The Hanged Man (23 page)

My body started to shake and I could feel sweat popping from every pore of my body.

Rita moved closer, held me. I couldn't get my breath.

She stood back. “You'd better lie down.”

“I feel stupid,” I said, but I let her help me get my legs up onto the table, let her ease my head and shoulders down to the pillow.

My teeth were chattering. “This is dumb,” I said.

Rita had found a blanket somewhere and now she draped it over me. “You're in shock,” she said. She tucked the blanket around my shoulder, sat beside me, wiped lightly at my forehead with the fingertips of her right hand.

“Shit,” I said. I took another deep breath. “Why now?”

“Because you're so dense that it takes you forever to realize that you nearly got yourself killed.”

“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

She leaned forward, kissed me lightly on the lips, sat back. “I'll get the doctor.”

“No, wait.” I brought my hand from under the blanket, found hers. “Stay here. I feel better now. And he's not going to be able to do anything. Give me a couple of aspirins. Tell me to call him in the morning.”

She shook her head and smiled. She squeezed my hand. “Sometimes you're infuriating, Joshua. You've built up this persona for yourself. Tough guy. Wiseass. Never at a loss for the glib response.”

I smiled. Weakly. “Justine Bouvier tells me I'm wearing emotional armor.”

“I hate to say it, but she's right.”

“Maybe I should get in touch with my inner child.”

She smiled. “Maybe you should develop an outer adult.”

“Great. Kick me when I'm down.”

She smiled. She put the palm of her left hand against my cheek. “I'm glad you're all right. When Hector called and told me you were in here, I was frantic.”

“I have a hard time picturing you frantic, Rita.”

“You're very important to me, Joshua.”

“Oh yeah? Prove it.”

Smiling again, she leaned forward …

And the doctor apparently took this as an invitation for him to return. He bustled back into the room, rubbing his hands together. Rita sat up.

“Ah well, Mr. Croft,” said the doctor, “we've found you a most wonderful room.”

The next morning at eight o'clock, after they released me, Rita drove me home. It was when she was pulling her old diesel Mercedes into my driveway that she told me she was going down to Albuquerque.

“Albuquerque?” I said. “Why?” To look at her, I had to turn my entire body toward her. My body was as stiff as a plank and the collar at my neck, foam or not, felt like a shackle.

“I need to talk to some people down there.” She was wearing her long blue coat, a white turtleneck, a black skirt, slender black leather boots.

“What people?” I said. “About what?”

She smiled. “You sound like my mother, Joshua.”

“This is something you're working on?”

“Partly, yes. Don't worry. I should be back tomorrow.”

“
Tomorrow?
”

“I'll call you tonight. You stay in bed.”

“I've got to find someone who can get the car down from the Ski Basin.”

“I called Pedro.” One of her cousins. “He'll rent a tow truck and take care of it.”

“I need to deal with the insurance people.”

“I called them. They're sending someone up there to meet Pedro. You get to bed. And leave the collar on.”

“Damn thing itches.”

“Joshua, stop whining. If you don't leave the collar on, your neck won't get better.”

“Especially if you keep being a pain in it. Why are you going to Albuquerque?”

“I'll tell you later.” She opened her purse, reached in, pulled out a revolver, handed it to me. My .38. I'd completely forgotten about it. “Here,” she said. “Hector gave it to me last night.”

I took it and she leaned across the seat to kiss me. “Get to bed,” she said.

When Rita didn't want to talk, she wouldn't.

Back inside my house, I took a long shower, as hot as I could stand it, trying to loosen up muscles that had set like cement. I dressed, which didn't take much longer than a lifetime or two, and then I stuck the collar into my belt, at the back, beneath my leather jacket. I felt that it might not inspire confidence in my driving skills.

I slipped the Smith & Wesson into my jacket pocket, which made it a concealed weapon. If I had to use it on Paul Chang, I'd worry about the legality later.

I called for a taxi. When it arrived, I told the driver where to take me.

“You want me to crank this baby up?” Ernie asked me, tapping the stereo. We were driving along Agua Fria, toward the airport. The car handled well. It may not have been a Maserati, but, after the Subaru, it felt like one.

“That's okay,” I told him.

“You gotta hear this system, Josh.” He picked up a black plastic box set between the bucket seats, set it on his lap, began to rummage through it. “No Lawrence Welk.”

“Damn.”

He rummaged some more. “Who's been screwing around in here? Someone copped my Neil Diamond tape.”

“Damn.”

“What about Megadeath? Ever heard of them? They any good?”

“Think I'll pass, Ernie.”

“So what do you want to hear?”

“Nothing.”

“Right. Okay.” He sat back. “So what do you think of the Jeep?”

“I'll take it,” I told him.

I filled out the paperwork with Ernie, wrote him a check for the down payment, and drove the Cherokee off the lot. I liked the car, liked it very much, but I didn't have the strength, or the nimbleness, to sit there and fondle the dashboard, as I might've done in different circumstances. I drove a few blocks away, down Cerrillos Road, then pulled over to the side and tugged the foam collar free from behind me. I had barely the strength and the nimbleness to do that. I wrapped the collar around my neck, pushed the Velcro closure together. I swung the rearview mirror around to admire myself. I did look like I'd grown a goiter.

I waited for a break in the traffic, pulled back onto the road, and drove downtown. I parked the car in the lot behind our building and then, moving with the grace and agility of Robbie the Robot, I shuffled to the office.

Inside, I hung my coat on the rack, arranged some things on the desk, and then sat down stiffly in the swivel chair. I took a deep breath and gave some very serious thought to going home and falling into bed. But the light on the answering machine was flashing. Duty called. Mine not to reason why. I leaned forward, slowly, and tapped the Play button.

There was a message from Hector Ramirez, asking me to call him at home, but not before ten o'clock this morning. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes to ten.

There was a curt message from Veronica Chang, asking me to call her as soon as I could.

And finally there was a message from Rita: “Joshua, I knew you wouldn't stay home. Sometimes you really are annoying. I'll talk to you tonight.”

I smiled.

And then I wondered, once again, what she was planning to do down in Albuquerque. This was the first time she'd left Santa Fe since Martinez's bullet had put her in a wheelchair.

It couldn't have been anything to do with the Bernardi case; there, the only connection to Albuquerque was the suicide of Starbright, Bernardi's hippie friend, and that had happened three years ago. Maybe some case
she
was working on?

But most of Rita's work involved the computer, searching databases. If she needed someone to do fieldwork, why hadn't she asked me?

Because I was busy?

Maybe. Never mind. Find out later today, when she calls.

I called Roger Morrison's number, got his wife, and thanked them for coming to my rescue the night before. I called Larry Porter at the insurance company and picked up some coverage for the new car. He suggested that it would be a good idea for me to take better care of the Jeep than I'd taken of the Subaru. I thanked him for his sage advice.

Then I dialed Veronica Chang's number.

“Hello?”

“This is Joshua Croft. You wanted to talk to me?”

“What was the idea,” she said, “of sending that big dumb policeman to my house last night?” She sounded considerably less cordial than she'd sounded yesterday. That was fine with me. I felt considerably less cordial than I'd felt yesterday.

“I didn't send anyone to your house,” I said.

“That big Hispanic cop,” she snapped. “Gonzalez, Ramirez, whatever his name was. You gave him my name.”

“Where was your brother last night, Miss Chang? Between nine-thirty and ten?”

“That is none of your goddamn business. I may have to talk to the police, but I certainly don't have to talk to you.”

Suddenly I was listening to the drone of a dial tone. I decided that I preferred it to the snarl of Veronica Chang. But I couldn't listen to it all day.

I looked at my watch. Ten. I dialed Hector's home number.

The phone was picked up and there was a brief silence on the line before I heard Hector's voice, raspy with sleep: “Ramirez.”

“Morning, Hector.”

Another brief silence. “Shit.”

“I know how you feel.”

“Shit.”

“You left a message for me to call you.”

“Shit.”

“Didn't quite catch that, Hector. Come again?”

“Hold on a second.”

I waited. I heard a muffled cough. After a moment, Hector said, “God. Mornings don't get any easier. Okay. Veronica Chang. I saw her last night.”

“She told me.”

“Her and her brother. Paul. She admits she made an appointment with you. Admits she canceled it. Her brother says he was with her from nine o'clock on. At their house. She corroborates that.”

“Does he own a gray Chevy pickup?”

“If he does, it's not registered with Motor Vehicles.”

“Hector, he's the only person with a motive.”

“Maybe so. He's also got an alibi.”

“Okay, Hector. Thanks. Go back to sleep.”

“I'll send someone to talk to the neighbors today. See if they saw anything last night.”

“Thanks. Bye.”

“Yeah.”

I sat back. Slowly.

If Veronica Chang and her brother had set me up, and it seemed to me that they must have, then it made sense for her to alibi him. But I'd probably never be able to prove she was lying. And I didn't expect the Changs' neighbors to be helpful—the hedge around the Changs' house would make comings and goings invisible, at least to anyone on their side of the street.

If I could locate the gray Chevy pickup, prove that Paul Chang had access to it …

Later, maybe. Right now I had to worry about Giacomo Bernardi. I reached into my inside jacket pocket, pulled out my notebook, flipped through it till I came to the page with the list of people who'd attended the soiree in La Cienega last Saturday. So far, the only people I hadn't talked to were Carl Buffalo and Carol Masters. I sat forward, slowly, and dialed Carl Buffalo's number.

He was home.

The address was off Agua Fria, not far from Alto Street, where Sally Durrell had once lived. It was a mixed neighborhood of tidy frame houses owned, for the most part, by Hispanic families, and of plump ersatz adobes owned, for the most part, by Anglos.

On the right side of the street, the houses sat along a small bluff that fell gently to the Santa Fe River, a body of water that would've been called, almost anywhere else, a brook. A thin trickle in the fall, slightly more ambitious in the spring when it caught some of the mountain runoff, it ambled between deep banks through the town and divided it, roughly, into north and south. Sometimes, at its peak in early summer, the Fish and Game Department dumped several tons of bewildered fingerling trout into the current. They fought their way past the empty soda bottles and the limp condoms and the ranks of eager adolescent anglers until, miles away to the east, they were flushed into the wide brown Rio Grande. Occasionally I wished that I were traveling along with them. Occasionally, like today, I felt that I had been.

Carl Buffalo's yard was surrounded by a thick, low adobe wall painted the color of a Snickers bar. Over the top of the wall I could see the house, a free-form single-story adobe painted the same color as the wall and shaped, roughly, like a pair of large buckets that were attempting to breed. I drove the Jeep through the gate onto the gravel driveway, parked it, stepped out, noted the solid-sounding slam as I swung the door shut.

Nice car. Let Paul Chang try to run me down while I was driving
that
.

The yard was unkempt. Brown grass, uncut all summer, buried beneath the snow until recently, lay flat and sodden against the uneven ground. I followed the cement walkway to the front step. Above the door hung another steer skull, nearly identical to the one that had hung above Leonard Quarry's front door. It was a fairly popular decorative item here in New Mexico; Georgia O'Keeffe and her paintings have a lot to answer for. But maybe, in some other dimension, steers are painting pictures of Georgia O'Keeffe's skull.