‘But you thought she was legal. Then why talk her out of it?’

‘Dude. First, I had my doubts about the license. But that wasn’t the point. She came in here for all the wrong reasons. You get inked to make a positive statement about yourself. Not for revenge, not to shove it in somebody’s face. Not because you want to be that stupid girl with a dragon tattoo. Ink’s about who you  are, not being anybody else. Get it?’

Not really, Sellitto’s expression said.

But Gordon continued, ‘You saw her hair, the goth makeup? Well, despite all that, she was not  a candidate for inking. She had a Hello Kitty purse, for Christ’s sake. And a Saint Timothy’s cross around her neck. In your day, you would’ve called her the girl next door, you know, going to the malt shop.’

My day? Malt? Still, Sellitto found himself leaning reluctantly toward the veracity of his story.

‘Besides, I didn’t have a big enough pussy ball for her,’ the young man said, grinning. Pushing Sellitto some.

‘A …?’

He explained: a tennis ball you gave to customers you didn’t think could handle the pain of the tattooing process. ‘That kid couldn’t take it. But, you gonna get inked, you gotta have the pain. Them’s the rules: pain and blood. The commitment, dude. Get it? So what can I do you for, now that I know there’s no, you know, mid life crisis involved.’

The detective grumbled. ‘You ever say “Dig it” instead of “Get it”?’

‘“Dig it.” From your day.’

‘From my day,’ Sellitto said. ‘Me and the beatniks.’

TT Gordon laughed.

‘There’s a case we’re working on. I need some help.’

‘I guess. Gimme one minute.’ Gordon stepped to a third workstation. This fellow tat artist, arms blue and red sleeves of elaborate inking, was working on a man in his late twenties. He was getting a flying hawk on his biceps. Sellitto thought of the falcons on Rhyme’s window ledges.

The customer looked like he’d just subwayed it up here from Wall Street and would head back to his law firm afterward for an all nighter.

Gordon looked over the job. Gave some suggestions.

Sellitto examined the shop. It seemed to belong to a different era: specifically, the 1960s. The walls were covered with hundreds of bright samples of tats: faces, religious symbols, cartoon characters, slogans, maps, landscapes, skulls … many of them psychedelic. Also, several dozen photos of piercings available for purchase. Some frames were covered by curtains. Sellitto could guess in what body parts those studs and pins resided, though he wondered why the modesty.

The inking stations reminded Sellitto of those in a hair salon with the reclining chairs for customers and stools for the artists. Equipment and bottles and rags sat on a counter. On the wall was a mirror, on which were pasted some bumper stickers and taped certificates from the Board of Health. Despite the fact that the place existed for the purpose of spattering body fluids about, it looked immaculate. The smell of disinfectant was strong and there were warning signs everywhere about cleaning equipment, sterilizing.

130 Degrees Celsius Is Your Friend.

Gordon finished his suggestions and gestured Sellitto to the back room. They pushed through a plastic bead curtain into the office part of the shop. It too was well ordered and clean.

Gordon took a bottle of water from a mini fridge and offered it to Sellitto, who wasn’t putting in his mouth anything from this shop. Shook his head.

The owner of the store unscrewed the top and drank. He nodded to the doorway, where the beads still pendulumed. ‘That’s what we’ve become.’ As if Sellitto was his new best dude.

‘How’s that?’

‘The guy in the business suit,’ he said softly. The hawk man. ‘You see where his tat is?’

‘His biceps.’

‘Right. High. Easy to hide. Guy’s got two point three children, or will have in the next couple years. Went to Columbia or NYU. Lawyer or accountant.’ A shake of the head. The ponytail swung. ‘Tats used to be insidious. The inked were bad boys and girls. Now getting a work’s like putting on a charm bracelet or a tie. There’s a joke somebody’s going to open a tattoo franchise in strip malls. Call it Tat bucks.’

‘That’s why the rods?’ Sellitto nodded at the bars in Gordon’s head.

‘You have to go to greater lengths to make a statement. That sounded effete. Sorry. So. What can I do for you, Officer?’

‘I’m making the rounds of the big parlors in the city. None of ’em could help so far but they all said I had to come see you. This’s the oldest parlor in the city, they said. And you know everybody in the community.’

‘Hard to say about the oldest. Inking – I mean modern inking in the US, not tribal – pretty much began in New York. The Bowery, late eighteen hundreds. But it was banned in ’sixty one after some hepatitis outbreaks. Only legalized again in ’ninety seven. I found some records that this shop dated back to the twenties – man, those must’ve been the days. You got a tat, you were Mr Alternative. Or Miss, though women rarely got works done then. Not unheard of. Winston Churchill’s mother had a snake eating its tail.’ He noted that Sellitto was not much interested in the history lesson. A shrug. My  enthusiasm isn’t your  enthusiasm. Got it.

‘This is, what I’m about to tell you, this’s confidential.’

‘No worries there, dude. People tell me all sorts of shit when they’re under the machine. They’re nervous and so they start rambling away. I forget everything I hear. Amnesia, you know.’ A frown. ‘You here about somebody might be a customer of mine?’

‘Don’t have any reason to think so but could be.’ Sellitto added, ‘If we showed you a tat, you think you could tell us something about the guy who did it?’

‘Maybe. Everybody’s got their own style. Even two artists working from the same stencil’re going to be different. It’s how you learned to ink, the machine you use, the needles you hack together. A thousand things. Anyway, I can’t guarantee it but I’ve worked with artists from all over the country, been to conventions in almost every state. I might be able to help you out.’

‘Okay, here.’

Sellitto dug into his briefcase and extracted the photo Mel Cooper had printed out.

Gordon bent low and, frowning, studied the picture carefully. ‘The guy drew this knows what he’s doing – definitely a pro. But I don’t get the inflammation. There’s no ink. The skin’s all swollen and rough. Real badly infected. And there’s no color. Did he use invisible ink?’

Sellitto thought Gordon was joking and said so. Gordon explained that some people didn’t want to make a commitment, so they were inked with special solutions that appeared invisible but showed up under blacklight.

‘The pussy ball crowd.’

‘You got it, dude.’ A fist poked in Sellitto’s direction. The detective declined to bump. Then the artist frowned. ‘I got a feeling something else is going on, right?’

Sellitto nodded. They’d kept the poison out of the press; this was the sort of MO that might lead to copycatting. And if there were informants, or the perp himself decided to ring up City Hall and gloat, they’d need to know that the caller had access to the actual details of the killing.

Besides, as a general rule, Sellitto preferred to explain as little as possible when canvassing for witnesses or asking advice. In this case, though, he had no option. He needed Gordon’s help. And Sellitto decided he kind of liked the guy.

Dude  …

‘The suspect we’re looking for, he used poison instead of ink.’

The artist’s eyes widened, the metal pins lifting dramatically. ‘Jesus. No! Jesus.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Ever hear about anybody doing that?’

‘No way.’ Gordon brushed the backs of his fingers across the complicated facial hair. ‘That’s just wrong. Man. See, we’re … what we do is we’re sort of this hybrid of artist and cosmetic surgeon – people put their trust in us. We’ve got a special relationship with people.’ Gordon’s voice grew taut. ‘Using inking to kill somebody. Oh, man.’