The Hanged Man (26 page)

The doorbell rang at four-thirty. With an effort—alcohol and exhaustion and damaged muscles slowed me down—I stood up and walked to the door. For all I knew, the person standing outside could be Veronica Chang, come to finish what her brother had started. I didn't even bother to peer through the peephole.

It was Rita. She stood there for a moment, looking at me. Then she said merely, “Joshua.” Her voice was soft.

“Hey, Rita. Come on in.”

She came in. Over the outfit she had been wearing this morning, she wore now a different coat, tan leather, three-quarter length.

“New coat?” I said.

She nodded, her face solemn.

“Nice,” I said.

“Thank you.” She started to take it off, and I moved to help her.

“Here,” I said, and slipped it from her shoulders. She turned to face me, her large dark eyes staring up at me, and I stood there holding the coat, looking down at her.

She put the palm of her right hand against my cheek. “Joshua,” she said. Her face was even more solemn now, almost tragic.

I tried a smile. It wouldn't stay in place. I took a deep breath, let it out. “Jesus, Rita,” I said. “It's been a hell of a day.”

Her hand slipped from my cheek to the back of my neck and I bent down toward her as her left hand came around to my back, and then I was tightly up against her, breathing the familiar smell of her hair and the new-leather smell of her coat, and I was sobbing like a baby.

Maybe I believed, at least at the beginning, that I was crying for Paul Chang and what I'd done to him. But grief, for good or for ill, finally isn't concerned with other people. In the end, we all cry for ourselves.

Rita and I didn't talk for a long time. I couldn't have talked if I'd wanted to.

I don't know how we got into the bedroom. I don't remember. But somehow we did, and then somehow, after a time, we were joined together once again in that miracle which, perhaps out of terror at its mysteries, we often make banal and commonplace: two isolate beings stripped of their day-to-day identities, their masks, their costumes, as naked before each other as sacrificial victims, or as gods.

“Joshua?”

“Hmmm?”

“Have you called the hospital?”

“No,” I said.

We were lying on my bed, me on my back, Rita on her side, her head on my shoulder, her hand on my chest.

“Shall I call?” she asked.

“They won't tell you anything.”

“Hector may know what's happening.”

“Yeah.”

“Will he be home?”

“Probably.”

“Shall I?”

I breathed in deeply. Breathed out deeply. Nodded. “Yeah.”

She turned slightly, kissed my arm, then gracefully rolled away to reach the phone on the nightstand. Supporting herself on her elbow, she picked up the receiver, dialed the number. I turned to her, reached out my left hand and ran my index finger lightly down the knuckles of her spine. At the small of her back, just to the right of the delicate ridge of bone, was the round puckered white scar left by the bullet that had left her paralyzed for nearly three years. Another inch over, and Rita would still be in the wheelchair today, would be in it forever …

“Hello, Hector … Yes … He's fine … Yes. Have you heard anything?… Good …
Good
… Thank you, Hector … Yes. You, too … Soon, yes. Bye.”

She hung up the phone, rolled back to me. “You heard?”

“Yeah. He's all right?”

“He's stabilized. Serious but not critical. No major organs damaged. Barring complications, he'll be fine.”

I let out another breath. I nodded. “Okay. Thanks.” I kissed her forehead. “And thanks for coming here. Thanks for being here.”

She smiled. “What are friends for?”

I kissed her again.

She put her head against my shoulder once again. “It doesn't make much sense, does it?”

“Which?”

“Paul Chang, trying to kill you.”

I shrugged. “Maybe he wasn't. This time. Maybe this time, like I told Hector, he wanted the two of us to go off somewhere for a rematch. But I don't think that was what he had in mind last night.”

“If that was Paul Chang last night, driving the truck.”

“Who else could it have been?”

“You'd rather it was Paul Chang, wouldn't you?”

“Yeah.”

“Shooting him would seem more justified.”

“Yeah.”

“He had a gun, Joshua.”

“I know.”

“You had to operate on the assumption that he was prepared to use it. And he did.”

“Yeah.”

She turned and kissed my shoulder again. “Do you want to take some time off?”

“Can't. Not now.” I turned to her. “What did you have in mind?”

“Cancun.”

“Cancun?” I grinned. “You're serious?”

She smiled. “For a week or so. You're always talking about lying on the beach down there. Let's do it.”

“Yeah?”

Another smile. “Yeah.”

I kissed her forehead. “Okay. Cancun. A week. That's a good idea. That's a very good idea. But I've got to wrap this up first.”

“Yes.” Her hand moved down my chest, down my stomach. “A man's got to do what a man's got to do.”

“Bet your ass.”

She laughed softly against my neck. “You're such a fraud.”

“Oh yeah? How?”

“You know how. It's what I was talking about last night, in the hospital. You like to act so tough and self-reliant—”

“And you think I'm not?”

“Self-absorbed, perhaps.”

“Self-absorbed? Hey—”

“When you're working on something. You
are
, Joshua. And I don't believe, basically, that it's a bad thing. Although it's sometimes a little difficult to live with. Joshua, you know that I think you're a good man. And a lot more sensitive than you like to pretend.”

“It's important to be sensitive. All the chicks really dig it.
Ouch!
”

Her laughter was less soft. It was a lewd chuckle, low in her throat.

“Shit,” I said. “You shouldn't do that, Rita. You could cause a serious sexual malfunction.”

Another chuckle. “Let's see if I have, shall we?”

“So just why did you go down to Albuquerque?” I asked her. Both of us were lying on our backs now. Idly, slowly, I was stroking her thigh with the back of my hand.

“Some things I had to take care of,” she said.

“Business?”

“Some of it.”

“What was the rest?”

“A candlelit tryst with a wealthy Italian count.”

“Oh.” I turned toward her. “Does he have a sister? A countette?”

She smiled. “Do you really want to know my major reason for going down there?”

“Yeah.”

“Clothes.”

“Clothes?”

“Clothes. Joshua, I haven't been shopping for over three years.”

“Maria went shopping for you.” Maria had been her housekeeper and companion. “And I could've gone. Anytime. All you had to do was ask.” I realized, as soon as I heard the words, how silly they sounded.

So, evidently, did Rita. She laughed. “Joshua, your idea of shopping is running into K-Mart and grabbing a pair of jeans.”

“Excuse me? Are you suggesting that I'm less than sartorially splendid at all times?”

“Of course not. Right now, in fact, I think you look very dashing. And I think that, generally, you pull off the Urban Cowboy look rather well. It's just that I'd rather shop for myself. And I badly needed some new things.”

“Urban Cowboy? That leather jacket of mine is an Armani.”

She laughed again. “Was I saying something earlier about your being self-absorbed?”

“I don't know. I wasn't listening.”

Another laugh.

“Why Albuquerque?” I asked her.

“There are more stores down there, and the prices are better. And it was
fun
, Joshua. I went to Coronado Mall. Do you know how many stores there are in Coronado Mall?”

“Three?”

“Hundreds. It was a true adventure in shopping.”

I rolled over, up onto my elbow, to look at her. I smiled. “This is a side of you I've never seen before, Rita.”

She smiled. “I imagine that you'll see more of it.”

“I bought something today, too, as a matter of fact.”

“What?”

“A car. A Jeep Cherokee.”

She frowned. “I didn't see it outside.”

“It's down in the lot behind the office. Hector drove me home.”

Smiling, she put her hand on my shoulder. “Poor Joshua. You haven't had much of a chance to play with it, have you?”

“I'll play with it later.”

“It's a nice car?”

“It's a sweetheart.”

Another smile. “Aren't you being a bit fickle? The Subaru isn't even in its grave yet.”

“Guy's gotta have a car. Oh damn,” I said suddenly.

She looked at me, frowned. “What?”

“What an idiot I am. You had to come back from Albuquerque. Because of me.”

She smiled. “I don't regret it.”

With my right hand, I brushed the hair from her forehead. “You can go back down there again. Tomorrow.”

She smiled again. “I plan to.”

“My goodness. What on earth happened to your neck?”

“An automobile accident.”

“How terrible.”

Carol Masters lightly put a hand, heavy with ornate rings, to her own neck. Both the hand and the neck were thin and corded, their skin leathery. Her bright shiny red fingernails were long enough and sharp enough to slice luncheon meat. Several pounds of jewelry were draped around the neck, links of gold and silver and beads of coral and turquoise. Whenever she moved, she clicked and clattered slightly, like a pocketful of change.

It was Saturday morning. Rita had returned to Albuquerque, and Carol Masters had returned to New Mexico from Alpha Centauri, or wherever she'd been hiding. I had called her from my house and she had agreed to see me, so I had taken a taxi down to the office, picked up the Jeep, and driven out here. We were standing in the doorway of her home in Tesuque, a small town a few miles north of Santa Fe.

“Are you quite all right?” she asked me.

“Fine, thanks.”

“Well, please, do come in.”

I followed her and the clicking of change and a trail of Giorgio perfume into a huge living room that had me blinking against its glare. Sunlight splashed through the wide picture window and swirled around the furniture. Everything in here was blinding white: the enormous sectional leather couch, the massive enameled wooden coffee table, four or five plump leather chairs, the walls, an acre or two of carpet with pile so thick you could lose small children in its depths. The only color in the room was provided by Carol Masters herself, and by a full-length oil portrait of a young Carol Masters standing tall and proud in a diaphanous pink nightgown at the base of an ornate curving staircase. The staircase must have been specially constructed, because Carol Masters, no matter what sort of pride she might possess, was no taller than the average ten-year-old girl.

“Won't you have a seat,” she said, smiling.

I thanked her and sat down in one of the chairs. She lowered herself to the sofa, where she sat politely smiling, her back upright, her knees together, her fingers interlaced on her lap.

“A real private dick,” she said to me, smiling again. “A
shamus
. How
exciting
.”

I smiled. “For whom?”

She laughed. “Well, for me of course. I've never met one before.”

She wore a red silk caftan with long flowing sleeves and a hem that reached to her gold sandals. I knew that she was, officially, nearly seventy years old, and it seemed to me that she hadn't given up a single one of those years without a struggle. Her hair, a confusion of wild curls, was the same bright red shade as her fingernails and her lipstick, but it glistened with highlights of something that might have been purple. Her eyebrows were thick dark arches that looked as though they were attached with Elmer's glue. Perhaps they had been. Certainly the thick black lashes below the half-moons of green eye shadow were unreal: I imagined, whenever she fluttered them, that I could feel a faint breeze.

Her skin was white, as though it had never seen the sun, and it was tight against the fine bones of her skull, as though someone had grabbed a handful of it at the back of her neck and tied it off with a rubber band.

But buried beneath the cartoonish makeup and the drum-taut skin was a face that had once been exceptionally beautiful. Her nose was small and delicately shaped. Her mouth was wide, the generous lips sculpted. Her best feature was her eyes, which were large and bright green and alert, and they watched me with a kind of avid amusement.

“But this is all such a terrible thing, isn't it?” she said. “First Quentin and now Leonard Quarry. I came to New Mexico, you know, because the vibrations here were so loving. So peaceful. It's a holy place, don't you think? Santa Fe in particular. A sacred spot. And now, suddenly, there's all this violence everywhere. Hangings and stabbings and whatnot. It's just horrible.” She shivered theatrically, but there was a faint gleam in the green eyes. I got the feeling that she didn't entirely disapprove of anything, including stories of violence, that might brighten up her day.