Ink Flamingos

by Karen E. Olson

  Chapter 20

  Jeff stopped short. “What makes you think I lied to him?”

  I shrugged. “I can tell.”

  He gave me a funny look, then said, “That’s downright psychic, Kavanaugh.”

  “You did lie to him.”

  “So what if I did?”

  “What about?”

  “Nothing you need to worry your pretty little head about,” he said, starting to walk again.

  I hustled to keep up with him. “Maybe I want to worry about it. Because it’s got something to do with me, doesn’t it?”

  “Exactly why you don’t need to worry about it,” he said, pushing the door open and letting the sunlight stream across my eyes.

  I rummaged in my bag for my sunglasses and stuck them on as I followed him, not even a step behind. “You can’t be serious that you’re not going to tell me.”

  “You’ll tell your brother.”

  “No, I won’t,” I said quickly, before realizing that if it was important, I might have to go back on that promise. He saw my expression change.

  “There,” he said, pointing at my face. “I knew it.”

  It was a little scary how well we knew each other.

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll keep badgering you.”

  “I’m dropping you off at your shop and leaving, so you won’t have the chance.”

  We were bickering like an old married couple. Not the kind of thought I wanted to have about Jeff Coleman. I changed tacks.

  “You didn’t lie to me, too, did you?” I asked.

  He studied my face a second, unable to see my eyes because of the sunglasses, then said, “No.” And after a pause added, “I might not have told you everything.”

  “But you’re going to now, aren’t you?”

  We stopped on the bridge I’d been on last night with Harry, when he kissed me and the flash went off. I was having some serious déjà vu, but I didn’t want to seem spooked in front of Jeff, so I stood my ground, happy that the sunglasses kept him from seeing my eyes darting around behind him, worried I’d discover another camera aimed right at me.

  Jeff shifted from one foot to the other, his own eyes searching out something behind me, but I didn’t want to show him I was curious, so I forced myself to look straight ahead.

  “The woman last night. We were talking about tattoos, and she commented on mine. But then she said Sylvia Coleman gave her a tattoo,” he added.

  “Your mother? She actually said Sylvia Coleman?”

  “Threw me for a loop. That’s what disoriented me, what I was thinking about when she went to the ladies’ room.”

  I mulled that a second. “So she knows that I know your mother. Funny that she’d say Sylvia tattooed that dragon.”

  Jeff took a deep breath. “Not the dragon.”

  I didn’t think I heard him right. “What do you mean?”

  “She said my mother tattooed Napoleon on her leg. She knew it was a painting you liked.”

  I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  Jeff kept talking, as though he didn’t notice.

  “She was wearing tight jeans, so she couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t check it out.”

  I wondered if she knew about the tiger lily on my side. Not many people knew about that one, because it was usually covered up by clothes. Even when I went swimming at the public pool in Henderson, I wore a Speedo one-piece. She could’ve seen the Napoleon tattoo when I swam, or when I wore a skirt. Although I didn’t wear a skirt too often. She obviously knew about the Celtic cross on my upper back because it was in living color on that blog—my penance for wearing a halter top. I wouldn’t be wearing that again. I thought about the stiletto heels in the plastic bag in the ladies’ room. My footwear was not something she’d studied at length, since I usually wore Tevas or Birkenstocks. Even the flats I wore today were a rarity. Heels weren’t exactly necessary when one was five foot nine.

  “Did she say anything else about me?” My voice was unusually soft, as though I couldn’t speak above a whisper.

  Jeff moved a little closer and for a second, his hand reached out like he was going to touch my cheek. But then he seemed to realize what he was doing and pulled it back, stuffing it into his pocket.

  “We didn’t get much further than that,” he admitted.

  “Why didn’t you tell Tim?” I asked. “I mean, shouldn’t he know?”

  His eyes skipped around behind my head. There was something else. I waited. Finally, he said, “She made a couple cracks about my mother. Unkind things. It was all I could do not to say something. I didn’t exactly want to repeat what she said to your brother and then have it all be on the record.”

  I couldn’t blame him, so I gave him a pass.

  “It’s enough he knows someone’s out there impersonating you. What she said about my mother and the description of your tat isn’t really relevant to his investigation.” He paused. “Come on. Let’s get to your shop. You might feel a little better once we get there.”

  He was right about that. Out here, I was a sitting duck. For some chick with a camera who had decided I was more interesting than she was so she had to take over my persona.

  Good luck with that.

  Bitsy’s eyebrows rose high into her forehead when she saw me come in with Jeff Coleman on my heels.

  “Just a little bodyguard duty,” he quipped, flashing a grin.

  Bitsy’s eyes skirted from him to me. “Your client is already here. She’s on the couch in back.”

  I was happy for the distraction.

  “Thanks for the escort,” I said to Jeff, wishing I could make some sort of joke or something, but my heart wasn’t in it.

  This time he did lean toward me, his fingers brushing my cheek. “You know the number,” he said, then whirled around and walked out, a quick nod to Bitsy, who sat with her mouth hanging open.

  “What’s up with you and Jeff Coleman?” she asked. “It’s like you two called a truce or something.”

  “Or something,” I said absently, not wanting to get into it with her. I started back toward my client, so I could get to work, but then remembered and turned around. “Has Harry been in yet?”

  Bitsy shook her head. “Haven’t seen him at all. This isn’t normal. I hope he’s okay.”

  I had no idea what Harry’s reaction to the pictures of us would be, but I pushed everything out of my head as I went back to greet Katie North, my client. She’d come in two days ago and wanted a butterfly on her upper back. I’d drawn up a design that she loved: a classic Monarch, with orange and black markings, its wings spread wide to make a real statement.

  “Come on back,” I said as I approached her. She was sitting on the black leather sofa, leafing through a tattoo magazine.

  Katie jumped up with a wide grin and followed me into my room. I motioned that she should sit while I went out to get the stencil from her file in the staff room.

  “You’ll be facedown,” I explained, showing her how the chair would lie flat, sort of like a massage table. It would be easier for me to tattoo her that way. It would also be more comfortable for her. It wasn’t her first tattoo (she had the Little Prince on her upper arm), but the butterfly was a lot larger and would take longer.

  Joel was in the staff room working on a stencil for one of his clients. He looked up when I came in and gave me a concerned expression.

  “Are you okay? We all saw the blog with the pictures of you and Harry.”

  I caught my breath and bit my lip. He noticed, got up, and gave me a hug. “It’ll be okay. Your brother will find whoever it is who’s doing this. Don’t worry.”

  I nodded and pulled away just as my cell phone started to ring. I still had my bag over my shoulder and I slung it onto the light table as I rummaged for the phone. I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello?” I asked tentatively, Joel watching.

  “Brett? It’s Harry.”

  “Hey there,” I said, uncertain what he was calling me about, and then wondere
d how he got my number. Bitsy, probably. “What’s up?” I tried to make my voice light, but it didn’t really work.

  “That’s what I was going to ask you,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your message. You said you had something important to tell me, that I should call right away. What’s wrong?”

  What was wrong was that I couldn’t have left him any sort of message. Because I didn’t have his number.

  Chapter 21

  I sat, my heart back in my throat. It should just have been permanently lodged there, because it was popping up there all the time lately.

  “I didn’t call you,” I said, forcing the words out. “Tell me exactly what the message said.”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t call me?”

  Couldn’t accuse Harry of being a Rhodes scholar. “I didn’t call you. Some woman is impersonating me. I bet it was her who called you. What was the number she called from?”

  “Someone’s impersonating you?”

  Was there an echo in here? I tried not to be impatient. I needed that phone number.

  “Please, Harry, the number?”

  “Okay, okay, hold on.” He was quiet a second; then he rattled off a number as I grabbed a pencil from Joel and jotted it down on top of one of the file folders on the table.

  “Thanks,” I said. “What did the message say?”

  “I told you. You said it was important. I should call you right away.”

  “She sounded like me?” It was one thing to make herself up like me, but to mimic my voice?

  “There were a lot of sounds in the background, like she was in a car or on a bus or something, but it sounded like you, I guess.” He was having doubts now. “Why do you think someone’s impersonating you?”

  I told him about the Ink Flamingos blog and the pictures of the two of us. “She obviously was following us around last night,” I finished.

  Bitsy was standing in the doorway, waving her arms around. Oh, shoot. I’d forgotten about Katie.

  “Listen, Harry, why don’t you stop by later and we can talk about it. I’ve got a client.” And I hung up.

  “Katie’s waiting,” Bitsy said.

  “I know. I need to give Tim a quick call.” I grabbed Katie’s folder with the stencil in it as I hit the speed dial number for Tim.

  “Kavanaugh.”

  I quickly told him about my conversation with Harry and gave him the number for the mysterious impostor as well as Harry’s number, which I now had because he’d called me and it was in my phone.

  “I’ll get on it,” Tim said, hanging up.

  Katie accepted my apology for being away too long, and I pressed the stencil against her back and peeled it off carefully, leaving the markings behind that I would trace with the tattoo machine. I showed her what it looked like with a hand mirror, and she was thrilled. I told her to lie down as I pulled on a pair of blue gloves, slid a needle into the machine, and dipped it into a small pot of black ink. I spun my chair around so I had a good angle, put my foot against the pedal on the ground, and heard the machine whir to life.

  As I worked, I felt my worries slip away, the tension in my shoulders ease. I lost myself in the zone, creating my art on someone’s skin, carefully moving the machine with the contours of her body. When I was in art school, I’d had no idea I’d trade a stiff, white canvas for this malleable one. The black heart on the inside of my wrist, which I gave myself when I was sixteen, had been only the beginning, and I should have known then, with each painstaking and painful stab of that needle, that this was what I was meant to create.

  I had someone ask me once whether I’d get into other forms of body modification, but besides the tattoos and the piercings in my ears, I hadn’t considered it. Putting more holes in my body or stretching my earlobes or splitting my tongue just weren’t the same to me as using my body as a canvas. I was a walking art gallery, as much a gallery as Ace’s was out in the front of the shop. That’s not to say I judged anyone else who might want to pursue other types of modification. That was their business and their own journey. It just wasn’t mine.

  I was finishing up Katie’s tattoo when something else hit me about what had been going on the last couple days. Daisy was the one who’d lost her life, but somehow this had become all about me. It was wrong.

  Or maybe that’s what whoever did this had meant to do. Steer all speculation toward me. Did my impostor know about Tim, how he was a police detective? That Tim would probably focus on whoever was blogging about me rather than Daisy’s death? Granted, Flanigan was on the case, too, as well as other police. But if it became about me, and not Daisy, then maybe she’d get away with it.

  She? Had I pinned this on the woman impersonating me? What about Sherman Potter? He said he’d already replaced Daisy, saying she’d planned to leave the band. I wondered what the other band members thought about that.

  As soon as Katie left with her aftercare instructions, I knew what I had to do. See where the Flamingos were playing and see if I couldn’t talk to them about Daisy. If I could figure out what she was doing at the Golden Palace, then maybe I’d be a step closer to finding my impersonator.

  Joel was on the laptop when I finally went into the staff room. He was in the middle of designing a tattoo. A while back, we’d had an intern who taught him how to design in Photoshop and Illustrator and he took to it easily. Ace and I had a little bit more trouble. Ace because, well, he really wanted to be a painter, and me, I didn’t do so well on the computer. I liked having a pencil in my hand—or a tattoo machine.

  Joel looked up as I came in.

  “Done with Katie?” he asked.

  I nodded, sticking my head in the fridge to see if there was anything to munch on. I pulled out a brick of cheddar cheese and a box of crackers. I cut off a little cheese and put it on a cracker and stuck it in my mouth.

  “Can I have one?” Joel asked, his eyes focused on the cheese.

  I made him a couple crackers and put them on a paper plate, setting it down next to him. “Going to be long?”

  “Just got started,” he said, indicating the screen.

  The outline of a snake was weaving its way through the eye sockets of a skull. I shivered involuntarily. Despite his newfound love of computer graphics, Joel was a traditional tattooist and did mainly old-school tattoos with a slightly modern twist. So far, this one was still just old-school.

  “I’ll go in the office, then,” I said, going down the hall. We had an old iMac desktop that had been replaced by the laptop, and I hoisted it up from its new home on the floor to the top of the desk. I had to hook it all up, which was why when Flanigan had been here yesterday I didn’t bother with it, just used the laptop. I fumbled with the wires, making sure the keyboard and mouse were attached and plugging it into the socket. When I had everything where it should be, I hit the power switch.

  The wireless still worked on this, and when it booted up, I went to the Internet and did a Google search for the Flamingos Web site. I wanted to find out where the band was playing next, so I could track them down and see if I couldn’t get some answers out of them.

  When I clicked on the first link, a page I’d never seen before popped up. It was a dedication to Daisy, her picture and her date of birth and death, with RIP under her picture and a small button at the bottom of the page that indicated I could get to the band’s Web site through that portal.

  It was a touching tribute, considering that Daisy was leaving the band and had already been replaced.

  But when I clicked through, I didn’t get the Flamingos Web site after all.

  It was the Ink Flamingos blog.

  Chapter 22

  I pushed the keyboard away from me and shoved back in my chair. This was getting way too creepy.

  Whoever had set up the blog had a new post. I scanned it, even though I wanted to get up and walk away.

  The post was all about Daisy’s flamingo tattoo, how it had only been black but “I” had felt it needed a t
ouch of color and Daisy had agreed, even though she was known for her black tattoos. There was no mention of the fact that she had an allergy.

  Curious.

  Where was the actual Flamingos site? Pushing aside my discomfort, I clicked back through the tribute page and to Google. Ah, there it was. Just underneath the link I’d hit.

  Relief washed through me as the site loaded, the strains of the Flamingos’ latest hit, “Bad Blood,” in the background. I clicked on the PERFORMANCES link and found a listing of the band’s upcoming gigs.

  They were supposed to be here in Vegas, at the MGM, tonight. I remembered how someone had said that the band was on the East Coast. But they had played their final concert there in New Jersey at the Meadowlands last night. No indication that any concerts were canceled. No indication on the Web site at all that Daisy was no longer with the band, no longer alive.

  I wondered why Sherman Potter had been here in Vegas when the band was in New Jersey last night. That didn’t make much sense. Unless he had to come out here because of Daisy. How had the other girls been able to perform without their lead singer? Knowing she was dead?

  I clicked on NEWS and found the latest from the local TV station: The Flamingos were due to arrive in Vegas this afternoon at two. I glanced at my watch. In about twenty minutes.

  I picked up the phone and dialed information to get the MGM. When I finally got through, I asked if I could leave a message for Melanie Black. While I didn’t know the other girls in the band, Melanie had come to the shop with Daisy one time and Ace had done a small tattoo on her ankle. She would recognize my name.

  Reciting my name and number and asking that she call as soon as she got in, I then thanked the hotel operator and set the phone back in its cradle.

  That was the most I could do. Now I had to keep myself busy, which wasn’t going to be hard because Bitsy stuck her head in the door to tell me my next client was here.

  Melanie hadn’t called me back two hours later, and after being here every day for the last month, Harry still hadn’t showed. Tim didn’t call to update me.