The Hanged Man Read online

  Hands in his back pockets, Brad Freefall offered, “Beer, maybe? Whatever.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I told Sylvia Morningstar, “The English tea will be fine.”

  “Good, that sounds lovely, we’ll all have some. Brad, darling, I’m sure Mr. Croft’s a busy man, why don’t you start without me, dear, and tell him everything that happened last Saturday—that’s what you wanted to talk about, isn’t it, Mr. Croft?”

  “Among other things, yes,” I said.

  “Sugar?” she asked me. “We’ve got Equal, too, if you want it. Or date sugar? And I think we’ve got turbinado, too.”

  “Plain sugar’s just fine.”

  “Lemon? Milk?”

  “Lemon. Thanks.”

  She bobbed her head at me. “I’ll be right back.”

  Brad Freefall sat back down in the corner of the sofa, left arm along the sofa’s back. He extended his long legs out along the floor and crossed them at the ankles and he grinned at me. “A private eye,” he said. “Far out. Is it ever like they make it look on TV?”

  “Not very often.”

  He nodded. “Running around and shooting people, car chases, all that good shit. Never really happens, right?”

  “Almost never.”

  “Way I figured. Hype, man. Media moonshine. Anyway, no shit, I’m glad you’re here. We both are. We’ve been talking about it a lot. Only natural, right? Considering it all went down right here at the house. Quentin getting offed and all. But I don’t care what the cops say, man. Giacomo never did it. Never happened. The guy may be kind of a slob—who’s perfect, right?—but he’s got real purity of heart, man. He’s got soul. He wouldn’t be able to do something like that.”

  “How long have you known Bernardi?”

  He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Years, man. Giacomo’s been around forever, seems like.”

  “When did you first meet him?”

  “I dunno. Ten years ago? You should ask Sylvie, she’s good with dates and like that. We met him at a party or something. No, wait, I take that back—it was at a psychic fair at La Fonda. I was there with my drums and Sylvie was there with her crystals. We had a booth together. Giacomo was doing readings in the next booth and it was kinda slow. Dead, in fact. Back then, the psychic fairs were just starting up, and we didn’t get the kind of traffic we get now. So, anyway, Sylvie asked him to do a reading for her. As a goof, mostly, you know? And so he did Sylvia’s cards for her, and then he did mine. He was good, man. I mean really good. Intuitive. Way I see it, the cards are like a vehicle, you know? A channel, man, for you to focus your own energies.”

  Hadn’t Bennett Hadley said exactly the same thing, in almost exactly the same words?

  “And Giacomo’s intuition,” Brad said, “was right on. We were both kinda down about then, Sylvie and me. Things weren’t working out, moneywise. We were even thinking of splitting, leaving town and heading back to California. But Giacomo said to fade that. He said that everything was gonna turn around for us, in a major way. And he was right on, man. Totally right on. Hey, Sylvie, I was just saying how Giacomo told us to chill out on the idea of splitting Santa Fe, back when we first met him. Remember, babe? The psychic fair?”

  “Giacomo is extremely sensitive,” Sylvia Morningstar told me, lifting a mug filled with steaming tea from a round red metal tray and handing it to me, “and extremely talented, and probably, if we hadn’t asked him to read our cards, we would’ve made a terrible mistake and gone back to California.” Holding the tray carefully, she sat down beside Brad and handed him a mug. “Here you are, darling.” She took the last mug for herself, and laid the tray to her left, on the sofa cushion. “And then none of these wonderful things would’ve happened.” She waved her arm lightly, to take in the wonderful lavish house, the wonderful high desert, the wonderful world.

  I asked, “How did the wonderful things happen?”

  “Well, it was incredible,” she said, “because the very next week, the week after the fair, I accepted a new client, a referral from a friend. She was a Swiss woman, the client, from St. Moritz, and she’d come here for the skiing and she was having these terrible pains all up and down her left hip, really agonizing pains. She was a wonderful woman, but no one had been able to help her, not the medical doctors, not the chiropractors, not even my friend, who did body work and who was just wonderful with it. So I worked with her, we were living in town then, off Agua Fria, and I had this little tiny office space with a rickety little massage table, the whole thing wasn’t much bigger than a closet, and I set up the crystals along her body—you know how crystals work?”

  “They vibrate?”

  “Exactly!” she said, delighted. Beaming, she turned to Brad and put her hand atop his thigh. “You see, darling, I told you he’d understand.” She turned back to me. “I’m so glad. But of course, I’m sure you realize that it’s just a teeny weeny bit more complicated than that, you’ve got to sense exactly where the blockage is, in your client, where the problem lies along the meridians, and you’ve got to know exactly which vibrational frequency is the proper one, and you’ve got to know exactly how much exposure to that vibration will produce the results you want.”

  Before she could explain any further, I said, “But it worked. You healed her.”

  “Oh no,” she said, “not me. The crystals, the crystals and her own recuperative powers, her own vital energy. No, I was merely an assistant, an agent.”

  Brad Freefall grinned and ran his flat hand gently along her frizzy hair. “Yeah, babe, but you were the one who knew how to use the crystals.”

  She looked at him, smiling happily, and she actually blushed with pleasure. He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the temple. She squeezed his thigh.

  Feeling somewhat like a voyeur, I said, “And how did that make the wonderful things happen?”

  She turned back to me, blinking. “Oh.” She said it as though she’d forgotten I was there. She blushed again. “Oh dear, I’m so sorry. Margarite, that’s my client, she was so pleased with what’d happened that she moved here, to Santa Fe, and she built this house and put it into trust for Brad and me. And then while she was alive, we all lived here together and we set up a foundation, the three of us, the Crystal Center, to investigate and promote alternative healing. We’ve done some wonderful work here, Brad and I. And we couldn’t have done any of it without Margarite’s help.”

  “While she was alive?” I said.

  She took in a deep breath and she sighed it slowly out. “Yes.” She nodded. “It was a terrible tragedy. Poor Margarite died five years ago, cancer, ovarian, there was nothing anyone could do.”

  I took a sip of tea and then I asked what might have been a rude question. “She didn’t have the cancer when you first used the crystals on her?”

  She looked shocked. “Oh no! She’d been examined by hundreds of medical doctors and none of them had ever found a thing, no, the cancer was something that happened later—it just suddenly appeared like some horrible monster and it took poor Margarite away from us.”

  I nodded, but I was wondering whether poor Margarite might have survived her cancer if she’d sought out another medical doctor soon enough. And hadn’t I read somewhere that ovarian cancer was sometimes difficult to detect? Despite what Sylvie believed, or said, had the dark unruly cells of Margarite’s body already begun their deadly blossoming, unnoticed, undiscovered, when she first showed up at Sylvia Morningstar’s door?

  I hoped not. Against all expectation, and my better judgment, I found myself liking both these people. I didn’t believe, myself, in the miracle of crystals; but it seemed clear to me that they did, sincerely. Whether that made them naive, or foolish, or absolutely right, or—as I suspected but preferred not to admit at the moment—fairly dangerous, those were questions for which I didn’t at the moment have the answers. And questions to which, at the moment, the answers were irrelevant.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s talk about last Saturday night. How long have you kno
wn Quentin Bouvier?”

  Brad shrugged. “Four, five years?” He looked at Sylvia.

  “Six, darling,” she told him. “Don’t you remember? He and Justine came to the convocation out in Galisteo. Veronica’s thing.” She turned to me. “Did you ever meet Quentin?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you didn’t know him well, he could seem a bit, oh, difficult, I suppose. He was extremely bright, and he’d spent all his life learning about High Magic, he’d really made a tremendous study of it, and I suppose he didn’t have much patience with people who didn’t share his interests, or know as much as he did. But, really, basically, he was a good person, I think. It’s just awful, a terrible thing, that someone could kill him like that.”

  I asked her, “Who do you think could’ve done it?”

  “Well, of course, it couldn’t have been anyone who was here that night. We know all of them, they’re all good friends of ours and wonderful people, spiritual people. Brad and I’ve been going over it, trying to work out how it might’ve happened, and we’ve come up with a theory.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, we never lock our front door, we’ve been living out here now for seven years and we’ve never had any trouble, none at all, but there’s always a first time, isn’t there? And it wasn’t locked last Saturday night. What must’ve happened is that someone, a burglar, came in that night, looking for something—valuables, jewels, I don’t know, maybe the stereo or the TV—and he went into Quentin’s room and Quentin woke up and saw him, and the burglar got frightened and hit him with my quartz crystal, which would’ve been the first thing he found, it was right there on the nightstand, practically begging to be picked up.”

  “Why,” I said, “after he hit him, would the burglar hang him?”

  “Because Quentin had seen him. Quentin could identify him.”

  “Ms. Morningstar—”

  “Sylvie, please.”

  “Sylvie. Burglars don’t usually enter a house at night. They generally go in during the day, when no one’s home. And how many cars were parked outside your house that night?”

  “How many? I don’t know.” She looked at her husband.

  He shrugged. “Six or seven?” he asked her.

  “Nine,” I told them. “According to the state police reports. A burglar isn’t very likely to hit a house that has that many cars outside.”

  “But it had to be a burglar,” she said. “Nothing else makes any sense. It couldn’t have been one of our friends.”

  “Did any of them have any reason to dislike Quentin Bouvier?”

  “None of them!” she said. “Really, Joshua—do you mind if I call you Joshua?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Really, Joshua, you have to understand that these people all treasure life. Most of them are healers, and caring for others, caring about others is the most important thing in their lives.”

  I said, “What do you think about Justine Bouvier?”

  She smiled happily. “You’ve met her? Isn’t she wonderful? So beautiful and so chic! All those lovely clothes she wears, and she wears them so well, she has such style, I’d give anything to be able to wear clothes the way she does.”

  I had been watching Brad Freefall out of the corner of my eye as I asked the question, and I noticed that he very quickly pursed his lips—it might have been a frown, but it was too fleeting to identify. When I glanced over to him, his own glance skittered away.

  Something there, something about Justine Bouvier.

  But to learn what it was, I’d have to chisel Brad loose from Sylvie. Which would probably be as easily accomplished as separating Siamese twins.

  I tried something, and it worked. “I wonder,” I said, “if I could take a look at the room where Quentin Bouvier was sleeping that night.”

  Sylvia scrunched up her thin shoulders, put a hand to her thin neck, and gave a feathery little shiver. “I’m sorry, Joshua, but I can’t go in there again. After the state police took away all the bedding, I had to go in there to clean up, and it was a terrible mess, and I got physically ill. I’ve been keeping it locked ever since, and I just can’t go in there again.” She turned to Brad. “Darling, do you mind?”

  He nodded bravely, squeezed her shoulder. “Sure, babe. We’ll be right back.” He stood up. “This way, man.”

  I set my tea on the floor and followed him from the living room. We went back the way I’d come, through a high-tech kitchen with an oven big enough to roast a Cadillac, and into the west wing of the building. A corridor ran down its length, floored with red Mexican tiles and walled to the right with stuccoed adobe and vertical panels of double-glazed glass. Through one of the panels, I looked out across the courtyard and saw that the house’s east wing seemed to be a mirror image of this one.

  Brad showed me the first room, the library, where, last Saturday night, Giacomo Bernardi had sat swilling sambuca while he watched a soccer match. The television, flanked by two tall speakers, was only a shade smaller than a drive-in movie screen. A burglar would’ve needed a U-Haul truck, and a derrick, to cart it away.

  Brad told me that the next room had been occupied by Peter Jones. He didn’t mention that Jones had shared his accommodations with Justine Bouvier.

  The next room had been Veronica Chang’s, and the room after that, Brad said, had been the Bouvier’s. I noticed that small spotlights ran on tracks near the hallway ceiling.

  As he unlocked Bouvier’s door, I asked him who had been sleeping in the last room, the room beyond the Bouviers’.

  “That was Carl’s, I think,” he said. “Carl Buffalo.” He shrugged. “But you should ask Sylvie. She arranged all that.” He opened the door and stood back to let me enter.

  A fair-size room. White walls decorated with a couple of abstracts that had been painted by an interior designer, brightly colored and immediately forgettable. A thick white shag carpet. A small kiva fireplace in one corner. A twin bed, stripped down to a bare mattress and flanked by two pinewood nightstands. A low pinewood dresser running along one wall. Two doors on the far wall. Overhead, sunshine filtered in through an opaque rectangular skylight and splashed in from a clerestory window as long as the room, facing toward the courtyard.

  And overhead, too, supporting the stained and polished vigas, was the beam from which Quentin Bouvier had been draped.

  It was a good solid beam. It would be able to hold quite a bit more weight than the one hundred and thirty pounds that Bouvier had weighed.

  I turned to Brad, who stood just inside the doorway, heavy shoulders slouched, his hands once again in his back pockets.

  “The rest of them were sleeping in the other wing?” I asked him.

  He shrugged again. “Most of them. The Quarrys were in the guest house, up ahead.” He jerked his head to the right.

  “So a total of how many bedrooms?”

  “Nine, counting the guest house.”

  “Guest house is connected to this wing?”

  He nodded. “Right. There’s a door up the hallway, by the last bedroom.”

  “The lights out in the hallway. The spots. Were they on last Saturday night?”

  “Yeah. But dim, man. They work off a rheostat. I turned them on before dinner.”

  I nodded. I crossed the room, opened one of the two doors. A closet, empty. Opened the other. A small, tidy bathroom: sink, toilet, shower stall.

  I walked over to the beehive-shaped fireplace. It had been swept clean.

  I said, “The fireplace hasn’t been used recently?”

  “Yeah, it was, man. Quentin used it. We had wood in all the fireplaces last Saturday. The state cops cleaned it out.”

  “Were all the fireplaces used?”

  “Most of ’em. There’s no other heat in this part of the house.”

  “The cops swept them all?”

  “Yeah. Looking for evidence, they said.”

  And if there had been any, they had found it.

  “What about the drains?” I asked him
. “In the showers.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. They checked those, too.”

  “They find anything?”

  “They didn’t tell me, man.”

  “The chunk of quartz,” I said. “The one that was used to clobber Bouvier. The cops have that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was one of Sylvie’s favorite pieces.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  He nodded. “Bummer, man.”

  I nodded. I looked around the room. “This is a terrific house, Brad.”

  He grinned. “Thanks, man. We like it.”

  “It’s huge, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Great for meetings. And now and then we rent it out. Groups, you know? The Sierra Club. Greenpeace. Like that. Gives us a nice little income.”

  I nodded. “So what’s this I hear about you and Justine Bouvier?”

  Beneath the tan, his face went pale.

  I took the interstate north, past the racetrack, past the Cerrillos exit, then swung off onto St. Francis. That street, one of the main commercial routes into town, was today choked with lumbering trucks and splenetic, honking tourists as it wound through the western part of Santa Fe, sloped down to the Alameda and the Santa Fe River, and then rose up after it crossed Paseo de Peralta. Traffic didn’t thin out until the road sloped down again at the ridge beyond La Tierra, sliding through the pine trees toward the stony brown bluffs and twisting arroyos north of town, wild ragged badlands flung out east and west as far as the eye could see.

  Every year there was more traffic, there were more tourists, more trucks hauling ground beef and chiles and salsa to feed the tourists. The locals fret about it, call it the Aspenization of Santa Fe, howl at the city council. The Plaza, they say, has become an upscale shopping mall of pricey, precious boutiques where dullards from Duluth dress up like nouveau riche cowboys and affluent Apache Indians. Which is an interesting grievance, since this is how many of the locals themselves prefer to dress.

  But the locals are right: there’s a point where chic slips over into crass, and Santa Fe seems destined to reach it. So long as people, including the dullards from Duluth, hunger for something with even a semblance of grace and tradition and spare uncluttered beauty, and so long as they’re prepared to pay for it, there will be affable sharks who will be more than happy to provide the semblance and take the cash. And Santa Fe, like many an American city, will continue its slow, relentless transformation into a theme park—dull, drab, and dead.