of spying on her. She thought someone was after her, and I’d thought she might be paranoid. Now she was dead. I didn’t feel like discussing it with the police.
I told Finchley most of the rest of what I knew, including finding the glass in the Body Artist’s paintbrush. He demanded that I retrieve it from the Cheviot labs, but he also revealed that he’d been able to pry the Body Artist’s name out of her.
“Karen Buckley. Not a very jazzy name for a stripper. Maybe that’s why she wouldn’t let anyone around here know it,” Finchley added.
“She’s not a stripper,” I said. “She’s an artist, and a fine one.”
“A woman who takes off her clothes on a stage for men to drool over is a stripper, in my book.”
“Bobby’s right,” I said. “You’ve been breathing the rare air on South Michigan way too long. You need to buy yourself a new book. What about this guy Rodney? You find anything out about him?”
“What guy Rodney?” Finchley demanded.
“Didn’t anyone here mention him? Big guy with a gut, looks like an off-duty cop, with a big old nine-millimeter under his jacket. It looked like an HK when he shoved his armpit in my face.”
“And why did he do that, Vic?” Finchley said. “You weren’t in his face, by any chance, were you?”
“I was telling him to stop sticking his hand into my cousin’s pants when she’s waiting tables. Does that constitute being in his face to you? And whether it does or not, does that mean he gets to wave a gun at me?”
Finchley pressed his lips together. He’s a good cop, and a good detective, but he’s close to a police sergeant I used to date. He still holds it against me that Conrad Rawlings got shot while he was involved with me. The human heart, or thyroid gland, or whatever it is that controls our emotions, is too tangled for me to understand. Conrad survived, but our affair didn’t, and I’ve never been sure which the Finch blames me for more—the breakup or the shooting.
Finchley sent an underling to fetch Olympia to the small stage, where the police were conducting interrogations. She looked briefly frightened, or maybe angry, when he asked her about Rodney, but then gave him her brightest smile and said, “I’m sure I know who Vic means. He’s a regular, he loves Karen’s show, but—are you sure his name is Rodney, Vic? I thought it might be Roger, or Sydney.”
I gasped at the brazenness of her lies, but before I could speak, Finchley was asking if she had had any complaints from her staff or from other customers.
“I gave one of Vic’s cousins a job here, and Vic is a mite overprotective, maybe jumps too fast to conclusions. If Petra can’t handle a little good-natured kidding with the customers, then I’m afraid she shouldn’t work in a club.”
“Is that why you comp his drinks, Olympia?” I asked. “To encourage the good-natured kidding? And why you offered Petra a bonus if she’d overlook His Gropiness?”
Olympia’s eyes seemed to glitter, but that might just have been the bright lights on the stage. “Your cousin needs to get a handle on her imagination. I don’t comp drinks here. I know she’s young, but this is a bad economy. I can take my pick of waitstaff—I don’t need Petra Warshawski.”
She turned back to Finchley, leaning so close that the white feathers of her corsage almost tickled his nose. “Detective, I’m sorry Vic is trying to involve you in her cousin’s problems when everyone knows it was that disturbed guy who must have shot poor Nadia.”
“Chad, you mean. Yes, we’ve heard about him. We’ll keep our eyes open. A last name would help.”
Olympia gave her best imitation of a silly, ignorant female, spreading her hands with a little hiccup of a laugh. “We don’t seem to go in for last names here. I only learned poor Nadia’s from you tonight. I don’t know Roger’s—or Rodney’s, if Vic insists—and I don’t know Chad’s, either.”
While Officer Milkova took Olympia back to her office, the Finch looked at me. “You may be telling the truth, Vic. Guy may be Rodney, not Roger. He may have wandering hands, and she may comp his drinks. But I don’t have the resources to check all that out unless it turns out that Nadia Guaman was shot with a nine-millimeter HK . . . She’s very good, Ms. Olympia Koilada.”
“I guess. Depending on what good means to you.”