Marked Man

28

“I don’t know what you’re going on about so much,” said Skink. “It ain’t like you’re the only one what ever got hisself inked.”

“But I might be the only one who didn’t remember getting it,” I said.

“Oh, don’t give yourself so much credit, mate. If it weren’t for the mind-numbing effects of alcohol, half these joints would be out of business.”

By these joints, he meant tattoo parlors, because that’s where we were, in a tattoo parlor, or, to be more precise, a tattoo emporium, Beppo’s Tattoo Emporium. Tacked onto the walls of the cramped and dark waiting room were Beppo’s original designs: dragons and griffins, swords and daggers, religious icons, movie stars, insects and guns, dancing spark plugs, frogs and scorpions, skeletons and clowns, geisha dancers, samurai warriors, naked women in all manner of lascivious pose. Scattered about the waiting room were a few plastic chairs, a ragged coffee table with loose-leaf notebooks filled with art. The place smelled of ammonia and rubbing alcohol, of cigarettes smoked to the filter. From behind the curtain that covered the doorway came a steady buzz punctuated here and there by a whimper of pain.

“You find anything on that Lavender Hill yet?”

“I’ve been asking around.”

“And making noise about it, too. He is not happy.”

“It’s how you wanted it, mate. Apparently he has a hand in many pots and just as many names.”

“No surprise there.”

“Those what know him some think of him as a harmless fop with impeccable taste. But those what know him better are too scared to talk.”

“That’s troubling.” I thought of the outline of Ralph’s body on the carpet of his house. “Any reputation for heartless violence?”

“Heartless and otherwise.”

A yelp erupted from the back room. The buzz stopped for a moment. There was a loud slap, and then the buzzing started again.

“I had a friend once,” said Skink, “what got a tattoo of a rooster on his shin. The rooster had a noose round its neck. He said that way he could always tell the dolls he had a cock what hung below his knee.”

“He sounds like quite the ladies’ man. Anything yet on the federal investigation involving Bradley Hewitt?”

“I’m working on it,” said Skink. “We might have an errand to run in a few days that you’ll enjoy.”

There was another yelp and a falsetto curse, followed by a harsh “Calm your tools, we almost done,” before the buzzing started up again.

“You think this Beppo can help?”

“Oh, Beppo’s a pro, he is. The other artists in the city, they call him the dean. We’ve had no luck tracing the name, so we might as well trace the tattoo. He’s our best bet to pick who did the what on your chest. We find him that did it, we might find us some answers.”

“What’s there to find? I stumbled in drunk as a skunk and immortalized on my chest the name of a woman I hardly knew and can’t remember.”

“Well, mate, all that might be true. But the needle boy might remember who you was with and might be able to tell us how he was paid. Interesting, isn’t it, that your money was intact and nothing came up on your credit card?”

“Maybe she paid,” I said.

“Maybe she did, unusual as that might sound, and if she did, and paid with something other than cash, we might be able to trace her that way.”

“It’s worth a try, I guess.”

The buzzing stopped, replaced by a quiet, pathetic whimpering.

“How do you know this guy?” I said.

“I did him a favor once. While you’re in the chair, you want I tell Beppo to put a rooster on your shin?”

“No thanks, Phil.”

“It might help your social life.”

“My social life’s fine.”

“Oh, is it, now? You go out with that girl again?”

“What girl?”

“The one from the club, the one with the sister.”

“Monica? No, please. I didn’t go out with her in the first place.”

“You bought her dinner.”

“I paid the check at a diner. It didn’t mean we were dating.”

“What, you too good to date a stripper?”

“It’s not that.”

“I dated a stripper once. In Fresno. Nice girl, name of Shawna. Pious.”

“Pious?”

“For a stripper.”

Just then the curtain across the doorway swung open and a young kid in a T-shirt came out, his left arm hanging limply, a long white gauze patch covering his entire upper arm. His face was red and swollen, but it held a wide, helpless smile, like he was stepping out of his first whorehouse.

As the kid passed us by, a stocky older man came through the doorway, pulling rubber gloves off his hands. He had dark hair and big ears, a jutting jaw, the short, bow-shaped legs of a longshoreman. His thick arms were covered in tattoos from his wrists until they disappeared under his T-shirt. A cigarette dangled out of his mouth. He smiled when he saw Skink.

“You been waiting all this time?” he said. His voice had been burned rough by life and tobacco, and as he spoke, his cigarette stayed miraculously in place, as if glued to his lower lip. “I’da kicked it into third, I knew you was here.”

“Didn’t want to disturb the artist at work,” said Skink. “How’s business, Beppo?”

“I’m grinding them out.”

“What’s up with Tommy?”

“After you bailed out his ass, he up and joined the marines.”

“How’s he doing?”

“His second tour in Iraq. Maybe you should have left him where he was. So you the guy?”

“I’m the guy.”

“This is Victor,” said Skink.

“Where’s the piece, Victor?” said Beppo.

“On my chest.”

“All right, then,” he said as he held aside the curtain. “Strip to the waist and hop in the chair so I can get a look-see.”

The room behind the curtain was small and bright, with an overhead light and a chair in the middle that looked suspiciously like a dentist’s chair. I took off my jacket, my tie and shirt, and as I did, I had the uncomfortable sensation that I was exposing more than mere flesh, I was exposing a part of my inner life.

“Don’t be shy, Victor,” said Beppo. “I seen it all before, good art and bad art, the vile and the sublime.”

“You think you can identify the ink slinger?” said Skink.

“If he’s from around here, I can make an educated guess,” said Beppo. “I’ve seen the work of pretty much every shop in town. A big piece of my day is fixing up the mistakes of everyone else. If it’s an original, I’ll be able to ID it. Up in the chair you go.”

My shirt off, I slid into the dentist’s chair and leaned back. My jaw instinctively lowered.

“Close your mouth, I ain’t pulling molars,” he said as he slipped on a pair of thick glasses and leaned his head close to my chest. “Let’s take a look.” The ash of his cigarette teetered, he rubbed his fingers over my breast. His touch was strangely gentle. He made a sound like a failing carburetor as he looked over the work.

“No skin scratcher here,” he said. “This is nice work, made with a first-class iron. Classic design. Solid fill, the colors bright and even. Keep it clean, use the goo, and stay out of the sun. The sun fades everything. You look after that piece, Victor, it’ll stay sharp for years.”

“That’s comforting.”

“This Chantal lady, she must be very special to you.”

“Oh, she’s special, all right.”

“Any ideas?” said Skink.

“Not right off. The quality is high, and I think I seen the design before, but I don’t recognize it as from one of the local artists. Haven’t seen one exactly like this in years.” He leaned closer, peered through his glasses, pawed at the skin. “Wait a second. Wait a freaking second. I’ll be right back.”

He skittered through a bead curtain at the back of the room. We could hear him climbing a set of stairs, then footsteps and voices above us.

“He lives up top,” said Skink.

“Handy.”

“That’s his girlfriend he’s talking with,” said Skink. “She’s sixty-eight. The girl he cheats on her with is fifty-four. And then there’s a piece what he keeps on the side.”

When Beppo came back down, he had a fresh cigarette dangling from a victorious smile and he carried a big black book cracked open.

“I know the puncher what created the design on your chest,” he said.

“Who’s our boy?” said Skink, rubbing his hands.

“A fellow name of Les Skuse.”

“Skuse?”

“Yeah, with a k. Skuse. I knew I had seen that exact tat before. I been keeping a record of all the designs I seen since I started in this business. And I have a couple of pages of original Les Skuse designs. Let me show you. Right here.”

I sat up in the chair as he dropped his book on my lap. The pages were encased in vinyl covers. One page held a dozen designs of coiled snakes and dripping swords, of spiders and birds and skulls. The other page had hearts, all kinds of hearts, hearts with daggers through them, hearts being held aloft by fresh-cheeked cherubs, hearts with flowers, with arrows, with kissing figures above a banner reading TRUE LOVE. And then, in the corner, a familiar design, my design, a heart with flowers peeking out of either side and a flowing banner with the words ANY NAME.

“There it is,” I said.

“That’s the one,” said Beppo. “See how even the colors on the flowers match? Yellow and red on the one, blue and yellow on the other.”

“So Les Skuse is our guy,” said Skink. “Give me a where, Beppo.”

“Bristol.”

“Bristol, Pennsylvania?”

“Nope. The other Bristol.”

“England?” I said.

“Exactly so. Les Skuse was the self-labeled champion tattoo artist of all Britain. I met the man once. Quite a brute.” Beppo rolled up his sleeve, pointed to an eagle spreading its wings amidst a veritable zoo on his arm. “He did this. He’s a legend, all right. But even if you go out that way, you’d have a hard time finding him. He up and died a good long while ago.”

“I don’t understand how that’s possible,” I said.

“Well, he was getting up there in years. He was already old when he did my eagle, and being by the sea, he spent a lot of time in the sun.”

“No, what I’m asking is how-”

“I knows what you’re asking, Victor,” said Beppo, letting out a raspy laugh. “You should get out more, lighten up. You got a girl?”

“No.”

“Walk around without your shirt, you’ll find one. Nothing draws the girls like a tattoo.”

“But how did this design end up on my chest?”

“Somebody swiped the design, is how. It’s no crime. I done it myself.”

“Any idea why he’d pick that one?” said Skink.

“Sure,” said Beppo. “You see, every artist got his own style. It can’t help but come out, even on something as simple as a heart. Little telltale things like shading and shape, the way the barbed wire winds around it. As identifiable as a fingerprint.”

“Unless you copy someone else’s heart,” said Skink.

“There you go, Phil. The slinger who inked your tattoo, Victor, he picked this design because it’s the kind of thing you ink if you don’t want anyone to know who it was that done the inking.”

“He didn’t want me to find him,” I said.

“That’s right, and I suppose that means he knew you’d be looking, too.”

“Why would he want to hide?” I said.

“How the hell would I know?” said Beppo. “Ask Chantal.”