Ink Flamingos (32 page)

“Where’s my Mustang?” I asked.

“Impounded. After you took off earlier.”

My heart sank. “What do I do to get it out?”

“I’ll take care of it,” Tim said as he parked near the entrance to the Grand Canal Shoppes and walked me past the kiosks and the shops, past the oxygen bar where Ace was usually hanging out, to The Painted Lady. Bitsy was sitting sentry at the front desk. She hopped up when we walked through the door.

“Joel’s just back. What’s going on?”

Tim waved his hand in the air, said to me, “I’ll be by in a bit to pick you up,” and said good-bye to Bitsy as he took off.

I had no idea where he was going.

Being back in the shop gave me an odd sense of calm. As though nothing could touch me now. I wanted desperately for someone to walk through the door and want a tattoo, because I could lose myself in the act of tattooing, go into that little Zen zone I had. But as far as I knew, no one would be walking through the door. It was late now, around ten o’clock. My stomach growled.

Bitsy grinned, even though I could see the anxiety behind it. “Joel brought back In-N-Out burgers.”

My heart did a little happy dance.

“And I rescheduled your eight o’clock.”

My heart sank as I remembered. “I didn’t call you,” I said. “I didn’t have my phone.”

“Joel called me. I took care of it.” While I figured she had every reason to be upset with me, her voice was kind. Maybe she knew how much of a mess I really was.

We passed Joel’s room, where he was tattooing a guy who was almost as big as he was. He gave me a nod as Bitsy and I went into the staff room. The aroma from the Double-Doubles made my stomach growl again. I tore open one of the paper wrappers and sank my teeth into the burger. I made a yummy sound and began to tell Bitsy about the events of the day. I left out the bit about Jeff kissing me again. Bitsy can’t keep her mouth shut, and I didn’t really know how I was going to deal with that and didn’t want it broadcast until I did.

As it was, she settled on the one thing I knew she would.

“Harry Desmond has a wife? That girl who was here earlier?”

I nodded. “Guess so. She was with Ace. And remember, she wanted a flamingo tattoo.”

We mulled that a few minutes as we finished our burgers. I took a sip of a Coke, as if I needed the caffeine, but the way I was feeling right this very minute, well, I doubted anything would keep me up tonight. I wanted desperately to lie down and close my eyes.

“Where do you think they went?” Bitsy asked. “And Jeff? You said Jeff followed them?”

I thought about Jeff’s orange Pontiac, handed over to the valet. Had he gotten his car or had he followed on foot? Maybe a cab. I thought about my car, impounded. With my bag inside. With my cell phone.

I went out to the front desk, the familiar whir of the tattoo machine emanating from Joel’s room. The sound calmed me as I dialed Jeff’s number.

“Where did you go, Kavanaugh?” he asked.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I said. “Where are you?”

“I lost them. I’ve been driving around, trying to find them; then I went back to the Flamingo, but you were gone.”

I quickly told him about Harry and Tim and Ainsley’s apartment.

He blew a low whistle. “I’ll be over in a bit. Make sure you’re okay.”

“No need,” I said. “Joel and Bitsy are here. Tim’s coming to get me. You need to open your shop.” Murder Ink was open till four a.m. most nights. I wasn’t sure how he did it, except that he wasn’t open as early as I was.

“You sure?” I could tell from his tone that
he
wasn’t sure.

“Yes. I’m fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” And I hung up before he could argue with me.

I half expected him to call right back, but he didn’t.

Joel finished up his tattoo, and his client came out and paid Bitsy as Joel and I cleaned up his room. Bitsy said we didn’t have any other clients scheduled for the night, and I began to think that maybe I would get that sleep I needed sooner than expected.

I leaned against the glass door and stared out at the canal, the gondoliers packing it up for the night, too. The mall would be shutting down soon; the tourists and shoppers would go home. Everything seemed so normal.

Bitsy and Joel watched me as I went into the staff room by myself. They hadn’t initiated too much conversation since Joel’s client had left. I pulled the laptop out from under the light table and opened it. I knew I shouldn’t do this, but curiosity was getting the better of me.

The last picture I’d seen on Ink Flamingos had been that one of Sherman Potter’s flamingo tattoo. I wanted to know if anything else had shown up.

Joel had moved into the room behind me. I could hear Bitsy with the vacuum out in the hall. Joel didn’t say anything, just turned on the TV, its volume soft.

The Ink Flamingos blog popped up on the screen at the same time I heard the announcer on TV saying there was something about breaking news.

I saw the picture of Jeff kissing me in the Flamingo gardens at the same time I heard the announcer say, “Sherman Potter, the manager of the Flamingos band, has been found dead in a hotel room at the Golden Palace, the same place where Dee Carmichael was found dead just days ago.”

I whirled around in my seat to see a grainy Detective Flanigan talking to a reporter outside the Golden Palace, the coroner’s van behind him.

“. . .found in a room on the third floor of the hotel,” he was saying.

So whoever had moved Sherman Potter had gotten him to another room on another floor and left him there.

“. . .several leads.”

My red hair being one of them, probably. So this was where Flanigan was, while Tim was being pushed into the pool at the Flamingo.

“What’s that?”

Bitsy had come up behind me. I hadn’t even heard the vacuum cut out. She was staring at the blog on the laptop screen.

I couldn’t make the screen go dark fast enough. Joel had seen it, too.

“You were making out with Jeff Coleman?” Bitsy asked, a smile crossing her face. “While all this is going on? Wow.”

Wow was right.

I sighed. “I don’t need any crap right now, okay?”

Maybe it was the way I said it that made Joel jump up, shut off the TV, and say, “I’ll go get some truffles. I think we need truffles.”

Joel always needed truffles, but I wasn’t going to argue.

“Sounds good,” I said, thinking about the Godiva shop just across the canal from the shop. “Get a dozen.”

“Or a big box,” he said gleefully.

Bitsy studied my face a minute, then said, “I’ll go with him. You look like you need a few minutes to yourself.”

She was right. I nodded. “Thanks.”

I went out front with them and watched as they went up the walkway and around the tip of the canal to Godiva. On instinct, I locked the door from the inside, making sure the boogeyman couldn’t get me while they were gone.

Still, I could see straight into the chocolate shop from here and kept my eyes on them as they perused the glass case, looking for the perfect truffles.

I watched as they paid, then came back out, but instead of coming around the canal, they turned left. Joel glanced up at me, waved, and pointed in the direction they were walking. I knew what was over there. The gelato place. Chocolate and gelato. He might be right that that’s what I needed now. A total sugar rush.

I began to feel silly. Paranoid. The door was locked. There were people in the mall. I turned and went down to my room, to see if I needed to clean anything else up before taking off for the night.

I heard the jingle of the bell on the door, which meant they were coming back in.

But I’d locked the door, hadn’t I? Had they brought a key with them?

My whole body tensed as I heard the footsteps. I scrambled for the door and had it halfway closed when his hand shoved it open, throwing me backward. He stepped around the door, an angry scowl on his face.

Harry.

H
e laughed, an ugly sound. “It’s just you and me now,” he said, shoving me farther into my room.

I noticed the bruise on his cheek, happy that I’d inflicted it and wondering if I could do more damage. Because while I’d had doubts before, I had no doubts now.

Harry was behind all this. It was that picture on the blog. The one I’d just seen. And the iPhone he’d had when he appeared out of the blue. “They’re coming back,” I said.

He snorted. “Right. But even if you’re telling the truth, they didn’t bring their key, did they?”

No. And I flashed on a memory. Ace telling me he’d lost his key.

Harry had found it. Or, more likely, taken it.

“You set up that blog,” I said. “Why?”

He pushed me back onto my client chair, putting his foot on the pedal that made the back go flat. He was stronger than I’d thought, and as he roughly turned me over, I tried to think of how I could twist away. Before I could, however, he had my arms under the chair and was tying them with something he’d grabbed off my shelf. A tattoo machine clip cord.

I’d seen one of those used to kill someone before. My whole body started to shake as he pulled the cord tight around my wrists, then got up and stepped around and behind me.

“What are you doing?” I asked, turning my head so I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He took out some ink pots and began setting them on the low table next to the chair.

I kicked up, and he grabbed my feet as I frantically tried to move my hands, but they were bound too tight. I felt something wrapped around my ankles, then around the chair so I couldn’t lift my feet.

Banging from out front indicated that Bitsy and Joel were back—but locked out as I suspected.

“Bitsy and Joel will call the police,” I warned Harry, who still hadn’t said anything but was now slipping a needle into my tattoo machine. He was going to give me a tattoo.

He was a scratcher. Jeff had fired him because he botched tattoos.

Something dawned on me.

“You did that tattoo on Daisy, didn’t you? The one that killed her?”

Harry’s head snapped up, his eyes full of anger. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“How did you come to tattoo her anyway?” I asked.

He snickered. “I met her coming here that day. She wanted another tattoo. I told her you weren’t here, that you were on vacation, but I could do it for her. I told her I worked for you, that I was new to the shop. She tried to back out, said she had to meet someone at the Golden Palace, but I told her I had my case. I said I could do it there. She finally said okay.”

Harry’s tone indicated that because she’d consented, everything he’d done was on the up and up.

“I knew you did all her tattoos, and I wanted a piece of that, too,” he said. “I wanted to prove to you that I was as good as you.”

But he hadn’t even told me he was a tattooist. Harry was totally delusional.

I thought about Daisy having to meet someone at the hotel. The room was in Ainsley Wainwright’s name. Was she going to talk to Ainsley—or, rather, Ann—about the band? Or was she meeting Ainsley, the blogger?

“Her friend wasn’t there when we got there,” Harry continued. “But I talked the girl at the desk into letting us in.” Like he’d talked the girl at the Venetian into giving him Sherman Potter’s room number. He was smooth.

“I didn’t know she’d have a reaction,” he said, still tinkering with my machine. It was as though he wasn’t quite sure how to get the needle in. Not good. “And then, when she did, and she stopped breathing, I panicked. I called my wife. Well, she’s my ex-wife. She sort of looks like you.”

She didn’t look at all like me.

“She agreed to help me.”

“To set me up so you wouldn’t be implicated,” I said.

“Everyone knew you were the only one who tattooed her,” he said matter-of-factly. “It would make sense it was you.”

And no one would suspect him at all.

He’d gotten the needle in now, and he settled into my chair, wheeling it around the side of the client chair. I felt my shirt being lifted up.

“Nice tat,” he said when he saw the Celtic cross on my upper back. “Needs something down below.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. His fingers slipped into the waist of my jeans and around the front. I tensed as he found the button, the zipper, and he tugged my jeans down around my hips. I struggled to catch my breath, my heart pounding.

“Then that blogger showed up,” Harry said, his voice devoid of emotion. “We couldn’t believe it. She was Terri’s neighbor. What are the odds of that?”

In a city that thrived on odds, Harry was right. If anyone had placed a wager on it, he’d be a rich man today.

Harry was still talking. “Terri was pretty sure the blogger recognized her. So we had to get rid of her.”

His fingers traced an imaginary outline on my skin. I forced myself not to flinch.

“You killed her,” I said flatly, trying to focus on his words and not what he was doing. The tattoo machine whirred to life as he stepped on the pedal. The needle pressed into the skin of my lower back. He hadn’t even done a stencil. What was he tattooing on me? I tried to follow the lines he was making, but I couldn’t figure it out, the usual pain nonexistent behind my fear.

“It was easy. We knew where to find her.” He snorted. “I had no idea there were two of them. Terri said she never said anything about a twin sister.”

“Did you think she had come back from the dead when you saw her with Sherman Potter?” I asked, forcing myself not to flinch. I was piecing it together now. Daisy went to meet the sister who was the singer, not the one who was the blogger. But Terri hadn’t known, so they’d killed the wrong girl. I remembered Harry’s initial reaction to the girl in Sherman Potter’s room, and then how he’d wanted to come with me to find her at the bar that night. Maybe he’d finally figured it out, too, and planned to cover his tracks. But thinking about that night reminded me. . .