The Hanged Man Page 13

  Instead of turning around, and to the right, which is what most of us do when we’re tapped on the right shoulder, I feinted to the right and then I sank into a crouch as I wheeled around to my left. I hadn’t been wrong. Probably he’d waited until we got outside because he didn’t want my blood spattered all over the designer furniture.

  His right arm went whistling through the space that was supposed to be occupied by my head.

  Karate or one of the other martial arts, Brad Freefall had said. Paul was Korean, so probably his hobby of choice was tae kwon do, the Korean brand of karate. Mostly footwork, leg thrusts and roundhouse kicks. Long-distance stuff—you needed room to bring your feet to bear. If he was using tae kwon do, he’d be backing up soon, to give himself enough space to create a potential circle of action. I wouldn’t be able to do any damage unless I could get inside the circle.

  But at the moment I was already inside the circle. And most of these martial-art types share a serious flaw. They’ve never really been hurt. They learn how to take falls, they learn how to parry thrusts. They seldom experience sudden, excruciating pain. Administering it is an excellent way to get their attention.

  It’s strange how elastic time can become in certain situations. All of this went through my head in something like a millisecond as I whirled down into my crouch and saw that he was off balance, his right side toward me. It took only one more millisecond to slam my fist, all the momentum of my spin behind it, into his stomach, just below the arch of rib cage.

  I’d been wrong about his ability to deal with sudden pain. He dealt with it very well. A good solid punch to the solar plexus will leave the average person—will leave me—doubled up and out of action for a day or two. Paul merely gasped and began to backpedal, probably looking for enough room to use his feet.

  I didn’t think that this was a good idea. I went with him, and, as we danced across the grass, I feinted a left. He parried with a swipe of his right arm and I jabbed a straight right at the side of his exposed neck.

  He took that punch very well, too. It hurt him, I believe it hurt him badly, but he only blinked. Then he remembered that he had fists and he began whipping them at me, left and right. I stayed inside, riding it out, taking it on shoulder and upper arm. And then he grabbed my arms and butted me, his forehead smacking against my cheekbone. My teeth clacked together.

  There was no pain, not yet, but the shock jarred me for a moment and that was time enough for Paul to spring back and twist into a sudden skillful spin, his left foot sailing toward my head. I staggered away, but he followed through, landed on his left foot, swiftly pivoted and twirled, slashed up his right foot in a smooth continuation of the attack. I backed away from that one, too, and he did it again, landed on the right foot, pivoted, swung around with his left foot, all in one fluid motion, quick, graceful, lethal, just the way they do it in the movies.

  I outweighed him by about fifty pounds. He may have had the momentum, but I had the mass. I stepped inside the arc of the swing, blocked his upper leg with my right forearm. He had quite a bit of momentum. I staggered with the force of it. But when he began his next move—a leap off the right foot to jackknife it at my face as he went down, prepared to roll away—I smashed my right fist, as hard as I could, down into his crotch.

  Unless he was wearing a plastic cup, that would slow him down a bit.

  He wasn’t.

  His right leg buckled and I stood back and he crashed to the grass on his back. The breath left him in a single explosive rush and he rolled onto his side and curled up, clutching with both hands at his groin.

  The entire thing had probably taken no more than a minute, maybe two minutes at the most, but I was panting and the chamois shirt beneath my leather windbreaker was soaked with sweat. I realized that I was standing in a kind of stoop, my back hunched over. I straightened it, sucked in some air. My cheek was throbbing. I reached up and touched it. Tender, and my fingers came away red and slick with blood. He’d broken the skin. I looked around the lawn. There were still no squat naked Indians, no brightly colored birds. But when I glanced toward the house, I saw that Veronica Chang was standing beyond the picture window, her arms crossed beneath her breasts, her face expressionless. I nodded and I turned and left.

  “What happened to you?” Hernandez asked me, glancing at the bandage on my cheek.

  “I was watching MTV. I got carried away.”

  “In an ambulance?”

  He was behind his desk, his black boots perched on its top. Standard cop office, tile floors, cement block walls, fluorescent lighting. Agent Green was off somewhere, probably polishing up new nightclub material for the two of them.

  I said, “You’ve got a statement for me to sign?”

  He swung his feet off the desk, pulled his chair closer to it, lifted a manila folder. He tossed it across the desktop. “Initial each page. Sign it at the end.”

  I picked up the folder. “Okay if I sit down?”

  He waved a hand toward an empty chair. “Taxpayers’ money.”

  I sat down, opened the folder, read through the statement, initialed each page. Hernandez watched me without saying a word. I signed the last page, closed the folder.

  Hernandez said, “Anything you want to add? A confession, maybe?”

  “My partner came up with a way for the Anglo guy to get the ice pick into the resting room.”

  Hernandez sat back, smiling faintly, and put his arms along the arms of the chair. “Do tell.”

  I told him.

  He nodded. “That the way you did it? Inside a gallon jug?”

  “She also pointed out something about the guy that I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Jeez,” he said. “You didn’t notice something?”

  “His tan. It’s February. Where’d he get it?”

  Hernandez shook his head in mock admiration. “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

  I nodded. “You did, in other words.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it? We’ve had troopers hitting the tanning salons in Santa Fe and Albuquerque since this morning.”

  “He could’ve been wearing a skin dye.”

  “Jeez. You think of everything.”

  “Did you learn anything at the tanning salons?”

  He smiled again, hooked his thumbs over his belt. “I know you’re not going to believe this, you being so helpful and such a hotshot and all, but my superiors, they don’t want me to tell you. They’re funny that way. I begged them, I really did. I said, hey, this guy is a sleuth. He can solve the whole damn case for us.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t want to put a blot on your record.”

  “You’re already a blot on my record.”

  But he said it without any real conviction, more from force of habit, I think, than anything else. I smiled. “You still like Giacomo Bernardi for the Quentin Bouvier killing?”

  “Three little words. Means, motive, opportunity.”

  “And you don’t think that Leonard Quarry’s death was related somehow?”

  “Your Anglo friend wasn’t on the guest list down there.”

  “It doesn’t strike you as a coincidence? Two people go to the same party, both of them get killed within a week?”

  He shrugged. “Coincidences happen.”

  “I don’t think that Bernardi killed Bouvier.”

  He mimed surprise: mouth open, eyebrows raised. “Jeez, why didn’t you say so? I’ll call C.C.A., have them turn him loose.”

  “And he couldn’t have killed Quarry. He was in jail at the time.”

  “Now I’ve got two little words for you.”

  “Merry Christmas?”

  “Fuck off. You’re working for the public defender’s on the Bouvier thing. You’re entitled to ask about that. I don’t have to tell you anything more than the law requires, but you’re entitled to ask. You’re not entitled to ask anything about the Quarry killing. They’re two separate cases.”

  “What if I can prove they’re not?”

 
He shrugged. “Then maybe we’ll renegotiate. In the meantime …”

  “Fuck off?”

  He nodded. “Like I said.”

  It was one o’clock when I reached the office, carrying a takeout lunch from the Burrito Factory. Rita was out. A note on my desk told me that she’d be back by three. I ate my carne adovado. I called Sally Durrell, told her what I’d learned and what I hadn’t, then wrote up my formal reports for her. I called Carl Buffalo. A woman, the same woman that I’d spoken to before, told me that he was still up in the mountains. She said that he was due back tomorrow. I called Carol Masters, the film actress turned channeler. Her machine told me, as it had before, that she was out of town. I wondered whether she knew that a burglar would be delighted with that piece of information. I called Ernie Beller, a friend who ran a used car lot on Cerrillos Road. Ernie was in. He probably didn’t know who killed Quentin Bouvier, so I didn’t ask him. He did know about cars, however, and he said he had a late-model Jeep Cherokee available, “almost cherry,” that he was practically giving away. I told him I’d stop by tomorrow.

  At two-thirty, I left for my next appointment.

  “I never drink alcohol,” she said. “Not even a glass of sherry. It clouds the mind.” She spoke with a clipped, no-nonsense Yankee accent that had been softened by years of Southwest living, but not very much softened.

  I smiled. “My mind is usually so cloudy that another cumulus or two doesn’t make much difference.”

  “All the more reason not to befuddle yourself.” She smiled. “But try one of the almond cookies. They go well with the tea. I made them myself.”

  The cookies, all perfectly rounded, all exactly the same thickness, had obviously not been made by hand. If she’d baked them, she was moonlighting for Stella d’Oro.

  We were sitting in the parlor of the house. The furniture was colonial, the chairs and the loveseat garnished along their backs with lace antimacassars. The curtains were also lace, and the rug on the dark hardwood floor was a kind of patchwork quilt. The walls were covered with floral wallpaper, the white background slightly yellowish now, the colors slightly faded. The one painting in the room showed a quaintly decrepit covered wooden bridge set against a billow of trees wrapped in brilliant autumn tints, reds and golds and coppers. The air was threaded with the scent of lavender sachet. If it hadn’t been for the view through the window, a panorama of Santa Fe and the brown hills to the south, I might’ve thought that I’d been whisked magically away to New England, and the late nineteenth century.

  It was a house I’d noticed many times before from the car as I drove along the northern sweep of Paseo de Peralta. Poised at the top of the ridge, it stood out from the two large and showy adobes that flanked it. It was probably the only house in Santa Fe built to a mock Tudor design, beam-and-plaster exterior walls, a mansard roof, and I’d often wondered who owned it. Now I knew. It occurred to me, once again, that these New Age people had staked out some nifty real estate for themselves.

  I leaned forward from the loveseat and plucked up a cookie. I sat back, bit into it. Stella d’Oro.

  Eliza Remington took a sip of tea from a Wedgwood cup. As Veronica Chang had done, earlier today, she kept the saucer in her lap. “Now let me see,” she said, cocking her head and eyeing me speculatively through her rimless rectangular glasses. “You’d be an Aries.”

  “That’s right.”

  “On the cusp of Pisces, I’d say. A few days off. The twenty-second of March? Twenty-third?”

  I smiled. “The twenty-third.”

  She smiled, obviously pleased with herself.

  If Bennett Hadley had been telling the truth, and she had access to a computer database, it wouldn’t have taken her long to discover my birthday.

  Her blue-rinsed hair was permed into tight wiry waves. Her hands were peppered with liver spots. She was in her late sixties or early seventies, about five foot five, thin and angular and somewhat stooped. But she was still very spry. Her movements were quick and decisive; her voice was strong. The blue eyes behind her rectangular rimless spectacles were clear. She wore black sensible walking shoes with thick soles and flat heels, black stockings, and a black dress festooned with small yellow fleurs-de-lis. At her throat, perhaps to hide her neck, she wore a yellow silk scarf. She had most likely never been beautiful: her chin and her nose were too forceful for that. But she had probably always been formidable, and time and experience had molded character into the lines and hollows of her face, and an expression that seemed to shift between alertness and a private amusement.

  She said, “Your moon’s in Sagittarius?”

  “In Seattle, for all I know.”

  She laughed, nearly spilling the saucer from her lap. She caught it with one hand before it slid to the floor—good reflexes—and she looked up at me, smiling broadly. Her teeth all seemed to be her own. “Not a believer, huh?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She leaned slightly forward. “Pardon?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not.”

  She sat back, shrugged amiably. “Well, some are, some aren’t. For those that are, astrology can provide a real solace.”

  “I’m sure it can.”

  She grinned. “No need to be polite. If you think I’m a crazy old bag, that’s fine with me. I’ll get by. Always have. Did Paul Chang do that to your face?”

  I smiled. “You’ve been talking to his sister?”

  She returned the smile. “She phoned me about an hour ago. Wanted to know if I’d talked to you yet. Told me you’d beaten Paul up.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly.”

  “Paul’s supposed to be good at that karate of his.”

  “I imagine he is.”

  “What’d you do? Fight dirty?”

  “Paul probably thinks so.”

  She smiled. “Good. Never liked him. Nasty, I always thought. Veronica says he’s furious at you.”

  “You and Veronica are good friends?”

  “Wouldn’t go so far as to say that. We know each other. We talk from time to time. She told me to warn you.”

  “Warn me about what?”

  “Paul. He’s looking for you.”

  “She told you to tell me that?”

  She smiled. “You must’ve made quite an impression on Veronica.”

  “She kept it well concealed.”

  “She wants you to call her.”

  Interesting. “All right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  She nodded toward the tray on the coffee table. “Have another almond cookie.”

  I took one.

  “So,” she said. “You told me over the phone you wanted to know about my Tarot card.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s missing. Quentin Bouvier and Leonard Quarry, the two people who wanted it, are dead.” I finished the almond cookie, sipped some tea.

  She nodded. “Heard about Leonard yesterday. And Quentin, of course—I was there when it happened. But the card didn’t kill ’em.”

  “No, but I’d still like to know something about it.”

  She nodded, sipped at her tea. “You know anything at all about Tarot cards?”

  People kept asking me that question. “Justine Bouvier thinks they came from Egypt. Bennett Hadley says they came from Italy. Peter Jones thinks they’re a kind of pictorial guide to enlightenment.”

  She smiled, raised her eyebrows. “Talked to Peter, did you?” She nodded. “I like that boy. Sharp. Serious without being an asshole about it. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  Her blue eyes narrowed behind her spectacles. “It bother you, my talking straight out?”

  “Not especially.”

  Again she leaned slightly forward. “Come again?”

  “Not especially.”

  She sat back and nodded. “Not that it’d make any difference.” She smiled. “One of the advantages of endurance. I’m a colorful old lady these days. Used to be a
loud-mouthed bitch.”

  I smiled.

  She took a sip from her teacup. “Justine, now, she’s an idiot. Learned everything she knew from Quentin, and outside of that magic mumbo jumbo of his, Quentin was a complete ignoramus.”

  “What about Bennett Hadley?”

  She frowned, puzzled. “You’re feeling badly?”

  “Bennett Hadley,” I said. “What do you think about him?”

  “Bennett’s an asshole,” she said comfortably. “Without being serious, although God knows he thinks he is. He’s right, though, about Italy. That’s where the cards came from. Started as a game. Trionfi. Triumphs. Which is where we get the word trumps. They weren’t called Tarrochi until later. Back in the fifteenth century, they were a pretty hot item among the wealthy. Lot of the rich old farts back then, they commissioned a deck for themselves. Charles the Sixth of France had one done. And so did Pope Alexander the Sixth—Rodrigo Borgia. The Borgia Deck. That’s the deck we’re talking about. Painted by Pinturicchio, one of Rodrigo’s favorites. Famous for the gilt work in his paintings, Pinturicchio. Anyway, Rodrigo gave the deck to his daughter, Lucrezia—you know Lucrezia?”

  “Only by reputation.”

  She blinked, apparently puzzled once again. “Constipation?”

  I smiled. “I know of Lucrezia Borgia only by reputation.” I was beginning to wonder if she was actually hard of hearing or whether she was putting me on.

  She narrowed her eyes again. “She wasn’t a poisoner, you know. Lot of people believe that old story about her killing off her husbands. Horseshit.”

  I nodded. “If you say so.”

  “Damn right I say so. It’s the truth.” She frowned, vaguely looked around the room, looked back at me. “Where was I?”

  “Rodrigo gave the deck to Lucrezia.”

  She nodded. “As a wedding present. When she married Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara. Her third husband, that one was. She passed it on to their son, Ercole, when he got married. The deck was split up sometime after that. Fifty or sixty years later, half of it, including the Death card, turned up in France.”