Pretty In Ink

by Karen E. Olson

  “Sure, he was there.”

  “So could what Trevor says be true?”

  Kyle laughed. “Honey, Trevor would lie to his grand-mother if it meant a good story.”

  “So you don’t believe him?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t think Trevor runs with Lester Fine’s crowd.”

  He had a point.

  “But maybe the story’s true. Maybe that’s why the other guy wants it. Maybe there was no mistake at all; maybe Joel’s right that he was just angling to get his hands on it.” I thought a second. “The stones in the brooch must be real. A pawnshop wouldn’t give Trevor money for something that wasn’t worth anything.”

  The look on Kyle’s face told me that he wasn’t convinced.

  I did know one thing for sure: If the guy looking for Trevor was the one who hit him with the cork after making a threat, then the police needed to know about it.

  “Eduardo should talk to the cops,” I suggested. “He could tell them what the guy looked like. Maybe he could look at one of those books with the mug shots.” I watched too much TV.

  Kyle batted his eyes a few seconds, then said, “Well, you know, there’s a problem with that. Eduardo isn’t exactly… well… legal. He’s not going to want to talk to the police about anything.”

  I could see his point. But at the same time, we needed to try to find out who the cork shooter was. Maybe it was the same guy who’d been doing this all over town, or maybe it was this pawnshop guy.

  “You could do a sketch,” Bitsy said, pulling on my arm.

  I looked down at her. “What?”

  “You do great portraits. What if Eduardo told you what the guy looks like and you draw the face? Then you can give it to the police.”

  “What, like a police sketch artist? That’s not what I do. I work from photographs.”

  Despite my misgivings, Kyle was nodding faster than a bobble-head doll.

  “That’s a great idea,” he said.

  I looked at Joel for support, but he seemed to be agreeing.

  “Oh, go ahead, Brett. I think it’s a good idea, too,” he said.

  I knew when I was beat.

  “Okay, sure. I’ll come back in the morning,” I told Kyle.

  But he was shaking his head. “No, no, you have to do it now. I’m not sure Eduardo will be around tomorrow.”

  “Why not?” I started to get suspicious about the whole thing.

  “He’s got another gig in Reno tomorrow night and has to get up there.”

  It sounded like the truth, but who knew?

  “I don’t have any sketching paper,” I tried.

  Kyle threw his arm around me and started leading me back to the club. I twisted my neck around to see Bitsy and Joel headed to their cars.

  “Where are you going?” I stopped, turned, and glared at them. “This is your idea. You can’t leave me here.”

  Bitsy shrugged. “I’ve got to get to the shop early tomorrow to open up,” she said. “See you then.” She waggled her fingers at me, gave me a quick grin, and got into her MINI Cooper.

  I’d talk to her tomorrow. I was too tired right now. I raised my eyebrows expectantly at Joel. His shoulders sagged with obedience as he clicked his key fob to relock the doors of his car, and he joined us as we went back into the club.

  The same group that had been drinking when we left was refilling their glasses. Someone had cranked up the music, and Miranda Rites and Marva Luss gyrated on the stage to a Donna Summer song as a couple of the young men hooted their enthusiasm while waving huge white feathered fans, reminiscent of old-time burlesque shows. The disco ball splashed little bits of light against everyone, like glitter come alive. I guess Miranda had decided after all that she wasn’t going to go hold Trevor’s hand until Charlotte got to the hospital.

  Kyle led me over to one of the young men and whispered in his ear. His face was classic Latino, with olive skin, dark, piercing eyes, and high, pronounced cheekbones. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, showing off his rippled abs, muscled biceps, and tiny waist. He had black tribal tattoos running down both arms and across his back. His jeans weren’t buttoned, showing off white shorts beneath.

  He was gorgeous.

  Eduardo nodded at me and gave me a small smile as he assessed my ink. Kyle led us backstage. Rather than going into the dressing room this time, he took us into a small office that housed a desk, a laptop computer, and a printer. Kyle grabbed a few sheets of paper out of the printer and handed them to me. I helped myself to a pencil that lay next to the laptop. It wasn’t very sharp, but it would have to do.

  “Have a seat,” Kyle invited, and I sat in the straight-backed desk chair. He pulled out a folding chair from the corner for Eduardo. There weren’t any other chairs for him or Joel, who leaned against the doorframe, his hands in his pockets.

  “So, can you tell me what the guy looked like?” I asked Eduardo, my pencil poised.

  “He had a round face,” Eduardo started. “A short nose.”

  I contemplated the paper. I’d done my share of portrait tattoos, and when I was at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, I’d drawn more faces and figures than I could remember. But I always had a model to work from. Not someone’s memory, which could be skewed. Especially, as I could see, a memory that had been influenced by maybe one too many cocktails.

  I sketched out a round face and a short nose.

  “No, no,” Eduardo said, touching the base of the nose. “It was rounder here and thinner here.” He ran his finger along the line I’d drawn.

  Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. He seemed to really know. I did what he said, and he nodded. “Yes, yes, that’s good. The eyes were large, with short eyelashes.”

  With his direction, I found myself filling out the sketch. As I thought about it a little more, I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that he’d take such close notice of a man’s looks. That’s what Chez Tango was really all about, after all.

  I was glad no one could see my right foot pressing hard into the ground, sort of like a backseat driver who wants to put the brakes on. It was an odd habit I’d developed when I drew, as if I were using the tattoo-machine pedal. I’d gotten so used to drawing with the machine in my hand that a pencil sometimes felt funny.

  I tried to remember how it felt the first time I drew a tattoo on my skin. I’d used a sewing needle wrapped tightly with black thread and ink from a ballpoint pen. I’d stuck my skin with tiny stabs, drawing blood, all the while creating a black heart that still adorned the inside of my left wrist. It was crude and took hours, but after the initial pricks, I hardly felt it at all. I was sixteen.

  For two years I hid the heart from my parents under a bunch of bangle bracelets that jingled almost constantly. When my mother saw the heart for the first time, her heart almost stopped.

  “No, no, no,” Eduardo said, bringing me out of my memory and pointing to the cheeks. “These are too large.”

  I took a guess and shaded in some contour, and he nodded. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”

  We were done.

  I put my pencil down and surveyed the drawing, Joel and Kyle behind me, looking over my shoulder. Eduardo was nodding as if pleased with himself.

  “You could do that for a living,” Kyle said.

  “I do,” I said thoughtfully, wondering who this person was that I’d drawn. “Does he look familiar?” I asked, knowing that even from this I couldn’t say for sure whether it was the guy with the champagne or not. I really hadn’t seen his face.

  Eduardo shook his head.

  “But you met him,” I said.

  “I don’t know him,” he retorted. “We were not properly introduced.”

  Touché.

  Kyle was looking over my shoulder and frowning.

  “Do you know this guy?” I asked, standing up. It was getting late, and exhaustion was stretching through my body like a tight elastic band. Bitsy would open tomorrow, but I had a client coming in at noon. I glanced at my watch. At this rate, I wou
ldn’t get home until two.

  Kyle picked up the drawing and studied it, leading us out of the office and into the dressing room. He still hadn’t said anything; I wondered whether he recognized the man in the picture.

  Miranda Rites was in the dressing room. Or at least her alter ego, Stephan Price, was. He was folding up the pink sequined costume and putting it in his own duffel bag. Like Kyle and Trevor, Stephan was just as good-looking a man as Miranda was a woman, although Stephan was skinnier than his friends.

  “You’re still here?” Stephan asked.

  Kyle held up the drawing.

  “See what Brett did?”

  Stephan took it and studied it a second, then looked at me with questioning eyes. “Why did you draw a picture of Wesley?”

  “Wesley?” I asked.

  Stephan looked at Kyle. “It’s Wesley, isn’t it?”

  Kyle took the drawing back and nodded. “Yes. It’s not exact-that’s why I wanted a second opinion-but it’s pretty close.”

  “Who’s Wesley?” I asked again.

  Kyle handed me back the sketch. “Wesley Lambert used to be in one of my shows. His drag name was Shanda Leer. But he dropped out of the circuit about a year ago, and no one’s seen him since.”

  Chapter 6

  Obviously, someone had seen him since, and it was Eduardo.

  “You said he was from a pawnshop,” I said to Eduardo, who was frowning. Eduardo, Kyle, Joel, and I had left Stephan in the dressing room and went back out into the front of the club.

  “I thought that’s what he said.” He sighed. “But maybe he didn’t, come to think of it. He said Trevor had pawned something, and there was a mistake. But that was all.”

  “Why did he stop doing your shows?” I asked Kyle.

  Kyle sighed. “He fell in with the wrong crowd. Bunch of rednecks. He said something once about a lab or something out in the desert, and it sounded like they were making drugs. And then his new friends started hanging around the club. They creeped everyone out. But I couldn’t throw them out based on that, until they started harassing some of the girls. I told Wesley if he couldn’t keep them out, he needed to find another gig. So he left. It’s too bad, because he was great for the club. He’d wear a gigantic chandelier on his head while singing ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.’ Everyone loved it.”

  I would’ve paid to see that.

  “But you don’t know where he went after that?”

  “As far as I know, nowhere. He just disappeared. His friends, too.”

  “Do you remember where Wesley lived?” I asked Kyle. “I could tell the police when I give them the drawing.” This was getting a little complicated, and I wondered whether I shouldn’t just give it to Tim instead of that nameless detective, who would undoubtedly have the same number of questions as Tim, but I could handle Tim more easily. Then again, if there was bad blood between Tim and that detective, as I suspected, that might not be a good idea.

  I felt like I was between that rock and a hard place everyone talks about.

  “I don’t remember,” Kyle said. “And I paid him in cash whenever he did a show.”

  “What about a queen-of-hearts tattoo? Did he have one? On his inner forearm?” I looked first to Eduardo.

  “He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt when I saw him.”

  Kyle was shaking his head. “I don’t remember a tattoo.”

  More rocks. More hard places.

  I folded the paper up and stuck it in my bag, taking Joel’s arm. “We’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks,” I said to Eduardo. “I won’t tell the police about you, and hopefully the drawing will be enough.”

  Kyle and Eduardo hung back as Joel and I went back out into the night for the second time.

  “Will you give that to Tim?” Joel asked.

  “Yeah, probably. He can pass it along to whoever.”

  When we got to our cars, Joel leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. “You did good,” he praised, like I was a puppy, but I knew he didn’t mean it like that.

  “Thanks. You could’ve done it, too.”

  “I don’t have your formal training, remember?”

  “Yeah, but you’ve done this long enough so you could.”

  He opened his mouth to argue again, and I shook my head. “We could go around and around on this.”

  The door to Chez Tango opened behind us, and the stragglers began spilling out. Definitely time to go.

  We said our good-byes and got into our cars. I sped out of the parking lot before Joel, eager to get home. I took the Strip rather than the back roads, because I knew the lights would keep me alert. The reflections of the neon flashed across my windshield, and I was reminded how someone once said that every movie and TV show filmed in Vegas had at least one scene with a car driving down the Strip, the lights cutting across the windows.

  I was such a cliché.

  The Bellagio fountains were dancing as I sat at a light. Every time I pass them I think about Ocean’s Eleven and wonder if George Clooney’s back in town. I’ve never seen him-or any other celebrity, except for Howie Mandel. I bumped into him-literally-and spilled gelato all over his Hawaiian shirt at the Palazzo. He totally freaked-out, being the germophobe that he is. Why couldn’t I have spilled something on Mark Wahlberg or Leonardo di Caprio? My sister, Cathleen, who lives in Southern California, always seems to be running into Keanu Reeves or Nicole Kidman or even Miley Cyrus at all of her charity events. You’d think that because the Vegas Strip is a lot smaller than Los Angeles, I’d be rubbing elbows with celebrities all the time. Instead, I’m inking tourists next to a fake Venetian canal in a fake St. Mark’s Square.

  Somebody’s got to do it.

  I pulled into the driveway at the house I share with Tim in Henderson, the headlights illuminating the banana yuccas by the front door. I’ve been here two years now, having moved from Jersey when Tim broke up with Shawna, his almost-fiancée, and needed a roommate. I needed an escape from a relationship gone bad, and I’d been getting too comfortable in my job at the Ink Spot. It was time to move on and run my own shop. I’d also still been living with my parents, who’d announced out of the blue that they were selling the house and moving to Florida. Personally, I think it was their way of saying, “You’re thirty years old, and you can’t live with us anymore,” although I would’ve been happier if they’d just come out and said that rather than plan to move fifteen hundred miles away to a town that rolled up its sidewalks at six p.m. and had a grocery store with its parking lot divided into sections named after the states. My parents always parked in New Jersey. It was easy to remember.

  I knew I wouldn’t live with Tim forever, but it was a nice place to hang my hat for a while.

  It was dark inside. I parked in the garage next to Tim’s Jeep and let myself in quietly, so I wouldn’t wake him. I pulled off my jeans and black blouse, which might survive a washing, might not, and put on a pair of cotton pajama bottoms and an oversized T-shirt. The bedside lamp let off a golden glow, casting shadows on the paintings on the walls. I’d indulged myself with works by college friends, splashes of color in oil and acrylic. My own work was in my parents’ house in Port St. Lucie, Florida.

  My mother still hadn’t gotten over my being a tattooist. She told all her new friends in the retirement community that her daughter was an artist but neglected to tell them what kind.

  Sister Mary Eucharista would give her a pass. I had a harder time forgiving her for not accepting who I was.

  Tim said I should get over it. But who was he to talk? He’d followed in Dad’s footsteps and had always been the favorite.

  I shut the light off, as if it would shut out my thoughts, too.

  It worked after a little while, and I fell into a deep sleep.

  Tim was scrambling eggs when I emerged the next morning, rubbing sleep from my eyes. He grinned and took another plate down from the cupboard.

  “Hey there, night owl.”

  I groaned and slid onto one of the kitchen chairs. My b
ag was still slung over the back.

  “So how was the show?”

  “Fine,” I said on reflex, then, “Well, there was a little excitement.”

  He dished the eggs out and put a plate and fork in front of me as he sat down with his own. “What happened?”

  I told him everything: how I witnessed the cork shooter and the mysterious nameless detective and Trevor going to the hospital and the queen-of-hearts tattoo and Trevor’s pin and Eduardo telling me what to draw. I managed to eat all my eggs while I talked and pulled the sketch from my bag, handing it to him as I chugged a glass of orange juice.

  He studied it for a second, taking a drink of his own juice, then put it on the table between us.

  “You did that?”

  “Yeah, what of it?”

  “Nothing, except it’s good. Great if it looks like the guy it’s supposed to be. You could have a second career if you want to give up the shop.”

  I chuckled. “Mom would love that, wouldn’t she?”

  “No kidding.” Tim shoveled more eggs in his mouth before asking, “So who is he?”

  “Some ex-drag queen named Shanda Leer.” I couldn’t remember his real name-I knew Kyle had told me-but I remembered his stage name because now I got it. “Chandelier, you know,” I said. “Shanda Leer.”

  Tim chuckled. “How do they come up with those names?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Beats me. Kyle kicked him out of the club because he started hanging with drug dealers or something.”

  Tim frowned. “Huh?”

  I told him how Kyle said there was some sort of lab in the desert.

  “Probably not just speculation,” Tim said, but then he grew quiet.

  I wanted to push it, find out just what was going on out in the desert, but I could tell he’d closed down on that subject. So I tried a new one. “Who’s the detective who wouldn’t give me his name?”

  Tim drank some more juice, buying time. I could tell he didn’t want to tell me.

  “Come on, big brother. What is it with you two? Did you get into a fight on the playground or something?”

  “He’s Shawna’s fiancé.”