The Second Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery (Dharma Detective: Tenzing Norbu Mystery) (15 page)

I called all twelve parlors and bombed out on twelve fronts. No one had tattooed Marv. No one had heard of anyone else tattooing Marv. I was told to fuck off several times, and those were the polite responses.

I was back to square one. I had to get smarter here. Okay, if I were
me
getting a tattoo, what would be my priority? Easy. A personal connection. I’d want to go to a tattoo artist who came highly recommended by someone who had used him or her.

Marv rubbed shoulders with a lot of stars. What star in Marv’s life had a tattoo?

A long-legged bird stiff-walked through my consciousness, settling on the groin of someone famous whose groin I had seen, someone Marv also knew. Keith Connor.

I tapped in a few key words and up popped a short article in
L.A. Weekly
from six years back, featuring Keith Connor, the rock star’s pelvis, and a tiny tattoo parlor in Sherman Oaks. My eyes lasered in on the name: T-Bird Tattoos. The proprietor’s name was Thurman Bird, aka “Thunder.” Thunder Bird. I took the muscle car connection to be a good sign.

I dialed the number.

“T-Bird Tattoos.”

“Mr. Thurman Bird?”

“Who’s asking?”

“My name is Tenzing Norbu. I’m an acquaintance of Keith Connor.”

The voice warmed up several degrees. “How is the SOB? I keep waiting for him to come in for that butt-tat he wanted. I still have the sketch. Mayan Sun God. Left cheek.”

I wrenched my mind away from the image. “I’d like to come see you about something. Today, if possible. Is there a good time, Thurman?”

“‘Thunder.’ Jesus. No one calls me Thurman but the fucking IRS. Yeah, sure, you can come by. Be my guest. I got no one scheduled until later tonight.”

“I’ll be there within the hour,” I said.

Adrenaline carbonated my blood.
Slow down, Ten.
You have an actual paying job to attend to, remember?

I hadn’t heard back so I texted Mike again.
NEED. HELP. YOUR PLACE. TONIGHT.
That counted as work.

I toasted a thick slice of seven-grain bread, spread an even thicker layer of olive tapenade, piled on chunks of ripe avocado and chopped Persian cucumbers, and ate as mindfully as I could, given that I was done in six minutes. I zipped my laptop in a hard travel case and slid it next to the Sadie file in my official Private-Investigator-Man backpack. I forked a can of mixed grill into Tank’s bowl and topped it with a splash of tuna water. Guilt water, more like it.

“Lunch is ready,” I told Tank. He was curled in the kitchen windowsill, catching the afternoon sun, one of his favorite pastimes. I sent him a mental message that I’d be gone for a while.

If he got it, he wasn’t saying.

On a whim, I changed into a pair of not-too-rumpled khaki pants, a proper cotton shirt with a collar and buttons, and my die-hard navy sport coat. I even stuck a tie in my pocket. You never know. I grabbed a fleece-lined windbreaker from the closet, in case I was out late, and left the house whistling. It felt good to be employed—to have tasks to complete and a nice fat check in my pocket.

I took the Toyota—it was time to ride the everyday workhorse, rather than my conspicuous thoroughbred. I decided to avoid possible beach traffic and navigated Topanga Canyon Drive away from the ocean, picking up the 101 at Woodland Hills. Thankfully, I’d guessed right. The Sunday freeway traffic was light, and I was parking at a meter on Ventura Boulevard, just off Woodman, within 40 minutes. I felt in my pants pocket for quarters and came up with three. Enough for a 12-minute visit these days—inflation hadn’t skipped over Sherman Oaks either. I fed the meter. Then I remembered it was Sunday. Parking was free. Now I was doubly irritated.

I put on the tie. Might as well. Easier to pass as a homicide detective, should the need arise.

T-Bird Tattoos was a small shop tucked between a Psychic and a Cigar, Pipe, and Hookah Boutique. A psychic tip, a tat, or a toke: take your pick. I picked the tat. I stepped under a scalloped white canvas awning boasting a drawing of a large pink lotus with a tiny skull in its center and T-Bird’s website address. I also counted at least five variations of the word “Tattoo” on the shop entrance: painted, stenciled, etched in glass, hung from a wooden shingle, and glowing in orange neon. In case I was confused.

I entered a dim, jumbled array of hanging plants, painted masks, gumball machines, and numerous black and white posters in gilded wooden frames—detailed drawings of buxom women with tassels dangling from their nipples, buxom women with iconic political figures on their laps, and rock ‘n’ roll deities, among them, buxom women. Statues of other deities, the Hindu kind, perched on homemade shelves, waving multiple arms and uplifted elephant trunks. The walls were painted bright blue, and a small fridge and microwave oven completed the decor. Two black leather chairs, the kind you’d find in a barber’s shop, awaited customers at the back of the shop. In front of them, a brocade curtain was bunched to one side, held in place by what looked like a wizened monkey’s paw. It was rigged to pull across and attach to a claw on the other side of the store, thus blocking the vision of whatever took place in back. That solved the privacy issue.

I tried, and failed, to imagine Marv sitting in one of those chairs, Thunder hunched over him with a buzzing machine. Marv must have really, really wanted Julius to invest.

“I’m eating a late lunch,” a voice said. “Hungry? There’s plenty.”

“Thunder?”

“That would be me.” He was sitting behind a desk to my left, eating out of a cardboard container. I recognized the carton, and the smell: frozen cheese enchiladas, zapped in a microwave. Bachelor cuisine. I’d eaten more than my share. He lifted the carton in my direction.

“No, thanks,” I said. Thunder looked to be nearing 40. His head was shaved, and a neat moustache and goatee framed an easy smile. Of medium build, but muscular, he was wearing a black T-shirt, and my eyes were drawn to the tiger creeping down his right bicep, like Tank descending a branch, only much more surefooted.

“I called earlier. Tenzing Norbu,” I said. “Ten, for short.”

“Cool,” he said. A phone on his desk rang. He glanced at the screen on the handset. “Never mind,” he said. “Probably my mortgage calling. Fuckers. Have a seat. Here. Leaf through this while I clean up.” He crossed the room and stuffed the container into a black trash bin, overflowing with similar containers. Again, a thought flicked past my brain. Again, I couldn’t catch it in time.

I pulled up a wooden three-legged stool and paged through an album of laminated photographs of tattooed body parts, most of them anonymous. I paused at one—a striking green Gila monster curling around a man’s neck. Two pages after, sure enough, there was a groin I knew well, sporting a long-legged bird.

I turned the album toward Thunder.

“Keith Connor?” I said.

“I’ll never tell,” he winked, and sat across from me again. “So, what gives? I’m guessing you’re not here for ink.”

“No. Not today. I’m actually here with a question concerning another tattoo, one I believe you gave a mutual acquaintance,” I said. “A Marvin Rudolph?”

Thunder’s face darkened, and for the first time I put his name to his form. “Yeah, well, I’ll tell you the same thing I told the other a-hole who came in asking about Rudolph. No fucking comment.”

“I’m sorry, who came in?” I found it hard, no, make that impossible, to believe Sully and Mack were onto this guy. Not unless they’d had an intelligence transplant.

“Some asswipe on a bike. He said he was a cop, and I laughed. Sorry, he just didn’t seem the type. Plus, the guy had the worst skull tat on his wrist I’ve ever seen; we’re talkin’ fuckin’ Casper the friendly ghost. He wasn’t too happy with me when I offered to ink it over, either.”

“And he questioned you about Marv?”

“He tried.” Thunder shook his head. “I’ve spent more time talking about that tattoo then I did inking it. First some suit was all over me about it three years ago, about a month after I inked it. Next day, Marv called me up, all pissed off, read me the riot act for two fucking hours. How was I supposed to know it was a secret? Yesterday morning, I read that Marv’s dead, and it starts up all over again, guys in ties with questions. Twice in two days? Dude, give it fucking rest.”

“I would,” I said, “but a man’s dead. And the tattoo might help lead us to whoever’s responsible.”

Thunder eyed me. I met his gaze. Finally, he nodded. “Right. Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you can tell me.”

“Okay, so three years ago, Marv calls me on my private line, tells me he’s a friend of Keith Connor. And he asks me what it would cost to close my shop for an evening, just for him. He needs a tattoo, on the DL, like I did for Keith. ‘Name your price,’ he says. So I do: one thousand, plus the time it takes to do the tat. Two nights later, I close early, pull the curtains, and set him up in the back. He’d brought in a picture of one of those number tattoos, from the Holocaust. Kind of creepy, actually. Anyway, he wanted to make sure I could duplicate the exact color of faded blue. It was a holy bitch to match, but I finally got it by diluting blue-gray dye with rosewater and a little witch hazel. The tat itself didn’t take long—maybe an hour. I think I charged him about thirteen hundred, total. I warned him it would take two or three weeks before it really looked authentic—that there’d still be a little bit of glisten while it healed. He went off happy, though.”

“What about the actual numbers? It would help me to know what they meant.”

“No idea,” Thunder said. “Only that they were important to him.” He shook his head. “You cops even talk to each other? The guy yesterday wanted to know the exact same thing.”

So Thunder assumed I was a cop. I decided to let that go for the time being. I was much more interested in the other possible imposter. “Was the other detective a tall, lanky guy, white hair, blue eyes, name of Sully?”

“Wrong,” Thunder said.

“How about Mack, or Bill Bohannon?”

Thunder made a sound like a buzzer. “
Annhhh.
Wrong again. Dude was kind of short, with a goatee and ridiculous wraparound shades. Hispanic.” He started to fish through a pile of business cards in a brass bowl on his desk. A very familiar brass bowl. A Tibetan singing bowl, in fact. Rub the rim with a wooden dowel and it creates a liquid sound, pure as prayer. I resisted the urge to rescue the poor thing, held hostage in a tattoo parlor.

“He had serious guns though, I’ll give him that,” Thunder went on, oblivious to my moral struggle.

“Guns? He was armed?”

“No, dude.
Guns.
” Thunder flexed his biceps, illustrating. He went back to rummaging through the bowl and pounced on a card. “Yes! I rock!” He handed it over. I glanced down at an official-looking LAPD calling card, one that I was 99 percent sure was fake, since (a) I didn’t recognize the name, Raul Martinez, and I hadn’t been gone from the force that long; (b) the card was printed on cheap stock, and the colors of the city seal looked suspiciously garish; and (c) who else from the division would be working the tattoo angle but Sully, Mack, or Bill? Or me, but that was another story.

“Can I have this?” I slipped it in my pocket before he could object. Another question worked its way to the surface.

“Did I hear you correctly? Did you say he arrived on a motorcycle?”

“Yeah. A chopper. HD.”

“HD?”

“Hardly Drivable. Low hanging bars and a shitload of shiny extras. Not your normal cop bike, am I right?”

Now I was 100 percent sure the man wasn’t a cop, not unless he was dead. That’s the only way you’d catch an LAPD officer on a souped-up chopper.

“One thing was weird, though. We were shooting the shit about Harleys, and I mentioned a buddy who had a bad spin-out on the 134 a few years back. Left him with a permanent limp. Some rich douche bag in a BMW didn’t see him, but my friend wound up booked on suspicion of reckless endangerment. Nobody likes Mexican Harley riders covered in tats. So anyway, this Martinez dude remembered the court case perfectly, only it sounded like he was on the side of the biker. I mean he backtracked pretty fast, but it sure seemed as if he was defending the guy at first—like maybe he was his lawyer or something.”

Finally, something I could work with.

I handed Thunder my own card. “Thank you for your help. If you happen to think of anything else, give me a call, all right?”

“No problem,” he said. “Hey, tats are half off on Sundays. You want a Chinese dragon or something?”

“Not today,” I said. As I left the store, I saw him toss my card into the singing bowl. I listened, but I didn’t hear a sound.

There was a ticket on my Toyota’s windshield.
What?
I looked around for an official in a uniform, but he or she was long gone, and anyway, I wasn’t playing for the home team anymore. I scoured the ticket and finally discovered what I’d done, or in this case, not done: “Non-Display of Current License Tabs.” The actual tab was in my glove compartment, waiting to be displayed. I could feel a small bubble of annoyance rise inside, swelling with justifications as to why I was special and why this was undeserved. I rotated my shoulders to reset: I had a lot of work hours ahead of me, and clinging to righteous indignation might bring brief satisfaction, but it would only increase fatigue in the long run. I affixed the new tab and tucked the ticket in my wallet.

After jotting down my conversation with Thunder, I checked the time. It was
4 P.M
., and still not a peep from Mike. I again weighed putting in a call to Bill. I wasn’t sure he would welcome hearing from me. I called him anyway. Force of habit.

“Hey,” Bill’s voice was low, almost a whisper. “I’m just leaving Marv Rudolph’s burial service. He’s in the ground, and they’re all heading back to the house. “

“Are you going there next?”

“Can’t,” he said. “Bhatnager and Summer are releasing their preliminary autopsy findings at a press conference in a couple hours. They want me there, just so everyone can know that the LAPD has no fucking cause of death and no fucking suspects. Did I tell you I hate my job? Because I do. It’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake. I was supposed to meet everyone at the zoo. I love the zoo. And I hate my job.” He sighed. “So, what’s up?”