on this, Officers?”
“If you’d be so good, M.,” Lestrade replied.
“Well…it’s pretty enough, but is it Art?”
Lestrade pressed on, “Any thoughts whose style it might be?”
“Any competent tattoo artist could… Some of them might not want to, but almost any of us could… I take it this is a— Oh, dear Lord in Heaven!” Dupont exclaimed. “This wasn’t—could this be connected to that—that horrible murder just this past wraparound?”
Seeing Clayton open his mouth, Lestrade beat him to the punch. “We’re always investigating several cases at a time, M. Dupont. Even in a town this size. So. Can you rule out any of your fellow body artists who wouldn’t soil their hands with something like this?”
“Well, we wouldn’t, Ly and I. Fortunately, we have enough money as it is. Unless…” Her hand trembling slightly, she laid the tracing flat on the table and studied it again. “As one element of a larger picture…or even by itself, with a few individualizing touches… Yes, it could have some possibilities, after all.”
“Could it be a stamped tattoo?” Clayton asked.
“Certainly. In that case, we couldn’t legally use it if we wanted to. Not unless the client already had it and asked us to incorporate it into a larger picture. All stamp designs are registered.”
“How do you check?” Clayton said curiously.
The body artist sighed. “With great difficulty, Officers, with great difficulty. The literature speculates that someday we may have electronic brains to file and sort through things like this automatically, but for here and now I’m afraid it’s still pretty much the old honor system. Resting mainly on what the client tells us. And since these stamps became so popular, the annual IABA directory has gotten as thick as the New York phone books.”
Lestrade asked, “Anything to stop an individual artist from turning out two identical stamps of his or her own design?”
Dupont-Strudelmeyer took a minute to answer that one. “Not legally, I don’t think. No, the design would be the individual artist’s, to re-use at will. It’d be more a matter of commercial ethics. You wouldn’t want to annoy any client who bought a stamp from you by selling one with the identical design to another client.”
“Not even two officers of the same club?” asked Clayton.
“Well…a case like that could be an exception…but I still don’t think it’d be very wise. Any kind of a club or association can break up, and then you could see rival organizations wearing the same design. No…it might work for something like a graduating class, where the membership never changes no matter what internal politics may develop. Then you might see two or three identical stamps—say, one for the class president and one for the faculty advisor. But otherwise…you’ve got to understand, Officers, you’ve caught me more or less in a blind spot here. Ly and I don’t design stamps, don’t even have the right equipment.”
“But you do have those annual directories?” Lestrade wanted to know.
Dupont sighed. “Yes, we’ve got the directories. IABA guiderules. Every year adds more designs, and once they’re there, they’re there forever.”
“How do you keep updated on the designs being made between editions?” Clayton rubbed Pango behind the ears.
“Honor system,” Dupont repeated.
“You might get a ‘Friendly Dog’ sign for your gate,” Lestrade observed.
“We have one. We decided to take it down after somebody was murdered here in Forest Green. We’ve even talked about getting a watchdog that isn’t so friendly.”
“Let’s not panic, M. And we’d like to borrow your latest directory.” Lestrade didn’t make it a question.
She noticed Clayton smothering a sigh, probably thinking he was going to end up checking the thing page by page. Well, maybe she’d help him out there. She didn’t have anything more important in her plans for this evening, and he was hoping to snag a quick date. Talking about this nurse he’d just met, the one who gave flu shots so smoothly a floater didn’t even feel it.
CHAPTER 4
Still Monday, September 18
Julie Whitcomb lived alone in a moderately priced four-room apartment in Pankhurst Heights, one of Forest Green’s most respectable upper middle-class neighborhoods. The Pankhurst Arms—lodge-style lounge, changing rooms, and bar downstairs, four tidy apartments upstairs—was a piece of pleasantly retro-style architecture only two degrees removed from imitation Frank Lloyd Wright, set down with an artificial pond pretending to be a lake on one side and a small but rolling park on the other three. “Pankhurst Lake” really could accommodate rafting and oar-boating, though neither full-sized sailboats nor anything motorized. They even kept it stocked with pan fish. Both pond and park were free and open to the entire Pankhurst Heights subdivision: four blocks of duplexes and single-family residences on each side of the park.
Thirty years ago, Pankhurst Heights had been both posh and somewhat less respectable than it was today, with—local legend whispered—a high-class courtesan house in the building that had been “saved,” like any other poor sinner, into a nondenominational community church with angels in stained glass windows and a real organ. Thirty years ago, Julie Whitcomb could never have afforded an apartment in the Pankhurst Arms. The big reason she could afford it now was because activities in the lodge lounge and bar just below the apartments, as well as Theater in the Park and the various school picnics, family reunions, summertime rowboat races and wintertime skating parties, Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve fireworks over the pond, and so on, while good, clean family fun, were both frequently scheduled and frequently on the raucous side. Not like the weekly wraparound activities at Sam’s house, which never disturbed the neighbors.
Also, the management gave Julie an additional discount because, as a trained nurse, she could be on call in case of need for these races and parties and other affairs, whenever she got enough advance notice to juggle it with her hospital hours.
Her life sometimes made it challenging to sandwich in her Life, but what was Life without a challenge?
Anyway, someday—probably soon, seeing she was already twenty-seven—her prince would come and she’d leave all this behind, both life and even some of Life, without a second thought, move on to her next incarnation as wife and, sweet Jesus willing, mommy.
Maybe that prince of hers had come already. Not, of course, Paul Osaka, who had the apartment catacorner to hers. He was a great floater, only he swang the other way; and, besides, Dante’s Delight Purgatorio had its guiderules, which let out Sam as well. But maybe, just maybe, the one she’d met this morning… Well, if not, she’d give that prince just six more years to reach her. If he didn’t, at the symbolic age of thirty-three she was phasing on alone if necessary: adopt an orphan or two grown to the age where they were hard to place, maybe get herself artificially inseminated, find a bigger apartment or even a nice little house…sweet Jesus knew where she’d get the money, but sweet Jesus should know, providing for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and all that!
And then, she’d already budgeted and bought the last big expense she expected to want until age thirty-three, anyway.
She closed her bedroom
