A couple of needle-wielders thought it likely that she’d frequented more than one source. I took that as a positive: more shops meant a higher probability of success. But a full day of searching proved futile.

I returned home and used my phone.

Clara DiMargio answered. “You found something!”

Feeling like a jerk, I said, “We’re moving along, Mrs. DiMargio.”

“Oh.” Deflated.

“Could I ask a few more questions?”

Long sigh. “Sure.”

“Did the money you and your husband give Frankie pay for her tattoos—”

“No way,” she said. “Even if I agreed to that, which I wouldn’t, my husband would have hit the roof. We paid her rent and her utilities—her phone when she still had one. Would there be enough left over for that garbage? I don’t think so.”

“Any idea how Frankie did pay?”

“You’re saying someone else gave her money? Maybe the same person who … oh my God, why didn’t I think of that? Where did she get money for that?”

“How recent was her last tattoo?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know—hold on, maybe I do. A couple of months ago she came in with an especially ugly one, a snake around her neck, just crude and nasty and ugly. Bill got mad and asked where she was getting the money to waste. Frankie turned around and left.”

Muffled sob. “I’d baked peanut butter cookies, Frankie loved them when she was a little girl. They went untouched. I tossed them in the trash. Oh, sir, everything just fell apart.”

CHAPTER

29

A control freak financing fresh ink might want to be on the scene to supervise.

I printed an L.A. street map and plotted, marking the epicenter between Frankie DiMargio’s rented garage in Mar Vista and Even Odd, then radiating outward.

Plugging in the locations of tattoo parlors I’d already visited was discouraging: I’d covered more ground than I thought, with only a narrow band of untraveled territory remaining.

But that blade-shaped bit of terrain included a cluster of ink shops on or near Fairfax Avenue.

The fourth one I visited was called Tigray Art set between two Ethiopian restaurants and my hopes rose when I spotted an antiques shop called Nocturna sharing the space.

The room was divided by a waist-high partition of plywood stapled with sheets of black velvet. To the right were jumbles of junk, including some mangy-looking stuffed birds in cheap cages. To the left an old barber chair, porcelain chipped, steel oxidized. An ominous-looking needle replacing the dental drill dangled overhead.

The wall was papered with patterns and stencils. Monsters, demons, African animals, space aliens, nothing that matched the ink on Frankie DiMargio’s DMV shot.