“I do.”

“I’ll take care of it. Just go in the parking lot and meet the tow truck, okay?”

“No problem.”

I was about to hang up, but he wasn’t done yet.

“Kavanaugh, it’s a good thing I like you.”

Then he hung up.

I stared at the receiver in my hand. He liked me? What did that mean? That he liked me, or that he just liked me? I hoped it was the latter. I told myself it was the latter. I was the sister he didn’t have. Or maybe another sister. I didn’t know whether he had a sister or not.

I wandered through the dressing room. Stephan Price, wearing a nylon cap over his hair, carefully outlined his eyes with black eyeliner, preparing to bring Miranda Rites out for the night. He spotted me in the mirror and put the wand down. He got up and came over to me, put his arm around my shoulders, and squeezed.

“Hey, girl. Sad about Trevor, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

“Charlotte must be torn up, huh?”

All the stress of the day chose that very moment to come out. “Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t. I can’t find her. I talked to her this morning before I found Wesley Lambert’s body. I don’t know what sort of game she’s playing.” My tone was harsher than it should have been; I shouldn’t take my frustrations out on Stephan, especially since he had nothing to do with anything that was going on.

“Wesley Lambert?”

For some reason, his brain seemed to have stuck on those two words, as if the others hadn’t registered.

I nodded. “Yeah. He’s dead. He was making poison in a condo on the Strip and managed to kill himself with it.”

“Poison?”

“Ricin. And because of him, I ended up in the emergency room, stripped to my birthday suit, and getting interrogated by Lester Fine, of all people.” I was rambling. I couldn’t stop myself.

“Lester Fine?”

“He called me a victim; he was trying to get me on TV.” I was a lost cause. I wasn’t making any sense.

“Honey, you need a drink.” Stephan leaned over to the dressing table, picked up a glass that was filled with ice and what looked like water, and handed it to me.

I chugged it. Felt like I was in college again. I didn’t even choke when I realized it was vodka. Not my drink of choice, but the moment called for it. I handed Stephan back the empty glass and thought I was going to be sick.

He got me into a chair and told me to put my head between my legs. Go figure, it worked.

“So Wesley’s dead?” Stephan asked.

I nodded as well as I could in my position. I felt Stephan’s hand massaging my scalp. It felt good.

“I knew he’d get into trouble someday. But what does Lester Fine have to do with it?”

“Nothing. He was just trying to drum up the sympathy vote, I think.” I raised my head and didn’t feel sick anymore. Actually, I was feeling rather warm and fuzzy. A glass of vodka would do that to you.

I had another thought.

“But somehow his personal assistant, Rusty Abbott, is part of all this. I just know it. He’s got the queen-of-hearts tattoo, you know, on his inner forearm. He could be the one who shot Trevor with the cork. I saw the ink with my own eyes.”

Stephan laughed and sat in front of the mirror again. He started spreading bright purple eye shadow under his eyebrows. “He’s not the only one with a queen-of-hearts tattoo, you know.”

I sat up straighter. “No, I don’t know. Who else has one?”

“Wesley Lambert.”

Chapter 33

I hadn’t had a good view of Wesley Lambert’s body when he was on the floor in that condo, and because of the vomit, I hadn’t been inclined to study it, either. And then there was all that decontamination and emergency-room stuff afterward that I didn’t even think to ask any questions about the scene or Lambert, either.

If he had a tattoo like Rusty Abbott’s, and he’d been hanging around looking for Trevor and saying he’d “send him a message,” then it was likely that Lambert was the guy who shot the cork at Trevor that night.

Mystery solved.

Maybe.

There was still that little matter of all that cash in Trevor’s apartment.

And then there was Charlotte. She’d gone underground for some reason.

This wasn’t over yet.

Marva Luss was sashaying around the dressing room in front of me, but she was only partially put together, too. She had a pair of nylons on and started to pull up a pair of Speedos that were about three sizes too small. I turned away. I couldn’t watch. I didn’t want to know what was going on there.

An unfamiliar queen was layering foundation on her face. It was thick, as brown as chocolate. She caught me staring and grinned.

“You don’t need this much makeup, do you?”

I never wore foundation. My skin was as pasty as a white cotton sheet, except where I had my ink, of course. I wore only mascara, a little blush, and occasionally some lip gloss. I couldn’t imagine caking it on like these guys-girls?-did.

She leaned over and held out her hand. “Just call me Chitty,” she said.

I took her hand. She had a grip like a vise. I coughed out a short laugh. “Chitty?” I asked.

“Chitty Chitty Gang Bang.”

I pulled my hand away. This was getting a bit too surreal for me. I needed to go out and wait for the tow, like Jeff had said.

I stood, gave Stephan an air kiss, and started out.

“Brett?”

I turned to see Stephan looking at me through the mirror.

“Yeah?”

“When you find her, tell Charlotte Trevor thought the world of her.”

I nodded and smiled. “Yeah, I will.”

Kyle was pirouetting across the stage. He flipped his hand up at me.

“We’ll talk.”

“I’m sure we will,” I said.

The tow truck beat me to the parking lot. The tow guy already had the car up on the flatbed, ready to take it away. He frowned at me, a clipboard in his hand.

“You Kavanaugh?”

Great. Jeff Coleman was going to get everyone to call me by my last name.

“I am.”

“I’m dropping you off.” He indicated that I should climb up into the cab, so I did.

“So how do you know Jeff?” I asked, trying to make small talk and ignoring his stare.

“Did Jeff do your ink?” he asked.

“No. Had it done in Jersey.” Except for Napoleon on my calf, but he couldn’t see that because of my jeans, and I wasn’t going to volunteer information if I didn’t have to.

“Nice,” he said, turning back to the road.

We rode in silence through the city streets until he pulled up in front of Murder Ink.

“Here you go.”

I’d hoped Jeff would have him drop me at the Venetian, but no such luck. I thanked the guy and got out of the truck. He took off before I could get to the door, the gold car glimmering as the sun hit it.

Jeff Coleman was nowhere to be seen. His mother, Sylvia, was inking a girl’s hand. I got closer and saw it was a skull. Peering into the girl’s face, I figured she was eighteen at most. She might regret that skull in a couple of years. Or maybe even next week. I might have tried to talk her out of it. If I knew Sylvia, she’d talked her into it.

“Hello, dear,” Sylvia said without looking up, her machine whirring seamlessly as she drew.

I didn’t know exactly how old Sylvia Coleman was, but I guessed she was in her seventies, maybe even early eighties. She’d run the shop for years and then turned it over to Jeff when she “retired,” although it seemed her retirement just meant she came to the shop for half a day instead of a full day. Sylvia wasn’t the golfing type. Or even the traveling type. She was an old-school tattooist, having learned the trade from her husband, who had died of pancreatic cancer about ten years ago. Sylvia had tattoos all over her body, except for her face, and I knew this because the day I showed up for my Napoleon ink, she stripped to her birthday suit and gave me the grand tour.