The Skin Collector (11 page)

‘Hey, dude. Take a seat. I’ll get to you in a few. You want to check out the booklet there? Find something fun, something to impress the ladies. You’re never too old for ink.’

The man’s eyes alighted on Lon Sellitto’s unadorned ring finger and turned back to the young blonde he was speaking to.

The tattoo artist – and owner of the parlor (yeah,
parlor, not studio
) – was early thirties,
scrawny as a crab leg. He was wearing well-cut and pressed black jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, white, immaculate. His dark-blond hair was pulled back in a long ponytail. He had a dandy beard, an elaborate affair that descended from his upper lip in four thin lines of dark silky hair that circled his mouth and reunited on his chin in a spiral. His cheeks were shaved smooth but his sideburns,
sharp as hooks, swept forward from his ears. A steel rod descended from his upper ear down to the lobe. Another, smaller, pierced each eyebrow vertically. After the facial hair and the metalwork, the full-color tattoos of Superman on one forearm and Batman on the other were pretty tame.

Sellitto stepped forward.

‘A minute, dude, I was saying.’ He studied the cop for a moment. ‘You know, for
an older guy, a bigger guy – I don’t mean any offense – you’re a good candidate. Your skin isn’t going to sag.’ His voice faded. ‘Oh, hey. Look at that.’

Sellitto had grown tired of the ramble. He’d thrust his gold shield toward the hipster in a way that was both aggressive and lethargic.

‘Okay. Police. You’re police?’

The tat artist was sitting on a stool next to a comfortable-looking but
well-worn reclining chair of black leather, occupied by the girl he’d been speaking with when Sellitto walked in. She wore excessively tight jeans and a gray tank top over what seemed to be three bras or spaghetti-strap camisoles, or whatever they were called. Pink, green and blue. Her strikingly golden hair was long on the left and crew cut on the right. Pretty face if you could get past the skewed
hair and nervous eyes.

‘You want to talk to me?’ the tattoo artist asked.

‘I want to talk to TT Gordon?’

‘I’m TT.’

‘Then I want to talk to you.’

Nearby another artist, a chubby thirty-something in cargo pants and T, was working away on another client – a massive bodybuilder – who was lying face down on a leather bed, like a masseur would use. The man was getting an elaborate motorcycle inked
on his back.

Both employee and customer looked at Sellitto, who stared back.

They returned to inking and being inked.

The detective shot a glance at Gordon and the girl with the unbalanced hair. She was upset, really bothered. Gordon, though, didn’t seem fazed by the cop’s presence. The owner of the Sonic Hum-Drum Tattoo Parlor had all his permits in a row and his tax bills paid, the detective
knew. He’d checked.

‘Let me just finish up here.’

Sellitto said, ‘It’s important.’

‘This’s important too,’ Gordon said, ‘dude.’

‘No, dude,’ Sellitto said. ‘What you’re going to do is sit down over there and answer my questions. Because
my
important is more important than
your
important. And, Miss Gaga, you’re gonna have to leave.’

She was nodding. Breathless.

‘But—’ Gordon began.

Sellitto
asked bluntly, ‘You ever hear about section two sixty point twenty-one, New York State Penal Code?’

‘I. Uhm. Sure.’ Gordon nodded matter-of-factly.

‘It’s a crime to tattoo minors under the age of eighteen and the crime is defined as unlawfully dealing with a child in the second degree.’ Turning to the client. ‘How old’re you really?’ Sellitto barked.

She was crying. ‘Seventeen. I’m sorry. I
just, I didn’t, I really, I mean …’

‘You want to finish that sentence sometime soon?’

‘Please, I just, I mean …’

‘Lemme put it this way: Get outta here.’

She fled, leaving behind her vinyl leather jacket. As both Sellitto and Gordon watched, she stopped, debated then snuck back fast, grabbed the garment and vanished again, permanently this time.

Turning to the owner of the store, Sellitto
was enjoying himself, though he was also noting that Gordon still wasn’t cringing with guilt. Or fear. The detective pushed harder. ‘That happens to be a class B misdemeanor. Punishable by three months in jail.’

Gordon said, ‘Punishable by
up to
three months in jail but production of an apparently valid identification card is an affirmative defense. Her license? It was really, really good. Top-notch.
I believed it was valid. The jury’d believe it was valid.’

Sellitto tried not to blink but wasn’t very successful.

Gordon continued, ‘Not that it mattered. I wasn’t going to ink her. I was in my Sigmund mode.’

Sellitto cocked his head.

‘Freud. The doctor is in, kind of thing. She wanted a work, real badly, but I was
counseling
her out of it. She’s some kid from Queens or Brooklyn got dumped
by a guy for a slut was inked with quinto death heads.’

‘What?’

‘Five. Quinto. Death heads, you know. She wanted seven. Septo.’

‘And how was the therapy going, Doc?’

The man pulled a face. ‘It was going great – I was talking her out of it. When you walked in. Discouragus interruptus. But I think she’s scared off for the time being.’

‘Talking her out of it?’

‘Right. I was making some shit
up about inking would ruin her skin. In a few months she’d look ten years older. Which is funny because women in the South Pacific used to get tattooed because it made them look
younger
. Lips and eyelids. Ouch, yeah. I figured she wouldn’t know Samoan customs.’

‘But you thought she was legal. Then why talk her out of it?’

‘Dude. First, I had my doubts about the license. But that wasn’t the point.
She came in here for all the wrong reasons. You get inked to make a positive statement about yourself. Not for revenge, not to shove it in somebody’s face. Not because you want to be that stupid girl with a dragon tattoo. Ink’s about who
you
are, not being anybody else. Get it?’

Not really, Sellitto’s expression said.

But Gordon continued, ‘You saw her hair, the goth makeup? Well, despite all
that, she was
not
a candidate for inking. She had a Hello Kitty purse, for Christ’s sake. And a Saint Timothy’s cross around her neck. In your day, you would’ve called her the girl next door, you know, going to the malt shop.’

My day? Malt? Still, Sellitto found himself leaning reluctantly toward the veracity of his story.

‘Besides, I didn’t have a big enough pussy ball for her,’ the young man
said, grinning. Pushing Sellitto some.

‘A …?’

He explained: a tennis ball you gave to customers you didn’t think could handle the pain of the tattooing process. ‘That kid couldn’t take it. But, you gonna get inked, you gotta have the pain. Them’s the rules: pain and blood. The commitment, dude. Get it? So what can I do you for, now that I know there’s no, you know, mid-life crisis involved.’

The detective grumbled. ‘You ever say “Dig it” instead of “Get it”?’

‘“Dig it.” From your day.’

‘From my day,’ Sellitto said. ‘Me and the beatniks.’

TT Gordon laughed.

‘There’s a case we’re working on. I need some help.’

‘I guess. Gimme one minute.’ Gordon stepped to a third workstation. This fellow tat artist, arms blue-and-red sleeves of elaborate inking, was working on a man in his late
twenties. He was getting a flying hawk on his biceps. Sellitto thought of the falcons on Rhyme’s window ledges.

The customer looked like he’d just subwayed it up here from Wall Street and would head back to his law firm afterward for an all-nighter.

Gordon looked over the job. Gave some suggestions.

Sellitto examined the shop. It seemed to belong to a different era: specifically, the 1960s.
The walls were covered with hundreds of bright samples of tats: faces, religious symbols, cartoon characters, slogans, maps, landscapes, skulls … many of them psychedelic. Also, several dozen photos of piercings available for purchase. Some frames were covered by curtains. Sellitto could guess in what body parts those studs and pins resided, though he wondered why the modesty.

The inking stations
reminded Sellitto of those in a hair salon with the reclining chairs for customers and stools for the artists. Equipment and bottles and rags sat on a counter. On the wall was a mirror, on which were pasted some bumper stickers and taped certificates from the Board of Health. Despite the fact that the place existed for the purpose of spattering body fluids about, it looked immaculate. The smell
of disinfectant was strong and there were warning signs everywhere about cleaning equipment, sterilizing.

130 Degrees Celsius Is Your Friend.

Gordon finished his suggestions and gestured Sellitto to the back room. They pushed through a plastic bead curtain into the office part of the shop. It too was well ordered and clean.

Gordon took a bottle of water from a mini fridge and offered it to
Sellitto, who wasn’t putting in his mouth anything from this shop. Shook his head.

The owner of the store unscrewed the top and drank. He nodded to the doorway, where the beads still pendulumed. ‘That’s what we’ve become.’ As if Sellitto was his new best dude.

‘How’s that?’

‘The guy in the business suit,’ he said softly. The hawk man. ‘You see where his tat is?’

‘His biceps.’

‘Right. High.
Easy to hide. Guy’s got two point three children, or will have in the next couple years. Went to Columbia or NYU. Lawyer or accountant.’ A shake of the head. The ponytail swung. ‘Tats used to be insidious. The inked were bad boys and girls. Now getting a work’s like putting on a charm bracelet or a tie. There’s a joke somebody’s going to open a tattoo franchise in strip malls. Call it Tat-bucks.’

‘That’s why the rods?’ Sellitto nodded at the bars in Gordon’s head.

‘You have to go to greater lengths to make a statement. That sounded effete. Sorry. So. What can I do for you, Officer?’

‘I’m making the rounds of the big parlors in the city. None of ’em could help so far but they all said I had to come see you. This’s the oldest parlor in the city, they said. And you know everybody in the
community.’

‘Hard to say about the oldest. Inking – I mean modern inking in the US, not tribal – pretty much began in New York. The Bowery, late eighteen hundreds. But it was banned in ’sixty-one after some hepatitis outbreaks. Only legalized again in ’ninety-seven. I found some records that this shop dated back to the twenties – man, those must’ve been the days. You got a tat, you were Mr Alternative.
Or Miss, though women rarely got works done then. Not unheard of. Winston Churchill’s mother had a snake eating its tail.’ He noted that Sellitto was not much interested in the history lesson. A shrug.
My
enthusiasm isn’t
your
enthusiasm. Got it.

‘This is, what I’m about to tell you, this’s confidential.’

‘No worries there, dude. People tell me all sorts of shit when they’re under the machine.
They’re nervous and so they start rambling away. I forget everything I hear. Amnesia, you know.’ A frown. ‘You here about somebody might be a customer of mine?’

‘Don’t have any reason to think so but could be.’ Sellitto added, ‘If we showed you a tat, you think you could tell us something about the guy who did it?’

‘Maybe. Everybody’s got their own style. Even two artists working from the same
stencil’re going to be different. It’s how you learned to ink, the machine you use, the needles you hack together. A thousand things. Anyway, I can’t guarantee it but I’ve worked with artists from all over the country, been to conventions in almost every state. I might be able to help you out.’

‘Okay, here.’

Sellitto dug into his briefcase and extracted the photo Mel Cooper had printed out.

Gordon bent low and, frowning, studied the picture carefully. ‘The guy drew this knows what he’s doing – definitely a pro. But I don’t get the inflammation. There’s no ink. The skin’s all swollen and rough. Real badly infected. And there’s no color. Did he use invisible ink?’

Sellitto thought Gordon was joking and said so. Gordon explained that some people didn’t want to make a commitment, so
they were inked with special solutions that appeared invisible but showed up under blacklight.

‘The pussy-ball crowd.’

‘You got it, dude.’ A fist poked in Sellitto’s direction. The detective declined to bump. Then the artist frowned. ‘I got a feeling something else is going on, right?’

Sellitto nodded. They’d kept the poison out of the press; this was the sort of MO that might lead to copycatting.
And if there were informants, or the perp himself decided to ring up City Hall and gloat, they’d need to know that the caller had access to the actual details of the killing.

Besides, as a general rule, Sellitto preferred to explain as little as possible when canvassing for witnesses or asking advice. In this case, though, he had no option. He needed Gordon’s help. And Sellitto decided he kind
of liked the guy.