“I don’t know anything about that. I never heard about it. I keep my distance from those people.”
She took a gulp of her warm beer. Osborne was brooding in the doorway. If, as he suspected, those mokos were the mark of a new gang, Umaga and his crew didn’t seem to be part of it.
“What about his father?” he said. “Where can I find him?”
“Oh, we haven’t seen each other for years! He drops by from time to time to see Kenny but, as he doesn’t give me any alimony, you can’t say he’s taking advantage of his visiting rights.”
A classic male.
“How about Joey. Did he see him?”
“Hah! He didn’t visit him once in prison!”
Tania curled her fine brown lips over the bottle top again. Osborne was ogling her cleavage, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“Did Joey do drugs?”
“Not as far as I know.” She shrugged. “Anyway, I never noticed.”
“Did he deal?”
“Same thing.”
“Did you know his friend Wallace?”
“No.”
“Did Joey hang about the city center?”
“Joey? He wasn’t the type. He can barely read the road signs.”
She was joking. But Osborne didn’t feel like laughing. He felt feverish, and although the pain was wearing off thanks to the pills, the appearance on the scene of these three ex-cons made things a bit more complicated for him.
“Did Joey ever talk to you about a girl called Ann Brook?” he ventured.
“The girl who was found murdered? Er . . . no. Obviously.”
“Can I see Joey’s room?”
“If you want,” she replied in a detached air, “though your colleagues already gave everything a good going-over and didn’t find anything. Like I said, it’s a while since Joey last set foot here.”
Osborne nodded slowly, lost in thought. Sensing that he was about to leave, Tania curled against the front door.
“Would you like a beer?”
* * *
“There’s no lack of good tattooists in this area,” the man said. “But we don’t do this kind of model here. You have to take the avenue on the right. Over there, you’ll find a whole lot of good people who’ll engrave the name of your mother. If you know it . . . ”
Coarse laughter rang out in the workshop.
Osborne had stopped his hands from shaking. He had been scouring the tattoo parlors of South Auckland for hours now, and nobody seemed willing to tell him who might have done the mokos on the big Maori he had met at the Backstreet. From stores to seedy workshops, he had been advised to fuck off. Just once, a handful of dollars had brought him not only an invitation to fuck off, but a suggestion to try Papakura, an out-of-the-way neighborhood near the airport, right on the edge of the city.
That was where he was now, with his camera and his digital photograph. These mokos were the work of an artist—a judgment confirmed by the Samoan tattooist laughing ingratiatingly behind his counter. Two idiots like him were slouching red-eyed on cushioned benches drinking green tea. On the ceiling, insects were throwing themselves head first at the fluorescent light, making little knocking noises as they met their deaths.
Osborne looked at the face of the Maori in the photograph. “Are you sure you don’t know this guy?”
“Certain!” The tattooist threw an amused glance at the two tea drinkers.
“He has the same tattoos as the Tagaloa brothers,” Osborne said.
“Who?”
“Three brothers,” he insisted. “All very young.”
“Never heard of them.” Drowsy beneath heavy eyelids, the Samoan’s eyes were curiously asymmetrical. It was hard to tell if he was lying or just an idiot.
“These mokos mean something,” Osborne went on.
Leaning across the counter, the Samoan peered down at the photograph. “Yeah.”
“What?”
The tattooist looked again. “I don’t know,” he said. “They’re Maori tattoos.”
