The Hanged Man (2 page)

She smiled again. “Welcome to Santa Fe, land of the free, home of the occult. It gets even better.”

“I doubt that.”

Quentin Bouvier, Sally told me, was not well liked in particular by Giacomo Bernardi, primarily because he had just purchased, from a woman named Eliza Remington, an antique Tarot card.

I asked Sally, “Who's Eliza Remington?”

“An astrologer. She was there that night, too.”

“Sounds like a pretty nifty soiree. How come I didn't get an invitation?”

Sally smiled. “Actually, she's an amazing little old lady. I've met her. You'll like her.”

“Uh-huh. So what was the deal with the card?”

“It's from an old Italian deck, apparently. It was painted in the fifteenth century. One of a kind, and very valuable. Bernardi felt that Bouvier—” She smiled. “This is where it gets better. Bernardi felt that Bouvier would be using the card for evil purposes.”

“Three-card monte?”

“Summoning spirits.” She smiled again, and shrugged, almost apologetically. “What can I say, Joshua. He believes in all that. Spiritualism. The occult.”

“Great.” I nodded. “Okay. Bernardi didn't much like Bouvier.”

“As I said, no one much liked Bouvier. But Bernardi had an argument with him that night, a very vocal argument that nearly became a fistfight. He threatened the man. And in the morning, Bouvier was found dead in his bedroom. Strangled. The Tarot card was missing and so was Bernardi. The state police picked him up on the interstate, trying to hitchhike to Albuquerque.”

“What do the state police have?”

“The argument the night before. Bernardi's leaving the scene. And his scarf. It was his scarf that was used to strangle Bouvier.”

“Strangle him how?”

“Preliminary report from the medical examiner says that Bouvier was clubbed first, then the scarf was tied around his neck, slung over a beam, and Bouvier was hoisted up off the floor. The scarf was pulled down and knotted to itself.”

“A long scarf.”

“Over six feet long.”

“Very dashing. And Bouvier was hoisted off the ground. Is Bernardi big enough to do that?”

“Bouvier wasn't a very large man. I could've done it myself.”

“He was an elf?”

“He was five foot two. He weighed a hundred and thirty pounds.”

“You said that Bouvier was there with his wife. Justine, is that right? Where was she while hubby was getting hanged?”

“They slept in separate rooms.”

“Not a happy marriage?”

“An open marriage. She was sleeping with a man named Peter Jones in his room. Jones had been involved with Mrs. Bouvier for some time, and evidently with Bouvier's blessing.”

“You know such interesting people.”

She smiled. “One of the perks of the business.”

“And who or what is Peter Jones?”

She grinned. “A spiritual alchemist.”

“Am I supposed to ask what that is?”

“Only if you want to.”

“Later maybe. Jones and Mrs. Bouvier alibi each other.”

“Both of them say they were asleep for most of the night. They heard nothing.”

“What was Bouvier clubbed with?”

“A large piece of quartz. It belonged to Sylvia Morningstar, and it was there in Bouvier's room.”

“But the blow didn't kill him.”

“No. He was still alive when the scarf was tied around his neck.”

“Blood?”

“Some. In his hair, on the bedsheets. Some on the floor.”

“Would it have gotten on the murderer?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. There was none found on Bernardi.”

“Prints on the quartz?”

“Wiped clean.”

“Bernardi wipes the quartz clean but he leaves his scarf wrapped around Bouvier's neck.”

Sally nodded. “I pointed that out to the state police. In the heat of the moment, according to them, Bernardi simply forgot his scarf.”

“What about the Tarot card?”

“It hasn't been found.”

“So it wasn't on Bernardi.”

She shook her head. “But he would've had time to hide it. So, at any rate, says the investigator for the state police, an Agent Hernandez.”

“Robert Hernandez?”

“Yes. You know him?”

I nodded. “Yeah. But we're not exactly the best of friends.” A few months ago, Hernandez had come close to arresting me for murder. “What does Bernardi say about all this?”

“To the cops and the D.A.'s people, nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Apparently the state troopers who picked him up were a bit rough. Bernardi refuses to talk to the authorities. Any of them.”

“A bit rough.”

“They beat him. Bernardi was resisting arrest, they say.”

I nodded. It was a rough work, being a cop, and sometimes it didn't bring out the best in the people who did it. And sometimes, with a few of them, their best wasn't any good at all.

I asked Sally, “What does Bernardi say to you?”

“That he didn't do it. I believe him.”

“You always believe them.”

“Not always. But certainly in this case. I think he's being railroaded.”

I nodded. “Okay. Standard deal. I find out what I can. If it's in your client's favor, then you and the cops get it. If it's not in your client's favor, then you and the cops get that.”

She smiled again. “You don't have to tell me, Joshua.”

I shrugged. “Just so you know.”

“I already knew.”

“When do I see Bernardi?”

I saw Giacomo Bernardi at ten-thirty that morning, at the Santa Fe Detention Center on Airport Road. We talked in the interview room off the medium-security wing. A neon light overhead, cement block walls, linoleum floors, a Formica table, three plastic chairs. Penal Moderne. The Center was run by a private company, Corrections Corporation of America, and it was as clean and humane as a place like that could possibly be. No rats scurrying off into dark corners, no far-off wails and moans. No leering cons rattling tin cups along the bars. From the outside, it could've been one of those drab commercial buildings that optimistic realtors like to call an executive office park. And yet I've never walked into it without feeling sweat trickle down my sides. You left it, even as a casual visitor, only when someone said you could.

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.”