Anton has you clamped in a vise. You spy on your performers so that you can hold any secrets you uncover over their heads—we won’t use such an ugly word as blackmail. Who’s Anton working for now, by the way?”
A sly smile tilted the corners of her mouth. “I couldn’t say, although if I knew Karen Buckley’s real name, it might trigger a memory