The Hanged Man (29 page)

He hesitated, glanced again at Eliza, who continued to ignore him and stare at me. “Look,” he said to me. “Can you make us a promise?”

“What promise?”

“Can you keep Eliza's name out of this?”

“Out of what?”

“I …” He looked at Eliza, looked back at me. “If we tell you something, can you promise us that you won't go to the police with it?”

“That's not a promise I can make. In order to keep my license, I'm required by law to report any felony I learn about. Are we talking felony here?”

Peter frowned. “What if we discuss this … hypothetically? What if we—”

“Oh, for God's sake, Peter,” said Eliza. “Forget it. I told you he was a Boy Scout.” She tossed back the rest of her drink, looked at me, her face set, her shrewd blue eyes steady behind her spectacles. “My Tarot card. The Death card. It was a forgery.”

She leaned forward, loudly set the empty glass down on the coffee table, then sat back, her arms crossed, her head raised, defiant.

“A forgery,” I said.

She nodded. “Counterfeit. Phony.”

I nodded.

“Fake,” she said.

“I get the idea. You forged it?”

She shook her head. “My great-grandfather.”

“When?”

“When he was staying in Italy, with Crowley.”

“And you've known all along that it was a forgery?”

“Of course I have.”

I sat back in the director's chair and looked at Peter Jones.

“Look,” he said earnestly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and holding out his hands. “Eliza never intended that any of this should happen. Quentin and Leonard getting killed. All the rest. The police can't blame her for that, can they?”

“Did you know about the card?” I asked him.

He sat back defensively. “Not until today,” he said. “When Eliza came and told me.”

I turned to Eliza. She hadn't moved. “Did anyone else know?” I asked her.

“Leonard.”

She was having no problems with her hearing today, I noted. “Leonard Quarry? For how long?”

She frowned impatiently. “For God's sake,” she said, “don't you get it? From the beginning. It was his goddamn idea.”

A few things suddenly began to make sense. “Quarry was never bidding for a third party,” I said. “The two of you were whipsawing Quentin Bouvier. Quarry was jacking up the price.”

She nodded.

“How much did he get?”

“He was supposed to get a third. Sixty-six thousand. Sonovabitch wanted half. I didn't think he deserved more than a quarter. If that. We settled on a third.” She frowned, quickly, bitterly. That still bothered her.

“Supposed to get?” I said.

“Never gave it to him. All the money's still in my account. After Quentin got killed, I was afraid to transfer the funds. Afraid the police might find out and think that it had something to do with Quentin's death.”

“Maybe it did.”

She scowled. “Horseshit. Giacomo killed Quentin. Still pissed off about that little hippie girl in Albuquerque.”

“And who killed Leonard? Giacomo was in prison when that happened.”

Her face was suddenly splotched with red. “I don't know, goddamn it.”

Peter Jones leaned forward again, back into the conversation. “Eliza's been concerned,” he said to me. “Quentin's death bothered her, of course. And so did Leonard's. And when she heard that you'd … that you and Paul Chang had been involved like that, him ending up in the hospital—”

“Don't be so mealy-mouthed, Peter,” Eliza snapped. “I don't give a damn about Paul Chang. Sneaky little arrogant asshole. But too many people are getting hurt. Or killed. Maybe the card isn't responsible. Personally, I don't see how it could be. But if it is, I want all this stopped.”

I said to her, “You left a message on my machine this morning.”

“Before I came here. Yes. I wanted to find out what was happening.”

Peter said, “Eliza's just trying to do the right thing.”

“Horseshit,” she said. “I want this nonsense to
stop
.”

I nodded. “All right,” I said to her. “Why don't you start at the beginning.”

She frowned, leaned forward, opened the bottle of Jameson's, poured some of the whiskey into her glass. For a teetotaler, she poured a healthy shot. She capped the bottle, drank from the glass, and then sat back, once again holding it on her lap.

She said, “Everything I told you was the truth. About my grandparents and Crowley. They lived with him for almost a year, in Sicily. You know that Crowley designed a Tarot deck of his own?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” she said, “he was working on that deck while my grandparents were there. Kirby—my grandfather—was an artist. A damn good one. He was helping Crowley doing drafts of the deck. He and Crowley went to Catania, to look at the Borgia deck—there's a museum in Catania, it's got ten of the cards. Then, one fine day, Crowley had an idea. He asked Kirby if he could make up a copy of the Death card. A copy that could fool people into thinking it was the real thing. Crowley owned a card, genuine, dating from about the same period. Valuable, but nowhere near as valuable as the Borgia card. Same size, same kind of pasteboard. He told Kirby he could paint the card on that.”

I asked, “Why did Crowley want to forge the Death card?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? He was a fraud. Maybe he wanted to sell it. Maybe he wanted to brag that he had it.” She drank some more whiskey. “Anyway. Kirby agreed. There were enough descriptions of the card in the literature to make it feasible, and he knew Pinturicchio's style. He stripped the original oils from Crowley's card and painted the Death card onto it. He used the same oils, the same gilt. They baked it in an oven, he and Crowley, to age it.” She shrugged. “It fooled people. Everyone who saw it.”

“But there are tests now,” I said. “Scientific tests. They'd prove that the card was a phony.”

Again her frown was impatient. “Quentin was a believer. He'd never have the card tested. Give it up to someone else, maybe get it damaged? Get some idiot scientist's vibrations all over it?” Scornfully, she pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Never. Not Quentin.”

I said, “But you must've had something that indicated the card was genuine.” Even Quentin couldn't have been fool enough to buy it otherwise.

“Letters from Crowley to my great-grandfather,” she said. “I told you, Kirby took the card with him when he left. Crowley was pissed off—the original card had been his, after all. Thing is, he never mentioned in the letters that the card was a fake, just said he wanted it back. Didn't say it was a fake, maybe, because he'd already told everyone it was genuine. Afraid, maybe, that Kirby would come back at him with the letters.”

She drank some whiskey. “The letters would've been enough, probably, for Quentin. But Leonard wanted the card, too, or said he did, and that was what carried the day.”

“And jacked up the price.”

She winced slightly. Stiffly, she nodded.

I said, “How did Leonard get involved?”

She sipped from her glass. “I'd told Leonard about the card years ago. Just mentioned it in passing. But Leonard had a memory like an elephant's, especially when it came to money. Last year, I had to sell him some of my things. Some gold, some jewelry. Trying to raise money for Adam, my cousin—that was true, what I told you about Adam. He was dying. And Leonard had the idea that I should get the card from Adam. Put it to good use.”

“By scamming Quentin Bouvier.”

Another scornful look. “Quentin had more money than he knew what to do with. Two hundred thousand dollars was peanuts to him. And my cousin was dying. He wasn't much, Adam. I used to say, if brains were dynamite, Adam couldn't blow his nose.” Still another frown. “But he was family. He was all I had.”

A touching moment, perhaps. And perhaps I spoiled it by saying, “But Adam died before Quentin bought the card.”

“Too late by then,” she snapped, her face red, her voice angry. “Quentin wanted that goddamn card.” I suspected that there was some guilt in her anger, and possibly some shame.

I could've been wrong. But at least she hadn't tried to put all the blame on Leonard Quarry. Who was, at the moment, in no position to deny it, or anything else.

Peter Jones had been sitting off to the side, acting as audience to her story. Now he said to me, “What do you think we should do, Mr. Croft?”

To Eliza Remington, I said, “You're going to have to go to the police.”

Peter Jones said, “Will it help them? Help them find out who killed Leonard?”

“I don't know. Have they talked with you about the man at Agua Caliente?”

“The thin man with the tan? Yes. They were here two days ago. They asked me if Leonard knew anyone involved in the theater. The only person I could think of was Carol Masters.”

I asked Eliza, “Did they talk to you?”

She nodded bleakly. “Asked me the same question. Carol's the only one.”

“Is going to the police absolutely necessary?” Peter asked me.

“I'm sorry, but yes, it is.” To Eliza: “If you don't, I will. I have to. I told you, up front, what my situation is. And this is information that may be relevant to their investigation. They have to have it.”

“How is it relevant?” Peter asked.

“I don't know yet. But if Eliza didn't think it might be relevant, she wouldn't have told you. Or told me.”

Eliza frowned. “I'll have to give back that damn money, won't I?”

I nodded.

“To Justine,” she said.

“Legally, it belongs to her.”

She sipped at her drink, frowned again, as though the whiskey had gone sour. “I can't think of anyone else in the world I'd
less
like to give two hundred thousand dollars.”

“You're not giving it to her. You're returning it.”

“Somehow that's not a hell of a lot of consolation.”

Peter Jones asked me, “But the police? What do you think they'll do?”

“That's something else I don't know.” I turned to Eliza. “Do you have a lawyer?”

She shook her head.

“I know one,” I said. “Would you be able to see her today?”

“Her?” she said.

“Sally Durrell. She's one of the best in the state. She can go with you when you talk to the police.”

Another sour frown. “And how much is she going to cost me?”

“You'll have to discuss that with her. But the police, the D.A.'s office, they're going to see this as major fraud. If I were you, I'd get the best lawyer I could afford.”

She pursed her lips. “I have some money coming in. From England. From the sale of Adam's house.”

I shrugged. “It's up to you.”

She drank some whiskey. Frowned again. Nodded. “I'll talk to her.”

“Does this help
you
, Mr. Croft?” Peter Jones asked me. “With Giacomo? Knowing about the card?”

“Maybe. No way to tell right now.” I turned back to Eliza. “Did anyone else know that the card was a forgery?”

“No one.”

“Not even Quarry's wife?”

“I told you. Sierra's an idiot. Leonard would've never told her what he was doing.”

“So presumably, whoever has the card still thinks that it's genuine.”

She nodded, sipped some whiskey. “Unless he's had it tested.”

I doubted that he had, whoever he was. He couldn't have had it tested without his answering a lot of questions.

She cleared her throat. “Mr. Croft?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Do you honestly believe that the card is the reason for all this? For Quentin's death? For Leonard's?” She was still sitting upright, her head raised, but there was a brittle note of tension in her voice, as though she were bracing herself for my answer, or daring me to give one.

I suppose I could have sugarcoated it for her. Even if the cops went lightly with her, she was in for a rough time. But if she and Leonard Quarry hadn't tried to con Quentin Bouvier out of two hundred thousand dollars, then maybe Quarry and Bouvier would still be alive.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

Using Peter Jones's telephone, I called Sally, told her what was going on. When I told her that the card was a forgery, she muttered another one of those technical legal terms. When I asked her about meeting with Eliza, she said that she'd be free at five that afternoon. Then she hung up. People keep doing that to me.

I said my goodbyes to Peter and Eliza. She was still sitting on the futon sofa, still sipping at her Irish whiskey, her face empty. Walking me out to the Jeep, Peter Jones assured me that he'd drive her into Santa Fe for the meeting with Sally.

I drove back to town, trying to think of a way that what I'd learned would help me prove that Giacomo Bernardi hadn't killed Quentin Bouvier. I couldn't.