Cheese and crackers beckoned from the fridge, and the bottle of Malbec was still half-full. I poured a glass before settling down in front of the TV. The clock reminded me that it was just about time for 20/20 and the exposé about Elise Lyon.
Alison Cho was giving the introduction just as I hit the remote.
“Elise Lyon had it all: youth, beauty, money, and she was going to marry the son of one of the richest men in the country. But she threw it all away, running from her fiancé to Las Vegas a week before her wedding, where she was last seen in a tattoo shop asking for a tattoo with the name of a man no one had ever heard of.”
The screen filled with a close-up of the devotion ink I’d drawn, “Matthew” prominent, larger than life.
“Who is Matthew?” Alison’s voice-over emphasized. “Is she with him now? No one knows, because after visiting The Painted Lady, Elise Lyon was never seen again.”
The commercial was for Viagra. I muted the TV, mulling the dramatics, the mystery perpetuated by the media. Granted, I had a personal interest in Elise Lyon and Kelly Masters, but most of the country wouldn’t even know about her if the media hadn’t pounced on the story, like they had so many stories like this one. She was, as Jeff Coleman had insensitively put it, “a rich bitch,” but she was also, in a sense, the princess who threw it all away to go slumming in Vegas. The public would eat it up.
I went into my bedroom and found my laptop, bringing it into the living room, turning it on, and logging into the wireless Internet—another post-Shawna splurge for Tim. Too bad he couldn’t break up with her twice; maybe I could get him to buy us both iPhones and GPSs.
I Googled Elise Lyon.
A wedding announcement from the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section popped up in the search, and I clicked on it.
Elise Lyon, 26, daughter of the world-renowned architect Richard Lyon and his wife, Madeline, of Philadelphia, will marry Bruce “Chip” Manning Jr., 31, of New York City, son of developer and entrepreneur Bruce Manning Sr. and his wife, Helene, on June 29. Richard Lyon most recently designed Versailles, Bruce Manning’s new resort in Las Vegas. The couple met through their parents at a cocktail party in Manhattan.
Elise Lyon attended Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, studying psychology, and Chip Manning is vice president of marketing for his father’s holdings in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, based in his father’s offices in New York City.
Doing the math, I quickly deduced that if Elise Lyon had gone to college when most high school graduates did and then graduated on time, it seemed unlikely she had pursued any sort of career path, otherwise the story would’ve said so. These stories were big on pointing out the high-powered jobs that the brides and grooms held. Maybe marrying Chip Manning, who was most definitely on a career path with his father’s empire, was her calling.
I didn’t get it. But I’d been working since I was sixteen.
I knew enough about Bruce Manning Sr. to skip the rest.
The voice on the TV tugged at me. I looked up from the laptop to see Alison Cho asking me questions. Joel had been right about the outfit. It totally worked, but I didn’t look like me. At least not the me I knew. I heard my voice and wondered if I really sounded like that.
The phone rang.
“Brett? Brett? Why didn’t you tell me you were on TV?” My sister’s soft, hurried voice echoed in my ear.
I’d conveniently forgotten she was obsessed with the news shows. “It happened so fast, Cathleen,” I tried.
Cathleen was the first to leave the nest—and the East Coast. Her husband was a software engineer, and they moved to Southern California ten years ago, right after they got married. Even though they were just a few hours away, we never saw each other. Cathleen thought I was a bad influence on her six-year-old daughter, who’d decided after my last visit that she wanted a tattoo of Tinker Bell on her arm.
“You should’ve called. Where’s Tim? Why didn’t he call? You were the last to see her? What was she like?”
I wanted to tell her to just hang up and let me finish watching the show, but she wouldn’t stop asking questions. To shut her up, I told her everything that was being said, at about the same time.
Except for one thing.
“A man named Matthew Powell was found murdered in Chip Manning’s suite at Versailles earlier today. Police will not say whether Matthew Powell, who was Chip Manning’s driver, was Elise Lyon’s Matthew.”
But by saying that, Alison Cho certainly implied it.
My sister was still babbling. I ignored her, my eyes trained on the TV.
I wasn’t prepared for the next statement.
“Police have confirmed that they have brought Versailles manager Simon Chase in for questioning.”
Chapter 25
I told my sister I would have to call her back. I hung up even as she was arguing with me about it.
I sat on the couch and took a drink of wine. I wished I liked something stronger, but the wine was going to have to do.
Simon Chase? What did that mean, they were questioning him? Did the police think he had something to do with Matt Powell’s murder? I thought about how he’d brought me up to the suite to see what I’d seen. If he’d already been there, he certainly hadn’t shown it.
He’d egged me on about inking Chip’s chest. Maybe he did know more about this than he was letting on.
I shivered, thinking about how he’d flirted with me.
My brain started going backward, like a video in rewind, through the events of the last couple of days, trying to get Simon Chase out of my head.
I thought again about Jeff Coleman. And Kelly Masters. I wanted to find the connection between Kelly and Elise. They seemed separate, but they weren’t. They couldn’t be.
I pulled my laptop out again and Googled Kelly Masters this time. I found a MySpace page, but it wasn’t her. It was a Kelly Masters at NYU who was advertising her Wiccan religion. An accomplished harpist named Kelly Masters had gone to Juilliard and now played with the Boston Symphony. And then there was the Scientologist named Kelly Masters who had a YouTube video, preaching L. Ron Hub-bard’s words much in the same way Tom Cruise did, but to her credit she didn’t jump on anyone’s sofa. I shuddered and hit the button to go back to the previous screen.
A small item in Entertainment Weekly from a year and a half ago caught my eye. A picture of a woman whose features were similar to the picture on my cell phone—without being dead, obviously—accompanied two paragraphs about a Kelly Masters from Los Angeles who’d won a modeling contract with a top agency after some reality program on an obscure channel no one watched. Alive, she was very pretty in that skinny-model sort of way.
I couldn’t see a tat on her neck.
I couldn’t be sure if it was the same Kelly Masters. Jeff had said she’d been living in L.A. the last he knew, so it was possible. But he also said he hadn’t seen her for a long time, so she could’ve been anywhere.
Except when I went to the next page, another small item popped out at me. Kelly Masters had been stripped of her modeling contract because she’d lied about her age during the competition. She was too old.
It was just a segue into the next hit. A tattoo shop site. Planet Tattoo. I clicked on it.
The shop was in Malibu; it advertised that all the hot celebrities had gotten tats there, prominently featuring the one I was supposed to ink earlier today.
And in the center of the screen was a photo of their star tattooist: K-C, who wore a wide, sexy smile, a black bustier, black leather pants, and eagle wings spread across her neck. A short bio said that K-C had trained in Las Vegas—but there was no credit for her ex-husband—and that she had won a modeling contest previously.
She should’ve been stripped of her title solely for choosing the moniker “K-C.” Those TV tattoo shows were creating monsters.
Did Jeff Coleman know his wife was the Tattooist to the Stars? He certainly hadn’t indicated that, and neither had Sylvia. Kelly Masters had truly moved on, b
ut it didn’t answer my original question: What was she doing in Las Vegas with Elise Lyon?
I stared at the Google search bar for a few seconds.
I couldn’t put it off any longer.
Googling Simon Chase brought up a slew of hits. Lots of news stories about Versailles, how Chase had been working for Manning in his Atlantic City casino before coming to Vegas.
I read through as much as I could, piecing together Chase’s history.
He’d grown up outside London, but not too much information was available about his life until he came to the United States, where he got his master’s in business administration from Harvard, hooking up with Bruce Manning early in his professional career. Not a bad star to hitch a ride on if you were ambitious.
And he was as ambitious in his off hours as he was on the job. He was a playboy, always with a different beautiful woman on his arm. I clicked on “Images” and saw him with celebrities, actresses and musicians and pop artists.
I picked one at random, clicking on the picture to make it larger.
The picture was taken on a beach, with palm trees and white sand. Chase was wearing a pair of khaki Bermuda shorts and a flowing cotton button-down shirt that was unbuttoned, revealing the physique I’d suspected when I met him. He had his arm slung over the shoulder of a woman wearing the scantiest of bikinis, her long dark hair pulled up and off her face, her features stunning and pink with sunburn.
Her body was turned to his, her neck swiveled in such a way that I could see it.
Eagle wings spread across her neck.
It was Kelly Masters.
My breath caught in my throat and my fingers froze above the keyboard.
Did he know Kelly Masters was dead? She was in Vegas; so was he. Had they hooked up here? Jeff said he’d heard she was getting married. Could it have been to Simon Chase?
Now I was even more embarrassed that I’d been taken in by his English charm. That his good looks had clouded any objectivity I would normally have had. But he had been suave and sophisticated and smart and funny, and, well, I’d been totally attracted to him.
The police were questioning him in Matt Powell’s murder. What about Kelly’s? Did the police even know Chase had a history with Kelly?
I wanted to know more. I hadn’t found enough. I hit the arrow to go back and found myself again among links for Simon Chase. I hit the “next page” button three or four more times before a link caught my eye.
The New York Times. An engagement announcement. But it wasn’t Simon Chase and Kelly Masters.
It was Simon Chase and Elise Lyon.
Chapter 26
The date told me the announcement had been published two years ago. Chase was working in Atlantic City at the time; Philadelphia wasn’t too far away. Maybe he and Elise had met there. At the time of the engagement, Elise was twenty-four and Chase was thirty-six. He was older than I’d thought, but some men aged better than women. It wasn’t fair.
I wondered what had happened to break them up.
Elise seemed to have a habit of falling in love and getting engaged. First Simon, then Chip, then Matthew. She was a busy girl. And Chip’s statement about her affair a few months ago indicated she obviously had some commitment issues. Maybe she was one of those girls who just liked the idea of falling in love and getting married but couldn’t follow through.
I’d been accused of that, but my story was more complicated. Paul and I met in a Manhattan club during the run of his first off-Broadway show. He played the Claus von Bulow part in a stage production of Reversal of Fortune. Let’s just say he was typecast. At first, I found him charming and clever and attentive. However, over the next three years, Paul managed to snag some prime parts, feeding his ego and eccentricities. His needs had to come first; his art was more important than mine. I ignored that for a long time, thinking I could live in the shadow of his success, until I realized I couldn’t. Tim was the only one I’d confided in; when he split with Shawna, he gave me the out I needed.
I pushed my memories aside. This wasn’t about me. I focused again on my computer.
I hadn’t seen the engagement announcement for Chase and Elise when I Googled her before, but I’d stopped searching for anything after I saw the one for her and Chip.
And then it struck me.
The connection I’d been looking for between Kelly and Elise was Simon Chase. I wondered if the police knew about that. Maybe they didn’t before, but since they were now “questioning” Chase, maybe they had found out.
If they had, however, why were they still looking for Jeff Coleman? Oh, right. The gun with Jeff’s fingerprints on it had killed Kelly. And I’d told Tim that Jeff was supposed to be in that suite at Versailles.
If Chase were guilty, then it would’ve been easy to set Jeff up there. Chase knew who would be staying in that suite and when, and if Jeff hadn’t talked to that high-profile client too many times it would be easy to disguise his English accent and pretend to set up a job.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made.
I couldn’t believe I had flirted with a murderer.
I shut my laptop and realized I’d missed the rest of the 20/20 program.
I finished my wine and ate a couple more crackers before lying back on the couch and closing my eyes. I didn’t mean to fall asleep, but when I awoke to the sound of the front door opening, I jumped up.
Tim looked like he hadn’t slept for a week.
“What time is it?” I asked, the TV still flickering behind me.
“Two a.m. What are you still doing up?”
“I was watching 20/20 and fell asleep.”
He spotted the laptop on the coffee table. “Checking e-mail?”
I nodded, uncertain whether I should tell him what I’d learned. I’d start out with baby steps. “The TV said you were questioning Simon Chase.”
He pulled off his tie, which had been hanging rather slackly around his neck. “Yeah.”
“Why?” I tried to keep from sounding too anxious.
“The press are a bunch of idiots,” Tim said. “We asked Chase to come downtown to answer some questions formally for us about that suite, who was staying there, what the situation was with the victim. He wasn’t a person of interest, but the reporters jumped to conclusions.” He ran his hand through his hair, making it stand on end. “By the way, you’re off the hook. We didn’t find your fingerprints in that room, and the videos showed you definitely arriving when you said you did.”
“You didn’t really think I had anything to do with it?”
“Of course not. But I was surprised that since you were there, we didn’t find a print anywhere.”
“I hit the elevator button with my elbow. I know better than to touch anything at a crime scene.” I said it like I was at crime scenes all the time, like I wasn’t just picking that up from CSI. “What about Chip Manning? Did you get his fingerprints? Did you find out anything about the blood on his shirt?”
“His fingerprints are all over that suite, but it’s not a surprise, since he was staying there.” Tim paused. “We got the shirt. We’re testing the stains. Thanks for the tip.”
I was about to tell him what I’d learned on the Internet about Chase and Kelly and Elise, but his expression changed slightly, and I knew something was on his mind.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Time of death. Matt Powell wasn’t killed today.”
“You’re kidding. When was he killed?”
“Medical examiner thinks maybe sometime yesterday.”
“Chip Manning stayed in that room with a dead guy?”
“He was moved. We found carpet fibers from the room all over his body.”
“So he was dragged through the suite and stuck in the tub?” I made a face. “That’s really sick.” I had another thought. “But how could someone get a body into the hotel without the cameras picking up on it?”
Tim smiled at me as if I were a simpleton. “Matt Powell had a smaller, much sm
aller, room on another floor.”
I got it now. “So he was killed there and put in Chip’s room? Was it to implicate Chip?” My thoughts were moving faster than a hamster on a wheel. “But even if he was moved, the cameras would’ve filmed it, right?”
Tim’s expression told me that he was one step ahead of me, but he had no intention of sharing.
I had another thought. Once I started, there was no stopping me. “Hey, Chip was at my shop yesterday morning. He said Matt was waiting for him in the food court.”
Tim’s interest was piqued. “Really? Did you see him?”
I remembered how Joel and I had tried to catch up with Chip but lost him. “No. Do you think he was setting up an alibi?” I sounded like I really knew what I was talking about. Hey, maybe that Starsky and Hutch crack Jeff Coleman had made wasn’t so far off the mark.
Tim didn’t answer. But I was on a roll.
“Do you think Chip killed his driver because his driver was Elise’s lover?”
Tim pursed his lips and shook his head. “Can’t speculate.”
I had another thought. “You know Kelly Masters’s brother’s name is Matthew, right? Maybe he’s got something to do with this.”
Tim frowned. “How do you know him?”
“I’ve seen him a couple of times. He showed up outside my shop the other day, and he was in the casino at Versailles when I left.”
“Is he bothering you?”
“He’s sort of a creepy guy. I don’t like the idea of running into him. I get a bad vibe from him.”
“But has he done anything? Approached you?” Tim’s tone was laced with worry, but as I thought about his questions, I realized Matthew hadn’t attempted to talk to me or follow me. Not that I knew. He’d just been there. And I hadn’t been able to see the driver of that truck. Maybe it wasn’t him at all. Maybe it was just a guy in a truck who just happened to be going my way. Maybe in my paranoia I’d jumped to conclusions.
I shook my head.
“If he does bother you, you should let me know.”
The Missing Ink: A Tattoo Shop Mystery Page 12
