Ink Flamingos Read Free Page A

he didn’t seriously think I had anything to do with any of this, but he had to ask.
    “I’ve been here all day,” I said. “Got witnesses, too. Bitsy and Joel and Ace, not to mention the two clients.” Clients. Like the one I’d abandoned in my room to watch the news report. “Uh, speaking of which,” I added, “I’ve got to go.”
    “So you didn’t do her tattoo?” Tim asked, ignoring me.
    Might as well tell him. “Which one?” I asked.
    “What do you mean, which one?”
    “Last I knew, I’d done all Daisy’s tattoos, well, except for . . .” My voice trailed off.
    “Except for what?”
    “The flamingo. Well, I did the black part of it. A while back, actually. Maybe last year? I can have Bitsy check the records. I didn’t do the color, though. She told me she was never going to have color in a tattoo because of an allergy. I don’t know why she’d change her mind.”
    Tim was quiet a second, then asked, “How do you know, then, that the flamingo has color?”
    “There’s a blog. A picture on a blog.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “A little while ago, I found a blog called Skin Deep. There’s a picture of it. The flamingo.” As I spoke, I realized the implications of what I was saying. The blogger took the picture, and then Daisy was found dead. I voiced my thoughts.
    “Do you know the URL for the blog?” Tim asked, his tone switching from Chatty Brother to Official Cop.
    “I’ve got it here on my screen.” I was aware of Bitsy and Joel staring at me as I recited the URL for my brother. I was also more and more aware of my client, waiting for me. I put a hand over the phone receiver and said to Bitsy, “Can you go tell Patty I’ll be in shortly? That there’s something I have to take care of right now?”
    She was out the door before I’d finished. This was why I kept her on after I bought the business from Flip Armstrong. Bitsy was one of the most efficient workers I’d ever known, and she had institutional memory like no one else’s.
    As I listened to Tim tapping on his own keyboard, I scrolled down past the elaborate header decorated with Ed Hardy tattoo designs, clearly pirated from the Internet, a surprise since the blogger took pictures of tattoos and would get more mileage out of them if those were used in the design instead.
    After a few seconds, Tim said, “Okay, got it.” A pause, then, “So what can you tell me just looking at this?”
    I went back to the picture of the tattoo, scrutinizing it a little differently now that I knew Daisy was dead.
    “It’s definitely mine, like I said, but before the color.” I peered more closely at the screen. Maybe if I concentrated on the tattoo, didn’t think about Daisy and how her life had been cut short, was more professional about this, then maybe I could be objective.
    Problem was, even though the picture was pretty big, the quality was lousy, like maybe it was taken with a cell phone camera. That didn’t help the cause, because I needed to see the sharp black lines as compared to the shaded color parts, and there was nothing sharp about it.
    “I would have to see it in person,” I said.
    “Well, that’s not going to happen,” Tim snipped.
    “I didn’t think it would,” I snipped back. “But that’s the only way I’d be able to tell for sure what parts are new.” Even though I’d already told him.
    “How many tattoos did you give her?”
    “Ten,” I said without hesitation. “The flamingo was number eight.”
    “You’re sure about the number?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I said. “Why?”
    “Do you remember what the tattoos were of?”
    Off the top of my head, I recalled the flamingo, that tree branch winding around her arm, her name in Chinese characters, a portrait of Janis Joplin—her hero—a Japanese crane, Betty Boop, a peacock, the logo for the Flamingo resort, a weeping willow—she loved my Monet’s garden sleeve and wanted to replicate the tree—and a rose. I rattled them off for