Benjamin Black: The Black-Eyed Blonde

“Well, thanks anyway,” I said and stepped past him. The air rippled above the roof of my car. I was thinking how hot to the touch the steering wheel was going to be. Sometimes I tell myself I’ll move to England, where they say it’s cool even in the dog days.

“You ain’t the first one asking after him,” the old man said behind me.

I turned. “Oh, yeah?”

“Pair of wetbacks come ’round last week.”

“Mexicans?”

“That’s what I said. Two of them. They was all gussied up, but a wetback in a suit and a fancy necktie is still a wetback, right?”

The sun had been shining on my back and was now shining on my front. I could feel my upper lip getting damp. “You speak to them?” I asked.

“Naw. They drove up in some kind of car I never seen the likes of before, must have been made down there. High and wide as a whorehouse bed, and a canvas roof with holes in it.”

“When was this?”

“Two, three days ago. They prowled around the place for a while, looking in the windows like you did, then got in the car again and moseyed off.” Another dry spit. “I don’t care for wetbacks.”

“You don’t say.”

He gave me a surly look, then sniffed.

I turned away again and started toward my hot car. Again he spoke—“You think he’s coming back?”—and again I stopped. I felt like the wedding guest trying to unhook himself from the Ancient Mariner.

“Doubt it,” I said.

He gave another sniff. “Well, he ain’t much missed, I guess. Still, I liked him.”

He had smoked the cigarette down to about a quarter inch of stub, which now he dropped into the grass. “You didn’t ought to do that,” I said, getting into the car.

When my fingers touched the steering wheel, I was surprised they didn’t sizzle.

Instead of going back to the office, I tootled around the corner to Barney’s Beanery in search of something cool to pour into myself. Barney’s was a bit too self-consciously bohemian for my taste — too many folks hanging about there with artist written all over them. That tired old sign reading, “Fagots — Stay Out” was still behind the bar. That’s a thing I’ve noticed about Barney’s kind of people: they’re not very good at spelling. Barney must have been thinking of some other word with one g, like bigot. But the barkeep was a decent guy who had lent a tolerant ear to my late-night grousings on more occasions than I cared to remember. He called himself Travis, but whether that was his first name or his last I couldn’t say. Big fellow with hairy forearms and an elaborate tattoo on his left bicep showing a blue anchor entwined with red roses. I doubted he was ever a seaman, though. He was very popular with the “fagots,” who, despite the warning sign, kept on coming here — because of the sign, maybe. He used to tell a funny story about Errol Flynn and something he did here at the bar one night with a pet snake he kept in a bamboo box, but I can’t remember the punch line.

I sidled onto a stool and ordered a Mexican beer. There was a bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the bar; I took one and ate it with a lot of salt. The salt and the dryness of the egg yolk left my tongue feeling like a piece of chalk, so I called for a refill of Tecate.

It was a slow early evening and there were few customers in the place. Travis, not being an overly familiar sort, had given me the barest nod when I came in. I wondered if he knew my name. Probably not. He knew what I did for a living, I was pretty sure of that, though I didn’t remember him ever mentioning it. When the place wasn’t busy, he had a way of standing with his hands spread on the bar and his big square head lowered, gazing out through the open doorway into the street with a far-off look in his eye, as if he were remembering a long-lost love or a fight one time that he won. He didn’t say much. He was either dumb or very wise, I could never decide which. Either way, I liked him.

I asked him if he knew Peterson. I didn’t think Barney’s would be Peterson’s kind of place, but I thought it was worth a try anyway. “Lives over on Napier,” I said. “Or did, until recently.”

Travis slowly came back from whatever section of memory lane he had been wandering down. “Nico Peterson?” he said. “Sure, I know him. Used to come in in the afternoon sometimes, drink a beer and eat an egg, just like you.”

This was the second time I had been linked with Peterson — Clare Cavendish had said he was tall like me — and however weak the link was, I didn’t welcome it. “What sort of guy is he?” I asked.

Travis flexed his muscleman’s shoulders in a shrug. He was wearing a tight black sweatshirt, out of which his thick short neck stuck up like a fireplug. “Playboy type,” he said. “Or that’s how he presents himself. Ladies’ man, with that mustache and the oiled hair combed in a nice wave. Funny, too — he can always make them laugh.”

“He brought his girls here?”

Travis heard the skepticism in my voice; Barney’s was hardly the place to romance stylish ladies in. “Now and then,” he said, with a wry half-smile.

“One of them tallish, blond hair, black eyes, a particularly memorable mouth?”

Travis gave me his cautious smile again. “That could be any of them.”

“Has an air, this one. Nicely spoken and very elegant — too elegant for Peterson, probably.”

“Sorry. If they’re as good-looking as you make her sound, I don’t look too close. It’s distracting.”

He was a real professional, Travis. But it occurred to me that maybe there was a reason he didn’t notice women, and that he too didn’t much like the sign behind the bar, for his own, private reasons.

“When was he last in?” I asked.

“Haven’t seen him in a while.”

“A while being…?”

“Couple of months. Why? Is he missing?”

“He seems to have gone off somewhere.”

Travis’s eye took on a faintly merry light. “That a crime nowadays?”

I studied my beer glass, rotating it on its base. “Somebody is looking for him,” I said.

“The lady with the memorable mouth?”

I nodded. As I said, I liked Travis. Despite his size, there was something clean and neat about him, something trim and shipshape; maybe he had been a sailor, after all. I’d never felt I could ask. “I was over at his house,” I said. “Nothing there.”

A customer was signaling from the far end of the bar, and Travis went off to serve him. I sat and thought about this and that. For instance, why was the first sip of beer always so much better than the second? This was the kind of philosophical speculation I was prone to, hence my reputation as the thinking man’s detective. I thought a bit about Clare Cavendish, too, but, like Travis said, I found her distracting and instead went back to the beer question. Maybe temperature was the answer. It wasn’t that the second sip was going to be all that much warmer than the first, but that the mouth, having had that first cool rinse, knew what to expect the second time around and adjusted accordingly, so the element of surprise was absent, with a consequent falling off in the pleasure principle. Hmm. It seemed a reasonable explanation, but was it sufficiently comprehensive to satisfy a stickler like me? Then Travis came back and I was able to take off my thinking cap.

“I just realized,” he said, “you’re not the first to ask after our friend Peterson.”

“Oh?”

“A week or two ago, a couple of Mexicans were in here wanting to know if I knew him.”

That same two again, no doubt, in their car with the holes in the roof. “What sort of Mexicans?” I asked.

Travis gave me a sort of wistful smile. “Just Mexicans,” he said. “Businessmen, they looked like.”