friends gave me the kind of frigid looks I remembered from my own adolescence. They sniffed as if smelling garbage and pointedly turned away from me, then started giggling loudly.
“It would be more to the point if you’d help Clara,” I said. “She’s frightened and lonely.”
This made them laugh more loudly.
The bus was stopped for the light at Nineteenth Street. I pulled out one of my business cards and scribbled on the back, “Rainier Cowles is not a friend or business associate of mine, and I would never repeat anything you told me. Call or text me when you feel up to talking.”
Enough kids had left the bus that it was easy for me to walk to the front and stand next to Clara. Her rigid posture, despite the weight of her backpack, told me she was very aware of my presence. I tucked the card into her parka pocket, but she refused to turn her head. I got off at the next stop and crossed the street to pick up a northbound bus.
As the winter twilight closed in on me, I rode buses and trains back to my office. My leasemate Tessa was hard at work, her half of the building flooded with spotlights and the flame of her blowtorch.
My own half was dark. I didn’t bother turning on a light, just took off my boots and sat with my feet curled up under me on the sofa to warm them, trying to decode Clara Guaman’s response to my questions.
Allie’s name is sacred.
Clara had been told never to discuss her sister. But why? Because the family was afraid Alexandra’s sexuality would leak out? It was hard to accept that a parent still thought of homosexuality as so shameful, but of course many people do.
Clara thought, or feared, I was connected to Rainier Cowles. Last night at Club Gouge, he had claimed he was there to make sure the club respected Nadia, but he and his friends had definitely felt they were on a boys’ night out and not at a wake.
Nor did I place any credence in Cowles’s casting himself as an honorary uncle; lawyers like him bill themselves at five hundred dollars an hour or more. They don’t waste their time on the families of baggage handlers. But if he wasn’t protecting the Guamans, what was he doing hanging around their lives? He was certainly protecting something, and that something had to be himself, or possibly a high-flying client.
Allie, Nadia had cried. She wanted her sister, not her mother, as she was dying. Or she knew she was dying and hoped Alexandra would be there to greet her in the country of the dead.
At length, I turned on a light and walked over to my computer.
“Find me Alexandra Guaman. Fetch, boy!”
The floor was numbingly cold underneath my panty hose. I rummaged in my back storeroom and found an old pair of running shoes to wear as slippers.
While LifeStory was searching out Alexandra Guaman’s details, I logged on to [http://embodiedart.com] embodiedart.com, the Body Artist’s website. I wanted to look again at the paintings Nadia Guaman had made on the Artist to see if I could understand why they had roused Chad Vishneski so thoroughly.
Instead of the slide show I’d found on my previous visit to the site, the screen was blank except for the message “Out of respect for the dead, we have temporarily taken the site off-line.” I somehow had not expected so much sensitivity on Karen Buckley’s part. It forced me to think of her as less completely self-centered than she’d seemed.
I made myself a coffee and opened the report I’d ordered on Olympia, which had been sitting in my computer’s pending folder since the previous afternoon. The details of Olympia’s life were sketchy, as were her financials. She owned a loft apartment on the near North Side, in the stretch made newly hot by the destruction of the old Cabrini Green high-rises. She didn’t actually own it; she was paying a mortgage on it, as she was on a summer place near Michigan City. The debt on the two properties was around half a million.
Olympia didn’t own the building where she ran the club; that was held by a blind consortium managed through the Fort Dearborn Trust. I whistled through my teeth, trying to pick apart what I could of the club’s finances.
Olympia had been running Club Gouge for almost three years. Her background had been in restaurants and entertainment; she’d managed a restaurant at one