the easy or, at least, less hard part. When we’d exhausted the public places, we moved on to the grim business of going door-to-door. I decided arbitrarily to limit the search to a half-mile radius around the L stop. Petra went east, and I took the west stretch.
It was a long, cold day. By the time I’d covered Karlov and Kedvale, I’d found two German shepherds, five terriers, three Labs, two Rottweilers. Petra and I met briefly to warm up at one of the coffee shops near the L. She wasn’t as discouraged as I because it was her first real detecting job. And also because she herself has the eager personality of a Labrador.
The area was mostly a collection of houses and two- or three-flats, which at least meant we weren’t trying to get into the lobby of big apartment complexes. Even so, we faced a lot of doorbells, with no guarantee that we were even in the right neighborhood.
By midafternoon, as snow began to fall again, I was so tired and so numb that I almost overlooked the name on the bell. It was a workman’s cottage on the west side of Kildare, divided into a two-flat. I was halfway down the walk before the second-floor name registered with me: F. Pindero.
F. Pindero. When I’d been in the coffee shop in Roehampton and the regulars had been talking about Kystarnik’s daughter, someone said Steve Pindero had been a good guy and it broke his heart when his Frannie OD’d along with Zina Kystarnik. I’d assumed Frannie was dead, too. But maybe she’d survived, and resurrected herself as the Body Artist.
I called Petra to tell her where I was, and went back up the steps to ring the bell again. A terrier, number nine for the day, began hurling itself at the ground-floor door, but no humans answered either bell. A curtain shifted in the house across the street. I walked over and rang the bell.
A woman about my own age came to the door and opened it the length of a chain. Fortunately, I hadn’t worked the east side of Kildare yet, so I could switch my story from the developmentally disabled sister to one who was married to an abusive husband.
“She thought she was safe here,” I said, “but he tracked her down somehow, and she called me about two this morning really scared. Have you seen her today?”
“You mean the gal across the street? If she acted as stuck-up around her man as she does to the neighbors on the street, no wonder he hit her. I wanted to myself.”
“No woman deserves to be beaten. Surely you believe that! Have you seen her today?”
“I believe a woman’s duty is to make a good home for her man. If she acts like a person who says hello to her on the street is dirt beneath her feet, then maybe she earned a black eye or two.”
“Are you always this warmhearted or does the cold weather bring out the best in you?”
“I can see how you’re related. You’re just as stuck-up as her. I hope you’ve got a man like hers waiting for you at home!”
She slammed the door in my face.
I walked back across the street, seething. So what if my story was fictitious? To believe any woman deserved a beating—I serve on the board of a domestic violence shelter, and it hurt to know there were women in the community who believed their battered sisters got what was coming to them.
My hands were shaking with anger and stiff with cold, so by the time I worked the picklocks into the cylinders and got inside Pindero’s house, Petra had joined me. I could feel the woman across the street watching. If she called the cops, I’d—I broke the ugly thought off mid-sentence. I was as bad as she was, thinking of beating her up.
The terrier barked hysterically as Petra and I climbed the stairs to the second floor. The stairwell was dark, but it was warm and out of the wind. I leaned against the wall, rubbing the circulation back into my fingers. Petra also seemed glad of the chance to catch her breath. Finally, as I knelt to pick the lock on Pindero’s door, I explained how I’d learned her name.
“Why would Karen use a fake name?” Petra asked.
“I don’t know. But if she was Zina Kystarnik’s friend, maybe she was scared Anton would be after her for letting Zina OD.”