by Ben Adams
“Sup.” John flicked his head. He motioned to the iPhone plugged into the sound system behind the bar. “Who’s this playing?”
“Pinecone Strip Mall,” the bartender said, irritated by people who weren’t familiar with his favorite band.
“Aren’t they the side project of The Harvesting Radiators?” John asked, adjusting his glasses.
“Yeah,” the bartender said, looking back at John, surprised.
“I saw HR in October at the Boulder Ballroom.”
“No way,” the bartender said, his handlebar mustache quivering when he talked. “I was just listening to that podcast the other day. The second set was killer.” He walked back over to John. “What can I get you?”
“PBR,” John said. He motioned to the two barflies. “Their next round is on me, too.” The two men raised their glasses.
“Sure thing. You from Boulder?” He set the beer can on the coaster.
“Denver. In town a couple of days. How much?”
“For yours and theirs? Twelve bucks.”
John tossed a twenty on the bar. “No change.”
“Since you’re new to town,” the bartender said, “I oughta warn you, Clem over there, now that you bought him a drink, he thinks you wanna take him home with you.”
Clem smiled, exposing gums and missing teeth. The teeth he did have were stained yellow and brown by tobacco. Clem put his hands on the bar, started to push himself up.
“Sorry, Clem,” John said, waving his hands. “I’m here on business, not pleasure.”
Clem slumped back down, staring into his now empty glass.
“Hold on a sec,” the bartender said. He poured Clem another drink. Clem nodded courteously toward John, then watched the ice melt in his glass. “So, what brings you to town, other than Clem?”
“Actually, I’m looking for someone. You know this guy?” He slid the photo across the bar with a folded twenty-dollar bill on top.
The bartender rolled his eyes, but still pocketed the twenty. He looked at the picture for a couple of seconds. “Ha, you’re looking for this piece of shit?”
“So, you know him?”
“Yeah, it’s Al Leadbelly.”
“Leadbelly, you sure?” A rockabilly name to match the blurry pompadour, the beer can littered trailer, the jumpsuit.
“Yeah, he works for my uncle. Comes in here trying to get free drinks. Had to kick him out last night. Hold on a sec.” The bartender refilled the other barflies’ drinks.
“Why did you kick him out?” John asked.
“He started a fight with some kid.”
“Over what?”
“No idea. It was pretty busy. I was taking care of some customers, next thing I know, Al and this kid are going at it, beating the shit outta each other. I had to run over and break it up. Had to kick them both out.”
“About what time was that?”
“I dunno, ten thirty?”
“You know what happened after they left?”
“Nope, don’t care either.” The bartender wiped the bar with a rag.
“Did you call the cops?”
“What are the cops gonna do? give Leadbelly a ride home?”
“Uh, yeah.” John thought about what would have happened if the cops and Leadbelly had crashed into the trailer while he was reattaching Leadbelly’s bedroom door, and was suddenly grateful for the latitude small towns give their residents. “So, what about this kid, what’d he look like?”
“I dunno, young enough for me to card him. He’d just turned twenty-one. I’d never seen him in here before”
“You think maybe you’d seen him around town?”
“I grew up here, know pretty much everybody or at least their families. I’d have recognized him.”
John thanked the bartender. He got up to leave. At the far end, Clem was slumped over his drink. John threw another twenty on the bar.
“Whatever they want, it’s on me. Thanks again for your help,” John said, patting the ceramic Dalmatian on the head as he left.
The sunny street, cloudless sky. The heat was coming.
Across the street, someone leaned on John’s car.
“Friend, I say, can I talk to you for a moment?” he asked, getting off John’s car, walking toward him. His chest shined with the badge of the local sheriff. The sheriff was a real cowboy, leather-faced and pearl-buttoned, with a cowboy name, Sheriff Lee Masters III.
“Sheriff,” John said, “what’s up?”
“Word is you’re going all over town asking questions, looking for someone.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I should have come by your office, introduced myself when I came to town. Name’s John Abernathy. I’m a P.I. from Denver.” John handed him his ID.
“A little young to be a P.I.,” the sheriff said.
“I get that. Anyway, I’m looking for this man.” John showed the sheriff the picture. “A woman, Elizabeth Morris, took it. Thinks he’s Elvis. A newspaper down in LA hired me to see if it’s legit.”
“LA, huh? Los Angeles is the armpit of the United States.”
“Everyone has a favorite armpit.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. So, Sheriff, maybe you can help me out. Bartender inside said it’s a guy named Al Leadbelly. You know him?”
“Well, the picture’s kinda blurry,” the sheriff said, holding it close to his face, “but that looks like Al Leadbelly.”
“You know where I can find him?”
“I hope so,” the sheriff said. “He works for my brother at the lumber yard. Tell you what, let me buy you lunch and then we’ll head over there together. Rosa’s Restaurante makes the best smothered burritos this side of the Rio Grande.”
“You want to keep an eye on me or something?” John asked, regretting not going to the sheriff’s office first.
“Something like that,” the sheriff said, putting his hand on John’s shoulder, leading him across the street to a pink adobe building with tinted glass windows.
“Ah, smell that,” the sheriff said, when they opened the glass door. “Just like Heaven.”
“If the smell of Heaven is burning meat.”
A high school kid sat them at a table by the window, with a perfect view of parked cars. The sheriff rested his cowboy hat, a sweat-stained Chesterfield Stetson, on the seat next to him. His hair was matted down like carpet under furniture legs. A line circled his forehead, the boundary for sun exposure.
From the outside, the restaurant promised to be like most Mexican restaurants in Denver, either a greasy hole-in-the-wall or a franchise Tex-Mex restaurant decorated with sombreros and old pictures, making a foreign country seem like an amusement park, but looking at the menu, John got excited. It was the type of place he’d expect in Boulder or Lower Denver, labeled ‘100% Organic, Locally Sourced, Free Range’.
A woman walked up behind John, but he didn’t see her. The stomach pains he’d been feeling since arriving in town returned. He felt like his body was about to implode. He grimaced and, dropping his menu, clutched his stomach.
“Are you alright?” she asked, putting her hand on his shoulder.
“Yeah,” he said, the pain gradually subsiding with her touch, “I ate a bad sandwich yesterday and I’m still feeling it.”
A beautiful, young, Mexican woman stood over John, her hand on the back of his chair. She appeared to glow naturally, overpowering the mid-afternoon sun and florescent lights. John looked up at her and shook in his chair, but was calm, experiencing the excitement and tranquility that come from seeing beauty.
“Lee,” she said, “I think we need to get some food in your friend.”
“Rosa,” the sheriff said, “this here’s John Abernathy.”
“Oh, uh, hello,” John said, embarrassed by his stammering, his inability to convey his thoughts, the main one being that Rosa was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
The simple, black dress that draped her body, protected by an apron tied around her waist, flowed to black stockin
gs and green Chucks. The hem of a tattoo peeked from under her right sleeve at her elbow. John wondered if other ink decorated her body. Or if she had any hidden piercings.
“You seem awfully young to be running a restaurant,” John said.
Her bangs ended above her trimmed eyebrows and two strands of hair hung on either side of her face. Rosa tucked a strand behind her ear. The rest of her hair had been pulled into a raven ponytail. A dyed blue streak. John smiled, hoping it meant Rosa was artistically inclined. He learned in college he had a greater chance with artsy girls.
She smiled back playfully. “I’m older than I look.”
“What are we talking here? thirty-five, forty?”
“I’m not that old,” she said, laughing and slapping his shoulder.
“Hey now,” the sheriff said. “A person’s age don’t mean nothing.”
“I graduated from college a couple of years ago.”
“Yeah? Me too,” John said. “What school?”
“University of New Mexico. You?”
“The Boulder School of Esoteric Art and Impractical Design.”
“Wow, that’s a mouthful.”
John’s cheeks turned slightly pink.
“What did you study?” he asked.
“A little bit of everything. Psych, Business Administration, Sociology, Biochem, Medieval Studies, but nothing really resonated with me. So I went the easy route. New Mexico History.”
“That’s the easy route?” All John had ever wanted to do was study puzzles. It never occurred to him that some people didn’t have a concentrated vision, that they tested everything until they discovered something they loved. “So, the restaurant, how did that happen?”
“I was going to go to grad school,” Rosa said, “get a PhD, do the academia thing, but I found that what I really wanted to do was help people. And the best way for me to do that was with food.”
“So you went to a culinary academy?”
“You don’t need a degree to make your grandma’s recipes.”
John tore the edge of his paper placemat, shearing away a fragment of green paper that protected the table from lunch falling from a fork.
“What about you? What do you do?” she asked.
“John’s a private investigator,” the sheriff said.
“You seem awfully young to be private investigator.”
“I get that,” John said, feeling slightly inadequate. Rosa was a small business owner, had studied multiple disciplines. He wanted her to know that he was more than a guy who photographed cheating husbands sitting naked on chocolate cake in front of a room full of Civil War re-enactors. “It’s just my day job, though. I’m really an enigmatologist.”
Sheriff Masters squinted, like the word ‘enigmatologist’ was sandstorm in a desert of spelling bee vocabulary, but Rosa smiled and nodded like enigmatology was something she talked about all the time with her guests.
“You design puzzles,” she said.
“How did you…” He looked up at her, surprised, eyebrows furrowing behind the frames of his glasses.
“Like jigsaw puzzles?” the sheriff asked.
“Like crosswords,” John said, “logic puzzles. What I want to do is create puzzles that change the way people view their world.”
“Like those pictures folks look at till they go all cross-eyed?” the sheriff asked.
“Crosswords are like form of meditation, something you do when you’re alone. You’re trying to recall everything you’ve learned, being flexible enough to fit your accumulated knowledge into the right amount of squares. That’s what I love about puzzles. They can alter us, stretch our thinking, expand our awareness, push us to become something more.” John prepared this quote years ago for when someone asked him about puzzles. He thought it was an impressive line and had been waiting for the right time to use it. Looking up at Rosa, he thought it worked.
“I think people just like to fill in boxes,” Rosa said, giving John a slight shove.
“Well, there’s that, too,” John said, blushing but grinning.
“I have a riddle you can answer for me,” Rosa said. “What brings a young enigmatologist to Las Vegas?”
“John’s on a case,” the sheriff said, leaning in, putting his elbows on the table. “He’s looking for Al Leadbelly.”
“Really?” Rosa started laughing. “Why him?”
“Show her the picture.”
John rolled his eyes and pulled the picture from his hoodie pocket, unenthusiastic about having to explain. He thought Rosa would think less of him if she knew why he was in town.
“My client thinks he’s Elvis,” John said, trying to sound indifferent, “wants me to check it out.”
“Al? Elvis? He’s like forty,” Rosa said. “Although, I’ve heard him do karaoke down at the bowling alley. He does do a mean Elvis.”
“Have you seen him lately?” John asked.
“Yeah, I saw him last night at this bar, El Borracho Feliz.”
“The Happy Drunk?”
“Sí.” She smiled, putting one hand on his chair back. “¿Cuánto tiempo ha hablado español?”
“Uh…,” John stammered, bewildered. “Uh…yeah, I really…”
“That’s what you get for trying to talk Spanish to someone named Rosa Jimenez,” the sheriff said, laughing.
“So, you saw Al Leadbelly last night?” John asked, quickly trying to conceal his banter misstep.
“I hope he’s alright. He looked pretty beat-up.”
“Not everyone likes karaoke.”
“About what time did you see Leadbelly?” the sheriff asked, suddenly sounding professional.
“Well, I went there after we closed,” Rosa said. “So, around eleven thirty.”
“You were there by yourself?” John asked.
“I was with Jose. We go there for a drink sometimes after work.”
“Jose, your husband?”
“My brother,” Rosa said. “He’s a sous chef here.” She thumbed over her shoulder, toward the kitchen.
“Your husband or boyfriend meet you there?”
“I’m not seeing anyone, if that’s what you’re asking.” She put her hand on John’s shoulder, shook her head. “You just can’t catch a break.”
“Actually,” John said, flustered by his transparency, “I was just wondering if I needed to talk to anyone else.”
“Nope, the only person you need to talk to is me.” The strand of hair fell from her ear. She re-tucked it.
“That’s what I was hoping.” John gazed at Rosa, absorbed by her smile.
“Do you know how long he was there?” the sheriff asked.
“He was still there when I left, but he was talking to Brandi Cartwright.” Rosa tilted her head and looked at Sheriff Masters.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” John said.
“Brandi Cartwright,” Sheriff Masters said, “is…how can I say it…notorious around town for having many boyfriends, especially for one night.”
“Gotcha.”
“Anything else?” Rosa asked.
The women he talked to were usually clients, bitter and flirting with divorce. Or, when he hung out with friends in Boulder, art school graduates who had just figured out that the real world didn’t care about their macramé yoga pants or their short film about toothpaste, and that they’d have to work in a fair trade coffee shop selling lattes to the next generation of art students to support their craft, this knowledge putting them on suicide watch. But Rosa was different. She exuded a soft vitality, a mellowed, youthful exuberance. It injected every movement, gesture, phrase with her love for this world, this town. John felt refreshed being around someone who was genuinely happy.
He heard Rooftop’s voice, lecturing him about the necessary distance required of P.I.s, the fact that he couldn’t get close to someone, but John didn’t care. It’d been a while since he’d enjoyed talking to someone. He was surprised at how good he felt and knew it was because of Rosa. And he didn’t want it to end.
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“Oh, here,” he said, reaching into his wallet like it was something he just remembered. “This is my business card. You can call me whenever you want, if you think of anything else, or, you know…”
“So if I need a seven letter word for oceanographic that starts with ‘a’, I can call you?”
“Aquatic. Or maybe even abysmal. Depending on the clue. Sorry, it’s part of my…Anyway, yes, you can call me for anything.”
They gazed at each other for a while. Rosa smiled at him, content and delighted, like she’d been waiting several years for him to walk into her restaurant. John hoped that Rosa was interested in him and not that she was waiting for him to order.
“Oh, lunch,” John said, opening and pretending to read the menu. “We came here for lunch.”
The sheriff ordered the combo platter: an enchilada, a flauta, and a chile relleno. John ordered ala carte: one enchilada con mole and a tamal. When Rosa walked away, John turned and watched her hips sway. They moved gently, like willow branches in a March breeze. When she reached the front counter she turned and caught John staring. She smiled and laughed a little. John blushed, quickly looked away.
He wanted to spend more time with her and regretted having to be on a case, having to track down some jerk who dressed like Elvis, did karaoke, and picked up loose women. Rosa glided between the register and the kitchen and John outlined their future, starting with coming back to her restaurant once his case was wrapped up, talking to Rosa, asking her out, charming her somehow, doing the long distance thing, becoming more serious, then moving in together, John working on puzzles while she ran the restaurant, his numerous awards hanging from the walls.
John shook his head, stopping his thoughts. He knew from experience how dangerous fantasies could be. When he was a child, he would sit next to the door and imagine his father walking through it, hugging him and his mother. His father would explain that he’d gotten lost coming home from work, something that happened to John once when he was at a neighbor’s third birthday party. So, John sat by the door waiting for something that never happened. Once he realized his father wouldn’t be walking through the door, John learned to control his fantasies, only dreaming about outcomes he could control, his puzzles, his future.
