Driven to Ink (35 page)

And the thing that Parker thought I found in the locker room? The reason why he’d tried to run me and Bitsy down at the university and then Tim and me in the parking garage? And why he’d shot at Jeff and me?

A love letter from Rosalie.

 

“Are you sure?” I asked for the umpteenth time.

Jeff sat in my chair, in my room at The Painted Lady. His shirt was off, showcasing his tattoos. My eyes lingered on the Day of the Dead tattoo that he’d designed himself—a skeleton in a big sombrero, playing a guitar—before moving up to the ugly red wound that was still healing near his clavicle.

“I know you think I’m good-looking, Kavanaugh, but let’s get to it,” he quipped. He’d been out of the hospital for two weeks. So far we hadn’t talked about anything that had happened. I tried, but every time I did, he changed the subject. Like now.

“Bitsy says you’re having dinner with that Dr. Sexy tonight.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “That’s not really your business.” I’d had a long conversation with Colin Bixby and asked him why he’d pointed me in the direction of Dan Franklin, who clearly had only an unrequited relationship with Rosalie. But the rumor around the university lab, however, had them having a heated relationship, and Bixby felt Franklin was suspect.

“Bitsy says you have a hard time with commitment,” Jeff was saying. “But I don’t think so.”

I frowned. What would Jeff Coleman know about that? I secretly thought Bitsy was right. I’d had a series of relationships in the last ten years, and none of them had lasted.

“You don’t get it, do you, Kavanaugh?”

“I guess I don’t,” I said, slipping a new needle into my tattoo machine.

He watched me for a second, then said, “Every time you mark your body, you’re making a commitment. A lifelong commitment. One of these days it won’t be just a tattoo.”

What? Was Jeff Coleman becoming profound? Who knew?

But then he ruined it. “Maybe it’ll be Dr. Sexy. Tonight. Should I tell your brother not to wait up?” He winked.

I dipped the needle in black ink. Despite his attempt to distract me, the question remained. “Are you sure?” I asked again, the machine poised.

Jeff pointed to a small space of bare skin just above where his wound was. “Right there. And I’ve never been so sure in my life.”

“You and Sylvia have talked about it?”

“That’s between me and her, Kavanaugh. Don’t worry your little head about it.”

But I did worry about it. This wasn’t just another tattoo.

I sighed and pressed the foot pedal, and the machine began to whir. I touched the needle to his skin.

There was no stencil. I didn’t need one.

It took fifteen minutes.

I wiped the last of the ink and blood away with a soft cloth and took my foot off the pedal. I handed him the small mirror so he could see it.

Jeff took the mirror and gazed at the tattoo.

“You know, Kavanaugh, you could have a good career for yourself if you play your cards right.”

I turned to put the machine on the shelf.

I felt his hand on the back of my neck. “Thanks,” he whispered, all teasing gone now.

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t want him to see that I’d teared up. I nodded as I heard him slide off the chair. I reached over and grabbed a tube of ointment.

He stood, shrugging on his shirt.

“You better put this on first,” I said, indicating the salve.

He grinned and winked. “You do it.”

I rolled my eyes at him, ran my fingers through the ointment, and touched it to the new tattoo, red around the edges, slightly inflamed.

“That’s Amore.”

Read on for an excerpt from
Karen E. Olson’s next Tattoo Shop Mystery

Coming in June 2011 from Obsidian

T
he picture of the flamingo tattoo was on the blog an hour before they found the body. In retrospect, I probably should’ve called the cops immediately.

I was working on an elaborate tattoo of a heart wrapped in the American flag when Joel Sloane, one of my tattooists, stuck his head through the door. At The Painted Lady, where we do only custom ink, we’ve got four private rooms for tattooing, unlike street shops, which merely have stations out in the open.

“Brett,” Joel said, nodding to my client, “sorry, but you have to see this.”

I set my tattoo machine down on the counter and slipped off the blue latex gloves as I rose. “I’ll be a minute,” I told my client as I followed Joel toward the staff room. “What is it?” I asked his back.

Bitsy Hendricks, our shop manager, was standing in front of the small TV set in the corner of the staff room. When we came in, she whirled around, her eyes wide.

She pointed at the TV. Red and blue flashing lights lit up the screen, which was filled with a sea of police cruisers and at least one ambulance. Something bad had happened.

At first I was relieved it was a crime scene I wasn’t witnessing personally. I’d gotten into a few situations in the last several months that had had me up close and personal with dead bodies, and I hoped that was all behind me now.

Until I saw the picture of Daisy Carmichael on the screen, the reporter’s voice-over telling me that her body had been found in a hotel room.

My knees buckled a little, and Joel’s arm snaked around my shoulders.

“Are they sure it’s her?” I asked no one in particular. My voice sounded far away, like I was talking into a tunnel.

“Yes,” Bitsy said flatly. “It’s on every channel.” And in case I didn’t believe her, she aimed the remote at the set and clicked through all the local channels.

She was right. It was on every channel.

“Did they say what happened?” I asked.

“No, just that they found her body.”

“Who found her?” I couldn’t help myself. My curiosity was too strong.

“Think they said the room service guy.”

As she spoke, a gurney rolled into view on the screen, a white sheet over what could have only been a body. I caught my breath.

Joel tightened his grip on my shoulder, and he put his other hand on Bitsy’s.

Daisy, or Dee as she was known to her fans, was the lead singer of the band the Flamingos. They were a bit like the Go-Go’s or the Bangles, but with a definite edge to their videos despite the wholesome pop sound. It wasn’t Lady Gaga edgy, but more of an early-1980s punk look. Daisy, which was the name I knew her by, had come in to The Painted Lady two years ago for the first time. She’d stumbled onto it by accident as she window-shopped at the Venetian Grand Canal Shoppes, the upscale stores that surrounded my shop. While tattoo shops weren’t exactly strangers to Las Vegas, aka Sin City, this location was the result of a little blackmail by the former owner, Flip Armstrong. My clientele was a little more high-class because of it, and dropping Daisy’s name now and then didn’t hurt, either. When she’d first stepped foot through the door, the Flamingos was just a dream. A YouTube-video discovery and two years later, they were at the top of the charts.

None of us had ever seen Daisy Carmichael socially. We’d never had dinner or drinks or even lunch with her. But she had come only here for her tattoos, and since she’d been here so frequently, we felt as though we had known her forever. Despite the edgy persona she portrayed to the public, Daisy was just a girl from Gardiner, Maine, a quiet little town where everything was within walking distance.

“. . . an overnight sensation on YouTube,” the reporter was saying about the Flamingos as a video of the band playing at the Bellagio on New Year’s Eve just weeks ago lit up the screen.

That’s right. They’d performed at the Bellagio. I frowned as I thought about it.

“She didn’t call for an appointment in December?” I asked Bitsy, who kept track of all our appointments and schedules.

She flipped back her blond bob and narrowed her eyes at me. She knew what I was after.

“She didn’t call. But we can’t expect her to get a tattoo every time she’s here,” Bitsy said.

Okay, I could buy that. But I was thinking about that picture of the flamingo tattoo on that blog.

Since I’d had a little time to kill earlier, I’d been playing around on the Internet when I found a blog called Skin Deep—not very original—by clicking on a link from another one.

Skin Deep’s latest post featured a tattoo of a flamingo. It was beautiful: long black lines with reds and pinks and oranges. It was one of the best I’d ever designed.

Except when I’d tattooed it on Daisy, there had been no colors.

I had scrolled up to the “About Me” section and read that blogger Ainsley Wainwright admired body art and the history of scarification and felt compelled to take photographs of tattoos seen on the Vegas Strip and post them so everyone could see their beauty. Other blogs were similar, but most added the stories surrounding the tattoos and where the person had gotten them. Skin Deep just show-cased the art and let that tell the story. Too bad. I could’ve used the publicity. Or at least a link to The Painted Lady’s Web site.

“When was she last here?” I asked Bitsy. I tried to think of the last tattoo I had given her. A tree branch that wove its way around her arm from her wrist to her shoulder.

“October,” Bitsy said without consulting the appointment book. She had a memory like the proverbial steel trap.

Since I’d designed her first tattoo, every time she was in town, Daisy would have another one done. I’d done ten so far. The flamingo was number eight. There hadn’t been any color the last two times she’d come in.

So sometime between October and now—it was the second week of February—Daisy had had another tattooist do that color.

“What’s wrong, Brett?” Joel asked.

I went over to the light table, where my laptop lay. I booted it up, hooked up to the Internet, and found Skin Deep. I pointed to the picture of the flamingo tattoo. I noticed that the picture had been posted just a little more than an hour earlier.

Joel peered over my shoulder at the computer screen.

“When did she come back for the colors, Brett?” he asked.

I shook my head, puzzled. “She didn’t. She can’t have color. She’s allergic to the dye, so she’s got only black tattoos.”

“So maybe it’s not her. Maybe it’s not yours,” he suggested, plopping down next to me, his hefty frame testing the boundaries of the chair.

“It’s mine,” I said, pointing to the four flowers in the tip of the wing. “She wanted one for each of her bandmates. Who else could this be?”

I mulled the picture of the tattoo. I
knew
this was Daisy.

“Is the blogger Ainsley a woman?” Joel asked, startling me out of my thoughts. I’d almost forgotten he was there, if you could forget that a man weighing about three hundred pounds was sitting next to you.

I shrugged. “Have no idea. Could be a man, too, I guess. It’s sort of androgynous name.”

“So would she”—Joel indicated the flamingo—“have gone elsewhere to get the color done?”

My ego wished that she hadn’t. But clearly, she had. I peered more closely at the photograph. The tattoo hadn’t started to get infected. If it had, it would have looked like a boil or a bad burn, perhaps even oozing. Maybe she wasn’t even really allergic. She’d told me she’d had a reaction to the red dye in an ibuprofen tablet several years ago, which was how her doctors had found out about the allergy. She said that to be on the safe side, she’d prefer to just have black tattoos.

Daisy was a canvas of black lines and curves, which made her tattoos stand out more than others, I thought.

Maybe she’d been in another tattoo shop in another city and the artist had talked her into adding the color. It was possible. It was also possible to get organic inks. I’d suggested that to her, but she’d rejected the idea. Maybe someone else had been more convincing.

I heard Bruce Springsteen singing “Born to Run.” Glancing around the staff room, I spotted my messenger bag slung over the back of a chair. I grabbed it and pulled my cell phone out, flipping it open after noting the caller ID.

“Hey, Tim,” I said. My brother, Tim Kavanaugh, was a Las Vegas police detective. I had a bad feeling about this.

“You hear about Dee Carmichael?” He didn’t mince words.

“Watching it on TV right now. What happened?”

“That’s what I’d like to ask you.”

I stopped breathing for a second. “What do you mean?”

“We’ve got a witness who says she saw a tall redhead leaving the hotel room about two hours ago.” He paused, and even if my mouth hadn’t felt as though it were filled with sand, I knew he wasn’t done yet. I waited as I curled one of my own red locks around my finger.

“We found some ink pots and tattoo needles in the trash.”