Pretty In Ink

by Karen E. Olson

  I could sense Jeff struggling with what to say. Finally, “I’ll call the garage. Do you need a ride?”

  I didn’t want to impose any more than I already had, but I could hear the drag queens arriving and knew Kyle wouldn’t have time to chauffeur me around.

  “I do.”

  “I’ll take care of it. Just go in the parking lot and meet the tow truck, okay?”

  “No problem.”

  I was about to hang up, but he wasn’t done yet.

  “Kavanaugh, it’s a good thing I like you.”

  Then he hung up.

  I stared at the receiver in my hand. He liked me? What did that mean? That he liked me, or that he just liked me? I hoped it was the latter. I told myself it was the latter. I was the sister he didn’t have. Or maybe another sister. I didn’t know whether he had a sister or not.

  I wandered through the dressing room. Stephan Price, wearing a nylon cap over his hair, carefully outlined his eyes with black eyeliner, preparing to bring Miranda Rites out for the night. He spotted me in the mirror and put the wand down. He got up and came over to me, put his arm around my shoulders, and squeezed.

  “Hey, girl. Sad about Trevor, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

  “Charlotte must be torn up, huh?”

  All the stress of the day chose that very moment to come out. “Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. I can’t find her. I talked to her this morning before I found Wesley Lambert’s body. I don’t know what sort of game she’s playing.” My tone was harsher than it should have been; I shouldn’t take my frustrations out on Stephan, especially since he had nothing to do with anything that was going on.

  “Wesley Lambert?”

  For some reason, his brain seemed to have stuck on those two words, as if the others hadn’t registered.

  I nodded. “Yeah. He’s dead. He was making poison in a condo on the Strip and managed to kill himself with it.”

  “Poison?”

  “Ricin. And because of him, I ended up in the emergency room, stripped to my birthday suit, and getting interrogated by Lester Fine, of all people.” I was rambling. I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Lester Fine?”

  “He called me a victim; he was trying to get me on TV.” I was a lost cause. I wasn’t making any sense.

  “Honey, you need a drink.” Stephan leaned over to the dressing table, picked up a glass that was filled with ice and what looked like water, and handed it to me.

  I chugged it. Felt like I was in college again. I didn’t even choke when I realized it was vodka. Not my drink of choice, but the moment called for it. I handed Stephan back the empty glass and thought I was going to be sick.

  He got me into a chair and told me to put my head between my legs. Go figure, it worked.

  “So Wesley’s dead?” Stephan asked.

  I nodded as well as I could in my position. I felt Stephan’s hand massaging my scalp. It felt good.

  “I knew he’d get into trouble someday. But what does Lester Fine have to do with it?”

  “Nothing. He was just trying to drum up the sympathy vote, I think.” I raised my head and didn’t feel sick anymore. Actually, I was feeling rather warm and fuzzy. A glass of vodka would do that to you.

  I had another thought.

  “But somehow his personal assistant, Rusty Abbott, is part of all this. I just know it. He’s got the queen-of-hearts tattoo, you know, on his inner forearm. He could be the one who shot Trevor with the cork. I saw the ink with my own eyes.”

  Stephan laughed and sat in front of the mirror again. He started spreading bright purple eye shadow under his eyebrows. “He’s not the only one with a queen-of-hearts tattoo, you know.”

  I sat up straighter. “No, I don’t know. Who else has one?”

  “Wesley Lambert.”

  Chapter 33

  I hadn’t had a good view of Wesley Lambert’s body when he was on the floor in that condo, and because of the vomit, I hadn’t been inclined to study it, either. And then there was all that decontamination and emergency-room stuff afterward that I didn’t even think to ask any questions about the scene or Lambert, either.

  If he had a tattoo like Rusty Abbott’s, and he’d been hanging around looking for Trevor and saying he’d “send him a message,” then it was likely that Lambert was the guy who shot the cork at Trevor that night.

  Mystery solved.

  Maybe.

  There was still that little matter of all that cash in Trevor’s apartment.

  And then there was Charlotte. She’d gone underground for some reason.

  This wasn’t over yet.

  Marva Luss was sashaying around the dressing room in front of me, but she was only partially put together, too. She had a pair of nylons on and started to pull up a pair of Speedos that were about three sizes too small. I turned away. I couldn’t watch. I didn’t want to know what was going on there.

  An unfamiliar queen was layering foundation on her face. It was thick, as brown as chocolate. She caught me staring and grinned.

  “You don’t need this much makeup, do you?”

  I never wore foundation. My skin was as pasty as a white cotton sheet, except where I had my ink, of course. I wore only mascara, a little blush, and occasionally some lip gloss. I couldn’t imagine caking it on like these guys-girls?-did.

  She leaned over and held out her hand. “Just call me Chitty,” she said.

  I took her hand. She had a grip like a vise. I coughed out a short laugh. “Chitty?” I asked.

  “Chitty Chitty Gang Bang.”

  I pulled my hand away. This was getting a bit too surreal for me. I needed to go out and wait for the tow, like Jeff had said.

  I stood, gave Stephan an air kiss, and started out.

  “Brett?”

  I turned to see Stephan looking at me through the mirror.

  “Yeah?”

  “When you find her, tell Charlotte Trevor thought the world of her.”

  I nodded and smiled. “Yeah, I will.”

  Kyle was pirouetting across the stage. He flipped his hand up at me.

  “We’ll talk.”

  “I’m sure we will,” I said.

  The tow truck beat me to the parking lot. The tow guy already had the car up on the flatbed, ready to take it away. He frowned at me, a clipboard in his hand.

  “You Kavanaugh?”

  Great. Jeff Coleman was going to get everyone to call me by my last name.

  “I am.”

  “I’m dropping you off.” He indicated that I should climb up into the cab, so I did.

  “So how do you know Jeff?” I asked, trying to make small talk and ignoring his stare.

  “Did Jeff do your ink?” he asked.

  “No. Had it done in Jersey.” Except for Napoleon on my calf, but he couldn’t see that because of my jeans, and I wasn’t going to volunteer information if I didn’t have to.

  “Nice,” he said, turning back to the road.

  We rode in silence through the city streets until he pulled up in front of Murder Ink.

  “Here you go.”

  I’d hoped Jeff would have him drop me at the Venetian, but no such luck. I thanked the guy and got out of the truck. He took off before I could get to the door, the gold car glimmering as the sun hit it.

  Jeff Coleman was nowhere to be seen. His mother, Sylvia, was inking a girl’s hand. I got closer and saw it was a skull. Peering into the girl’s face, I figured she was eighteen at most. She might regret that skull in a couple of years. Or maybe even next week. I might have tried to talk her out of it. If I knew Sylvia, she’d talked her into it.

  “Hello, dear,” Sylvia said without looking up, her machine whirring seamlessly as she drew.

  I didn’t know exactly how old Sylvia Coleman was, but I guessed she was in her seventies, maybe even early eighties. She’d run the shop for years and then turned it over to Jeff when she “retired,” although it seemed her retirement just meant she came to the shop for half a
day instead of a full day. Sylvia wasn’t the golfing type. Or even the traveling type. She was an old-school tattooist, having learned the trade from her husband, who had died of pancreatic cancer about ten years ago. Sylvia had tattoos all over her body, except for her face, and I knew this because the day I showed up for my Napoleon ink, she stripped to her birthday suit and gave me the grand tour.

  Most people might have been a little freaked-out by that, but each tattoo has a story, and she told those stories so well that I forgot she was naked underneath that ink.

  “While you’re here, you might as well pick something out,” Sylvia said, waving the machine toward the flash on the wall. “Jeff says you might be here a while.”

  He did, did he?

  I pulled up a chair. “Thanks anyway, Sylvia, but I don’t know how long I’ll be here.” I watched her outline the skull, then looked back at the girl’s face. One tear was crawling down her cheek; her mouth was set in a grim line.

  It hurt. It hurt like a thousand bee stings. But for most, the hurt evaporated when the endorphins kicked in. Not for this girl.

  She was regretting this already, but she wasn’t going to admit it.

  And it was too late now. If she told Sylvia to stop, she’d have half a skull on her hand. Might as well go for the whole shebang.

  A voice from behind me made me jump.

  “It’s about time you showed up.”

  Chapter 34

  Jeff Coleman came out from the back of the shop. For “liking” me, he didn’t look too friendly at the moment. He jingled a set of keys.

  “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’re going to see your brother, dear,” Sylvia said without looking up from her work. “You need to come clean.”

  Easy for her to say.

  “Do you have another car here?” I asked as I got up.

  Jeff had already started out the back again, and I sped up a bit to keep up. He didn’t say anything, just led the way through the office and out the back door.

  If I’d thought the gold Pontiac was outdated, then the purple Gremlin that sat against the curb was a dinosaur. I might not have even recognized it if it weren’t for a silly book Tim had brought home about the worst cars ever. I couldn’t remember where the Gremlin was in the lineup, but I did think it got a better rating than the Pinto, which apparently tended to catch fire spontaneously.

  Those cars were in and out again before I was even born.

  Jeff Coleman, however, was about ten years older than me, if I could hazard a guess, and he probably had some sort of nostalgic warm feeling about this funny-looking car with a long snout and a back end that looked like it had its tail chopped off.

  “Whose car is this?” I asked as Jeff opened the passenger door for me. Chivalrous. Who knew?

  I had to wait until he got into the driver’s seat before he said, “It’s my mother’s.”

  This made sense. Somehow I could see how this car’s quirkiness would appeal to someone like Sylvia. A vintage car for a vintage woman.

  “Are you really taking me to Tim?” I asked.

  “I’m taking you home. If he happens to be there, then I guess, yeah, I’m taking you to Tim.”

  Home. Immediately I thought about my queen-sized bed with the fluffy white cotton sheets. Now I wanted nothing more than to crawl under the covers and sleep for about three days. I felt like I’d been up for a month. And that vodka I’d had at Chez Tango had made me sleepy without my even realizing it.

  “Sorry about your tires,” I said.

  “What did you do?”

  “Hey, I didn’t do it,” I argued.

  “No, I know that,” he said, taking a cigarette out of his breast pocket and sticking it in his mouth.

  “Can you not smoke in here?” I asked.

  He gave me a quick glance before looking back at the road again. He kept the cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. Security blanket, I guess.

  “I mean,” he said, the cigarette wobbling between his lips, “what did you get into that someone had to slash my tires?”

  I sighed. There had been so much all day that it could’ve been any number of things. And for some reason, my brain settled on Frank DeBurra. Maybe he’d found me after all and was mad I’d ducked out on him at the hospital.

  No, he didn’t know to look for a gold Pontiac.

  He certainly didn’t know to look for a purple Gremlin.

  Why the heck would a car company call a car a Gremlin?

  “Earth to Kavanaugh,” Jeff was saying.

  “Oh, yeah, sorry. I’m a little tired.”

  I saw his hand twitch on the steering wheel, like he wanted to maybe reach out and touch me but stopped himself in time.

  I studied his profile. Even though he was a couple inches shorter than me and possibly way too old, he wasn’t a bad-looking guy if you looked close enough. The salt-and-pepper buzz cut made him look a little military. Hmmm.

  “Were you in the army?” I asked.

  His expression changed slightly; he clenched his jaw and his eyes narrowed, but he kept staring straight ahead at the road.

  “Marines,” he said, so softly I had to lean over to hear him. “Gulf War.”

  Suddenly this was way too much information.

  “I found fifty thousand dollars in Trevor McKay’s boots,” I volunteered, eager to change the subject.

  Jeff slammed on the brakes, and my body jerked forward, only to be jerked back again by the seat belt.

  “Hey!” I said, clutching the dashboard.

  He pointed up. “Red light. Sorry. So what was this? Fifty thousand dollars? Boots? Kavanaugh, it’s no wonder someone’s trying to ground you. Where’s the money now?”

  “I left it there.”

  He did look at me now, with an expression of such incredulity that I started to laugh. “You should see yourself,” I said.

  His face didn’t change. “You left fifty thousand dollars in some guy’s boots in his apartment? And he’s dead? And you found a dead guy this morning? And my tires got slashed? What else?”

  I managed to ease down to a couple of chuckles. “What else? What do you mean, what else?”

  “I’ve never known anyone who had more things happen to her than you, Kavanaugh.”

  “Why do you always call me Kavanaugh?” I asked.

  He just shook his head and put his foot on the accelerator, and the car shot forward, forcing me this time against the seat back.

  “Watch it!”

  “Where does this guy live?” Jeff asked casually. Too casually.

  I knew what he was up to.

  “We don’t have a key. Kyle’s got it, and he’s all MissTique’d up at Chez Tango right about now.”

  “Do we need a key?”

  It was the way he said it that made me take notice. Like he didn’t need a key. I was exhausted and wanted to go home in the worst way, but at the same time curious about what he had in mind. I wasn’t eager, either, to face Tim’s wrath. Or possibly find Frank DeBurra parked on my doorstep.

  So I told him where Trevor lived.

  It was late afternoon and the sun had started to fall, casting a glare across the windshield and causing me to squint. I wished I had my sunglasses, but they were in my bag somewhere with the police. I flipped down the visor, but the rays peeked underneath.

  Jeff and I settled into a companionable silence on the way. I was running over all the day’s events; I had no idea what Jeff was thinking. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  I indicated the apartment complex. Jeff pulled into the lot and eased the Gremlin into a visitor’s space.

  On the way up to the apartment, I stopped suddenly.

  “What?” Jeff asked.

  “I left Trevor’s laptop in the Pontiac,” I said. “That was stupid.”

  “We’ll just stop and get it on the way back,” Jeff said. How could he be so calm and levelheaded?

  We reached the door and Jeff tried the knob. Locke
d, as I’d said.

  “Kavanaugh, you might want to turn around for this,” he said, reaching into his back pocket.

  He was right. I didn’t want to see what he was going to do. I stepped away from the door and leaned my back against the wall just to the left of it, eyeing the Gremlin in the lot. It really was an ugly car, and it had been a rather bumpy ride. The Pontiac was much smoother. But then again, it wasn’t half a car.

  I was so distracted by the Gremlin that when I heard it, I didn’t recognize it for what it was, and all of a sudden Jeff Coleman was on top of me, forcing us both to the ground, his arms around me, my head shoved against his neck.

  The second gunshot registered.

  Chapter 35

  I could feel Jeff’s heartbeat against my chest, going in synch with mine. My face was smothered, and he smelled like cigarettes and ink and baby wipes. Comfort smells.

  And then I felt his hand in a place where I never wanted Jeff Coleman’s hand to be.

  I tried to shrug him off, but his grip grew tighter.

  “They’re shooting at us from inside the apartment,” he whispered, his breath tickling the side of my face.

  “Who?”

  “This is your movie, Kavanaugh, not mine. You tell me.”

  I had a flash of Rusty Abbott’s warning that accidents happen.

  But an accident is falling off a ladder, getting hit with a baseball, having a fender bender.

  It’s not being shot at outside a dead drag queen’s apartment.

  At least not in my world.

  “We have to get out of here.” Jeff was still whispering.

  “How?” I was afraid if we got up, they’d start shooting again.

  Before he could answer, however, we heard the sirens. One of the neighbors probably had heard the shots and called the cops. Of course, whoever it was didn’t feel compelled to come outside and see what was going on.

  Two police cruisers rolled into my line of vision. We were just one story up, and I could see them between the slats in the railing overlooking the parking lot. They stopped just below us. Right in front of the Gremlin. That wouldn’t do.