to do. But—my mom was dead. Her name—before she married, she was Karen Buckley, and my dad still had her old high school yearbook and her old high school ID. I took them and ran away, and called myself Karen Buckley.”
She’d spent so many years with her story locked inside her that once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. I sat quietly on the stool in front of the space heater.
“I couldn’t even tell my dad what I’d done because I was afraid he’d try to go after Anton, and Anton would have killed him, like swatting a fly. So I disappeared. I bummed around the country just living on what I could live on. I cleaned houses, I did some carpentry—I learned how, working with my dad in the summers—but I couldn’t get a regular job, I couldn’t do anything where they needed a Social Security number because then Anton would know where to find me, and I didn’t want to ever see him or hear from him again. I took some painting classes at local community colleges and worked on my art, but nothing was right in my life.
“Then I came back to Chicago and started this body art gig. I thought, I can be anonymous here behind all this paint, so I started doing it in public.”
“How did Anton find you?” I asked when she paused.
“Because my life is crap and nothing turns out right! It was that idiot bitch, Olympia. If I’d known she’d borrowed money from him, I never would have set foot in her goddamned bar! But she always did these kind of edgy acts, music and performance both, and when I pitched my body-painting idea she thought it would work because it was novel. That’s what you need in the club business, something new all the time. And it was starting to work, except Rodney came around. By now, he was Anton’s enforcer, but he’d been strictly junior grade when I was in high school. He recognized me from the sex parties.”
“Sex parties?”
“Oh, you know, Anton liked Zina and me to help entertain his friends. His wife was usually pretty stoned by the time night rolled around, and we thought at first it was fun. We made so much money, you can’t imagine—for a teenager to have a thousand dollars in cash—but sex with those guys—it’s why Zina and me, why we started using. Had to be high to get through the night. Anton, he had pictures, that’s why I couldn’t move without being afraid of him and blackmail.” She began chipping at her fingernails, tearing off little pieces and throwing them to the floor.
“So it must have been horrible when you saw Rodney at Club Gouge,” I said.
She looked up. “I’ll tell you what was really horrible. He knew me before I knew him on account of he’d put on about a hundred pounds. Anton had been sending him to Club Gouge just to keep the heat on Olympia about the money she owed. But when he recognized me, it all started again. Anton had this idea, he thought it was so damned funny—”
“Yes, to use you as his message center. I got that much. And that’s why you were so angry the night they came in and started beating on you.”
“I wanted to kill you,” she said. “If Anton thought I’d ratted him out to a cop, even a private one, my life was worth less than the paint covering me. So I ran home and grabbed my stuff and hid out. But then I saw your ads on the Net and I couldn’t stay away—I needed to see what you were doing in my name. I guess you were counting on that, weren’t you?”
She looked at me in surprise, as if startled to think I could be that clever.
“Hoping for it,” I said, “not counting on it. I didn’t know what would happen tonight. I wanted the cops to see an alternate version of the story of Nadia’s murder. I thought if you were here, you could fill in some critical blanks.”
The Artist began fiddling with the paintbrushes I’d left out on the counter.
“Yes, poor Nadia. I thought she was full of drama—self-drama—over her sister. Poor Allie, too. Is that really what happened to her? Raped and murdered in Iraq?”
“It’s what really happened to her. The wrong guy got shot tonight. Just my opinion, but the corporate guys, MacLean and Scalia—nothing will happen to them. Once the Guamans threatened legal