The Hanged Man (3 page)

“How did the scarf manage to wrap itself around Bouvier's neck?”

“He doesn't know.”

“What did he say?”

What Giacomo Bernardi had said was that after the argument with Bouvier, he had gone off to brood in the library, taking with him a bottle of sambuca—the Freefall-Morningstar household, New Age or not, evidently kept a well-stocked bar. He had sat in the library, alone, watching a soccer match on cable TV and hitting the sambuca vigorously. I'd gotten the feeling, talking to him, that hitting sambuca vigorously was an activity with which he was not entirely unfamiliar.

Eventually, he said, he fell asleep, still sitting in his armchair. He was awakened by what he described as a noise.

“What kind of noise?” Rita asked me.

“He doesn't know. A noise. Whatever it was, it woke him up. And then, he says, he heard someone running in the hallway. He said it sounded like someone running barefoot.”

Still groggy from the aftereffects of half a bottle of vigorously hit sambuca, Bernardi had stumbled out of the library and into the hallway. Looking down the hall, he saw that one of the bedroom doors was open—Bouvier's. Without thinking much about it, probably without thinking at all, he shambled down the hall and looked into the room. Hanging immobile at its center, attached to a beam by a scarf that Bernardi recognized as his own, a long red silk scarf trimmed with gold, was a very dead Quentin Bouvier.

Rita said, “Where had the scarf been before this?”

“In Bernardi's bedroom closet.”

“He panicked?”

“He panicked.”

Bernardi had told me, “I got afraid.” Some of the flatness had left his voice. He had sat forward, his hands on the Formica table. “I see my muffler, you know. My scarf. And I see his face, that man's face, all black and swole up. And his eyes, you know, they are like this”—he showed me with his hands—“wide open, you know, and sticking out. Looking at me. And I got afraid the people would think I done this. And so I left.”

“What did he take with him?” Rita asked me.

“Only his coat. A navy pea coat. I don't think he had much else.”

“Not the Tarot card?”

“He says not. He says he didn't even think about the card until after he'd left La Cienega.”

“How did he leave?”

“He walked. He doesn't have a car, he'd gotten a ride there from one of the other guests, a woman named Veronica Chang. Anyway, he walked. This was about five o'clock in the morning, still dark. He walked down to the entrance to the interstate and hitchhiked until he got a ride. He was standing there, he says, for over an hour before someone stopped. The sun was beginning to come up.”

“Did he get the driver's name?”

“No. And he doesn't know what kind of car it was, either. American, he says. An older model.”

“The state police will locate it, if they haven't already. At that time of the morning, anyone leaving La Cienega probably lives there.”

“Probably. The ride took him as far as Bernalillo. He had some coffee and doughnuts at a diner and then walked over to the next interstate entrance. He was trying to make Albuquerque, where he knows some people. The state police picked him up there, at the Bernalillo entrance, at seven-thirty.”

Rita asked, “Do we know who found Bouvier's body, and when?”

“Bouvier's wife, Justine. Six o'clock. I got that from Sally. The state cops were there, at the house, by six-thirty.”

“What was the time of death?”

“He hadn't been dead long. Couple of hours, max. Sometime between four-thirty and five-thirty.”

“If Bernardi's telling the truth, he came on the scene almost immediately afterward.”

“Yeah.”

“Did he shut Bouvier's door when he left the room?”

“He says he didn't. But according to the wife's statement, it was shut when she arrived at six.”

“Presumably, then, the murderer shut it
after
Bernardi left the house.”

“Probably the murderer, yeah. No one admits to seeing it open. No one admits to being out in the hallway all night. And if anyone
had
seen the door open, probably he would've looked inside to see if everything was all right. And he would've seen Bouvier hanging there.”

“Assuming there was enough light.”

“Right. Assuming that.”

“Do you have the names and addresses of the rest of the people who were present in the house that night?”

“Yeah. Got those from Sally, too.”

“Put them into the computer and, when I can, I'll run them through the databases.”

“When you can?”

She smiled. “When I can. I know you'll find this difficult to believe, Joshua, but I do have one or two things on my plate besides your Mr. Bernardi. I'm doing some asset searches for Kevin Lehrmer, up in Denver. I'm doing a due vigilance for Ed Norman. And I already told you that I'm trying to locate that man from Scottsdale, Frederick Pressman.”

“Yeah. The guy who disappeared with two million dollars. How you doing?”

“I've learned his new name—Ralph Bonner.”

“How'd you get it? Girlfriend? Relative?”

“An old girlfriend. I got her off the phone records. She's in Phoenix, and I asked Steve Chapman down there to check her out. He made a garbage run, found a letter with Bonner's name and a return address. He was staying at the Hilton in Houston at the time. A week ago.”

Once you put your garbage out on the curb, it loses all of its right to privacy, and so do you. The highest court in the land, the Supremes, has determined that anyone who wants the stuff can just zip up to the bag, toss it into the backseat, take it home, and peruse its contents at leisure. Be careful what you throw away.

Rita said, “Bonner's description matches Pressman's. The real Ralph Bonner is buried in a cemetery in Syracuse, New York.”

“So Pressman has papers.”

“Birth certificate, Social Security, Texas driver's license, passport. He booked a flight from Houston to Mexico City for last Friday. He wouldn't need the passport for Mexico—not immediately, anyway—so I suspect he's headed for somewhere below the border.”

“Brazil?”

“I don't think so. According to his college transcripts, he's got three years of Spanish. No Portuguese. And he could've flown to Brazil directly. I think he'll be aiming for one of the smaller countries, possibly one with a sizable contingent of American expatriots. Costa Rica. Guatemala.”

“He could've flown directly to either one of them.”

“He's being cute, I think.”

“But you're cuter, Rita.”

“I'll find him,” she said. “In the meantime, you put those names into the computer—”

“Well, see,” I said. “What I was hoping, see, was that
you'd
put them in the computer, see, and then I could take off and—”

“Joshua, you're perfectly capable of typing some names into the computer. I know that you like to pretend that computers are some sort of black magic—”

“Spiritual alchemy.”

“What
is
spiritual alchemy?”

“Beats me.”

“Well, spiritually or otherwise, put the names and addresses into the computer.”

“Yes, dear,” I said. “You know what this is? This case? Aside from being a major pain in the ass, I mean.”

She sat back, put her arms along the arms of her swivel chair. “What?”

“It's unreal. All these space cadets. It's like one of those English mystery novels of the thirties. An isolated manor house filled with eccentrics. A nighttime murder. One of the eccentrics, probably innocent, has been arrested by the local constabulary.”

She smiled. “But then you show up, the debonair amateur sleuth, and you begin your careful investigation. And finally, in the last chapter, through your incredible powers of observation and your supreme skill at ratiocination, you identify the real murderer.”

“Well, to tell you the truth, what I was planning to do was keep beating up on people until someone confessed. I'll try to be debonair about it, though.”

“The difference here,” she said, “is that this
is
a real house. With a real corpse in it, a person who was once very much alive. And who died in a very messy way.”

“Yeah. There's that.”

“Tell me about this Tarot card.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think the card's important.”

She nodded. “It's missing. Someone's dead. Until we learn otherwise, I think it's safe to assume that it's important.”

I took out my notebook, flipped it open. “Okay. From what Sally and Bernardi tell me, the card is from a deck originally hand-painted in Italy in 1494. The deck was commissioned by Pope Alexander the Sixth. Rodrigo Borgia. You're familiar with Rodrigo?”

“Lucrezia's father.”

I smiled. “One way to put it. According to Bernardi, it was short of a full deck. Which makes sense, because that's what most of these people in La Cienega would be playing with.”

“Joshua.” Mildly reproving.

“You know that a Tarot deck has twenty-two major trumps? Major Arcana, they're called.”

She nodded.

“Well, those twenty-two cards, the Major Arcana, they were all that were painted. And then, over the years, the deck got split up. Right now, eleven of the cards are in the Louvre, in Paris, and ten others are in a private museum in Catania, Italy. This card's been missing for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century. But according to Bernardi, there are stories, legends, that it's turned up from time to time in the possession of different occultists. A guy named Court de Gebelin, in Switzerland, sometime around 1776. Later, around 1886, with a French guy named Eliphas Levi. The last person who claimed to have seen it was Aleister Crowley, when he was a member of something called the Order of the Golden Dawn.”

Rita nodded. “The English magical group. Yeats was a member.”

“Yeats the poet?”

She smiled. “No, Joshua, Yeats the chiropractor.”

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. Who holds the record for the most home runs hit during a single season?”

“Roger Maris.”

“Okay,” I said. “Fine. You wanna fuck?”

She laughed and I watched the muscles play beneath the smooth skin of her throat.

I said, “It's just I get so turned on when you point out my deficiencies.”

She laughed again. “All right,” she said. “We'll try it again. Yes, Joshua. Yeats, the poet.”

“Thank you.”

“And how did it come into the possession of this woman, this Eliza Remington?”

“I don't know. But I'll beat her up until I find out.”

“You might try asking her first.”

“Aha. That's just what she'd
expect
me to do.”

She smiled—puzzled, maybe. “You're being unusually silly this morning.”

“Unusually?”

“More so than normal.”

I smiled. “Ah, well. Maybe the idea of talking to all these fruit loops is making me a little goony. And maybe it's just that I still get such a big kick out of seeing you here.”

She smiled again. “I plan to be here for a long time, Joshua. It might be a good idea for you to get used to it.”

I smiled. “Yes, dear. I'll certainly try.”

“Can we get back to business now?”

“Absolutely.”

“A card like that,” she said, “assuming the provenance could be established, would be priceless.”

“Eliza Remington apparently set a price. And Bouvier apparently paid it.”

“Do we know how much?”

“No. But you just wait till I get my hands on Eliza.”

“Stop it.”

I grinned.

“How was it being carried?” she asked me.

“Bernardi says it was in a stiff leather binder, beneath a sheet of glassine paper. The binder was about a foot square. The card itself was about three inches by seven.”

“Both the binder and the card are missing?”

“Yeah.”

“And they were in Bouvier's bedroom before he was killed.”

“They were supposed to be.”

“So if Bernardi didn't kill Bouvier, then whoever
did
kill him presumably took the card.”

“Unless Bernardi's lying about not taking the card. He could've found Bouvier dead, seen his chance, and ripped it off.”

“If he had the presence of mind to do that,” she said, “why didn't he have the presence of mind to remove his scarf?”

“Maybe he was squeamish.”

“And taking the card would've made the case against him look even worse.”

“Not if he hid it somewhere. Wrapped it in a garbage bag and buried it somewhere between the house and the interstate.”

“He'd only hide it if he were working on the assumption that he was going to get picked up.”

“Or that he
might
be picked up.”

She frowned. “Is that what you think happened?”

“Not really. I'm just ratiocinating.”

She smiled. “So we're back to the likelihood that whoever killed Bouvier was the person who took the card.”

“Makes sense to me.”

“Or. Person A kills Bouvier for an unrelated reason, and then, later, Person B wanders in and takes the card.”

“Which would put at least three people in Bouvier's room that night, including Bernardi. Four, including Bouvier. It's beginning to sound like the ship cabin scene in
A Night at the Opera
.”

She smiled again. “Did the state police search everyone?”

“If they did, they probably didn't do a very good job. It looks to me like they decided from the beginning that Bernardi was the guy responsible.”

“Not surprising,” Rita said. “He was missing. The card was missing.”

“Yeah.”

She nodded. “The missing card. Which card was it? Which trump?”