Pretty In Ink

I thought about my brother, Detective Tim Kavanaugh. I wondered whether he’d show up. He might be a little surprised to find me here at Chez Tango.

It was opening night of MissTique’s new Nylons and Tattoos show, featuring Britney, Miranda, Lola LaTuche, and Marva Luss.

Drag queens.

They’d chosen The Painted Lady, my tattoo shop, as the one they’d entrusted with designing their new ink, because Charlotte Sampson, our trainee, knew Britney, who was Trevor McKay when he wasn’t dolled up. In Charlotte ’s other life, as an accountant, she’d done Trevor’s taxes the past couple of years. When Trevor found out Charlotte had ditched her former career choice to be a tattoo artist, he said it must be karma.

Because of our contribution to the show, Charlotte; my shop manager, Bitsy Hendricks; my friend and tattooist Joel Sloane; and I had been given the VIP treatment: free drinks, a great table, a backstage tour. The only one in our shop who had chosen not to come was Ace van Nes, who had issues with the idea of a drag show-but he had issues with a lot of things. I’d been a little leery at first, too, for different reasons than Ace, but I easily caved to peer pressure when Charlotte, Bitsy, and Joel said we just had to be there.

So that’s how we ended up covered in champagne, the music blasting, a strobe light cutting across Britney’s body as she lay sprawled on the stage, her five-inch red platform heels pointing toward the ceiling and looking oddly like the Wicked Witch of the West’s just after the house fell on her.

My eyes were still smarting from the bubbly, and I closed them again for a second. When I did, my memory kicked back to the guy who’d sprayed me. I hadn’t seen his face. The strobe had created a cutout image, his outline flashing light, then dark too fast for me to remember many details, especially with the oversized hooded sweatshirt and baggy jeans that hung precariously low from his hips, with bunched-up boxers protruding from the top as though he was some urban kid.

But he’d had his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Maybe he didn’t want to get any of the Moet on himself. By doing that, however, he’d given me something I could share with my brother the detective. Something that I would never miss.

He had a tattoo on the inside of his right forearm. A rather distinctive one.

It was a queen-of-hearts playing card.

Chapter 2

Someone finally shut off the strobe when the cops showed up, and replaced the dim lights with bright ones that accentuated the weariness of the night: spilled booze, smudged martini glasses, a couple of shoeless heels. Even the hunky background dancers looked a bit worse for the wear. And while the champagne was spilled only halfway through the show, there had been enough cocktails beforehand to get a third world country drunk.

I didn’t see my brother with the two uniforms who’d escorted the paramedics onstage to tend to Britney. Then again, it didn’t seem logical that a detective would be sent here. While it was clear to me that the guy who shot the cork at Britney was aiming for her, she may have gotten only a bump on the back of the head when she fell.

But I remembered that actress who’d had what everyone initially thought was a minor bump on the head, too. She died just hours later. Maybe I should tell those uniformed cops that the cork was shot on purpose. I could at least give them a description of the tattoo, even though I hadn’t seen the guy’s face.

I felt something tug on my foot as I started toward them. I glanced down. My shoe was stuck to some spirit gum and sporting a curly blond wig that had somehow lost its drag queen.

“You know you’re dragging something that looks like a dead cat, don’t you?” Joel asked.

I was one step ahead of him. I leaned against his arm and lifted my foot, pulling the wig off my shoe with a yank. I waved it in front of him, accidentally hitting Bitsy with it. I hadn’t seen her come around the other side of him.

She made a face at me and brushed at the wig. “Where’d you get that?”

I tossed it on one of the large speakers next to the stage, where male dancers had been performing as Britney lipsynched. “I saw him,” I said simply.

Bitsy looked at me as if I had three heads. “What?”

“I saw the guy with the champagne. The cork-it hit her. He aimed it at her.”

Joel tugged my arm. “You have to tell them.” He indicated the cops. So even Joel thought it was a good idea.

We made our way over to the stage. Joel is good in a crowd. He weighs about three hundred pounds and few people can get past him. Bitsy, however, was again missing.

As we approached, I did see a detective, after all, near the edge of the stage. I could tell he was a detective because of the cheap-looking green sport jacket and gray Dockers frayed at the bottoms. His hair was cropped short and his ears stuck out, giving him the appearance of an impish Santa’s elf. And he had that look about him. That cop look. The one my dad had. The one my brother has.

“Excuse me?” I said loudly, trying to get his attention.

He didn’t hear me.

“Excuse me!” I said more loudly.

He turned and looked right through me.

“Excuse me!” The third time is said to be a charm, but he hardly looked charmed. He frowned.

“Yes?”

“I saw the guy who hit her with the cork,” I said.

He leaned over and whispered something to one of the uniforms before turning back to me, rolling his eyes and sighing. I didn’t hear the sigh, but I could see his chest rise and fall. I thought maybe he should think about asking MissTique for a job. He obviously had a flair for the dramatic. I wondered what he’d look like in a dress, then immediately tried to erase the image from my head. It wasn’t pretty.

As he jumped down off the stage to join me and Joel-Bitsy had somehow scrambled up onstage and was talking to Charlotte now-I noticed that he was older than I’d originally thought. Or maybe it was the lighting that showed off the wrinkles around his eyes and the sag of his jaw. I wondered what I looked like in this dreadful light.

Sister Mary Eucharista, my teacher at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy School, would’ve said I shouldn’t be so vain while Britney was being moved onto a gurney.

A gurney?

“Are they taking her to the hospital? I thought she was okay.”

The cop shrugged. “Hit her head pretty hard on the floor. Paramedics want to make sure she doesn’t have a concussion.” He was distracted, checking out my tattoos. His eyes followed the Monet water lily garden up my arm to the dragon poking its head up through the low neckline of my silk blouse, which was sticking to me because it was wet from the champagne. Fortunately, it was black, so he couldn’t see the rest of the dragon curling around my torso, meeting up with the tiger lily that slinked down from my breast to my hip. My jeans hid Napoleon riding his horse up the Alps on my right calf, the ink so new it still had a bubblegum pinkish hue, and my blouse also covered the Celtic cross on my upper back.

In a moment of solidarity, the cop moved his sleeve up to show a snake curled around his left arm just above his wrist.

“Nice,” I said politely, although it was probably flash, a stock tattoo. At The Painted Lady, we do only custom ink.

He grinned. “So, what happened here? We can’t get a real answer out of any of those fags.”