The Hanged Man Read online

  “Nothing so far. I still think that Quarry’s death is connected to Bouvier’s, but I don’t know how to prove it. Rita had an idea, and I’m going to check it out.”

  “What idea?”

  “I told you this morning that the guy who killed Quarry, the guy that I think killed Quarry, had a heavy tan?”

  “Yes. You said the state police were inquiring at the tanning salons.”

  “And I told you about the possibility of skin dye?”

  “Yes?”

  “So Rita thinks it might be a good idea to check with Quarry’s friends and relations, see if they knew anyone connected to Quarry who was involved in the theater.”

  Only a brief moment passed before she said, “Stage makeup.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, Joshua, it’s possible that this man’s tan is genuine. That he flew into New Mexico from somewhere like the Caribbean, and then flew out again, after he killed Quarry.”

  “Sure it’s possible. But that would probably mean that he’s a contract killer, and so far I haven’t seen anything to indicate that.”

  “Someone sent by the man for whom Quarry was bidding on the card?”

  “Maybe. If he exists. But even if he does, it wasn’t Quarry’s fault that he lost out on the bidding. And Sally, I’ve got no way of checking arrivals and departures at the Albuquerque airport. The police can, but I can’t. This is something I can check on.”

  A pause, and then: “It’s worth looking into, I suppose.” She sounded dubious.

  “It won’t take much time. A few phone calls. And I don’t have much else to look into.”

  “I know, Joshua. I know you’re doing the best you can. But you have to bear in mind that my interests here revolve only around the defense of Giacomo Bernardi for the murder of Quentin Bouvier. What if you and Rita are wrong? What if Quarry’s death has nothing to do with Bouvier’s?”

  “Then I’ll be wasting your fifteen dollars an hour. Maybe you’d better try hiring Robin Williams.”

  She laughed. “All right, Joshua. Keep me informed.”

  When I telephoned the Freefall-Morningstar house, Brad answered. “Crystal Center.”

  “Hello, Brad. This is Joshua Croft.”

  “Hey, man, what the hell is going on here? I heard that Leonard got killed. The state cops were here. A couple of troopers.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They wanted to know if anyone who knew Leonard was into theater. Actors, stagehands, like that.”

  So the state police were following the same trail. Hernandez had told me this morning that he didn’t believe that Quarry’s and Bouvier’s deaths were related. But a couple of state troopers talking to Brad didn’t necessarily mean that Hernandez had been lying to me. Brad had known both men. The state police were investigating both cases.

  “And what did you tell them?” I asked Brad.

  “I told them no, man. I don’t know anyone like that. Except for Carol Masters, and they couldn’t care less about her. How come they want to know?”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  “Not a thing, man. Typical cop mentality. They told me they were the ones asking the questions.”

  I explained to him what had happened, told him about the heavily tanned man who had probably killed Quarry.

  “No, man, no. I don’t know anyone like that. Could this guy be the one who killed Quentin, too?”

  “I don’t know. One more thing, Brad.”

  “What?”

  “A young woman, a friend of Giacomo’s, killed herself a few years ago, down in Albuquerque. Did you know anything about that?”

  “Killed herself? A friend of Giacomo’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, man. I didn’t know. Why’d she do that?”

  “I’m not sure. Thanks for the help.”

  I called Bennett Hadley and received pretty much the same responses: the state police had asked him about theatrical people who’d known Quarry, and, other than Carol Masters, he’d been unable to come up with any. Like Brad, Hadley wanted to know if the tanned Anglo man could have killed Quentin Bouvier. I told him I didn’t know. He didn’t know, or said he didn’t, about the suicide of Starbright in Albuquerque. I called Peter Jones. No answer. Called Justine Bouvier. Got her machine, asked her to call me. I tried Eliza Remington, found her and received, once again, the same responses. Called Sierra Quarry. Apologized for bothering her, asked her how she was. She was all right, she said. But she didn’t sound all right: she sounded lost. I asked her about a theatrical connection to her husband. Except for Carol Masters, she didn’t know of one. Like the others, she had been questioned about it by the police. Like the others, she wanted to know why the police were interested. I explained.

  “Oh,” she said in her soft, solemn voice. “But why are you interested, Mr. Croft? The state policeman, Mr. Hernandez, told me that Leonard’s death probably had nothing to do with the death of Mr. Bouvier.”

  “I think that Hernandez is wrong, Mrs. Quarry. The state police are committed to the idea that Giacomo Bernardi killed Quentin Bouvier. And since Giacomo’s in prison, so far as they’re concerned the two deaths can’t be related. I think they are.”

  She sighed slowly and I could hear her sadness over the phone line. “I don’t know that it makes any difference.”

  “I think it does. And Mrs. Quarry? I’m pretty good at this. Sometimes I can do things, go places, that the police can’t. There’s a possibility that if they can’t find the man who killed your husband, then maybe I will. I just wanted you to know that I’ll be trying.”

  Another sigh. “All right, Mr. Croft. Thank you for your concern.”

  “Mrs. Quarry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you sure that your husband was bidding on that Tarot card for himself?”

  “That’s what he told me. I …”

  “What, Mrs. Quarry?”

  Another sigh. “I don’t know, Mr. Croft. Leonard never really talked to me about his business. I’m sorry, but I’m not very good with money, it’s just something that never interested me, and Leonard knew that. And now, well, I’ve been talking to everyone, all our friends, and they all say that Leonard couldn’t have afforded it for himself. And the police, too, they say the same thing. They must be right, all of them. But I just don’t know. He never told me about anyone else. He never mentioned anything about anyone else.”

  “And he did tell you that he wanted the card for himself?”

  “Well, yes. I mean, I was sure he did. But he couldn’t have afforded it, could he? So why would he have said that?”

  “I don’t know yet. To your knowledge, had he been involved in any other deals recently?”

  “Oh dear. The police asked the same question. I really don’t know, Mr. Croft. I’m sorry, I’d like to help you, but I honestly don’t know.”

  “All right. Just one more question. Did you ever hear of a young woman named Starbright? She lived in Albuquerque and she was a friend of Giacomo Bernardi’s. She committed suicide a few years ago.”

  “How awful. Starbright was her name? No. No, I don’t think so, Mr. Croft. Is it important?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Quarry. Thank you.”

  The air was clear and mild; bright stars crowded the black sky. Back in town, most of the snow had melted away, but up here in the mountains, beyond the tall caped forms of the conifers, the pale silent trunks of the aspens, it still sheeted the steep slopes, a cool white blaze in the beams of my headlights.

  There weren’t many cars on the Ski Basin Road, and none of them, it seemed, contained Paul Chang. A pair of headlights did stay behind me all the way, about two hundred yards back, but never moved any closer. When I reached the Big Trees Lodge, at ten minutes to nine, I parked the station wagon and twisted myself around in the seat to watch the road through the rear window. I saw that the headlights belonged to a gray Chevy pickup, about ten years old. It drove by the restaurant’s parking lot without a he
sitation. I couldn’t see the driver.

  I got out of the Subaru, closed the door, locked it. There were only four or five other cars in the parking lot at the base of the big A-frame building. A slow night. I climbed up the wooden steps. I hadn’t climbed them for a couple of years.

  Every five years or so, some ambitious would-be restaurateur decides that the Big Trees Lodge offers more promise than it’s ever actually kept before. He buys the place, refurbishes it, hires a new staff, puts some ads in the Reporter and the New Mexican, and then sits back and waits for the tourists and their money to roll in. The tourists who’ve come for the skiing roll right on by, up to the big lodge at the ski basin, and the other tourists seldom drive the ten miles required to get there from town. Neither do many of the locals. Sooner or later, the owner cuts back on the staff, hires a less imaginative chef. The tourists don’t care, but the few locals who have been coming, stop coming. Usually, five years after he buys it, he sells it.

  Just now the restaurant was about midway into its cycle. It still did some dinner business on the weekend and occasionally some lunch business during the week, but not much of anything on a weekday night.

  Inside, there were two couples sitting on opposite sides of the room at small, candlelit tables. The bar, a low-ceilinged space separated from the dining area, was empty, and so were the booths that ran down the opposite wall. I perched myself on a Naugahyde stool and ordered a weak Jack Daniel’s and water.

  The bartender, Sabrina, was a tall, thin, blond woman who’d been born and raised in Santa Fe. I’d seen her around town, as a cocktail waitress or a bartender, in one bar or another since I arrived here myself. Tonight she passed the time by gossiping to me about the local luminaries: who was divorcing whom, who was marrying whom, who was drinking more these days, who was drinking not at all.

  She told me about a Santa Fe politician who’d come into the bar, two weeks before, with his new girlfriend. (“I swear, Joshua, half the people we get here, we get them because they’re screwing around and they figure this place is so dead they won’t get caught.”) The two of them had sat at the far booth. Fifteen minutes later, the politician’s wife had come in with her new boyfriend, and they’d sat down two booths away.

  Sabrina took a drag from her cigarette, exhaled. “Louise was on that night—the cocktail waitress—and she was so nervous she could hardly carry her tray.”

  Nothing had happened, she said, for half an hour. “A half an hour Louise and I are watching them, waiting for one of them to spot the other. And then Bill and the girl get up, and they’re walking out, and just as they go by the other booth, Bill smacks his hand down on the girl’s butt and gives it a great big squeeze. And then he looks over—his hand is still on her butt—and he sees Maria. And Maria sees him and in less than a second she’s out of that booth. She climbs right up onto the table and jumps on him and she grabs at his hair—that nice white hair of his—and she starts pulling it out by the roots. She’s got her legs wrapped around him and he’s staggering all over the bar, reeling around, and she keeps shouting, “This is your Property Tax Commission, you son of a bitch?”

  I laughed. “Poor Bill.”

  “Poor Bill nothing. He’s been cheating on her since the day he got married. I heard he chippied one of the bridesmaids in the hallway closet.” She sucked on her cigarette, exhaled. “Like they say. What goes around, comes around.”

  I nodded. “It’s all karma.”

  She frowned at me. “You’re not going Hindu on me, are you, Joshua?”

  “It’s all karma, Sabrina. You can’t escape the stuff. We’re all trapped on this big wheel, going round and round. If you kill somebody, that’s karma. If you get killed, that’s karma. If you don’t believe in karma, that’s karma. If you decide to run away from your karma, that’s karma.”

  “Karma does it all, huh?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then what are we hanging around here for?”

  I shrugged. “It’s our karma.”

  She laughed.

  “But what happened to Bill and Maria?” I asked her.

  Behind Sabrina, on the back counter, the telephone rang. She frowned. “One second,” she told me, and then turned to pick it up. “Bar.”

  I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes after nine. Veronica Chang was late.

  When I looked back up, Sabrina was holding out the cordless telephone receiver in her right hand, her left over the mouthpiece. “It’s for you, Swami. A woman.”

  I took the phone. “Hello?”

  It was Veronica Chang, calling to apologize and to tell me that something important had come up, that she couldn’t get here tonight. She asked if I’d call her tomorrow to reschedule. I said I would, and she apologized some more and then hung up.

  I turned off the telephone and handed it to Sabrina. She was smiling. “You got stood up,” she said.

  “Apparently.”

  “Serves you right for cheating on Rita.”

  I shook my head. “Business meeting.”

  She smiled. “Right.”

  Bartenders seldom believe the best of people. They seldom see it.

  “So what happened to Bill and Maria?” I asked her.

  “Oh yeah.” She replaced the phone in its cradle, then turned back to me, leaning her elbows on the bar. “A couple of the waiters came in from the dining room, and finally they were able to get the two of them separated and quieted down.” She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray. “Bill took her home. Never even looked at the girl. She just stood there the whole time, watching.”

  “How’d she get home?”

  “Maria’s boyfriend took her.” She shrugged. “Maybe they’ll live happily ever after.”

  I nodded. “Karma.”

  She smiled. “Another drink?”

  I shook my head. “Gotta go. It’s—”

  “Right, yeah. Karma.”

  About a mile down the road, and maybe sixty yards behind me, the headlights picked me up again.

  To my occasionally paranoid eyes, at any rate, they seemed to be the same headlights that had followed me from town. But if it was Paul Chang, why hadn’t he tried something on the way up?

  I could think of one answer to that, and I didn’t much like it.

  On the way up, the Subaru and I had been on the mountain side of the road: anyone wanting to run us off the road might think that the trees and the bank of the hill would cushion our arrival.

  Heading back into town, we were on the cliff side of the road. For the next four or five miles, the right edge of the highway ran along the edge of the mountain, which sometimes sloped gently downward beneath the weight of its towering black ponderosas, but more often simply plunged straight into the valley, a drop invisible from the car. The only barrier was a line of flimsy retaining posts, each set with a small round plastic reflector that peered at me like a single unblinking eye.

  I looked into the rearview mirror. The headlights hadn’t moved up. Maybe it wasn’t the same car.

  There was a glow ahead, through the trees. It became a beam of light swaying through the treetops and then it became another pair of headlights. They grew larger and then the car whooshed by and I watched in the mirror as its taillights diminished and finally vanished behind the glare of the car following me.

  Which began to move up now, closing the distance between us.

  In New Mexico, except in a bar or restaurant, and so long as it’s visible, you’re allowed to keep a gun on your person. You’re also allowed to keep one in your car. Some enterprising souls, true Sons of the Pioneers, do both. I reached down under the seat and retrieved mine, a .38 Smith & Wesson. The Model 42, five shots maximum, but I keep an empty chamber beneath the shrouded hammer. I’m not usually attacked by more than four people at a time.

  I wedged the butt down between the cushion of the passenger seat and the seat back, so the thing wouldn’t get lost.

  Up ahead, a bright yellow diamond-shaped sign indicated that the road woul
d soon start acting like a snake.

  There was no glow down there, no car approaching. I tapped my brakes, suggesting to the driver behind me that I was about to slow the Subaru, and then I downshifted into third and hit the gas, swinging wide to the left lane just before I slipped into the right-hand turn. The tires whined in protest, the engine coughed, but the station wagon held the asphalt. I shifted into fourth and the car shot toward the next curve.

  The headlights found the rearview mirror and then, on the straight, they began to grow larger.

  It was possible, of course, that the car behind me was being driven by some idiot who was guilty only of recklessness and pride, and who’d been insulted by my attempt to outrun him in a puny Japanese wagon. In which case, by trying to stay ahead of him, I’d just be making things worse.

  It was possible. I could worry about it later.

  Next curve winding left. No glow, no cars coming. Downshift into third, slide into the turn. The steering wheel fighting me, the wagon’s rear end fading off to the right. Hold it steady, ease up on the pedal, get the road back beneath all four tires. Clutch, stick, gas.

  Another cough from the engine.

  Hang in there, kid. Pull through this and I’ll buy you some nice new oil. I was only kidding about the new car.

  The headlights stayed behind me all the way, disappearing on the turns and reappearing after them, slightly farther back at first, and then moving closer on the straights.

  At last the curves ended and the road ran straight for maybe half a mile. The Subaru was running flat-out but the headlights kept getting larger in the mirror.

  Let’s see what he has in mind.

  What choice do we have?

  The headlights filled the mirror. He was less than twenty feet away.

  If he hit me from the rear, rammed me hard enough at the left rear bumper, he could cause me some serious trouble.

  He moved out into the oncoming lane and lumbered up alongside me. I sent off a silent prayer of thanks to Hollywood, which has encouraged a belief in this sort of nonsense. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the hood of the truck—it was the gray Chevy pickup—and when the driver pulled even with me I risked a quick glance. Saw only a vague featureless shape in the grayness. Ski mask?