Chapter Text
Benoit Blanc, gentleman detective, had done enough speaking engagements by now to know that when people asked him about his favorite mystery, they were usually angling for a story about a case he’d solved, preferably one with false leads, or surprise endings, or narrow escapes. The more philosophically-minded members of the audience might have accepted the semantic argument that “mysteries” were not necessarily synonymous with “cases”—not always, and maybe even not often. But by and large, Benoit answered the questions as they were intended, rather than as he wanted to, if he’d had his druthers. After all, most audiences would only be disappointed if he told them the truth—that his favorite mysteries were those contained within the human heart.
Take his husband, for example. After four years together, there were still surprises, still small acts of trust, of confidences shared, that opened up whole worlds inside Phillip that Benoit hadn’t known were there. He suspected that he could happily spend his whole life deciphering what made him tick, what made Phillip Phillip. It had been, in no small part, one of the reasons he’d married him.
And even those people whose lives coincided with his for a shorter time, who were destined to pass in and out of his orbit while remaining largely a cipher to him—well, those mysteries left an impression, too, fleeting as they were.
Especially when it seemed that one of them had never deleted his phone number.
He’d been at the farmer’s market, on a rare Saturday morning without Phillip, whose orchestra had a matinee performance. He’d pulled out his phone to text Phillip a picture of some particularly glorious beets that would go nicely in a goat’s cheese salad when he noticed the missed call from an unknown number, and a voicemail notification.
He recognized the voice immediately, of course—the posh accent, and the soft tone that could lure an unsuspecting listener into believing that the speaker was mild as a spring rain, when ordinarily he was more akin to a hurricane.
“Benoit, hello, it’s Benjamin--though I’m sure you’ve deduced that already. Listen, I’ve been consulting for an art museum in Santa Fe, these last several months, and something’s happened. One of the curators passed away—a suspicious death, I believe the police have called it—and I’m rather afraid they think I’ve had something to do with it. I know—well, I know we haven’t spoken, in a few years, but as you can see, I still had your number, and I just thought—could you call me back, if you have a moment? Ta very much.”
Blanc’s paternal grandmother had been Southern and Catholic, always perfectly coiffed and never without her string of pearls and her glass of sweet tea. He’d never once heard her take the Lord’s name in vain, but that one thin red line aside, she’d possessed one of the most wickedly inventive knacks for cursing he had ever had the fortune—or the misfortune, on the rare occasion when he was on the receiving end of one of her invectives—to encounter. Her favorite mot juste when things had gone particularly pear-shaped was the disturbingly evocative phrase, “shit in the broccoli.” He’d been certain, as a boy, that it was too folksy, too parochial, too old to ever be something he would say with any kind of alacrity. He’d aged into it, of course, in the end, just like he had his daddy’s cigars, and his mother’s fondness for shoo fly pie. But, much like the silver he’d inherited from his grandmother on her passing, he tried to reserve it for special occasions, rather than to let it tarnish through overuse.
Blanc was rapidly beginning to suspect that today was going to be one of those days.
He picked up his phone, scrolled over to recent calls, and hit redial. It only rang once before Benjamin picked up.
“Thank you for calling me back so quickly! I wasn’t sure—where are you these days, anyway? Not still in New York, surely?”
“We can catch up later, Benjamin,” Blanc said, giving the beets one last wistful look before stepping away from the stall and sitting down on a nearby bench. “How serious is it?”
“Well, here’s the thing, Blanc…” There was a sigh down the line, and then silence, broken only by the sound of shuffling papers.
Benjamin—back when he’d been Benoit’s Benjamin—didn’t pause. He went a hundred miles an hour, reckless in pursuit of whatever it was he’d deemed worthy of his undivided and indivisible attention: what he considered to be justice, more often than not. Artistic renown, frequently. Pleasure, on many, many, memorable occasions that left Blanc, no stranger to the occasional bout of hedonism himself, wondering how long he might be able keep up. During the rare times when Benjamin slowed down, it was usually because something was either deeply wrong, or was about to be.
“…They’ve confiscated my passport.”
Shit in the broccoli.
“Are you certain the orchestra can spare you for a few days?” Blanc asked again, adjusting the rearview mirror.
Phillip waved a hand dismissively as he climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s Carmen. We could do Carmen in our sleep. Besides, if Tanya didn’t have at least one chance to play the first bassoon part instead of the second, she’d have found a way to take me out herself.”
“She’s ambitious.”
“Yes, well, so was Lady Macbeth.” Phillip slipped a copy of the New Yorker into the glovebox, before turning to smile at Blanc. “Anyway, this should be fun. I’ve never met one of your exes, you know.”
Blanc did know. In fact, it was possible he’d never been more aware of that fact than at that exact moment, in a rental car on the lot next to the Albuquerque Sunport, when in a matter of hours he would introduce the love of his life to the only one of his exes who had ever run a museum heist.
Heists, plural, most likely, if he was honest.
And now he was apparently suspected of murder.
This was going to go well.
He had no one to blame but himself, of course. It had been impulsive, the night before. He had been searching for flights on his laptop, and Phillip was humming to himself as he brushed his teeth in the master bathroom, simultaneously trying to put on a pair of pajama pants in a way that should have been utterly ridiculous, but instead made Blanc’s chest tight with love and anticipatory loneliness.
This man, he’d thought to himself, this absurd man is my home, and I don’t want to leave him tomorrow.
Before he could overthink it, he’d closed his laptop and moved to sit at the foot of the bed. “Phillip, listen, why don’t you come with me?”
Phillip had paused, one pajama leg on, and taken the toothbrush out of his mouth.
“Are you serious?”
“Deadly.”
“Hold on a moment,” Phillip had said, pulling his pants on the rest of the way and retiring to the sink to rinse his toothbrush. When he’d come back into the bedroom, he’d sat down next to Benoit and placed a hand on his knee.
“Are you asking me to come along just because it’s your ex who’s asked you for help? Because I trust you, you know. You needn’t worry that I’ll be jealous, or—I don’t know, that I’ll check in on you all the time or anything like that. I know nothing’s going to happen.”
“You’ve never met him,” Blanc had pointed out, in a statement that was most definitively against interest.
“No,” Phillip said, adjusting the lapel of Blanc’s dressing gown, “but I’ve met you, and I’ve never met a more honorable man.”
“And if I’m asking you to come along because I’d miss your company?” Blanc had asked, placing his hand over Phillip’s and holding it, briefly, against his chest.
“Well, then, that’s all you had to say. Of course I’ll come, in that case.”
“That easy?”
“That easy,” Phillip said. He’d nudged Blanc’s laptop with his knee. “Remember, I like aisle seats.”
And less than 24 hours later, here they were, and there was nothing for it, now, but to follow the highway north.
“You’re thinking about the case, aren’t you?” Phillip asked, reaching into his bag for a bottle of water.
“Something like that,” Blanc hedged. “But speaking of, I suppose we’d better talk logistics for a moment—Benjamin is going to meet us at the hotel bar at 7, and give us a little background on what’s happened. He didn’t want to give me much information over the phone, and I can’t say that I blame him.”
“That serious, is it?”
Blanc took his time responding, rubbing the thumb of his left hand against the steering wheel. Outside, the sprawl of the city was rapidly giving way to the high desert, the muted ochre of the earth broken up by patches of chamisa and juniper.
“Benjamin is inclined to trouble—at least he was. And yet he’s never asked for my help, before.”
“And that worries you.”
“It does,” Blanc admitted.
Phillip reached across the center console to take Blanc’s free hand. “Well, he’s in good hands. It will all come out all right, in the end.”
“You sound very certain of that.”
“Oh, I am. When I finally murder Lionel from the French Horn section, you’ll be the first person I call to help cover it up.”
Blanc opened his mouth, only to shut it again immediately.
“Go on,” Phillip poked him. “What were you going to say?”
“Is it terribly unromantic if I tell you that you’d be better off bringing me in during the planning phase?”
“Not unromantic at all, darling, I appreciate the offer.”
Benoit chuckled, bringing their linked hands to his lips. “Thank you, Phillip.”
“For what?”
“For agreeing to come with me, for a start. For not minding that I needed to do this, for another.” And for the thousand other things he couldn’t say, just then, and didn’t, things that would be too heavy for the moment to carry. There was only so much room, metaphorical or otherwise, in their rented Honda Civic, as they sped onward, toward parts of Benoit’s past he’d once thought were well behind him, but that were now curling back, ouroboros-like, into the path ahead of him.
“You’re welcome,” Phillip said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
By the time they’d checked into their hotel on the historic Santa Fe Plaza, there was only half an hour left before they were due to meet Benjamin at the bar on the ground floor.
“I’d like to shower, first, if you don’t mind,” Blanc said as they unpacked. “If you’re ready before me, feel free to go downstairs. You might even find a table.”
“I will do, thanks,” Phillip said, pulling a navy blue sweater out of his suitcase. It was his favorite, Blanc knew, the one he wore when he wanted to showcase his eyes to perfection. Blanc thought, with a sudden surge of fondness, that he might not be the only one nervous about the night’s events.
“How will I recognize your ex, if he gets there before you?”
“Oh, I doubt you’ll need to worry about that—I’ve never known him to be on time to anything. But if he’s somehow had an entire personality transplant in the last five years, he’s a thin white man with wild, curly hair. Look for the hair first—you won’t be able to miss it.”
Phillip laughed. “All right, then. I’ll keep an eye out. Shall I see if the bartender can make you an aviation?”
“You know me too well.”
Phillip leaned over and kissed Benoit on the cheek. “I’ll see you down there.”
Blanc lingered in the shower, his nerves slowing him down for once instead of driving him inexorably forward, as they usually did. Even so, he walked into the bar at five minutes to seven, early enough that he expected to find Phillip still on his own. Instead, when he scanned the bar, what he found was Benjamin, his glorious head of hair shaved off, leaving only a dark layer of stubble, the better to show off the pearl earring that definitely hadn’t been there five years before. He was leaning in close and laughing at something Phillip said, with his hand, improbably, already on Phillip’s arm.
Blanc cleared his throat as he approached, suppressing, though just barely, the urge to place his body between them.
“Good evening,” he said to Benjamin, and to Phillip, “I see you’ve already met my ex.”
Phillip freed himself from Benjamin’s grip and turned to Blanc, blinking up at him as if the dim lighting of the bar had suddenly become uncomfortably bright. “I’m sorry, did you just say he’s your ex?”
“What an incredibly small world it is, Blanc,” Benjamin said, linking his arms through each of theirs. “You see, I’m his ex as well.”