Pied Piper

CHAPTER 52

Boldt failed to see the romance of the French Quarter. For years he had heard stories about the mix of French and black cultures, of voodoo, umbrella drinks, of Creole bar girls with bodies like centerfolds, of blues and jazz drifting onto cobblestone streets at three in the morning and fresh oysters the size of golf balls. Instead, he saw only a giant tourist attraction, a Disneyland for alcoholics and unfaithful husbands masquerading as conventioneering businessmen. The locals provided color in street music, juggling and costuming, but to Boldt it felt contrived. The Quarter had been great once-it reeked of history-but the Chamber of Commerce and tourist board had cleaned it up for the McDonald’s crowd in a way that left it too slick, too polished, too Kodak, too little of the soul that had once fueled its engines.

The tattoo shop was called Samantha’s Body Art. Its wooden sign hanging out front depicted a large-breasted woman vampire clad in black lingerie and straddling a Harley holding a delicate paintbrush trained onto the naked form of a pale female ghost. Located outside the Quarter in an area of hairdressers, Tarot card readers and personal injury attorneys, the shop made the most of neon. The smell of pot and incense tainted the air.

Samantha did not exist. In a city of pretense, the tough behind the needle went by the name Maurice. He wore a silver stud in his left ear, had biceps the color and density of ebony and a shaved head that looked like an eight ball. He wore a T-shirt that showed two women fornicating in the palm of an outstretched hand. No explanation. The place was for bikers and sailors. Its walls bore hundreds of designs. It took Boldt a minute to locate the eagle, wedged as it was between the space shuttle and the butt end of a pig, but when he finally did identify it, the likeness to Tommy Thompson’s rendition was unmistakable.

“Help you?” Maurice asked. A voice dipped in roofing tar saturated by nonfilters.

“I’m interested in this design,” Boldt said, pointing out the eagle.

“You heat?”

“Who’s asking? And why?”

“You ain’t drunk enough and you ain’t young enough to be wanting something like that. As for what you is, you got the look, you know? I can spot that look.”

“Apparently you can,” Boldt agreed. “But you missed with me. I’m private heat.”

“Not from around here, you ain’t.”

“Not from around here, no.”

Boldt pulled a fifty dollar bill from his pocket that he had waiting. “A client of mine is interested in a man who’s wearing one of these birds on his forearm.”

“It ain’t a bird, it’s an eagle.”

“Do a lot of them, do you?” Boldt toyed with the fifty, a man who wasn’t certain if he would spend it or keep it.

“Not many.”

“I tell my client I paid fifty for information, and I get reimbursed whether I paid it out or not.” He slipped it into his pocket and then pulled it back out.

“That’s a good gig.” The guy liked the sight of the fifty. The public wasn’t exactly banging down his doors.

“I’d be pleased if you remembered a name or a face.”

“Bet you would.”

“A date, a time of year. Anything like that and the fifty’s yours.”

The man’s fingers reminded Boldt of chocolate candy rolls, thumbs like cigar butts. One of those fingers pointed out a half dozen black vinyl photo albums chained to the wall and sitting atop a small counter. The counter was pockmarked with an army of cigarette burns, lined up like a regiment. The man explained, “They sell better in person. Look better than hanging on the wall. Besides, guys get off looking at all the tits and ass-you wouldn’t believe some of the shit girls want, and where they put it. And we take pictures of all of it, man. ’Cause the way it works out-you think nobody never done something like that, but shit, then you see it there in the book and it don’t look half bad and you think, maybe you want one too. Least that’s the way it works out. Anything you can think of, it been done. And I personally have laid some art down on inner thighs, ass, pussy, tits, cocks-you name it. I seen it all, done it all.”

“These are photo albums?”

“Damn straight.”

Boldt opened one of the books. For shock value, he supposed, female genitalia and breasts occupied the first page. He blushed at what he saw exposed there, and what the owner of the tattoo had chosen to do to her body. One woman’s shaved crotch had been painted into a face with an obvious mouth. It stood out from the snake winding up to an enlarged nipple, the daisy around the navel, the hummingbirds in cleavage, and the inner thigh with Cupid’s arrow aiming at labia. “These are disgusting,” he said, “you don’t mind me saying so.”

“’Course I mind. It’s art, man. You’re looking all wrong. That there is quality work. Fine pitch, good solid color. A person wants to ’xpress hisself, that’s a good thing. It’s a free fucking country.”

Boldt leafed through the plastic pages of Polaroids. “They let you take pictures like this?” he gasped. Page upon page of buttocks and breasts, penises, ankles, necks, eyelids, fingers. Gray’s Anatomy courtesy of the Cartoon Network.

“It’s not like you know who they are.”

No, it’s not, Boldt thought, wondering why he would bother to look on. Driven by a voyeuristic curiosity, he did just that, landing on a page of motorcycles and nudes on forearms, male chests and biceps. The detail and color were in fact extraordinary for flesh art. “It’s good stuff,” he said conversationally.

“A couple my pieces been in a gallery down in the Quarter,” the man bragged. “A swan I done using a guy’s dick, and another of Van Gogh’s irises right up the bikini line, you know? This girl could’a walked the beach and you wouldn’ta even known she was bare ass.”

“Impressive,” Boldt muttered cynically. “You have repeats in here,” he said.

“Same artwork, different body location. The images look different, depending where you put them. We try to show it all.”

“You have eagles in here?”

“Third or fourth book, I think. One of ’em’s nothing but animals: frogs, lizards, snakes. I do a lot of reptiles, for whatever reason.”

“And you do all of this work?”

“I didn’t do all of it, no. ’Course not. But I could. Sure. What my eye sees, my hands can paint.”

“That includes the women?”

“Some guys get their girls to pose. I’m not shitting you. Imagination plays into it,” said the artiste. He had a wide boyish smile, not at all what Boldt might have expected from such a brute.

Boldt worked through the lions, pussy cats, tigers, an aardvark, pandas, teddy bears and landed on a series of bald eagles. A profile of just the beak and head. An eagle in flight. A number of eagles with various messages or items clutched in the talons. An eagle with its wings wrapped around its body like a cape.

Boldt pointed it out.

“My own design. Maybe half what you see is original design. The rest I rip off from magazines, film or whatever, or I do custom from a photo or something. I charge extra for the custom work.”

“Any others?” Boldt asked, flipping the page of Polaroids, his eye immediately answering his own question as it landed on an eagle drawn onto a knotty biceps. “You did this?”

“I told you: It’s original. It’s mine.”

“There’s one missing,” Boldt stated.

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s missing. Maurice,” Boldt encouraged, making a point of the fifty, “it showed an eagle on a forearm, not a biceps.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Someone else was here ahead of me,” Boldt suggested to the man.

Boldt handed him the fifty. It had come out of his and Liz’s joint account using the ATM card. The account was seventeen hundred dollars in the red, thanks to the hospital. More now with the airfare. “Guy looks like a surfer but has an attitude. He tell you who he was?”

Maurice considered the money. “Like I gotta ask? A suit like that?”

“He took a photo with him,” Boldt stated. “He paid you how much?” Boldt asked.

Maurice pocketed Boldt’s cash. “Not enough. Fucking prick Fed.”

“Threatened to bust you.”

“The half of it,” the man said. Boldt produced another fifty. Maurice said, “I gave him the picture and I kept my door open for business.”

“He told you how to reach him in case your memory came back.” Boldt knew the routine. He pulled a third fifty out of his pocket.

“He might have mentioned the Hyatt.” The fifty disappeared into the jeans.

“Anything you left out? Anything you forgot to tell him?” Boldt’s time at the Intelligence desk had not been for naught.

The big stump of an index finger pointed out several other photos on the page. He flipped forward a page, then back two, and pointed out another row of photos. “You see that gray wall? The background? You know what that cement wall means?”

Many of the photos were shot against the same gray background. “Tell me, Maurice. What is the significance of that wall?”

“Couple times of year they bring one or another of us inside. Ends up like a fucking arts and crafts fair, know what I mean?”

Boldt felt his system charge with adrenaline. “We’re talking about the penitentiary, Maurice. The guy with the eagle on the forearm-he was doing time.”

“You got it.”

“When?”

Maurice slipped out a photo and flipped it over. “Nineteen ninety-five.”

“The suit … does he know this?”

“He didn’t ask,” Maurice said, his face spreading into a smile.