Ink Flamingos (2 page)

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 in the door. At The Painted Lady, where we do only custom ink, we’ve got four private rooms for tattooing, unlike street shops that 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 snapped off the blue 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 firsthand. I’d gotten into a few situations in the last several months that had me up close and personal with dead bodies, and I hoped that was all behind me now.

Then I saw the picture of Daisy Carmichael on the screen, the reporter’s voice-over telling me that her body was 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 Bitsy spoke, a gurney rolled into view on the screen, a white sheet over what could only be 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 an early 1980s punk look. Daisy, which was the name I knew her by, had come into The Painted Lady two years ago for the first time. She’d stumbled onto my shop by accident as she window-shopped at the Venetian Grand Canal Shoppes, the upscale stores that surrounded it. 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 were 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. She only came here for her tattoos, but 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, to us, Daisy was 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 video of the band playing at the Bellagio on New Year’s Eve just weeks ago lit up the screen.

That’s right. They performed at the Bellagio. I frowned as I thought about that picture of the flamingo tattoo on the blog.

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

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 couldn’t get that picture on the blog out of my head.

Since I’d had a little time to kill earlier, I’d been playing around on the Internet when I found the blog, called Skin Deep—not very original—by clicking on a link from another one. There were many blogs about tattoos these days. Some were very specialized, like those featuring science-related tattoos—one young woman had a DNA strand curling around her arm—and literary tattoos—images from books like
Lord of the Rings
and
The Little Prince
were popular—but some blogs, like Skin Deep, were more generic.

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 were 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, so felt compelled to take photographs of tattoos seen on the Vegas Strip and post them so everyone could see their beauty. Most blogs would add the stories surrounding the tattoos and where the person had gotten them. Skin Deep merely showcased 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 thought of the last tattoo I gave 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 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 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. “She didn’t. She can’t have color. She’s allergic to the dye, so she’s only got 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 over the picture of the tattoo. I
knew
this was Daisy.

“Is 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 an androgynous name.”

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

It was a free country; Daisy could get a tattoo anywhere she wanted. And clearly she had. But my ego wished that she hadn’t. I peered more closely at the photograph. The tattoo hadn’t started to get infected. If it had, it would look 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 found out about the allergy. She said that to be on the safe side, she’d prefer to have only 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 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 was 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 didn’t feel as though it were filled with sand, I knew he wasn’t done yet. I waited, curling a lock of my red hair around my finger.

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

I
swallowed hard, forcing some saliva into my mouth so I could speak. “So you think someone saw
me
?”

“If the ink fits.” He smothered a small chuckle. While it was in bad taste, it told me he didn’t seriously think I had anything to do with any of this, but he had to ask.

“I’ve been here all day,” I said. “Got witnesses, too. Bitsy and Joel and Ace, not to mention the two clients.” Clients. Like the one I’d abandoned in my room to watch the news report. “Uh, speaking of which,” I added, “I’ve got to go.”

“So you didn’t do her tattoo?” Tim asked, ignoring me.

Might as well tell him. “Which one?” I asked.

“What do you mean, which one?”

“Last I knew, I’d done all Daisy’s tattoos, well, except for . . .” My voice trailed off.

“Except for what?”

“The flamingo. Well, I did the black part of it. A while back, actually. Maybe last year? I can have Bitsy check the records. I didn’t do the color, though. She told me she was never going to have color in a tattoo because of an allergy. I don’t know why she’d change her mind.”

Tim was quiet a second, then asked, “How do you know, then, that the flamingo has color?”

“There’s a blog. A picture on a blog.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A little while ago, I found a blog called Skin Deep. There’s a picture of it. The flamingo.” As I spoke, I realized the implications of what I was saying. The blogger took the picture, and then Daisy was found dead. I voiced my thoughts.

“Do you know the URL for the blog?” Tim asked, his tone switching from Chatty Brother to Official Cop.

“I’ve got it here on my screen.” I was aware of Bitsy and Joel staring at me as I recited the URL for my brother. I was also more and more aware of my client, waiting for me. I put a hand over the phone receiver and said to Bitsy, “Can you go tell Patty I’ll be in shortly? That there’s something I have to take care of right now?”

She was out the door before I’d finished. This was why I kept her on after I bought the business from Flip Armstrong. Bitsy was one of the most efficient workers I’d ever known, and she had institutional memory like no one else’s.

As I listened to Tim tapping on his own keyboard, I scrolled down past the elaborate header decorated with Ed Hardy tattoo designs, clearly pirated from the Internet, a surprise since the blogger took pictures of tattoos and would get more mileage out of them if those were used in the design instead.

After a few seconds, Tim said, “Okay, got it.” A pause, then, “So what can you tell me just looking at this?”

I went back to the picture of the tattoo, scrutinizing it a little differently now that I knew Daisy was dead.

“It’s definitely mine, like I said, but before the color.” I peered more closely at the screen. Maybe if I concentrated on the tattoo, didn’t think about Daisy and how her life had been cut short, was more professional about this, then maybe I could be objective.

Problem was, even though the picture was pretty big, the quality was lousy, like maybe it was taken with a cell phone camera. That didn’t help the cause, because I needed to see the sharp black lines as compared to the shaded color parts, and there was nothing sharp about it.

“I would have to see it in person,” I said.

“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Tim snipped.

“I didn’t think it would,” I snipped back. “But that’s the only way I’d be able to tell for sure what parts are new.” Even though I’d already told him.

“How many tattoos did you give her?”

“Ten,” I said without hesitation. “The flamingo was number eight.”

“You’re sure about the number?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Why?”

“Do you remember what the tattoos were of?”

Off the top of my head, I recalled the flamingo, that tree branch winding around her arm, her name in Chinese characters, a portrait of Janis Joplin—her hero—a Japanese crane, Betty Boop, a peacock, the logo for the Flamingo resort, a weeping willow—she loved my Monet’s garden sleeve and wanted to replicate the tree—and a rose. I rattled them off for Tim.

“You’ve got a pretty good memory,” he noted.

“She was a special client, and I did them all in the last couple years.”

“So there weren’t any more?”

I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at. “No. Just the ten.” And then I had a thought. “When she got the color, did she get another tattoo?” I hoped he’d say no—my ego was already bruised by that color—but instead he asked something out of the blue.