Ink Flamingos

by Karen E. Olson

  “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.”

  Chapter 2

  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.

  “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.”

  Chapter 3

  If 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 w
as 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.