Body Work

“See, we’d just come back from a road run of Chorus Line. We needed a gig. The Body Artist dug our act. And it was kind of cool, you know, the disguised, gender-bending thing. But it’s old now.”

“Yeah,” said Leander. “Time to move on.”

“You can’t!” Rivka cried. “The Body Artist needs you.”

Kevin looked at her coldly. “She needs to update her act. It’s old. It’s stale.”

“She’s only done it for six months. How can you-”

“Six months!” Leander flung up his arms. “That is beyond stale, it’s rotting!”

“Right,” I said. “Where does Karen live?”

Kevin’s wide mouth gave an exaggerated grimace of contempt. “We weren’t dating the chick. We worked with her on her act.”

“Did you rehearse the act outside the club?”

Leander explained that one of his ballet teachers was on the faculty at Columbia College and let him and Piuma use one of the practice studios when they were in town.

“If you want to call the Body Artist, what number do you use?”

“E-mail. She didn’t give us a number.”

I looked at Rivka. “What about you?”

She bit her lips. She wanted to claim some special inside knowledge of Karen Buckley but couldn’t. The Body Artist always phoned Rivka, but she blocked her own number.

Vesta nodded agreement. “Girlfriend liked her secrets.”

Vesta had met Karen at the dojo where she trained. “She wanted to study self-defense. She took about four months of classes. That’s when we…”

She didn’t finish the sentence, but I assumed from Rivka’s scowl that Vesta meant when she and Karen had been lovers.

“What about Olympia?” I asked. “How did all that get started, the act at the club and so on?”

“Karen goes to all the clubs,” Vesta said. “She studies other people’s acts. She had this thing she wanted to do with body art; she pitched it to Olympia, who thought it was enough of a novelty to bring in a crowd. Nothing happened for a few months, and then suddenly, around Thanksgiving, the act took off.”

“Why?”

“People realized they had the chance to see an extraordinary artist for free,” Rivka said.

Vesta said, “It was more that people took video footage with their cell phones and put it out on the Net.”

“When did Rodney start taking part?” I asked.

Leander and Kevin looked at each other again as if they could only think in tandem, but it was Leander who spoke. “Rodney’s the big thugly guy, right? We’d been doing the act for about six weeks, maybe two months. At first, it was all about Karen painting on herself and we’d hold mirrors for her, but that was way too hard. Then she started this public art idea. About a week after that, Rodney the Rod Man arrived. Raw sex. Not a nice man.”

The last phrase hung in the air for a moment, allowing us all to wonder if he’d had raw sex with Rodney or if that was just his way of describing a brutish person.

“I’m assuming it was Anton Kystarnik who was at the club last night,” I said. “If he’s not the person blocking her website, who is? And why?”

The four of them looked at one another and then at Petra, obediently quiet in her corner of the couch. None of them had any ideas.

“Rivka,” I asked, “do you have a picture of Karen? Do any of you?”

“She hated being photographed except when she had her full body art on,” Rivka said. “The one time I took her picture, she grabbed my camera and erased it.”

“You’re a good artist,” I said. “Can you draw her from memory? I’m going to need a picture if I’m going to canvas for her.”

“She won’t like it if I do.” Rivka’s face was flushed.

“There’s no point to my asking around about her if I don’t have a picture. This is the last discussion we’ll have on the subject. Either draw a picture of Buckley for me or go home and don’t bother me again.”

Rivka started another protest, but Vesta shook her head at her. “You’re the only one who pulled the detective into this. Do like she says-put Buckley’s face onto a piece of paper or go on home.”

30 Deserted Home-or Whatever

Vesta and the dancers left while Rivka was working on the Body Artist’s portrait. Whatever Rivka’s more tiresome qualities, she was a skillful artist. In less than an hour, she put together a couple of sketches that captured the Artist’s elusive quality. Working only in ink, Rivka showed the transparent, expressionless eyes and the sternness around the mouth that kept people at a distance.

“Where are you going to search?” Rivka asked.

“Maybe I’ll throw a dart at the map.” I pointed to a big map of the city that hangs in my main workroom. “They say if you pick stocks that way, they perform as well or better than a financial adviser’s portfolio. Maybe it will lead me to the Artist as well.”

“I’m staying with you.”

“No, you’re not. Not unless you’ve been lying and know where the woman is. Or what name she might be hiding behind.”

Rivka started to argue the point, but I shut her up without finesse. “You want to find Karen Buckley, but you’re wasting my time. Which I bill at a hundred fifty dollars an hour.”

Her jaw dropped. “I don’t have that kind of money!”

“Then you’d better get out of my way before I decide to start charging you, hadn’t you.”

She scurried out the door so fast that Petra burst out laughing.

“But why aren’t you charging her?” my cousin asked when I’d made sure Rivka had gone out the front door.

“Because I want to find the Body Artist myself. And these pictures may help us.”

“Where are you going to start? At the club?”

“If Vesta and Rivka don’t know where she hangs out, no one at the club will, either. Nope. We’re going up to Irving and the Kennedy, where Karen abandoned that SUV. I’m going to assume she raced home, picked up what she thought she needed to survive on the run, and hopped on the L.”

“Then you won’t find her up there,” Petra objected.

“If we can discover where she’s been living, we may find the name of someone who knows her well enough to tell us where she might go next,” I explained. “She is a remarkably invisible person, considering how much she exposes herself. And considering how hard it is to hide your life in the age of the Internet. You make copies of these sketches while I get my maps out.”

I’ve got those apps on my cell phone that guide you around the streets, but I still prefer seeing the big picture-How many blocks did we have to cover? And how long might it take?-although the apps would come in handy when we needed to find a bathroom.

The first challenge was to make sure no one was after us. If Anton was trying to find the Body Artist, he could get Rodney or one of his other minions to stake me out, knowing I might be looking for her, too. I made Petra pull a wool cap over her halo of hair-it was far too recognizable. Her height I couldn’t do much about.

We went by L, changing trains and directions four times at less-used stops to make sure the same people weren’t getting on or off with us. Finally, we picked up the O’Hare train and rode to Irving Park. The L runs alongside the Kennedy Expressway here, and traffic was heavy.

The Irving Park stop served K-Town, so-called because it’s a corridor where all the street names begin with K. We would treat the search like all canvassing, going door-to-door, looking at the names on the buzzers if there were any, seeing who was home, showing a picture of Karen, seeing if anyone recognized her.

We started at the L ticket booth. The woman in the booth shook her head over the two sketches: the