“I have nothing to say to you,” the Body Artist said, “so you might as well let me go now.” Her chin was high, defiant, Joan of Arc confronting her Burgundian jailers.
“Then you can sit in lofty silence, while I clean up and dress. And I’ll talk to you.”
54
The Body Artist’s Tale
The concrete floor and walls were just about at the freezing mark. I turned on a space heater full blast, but I was still shivering. I began rubbing cold cream on my legs. Vesta retreated into the back, sitting on a crate of beer bottles. She stayed so quiet during our conversation that, after a few minutes, both the Artist and I forgot she was there.
“Let’s see,” I started, “you were born Francine Pindero, you and Zina Kystarnik sold drugs to the rich kids on the North Shore until you and she overdosed. She died but you survived. I guess that proves how ignorant I am because I always thought dealers were too smart to use their own dope.”
“How did you know my name?” she demanded.
“I’m a detective. I detect things.”
“Then how did you detect I’d given roofies to your tame soldier?”
“That was a guess.”
I ran a facecloth under the tap in a sink that stood in one corner of the basement and soaped my breasts. It felt wonderful, like being newborn, to see my own skin again.
“You guessed wrong. Like you guessed wrong about Anton and me.” Her arms were folded across her chest, her mouth a thin uncompromising line.
I dried off and pulled on a T-shirt and a sweater. My hair, stiff with the hair spray Rivka had used to hold the Barbie dolls in place, felt heavy and filthy, but I’d wash it at home.
“You let Rodney Treffer use your ass as a billboard for Anton Kystarnik.”
“Wrong,” she said.
“Okay, what’s the right version?”
“Why should I tell you one damned thing?”
“No reason,” I said. “My version is the one that will go out in the Herald-Star, and then it will be all over the blogosphere. But if you’re cool with that—”
“You can’t be putting out lies about me,” she interrupted. “I’ll sue you.”
“And then you’ll have to tell the truth in court, and everyone will know your real name. So why not do it here and now?”
She looked around the cold basement as if hunting for an escape route. The service door to the stairs leading up to the street was behind me. The stairs going up to the bar were behind her, but she knew Marty Jepson and Tim Radke were waiting there.
“Let me tell you a version,” I suggested, “and you tell me where I’m wrong. You recovered from your overdose all those years ago and knew Anton was out for your blood because his kid had died, so you took refuge in a second identity. Leaving your dad with a basement full of drugs.”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!” The last “wrong” came out as a scream, and her transparent eyes flooded with color as violent emotion swept through her. “My dad—I would never have done that to him. It was Anton. Where do you think Zina and I got the drugs? Anton thought it would be good fun for us to sell them to our friends, and their parents. Why do you think we got away with it for two years? Because he was covering for us!”
She began to pace the small basement, frenzied, a panther in a cage. “I got out of the hospital, and cops were waiting to talk to me, and Dad, he was shaking, he looked like an old man. I see him in my nightmares to this day—not just how afraid he was for me, whether I’d ever recover, but because he hadn’t known what Zina and I were doing. He was so disappointed in me. He had big hopes for me, I was going to go to college, I was going to be a painter—I was going to be his special success in the world! And then the cops got a tip, probably from Anton, and suddenly this whole pharmacy appeared in our basement.”
She gulped back hysterical laughter. “And then Anton showed up. He waited till Dad had left for work, then he beat me up and said I was lucky he didn’t kill me. He said it should’ve been me who died, not Zina, and if I told anyone where we got the drugs, he’d see that my dad was arrested, not him.