morning I didn’t even know this thing existed. It was better that way.”
I felt Joel’s hand on my back, rubbing in a circular motion. “It’s not so bad, Brett. At least you’re all dressed and stuff. And she didn’t take any pictures of you eating. That could be really embarrassing.”
Got to hand it to Joel to see the silver lining in this. Another tap on the door.
“Come in,” Joel and I said together.
Bitsy’s eyebrows rose high on her forehead when she saw me with my head down, Joel rubbing my back.
“Are you okay?” she asked me. “Are you sick? Do you need some aspirin?”
“I’m fine,” I said, although not exactly confidently.
“Someone took pictures of her,” Joel said, pointing at the laptop.
Bitsy came over to the desk and pulled the laptop to the edge so she could see.
“At least there are no pictures of you picking your nose or anything,” she said. Okay, another silver lining. “It’s really not so bad, is it?”
How to explain the feeling of violation?
“You know,” Bitsy added, “this is a pretty interesting blog. These tattoos are really good.”
She turned the laptop so we could see the tattoos she was talking about. Elaborate designs, detailed portraits, work I would be proud of if I’d done it.
“You’re in good company,” Joel said.
My cell phone rang. Jeff Coleman again.
“I thought you had a client,” I said without any other greeting.
“Nice to talk to you again, too, Kavanaugh,” he said sarcastically, then, “I forgot to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“To read the comments.”
“What comments?” A butterfly started flittering around in my stomach.
“The comments on the blog post about you. Figured you should know.” He hung up.
I didn’t really want to look at them. But I couldn’t help myself. I reached over to the laptop and scrolled back up to the post about me and looked at the link for the comments. There were three.
I glanced up at Joel and Bitsy and then clicked on the link.
The first comment was from someone called MeganB: “Where is her shop?”
SkinDeep: “At the Venetian.”
But the clincher was from TitforTat: “I’d stay away from there. She gave Dee Carmichael a botched tattoo that killed her.”
The time on the third comment indicated that it was made an hour ago, despite the fact that the pictures had been posted a couple of weeks ago. Who was TitforTat? There was no link attached to the name, which meant that the person was posting practically anonymously. Usually, though, anyone who commented had to fill out a form with an e-mail address that wasn’t published.
I reached again for my cell phone. Tim had to know about this. He had to find this person who was accusing me of killing Daisy. Maybe this person was the redhead seen at the Golden Palace, the one who really did kill her.
Granted, I still didn’t know how Daisy had died, but that was another thing to press Tim about.
“What is it, Brett?” Tim’s voice was curt. He was working, and I was interrupting.
But he needed to know about this. I told him about the blog, the pictures of me, and the comment left.
“I already saw it.”
“You did?”
“Don’t worry about it, okay? We’re on top of it.”
“Have you found her yet-Ainsley Wainwright?”
“Listen, Brett, I have to go. I’m working. I’ll see you at home later, okay, and I’ll fill you in then.” He hung up on me without saying good-bye, much like Jeff Coleman had. If I were more insecure, I might start to get a complex or something.
“He says they’re working on it,” I told Bitsy and Joel.
They exchanged a look, and Joel nodded. “That’s all we can do for now. I say we get some gelato. Make us feel better.”
“You’re not supposed to have sugar,” I reminded him.
“It’s a special occasion.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “It’s always a special occasion,” I said. “But not this time. I won’t be responsible for you going off your diet.” I didn’t want to point out that he’d been doing a fine job of it by himself, without any help from me.
Bitsy, however, didn’t have the same sort of tact.
“I saw you going into Godiva earlier,” she scolded. “Chocolate and gelato in the same day? And you expect to lose weight? That’s ridiculous.”
Joel sighed. He’d lost some weight on the Atkins Diet, but he’d gained it all back and then some. The Weight Watchers had been worse. He hadn’t even lost anything on that, just gained.
“I’m thinking about that diet where you have to buy your food. You know, the one those celebrities do those commercials for? Hey, maybe I can do one of those commercials.” His face lit up as he thought about it. “I’m a regular person. If I lose weight, then regular people everywhere will feel they can, too.”
I smiled. Joel, a regular person? There wasn’t a more irregular person anywhere, and I mean that in the most affectionate way. Joel was large, but his heart was bigger than his body, although anyone who hadn’t met him might be a little frightened. He looked like a biker, with a long blond braid hanging halfway to his waist, a barbed wire tattoo around his neck, tattoo sleeves running down both arms, and chains holding his keys dangling from his jeans pockets. When he opened his mouth, though, his voice was as soft as his personality. We weren’t quite sure which way Joel swung, since we’d never heard him talk about a girlfriend or a boyfriend, but it didn’t much matter. He was Joel, and we loved him just the way he was.
A bell rang out in the front of the shop, indicating that someone had come in. Bitsy scurried out the door to see who it was.
Joel squeezed my arm. “It’ll be okay, Brett. Don’t worry.”
We followed Bitsy out to see Harry leaning against the front desk. Harry Desmond had discovered us one night when he was trying to find the Mexican restaurant here in the Grand Canal Shoppes. Since then, he’d been hanging around. He was a victim of the recession, told us he’d gotten laid off from his job as a blackjack dealer at one of the casinos, so he had a lot of time on his hands.
Today he was dressed in his usual uniform of shorts and a bright Hawaiian shirt. He was about twenty-five, I’d say, with a college degree in philosophy and eighteenth-century English poetry. He wasn’t qualified to do much of anything, which was why the casino had seemed like a good way to go. Until the layoff. Somehow he was managing to live off his unemployment checks.
Harry always seemed to be a little stoned. Not totally, just a little. Maybe it was the way his bright blue eyes fixated on me as if he were seeing me for the first time. Or the languid way he spoke, drawing out all his words like a Faulkner novel. Or how he used his hands when he talked, in long, slow lines, to emphasize what he was saying.
Every tattoo shop has at least one Harry, someone who stops in and seems to become a fixture. We hadn’t had one before, probably because we were mixed in with all the upscale shops, and until Harry arrived, I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed that particular eccentricity of a tattoo shop.
Oddly enough, Harry didn’t have any tattoos. He kept saying when he got a little cash in his pocket, he’d have one of us tattoo him. So far, though, no extra cash. At least not that we knew of.
As we approached the front desk, Harry looked up and grinned.
“It’s the beautiful Brett Kavanaugh, the delightful Bitsy Hendricks, and the esteemed Joel Sloane,” he said, bowing at the waist. “I was wondering if you’d heard about Dee Carmichael.”
“We did,” I said.
