Benjamin Black: The Black-Eyed Blonde

Businessmen. Right. Like my man from New York with the pinkie ring. “They say why they were looking for him?”

“Nope. Just asked if he was a customer here, when he’d last been in, and so on. I couldn’t tell them any more than I’ve told you. It didn’t improve their mood.”

“A gloomy pair, were they?”

“You know Mexicans.”

“Yes — not the most scrutable people in the world. They stay around long?”

He gestured at my glass. “One of them drank a beer, the other had a glass of water. I had the impression they were men on a mission.”

“Oh? What sort of mission?”

Travis considered the ceiling for a moment. “Can’t say. But they had that serious look that made their eyes shine — you know what I mean?”

I didn’t, but nodded anyway. “You think this mission they were on might have had serious consequences for our Mr. Peterson?”

“Yeah,” Travis said. “One of them kept on toying with a pearl-handled six-shooter while the other picked his teeth with his knife.”

I wouldn’t have taken Travis for the ironic type. “Funny, though,” I said. “Peterson doesn’t seem the kind of guy to be involved with Mexican businessmen, somehow.”

“Lot of opportunities, south of the border.”

“You’re right, there are.”

Travis picked up my empty glass. “You want another?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to go wild.”

I paid the man and climbed down from the stool and went out into the evening. It was a little cooler now, but the air tasted of car exhaust, and the day’s grit had laid down a grainy deposit between my teeth. I had passed Travis my card and asked him to give me a call if he happened to hear any news of Peterson. I wouldn’t be waiting by the phone, but at least now Travis knew my name.

* * *

I drove home. The lights in the houses up in the hills were coming on, making it seem later than it was. A sickle moon hung low on the horizon, embroiled in a bank of mud-blue murk.

I still had the house in Laurel Canyon. The woman who owned it had gone on an extended visit to her widowed daughter in Idaho and decided to stay there — for the potatoes, maybe. She had written to say I could have the house for as long as I liked. It left me feeling pretty settled on Yucca Avenue, in my hillside roost with the eucalyptus trees across the street. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Did I really want to spend the rest of my days in a rented house where about the only things I could call my own were my trusty coffeepot and a chess set of faded ivory? There was a woman who wanted to marry me and take me away from all this, a beautiful woman, like Clare Cavendish, and rich like her, too. But I was bent on staying footloose and fancy-free, even if it didn’t feel quite like that. Yucca Avenue is not exactly Paris, which is where the poor little rich girl was nursing her bruised heart, last time I’d heard from her.

The house was about the right size for me, but on certain evenings, such as this one, it felt like the White Rabbit’s place. I brewed a strong pot of coffee and drank a cup of it and prowled around the living room for a while, trying not to carom off the walls. Then I drank another cup and smoked another cigarette, ignoring the dark blue night gathering in the window. I thought of laying out one of Alekhine’s less terrifying openings and seeing where I could go with it, but I didn’t have the heart. I’m not a chess fiend, but I like the game, the concentrated coolness of it, the elegance of thought it calls for.

The Peterson business was weighing on my mind, or at least the part of the business that involved Clare Cavendish. I was still convinced there was something fishy in her approach to me. I couldn’t say why, but I had the distinct sense that I was being set up. A beautiful woman doesn’t walk in off the street and ask you to find her missing boyfriend; it doesn’t happen that way. But what way does it happen? For all I knew, there might be offices like mine all over the country that beautiful women walked into every other day and asked poor saps like me to do exactly that. I didn’t believe it, though. For a start, the country surely couldn’t boast many women the likes of Clare Cavendish. In fact, I doubted there was even one more like her. And if she was really on the level, how come she was involved with a lowlife like Peterson? And if she was involved with him, why wasn’t she the slightest bit embarrassed about throwing herself on the mercies — I was going to say “into the arms” but stopped myself in time — of a private detective and imploring him to find the flown bird? All right, she didn’t implore.

I decided that in the morning I would do some digging around in the history of Mrs. Clare Cavendish née Langrishe. For now I had to content myself with placing a call to Sergeant Joe Green at Central Homicide. Joe had once briefly entertained the notion of charging me as an accessory to first-degree murder; that’s the kind of thing that will create a bond between two people. I wouldn’t say Joe was a friend, though — more a wary acquaintance.

When Joe answered, I said I was impressed that he was working so late, but he only breathed hard into the receiver and asked what I wanted. I gave him Nico Peterson’s name and number and address. None of it was familiar to him. “Who is he?” he asked sourly. “Some playboy involved in one of your divorce cases?”

“You know I don’t do divorce work, Sarge,” I said, keeping my tone light and easy. Joe had an unpredictable temper. “He’s just a guy I’m trying to trace.”

“You got his address, don’t you? Why don’t you go knock on his door?”

“I did that. No one home. And no one has been home for some time.”

Joe did some more breathing. I considered telling him he shouldn’t smoke so much but thought better of it. “What’s he to you?” he asked.

“A lady friend of his would like to know where he’s taken himself off to.”

He made a noise that was halfway between a snort and a chuckle. “Sounds like divorce business to me.”

You’ve got a one-track mind, Joe Green, I said, but only to myself. To him I repeated that I didn’t handle divorces and that this had nothing to do with one. “She just wants to know where he is,” I said. “Call her sentimental.”

“Who is she, this dame?”

“You know I’m not going to tell you that, Joe. There’s no crime involved. It’s a private matter.”

I could hear him striking a match and drawing in smoke and blowing it out again. “I’ll have a look in the records,” he said at last. He was getting bored. Even the tale of a woman and her missing beau couldn’t hold his jaded interest for long. He was a good cop, Joe, but he’d been in the business a long time and his attention span was not broad. He said he would call me, and I thanked him and hung up.

* * *

He telephoned at eight the next morning, while I was frying up some nice slices of Canadian bacon to have with my toast and eggs. I was about to tell him again that I was impressed by the hours he kept, but he interrupted me. While he spoke I stood by the stove with the wall phone’s receiver in my hand, watching a little brown bird flitting about in the branches of the tecoma bush outside the window above the sink. There are moments like that when everything seems to go still, as if someone had just taken a photograph.

“The guy you were asking about,” Joe said, “I hope his lady friend looks good in black.” He cleared his throat noisily. “He’s dead. Died on”—I heard him riffling through papers—“April nineteenth, over in the Palisades near that club they got there, what’s it called. Hit-and-run. He’s in Woodlawn. I’ve even got the plot number, if she’d like to go visit him.”