Tahoe deep, p.22
Tahoe Deep, page 22
part #17 of An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Series
“A mix. I’m a private investigator trying to solve a real murder and a real assault.”
Andy’s eyebrows went higher. “Sweet.”
It was an unusual reaction. But I understood that the media is always looking for an attention grabber.
“I’m taking something real and enhancing it,” I said. “Think of it like fiction based on a true story.”
Andy was taking notes at a furious pace.
I continued. “This Sunday, beginning late morning, there’s going to be an on-water event at Glenbrook Bay. It’s called the Tahoe Steamer Festival. The focus is the possible retrieval of treasure from the Tahoe Steamer four hundred feet down at the bottom of the bay. I think I would like your package of twenty spots, providing advance promotion of the festival.”
“I saw the article about it in the Herald,” he said.
“I’d also love to have you do an on-location broadcast about the festival, preferably from a boat.”
“Like when I do on-slope broadcasts for ski and mountain bike championships.”
“Exactly. I think it will be good promotion for KExcellence Radio. The Tahoe Herald will be running additional stories about it, and they’ll also do a followup mention or two. I’m willing to give you an exclusive for on-the-water reporting in return for a discounted price on the advance spots. It could be a prize opportunity, bringing the world the story of valuables hidden for eight decades on Tahoe’s most famous shipwreck.”
Andy nodded. “I’m sure we can work something out. Tell me more.”
“The treasure retrieval attempt will likely be made by what are called underwater ROVs.”
“Remote operated vehicles,” Andy said. “I know about them.”
“We don’t know exactly which ROV companies will be involved. Unfortunately, the ROV action is underwater.”
“Which is where I come in,” Andy said. “Not much excitement to witness from a boat, heh, heh. But I bet I could do something exciting.”
“Right. I’m thinking you could build up the hype by reporting the ascent of a particular ROV run by a company called Deep Recovery. As the ROV approaches the surface, I’m hoping that your reportage would draw the attention of the murderer.”
“Wait. Let me make sure I’m clear. You don’t want to draw attention to the murderer. You want to draw the attention of the murderer. Because he’s after the treasure.” Andy’s eyes were wide with excitement.
“Yeah. We don’t want people to even know about the murder. Hopefully, the murderer will think that he’s just one more spectator. Your angle could be that you have a connection to the Deep Recovery company. That’s what would rivet people’s attention to KXcellence Radio. You would be able to work the question of whether or not the ROV is carrying anything as it approaches the surface. You could create suspense around that concept.”
“Teasing it out, dragging it out,” Andy said. He added, “But I wouldn’t really have a connection to the company. Because it doesn’t exist, right?”
“It exists as part of a law enforcement concept to catch a killer. I’m hoping that your work will be instrumental in this plan. If we’re successful, you can add that to your list of testimonials. KXcellence Radio, the only station to ever help catch a killer.”
Andy beamed.
“Your story angle could be all about the ROV’s depth. The crushing pressure four hundred feet down, then three hundred, and so on. Why divers can’t go that deep without special air mixtures and special training. And, will the ROV come up empty-handed or with fabulous treasure?”
“I’ve got the patter in my head already.”
“Can you do this from a boat?”
“Absolutely. My buddy owns The Black Jack Pot. He lets me borrow it. It’s just a twenty-four-foot runabout. But it will give me on-the-scene accuracy. I have a battery-powered satellite uplink I can bring along. As long as it doesn’t get wet, I’m king of the airwaves.”
He paused, thinking, frowning. “Here’s my first idea already. I know a guy who has one of those ROVs. He’s not real speedy on the tech stuff. But he’s had it in the water. And he’s put it through some dives, testing the lights, the video cam, the control features. How ’bout I call him. He could have his drone in the water and give us an underwater video feed. We could patch his video into an internet presentation. Would that be great or what!”
I liked that Andy was so enthusiastic. It seemed that he’d already started thinking of himself as running the whole show, for which he’d get a reasonable fee and, more importantly, the buzz that comes from reporting something the local community would think was big.
He continued, “I could do a radio/video simulcast. People could watch and listen in real time as the ROV is coming up from the depths. They could tweet their friends while they’re throwing treasure-hunting parties. This could be the most exciting thing to happen on Tahoe’s waters in years! And all the while I’ll pump the “Deep Recovery” label. People won’t be able to find info on it through traditional channels. So it will be all Airwaves Andy!”
He made some more notes on his pad, then looked up at me, his eyes crinkling with excitement.
“Let me see if I’m imagining this the way you are,” Andy said, trying to sum up. “In essence, what you’re after is a theatrical event. Using the power of radio and internet, you want me to create theater about a treasure that - in the listener’s ears - is going to be brought up from the Tahoe Steamer by an underwater ROV. That ROV will carry a package that looks like something that’s been four hundred feet down for eighty years. The presentation will be so enticing that numerous divers will want to be underwater to witness this incredible find. And some of those divers may try to steal the package.” Andy’s lower eyelids were raised, making him look crazed.
“Exactly,” I said. “And if a diver tries to take the package, other divers may intervene, trying to stop him or attack him or maybe steal the package from him. Even though your video feed will seem official, people will wonder if other ROV companies might try to get in on the action with their own robots. So no one will know for sure which ROV is bringing up treasure.”
“Wow,” Andy said. “This is like the old west when rumors came down about a stagecoach hauling a secret load of gold through the desert wilderness!”
“I’m hoping you’ll get uncountable benefits from having the whole world of Tahoe and the world of shipwreck diving all tuned to you.”
Andy grinned as if I’d just convinced his bank to cancel foreclosure proceedings on his house.
“You bet, McKenna. You’re gonna be amazed at what I can do. Thanks for this opportunity.”
We shook, and I left.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Before the festival started, I wanted to track down the artist who did the elaborate shipwreck tattoo on Colin’s back.
I spent some time visiting tattoo artists’ websites and looking at tattoos. I saw nothing that was reminiscent of the shipwreck tattoo based on the Caspar David Friedrich shipwreck painting. I Googled the words “shipwreck tattoos” and found nothing useful. I needed to talk to tattoo artists.
The first artist who came to mind was the man that Mallory had called to look at Colin’s body on the beach. I remembered that the man, Ivan Manfred, went by the business name of Ink Maestro. He hadn’t recognized the Caspar David Friedrich painting that Colin’s tattoo was based on, but he might know how to track down other tattoo artists.
When I Googled his name, I clicked through to his website and looked through his library of images. There was a large number of images and a large variety of styles. His rep as a master inker seemed justified by his impressive range of work. I remembered that he had disparaging comments to make about tattoos made from paintings. And nowhere on his website were there images with the feel of paintings, famous or not. Despite Ivan Manfred’s far-ranging abilities, his tattoos seemed, to my naive eyes, quite traditional.
That was probably where the money was.
I looked up his business address and drove there with Spot.
The Ink Maestro’s studio was one block off Lake Tahoe Boulevard in South Lake Tahoe in what looked to be an old, brick, auto repair garage that had been painted white inside and out, and fitted with new large windows.
I parked in the shade of a thick stand of Jeffrey Pine, gave Spot a pet, and walked over.
The inside of the converted garage was visible through the windows. It was well lit, as if from unseen skylights above and track lights that shined on the white walls. Painted on the walls were huge black lines with rough edges. They formed abstract shapes as if they were a new type of Kanji, American instead of Japanese.
The effect was commanding. No one could turn down the street without being riveted by the view inside the windows. Something about the pattern seemed familiar. But I couldn’t identify it.
In one corner of the single spacious room were a table and two chairs, one on each side as if comprising a mini conference area. On the table were three-ring binders, perhaps with tattoo designs that customers could flip through. In the center of the room was a techy recliner similar to a dentist’s chair, and articulated lights like those a dentist might use. On a nearby workbench was some machinery that I took to be tattooing equipment.
Ivan Manfred appeared to be alone. He was pacing back and forth, talking on his cell phone. His blond hair flowed behind him. When he made his about-face turns, his hair flew out like the mane of a palomino horse in a barrel race.
I pushed open the door. Ivan turned and looked at me, made a little wave, and kept pacing and talking.
“Eight o’clock? No, I don’t do evening appointments.” Pause. “Sorry, but I’m a professional. You wouldn’t ask your doctor for an evening appointment. Same with me.” Pause. “Noon? No, I’m at lunch from noon to two. You wouldn’t ask your doctor to interrupt lunch. So either we fill in for my cancellation at three-thirty on Thursday, or we pick a time during the month after next. If you prefer, I can refer you to another artist.”
“You’ll call back? Okay.” He hung up and turned to me.
“I know you from someplace, right?” he said. “But I haven’t inked you. I remember all of my clients.”
“You saw me briefly when the South Lake Tahoe cops called you to look at an unusual tattoo on a body at El Dorado Beach. I was there as well.”
Ivan frowned. “Oh, yeah. The abstract on the man’s back. Unusual for a tattoo, that’s for sure.”
“Because abstract tattoos are uncommon?”
“So much so that they don’t exist in any measurable way. Lots of tattoos are non-literal. They can be really fantastical. But they are almost always recognizable pictures of something. Not abstracts.”
I decided not to explain what I’d told Commander Mallory on the beach, that the tattoo was in fact a recognizable picture of a famous painting and not abstract at all.
I reached out my hand. “Owen McKenna. I’m a private investigator. Those same cops called me for help as well.”
“Ah. I provide the intellectual artistic input. You provide the gumshoe, street-crime input. An interesting dichotomy. Which suggests that you are here to ask something about art or tattoos or… Dead bodies?”
I gestured toward his big wall. “Would this kind of image be good for tattoos? Or is this too abstract as well?”
“You like abstract expressionism?”
“Not especially. But I do like Franz Kline more than most of the New York School. De Kooning’s idea that Kline take a rough sketch and blow it up wall-sized so that it loses all connection to the original object he drew was brilliant, don’t you think?”
Ivan Manfred didn’t respond. He studied me, a strong frown on his face. It was one of those expressions you see when someone realizes they had misjudged a person. Eventually, he gestured toward the wall and spoke slowly.
“No, I don’t think these marks would make a good tattoo. They are special, however. Maybe you’ll figure them out with time.”
I stared at the wall.
“Have you learned anything about the person who died on the beach?” Manfred asked.
“No. But I thought that if I could track down the tattoo artist, that would be informative. So I came here to ask you how one would find a particular tattoo artist. To my knowledge, there was no identifier on the tattoo, no artist signature.”
“Some Japanese inkers sign their work, especially on large, full-body art. But they sign with Kanji, so people who don’t know Japanese just see it as part of the art, not as a signature.”
“American artists don’t put their signature on their work?”
“Not generally. People look down on artists signing their names as if it is crass commercialism. But some inkers have sly ways of identifying themselves. For example, they’ll add a tiny image that is associated with them to every large tattoo they do. It becomes a kind of trademark.”
“What kind of image?” I asked.
“Anything. It could be a small valentine heart or a skull or an eye or a cat’s head. The customer just thinks it’s an artistic style. And on a complicated tattoo, the customer might not even notice the image if it’s small enough.”
“Do you remember noticing such an image on the dead body’s abstract?”
Ivan shook his head. “I specifically looked for one. But no.”
“How else might I track down the artist?”
“You could post the image online. There are uncountable tattoo sites and tattoo threads. Someone might recognize the tattoo or, more likely, the style that would suggest a particular artist.”
“Good idea. Although I would have no idea how to do that. Because I don’t know the business at all, I’m curious about something else. You are a celebrated tattoo artist. Why is it that you don’t have tattoos yourself? Or if you do, they’re not in visible locations.”
He frowned and glanced at his watch as if very squeezed for time. “I’ll give you a couple of quick answers. First, I keep getting better at my art. And tattoos are hard to remove. So I don’t want to put a work of art on my own body because I imagine that some day I will think it’s not up to my new standards. Another reason is, frankly, that I’m a bit of a snob. Most tattoos are done in a way or a location that makes it hard or impossible to ink yourself. And I don’t think other inkers are as good as I am. So I’m reluctant to have the work of other inkers on my body, even if I design the tattoo.”
“Ah,” I said.
“There’s one more reason. If you think of other kinds of artists, say, oil painters, you’ll find that some of them have blank walls in their houses. Their studios will be full of their art and the art of other artists. But their living room walls are often bare or at least not cluttered with art. It’s a kind of respite from work. When you leave your studio after working on an image all day, you sometimes want to go home to the calm of no images. Well, that’s the way I feel about my body. I spend my entire working day putting images on bodies. When I get out of the shower and look in the mirror, I like to feel like I’m on a mini-vacation from my work life.”
“A good point,” I said. “One more question, if I may. How did you learn tattooing?”
“Not like a lot of other artists, I can tell you that. Most inkers learn by apprenticing under a successful inker. Then they get a machine, tattoo their own ankle, move on to their friends and so forth. I went the more formal way. I got my BFA degree at San Jose State, a school which has a really good art department. Then I got my MFA at CalArts in Santa Clarita. I considered getting a doctorate in art history because the Masters of Fine Arts is a terminal degree for practicing artists. You can’t go any higher. And, well, I always wanted to have a Ph.D. Ivan Manfred, Ph.D. It sounds good. But I realized that painting was my fated oeuvre.”
“Yet you became a tattoo artist.”
Manfred looked insulted. “Tattooing is not a step down, despite what ivory tower academics think. Those are the same people who used to think that photography was a step down. Some still think it. You can make serious art in nearly any medium. When I saw that tattooing was the new frontier for art, I apprenticed under a well-known inker in Southern California. I think I’m now one of the pioneers in great tattoo art.”
“You probably are,” I said. I handed him a card. “Please call if you hear anything that might lead me to the person who did the dead man’s tattoo.”
“Will do.”
I opened the Ink Maestro’s door and headed over to where I’d parked.
Spot had his head out the window. He was panting, the huge tongue flopping. I could see his tail wagging across the back seat. As I got close, I said, “Eager to see me, huh? Hard to go without your master, isn’t it?”
Then I realized that he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking past me toward the tattoo studio. I turned.
Ink Maestro was trotting after me. “I’m sorry to bother,” he said. “But I realized you are heading toward this Jeep, which means that Harlequin Dane is yours. Am I right?”
“Correct. Although a closer analysis of our relationship might suggest that I’m his rather than he being mine.”
Ivan slowed as he got closer. “Could I… Would it be okay if…”
“Yes, feel free to pet him. He’s friendly. So much so that he might like to go home with you.”
Ivan didn’t seem to hear me. He was transfixed as he got closer to Spot. He had both hands out as if to walk up and cradle the face of a religious icon. Ivan’s transformation from arrogant artist to Great Dane groupie was immediate. Gone was the holier-than-thou attitude. In its place was childlike wonder.
Spot stopped panting just long enough to sniff Ivan’s hands, then resumed panting.
Ivan put his hands on Spot’s cheeks and pushed back across his ears. Then he used one hand to pet the top of Spot’s head while his other hand gently cupped underneath Spot’s jaw.
