The Enigmatologist (7 page)

The
next morning, a key turned in the lock. The sound snapped John from his sleep.
He sat up in bed, reached for the gun on the nightstand. He was not the same
angry kid Rooftop used to take to the shooting range, envisioning his father’s
face on the targets. He hadn’t been to the shooting range in years, and art
school had changed his Old West views. But the Air Force spooked him. The
broken chain rattled as the key turned and there was nothing stopping someone
from forcing their way into his room. John pointed the gun at the door and his
hand shook as the door creaked open a crack and the morning and the routines of
the small hotel imposed themselves upon him.

“Housekeeping,” a woman said in a thick, Mexican accent.
It was just the maid, not uniformed men armed with guns and
iPads
.

“Still sleeping. Come back later,” he said, collapsing
into the bed. He clutched the gun to his heart.

She apologized in broken English, and quickly shut the
door. A cart, heavy with cleaning supplies, creaked to the next room on worn,
uneven wheels.

John put the gun on the nightstand. The clock. It was a
little after eleven. Six hours of tossing under starched sheets and synthetic
blanket. The sun burned through the cracks in the curtains. He tried to fall
asleep again, but lay there, feeling sticky from a stressful snooze. John
rubbed his throat where the soldier had held the knife. He could have died last
night, been killed just like the kid, on his own for the first time,
unprepared. What had he gotten himself into? He could pack up, run back to
Denver, but the kid had died alone in the desert, unable to fulfill his
journalistic aspirations, while John clicked away at his computer, searching
for the right words. He rubbed his wrists, noticed the abrasions from the
handcuffs were gone, his skin fresh and healed, and decided to get up, to keep
looking for the guy in the photo. He owed it to the reporter.

A phonebook hid in the nightstand’s only drawer. It was
thin, a small-town phonebook containing yellow and white pages. He flipped
through the yellow pages to the bar section. There were bars around New Mexico
Highlands University. John shuddered, remembering boorish University of
Colorado-Boulder parties and DJs playing songs about doing shots. He couldn’t
think of an Elvis song about shots, so he ruled out the college bars. The rest
of the bars were in the plaza. That’s where he’d start.

* * * *

Everything
spread from the plaza, the town center, like cracks in a windshield. At one end
stood brick and mortar history, the stately Plaza Hotel, a grand hotel
predating statehood. The plaza extended into the downtown, a desolate blend of
brick and tumbleweed. It seemed empty but watchful, like old, Colorado ghost
towns, restless. Mud brick walls dissolved and intricate facades deteriorated
under sun and time.

Rooftop used to say, ‘Pueblo’s the armpit of Colorado.’
Driving through town, John thought Las Vegas might be the armpit of New Mexico.

Several restaurants and bars inhabited the older buildings
surrounding the plaza. At least one person had to know the man in the picture.

John walked into a neon-lit hole occupied by a couple of
retired cowboys riding bar stools. He asked them about the photo, but they
couldn’t make anything out in dim lights. And the daytime drinking didn’t help.

The bartender was bearded and overweight. The sleeves had
been cut from his black t-shirt, exposing hairy upper arms. John asked him
about the man in the photo. The bartender didn’t even look at it. He pulled out
the biggest handgun John had ever seen, a Colt Python with an eight-inch
barrel. John recognized it from the first-person shooters he played in high
school, the type of gun that would blow the head off a zombie or alien. The
bartender stared at John, a preamble to a showdown. John didn’t say anything.
He bolted out the door and across the street.

Collapsing on a bench, John collected himself, tried to
catch his breath. He’d been threatened twice in twelve hours. Making puzzles
wasn’t nearly this dangerous. All he had to worry about was high blood pressure
from sitting all day, maybe developing restless leg syndrome. And John swore on
his puzzle notebook that everything would be different when he returned home.
He wouldn’t take his time working on puzzles for granted. He’d be fully engaged
in the creation of each clue. He’d put everything he had into finding filler
words that would supply subtext for his theme words. When he returned home,
things would be different. But he had to finish the case first, find the man in
the photo. He had to check out the other bars. Sitting on a bench, John
wondered if the other bars were run by gun-toting bikers, and thought maybe he
should start by asking if they had any meth, then ask about the photo.

An open door next to him. The neon sign in the window
said, ‘
The Watering Hole’,
and
he heard music playing somewhere inside. It sounded like the type of band he’d
like, low energy rock not played on the radio.

The bar was dimly lit. Most of the light came from the
window’s neon beer sign and a glowing hula girl lamp. Bottles lined the back
wall, blocking the mirror. The walls were dark green but obscured by framed
pictures of old buildings, trains, forgotten men and women, old liquor ads, and
three movie posters for films starring Annette
Funicello
and Frankie Avalon. John recognized the titles from his Surf Movie Appreciation
class,
Madam
Groovy’s
Wondiferous
Bongo Bikini
,
Dr.
Surfenstein’s
Robot Bikini
Babes, The
Surftacular
Rock
Waverider
on Bikini Planet X
. The classics. A ceramic Dalmatian sat by the door.

A couple of barflies displaced their day on stools. They
didn’t turn when John walked through the door or look up when he sat next to
them. Instead, they continued gazing into their glasses, completely consumed by
their bourbon encouraged meditations.

“Sup.” The bartender flicked his head, his tattooed arm
throwing a square coaster in front of John.

“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 stockings 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.