The Hanged Man (30 page)

At the office, there were three messages on the machine. One was from Hector, telling me that Paul Chang had been moved from Intensive Care. One was from Rita, saying she'd be late coming back tonight, asking me to come over to her house tomorrow morning. But the first message was from Justine Bouvier:

“Listen, Mr. Asshole Private Detective. How
dare
you hang up on me? No one treats me like that.” Click.

I was putting myself in solid with the New Age community. Pretty soon, if I wasn't careful, evil spirits would start appearing in my refrigerator, hovering over the Cheez Whiz. Or one morning I'd roll out of bed and my arms and legs would fall off.

I finished my reports, thought about going to the pool, decided that my body was so stiff I'd probably sink like a stone. Went home, stir-fried some chicken, read for a while, went to bed. Lay there, trying to puzzle everything out. Didn't succeed. Felt as though I never would. Finally fell asleep.

Next day, it was all over.

“It doesn't make any sense,” I said. “I never really bought the idea that Leonard Quarry was killed by a hit man. Seems to me, a professional wouldn't have screwed around with an ice pick, especially not in a public place. He'd have shot Quarry in private, and then walked. And a hit man is even less likely now, when we know there was no third party involved in the bidding for the card. Quarry was only bidding to raise the price, and his own share.”

Rita nodded. “Did Eliza Remington meet with Sally?”

With a temperature lazing in the upper fifties, the Sunday morning was warmer than any February morning in Santa Fe has a right to be. The air was clear and still and it smelled of pine. The sky was blue and cloudless. Rita was wearing dark brown boots with low heels, lightweight tan wool slacks, and a pale brown turtleneck sweater beneath her new leather jacket. The slacks and the sweater were also new, purchased yesterday, presumably, in Albuquerque. Her purse was slung over her left shoulder and she carried her cane in her right hand. So far, she hadn't really used it. But at the moment we were only a hundred yards or so down the Ski Basin Road from the entrance to her driveway. We were making the walk that Rita had promised herself, and promised me, when she had first been imprisoned in the wheelchair. I had told her what I'd learned yesterday, from Eliza Remington and from Carol Masters.

Today she had been dressed and ready, cane in hand, when I arrived. “Let's go,” she had said as soon as she opened the door.

“Go where?”

She had smiled. “To the Plaza. I told you I'd walk down there today. Are you up to it?”

I had frowned. “Are you sure
you
are?”

“Positive.” She had stepped out onto the front porch, shut the door behind her.

I had said, “It's almost two miles to the Plaza, Rita.”

She had laughed. “Joshua, you've been trying to get me to walk down there for as long as I can remember. I must've walked twice that much in Albuquerque yesterday.” Slipping her arm into mine, she had smiled up at me. “Come on.”

When she saw the Cherokee parked big and bold in her driveway, she had concealed her enthusiasm for the machine, or possibly her envy, behind a merely casual comment: “It's a pretty car.”

“Pretty?” I said. “It's beyond pretty, Rita.”

She had smiled. “Are you going to give it a name? Ursula? Nellybelle?”

“No one likes sarcasm in a woman. It's a scientific fact.”

She had grinned at me.

And now we were walking arm in arm along the side of the road, Rita on the outside. I was a bit worried. The surface here was uncertain—pebbles and grit, the occasional beer can—and the traffic was fairly heavy, locals and tourists driving up to the Basin so they could ride a pair of sticks down the sunlit slopes. We were walking on the left side of the road, just like they tell you to do in elementary school. Every time a car zoomed by, its slipstream slapped rude and cold against my face and whisked at Rita's long black hair.

“Yeah,” I told her. “I talked to Sally this morning. She called Herb Maslow at the D.A.'s office. She and Eliza met with him last night and Eliza signed a statement. She'll be charged on Monday. Sally convinced Maslow not to hold her until then. Pointed out that Eliza had come in of her own free will.”

“Will the police be releasing any information about the card?” Rita asked.

“Sally convinced Maslow not to. He's like everybody else at the D.A.'s office—he thinks that Giacomo is guilty. But Sally persuaded him that if he
is
guilty, releasing the information wouldn't make any difference. And if he isn't, and it gets out that the card is worthless, then whoever has it will probably toss it. And then zap, no evidence.”

“Maslow's being very cooperative.”

“I think he's got the hots for Sally.”

“Joshua.” Mildly reproving. “What about bail for Eliza? Will that be a problem?”

“I doubt it. Sally says that Eliza can borrow money on her house, if that's necessary. But she says she'll probably be released on her own recognizance.”

“What sort of a sentence does she think Eliza will receive?”

“Whatever it is, she thinks it'll be suspended. Eliza volunteered her confession, and on Monday she'll be returning the money to Justine Bouvier.”

Rita smiled. “That must make Eliza happy.”

“I think there's a part of her that would rather go to the chair.”

Her smile broadened. “At least it'll make Justine Bouvier happy.”

“Yeah. I'm sure it'll make Justine very happy.”

She squeezed my arm. “You don't like these people very much, do you?”

A Porsche ripped by us, upshifting theatrically. Porsches tend to do that.

“Some of them I don't like at all,” I said. “Justine. Veronica Chang. Did I tell you that Veronica's going to put some weird kind of hoodoo on me? Turn me into a snail. Or a cockroach.”

“Or a grown-up,” she smiled. “Yes, you did. What about the others?”

“Well, Carl Buffalo's a moron. What's his name, the writer, he's a jerk.”

“Bennett Hadley. You're sounding a little bitter, Joshua.”

“Yeah. Did you ever get Hadley's medical records off the computer?”

“No. I didn't think it was necessary. It's not likely, I think, that he killed Quentin Bouvier. And obviously he didn't kill Leonard Quarry. So his headaches aren't really any of our business.”

“Obviously
none
of them killed Leonard Quarry. The guy with the ice pick must be a figment of the imagination. Quarry must not be dead.”

The gravel crunched and clicked beneath our feet.

“What do you think about Brad Freefall and Sylvia Morningstar?” she asked me.

“As killers?”

“As people.”

“I don't know. I suppose their intentions are good. I think they're sincere about what they're doing. But I don't know. I wonder whether it's not basically dangerous. Sylvia might be using her crystals to treat someone who really requires traditional medicine.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But on the other hand, perhaps there are people whom she genuinely helps.”

I frowned. “By giving them some kind of hope, you mean.”

“At least that, yes. But you know about the work that's been done on the psychological side of healing. Imaging. Visualization. It's possible that Sylvia is providing a belief system that these people can accept. And possible that the beliefs actually enable them to heal themselves.”

“Or maybe her crystals have some real mojo working.”

She smiled. “Or maybe that.”

“I think I'll stick with penicillin.”

Another smile. “What about Sierra Quarry?”

“Kind of a space cadet, I thought.”

“And Peter Jones? You liked him, you said.”

“I did. I do. And I like Carol Masters, too. She's what I've been searching for all my life. A happy medium.”

Rita's elbow thumped into my side. I laughed. I said, “I'm not so sure about her friend Araxys, though.”

“He said some interesting things, from what you tell me.”

“Love dancing with Love? Yeah. I liked that.”

“I was thinking about something else he said.”

“What?”

She said nothing. When I turned, I saw that she was smiling one of her small secret smiles.

I stopped walking. Rita stopped beside me. “Shit,” I said.

She looked up at me innocently. “What?”

“You know something, don't you, Rita? You only smile like that when you know something that I don't. What is it?”

Rita laughed and tugged at my arm. “Come on. Let's keep walking.”

A Ford station wagon whooshed by, skis tethered to the rack on its roof. We had stopped at a spot where the road dipped abruptly, rolling down into the city. All of downtown Santa Fe was spread out below us—the trees, the adobe walls, the tin roofs of the homes and shops, the mismatched towers of the cathedral. Far off to the west, the purple-gray slopes of the Jemez Mountains rimmed the horizon. I may complain about the tourists and the sharks who feed on them, but all I need is a walk like this to remind me that I probably wouldn't be happy living anywhere else.

We walked. “So what is it?” I asked her.

She smiled. “Let's go back to the beginning,” she said. “What was the first assumption we made about the killer?”

“The killer of Quentin Bouvier? That he was probably one of the people who was at the party that night, down in La Cienega.”

She nodded. “And when did we put that assumption aside?”

“I love it when you do this. The Socratic method. They killed Socrates, you know.”

“
When?
” she asked me again.

“Jeez, I dunno. The fifth century before Christ, I think.”

Her elbow thumped me again. Harder.

“Why did we drop the assumption?” she said.

“I haven't really dropped it. I just don't see how I can justify it.”

“Why?”

“Because someone stuck an ice pick into Leonard Quarry.”

“And from his description, that person wasn't one of the people in La Cienega.”

“Right.”

“And you want to believe that Bouvier and Quarry were both killed by the same person.”

“Yeah. The two of them die within a week of each other. They're both involved with the Tarot card. It seems to me that the deaths have to be connected. But the guy with the ice pick—I don't know who he is, or how he fits in. Like I said, it doesn't make any sense.”

She nodded. “Have you checked with Motor Vehicles about the truck that ran you off the road?”

I turned to her, frowning. “What's that got to do with anything?”

“Have you?”

I sighed. “Hector told me it didn't belong to Paul Chang. It must've belonged to someone he knew. But I've been a little busy lately.”

“I checked. There are quite a few ten-year-old Chevrolet pickups in the state of New Mexico.”

“Yeah?”

“To be on the safe side, I asked for a list of all the Chevy pickups that were between twelve and eight years old. Would you hold this for a minute?” She handed me her cane, swung her purse around, opened it, pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

She offered me the paper. I traded her the cane, opened the paper. Not surprisingly, it was a list of Chevrolet trucks, with the owners' names and addresses.

“That's only one sheet,” she said. “There were four of them.”

I was studying the paper. No names leaped out at me. I looked at Rita. “So?”

“The fifth listing from the top.”

I looked at the paper. “Fred Richards?” I looked at Rita. “Who's he?”

“I'm fairly certain that he's the owner of the truck that ran you down.”

I frowned. “Who the hell is he, Rita? Why would he run me down?”

“What I said was that his truck ran you down. I didn't say that
he
ran you down. According to Motor Vehicle records, he's in his late seventies. He lives with his son. I can't really see him racing up and down the mountain.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Joshua, look at the address.”

I did. I looked at Rita. “But …”

“Think back to the day you were run off the road,” she said. “Before you left for your appointment with Veronica Chang, who did you talk to? What did you say?”

I thought about it for a moment. I mentioned some names. At one of them, Rita nodded.

“No,” I said. “But … wait a minute.” I frowned again.

She smiled.

“Rita,” I said.

Her smile grew wider.

We talked about Rita's theory, and what we should do about it, and what we could do, all the way into town, down the Ski Basin Road, and then along Washington Street, where the thin shade beneath the leaf-striped trees chilled the air. Back in the sunshine, we passed the public library, and then the Burrito Factory. We crossed Washington, dodged through the mob that milled at the entrance to the portico of the Governor's Palace. We crossed Palace Avenue, and finally we were on the Plaza.