The Missing Ink: A Tattoo Shop Mystery

by Karen E. Olson

  “What hotel?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “We’ve been staying off the Strip.” She gave Matthew a sidelong look that told us what they’d been doing when they weren’t following me around.

  Elise didn’t seem to have a problem jumping from one man to the next.

  “Kelly went to Matt Powell’s room to try to talk him out of telling Chip about the baby,” Matthew said, taking over. “She ended up killing him while they were fighting about it. She said it was self-defense.”

  “But she had a tattoo needle on her?” I asked.

  Matthew sighed. “She had a case with her. She was going to give Elise her tattoo after she met with Matt. But when she realized Matt was dead, she figured she could protect Elise and me, and she gave him that tat.”

  “How did he get to Chip’s suite, though? He wasn’t found there until the next day.”

  Matthew nodded. “I moved him. Made it look like I was helping a drunk friend to his room, so anyone watching the cameras wouldn’t catch on.”

  “And who had the brilliant idea of setting up Jeff Coleman?”

  Matthew actually looked embarrassed. “Never liked the guy,” he admitted.

  Well, who did? Except for Sylvia, of course. But that wasn’t a reason to frame a guy for murder. Two murders.

  “I knew about that client of his,” Matthew continued. “And I knew he’d been in town. Kelly told me. She’d inked him, too. It was easy to arrange.” He looked apologetically at Simon. “I used Simon’s phone.”

  “So you set Jeff up to be in that room, but instead of Jeff, I ended up there,” I mulled out loud before having another thought. I looked at Elise. “Why didn’t you just have Kelly do your devotion ink in the first place, instead of coming here?”

  Elise gave Matthew a small smile before answering. “I told you; I wanted to surprise him. If I had Kelly do it, he’d know. But someone had seen me here, and then the cops were all over the place, and I couldn’t come back.”

  Seemed reasonable. But one thing didn’t. “Why did you kidnap me today? Why didn’t you just tell me you were with Elise?” I asked Matthew.

  “I was going to try to scare you into telling me where the diamond was.”

  He’d scared me, all right, but he hadn’t had a chance for negotiations after I jumped out of the car.

  “Who left me that drawing on my car?”

  Elise and Matthew exchanged a look, both of them shrugging.

  “You were sticking your nose in where you shouldn’t.” Chip, the peanut gallery, had spoken.

  “Did Matt Powell show you that sketch I did for Elise?” I asked.

  Chip made a face. “He wanted to prove to me that he wasn’t her lover. He showed it to me—out of loyalty, he said. I didn’t believe him. I mean, it said Matthew. What did he expect?”

  Matt Powell had been playing all angles, it seemed. He knew about Kelly and her pregnancy, he knew about Elise and Matthew, he knew about Jeff Coleman. But what he’d known ended up being his own death sentence.

  Matthew was still holding on to Chip’s shoulder. Chip was slumped over now, sort of like a rag doll, his eyes glazed and unblinking. Without waiting for an answer, I went into the staff room and found a roll of paper towels and brought it out, wadding some up and pressing them to Chip’s wound. He blinked at me a couple times.

  “Don’t thank me or anything,” I said curtly, then looked at Matthew. “Take him to the couch and sit him down.”

  Simon was still holding Elise, and gently I took her arm, nodding at Simon, who released her. I brought her into my room, shutting the door and sitting her in my chair, reclining it.

  “What are you doing?” she asked through her tears.

  I had to do something about the tat. It wasn’t done right, and she’d have trouble with it if I didn’t take care of it. I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and took a baby wipe, moving it across the ink. The blood smeared over her skin.

  “I’m going to fix this up for you,” I said. “It’ll get infected if I don’t.”

  She nodded and closed her eyes. “I saw him kill her,” she said softly.

  My hand froze a second before I resumed wiping down the tat. “Is that why your driver’s license was found in the car? You were with her?” The tattoo was clean now, the outline a little rough. I slid a clean needle into my machine and dipped it in red ink.

  She tensed when she heard the machine start.

  “It’s okay, Elise. Trust me.”

  She relaxed a little. “I was with her. Kelly was taking me to the airport. I was going to go home, tell everyone I wasn’t going to marry Chip, and that would be the end of it. I would go back and meet Matthew after I took care of everything.” She paused and gave me a sad smile. “Kelly wasn’t a very nice person. She told Chip we were going to be there. He showed up, but she didn’t realize that he would choose me over her, even though she was pregnant.

  “When Chip told her he still wanted to marry me, she pulled a gun on him. He got it away from her, and I tried to stop him. I fell and cut myself. He threw me into the backseat, told me to stay there, but I didn’t. I heard the shot as I was running away. I called nine-one-one after I called Matthew to come get me.”

  I filled in the heart with the red ink and drew a black arrow through it, turning the start of the “C” into feathers.

  I heard a knock at the door, and Simon Chase stuck his head inside. For a second he didn’t say anything, just looked at my handiwork.

  “It looks good,” he said. “Your brother’s here.”

  That was fast.

  “We’ll be out in a few minutes,” I said, and he closed the door after himself.

  “Why didn’t you just come back for the diamond?” I asked Elise as I touched up the scraggly lines of the heart. “Why did Matthew have to break in?”

  “He looked in the orchid first, but it wasn’t there. He thought you’d found it and put it somewhere else.”

  It was the wrong orchid.

  “He felt bad about hitting your friend.”

  I wasn’t sure that was going to really comfort Ace, knowing Matthew “felt bad.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask me for it?”

  “We knew everyone thought Matt Powell was my lover. We didn’t want anyone to suspect about Matthew. We were going to just disappear.”

  “With a two-million-dollar diamond,” I said flatly, wiping the tat and assessing the work. It wasn’t the best I’d ever done, but it was a satisfactory cover-up. I took a hand mirror off the shelf and handed it to Elise, who studied the heart.

  She smiled shyly. “It’s nice,” she said, handing me back the mirror. “But I really did want Matthew’s name.”

  I could remind her that she’d been engaged to Simon Chase once. That she’d been engaged to Chip. That love sometimes doesn’t last, but the devotion ink would.

  I just nodded, wrapped the tat in Saran Wrap, and told her how to take care of it. She adjusted her bra and buttoned up the blouse as well as she could. The corner of the Saran Wrap peeked out from behind it.

  Tim hadn’t waited for me. A paramedic was dressing Chip’s wound as Tim read him his rights. Matthew saw Elise and drew her to him, his big arms surrounding her. Simon Chase raised his eyebrows at me, and I nodded to indicate everything was all right.

  But it wasn’t all right. Tim saw me, and looked up at Matthew.

  “This was the guy who kidnapped you today, right?”

  Description fit to a T. I thought about Jeff’s warning about Matthew, how he was “bad news.” So maybe he was trying to turn over a new leaf or something with Elise, but he still had a long way to go in the social skills area. He obviously hadn’t had a Sister Mary Eucharista to keep him in line.

  “He also fits Ace’s description of the guy who broke in here,” Tim said, nodding at the uniformed cop, who now gripped Matthew’s arm, pulling it to his back, taking out his handcuffs.

  For a nanosecond, I felt a little bad, thinking about Elise. But he did tras
h my place; he did kidnap me. He’d been following me around, scaring me for the last few days.

  “You’re not arresting him, are you?” Elise’s eyes were wide as she confronted Tim. She swung around to me. “Tell him to stop. You know he didn’t mean it.”

  “It’s okay.” Matthew’s voice resonated through the room as he smiled sadly at Elise. He looked a little too comfortable in those cuffs. Obviously, he’d been here before. I had about as much confidence that this relationship would work as I did in that devotion tat. Sure, he looked at her with some softness in his eyes, but I couldn’t forget that the diamond was what he was after all along. Two million dollars was nothing to sneeze at.

  “Don’t worry. Simon’ll take care of you until I get out,” Matthew was saying.

  Oh, yeah, Simon. “Why were you helping them?” I asked him.

  “Because I still care about Elise and want her to be happy.” Simon cocked his head at Chip. “And because I couldn’t stand what he’d done to her. He was making dates with cocktail waitresses even while she was considered missing.”

  I thought about Robbin, the woman in the restroom at Versailles who’d fixed my makeup. So her date was with Chip, not with Simon. I’d jumped to the wrong conclusion.

  “And I found out that Chip was the one who lured you to my office with that text message. Your number was queued in. He’s also the one who locked you in. He wanted his father to find you there,” Simon said.

  I mulled that over for a second. It made me less sorry I’d skewered Chip’s shoulder. But I had another question for Simon Chase.

  “I overheard Manning asking you to take care of something, saying you could ‘let him come back’ after ‘it all died down.’ What was that all about?”

  Simon shrugged. “One of our employees is facing a deportation issue, despite our sponsorship. We agreed to continue to help him get his visa, but he has to go home for a short while. That’s all.”

  Made sense, now that he explained it.

  “You might want to just ask for what you want the next time,” I told Matthew, then turned back to Simon. “And you, too. I mean, you just made that date with me so you’d get the diamond for them.”

  A twinkle flashed in his eye. “That’s not the only reason.” And his gaze made me catch my breath.

  Chapter 62

  “You could’ve called and told us what was going on,” Bitsy scolded.

  “I thought you’d had enough excitement yesterday,” I said. I’d just gotten back from bringing Ace home from the hospital. Somehow he’d managed to bribe a nurse into giving him his own private oxygen tank. Never underestimate the power of a handsome face. Even after its nose gets crushed.

  Joel handed me a doughnut and a cup of coffee. “Our lives are boring,” he teased. “We can always use a little more excitement.”

  “Do you think Elise really loves him?” Bitsy asked. “I mean, that guy’s definitely not in her league.”

  “I think she thinks she does,” I said. “She finds out her fiancé is having a baby with another woman, a guy who’s so totally not what her family would want for her pays attention, offers her a shoulder—and a lot more than that—and she thinks she’s in love. It’s happened before.”

  “What about the blood you saw on Chip’s shirt?” Bitsy asked.

  “It was red ink.”

  “Tattoo ink?” Joel asked.

  “No, from a pen.” The ink splatter made me think of something else. I showed them my leg, where Chip inadvertently had drawn the black line. “What should I do here?” I asked Joel. “I’ve got to cover it up somehow.”

  Joel studied the short line, nodding. “How about a quote? Isn’t Macbeth about murder? ‘Out, out damned spot,’ or something like that?”

  I shook my head, but couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, by the way, we need to talk about Charlotte Sampson. How she wants to train here. I almost forgot all about her.”

  “She’s coming in day after tomorrow for an interview,” Bitsy said.

  “Sounds a little formal,” I said, looking at Joel. “What do you think?”

  He shrugged. “She’s a nice kid. Can she draw?”

  Bitsy was one step ahead of him, pulling some sketches out of a file folder. “She dropped these off.”

  They were good. Really good. Bold use of lines and color, geometric shapes, butterflies, flowers, even a portrait. She must have taken some art classes in between all that math. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, and from the way Joel was nodding, it could be unanimous.

  I sipped my coffee and heard the front door open. I stepped out into the hall. Jeff Coleman stood awkwardly next to the front desk, staring at Ace’s paintings. He grinned when he saw me.

  “So, Kavanaugh, this is your shop.”

  He’d never been here before.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  He walked toward me, sticking his head into a couple of the rooms. “Swanky. Just like I expected. No self-respecting tattooist works like this.”

  “Want some ink as a souvenir?” I teased.

  He grinned. “I just wanted to thank you for talking to your brother, clearing everything up.”

  “Well, it all sort of cleared itself up,” I said. “I’m sorry about Kelly.”

  His face softened for a second. “Thanks, Kavanaugh.” He spotted the box of doughnuts and Bitsy and Joel in the staff room. “Doughnuts? Really? I don’t think I can deal with this. It’s way too clean-cut for me.” He started backing up. “Oh, by the way, my mother wants you to come by. Said something about a date with Napoleon.” He frowned. “Sometimes I just can’t figure out what she’s talking about anymore, but she swears you know what it means.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, I do. And tell her I’ll call her next week. But she’s going to have to come here.”

  “She won’t like that. And you won’t be able to change her mind.”

  Maybe not. But maybe if I promised her a ride in a gondola she might.

  Jeff gave me a little punch on the arm. “It’s been real. Later, Kavanaugh.”

  I watched through the glass doors as he walked along the canal and across the footbridge and out of sight.

  Napoleon. Now that would be a nice leg tat.

  Read on for an excerpt

  from Karen E. Olson’s next

  Tattoo Shop Mystery,

  Pretty in Ink

  Coming from Obsidian in April 2010.

  If your name is Britney Brassieres, going down in a tsu nami of champagne might seem only fitting.

  One minute she was belting out “Oops! . . . I Did It Again,” the next she was on the floor, her arms flailing as the Moët—not the really expensive kind, but that White Star kind you can get at a discount if you look hard enough—showered her.

  I know it was Moët because I saw the guy with the bottle. As Britney was singing, he’d come up to the edge of the stage near my table, shook the bottle, and popped the cork. The sound was as loud as a gunshot as the cork went airborne and slammed right into Britney’s chest.

  Bull’s-eye.

  It wasn’t an accident, either. He’d aimed at her.

  I jumped up on a gut reflex and impulsively shouted at the guy. “Hey!”

  After successfully hitting his target, he turned the bottle on me—confirming that he’d actually heard me—and everyone else in my vicinity.

  Unfortunately it still had some oomph left, and liquid splashed across my face, getting into my eyes and dripping down my face onto my chest. I tried to blink, but it hurt, so I kept my eyes closed, hearing the pandemonium around me: chairs scraping as people scrabbled to their feet, glass shattering. The vibration moved through my legs as the floor shook with the weight, the hurry to escape. I wanted to shout out that it was just champagne, but that cork explosion freaked everyone out, and when they saw Britney fall, they figured the worst.

  Bodies shoved past me, jostling me, and I struggled to keep my balance, holding out my arms like a trapeze walker and hitting someone who grunted but didn’t
stop.

  “Joel?” I shouted above the din. “Joel?”

  An arm snaked around my waist. “I’m here, Brett. You okay?” His voice was soothing as his big belly pressed into my side, and for a second I relaxed before tensing up again.

  “Yeah, just got some champagne in my eyes. Is Britney okay?” I asked, trying to open my eyes, but they still stung and I shut them again.

  “She’s moving,” Joel said. “I think she’s okay. What happened?”

  “Guy with a champagne bottle. Where’d he go?” This time I forced my eyes open, blinking quickly a few times, clearing the fog. I scanned the dimly lit nightclub. There had been about a hundred people here for the show. Most of them were now pushing one another toward the door; someone was screaming; someone else was wailing.

  The scene on the stage looked like something from a Shakespearean tragedy: Britney, her blue and white schoolgirl outfit complementing her long blond tresses, was splayed across the floor as her fellow performers hovered over her, clucking like the mother hens they were. I spotted Charlotte with them, kneeling and stroking Britney’s forehead. Britney’s lips were moving, and her eyes were open.

  MissTique, who ran all the shows here at Chez Tango, flailed her arms as she teetered on six-inch clear plastic stilettos on the edge of the stage—not to stop herself from falling, but because she was trying to calm everyone down. I could hear her shouting, “All right,” “Everything’s fine,” and “Get me a cocktail.” The last was said to a young man with a remarkable physique who’d been dancing shirtless behind Britney before the champagne attack.

  “Where’s Bitsy?” I had to lean in toward Joel so he’d hear me as we took a couple of steps toward the stage.

  Bitsy is a little person, and it is easy to lose her in a crowd.

  Or bump into her.

  “Watch it!” I heard her say, and looked down to see her rubbing her arm where I’d collided with her.

  I was about to apologize when it grew darker, sort of like a solar eclipse. But instead of the electricity going out, it was merely Miranda Rites, blocking the light behind her. She looked like someone had dumped a bottle of Pepto-Bismol on her: a vision in pink sequins and a high bouffant of pink-accented orange hair, the multicolored butterfly ink I’d given her a few weeks ago stretched between her shoulders above her ample bosom. It was fake, of course. The bosom, I mean, not the tat.