The Hanged Man (17 page)

“Whereas Leonard Quarry …?”

“Whereas Leonard Quarry bought things low and sold them high. He contributed nothing to society, nothing to humanity. He was a leech. It is a kind of karmic justice that he's been removed.”

“What about Quentin Bouvier?”

She frowned slightly. “What about him?”

“Was his removal a kind of karmic justice?”

“All karma is just, Mr. Croft. Whatever happens was destined to happen.”

“So it's okay for someone to hang Bouvier from the rafters.”

“Of course not,” she said softly, without heat. “The person responsible has incurred a terrible karmic debt, which sooner or later must be paid.”

“But it was his karma that led him to kill Bouvier.”

“To act as the instrument, yes, that paid some karmic debt owed by Quentin.”

Impressive stuff, this karma. “All right,” I said. “Giacomo Bernardi. In your opinion, could he have killed Quentin Bouvier?”

“In my opinion, anyone is capable of killing.”

Given the proper karma, no doubt. “Do you think that Bernardi was capable of killing Bouvier last Saturday night?”

Once again she shrugged lightly. “Who am I to say?”

“And Leonard Quarry? Do you know of anyone who might want to kill him?”

“I imagine that many people might have wanted to.” Pretty much what Leonard Quarry had said about Quentin Bouvier.

“Anyone in particular?” I asked her.

“None that I know of.”

I sipped my tea. “You said that you were a close friend of Quentin Bouvier's.”

She nodded lightly. “Yes.”

“How close a friend?”

She smiled. “How do you mean?”

“I think you know what I mean, Miss Chang. Were you and Quentin lovers?”

She smiled again. “Surely, Mr. Croft, that is none of your business.”

“My business is finding the person who killed Quentin Bouvier. And to do that, I have to learn as much as I can about the people who were in La Cienega last Saturday night.”

She did her focusing trick again and gave me another small smile. “You are entitled, of course, to learn whatever you can. Or to attempt to. But you will learn nothing about this particular subject from me.”

“You're denying that you and Quentin were lovers?”

“I neither deny nor affirm it. I merely refuse to answer the question.”

“Miss Chang. It doesn't bother you that Giacomo Bernardi is in jail right now for a crime he didn't commit?”

She smiled, shrugged lightly. “The police believe he committed it.”

“I think the police are wrong.”

“If it is Giacomo's karma to remain in jail, he will remain in jail. If it is his karma to be released, he will be released.”

“And meanwhile everybody sits around on his backside sipping tea?”

Pointedly, smiling, she took a sip of tea. “If that is his karma,” she said.

I said, “Did Quentin know that you and Justine had been lovers?”

She lowered the cup to the saucer in her lap and sighed. “Mr. Croft, you grow tiresome. It is time, I think, for you to leave.” She looked toward the doorway. “Please show Mr. Croft out, Paul.”

I followed her glance, saw her brother standing just inside the entrance to the room, arms folded across his chest. He did move very well—he had appeared without me hearing a thing. And he had appeared, so far as I could tell, without being signaled by his sister. Maybe she actually did possess some strange mysterious power of the East. Or maybe, all along, Paul had been loitering just around the corner.

I set my cup and saucer on the silver tray, turned to her, and smiled. “Thanks for the tea.”

She said nothing, merely looked up at me with her faint smile in a very attractive demonstration of inscrutability. Paul had glided across the room and now stood beside me, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. He, too, said nothing. I unfolded myself from the sofa, nodded to Veronica Chang, and started walking toward the door. Paul fell in behind me. I didn't much care for that. I didn't want him behind me.

The passage through the house was uneventful. At the front door, he came around in front of me, opened it, and gestured for me to leave. I left. He came along behind me, pulling the door shut after him. I didn't much care for that, either.

We were halfway across the lawn, him still behind me, when he tapped me on the shoulder.

I knew that I could've been wrong about his intentions. Maybe he only wanted to ask me who I liked in tonight's Lakers game. Maybe he wanted to discuss quantum physics. If I were wrong, what I was about to do would make me look more than a little like a fool. But I'd looked like a fool before. And I'd been sucker-punched before. On the whole, I preferred to look like a fool.

Instead of turning around, and to the right, which is what most of us do when we're tapped on the right shoulder, I feinted to the right and then I sank into a crouch as I wheeled around to my left. I hadn't been wrong. Probably he'd waited until we got outside because he didn't want my blood spattered all over the designer furniture.

His right arm went whistling through the space that was supposed to be occupied by my head.

Karate or one of the other martial arts, Brad Freefall had said. Paul was Korean, so probably his hobby of choice was tae kwon do, the Korean brand of karate. Mostly footwork, leg thrusts and roundhouse kicks. Long-distance stuff—you needed room to bring your feet to bear. If he was using tae kwon do, he'd be backing up soon, to give himself enough space to create a potential circle of action. I wouldn't be able to do any damage unless I could get inside the circle.

But at the moment I was already inside the circle. And most of these martial-art types share a serious flaw. They've never really been hurt. They learn how to take falls, they learn how to parry thrusts. They seldom experience sudden, excruciating pain. Administering it is an excellent way to get their attention.

It's strange how elastic time can become in certain situations. All of this went through my head in something like a millisecond as I whirled down into my crouch and saw that he was off balance, his right side toward me. It took only one more millisecond to slam my fist, all the momentum of my spin behind it, into his stomach, just below the arch of rib cage.

I'd been wrong about his ability to deal with sudden pain. He dealt with it very well. A good solid punch to the solar plexus will leave the average person—will leave me—doubled up and out of action for a day or two. Paul merely gasped and began to backpedal, probably looking for enough room to use his feet.

I didn't think that this was a good idea. I went with him, and, as we danced across the grass, I feinted a left. He parried with a swipe of his right arm and I jabbed a straight right at the side of his exposed neck.

He took that punch very well, too. It hurt him, I believe it hurt him badly, but he only blinked. Then he remembered that he had fists and he began whipping them at me, left and right. I stayed inside, riding it out, taking it on shoulder and upper arm. And then he grabbed my arms and butted me, his forehead smacking against my cheekbone. My teeth clacked together.

There was no pain, not yet, but the shock jarred me for a moment and that was time enough for Paul to spring back and twist into a sudden skillful spin, his left foot sailing toward my head. I staggered away, but he followed through, landed on his left foot, swiftly pivoted and twirled, slashed up his right foot in a smooth continuation of the attack. I backed away from that one, too, and he did it again, landed on the right foot, pivoted, swung around with his left foot, all in one fluid motion, quick, graceful, lethal, just the way they do it in the movies.

I outweighed him by about fifty pounds. He may have had the momentum, but I had the mass. I stepped inside the arc of the swing, blocked his upper leg with my right forearm. He had quite a bit of momentum. I staggered with the force of it. But when he began his next move—a leap off the right foot to jackknife it at my face as he went down, prepared to roll away—I smashed my right fist, as hard as I could, down into his crotch.

Unless he was wearing a plastic cup, that would slow him down a bit.

He wasn't.

His right leg buckled and I stood back and he crashed to the grass on his back. The breath left him in a single explosive rush and he rolled onto his side and curled up, clutching with both hands at his groin.

The entire thing had probably taken no more than a minute, maybe two minutes at the most, but I was panting and the chamois shirt beneath my leather windbreaker was soaked with sweat. I realized that I was standing in a kind of stoop, my back hunched over. I straightened it, sucked in some air. My cheek was throbbing. I reached up and touched it. Tender, and my fingers came away red and slick with blood. He'd broken the skin. I looked around the lawn. There were still no squat naked Indians, no brightly colored birds. But when I glanced toward the house, I saw that Veronica Chang was standing beyond the picture window, her arms crossed beneath her breasts, her face expressionless. I nodded and I turned and left.

“What happened to you?” Hernandez asked me, glancing at the bandage on my cheek.

“I was watching MTV. I got carried away.”

“In an ambulance?”

He was behind his desk, his black boots perched on its top. Standard cop office, tile floors, cement block walls, fluorescent lighting. Agent Green was off somewhere, probably polishing up new nightclub material for the two of them.

I said, “You've got a statement for me to sign?”

He swung his feet off the desk, pulled his chair closer to it, lifted a manila folder. He tossed it across the desktop. “Initial each page. Sign it at the end.”

I picked up the folder. “Okay if I sit down?”

He waved a hand toward an empty chair. “Taxpayers' money.”

I sat down, opened the folder, read through the statement, initialed each page. Hernandez watched me without saying a word. I signed the last page, closed the folder.

Hernandez said, “Anything you want to add? A confession, maybe?”

“My partner came up with a way for the Anglo guy to get the ice pick into the resting room.”

Hernandez sat back, smiling faintly, and put his arms along the arms of the chair. “Do tell.”

I told him.

He nodded. “That the way you did it? Inside a gallon jug?”

“She also pointed out something about the guy that I hadn't noticed.”

“Jeez,” he said. “You didn't notice something?”

“His tan. It's February. Where'd he get it?”

Hernandez shook his head in mock admiration. “Now why didn't I think of that?”

I nodded. “You did, in other words.”

“Amazing, isn't it? We've had troopers hitting the tanning salons in Santa Fe and Albuquerque since this morning.”

“He could've been wearing a skin dye.”

“Jeez. You think of everything.”

“Did you learn anything at the tanning salons?”

He smiled again, hooked his thumbs over his belt. “I know you're not going to believe this, you being so helpful and such a hotshot and all, but my superiors, they don't want me to tell you. They're funny that way. I begged them, I really did. I said, hey, this guy is a
sleuth
. He can solve the whole damn case for us.”

“I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't want to put a blot on your record.”

“You're already a blot on my record.”

But he said it without any real conviction, more from force of habit, I think, than anything else. I smiled. “You still like Giacomo Bernardi for the Quentin Bouvier killing?”

“Three little words. Means, motive, opportunity.”

“And you don't think that Leonard Quarry's death was related somehow?”

“Your Anglo friend wasn't on the guest list down there.”

“It doesn't strike you as a coincidence? Two people go to the same party, both of them get killed within a week?”

He shrugged. “Coincidences happen.”

“I don't think that Bernardi killed Bouvier.”

He mimed surprise: mouth open, eyebrows raised. “Jeez, why didn't you say so? I'll call C.C.A., have them turn him loose.”

“And he couldn't have killed Quarry. He was in jail at the time.”

“Now I've got two little words for you.”

“
Merry Christmas
?”

“
Fuck off
. You're working for the public defender's on the Bouvier thing. You're entitled to ask about that. I don't have to tell you anything more than the law requires, but you're entitled to ask. You're not entitled to ask anything about the Quarry killing. They're two separate cases.”

“What if I can prove they're not?”

He shrugged. “Then maybe we'll renegotiate. In the meantime …”

“Fuck off?”

He nodded. “Like I said.”

It was one o'clock when I reached the office, carrying a takeout lunch from the Burrito Factory. Rita was out. A note on my desk told me that she'd be back by three. I ate my carne adovado. I called Sally Durrell, told her what I'd learned and what I hadn't, then wrote up my formal reports for her. I called Carl Buffalo. A woman, the same woman that I'd spoken to before, told me that he was still up in the mountains. She said that he was due back tomorrow. I called Carol Masters, the film actress turned channeler. Her machine told me, as it had before, that she was out of town. I wondered whether she knew that a burglar would be delighted with that piece of information. I called Ernie Beller, a friend who ran a used car lot on Cerrillos Road. Ernie was in. He probably didn't know who killed Quentin Bouvier, so I didn't ask him. He did know about cars, however, and he said he had a late-model Jeep Cherokee available, “almost cherry,” that he was practically giving away. I told him I'd stop by tomorrow.

At two-thirty, I left for my next appointment.