The bouncer was inspecting people’s bags and backpacks before letting them in. That was the only sign that something unusual had happened. No one protested-we’re all inured these days to being searched. Pretty soon, we’ll have to get undressed before we walk into our apartment buildings at night, and we’ll probably submit to that without a murmur.
When I reached the front of the line, I showed the bouncer my PI license and explained that Petra had summoned me. The bouncer, Mark, looked me up and down but nodded me into the club.
“I don’t know if the Artist’ll talk to you,” he said, “but she’s in the back. Her performance starts in about twenty minutes-I’ll get Petra to take you to her.”
“What happened?”
Mark shuffled his feet.
“She’ll tell you herself. I’m not a hundred percent sure.”
I looked at him narrowly, wondering what he didn’t want to reveal, but went into the club. Olympia was behind the bar, helping the two bartenders keep up with the orders. As the Body Artist’s performance time was drawing near, the club was filling, and drink orders were piling up.
Olympia was striking, with her dyed black hair and the thick streak of white over her left eye. She was dressed in black and white, too, as if she, like the Body Artist, were a canvas on display. Tonight she was wearing a pantsuit that shimmered like oilcloth under the lights. The jacket was open to her breastbone, where you could see the fringed top of a white camisole.
My cousin was easy to find. At five-eleven, with her halo of spiky hair adding another three inches, she towered over most of the room. When I tapped her arm, she finished delivering drinks to four tables without missing an order and then waltzed me behind the stage to the small changing room set aside for performers.
She knocked perfunctorily on the door but opened it without waiting for an answer. The Body Artist was sitting in the lotus position, eyes shut, breathing slowly. She was already naked except for her thong, which was covered with the same kind of cream foundation paint as her body. Close up, she looked more like a mannequin than before, which was somehow more disturbing than her nudity.
Petra cleared her throat uncertainly. “Uh, this is my cousin, the detective, you know. I told you I was calling her when you said you didn’t want the police here. Vic, Body Artist. Body Artist, Vic. I’ve got to get back to my station.”
She backed out of the room, the feathery ends of her hair brushing against the top of the door frame.
The Artist looked up at me. “I don’t want to be disturbed before my performance. Come back later.”
“Nope,” I said. “Later, I’m going to be home. I’ve been working since eight this morning and I’m beat. Who attacked you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where did it happen?”
“Here, in my dressing room.”
“The first time I was here, some big guy with tattoos tried to attack you. Was it him?”
“It was… an indirect assault. Not a mugging.”
“Were you attacked at all?” I asked. “Or is this a publicity stunt-will I see a paragraph in tomorrow’s paper that I repelled yet another customer infuriated by your nudity?”
The Artist’s eyes were hard to read inside the mask of paint. “It was a real assault.”
She rose, with the fluid motion of a dancer, and showed me her left leg. Beneath the foundation paint, I could just make out the long line of a cut.
“A piece of glass was hidden in one of my brushes. It’s in the garbage now.”
I put on my gloves and extracted the brush from the pile of tissues and sponges that was filling the can. It was soft, made of sable, the bristles about an inch wide and two inches long. A glass shard had been attached to the bristle head with a piece of wire painted the same color as the handle. Even so, it was easy to spot.
“How come you didn’t see the glass?” I asked.
“I’ve done this so many times, I don’t think about it,” she said. “I unroll my brushes, stick them in the paint containers ready to take onstage, and apply my foundation.”
“So your brush was rigged before you got here tonight?”
“Maybe. But I dropped everything off here this afternoon so that I could run some errands, and I don’t lock the case.” She waved a hand at a large metal suitcase under the dressing table.
“You need to give this to the cops. If there’s poison on it, or tetanus-”
“I’ll get a tetanus shot tomorrow morning. But I don’t want the police here.” For the first time, she sounded agitated, even angry.
“Why not? Someone injured you.”
“I don’t want police in here slobbering over me, and I don’t want to put clothes on over my foundation. Period, end of story.”
Olympia had appeared in the doorway without my noticing. “Who are you? Oh, right, Warshawski, the detective who craves anonymity. The Artist has to go onstage in five minutes, and you’re going to hurt her performance, badgering her like this. You need to leave.”
I asked Olympia the same question I’d put to the Body Artist about the tattooed guy at the table of drunks who’d tried to jump the Artist the night I came with Jake and his friends. “Chad, I think I heard his pals call him.”
“Drunks don’t have the subtlety for something like this,” the Artist said.
She was staring at Olympia when she spoke. The heavy foundation made it impossible to read her expression, but it flashed through my mind that Olympia had rigged the brush, or at least that the Artist thought she had.
“Get out now, Warshawski,” Olympia said. “Go sit at a table in the back-we’ll treat you to a drink.”
“Thanks, Olympia, but I’m way past my limit tonight.”
Over objections from both women, I put the brush into a plastic bag the Body Artist had used to hold cotton balls, wrote down the date and place I’d found it, and tucked it into a pocket of my handbag. On my way out of the club, I scanned the crowd. I didn’t see Chad or his friends, but the heavyset man who looked like a cop was there again. He was nursing a drink at a table by himself. Morose, off-duty policeman without friends, the kind who makes headlines by using his weapon in a crowded bar.
Another person, sitting close to the front, also looked familiar. I studied her for a moment and then decided she was the painter whose work had provoked Chad. Her thin shoulders were hunched up around her ears. Her hands were on the table, tensed so tightly that I could see the tendons raised across the back. She, too, seemed to be alone.
4 Individual of Interest
It was a week later that Petra dropped by my office on her way home from her day job. She was drooping. Even her spiky hair had collapsed, and she looked less like a radiant Valkyrie than a houseplant in need of water.
I was in the middle of a complicated transaction with an Ajax Insurance auditor, trying to unravel a fraud committed by one of their claims adjustors, but I gave my cousin an extra-bright smile to show that I loved her and was delighted to see her.
While I talked the accountant through the entries I’d made in my audit software, Petra wandered around my office. She fiddled with stacks of documents, studied her teeth in the glass over my Antonella Mason painting, and then spun a crystal paperweight, a gift from a grateful client, on its edge. She was so distracting that I finally beckoned her over and told her to go across the street for a couple of espressos. By the time she’d returned, her hair damp from the snow that was starting to fall, I’d finished my phone call with Ajax.
I sat her down in the alcove reserved for clients, the sole clutter-free place in my office. “What’s up, babe?”
“I, uh, Vic… Did you ever find out who put that piece of glass in the Body Artist’s paintbrush?”
“No, why? Has it happened again?”
Petra shook her head. “No. I just wondered.”
