The Hanged Man Read online

  Wearing baggy, standard-issue C.C.A. orange cotton pants, a sagging T-shirt, white socks, and a battered pair of running shoes, Bernardi was a man of medium height, overweight, with thick, tousled black hair and a day’s worth of thick black stubble salted with white. He was thirty-six years old, according to his arrest report, but he looked closer to forty. His jowls were fleshy, his lips were thick and sensual, his dark brown eyes were half hidden behind sleepy lids. The right lid was puffy, and there was a bruise, turning from blue to yellow, just beneath his right cheekbone. He sat slumped in the chair with his hands in his pockets, looking surly and morose. But, guilty or innocent, if I’d been beaten up and tossed into a cell, I’d probably look surly and morose myself.

  “You understand,” I told him, “that I’m working for Sally Durrell, your lawyer.”

  “Si,” he said. “Yeah. I unnerstand.” His flat, phlegmatic voice was gravelly, and his accent suggested that he’d been born in Italy or that he’d spent many hours watching the collected works of Francis Ford Coppola.

  “And you understand,” I said, “that the police have a pretty good case against you.”

  He nodded. “You think I kill him, huh?” His voice was still flat, unmodulated, as though he didn’t especially care what I thought.

  “I don’t think anything, Mr. Bernardi. But Miss Durrell believes that you didn’t do it, and she’s hired me to learn what I can.”

  “How much I got to pay you?” With the same dull lack of interest.

  “You don’t pay me anything. The public defender’s office takes care of that.”

  “How much they pay you, huh? The public defender’s office?”

  “Fifteen dollars an hour.”

  He grunted. Few grunts express contempt more effectively than an Italian grunt. “I make more with the cards,” he said.

  “I don’t have your special skills. So do we talk or do I go back to Miss Durrell and tell her to find someone else?”

  He eyed me for a moment from beneath his hooded lids. Then, slowly, he sat up. He pulled his right hand from his pocket. In it, he held a small sheaf of papers, maybe twenty or so, soiled along the edges and slightly crumpled. They had been cut, or carefully torn, from larger sheets of lined notebook paper, and each was about the size of a playing card. Without a word, Bernardi laid them out along the tabletop in the shape of a horseshoe, the open end at my side of the table. The sheets—or cards, which is what I assumed they were intended to be—were blank, at least on the sides that faced upward.

  Bernardi sat back. “They take away my cards. I make these.”

  “Very enterprising.”

  He said, “You pick one now.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I got to know.” As though that were an answer.

  I leaned forward and reached out my left hand.

  “Right hand,” said Bernardi.

  “Right hand,” I said. I selected one of the homemade cards. “Now what?” I said. “You guess what it is?”

  “Put it down on the table. The face up.”

  I turned over the card and set it on the table. It was a line drawing in pencil, very well executed, of a man about to step off a cliff. He wore boots and a long tunic, belted at the waist, and, like a hobo, he carried over his shoulder a staff with a bundle dangling from its end. Some small unidentifiable animal—a dog or a cat or, for all I know, a wombat—was nipping at his heels. For no discernible reason, the man was smiling.

  Bernardi was nodding. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

  “Yeah?”

  He leaned forward. Looking at me, he tapped the card with his fingernail. I noticed that his fingernail had been bitten to the quick. Maybe he wasn’t as phlegmatic as he seemed. “This card, he stand for you. He represent you. He’s a good card.”

  “And which card is he?”

  He tapped again at the card. “This card, he’s the Fool.”

  “He sounds to me,” said Rita, smiling, “like an admirable judge of character.”

  “Very amusing, Rita. Next time, you can be the one who goes over to the Detention Center and plays Groucho to his Chico.”

  “Don’t let the Knights of Columbus hear you say that. Or the Mafia.”

  “The Mafia wouldn’t let this guy in. He wouldn’t know a sharkskin suit if it swam up and ripped his leg off.”

  We were sitting in Rita’s office, Rita behind the desk and me in one of the client chairs. For almost three years the office had been empty, and even now, after a month, I still felt a gratifying mixture of surprise and pleasure whenever I looked across the desk and saw her sitting there, saw her hair, black as raven wings, outlined against the pale blue sky beyond the window. I felt other things, as well, but Rita preferred that we didn’t discuss those in the office.

  Rita said, “You’re sounding a bit provincial, Joshua. But I imagine that’s because, unlike Bernardi’s English, your Italian is absolutely fluent.”

  “Well,” I said. “I admit that it’s not up to my Urdu. But then, few things are.”

  “You’re not happy with this case.” She was wearing a black bolero vest over a blue silk blouse, and her hair was swept back over her ears and gathered into a chignon. She had an extremely good neck, and her neck was far from being her best feature. I’ve never been able to decide just what, exactly, her best feature is. Her large dark eyes? The regal Hispanic nose, the arch of Indian cheekbones? The wry parentheses at the corners of her wide red mouth?

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “I love it. Astrologers, Satanists, Tarot readers, spiritual alchemists. My culture heroes, all of them. I can’t wait to sit down with these honchos and shoot the shit. I can get my aura polished. I can get my chakras looked into. I’ve been worried about my chakras lately. I think they need recharging.”

  “I love it when you whine,” she said. “You know you’re going to take the case. Sally asked you to.”

  Three years ago, a man named Martinez had shot Rita and her husband, killing him and wounding her so badly that her doctors had been convinced she would never walk again. She was walking now, but she’d been in a wheelchair for a very long time. Three years ago, I had gone looking for Martinez. I had found him, and things had happened, and shortly afterward I had found myself in court, accused of attempted murder. Sally had defended me, successfully, and she had refused to accept any payment.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “What else did Bernardi tell you?”

  “That he didn’t kill Bouvier.”

  “You believe him.”

  “I’m inclined to. Doesn’t make sense to me that he’d wipe prints off the chunk of quartz and then leave his scarf hanging there.”

  “How did the scarf manage to wrap itself around Bouvier’s neck?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “What did he say?”

  What Giacomo Bernardi had said was that after the argument with Bouvier, he had gone off to brood in the library, taking with him a bottle of sambuca—the Freefall-Morningstar household, New Age or not, evidently kept a well-stocked bar. He had sat in the library, alone, watching a soccer match on cable TV and hitting the sambuca vigorously. I’d gotten the feeling, talking to him, that hitting sambuca vigorously was an activity with which he was not entirely unfamiliar.

  Eventually, he said, he fell asleep, still sitting in his armchair. He was awakened by what he described as a noise.

  “What kind of noise?” Rita asked me.

  “He doesn’t know. A noise. Whatever it was, it woke him up. And then, he says, he heard someone running in the hallway. He said it sounded like someone running barefoot.”

  Still groggy from the aftereffects of half a bottle of vigorously hit sambuca, Bernardi had stumbled out of the library and into the hallway. Looking down the hall, he saw that one of the bedroom doors was open—Bouvier’s. Without thinking much about it, probably without thinking at all, he shambled down the hall and looked into the room. Ha
nging immobile at its center, attached to a beam by a scarf that Bernardi recognized as his own, a long red silk scarf trimmed with gold, was a very dead Quentin Bouvier.

  Rita said, “Where had the scarf been before this?”

  “In Bernardi’s bedroom closet.”

  “He panicked?”

  “He panicked.”

  Bernardi had told me, “I got afraid.” Some of the flatness had left his voice. He had sat forward, his hands on the Formica table. “I see my muffler, you know. My scarf. And I see his face, that man’s face, all black and swole up. And his eyes, you know, they are like this”—he showed me with his hands—“wide open, you know, and sticking out. Looking at me. And I got afraid the people would think I done this. And so I left.”

  “What did he take with him?” Rita asked me.

  “Only his coat. A navy pea coat. I don’t think he had much else.”

  “Not the Tarot card?”

  “He says not. He says he didn’t even think about the card until after he’d left La Cienega.”

  “How did he leave?”

  “He walked. He doesn’t have a car, he’d gotten a ride there from one of the other guests, a woman named Veronica Chang. Anyway, he walked. This was about five o’clock in the morning, still dark. He walked down to the entrance to the interstate and hitchhiked until he got a ride. He was standing there, he says, for over an hour before someone stopped. The sun was beginning to come up.”

  “Did he get the driver’s name?”

  “No. And he doesn’t know what kind of car it was, either. American, he says. An older model.”

  “The state police will locate it, if they haven’t already. At that time of the morning, anyone leaving La Cienega probably lives there.”

  “Probably. The ride took him as far as Bernalillo. He had some coffee and doughnuts at a diner and then walked over to the next interstate entrance. He was trying to make Albuquerque, where he knows some people. The state police picked him up there, at the Bernalillo entrance, at seven-thirty.”

  Rita asked, “Do we know who found Bouvier’s body, and when?”

  “Bouvier’s wife, Justine. Six o’clock. I got that from Sally. The state cops were there, at the house, by six-thirty.”

  “What was the time of death?”

  “He hadn’t been dead long. Couple of hours, max. Sometime between four-thirty and five-thirty.”

  “If Bernardi’s telling the truth, he came on the scene almost immediately afterward.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he shut Bouvier’s door when he left the room?”

  “He says he didn’t. But according to the wife’s statement, it was shut when she arrived at six.”

  “Presumably, then, the murderer shut it after Bernardi left the house.”

  “Probably the murderer, yeah. No one admits to seeing it open. No one admits to being out in the hallway all night. And if anyone had seen the door open, probably he would’ve looked inside to see if everything was all right. And he would’ve seen Bouvier hanging there.”

  “Assuming there was enough light.”

  “Right. Assuming that.”

  “Do you have the names and addresses of the rest of the people who were present in the house that night?”

  “Yeah. Got those from Sally, too.”

  “Put them into the computer and, when I can, I’ll run them through the databases.”

  “When you can?”

  She smiled. “When I can. I know you’ll find this difficult to believe, Joshua, but I do have one or two things on my plate besides your Mr. Bernardi. I’m doing some asset searches for Kevin Lehrmer, up in Denver. I’m doing a due vigilance for Ed Norman. And I already told you that I’m trying to locate that man from Scottsdale, Frederick Pressman.”

  “Yeah. The guy who disappeared with two million dollars. How you doing?”

  “I’ve learned his new name—Ralph Bonner.”

  “How’d you get it? Girlfriend? Relative?”

  “An old girlfriend. I got her off the phone records. She’s in Phoenix, and I asked Steve Chapman down there to check her out. He made a garbage run, found a letter with Bonner’s name and a return address. He was staying at the Hilton in Houston at the time. A week ago.”

  Once you put your garbage out on the curb, it loses all of its right to privacy, and so do you. The highest court in the land, the Supremes, has determined that anyone who wants the stuff can just zip up to the bag, toss it into the backseat, take it home, and peruse its contents at leisure. Be careful what you throw away.

  Rita said, “Bonner’s description matches Pressman’s. The real Ralph Bonner is buried in a cemetery in Syracuse, New York.”

  “So Pressman has papers.”

  “Birth certificate, Social Security, Texas driver’s license, passport. He booked a flight from Houston to Mexico City for last Friday. He wouldn’t need the passport for Mexico—not immediately, anyway—so I suspect he’s headed for somewhere below the border.”

  “Brazil?”

  “I don’t think so. According to his college transcripts, he’s got three years of Spanish. No Portuguese. And he could’ve flown to Brazil directly. I think he’ll be aiming for one of the smaller countries, possibly one with a sizable contingent of American expatriots. Costa Rica. Guatemala.”

  “He could’ve flown directly to either one of them.”

  “He’s being cute, I think.”

  “But you’re cuter, Rita.”

  “I’ll find him,” she said. “In the meantime, you put those names into the computer—”

  “Well, see,” I said. “What I was hoping, see, was that you’d put them in the computer, see, and then I could take off and—”

  “Joshua, you’re perfectly capable of typing some names into the computer. I know that you like to pretend that computers are some sort of black magic—”

  “Spiritual alchemy.”

  “What is spiritual alchemy?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Well, spiritually or otherwise, put the names and addresses into the computer.”

  “Yes, dear,” I said. “You know what this is? This case? Aside from being a major pain in the ass, I mean.”

  She sat back, put her arms along the arms of her swivel chair. “What?”

  “It’s unreal. All these space cadets. It’s like one of those English mystery novels of the thirties. An isolated manor house filled with eccentrics. A nighttime murder. One of the eccentrics, probably innocent, has been arrested by the local constabulary.”

  She smiled. “But then you show up, the debonair amateur sleuth, and you begin your careful investigation. And finally, in the last chapter, through your incredible powers of observation and your supreme skill at ratiocination, you identify the real murderer.”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, what I was planning to do was keep beating up on people until someone confessed. I’ll try to be debonair about it, though.”

  “The difference here,” she said, “is that this is a real house. With a real corpse in it, a person who was once very much alive. And who died in a very messy way.”

  “Yeah. There’s that.”

  “Tell me about this Tarot card.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think the card’s important.”

  She nodded. “It’s missing. Someone’s dead. Until we learn otherwise, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s important.”

  I took out my notebook, flipped it open. “Okay. From what Sally and Bernardi tell me, the card is from a deck originally hand-painted in Italy in 1494. The deck was commissioned by Pope Alexander the Sixth. Rodrigo Borgia. You’re familiar with Rodrigo?”

  “Lucrezia’s father.”

  I smiled. “One way to put it. According to Bernardi, it was short of a full deck. Which makes sense, because that’s what most of these people in La Cienega would be playing with.”

  “Joshua.” Mildly reproving.

  “You know that a Tarot deck has twenty-two major trumps? Major Arcana, the
y’re called.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, those twenty-two cards, the Major Arcana, they were all that were painted. And then, over the years, the deck got split up. Right now, eleven of the cards are in the Louvre, in Paris, and ten others are in a private museum in Catania, Italy. This card’s been missing for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century. But according to Bernardi, there are stories, legends, that it’s turned up from time to time in the possession of different occultists. A guy named Court de Gebelin, in Switzerland, sometime around 1776. Later, around 1886, with a French guy named Eliphas Levi. The last person who claimed to have seen it was Aleister Crowley, when he was a member of something called the Order of the Golden Dawn.”

  Rita nodded. “The English magical group. Yeats was a member.”

  “Yeats the poet?”

  She smiled. “No, Joshua, Yeats the chiropractor.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine. Who holds the record for the most home runs hit during a single season?”

  “Roger Maris.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine. You wanna fuck?”

  She laughed and I watched the muscles play beneath the smooth skin of her throat.

  I said, “It’s just I get so turned on when you point out my deficiencies.”

  She laughed again. “All right,” she said. “We’ll try it again. Yes, Joshua. Yeats, the poet.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And how did it come into the possession of this woman, this Eliza Remington?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll beat her up until I find out.”

  “You might try asking her first.”