The Hanged Man Read online

  She took the card. “I will. Of course. Thank you.” The gratitude seemed genuine, but I couldn’t tell whether she was thanking me for leaving the card, or simply for leaving.

  I told her, “But I’ll try stopping by again, later today.” After I talked to Peter Jones.

  Her eyes widened again. “Oh no, you really shouldn’t. I don’t have any idea when Leonard will be coming home.”

  I didn’t point out that she was supposed to be psychic. I thought that this was very sporting of me.

  “It might be very late,” she said. “You’d probably just be wasting your time.”

  I was probably wasting it now. “Right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I climbed down the steps and into the Subaru. She stood there, peering solemnly around the door, and watched me until I drove out of sight. Before I did, I waved at her. She didn’t wave back.

  I was irritated. First the guy doesn’t return the calls I leave on his machine. Then, when I very cleverly show up on his doorstep, he’s not there.

  I was irritated enough to play a hunch. Playing it would cost me only a couple of minutes, anyway. So, instead of driving past the gate to the hot springs, I turned into it. Drove down the gravel road, across the narrow bridge, parked the wagon at the main building, thumped up the wooden steps, entered the office. The woman behind the counter—attractive, blue-rinsed, in her fifties—smiled brightly and brightly said hello.

  “Hi there,” I said, even more brightly. “I’ve got an appointment with Leonard Quarry.”

  She blinked against this gust of cheeriness, but her smile endured. “He’s in the pool.” She riffled through some papers on the counter, looked up. “I’m sorry,” she said, and seemed to be. “It looks like Mr. Quarry didn’t leave you a pool ticket.”

  “That scamp.” I smiled. “No problem. I’ll spring for the ticket.”

  I paid her, took my ticket, and stepped back outside.

  The place had changed in the three or four years since I’d last been here. Back then it had been simple and rustic, pretty much the same way it’d been for thirty years. A large weather-beaten wooden structure, set back into a notch in the rocky hillside, containing the men’s and the women’s hot pools. In front of this, a rusty hand pump which guests could use to suck the potable mineral water up from its secret channels beneath the gravelly soil. To the left, a line of weather-beaten wooden cabins that held the people who were staying longer than an afternoon. Few people did, back then.

  It was a shade more upscale now, as though it were trying to attract the Perrier crowd. The cabins and the pool building had been painted an unfortunate mustard yellow. An outdoor swimming pool had been built of concrete, fifty feet long, twenty feet wide. Pale fingers of steam fluttered slowly along the surface of the still, blue water. The pool was empty. So, apparently, were the cabins. Maybe the Perrier crowd hadn’t heard yet.

  The pump was still there, and still rusty. Either the renovation money had run out too soon or the owners had decided to leave it as it was. A touch of rural authenticity.

  I entered the hot-pool building, gave my ticket to a slight, slim Hispanic man, then went into the small locker room, stripped, stuffed my clothes into a locker, locked it, and stepped out into the shower room.

  The shower room hadn’t changed: a warm fog of air, a smell of mildew, gray cement floors, gray cement walls, white metal stalls blistered along their edges with rust. In the stall next to the one I chose, a fat man too young to be Leonard Quarry washed himself with a small amount of soap and a large amount of zeal. The black tufts of hair at his shoulders looked like epaulets. On the floor outside his stall stood a plastic gallon jug, half filled with mineral water—like many of the guests, he apparently liked to replenish the fluids he sweated away in the pool.

  I washed, then padded past the fat man, who was still lathering exuberantly, and into the resting room, where there was a row of white padded tables. Two of them were occupied, each supporting an unidentifiable form swathed in sheets from head to toe. Neither was fat enough to be Leonard Quarry.

  The pool attendant, the same man who’d taken my ticket, sat on a stool in the corner, reading TV Guide. He looked up, nodded to me.

  In front of the pool, which was hidden behind a wall of glass milky with condensation, the cement floor gave way to rough steps chiseled out of the living rock, slick beneath my feet. I opened the glass door and looked around.

  Two hundred years ago, when the local Indians used it, the pool had been open to the wide New Mexico sky and the dazzling New Mexico sun. Now it was roofed with corrugated metal and illuminated with electric lights. Progress. A natural formation in the rocks, it was roughly elliptical, fifteen feet wide by about twenty feet long. Steam unfolded from its greenish surface. The air was soupy and smelled still more strongly of mildew.

  There were only four people inside here. Two young men stood off to the left, standing chest deep, their hair slicked back, sweat streaming off their shoulders as they discussed Santa Fe property values. An elderly Hispanic man, wrinkled brown skin sagging at his chest and hips, sat in thoughtful silence on a small ridge of rock, only his lower legs in the water. And in the corner off to my left, rising out of it like an iceberg, was a mountain of loose white blubbery flesh that had to be Leonard Quarry.

  He was bald except for some gray hair fringing the back of his skull. His face was an assortment of circles and spheres: domed forehead, globular cheeks, round snout of a nose, plump drooping lower lip, three or four pale white chins. Thick pendulous breasts and pudgy shoulders above water level, bulky arms beached along the rock ridge that ran around the pool, he sat with his big round, head leaning back against the rock, like an emperor patiently waiting to learn whether Rome had burned down.

  I stepped into the pool, felt its heat rise up my thighs, my stomach, my chest, then I set off toward him, the granular sand nuzzling against the soles of my feet.

  Hernandez said, “And you just happened to be there.” He put enough sarcasm into the word happened to curl it along the edges.

  “No,” I said. “I told you. I came up here to ask Quarry about last Saturday night.”

  Dressed again, I was sitting in a chair in the office of the manager of the Agua Caliente hot springs. Hernandez was also dressed, in a navy blue suit, a white shirt, and a blue tie striped with red. He sat atop the manager’s metal desk, his right foot off the floor, and he was swinging his black tooled-leather cowboy boot impatiently back and forth. His partner, Green, wore a gray suit and sat on the far side of the room, which in fact wasn’t very far, in a padded leather chair identical to mine. Although he seemed less impatient than Hernandez, he didn’t appear any happier with me.

  The office was pleasant enough, knotty pine walls and hardwood floors, but it was small and it was getting smaller all the time. I had been there, with Hernandez and Green, for over an hour. Green’s Sony Walkman, lying on the desk, had been recording it all. Through the window behind Hernandez I could see three state police cars, two cruisers, and the unmarked Chrysler in which Hernandez and Green had arrived, all parked helter-skelter in front of the pool building.

  “Why’d you do it?” Hernandez said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I got tired of the usual stuff. Video games. Bungee jumping.”

  “Cute. You’re very cute.”

  “So are you,” I said. “Did you know that you’ve got little flecks of gold in your eyes?”

  Hernandez nodded. “You’ll have plenty of time for that shit later. Lots of pretty eyes up in the state pen. And that’s where you’ll be getting your mail for a long time. We’ve got means, we’ve got opportunity.” He grinned. “And we’ve got you, pussycat.”

  I nodded. “And where’s my motive?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to establish.” He spoke in tones of great reasonableness. “That’s why we’re having this little conversation. This pleasant little chat.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right. I wondered.”

 
“So why’d you do it?”

  “Come on, Hernandez. Get real.”

  Hernandez sat back, looked over at Green. “What do you think?”

  Green, expressionless, glanced at me, looked back to Hernandez, and said, “I think maybe he should resist arrest a little bit.”

  I laughed. I said to Hernandez, “You guys get this stuff out of a book?”

  Hernandez leaned forward. He smiled. “You think this is funny, sweetheart?” He had eaten garlic recently. Several pounds of it. Garlic is never at its best when it arrives secondhand.

  “No,” I said. “I think it’s a waste of time. For all of us.”

  Hernandez sat back, looked at Green. “He thinks it’s a waste of time.”

  Green nodded. “Gee.”

  “Look,” I said, “I told you—”

  “Tell us again,” Hernandez said. “Start from the beginning. You went up to Quarry in the pool.”

  I went up to Quarry in the pool. His breathing was rheumy; I could hear the air rattling in his lungs. “Mr. Quarry?” I said.

  The big round head slowly lifted itself away from the wall. The eyelids slowly rose. Two small gray eyes, squeezed even smaller by horizontal folds of flesh, looked out at me without much interest. “Yes?”

  “My name is Joshua Croft. I’m an investigator working for the Santa Fe public defender’s office. I’m sorry to bother you—”

  “Then don’t.” The eyelids dropped and the head fell gently back to the wall. Somewhere deep inside that mass of chest, phlegm rasped and gurgled.

  “Mr. Quarry, I have to ask you some questions about last Saturday night.”

  “I’ve already discussed that with the police, and at great length. I have nothing more to say.” His eyes were still shut.

  “Mr. Quarry, do you believe that Giacomo Bernardi killed Quentin Bouvier?”

  The eyelids rose, and then the eyebrows did. “Are you still here?”

  “I like it here. I’m thinking of moving in.”

  He closed his eyes. “There goes the neighborhood.”

  The door opened, off to my left. I glanced over. It was the fat man from the shower, carrying his plastic jug. He dipped his toe tentatively into the water, testing it.

  I turned back to Quarry. “Mr. Quarry, if I had that Tarot card in my possession, the Death card, how much would I be able to sell it for?”

  The eyelids didn’t move. “But you don’t have the card in your possession.”

  “Someone does.”

  He opened his eyes. “What grave psychological flaw compelled you to believe that you have the right to disturb me?”

  “I don’t see it as a right. I see it as a privilege.”

  He raised an eyebrow. He looked me up and down. This wasn’t as effective a display of contempt as it might have been, since there was only about two feet of me above water. He said, “Are you always this unpleasant?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t even started yet.”

  He lowered his head. His chins lapped out across his chest. “Is that a threat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I could call the police, you know.”

  I shrugged. “I paid for my ticket.”

  “Perhaps. But you’re a nuisance. Even worse, you’re a bore.”

  “Right. You call the police. Maybe they’ll ask me to leave, maybe they won’t. Say they do. I park outside your driveway and I wait there until you talk. You go into town, I follow. You eat at McDonald’s, I’ll be in the next seat with my Big Mac.”

  Once again, he looked me up and down. “Yes,” he said. “I should imagine that McDonald’s is exactly the sort of place you’d frequent.”

  “You could probably get a restraining order. But it would take time. It would mean going to court.”

  “The idea is beginning to tempt me.”

  “Or,” I said, “instead, you give me ten minutes. I ask you my questions and then I leave.”

  He took a deep breath. Air rattled inside him, and he coughed and put his hand to his mouth. His breasts wobbled and water rippled away from him in frantic little waves. It was a long, raspy, liquid cough and, when it ended, his face was red and his eyes were watering. He looked over to me, irritated, as though I’d somehow been responsible for the attack. “I don’t like you, you know.”

  I nodded. “I can probably live with that.”

  He leaned his head back against the wall, shut his eyes. He pressed his meaty lips together. “Very well,” he said. “Ten minutes.”

  “If I had the card, how much could I get for it?”

  “Nothing,” he said without opening his eyes. “Unless you happened to know a buyer who was willing to purchase it illegitimately.”

  “Do you know any buyers like that?”

  He smiled faintly but kept his eyes shut. “Of course not.”

  “Hypothetically,” I said, “what could the card bring in an illegitimate sale?”

  He shrugged. Pale flesh quivered on his upper arm. “No way of telling. The buyer would know, of course, that the card was stolen, and that a murder was connected to its theft. That would give him a certain amount of leverage, I should think. Bring the price down rather a lot. Who can say? A hundred thousand dollars?”

  “I understand that you wanted to buy the card from Eliza Remington.”

  “Did I?”

  “The ten-minute deal only works if you actually answer the questions.”

  “You really are a dreadful bore.”

  “Yeah. It’s something I’m working on.”

  “You’ve gotten quite good at it.”

  “You wanted the card,” I said.

  “Not for myself.”

  “For whom?”

  “A buyer who shall remain nameless.”

  “Would he still be interested?”

  “The card is stolen property.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “No,” he said. “He would not be interested.”

  “Do you think that Giacomo Bernardi stole it?”

  “The police do, obviously.”

  “But do you?”

  “I think that the theft of the card and the clumsy murder of Quentin Bouvier are entirely in keeping with Bernardi’s general level of incompetence.”

  “He was clumsy enough to get caught, therefore he’s guilty?”

  He smiled. “Exactly.”

  “In your opinion, was there anyone else who might’ve been happy to see Bouvier dead?”

  “I can’t imagine that there was anyone who wasn’t perfectly delighted. The man was an insect.”

  “What about his wife?”

  He smiled again. “She inherits, does she not? A tidy little sum, I’ll wager.”

  “Do you know of anyone in particular who disliked Bouvier?”

  “Everyone disliked him.”

  “Sylvia Morningstar says she liked him.”

  “Sylvia Morningstar says she likes everyone. She’s the Mother Teresa of Santa Fe, to hear her tell it. Mother Teresa dresses better, of course.”

  “So there’s no one—”

  “No one in particular, no. The man was universally despised. Quentin Bouvier is the man that Will Rogers never met. He was a charlatan. He was a self-serving, self-aggrandizing lout. Dying was the one decent thing he did in his life.”

  “You weren’t very fond of him.”

  “How acutely perceptive of you.”

  “What do you know about Veronica Chang?”

  “Nothing. Your ten minutes are up, surely?”

  “One more question.”

  He sighed a low, rattling sigh. “One.” He cleared his throat.

  “Who wanted to buy the card?”

  “I’m not at liberty to reveal that.” He opened his eyes and lifted his head from the wall. “I wish I could say that it’s been a pleasure, but of course it hasn’t.”

  With a great wobbling of flesh and splashing of water he lowered himself into the pool. The trembling surface reached just to his sec
ond chin. He didn’t say goodbye before he turned and began to wallow toward the entrance. I watched him clamber slowly up the steps, his hand clutching at the metal rail, and I realized that probably, for the rest of my life, whenever I debated having a second beer, the view of his naked backside would return to haunt me.

  He was still in the resting room ten minutes later, when I emerged from the pool area: a mountain of blubber lying beneath a white cotton sheet that rose and fell with his wheezing breath. The table next to his was empty and I lay down on it. As the attendant swaddled me in cotton, I looked over to the mound that was Quarry and I said, “Sooner or later I’ll find out who the prospective buyer was. Why don’t you save me some time?”

  From beneath the sheet he said, “I have no interest whatever in saving you anything. Paco, please tell this man that I don’t wish to be disturbed.”

  Paco smiled at me and shrugged. “Is better be quiet now,” he told me. “Is better, the resting after the water.” He drew the sheet up over my head and tucked it in.

  I lay there, wrapped up and steaming like an enchilada. My body throbbed. Sweat poured down my skin. I drifted off for a while, hearing from a distance the slow asthmatic wheeze of Quarry’s breathing. I was lying on a beach in Cancun, Rita beside me, the air candied with the scent of coconut oil. Quarry coughed again, another liquid, rattling eruption. The weight of the sunlight pressed me flat against the sand. The fronds of palm trees flickered in the breeze, a faraway seagull fluttered off into the blue …

  I suddenly realized that something was missing. Not from the fantasy, from the current reality. The room was silent.

  Quarry’s wheezing had stopped.

  I hadn’t heard him leave. I tugged my hand away from my side, where the sheet held it, and pulled the damp cotton material away from my face. I pushed myself up from the table and turned to him.

  He lay there. He was absolutely still. In the center of his chest, surrounded by an irregular stain of bright scarlet, a transparent rectangular chunk of plastic jutted up at an angle from the sheet, like an electric switch set to Off.

  “So how’d you get the ice pick into the resting room?” Hernandez asked me. “Everyone’s naked in there, right? How’d you do it without someone seeing it?”