The Hanged Man (32 page)

Her eyes lost their focus. Her arms lost their strength and the knitting needle fell harmlessly away, onto the floor. I rolled off her and sat up, panting.

Dimly I heard a door crash open. The cavalry had arrived. Hernandez and Green rushed into the room, waving guns. Green, I noticed, was still wearing his earphones. I wondered what the struggle with Sierra had sounded like, broadcast from the concealed mike I wore.

“You okay?” Hernandez snapped at me.

I nodded.

Someone else came rushing into the room. Rita. “Joshua!” She ran to me, and I saw that she was limping.
She shouldn't be running
, I thought. “Are you all right?” she said as she knelt down beside me.

I nodded some more. “Yeah. Fine.”

“What happened to your hand?”

I looked. Blood was streaming from my fingers, pattering against the wooden floor, pooling there. “She bit me.”

“Probably need a rabies shot,” Hernandez said. He had moved around the unconscious Sierra. To Green, he said, “This guy's good, huh? He gets the suspect to eat right out of his hand.” And then, bending down onto one knee, holding the gun on her with his right hand, he reached forward with his left and twined his fingers in her long, black, Pre-Raphaelite hair. He tugged, and her wig came free.

He stood up, holding it away from him as though it were a dead raccoon. “Shit,” he said.

“Sierra?” Giacomo Bernardi said. “She is a man?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

Monday morning. He and I were back in the Interview Room. In his droopy T-shirt and orange pants, Bernardi looked exactly the same. Since I'd last seen him, however, I myself had been somewhat modified. Bruises, a foam collar, bulky bandages on the first two fingers of my left hand.

“But how?” he asked me.

“How what?”

“How could she …” He frowned, blinked. “He? How could he do such a thing? To be living as a wife? And no one knows?”

I didn't blame him for his confusion about the pronoun. I'd been a bit confused myself. But Sierra had lived most of her life as a woman, thought of herself as a woman, and if that was what she wanted, that was fine with me. So long as she didn't try to stab me with a knitting needle again.

“It was easy enough,” I said. “When she and Quarry got married, no one in San Francisco knew she was a man. She had false papers saying that she was Maria Sorenson. She changed her name to Sierra when the two of them came to Santa Fe. She never went out as a man in San Francisco, and she never did here.”

“So the marriage, it was legal?”

“No. It was invalid. But no one knew that until now.”

He thought for a moment, brow furrowed, his hand rubbing at his salt and pepper stubble. He looked at me. “And he steals the card for the money?”

“Yeah. She didn't plan to kill Bouvier, she says. She planned to slip into his room, grab the card, and slip away. But Bouvier woke up and saw her. She hit him with the piece of quartz, but she realized that that was just a temporary solution to her problem. Bouvier had seen her. She'd never be able to keep the card and, worse, she'd be arrested. Her real identity—who she was, what she was—would be revealed. She knew about you and Starbright, knew about the fight you'd had with Bouvier that night, and decided that you'd make a nice patsy. She went to the closet in your room, got your scarf, came back and hanged Bouvier. You were still asleep in the library.”

“She could do that? Lift him up to the ceiling?”

“She's strong when she wants to be.” As I could attest. “After she killed him, she ran back to the guest house, where she was staying with Quarry. He was still asleep in the next room. The guest house is connected to the main house, and from the window, she was able to watch the corridor. She saw you go into Bouvier's room, saw you run out again. She saw you leave the house. When you did, she ran back to your room, burned the card's leather folder in your fireplace. There was some blood on her arm, from Bouvier, and she rinsed it off in your shower. She knew about forensic evidence. She was clever.”

“Clever, yes, but stupid also. Someone could see her when she was running. Someone could wake up and come into the hallway and see her.”

“Yeah. She was improvising. But she didn't do too badly. She managed to get you locked up in here.”

Giacomo frowned. “And she kills,
he
kills his—” He frowned again, blinked. “He kills Leonard Quarry?”

“She thought, she says, that Leonard had figured out she'd stolen the card. Probably he hadn't. Probably, if he had, he would've told her it was a fake. And from what she says about Leonard, he would've laughed about it. The two of them had been having a rough time for the past couple of years. She wanted out of the relationship. Leonard wouldn't let her go. She had no money, nothing of her own. Everything was in Leonard's name. She couldn't divorce him, because they weren't legally married. She was trapped, she says. And Leonard made a point of reminding her that she was trapped. The card, and the money it represented, would've been her way out. But then, according to her, Leonard was beginning to suspect that she'd stolen it. They'd had a big fight just before he left the house that day. She was still simmering. When I showed up, asking about the card, she was afraid Leonard would tell me his suspicions. Or so she says.”

“But the police, they talk to her too. She did not kill him then. And you say he did not know.”

“She was ready to dump Leonard. And she'd learned how easily murder could solve her problems. By then, I think, she was turned on by the idea of killing. Turned on by actually doing it, the danger, the role-playing, and then turned on by getting away with it. I think it appealed to her actress instincts.”

Rita, who tends in general to be more compassionate than I, had a different notion. She believed that Sierra had been demonstrating the self-destructiveness that murderers sometimes show—unconscious guilt driving them to increasingly more dangerous behavior. Maybe. But Sierra hadn't seemed to be displaying much unconscious guilt when she was trying to turn my heart into a shish kebab.

“So she improvised again,” I said. “She had some dark body makeup—she owned just about every kind of cosmetic that exists. She slapped it on, dressed up in a pair of jeans, a shirt, and running shoes, got an ice pick from the kitchen, and then walked along the river to the springs.”

“But this, this was stupid too, no?”

“Yeah. But she got away with it again. Stabbed Leonard, dressed, left the springs, walked back to her house. Wiped off the makeup, burned the towels and the clothes in the wood stove. By the time the police arrived, she was ready to play the bereaved widow. She played it well. But she was a natural actress. She'd been playing a part for most of her adult life.”

Giacomo shook his head. “Amazing, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“Amazing,” he said, looking off. He turned to me and his face brightened. “But now it is all over, eh? Soon I can leave this place.”

“Well, no,” I said. “Not exactly, Giacomo.”

He frowned again, confused. “No? Why? It is all over now.”

I reached into my jacket pocket. The movement was painful. Falling backward in Sierra's chair had done something to my back. I was getting too old for all this.

I took out the Polaroid, handed it to him. It showed a medallion, a small ebony ankh enclosed in a delicately molded circlet of gold.

“You recognize that?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “No.” He looked up at me.

“The police found it on the floor of Starbright's house, the day she died.”

He looked at the photo again, shook his head. “I never see it.”

“That's funny,” I said. “There's a guy down in Albuquerque who claims that Starbright gave it to you.”

“No,” he said. He shook his head. “Never. I never see this thing.” He put the Polaroid on the table.

“He's the same guy who claims he saw you leave Starbright's house on the morning she died.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I never see her that day.”

“The guy's name is Brody. William Brody. He was Starbright's next-door neighbor. He was moving, leaving the state, on the same day Starbright was killed. He moved to California, never even knew that she'd died. The Albuquerque cops tried to track him down, but they never found him. After the suicide verdict was handed down, they stopped trying.”

Giacomo shook his head again. “I never see her that day.”

“My partner doesn't like loose ends. She was down in Albuquerque this week, and one of the things she did down there was talk to the police about Starbright's death. She learned about Brody and she decided to find him. She's good at that. Finding people. Uses a computer. Turns out that Brody had moved back to New Mexico. Back to Albuquerque, as a matter of fact. She talked to him.”

“He is lying.”

“By now, naturally, he'd learned that Starbright was dead. That she committed suicide. Supposedly. But he's married now. Whatever interest he had in Starbright is gone. He never bothered to find out exactly when she died.”

Giacomo shook his head. “No.”

“He's a jeweler. He made the ankh, gave it to Starbright. When he asked her about it, a few months later, she told him she'd given it to you.”

“No, never. I never see it.”

“He remembers because he was pissed off. He'd made it for her, not for you. So how did the ankh get back to Starbright's house, Giacomo?”

“I
tell
you, I never see this thing.” Beneath his stubble, the pale skin of his face was growing pink.

“The ankh,” I said, “all by itself, doesn't prove much. But his testimony that he saw you leaving her house at ten o'clock that morning—well, Giacomo, that doesn't look good. According to the medical examiner, ten o'clock is about the time she died.”

“Lies,” he said stubbornly. “All lies.”

“Maybe. Anyway, you'll only be here for a little while longer. The Albuquerque cops are sending someone up to get you. Probably today.”

I stood. Giacomo looked up at me, his face red now, his features sullen.

“See you,” I said. “You can keep the Polaroid.”

Outside in the parking lot, I unlocked the Cherokee and climbed in. The sky was gray now. Overnight, the temperature had dropped nearly thirty degrees. A storm was due today.

I drove out onto Airport Road and headed east.

I kept seeing Giacomo, his sullen face staring up at me.

Sierra Quarry had been sullen, too. Sitting there in her living room, shoulders slumped, she had pouted and sulked as she confessed to two murders. When she talked about killing Quarry, she had begun to cry.

“It was all his fault,” she'd said. “I never wanted to kill him. It was all his fault.” Tears had rolled down her face and fallen to her lap.

In the end, we all cry for ourselves.

As I drove past Villa Linda Mall, the snow began. A few gray flakes went sliding past the windshield.

I wondered if it snowed in Cancun.

Sierra Quarry, whose real name was Robert Eastlake, was tried on two counts of first-degree murder. She dressed as a man in court, in a conservative three-piece suit, very nicely cut, I thought. She repudiated the confession she'd made that day in Agua Caliente and had later signed in Santa Fe. She was acquitted on the first count, the death of Quentin Bouvier. Despite her being in possession of the stolen Tarot card—she claimed that Leonard Quarry had stolen it—the jury felt that reasonable doubt existed. But primarily because of the testimony of Paco Murales, the attendant at the hot springs, she was convicted on the second, the death of Leonard Quarry, and sent to the state penitentiary. I hear she's doing well there.

Giacomo Bernardi copped a plea and was convicted of manslaughter. He, too, is currently a guest of the state.

For a while there, it looked as though I'd be having some legal problems of my own. Veronica Chang apparently decided to opt for litigation over voodoo. I received a notice from a local lawyer which said that Paul Chang planned to sue me for violating his civil rights, and would be asking for enough money in punitive damages to bankroll a small country. Sally Durrell talked to the lawyer. The case never came to court. A few weeks later, Veronica and Paul Chang left Santa Fe.

Rita and I didn't get to Cancun. She had programmed one of her databases to report on the appearance, in any newspaper, of the name Ralph Bonner, that being the alias adopted by Frederick Pressman, a gentleman who had stolen two million dollars from the company for which he worked. About a week before we were due to leave for Mexico, a bank was robbed in Golfito, Costa Rica. The robbers were shot by the police, and turned out to be two American thugs wanted by the F.B.I. One of the witnesses quoted in the A.P. article was a Mr. Ralph Bonner, who had watched the excitement from the window of his new, and apparently flourishing, boutique. The database electronically clipped the article and delivered it to Rita.