The Hanged Man (25 page)

“And what did you tell them, Justine? The police. When they asked about theater friends of Leonard's.”

“I told them I haven't the faintest idea who Leonard knew. And I really couldn't care less.”

“All right. Thanks.”

“When are you coming up here again, darling? I'd
love
to do your past-life regression for you.”

“Sorry, Justine. Right now I'm still fairly busy with my current life.”

“You've got to learn to loosen up, Joshua. Get rid of some of that armor you carry around.”

“Yeah. Pawn it, maybe.”

She laughed. “Well, don't forget to give me a jingle.”

“Right.”

“Bye now.”

“Goodbye, Justine.”

As I hung up, I realized that I hadn't yet asked Peter Jones about Leonard Quarry's theatrical connections. Probably, like all the others, he would know of none. But I still had to speak with him.

I was going through my notebook, looking for his phone number, when the door to my office opened and Paul Chang stepped in, holding a large automatic in his right hand.

I know a few people who claim to feel an enormous affection for the M-1911 Colt .45 automatic. They mention, and sometimes keep mentioning, its reliability and accuracy, its size, its weight. But the feature they most esteem is what they call, with a certain relish, its stopping power. One slug in the arm or anywhere else, they like to say, and a guy goes down, and he stays down.

The slug in question is nearly half an inch wide and weighs nearly half an ounce. Propelled from its casing, it moves more slowly than the .38 or the nine-millimeter, but it carries quite a bit of momentum.

While I'm not personally fond of automatics and the maintenance they require, I'm prepared to admit that the Government Colt, when its big muzzle is aimed at my head, does get my attention.

“Hello, Paul,” I said. “Nice gun.”

He shut the door behind him and leaned against it. “Asshole,” he said.

I realized that this was the first time I'd heard his voice. Yesterday, when I met him, he hadn't spoken a word. Like his sister's voice, his was low and nicely modulated.

He was wearing black leather gloves, a black leather jacket with its collar up, a black silk scarf, a black silk shirt, black twill trousers, black socks, black slip-on shoes. The Contemporary Ninja look.

“What can I do for you?” I asked him. My voice was nicely modulated, too, but it may have been higher than normal by an octave or two.

“Get up,” he said. “You're coming with me.”

I sat forward in the swivel chair, put my hands on the desk. “Have you thought this out, Paul?” The important thing, it seemed to me, was to keep jabbering away until something distracted him. I glanced at the phone, willed it to ring.

“Get up,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because if you don't, I'll kill you where you sit.”

“Why should I care where you kill me?”

His eyes narrowed. “Get up.”

“Are we going to be using the car?”

“I'm not going to tell you again. Get up.”

“Because if we are, maybe you should start thinking about who's going to drive. If you're the driver, you won't be able to hold the gun. If I drive, how are you going to stop me from piling into a dump truck and taking you with me?”

He took a step toward me and cocked the pistol's hammer. His hand was trembling, the gun barrel wavering slightly. “Shut your fucking mouth. And get up out of that chair.”

The phone rang. He turned toward it. I shot him. He shot back.

“You're lucky,” Hector Ramirez told me.

“Yeah.”

“And you were smart for a change, putting the gun where you could reach it.”

I shrugged weakly. “He tried to kill me yesterday. I didn't want to give him a second chance.”

“Where'd you have it?”

I was sitting in one of the client chairs, Hector was sitting in the other. I jerked my head toward the desk. “Behind the box of Kleenex.”

He nodded. “How are you feeling?”

I shook my head. “Just great, Hector. Just fucking great.”

“The paramedics said he's probably going to pull through.”

“Yeah.”

The paramedics had left; and so, after taking my statement, had the uniformed cops. Hector, who was supposed to be off duty today, had arrived sometime in the middle of all the excitement, cops asking me questions, paramedics sliding Paul Chang onto a gurney and hooking him up to an I.V. Everyone, or so it seemed, had been furiously talking into walkie-talkies while they bustled about. One of the paramedics had been in the ambulance with me last night, when I was carted down from the sky basin. He had looked at me today as though I were Charlie Manson.

I felt a bit like Charlie Manson.

Over by the doorway, the hardwood floor was puddled black with blood. Black footprints crisscrossed the room, some of them smeared, some of them as distinct as if they'd been painted there with a stencil.

“Self-defense, Josh,” Hector said. “Him or you.”

“Yeah.”

“He fired at you. If he'd hit you, you'd be the one in the ambulance.”

I looked over to the wall behind my desk. At approximately chest level, Paul Chang's slug had pocked a ragged hole in the plaster. One of the uniforms had used a penknife to pry it out of the adobe beyond.

“Yeah,” I said.

Hector said nothing.

The telephone rang.

It had been Rita calling before, when the ringing phone had distracted Paul Chang. I hadn't answered it because I was busy kicking the Colt away from the doorway, where he'd dropped it when he crumpled to the floor. I'd heard her voice coming through the answering machine as I ripped clumps of Kleenex from the box and stuffed them into Chang's wounds, one just above his hip on the right side, the other in his right shoulder. I couldn't recall shooting at him twice. I had been moving when I fired, heading for the floor.

Lying there, he had been in shock, his eyelids fluttering. I had mumbled the entire time I worked on him, calling him a stupid shit, telling him that everything was going to be fine, calling him a stupid shit again. Probably, even if he'd been able to understand me, I wouldn't have made much sense.

The phone was still ringing. I got up, shuffled over to the desk, lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

“Joshua?” Rita. “You sound strange.”

“Yeah. Well, there's been kind of an accident here.”

“What kind of an accident?”

“Paul Chang. I kind of shot him.” I giggled. It sounded inappropriate, even to me.

After a moment Rita said, “You're all right?”

“Just swell. Hunky dory. Never felt better.”

“Is anyone there with you?”

“Hector.”

Another brief pause. “Joshua? May I talk to him?”

“Yeah, sure.” I held out the phone to Hector. “Lovely Rita.”

Hector stood, crossed the room, took the phone. “Hello, Rita.”

I circled the desk, sat down in the swivel chair, slumped myself against the backrest.

“Yeah,” Hector spoke into the phone. “He's fine … No … Yeah … They say he'll live … I don't know. Not well … No, nothing like that … Yeah … Yeah, I will … I will, Rita, I promise … Okay, I'll tell him … You too. Okay. Later.”

He hung up. “Okay,” he said to me. “Let's go.”

I looked up at him. “Where?”

“I'm taking you home.”

“Jesus Christ, Hector. I shot the guy, nearly killed him. If nothing else, I fired a gun inside the city limits. Don't I at least get a ticket?”

“You were on your own property, protecting yourself. All the evidence corroborates your story. We've got his gun, we've got the slug he fired. We've got your statement. Anything comes up, I'll let you know. Meanwhile, I promised Rita I'd drive you home. She'll get there as soon as she can. An hour or two, she said. Let's go.”

I shook my head. “I can't, Hector. Got to clean that up.” I nodded to the doorway, to the smeared puddle of blood.

“Rita said you'd say that. She's calling the service. They'll take care of it. Come on. I'll drive you.”

“We'll take my car?”

He shook his head. “Mine. Yours will be fine where it is.”

Suddenly I was too tired to argue about it. Too tired to argue about anything.

Hector and I didn't speak much as he drove me home. But in my driveway, just as he stopped the car, he turned to me. “Joshua,” he said. “I know how you feel.”

I nodded. He probably did. But somehow that didn't seem to matter much.

He said, “There are a few things you should remember. First of all, he's still alive.”

“So far.”

“Second, like I said before, if you hadn't nailed him, you'd probably be dead right now.”

I shook my head. “We don't know that, Hector. He wanted to take me somewhere. I hurt him pretty badly yesterday. Maybe all he wanted was another shot at the title.”

“If he didn't plan to use the gun, he should never have pulled it.”

I shook my head. “I keep seeing his face. He looked so goddamned
surprised
.”

“He wasn't the one who was supposed to get shot.” He reached out, squeezed my arm, released it. “Don't punish yourself, Josh. And listen. Call me if you want to talk.”

I looked at him. He had been something like a friend for a long time now, as much like a friend as any cop could be to a private investigator. He was big and he was genuinely tough and he looked about as sensitive as a set of brass knuckles. I knew that there were cops—not many of them, thank God—who wouldn't be at all bothered by the idea of shooting someone. And who would never understand why I'd be bothered by the idea of shooting someone.

There were things I wanted to tell him, but they were things that didn't easily come out of male vocal cords. Out of my vocal cords, anyway. What I said was, “Thanks, Hector.”

I wandered around the house for a while, aimlessly, moving things, picking them up, setting them down. I'd been sleeping at Rita's almost every night for the past month or so, coming here only for a change of clothes. The rooms felt unused and abandoned. So did I.

When I looked at my watch, I saw that it was already three o'clock. Paul Chang had entered my office just before one. Time flies when you're having fun.

I went into the kitchen, found the Jack Daniel's, built a drink, carried it into the living room, sat down. Tasted the drink. Noticed, on the folded-back cuff of my denim shirt, a large dark brown smear.

I put the drink on the coffee table. I stood up, ripped the shirt off, tossed it across the room, stalked into the bathroom, and was extremely sick.

It seemed like a long time that I sat there on the sofa, drinking, thinking.

I had killed two human beings in my life, a pair of thugs from El Paso. They had tortured and killed a defenseless old man; and, at the time, on a dusty mountainside in Arizona, they had been trying very hard to kill me. If any two people had ever deserved to die, I believe that they had. But I still had dreams about them. Bad dreams.

When medieval cartographers drew the Atlantic Ocean, they often scrawled a notation across the blank unknown area beyond the Azores:
Here be monsters
. Today's cartographers could, with more accuracy, scrawl it across the entire globe. The monsters are everywhere now. They are ruthless and they are unredeemable. Captured, imprisoned, they are almost certainly not going to be rehabilitated. Whatever lethal combination of gene and scene created them, they are damaged beyond repair.

I can understand the arguments for capital punishment. I can understand the thirst for revenge. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Destroy the destroyer. It's pretty basic stuff.

But, maybe because the thirst is so basic, I tend to distrust it. Too often, I suspect, what we wish to destroy is just a handy screen onto which we project the psychic ghosts shaped by the bitterness and the brutality we've all suffered, our own private devils and demons. You can sometimes see this on the faces of those ghouls who stand vigil outside the prison when an execution is about to take place. What shows in their eyes, in the set of their mouths, isn't compassion for the prisoner's victims, but lust for the blood of the prisoner. When we destroy the destroyer, murder the murderer, collectively we reduce ourselves to his level.

Was Paul Chang a monster? I didn't know. Did he deserve to die? I wasn't equipped to provide an answer. I didn't think that anyone was.

If someone were threatening Rita's life, without a moment's thought I would do everything I could to stop him. Paul Chang had threatened mine, and without a moment's thought I had stopped him. No doubt, in a similar situation, I would do so again.

But that didn't mean that I had to like it. And it didn't mean that I could forget what I'd done. Over and over as I sat there that afternoon, I saw the look on Paul Chang's face as the slugs from the .38 slammed into his flesh. Saw the red blood seeping down the lining of his leather jacket and soaking into the carpet …