The Hanged Man (10 page)

He shrugged. “Six or seven?” he asked her.

“Nine,” I told them. “According to the state police reports. A burglar isn't very likely to hit a house that has that many cars outside.”

“But it
had
to be a burglar,” she said. “Nothing else makes any sense. It
couldn't
have been one of our friends.”

“Did any of them have any reason to dislike Quentin Bouvier?”

“None of them!” she said. “Really, Joshua—do you mind if I call you Joshua?”

“Not at all.”

“Really, Joshua, you have to understand that these people all treasure life. Most of them are healers, and caring for others, caring
about
others is the most important thing in their lives.”

I said, “What do you think about Justine Bouvier?”

She smiled happily. “You've met her? Isn't she
wonderful?
So beautiful and so chic! All those lovely clothes she wears, and she wears them so well, she has such
style
, I'd give
anything
to be able to wear clothes the way she does.”

I had been watching Brad Freefall out of the corner of my eye as I asked the question, and I noticed that he very quickly pursed his lips—it might have been a frown, but it was too fleeting to identify. When I glanced over to him, his own glance skittered away.

Something there, something about Justine Bouvier.

But to learn what it was, I'd have to chisel Brad loose from Sylvie. Which would probably be as easily accomplished as separating Siamese twins.

I tried something, and it worked. “I wonder,” I said, “if I could take a look at the room where Quentin Bouvier was sleeping that night.”

Sylvia scrunched up her thin shoulders, put a hand to her thin neck, and gave a feathery little shiver. “I'm sorry, Joshua, but I can't go in there again. After the state police took away all the bedding, I had to go in there to clean up, and it was a
terrible
mess, and I got physically
ill
. I've been keeping it locked ever since, and I just
can't
go in there again.” She turned to Brad. “Darling, do you mind?”

He nodded bravely, squeezed her shoulder. “Sure, babe. We'll be right back.” He stood up. “This way, man.”

I set my tea on the floor and followed him from the living room. We went back the way I'd come, through a high-tech kitchen with an oven big enough to roast a Cadillac, and into the west wing of the building. A corridor ran down its length, floored with red Mexican tiles and walled to the right with stuccoed adobe and vertical panels of double-glazed glass. Through one of the panels, I looked out across the courtyard and saw that the house's east wing seemed to be a mirror image of this one.

Brad showed me the first room, the library, where, last Saturday night, Giacomo Bernardi had sat swilling sambuca while he watched a soccer match. The television, flanked by two tall speakers, was only a shade smaller than a drive-in movie screen. A burglar would've needed a U-Haul truck, and a derrick, to cart it away.

Brad told me that the next room had been occupied by Peter Jones. He didn't mention that Jones had shared his accommodations with Justine Bouvier.

The next room had been Veronica Chang's, and the room after that, Brad said, had been the Bouvier's. I noticed that small spotlights ran on tracks near the hallway ceiling.

As he unlocked Bouvier's door, I asked him who had been sleeping in the last room, the room beyond the Bouviers'.

“That was Carl's, I think,” he said. “Carl Buffalo.” He shrugged. “But you should ask Sylvie. She arranged all that.” He opened the door and stood back to let me enter.

A fair-size room. White walls decorated with a couple of abstracts that had been painted by an interior designer, brightly colored and immediately forgettable. A thick white shag carpet. A small kiva fireplace in one corner. A twin bed, stripped down to a bare mattress and flanked by two pinewood nightstands. A low pinewood dresser running along one wall. Two doors on the far wall. Overhead, sunshine filtered in through an opaque rectangular skylight and splashed in from a clerestory window as long as the room, facing toward the courtyard.

And overhead, too, supporting the stained and polished vigas, was the beam from which Quentin Bouvier had been draped.

It was a good solid beam. It would be able to hold quite a bit more weight than the one hundred and thirty pounds that Bouvier had weighed.

I turned to Brad, who stood just inside the doorway, heavy shoulders slouched, his hands once again in his back pockets.

“The rest of them were sleeping in the other wing?” I asked him.

He shrugged again. “Most of them. The Quarrys were in the guest house, up ahead.” He jerked his head to the right.

“So a total of how many bedrooms?”

“Nine, counting the guest house.”

“Guest house is connected to this wing?”

He nodded. “Right. There's a door up the hallway, by the last bedroom.”

“The lights out in the hallway. The spots. Were they on last Saturday night?”

“Yeah. But dim, man. They work off a rheostat. I turned them on before dinner.”

I nodded. I crossed the room, opened one of the two doors. A closet, empty. Opened the other. A small, tidy bathroom: sink, toilet, shower stall.

I walked over to the beehive-shaped fireplace. It had been swept clean.

I said, “The fireplace hasn't been used recently?”

“Yeah, it was, man. Quentin used it. We had wood in all the fireplaces last Saturday. The state cops cleaned it out.”

“Were all the fireplaces used?”

“Most of 'em. There's no other heat in this part of the house.”

“The cops swept them all?”

“Yeah. Looking for evidence, they said.”

And if there had been any, they had found it.

“What about the drains?” I asked him. “In the showers.”

He nodded. “Yeah. They checked those, too.”

“They find anything?”

“They didn't tell me, man.”

“The chunk of quartz,” I said. “The one that was used to clobber Bouvier. The cops have that?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was one of Sylvie's favorite pieces.”

“That's a shame.”

He nodded. “Bummer, man.”

I nodded. I looked around the room. “This is a terrific house, Brad.”

He grinned. “Thanks, man. We like it.”

“It's huge, isn't it?”

“Yeah. Great for meetings. And now and then we rent it out. Groups, you know? The Sierra Club. Greenpeace. Like that. Gives us a nice little income.”

I nodded. “So what's this I hear about you and Justine Bouvier?”

Beneath the tan, his face went pale.

I took the interstate north, past the racetrack, past the Cerrillos exit, then swung off onto St. Francis. That street, one of the main commercial routes into town, was today choked with lumbering trucks and splenetic, honking tourists as it wound through the western part of Santa Fe, sloped down to the Alameda and the Santa Fe River, and then rose up after it crossed Paseo de Peralta. Traffic didn't thin out until the road sloped down again at the ridge beyond La Tierra, sliding through the pine trees toward the stony brown bluffs and twisting arroyos north of town, wild ragged badlands flung out east and west as far as the eye could see.

Every year there was more traffic, there were more tourists, more trucks hauling ground beef and chiles and salsa to feed the tourists. The locals fret about it, call it the Aspenization of Santa Fe, howl at the city council. The Plaza, they say, has become an upscale shopping mall of pricey, precious boutiques where dullards from Duluth dress up like nouveau riche cowboys and affluent Apache Indians. Which is an interesting grievance, since this is how many of the locals themselves prefer to dress.

But the locals are right: there's a point where chic slips over into crass, and Santa Fe seems destined to reach it. So long as people, including the dullards from Duluth, hunger for something with even a semblance of grace and tradition and spare uncluttered beauty, and so long as they're prepared to pay for it, there will be affable sharks who will be more than happy to provide the semblance and take the cash. And Santa Fe, like many an American city, will continue its slow, relentless transformation into a theme park—dull, drab, and dead.

But outside town, the countryside is still spare and uncluttered, the sunlight still reels down from a clear blue silky sky, the mountains and the buttes still soar wild and reckless from a landscape so nonchalant about its lean rugged beauty, so indifferent to the passage of time, and the passage of man, that it takes the breath away. Driving through this country can be, should be, an exercise in humility; and that may be one of the very best exercises possible.

And so I drove north toward Agua Caliente and I admired the scenery and I felt properly humble and I thought about what I'd learned from Brad Freefall and Sylvia Morningstar.

Once again, when Brad and I returned to the living room, it had been Sylvia who had done most of the talking. Her account of the get-together last Saturday night didn't differ, in any significant way, from the accounts given by Justine Bouvier and Bennett Hadley, or from what I'd read in the police reports. Except that Sylvia minimized the violence of Bernardi's attack on Bouvier, tried to make the confrontation sound less like an actual physical assault than a spunky debate that had gotten a bit out of hand. Brad had sat there, quietly deferring to her. I got the impression that he usually deferred to her: that she provided the strength in the relationship.

When I asked her about her guests that night, I learned that Sylvia, unlike Bouvier and Hadley, didn't have an unkind word to say about anyone, anyhow, in this life or any other. According to her, all the people who had been there when Bouvier was killed were paragons of probity and kindness, selfless souls dedicated to the betterment of mankind. After the earlier interviews, it was refreshing to listen to someone for whom derision wasn't a hobby. But it was also less than illuminating.

Brad, when I talked to him alone in Bouvier's bedroom, had been a bit more helpful.

I had set him up, of course, put him at ease and then sandbagged him with the question about Justine Bouvier. And, as I'd thought, Brad didn't possess the emotional equipment—duplicity, we call it in the trade—to carry off a convincing denial.

As he went pale, he had said, “What?” He tried for a smile, and it came off sickly.

I grinned at him, man to man. This didn't come off too well, either—it was almost a leer, and it made me feel slightly tainted. “Come on, Brad,” I said. “It was probably no big deal. A quick roll in the hay, right?”

He surprised me then by blushing. A lot of people in Santa Fe did things that deserved a blush or two, but Brad and Sylvia were the first people I'd seen in a long while who actually came through with one. For a moment he said nothing. He blinked. He took a deep breath. He sighed, and then he said, with more sadness than anger, “The bitch.”

My turn to say nothing.

He said, “She's the only one could've told you.” But there was a thin note of doubt running through his voice, and a questioning, almost anxious look on his healthy, open face.

Still I said nothing. Brad had the ball and I let him run with it.

“I begged her not to tell anyone,” he said. “I warned her. I told her that if Sylvie ever found out, I'd …” He frowned, looked away.

Kill her? Make her listen to rap music?

He sighed again, looked down, shook his head. “Ah shit, man.” He took his hands from his back pockets and sat down on the bare mattress, arms on his thighs, shoulders bowed, head down.

I sat down myself, atop the dresser. “She didn't tell me, Brad.”

He looked up, puzzled, perhaps a bit alarmed, afraid it might have been someone else.

“No one did,” I said. “It was a guess. A shot in the dark. I saw how you reacted when I mentioned her name. And I've met the woman.”

Not quite believing me, but clearly wanting to, he said, “She didn't say anything about me?”

“Nothing about any kind of relationship.”

His face went suddenly sour. “Shit, man, it wasn't
any
kinda relationship. It was a one-shot deal. She showed up here one night when Sylvie was out of town. Came to the door wearing a fur coat and nothing else. Even then, man, nothing would've happened, probably, except that I was feeling down, you know? Missing Sylvie and all. I had some weed in the house, not much, an old joint somebody left, like years ago. But I did it, and that just made me feel more down, and then
she
showed up. Invited herself in, told me she knew I'd be lonely with Sylvie off in Mill Valley. And it just happened, man. She got what she wanted.”

He flushed again, remembering. “Well, shit, man, I wanted it too, I guess. Hard not to. She's—well, like you say, you met her. You know what she's like, I guess. But it was just that one time. Never again. And I told her, man, I told her I never wanted Sylvie to find out. She just laughed at me. And so I had a beer can, empty, you know? And I tore it in half, right across the middle, and I told her that's what'd happen to her if it ever got to Sylvie what'd happened. She believed me. I must've sounded pretty spooky.”