Body Work by Sara Paretsky

Club Gouge. Karen Buckley’s safety had been threatened. I’m a detective. I was trying to see that she didn’t get hurt.”
    “You did a good job, didn’t you? It was my sister who got killed.”
    I smiled painfully but held out my card. “Would you talk to me if I came to your school or your home?”
    Clara’s eyes slid past me to someone behind me. The man in the black cashmere coat appeared next to me.
    “Clara.” He took one of her bare hands between his two gloved ones. “This is no time to be standing around without a coat!”
    She pulled her hand away and gave him the same angry stare she’d turned on me a minute earlier, but didn’t say anything.
    “This is a hard time for your whole family,” the man said. “Your mother needs to be able to count on you. So get into the car before you add to her worries by catching cold, okay?”
    He put a hand on her neck to shepherd her to the car, but she twisted away from him. She climbed into the limo, and the man in black cashmere leaned in over her head to say something to the Guamans. He spoke so softly I couldn’t hear him, but Cristina replied loudly, “I do understand. You don’t need to repeat yourself.”
    He shut the door and slapped the car’s top a couple of times, I guess as a signal to the driver to take off.
    “Clara’s a tough kid to talk to.” He had a light, pleasant baritone.
    “All kids that age are. Or can be.”
    “You a family friend?”
    “I was close to Nadia at one time.” I didn’t feel like explaining my connection as a private investigator. “And you?”
    “I’m sort of an honorary uncle to all of them, especially since poor Ernie had his accident.” He stuck a hand inside his coat and pulled out a card: Rainier Cowles, Attorney.
    “They seem dogged by misfortune; they’re lucky to have an honorary uncle who’s a lawyer.” I didn’t give him a card of my own; a La Salle Street lawyer like him probably wouldn’t take kindly to a PI sniffing around the Guamans. “I don’t know the family well. Can Ernest be left alone?”
    “Not really. It’s not that he’s dangerous, but his impulses are out of whack. Cristina worries about him leaving the stove on, that kind of thing. Lazar’s mother lives with them, helps keep an eye on Ernest.”
    “So how do they manage?”
    I tried to imagine what home life must be like for Clara and her parents: hard work for the parents, but painful for a teenager who had to put her own life on hold.
    “Are you a social worker looking for a customer?” His eyebrows were raised.
    I smiled. “Like you, I was worrying about the Guamans’ welfare, wondering how they cope. And I gather there was another sister who also died—Alexandra.”
    “They don’t like to talk about her.” His voice was bland, but all the muscles in his face tightened.
    “How did she die?”
    One of Ernie’s outbursts came back to me: Allie. Allie is a dove. When Nadia lay in my arms, her last word had been “Allie.” Not bitterness at ending her life in an alley—she thought my face bending over hers was that of her dead sister. My insides twisted in an involuntary spasm of grief.
    “You don’t know?” Cowles said. “It doesn’t sound to me as though you ever knew Nadia at all.”
    “We were close once,” I repeated, “but not for long. She let me know Allie was very important to her, but she didn’t spell out why.”
    His face relaxed again. “I’d let that dead dog lay, then. It’s too painful to Cristina and Lazar—you’ll never hear them talk about Alexandra. By the way, who was the woman who interrupted the service? She knocked poor Father Ogden off balance.”
    I shrugged. “Her name is Karen Buckley.”
    “And what was she to Nadia?”
    I shook my head. “Anybody’s guess.”
    “What’s yours?”
    I smiled again. “Not enough data to begin to guess.”
    “So you’re a careful woman, are you? Not a risk taker, hmm?”
    For some reason, the time I’d swung from a gantry and