The Hanged Man Read online

  “She mentioned something about the cards being originally Egyptian.”

  “Typical Bouvier bullshit. Bullshit that’s been handed down by pseudo-scholars for centuries. People like de Gebelin and Eteilla believed that the cards were introduced into Europe by the Gypsies, and that the Gypsies were originally Egyptian. Wrong on both counts. The Gypsies are from India and the cards are originally Italian. But Quentin had an Egyptian bee in his bonnet, thought he was the reincarnation of Akhnaton. And Justine, who’s never had an original thought in her entire life, bought his story. She liked the idea of being Mrs. Pharaoh.”

  I said, “She believes, or says she believes, that this card possesses a power it picked up from the magicians who handled it.”

  For a moment his face was as scornful as Justine Bouvier’s had been, earlier today. “Justine believes anything that her idiot husband believed. Well, let’s face it, the woman is not a giant of the intellect—she was his bloody secretary before she was his wife. But all right, sure, the card probably did pick up vibrations from whoever handled it. A sensitive psychometrist might even be able to identify some of them. But personal vibrations become attenuated over time. And they get overlaid by the vibrations of the people who handle an object more recently. The strongest vibrations on that card would’ve been the vibrations of Eliza Remington.” He grinned. “So Bouvier paid two hundred thousand bucks for the vibrations of an anemic little old lady who pretends to be an astrologer.”

  “How did you know how much Bouvier paid for the card?”

  “What?” His eyes narrowed, in pain or in thought, and his fingertips touched delicately at his temple again, and began kneading. “I don’t know. Someone mentioned it that night.”

  “Do you remember who?”

  “No,” he said. Lightly, his fingertips made small circles in the gray hair.

  “Who else might’ve known how much the card was worth?”

  Gruffly: “How would I know?”

  I said nothing. I let his anger lie between us, across the wooden table, and I waited to see what he did with it.

  He stopped kneading, held up his hand, showed me his palm. “Sorry,” he said. “I had a rough night last night. My head’s killing me. I just don’t know, all right?” It wasn’t particularly gracious, but it was an apology.

  “No problem,” I said. “What do you think of Leonard Quarry?”

  He frowned. “Why?” He lifted his bottle, took a hit of his beer.

  I said, “I need to learn everything that I can about these people. You know them. I’d appreciate any insights you might be able to offer.”

  He shook his head. “You’re trying to help Bernardi. I understand that. But you’re wasting your time, my friend. There are two kinds of people in this world. There are winners and there are losers. And Bernardi is definitely a loser.”

  Whenever I hear someone express a sentiment like this, I’m reminded of Robert Benchley’s observation about the two kinds of people in this world: there are those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I’m being paid to learn what I can.”

  “And you think one of the others killed him.”

  “I’m not being paid to think.”

  He grinned. “That’s good. Because if you think Bernardi’s innocent, you’re wrong.”

  “Maybe. It happens fairly often. Leonard Quarry?”

  He shrugged. “But this is all off the record, right? The last thing I need right now is one of these clowns coming back at me with a lawsuit.”

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said. “Nothing you tell me is going to end up in the New York Times. And I won’t be giving out names.”

  He nodded. “All right. Leonard Quarry. Another dilettante. Worse than Bouvier, in fact, because at least Bouvier believed the bullshit he was spouting. I don’t think that Quarry believes in anything except Mammon.” He sipped at his beer. “That’s money.”

  “Right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Once again, he hadn’t heard the irony. Maybe he never did. “He lives out in Agua Caliente,” he said, “near the hot springs, with his wife, a frail little number who calls herself Sierra. She’s a psychic, allegedly. Quarry’s a dealer—in esoterica, primarily, but when push comes to shove, he’ll move anything that’ll turn him a buck. He likes to pass himself off as an expert on the occult. He’s anything but. He talks the talk, but he can’t walk the walk.”

  I said, “You knew that he wanted to get that Tarot card from Eliza Remington?”

  “Sure. And I know he was pissed off that he didn’t get it. But look, Quarry didn’t kill Bouvier. Quarry weighs in at about four hundred pounds, and on top of that he’s got emphysema. He has a hard time lifting his gin and tonic. He’d never be able to lift Quentin Bouvier.”

  “How did you know that Quarry wanted the card?”

  “What?” Wincing slightly. We were back to the routine with the fingers at the temple.

  “How did you know that Quarry wanted the card?”

  “I don’t know. Someone mentioned it at dinner that night.”

  “Okay,” I said. And then, one by one, as I had with Justine Bouvier, I went through the names of the other people who’d been at the house in La Cienega last Saturday night. Hadley’s responses, although he didn’t know it, were nearly identical to Bouvier’s, and as glibly dismissive.

  Peter Jones: “He’s into a kind of alchemical meditation. Transmuting base elements into spiritual. And he’s got plenty of base elements to work with. You know he’s been having an affair with Justine Bouvier for over a year?”

  Brad Freefall and Sylvia Morningstar: “Sylvia’s a crystal maven, Brad’s into drums. They’re both relics. Debris left over from the sixties.”

  Carol Masters: “The poor man’s Shirley MacLaine. She’s into reincarnation and she’s a channeler, channels a celestial being named Araxys. Funny, but a lot of what he has to say is lifted straight from the dialogue of Carol’s old movies.”

  Carl Buffalo: “Chief Thunderthud, I call him. One of the local gurus of the men’s movement. A muscle-bound clod.”

  Eliza Remington: “A fraud. But a sharpy, no question. You make an appointment, Little Liza takes your name and your birthdate and your place of birth. She uses those to get your social security number—she’s got a computer, and she’s hooked up to a database—and then she can find your medical history, your employment record, credit standing, pretty much anything she wants.” He grinned. “Well, shit, you’re a private eye, right? You know how that works.”

  “Yeah.” But only because Rita had told me.

  “And then, when you show up, she dazzles you with how accurate she is. She’s a sharpy, all right.” He grinned and shook his head, almost in admiration.

  I asked him, “How did she get the Tarot card?”

  “Been in her family for years, apparently. She only sold it now because she needed the cash. That’s the story, anyway.”

  “And what about Veronica Chang?”

  As it had earlier today, when I was speaking with Justine Bouvier, Veronica Chang’s name abruptly changed the texture of the conversation. Hadley frowned, and started once again to do his trick with his temple. “Veronica,” he said. “Interesting woman.”

  “How so?”

  “Very bright, very attractive. I never understood how she got involved with Bouvier.”

  “She was involved with Quentin Bouvier?”

  He frowned, puzzled. “Quentin?” Then he grinned. “No, not with Quentin. With Justine.”

  “I need a new car,” I said.

  Rita said, “I told you, Joshua. I think you should lease one.”

  “Obviously, Rita, you don’t understand the intimate relationship that exists between a man and his motor vehicle.”

  “Obviously not. But I do understand the intimate relationship that exists between a man and the Internal Revenue Service. If you lease the car and put it in the agency’s name, you can deduct y
our payments.”

  “There are some things whose importance transcends financial considerations. A car, Rita, is more than just a means of transportation. It’s an expression of a man’s inner being, his true essence.”

  “Joshua?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t want you to be offended.”

  “You don’t buy that, huh?”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I do. It’s pathetic, of course, but I buy it. But I’m not talking about that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your feet. They’re cold.”

  “Oh,” I said, and I laughed. “Sorry.”

  We were in Rita’s bedroom, lying in Rita’s big canopied bed, the down comforter pulled up to our waists. Propped up against a pair of pillows, her hair jet black against the white Egyptian cotton, Rita was wearing a black silk nightgown that I found, as always, profoundly interesting. Lying on my side, my elbow against the mattress, my cheek notched against my fist, I was wearing what I usually wore in these circumstances. A silly grin. In the soft light from the nightstand lamp, she looked about twenty years old, and more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen.

  “Speaking of inner beings,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Were you able to locate Carl Buffalo?”

  “Locate, yes. Talk to, no. He’s up in the mountains with a flock of happy campers. He’ll be back in a couple of days. I spoke with some woman at his house—wife, girlfriend, I don’t know.”

  “Not a wife. The land tax records have him as single.”

  “You got that from the computer?”

  “Yes. What about Carol Masters?”

  “She’s out of town, too. Probably visiting Alpha Centauri. That’s where this guy she channels, Araxys, is supposed to live. What do you figure Alpha Centauri is like, this time of year?”

  “Warm. Who will you be seeing tomorrow?”

  “Brad Freefall and Sylvia Morningstar. I’ve got an appointment out in La Cienega at ten.”

  “When you’re in the house, make certain you take a careful look at the fireplaces.”

  I took a careful look at Rita. “And why would I do that?”

  “That Tarot card would be easier to conceal if it weren’t inside its leather binder.”

  “Ah. Right. And leather can burn.”

  “And leather can burn.”

  “Hey,” I said. “I knew that.”

  She smiled. “But possibly, if the binder has been burned, some of it remained.”

  “I’ll take a careful look at the fireplaces,” I said.

  “What about Leonard Quarry?” she asked me.

  “He hasn’t returned my call. But Peter Jones did, the guy who’s been playing around with Justine Bouvier, and I’m seeing him at four tomorrow. He lives in Mesa Roja. What I thought I’d do, after I talk to Brad and Sylvia, was shoot up to Agua Caliente and see if I can find Quarry. Afterward I can drive over to Mesa Roja. It’s not far.”

  “And Veronica Chang?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “Eliza Remington?”

  “I see her on Thursday. I told you about her using the computer to fake the astrology stuff?”

  “Several times.” She smiled. “You know, Joshua, this affection you have for petty fraud is a little bit worrisome.”

  “I get a kick out of a sixty-one-year-old woman who uses a computer base to scam people.”

  “You’ve only got Bennett Hadley’s word for it that she does, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “But even if she doesn’t, it’s a good story.”

  “What do you think of his story about Bernardi killing Bouvier?”

  “I don’t like that one as much. If the whole point is that Bernardi killed Bouvier because Bernardi saw him as a traitor, then why didn’t he hang him up by his ankles? Which, on Hadley’s argument, is what Bernardi would’ve done. Should’ve done.”

  “The argument is specious, obviously.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  She said, “Hadley feels that no one else makes a likely suspect?”

  “So he says. He admits that no one liked Bouvier, but he’s convinced, or says he is, that no one disliked him enough to kill him. Except Bernardi.”

  She said, “What about the connection between Bouvier’s wife and Veronica Chang?”

  “Hadley says they were an item for a while last year. Before Justine Bouvier became involved with Peter Jones.”

  “These people lead complicated lives.”

  “They surely do.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “What?” I said.

  She smiled. “When you say something like They surely do, aren’t you cowboys supposed to add ma’am?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I plumb forgot.”

  She laughed. She reached out and, lightly, she put her hand on the back of my head. “Give me a kiss, you big galoot.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, swooping slowly down off my elbow. “I surely will.”

  La Cienega is a small community south of Santa Fe, hidden behind the hills to the west of the interstate. The older homes, built and still owned by Hispanic families, sit close together among the tall cottonwoods that crowd the banks of the narrow creek. Today the neat vegetable gardens, the carefully constructed chicken coops, were beginning to poke themselves out from beneath the flimsy pelt of melting snow. The trees, winter-stripped and streaked with meltwater, groped with gray spidery branches toward the faraway blue sky.

  The newer homes, most of them built by latecomer Anglos, sit farther out on the plateau, away from the water and the trees, isolated from each other by the open spaces of high desert. The house of Brad Freefall and Sylvia Morningstar was probably the largest of these. A huge compound encircled by a pale brown adobe wall, it sprawled like a fortress along the top of a long bare hill where snow lay in veins along the gullies. The rutted mud of the driveway swung through a broad wooden gate in the south wall. A sign over the gate announced to the weary, and possibly puzzled, traveler that he was entering Rancho Nirvana.

  In the courtyard, I parked the Subaru between an old Dodge pickup truck and a boxy Mercedes-Benz four-wheel-drive wagon, a vehicle that had cost more money than I earned in a successful year. Financially, these New Agers seemed to be doing okay for themselves. Justine Bouvier lived in an Egyptian eagle’s nest paneled in marble, Bennett Hadley in a dandy La Tierra minimansion, and the Freefall-Morningstars in an adobe version of Xanadu. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that perhaps I was in the wrong line of work. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to begin a new career—foretelling the future, maybe, by squinting thoughtfully into a handful of chicken gizzards. If worse came to worst, and I bombed, I could always make gravy.

  I clambered out of the Subaru, clomped up the damp flagstone walkway that ran through the spindly Russian olive trees to the long territorial-style wooden portico. I pressed the glowing button to the right of the heavy oaken door.

  The woman who opened the door wore a white peasant skirt and a ruffled white peasant blouse that exposed a bit more bony brown shoulder and a bit more bony brown sternum than perhaps it should have. Medium tall, she was very thin, and her quick, nervous movements made the thinness seem almost febrile. But despite the gauntness, her face was an attractive one, deeply tanned, animated, her brown eyes round and lively, her nose elegant, her lips full and quick to smile. Her teeth were large and white, and her hair was a thick brown frizzy cascade, threaded with silver. She was perhaps forty-five years old.

  “Mr. Croft?”

  “Yes. Sylvia Morningstar?”

  “Yes, please come on in, it’s such a pleasure to meet you.” She was shaking my hand rapidly, pumping away, her thin fingers strong against mine. She emphasized quite a few of her words when she talked, like Justine Bouvier, or like someone who’s read a lot of Cosmopolitan. And she strung her sentences together, plaiting them into a single bright encircling lariat of chatter: “Th
is way, Brad’s in the living room, I’m so glad you’ve come.” As I followed her down a tiled hallway, she said over her shoulder, “I’m just so phased, I can’t tell you, that someone’s trying to help out poor Giacomo, it’s terrible what happened to Quentin of course, but Giacomo couldn’t have done that, we’ve known him for years, he’s been a wonderful friend, and I just know in my heart that this is all some kind of terrible mistake. Brad? Look who’s here, darling, it’s the private detective I told you about, Mr. Croft, from the public defender’s office.”

  The living room had been built on three levels, each two feet lower than the last, connected one to the other by wooden steps and creating a kind of broad amphitheater that circled a huge kiva fireplace where a sprightly yellow fire fluttered. Floating across the air was a faint smell of sandalwood and some soft melodic guitar music I didn’t recognize. The curved white stucco walls towered up to a ceiling of dark brown shiny vigas and latillas. Except for a large cream-colored carpet on the lowest level, before the fireplace, the bleached and polished hardwood floor was bare. Sylvia Morningstar and I stood on the upper level, and Brad Freefall was lying on a long blue sofa against the wall on the middle level, his head against its arm, his knees raised, his bare feet flat against its cushion. Behind him, a curved picture window displayed a panoramic view of the courtyard and its Russian olives. He had been fiddling with a small drum, the size of a bongo, made of leather and wood. Now he grinned and set the drum on the floor, swung his feet down and stood, holding out his hand as I approached. “Hey, man, glad you could make it.”

  About the same age as his wife, just as tanned, he was tall, my height, and comfortably overweight, his rounded belly drum-taut against a Grateful Dead T-shirt. His eyes were blue and very clear, his face boyish and pleasantly fleshy. With his long blond hair held in place by a beaded headband, he looked liked a surfer going amiably to seed. “Sit, man, sit,” he said, and waved a big flat hand toward an upholstered armchair. I sat.

  Sylvia Morningstar asked me, “Can I get you some tea? We’ve got some regular, English Breakfast, I think, and we’ve got some really nice herbal tea. Red Zapper? Heavenly Herbal? Citrus Surprise?”