Ink Flamingos (3 page)

“So who do you think was impersonating you?”

“Huh? Oh, right, the redhead. I’m not the only tall redhead in this city,” I said. “There are a lot of tall redheaded showgirls in Vegas.”

“True, true. But who else travels with tattoo ink?”

This conversation was getting old, and I had a client.

“Listen, Tim, unless you need something official from me, I’ve got to get back to work. I need to pay my rent.” A not-so-subtle reference to the fact that I paid
him
rent for sharing his house in Henderson.

“That’s just it, though, Brett, we might need to follow up officially. Everyone here knows about you. They know you’re a tattoo artist. They know you’re a tall redhead. We might need proof you weren’t anywhere near the Golden Palace earlier.”

The Golden Palace?

“That’s where she was found?” I asked. “I couldn’t tell from the TV; we came into the report late. What a scummy place to die.” I felt awful for the pretty girl who had more talent in her little finger than most people had all over. The Golden Palace was off the Strip. Not too far, but even a block away put you in dicey company. It was gorgeous from the outside, all reds and golds and Chinese dragon statues, but I’d wandered in there one day to see if the inside matched the outside. Absolutely not. The carpet was worn and frayed; even the slot machines were the old-fashioned kind you could still get a pot of coins out of. But no one in the Golden Palace was a winner. The gamblers were older people who came in with their Social Security checks every month and lost. They were the down-and-out who came to Vegas and stayed in the only place they could afford, and even that couldn’t support their dreams.

“Daisy didn’t have to stay there,” I said, stating the obvious. “Did she really have a room there?”

“I’ll send someone over to verify your alibi,” Tim said, ignoring me, which piqued my curiosity further.

I quickly beat it down. I’d promised myself a couple of months ago that I wouldn’t get involved in police business anymore, that I would curb my curiosity about things that didn’t involve me.

I reminded myself, though, that this
did
involve me, if the police had to check out my whereabouts when a girl died.

There was one question, though, that was still nagging at me: “So if there were ink pots and tattoo needles, did she have a new tattoo or was it just the color in the flamingo that you think might be new?”

“How could we tell if a tattoo is new?”

She
did
have a new tattoo.

“Whatever is new will have a pinkish hue to it, sort of like a bubblegum color. And it might be a little inflamed.” I couldn’t help myself. “Was she murdered, Tim?”

“It’s just routine, the questions,” Tim said, ignoring me again. “Like I said, to make a hundred percent sure that it wasn’t you in that hotel room.”

“Do the police think this redhead killed her?”

“None of your business, Brett,” Tim said sternly. “Remember?”

Okay, so it wasn’t enough I had to remind myself that I wasn’t going to get involved. Now my brother had jumped on that bandwagon.

I didn’t have time for a snappy retort, though, before he threw me another question.

“Have you seen this blog before, Brett?”

I glanced down at the laptop screen, which had grown dark. I moved my finger on the pad, and the colors of Daisy’s flamingo flashed bright.

“I found it through a link from another blog,” I admitted. “I don’t know why I didn’t know about it before, because apparently they take pictures of people’s tattoos on the Strip.”

“So you don’t know this Ainsley Wainwright?”

“No. Never heard of her. Or him. Joel and I couldn’t figure out if it was a man or a woman.”

“Woman,” Tim said automatically.

My little nondetective antennae went up. “How do you know it’s a woman?” I asked slyly.

“Never mind,” he said sharply. “Don’t you have a client to get back to?”

I knew when I was being dismissed, even on the phone.

“I’m sending Flanigan over to talk to Bitsy. She’s got your schedule, right?”

“Flanigan? Does it have to be Flanigan?” Detective Kevin Flanigan and I had crossed paths not long ago, and it was not a pleasant experience. He always looked at me as though I were guilty of something. Even when I wasn’t.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said and hung up.

I stared at the phone a second before setting it down. The TV was still on; Joel had stopped paying attention to me and was watching the coverage of the breaking news about Dee Carmichael. I didn’t have time to join him, so I started for the door. Patty was probably wondering whether I’d ever come back.

“Brett, I know how he knew Ainsley Wainwright is a woman.” Joel’s voice stopped me, and I turned around.

“How?”

He pointed at the TV. “They just reported that Daisy checked into her room at the Golden Palace using the name Ainsley Wainwright.”

I
f I didn’t get to Patty now, I’d have to reschedule her. I stored away what Joel said and went back to my room, where Patty was texting someone, iPod earbuds in her ears, clearly not missing me very much at all.

I’d finished outlining the American flag around the heart and needed to start with the colors. Patty was an Iraq war veteran, just twenty-nine, and she’d seen more in two years than I’d seen in my entire life. The flag was her homage to her service, the heart reminding her of humanity and the fragility of life.

She glanced up at me as I came in.

“Thought you ran away.”

I sat down and pulled on my gloves. “Don’t worry about me,” I said, picking up the tattoo machine and dipping the needles into the red ink. I swiveled around and settled my foot on the pedal on the floor. The machine kicked in with a whir, and I put the needles to Patty’s skin. She flinched slightly, then relaxed. Sometimes they can’t stop flinching. Makes my job harder.

As I worked, I thought about Daisy Carmichael. Obviously, she wasn’t Ainsley Wainwright. Maybe Ainsley had checked into the room and then Daisy came to visit her. Maybe Ainsley did the tattoo color. And then somehow Daisy died. Had she been murdered? It seemed a possibility. She was a young woman, younger than me by a couple of years, which would put her around thirty, maybe.

Had she killed herself? No. I couldn’t buy that. Why get color in a tattoo and then kill yourself? Wouldn’t you want to enjoy the tattoo for a while? Plus, she was at the top of her game, the top of her career. She always seemed like a happy person, someone who didn’t take her fame for granted.

And then I had another thought. The picture on the blog was taken before the body was found, on the Strip, outside. Had she had the tattoo colored in and then gone out for a stroll on the Strip, where Ainsley snapped her picture, then back to the hotel and died?

Seemed doubtful. The sequence of events didn’t make sense. And it also wouldn’t explain the inks and needles in the hotel room.

I thought about the questions Tim had asked. Sounded like there might definitely be another tattoo. Maybe the flamingo had been colored in a while back, and someone gave her a new tattoo in the hotel room.

I was doing it again. I was getting way too interested in something that wasn’t my business. But I couldn’t help it. I was sort of involved. Tim’s phone call and Flanigan’s impending visit were indications that I wasn’t totally out of the clear on this one.

It was possible Ainsley Wainwright was a redhead. There hadn’t been a picture of her with her bio on the blog site. Thus the confusion about her gender.

I had to stop thinking about it. I pushed all thoughts aside and began to concentrate more closely on Patty’s tattoo. My hand was curled around the tattoo machine, its weight familiar and comfortable. My professors at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia would probably shake their heads with disapproval that this machine had taken the place of my traditional paintbrush.

It wouldn’t be such a bad idea, though, to actually teach a class in body art. Tattoos have become so mainstream, and the art has a long history that would be worth studying.

Who was I kidding? Tattooists wouldn’t be considered serious artists, which was why my employee Ace van Nes felt so frustrated. He’d never felt that he was being appreciated and considered his time at the shop temporary, even though he’d been here five years now. He painted comic book versions of classic paintings, and we sold them in the shop—yet another frustration for him because he wanted to show his work in a real gallery. Right now we had Delacroix’s
Liberty Leading the People
, Ingres’s
Grande Odalisque
, and Millet’s
The Gleaners
on the walls out front. Since we weren’t allowed to have the word “tattoo” anywhere on our door—a little concession to having a tattoo shop in such an upscale place—many people wandered in thinking we really
were
a gallery, a point that Bitsy, Joel, and I kept trying to hammer home to Ace.

Although you’d be surprised how many of those people actually made appointments for tattoos once they stepped through the door, something that did not go unnoticed by Ace and didn’t help our cause.

The intricacies of Patty’s tattoo meant that when I was finally done, over an hour had passed. I set down the machine, wiped the last of the ink and blood off Patty’s lower back, gave her a hand mirror, and sent her off to the full-length mirror in the back of the shop so she could admire her new tattoo.

I’d started throwing away the ink pots and wiping down my counter when Bitsy appeared in the doorway.

“He’s here,” she said, as if she were announcing the Prince of Wales.

Detective Kevin Flanigan hovered behind her, and I was glad he couldn’t see the look of disdain on her face. I plastered a smile on mine.

“Nice to see you again, Detective.”

Flanigan had always been a dapper dresser, but it seemed that perhaps he’d gone even classier with the Armani suit that hugged his narrow shoulders. His salt-and-pepper hair was slicked back neatly, not a tendril out of place. A few wrinkles around his eyes proved that perhaps he did smile now and then, but usually not when he spoke to me.

His mouth was set in a grim line, so I supposed he wasn’t going to break his record today.

Patty tapped him on the shoulder, and Flanigan stepped aside to let her into the room. She handed me the mirror with a broad grin and said, “It’s fantastic.”

I saw Flanigan’s eyes move down to her lower back. Her T-shirt was rolled up just under her breasts and her sweatpants had been lowered slightly so they wouldn’t smudge the tattoo. A flicker of a smile, just a flicker, and then it was gone. So he was human after all. Just not with me.

I cocked my head toward him. “Can you wait just a few? I have to finish up here. Bitsy can show you the schedule; you know the drill.” He’d come around checking on me before.

Without a word, Flanigan gave a short nod, and Bitsy led him to the front desk while I gave Patty her instructions for aftercare of the tattoo. I smoothed some Tattoo Goo on it, then covered it with a large bandage so her pants wouldn’t chafe it. When we were done, I followed her out to the sleek mahogany desk where Bitsy would take her payment.

I indicated Flanigan should follow me back down the hall to the office across from the staff room. Once there, I shut the door and went around the less sleek desk and sat.

“What do you need to know?” I asked bluntly.

Flanigan sat in the uncomfortable metal folding chair across from me. He leaned forward, setting his elbows on his knees, his expression blank.

“Miss Hendricks showed me your schedule for today.”

“I was here all day.”

“So it seems.”

“So that should be that, right?”

“Not so fast.”

I should’ve guessed. Flanigan wouldn’t have come all the way out here so soon after Daisy’s body was discovered just to find out whether I’d been in my shop all day. I had no idea what he was after, so I waited.

“I understand Miss Carmichael was a client of yours.”

I nodded. “For the last two years. I did all her tattoos.” When I realized what I’d said, I quickly added, “Except for that color on the flamingo. I did the black, but I never did color.”

“Why not?”

“She told me she was allergic to red dye. Found out when she took an ibuprofen when she was younger. She was really nervous about any sort of tattoo color, because she thought she’d have a bad reaction to it.” I remembered the first time Daisy had come in, adamant about not having any color. She had done her homework. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not regulate tattoo ink. Anything can be in it, and no one would be the wiser. There are a lot of metals and mercury, especially in red and yellow inks, and I always warn my clients that if they’ve got any sort of nickel allergy, they shouldn’t get red or yellow. We take an elaborate medical history, like they do at the doctor’s office, and make our clients sign a waiver so we’re covered just in case someone has a reaction and tries to come after us.

“What would a reaction look like?” Flanigan asked, and I knew he wasn’t expressing mere curiosity from the way he asked.

“It’s easier to show you,” I said. “Hold on.” I left the room and went into the staff room, where Joel was picking at a salad. He’d been on Weight Watchers, then the Atkins Diet, and was now trying the South Beach Diet on for size.

“What’s up?” Joel put his fork down, and his expression said he hoped I would stick around and keep him company. Maybe eat the salad for him so he wouldn’t have to.

I grabbed my laptop and swung it under my arm. “Have to get back to the detective,” I said apologetically.

“Oh, right. What does he want now?”

“He’s asking about reactions to tattoos and inks.” I indicated the laptop. “Figured I’d pull up some Google images for him.”