The Hanged Man (6 page)

I smiled. My debonair smile. “It's a wonderful thing, Justine.”

She smiled. “Where am I supposed to start?”

“Whose idea was this party?”

“Brad and Sylvia's. Sylvia's, probably. Brad's not much in the idea department. You know about the arrest of Clayton Railsback last week?”

“Nope.” I did, of course, from Bernardi. I wanted to hear what she had to say.

She frowned. “How could that be? It's one of the biggest things to hit this town in years.”

“I was out of town last week.”

“Oh. Well, Clayton's a healer, a psychic surgeon, studied for
years
in the Philippines with one of those little men they have there. Reaching right into the body and pulling out diseased organs? Nasty,
gruesome
stuff, and a lot of it is fakery, naturally, but Clayton is supposed to be
very
effective. I've never used him myself, but I'm hardly ever sick, not even a cold in the winter. I just seem to have this incredibly strong constitution. But a lot of people swear by Clayton. Anyway, he was arrested last week, for fraud. It's a put-up thing, naturally, the A.M.A. trying to get him, out of jealousy, mostly. So Brad's idea was for a group of us to get together and work out a kind of strategy.”

“A political strategy?”

“Well, that, too, naturally. Because, I mean, if it starts with Clayton, then where does it stop? The fascist mentality, Joshua. You remember the Jews in Germany?”

I did, and nothing she had said so far had angered me more than her comparing herself, and her friends, to the Jews in Germany.

“We were all threatened,” she said. “All of us who've chosen alternative pathways, alternative ways of healing.”

In New Mexico, anybody who wants to call himself a therapist can legally do so, and accept money for whatever therapy is provided. No training is required, nor is any sort of degree or certification. And in Santa Fe, it sometimes seemed that there were more therapists, and more varieties of therapy, than there could possibly be people in need of it. Possibly the therapists all provided it to each other.

“But mostly,” she said, “to work out a spiritual strategy. What Brad wanted was for all of us to gather together in one place, so we could focus our energies and see what we came up with.”

“And what did you come up with?”

“We never had time. The next day, poor Quentin was murdered, and then the card was gone, and then there were police all over the house. After we all talked to the police, everyone sort of dribbled away home.”

“Okay. Tell me about Saturday evening.”

And so she told me a story that I already knew, from the police records and from Bernardi's account. I would hear it again, and again, from all the others; and I would watch the teller and listen to the tale in the way I watched and listened now, waiting for some small detail altered or omitted or added, some small shift of voice or eye or emphasis. Observation, incredible powers of.

She told me that when she and her husband had arrived at the house in La Cienega, at about five in the afternoon, everyone but Bernardi and Veronica Chang was already there. There had been drinks out on the big enclosed porch, people milling about and gathering into clusters, most of them, she said, chattering about the recent arrest. Yes, Eliza Remington had brought the leather binder and had passed it to Quentin. Quentin had passed her a check for two hundred thousand dollars.

“Why conduct business there, at the house?” I asked her.

“The Remington witch's idea. She had to go to Houston the next day, she said. And Quentin hadn't been able to get all the money together until late on Friday.”

Quentin had kept the card with him, showing it off to anyone who wandered up. Now and then, a small crowd of two or three or four had assembled around him and his prize. There were oohs. There were aahs. Leonard Quarry and his wife had stood on the other side of the room, looking stonily away.

“So everyone knew that Quentin had the card,” I said.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

“Did they know how valuable it was?”

“Quentin never mentioned what he paid for it.”

“But he told them what it was. He told them its history.”

“Yes. Naturally.”

“And Quentin thought that was a safe thing to do?”

“But we knew everyone there. It wasn't like it was a room full of strangers.”

Veronica Chang and Giacomo Bernardi had arrived only about fifteen minutes after the drinking had begun. “He's not the type,” Justine Bouvier told me, “to miss out on free drinks.” Veronica had joined her and Quentin while Bernardi had sat at the bar, drinking by himself.

A little after six, all of them had gone outside “to say goodbye to the setting sun,” said Justine. All except Bernardi, who claimed to be suffering from asthma, which, he said, was aggravated by the cold. He remained at the bar. Justine, annoyed with Bernardi, maintained that he was simply unwilling to join in convocation with the others. I found that I was suddenly more fond of Bernardi.

Wine (“not too bad”) was served with the vegetarian dinner (“dreadful sandy little bits of chick-peas or something floating in the sauce”). It was at dinner that someone asked Leonard Quarry how he felt about not having been able to obtain the Tarot card.

“Who asked him?” I said.

She shrugged. “I really can't remember now.”

“According to the testimony of the other witnesses, it was Veronica Chang.”

A bit snappish: “Well, if you already know, why ask me?”

I told her, “I need to know that everyone's in agreement, Justine. About what happened.”

“Well,” she said, reluctantly, her voice only slightly softer—she had been mollified, perhaps, but wasn't anxious to admit it. She wanted more. I suspected that she always wanted more, and that frequently she got it. She picked up the cigarettes, slid one out, lit it. “Maybe it was Veronica. I really can't remember. I mean, an awful lot happened that weekend. My husband was
strangled
, remember?”

It seemed to me that I wasn't the one who might be in danger of forgetting.

“I mean,” she said, “even though I'm absolutely convinced that Quentin is still with us, the
essential
Quentin, it was still a terrible shock for me to wander into that room and see him hanging there.”

“Of course it was,” I assured her. “How would Veronica Chang know that Leonard Quarry had wanted the card?”

She shrugged. “I can't imagine.”

“What did Leonard say?”

“Oh, the big fat fool tried to pretend that it didn't matter. Tried to pretend that he was being gracious about the whole thing. But you could tell,
anyone
could tell, that he was furious.”

After dinner, she said, more drinks were served in the living room. Eliza Remington, who never drank anything stronger than tea or mineral water, went off to her room around nine o'clock. About fifteen minutes later, Justine Bouvier told me, the argument started.

To keep its wounded engine happy, I let the Subaru coast at fifty down the long winding run of the Ski Basin Road, past the adobe homes and the clutters of condominiums sprinkled amid the scrub pine. Most of these yuppie haciendas had been built fairly recently, after the California and Texas money flooded into the real estate market and sent prices floating skyward. Twenty years ago this had all been windswept arroyos and sunswept trees. The only occupants had been the coyotes and the rattlesnakes. The coyotes were gone now, and the rattlesnakes had become investment bankers.

At the bottom of the hill, at the Stop sign, the road met Washington Street, and I crossed this and drove along the asphalt entrance to the Fort Marcy sports complex. I parked the wagon in the lot, the engine coughing twice. It was two o'clock. The air was warm and the sky was blue. A few men and women in shorts and sweatshirts were running doggedly around the damp dirt track that circled the field.

Inside, I took a shower first, and sudsed myself up like Lady Macbeth on a bad morning, then spent a long time letting the scalding spray sluice off the soap. I didn't feel dirty, exactly, after my time with Justine Bouvier; but I didn't feel exactly clean, either.

The municipal pool was heated just enough to prevent sedentary types from leaping into cardiac arrest after they leapt into the water, and the air that had settled over it was warm and soupy and it held the tang of chlorine. At the moment, the pool was almost empty. A heavyset older woman in a floral one-piece and a floral swim cap wallowed in a tired but determined doggy paddle. A teenage girl, her eyes invisible behind her goggles, her body beneath the gleaming black nylon suit as sleek and graceful as a young seal's, went sliding in a sturdy and deceptively slow-looking crawl. And in the center lane, a bemuscled lout executed loud and splashy power strokes, arms furiously flashing, feet furiously flailing, flat palms smacking against the water as though hating it, flogging it. Water spattered and splattered, great gouts of silver, into the lanes on either side.

I chose the lane at the far side of the pool and I dove in.

My own stroke is a fairly sedate, grandmotherly affair, a kind of aquatic jog. Swimming a mile—seventy-two lengths in a pool that size—is a tedious business if you see it merely as exercise. So what you do, you don't think about the exercise, or about anything at all. You concentrate on the sensations. The water supporting you and sliding like silk along your flanks. The smooth entry of each arm into its surface, the smooth downstroke against the density of liquid, the smooth exit. The stretch and pull of muscle. The steady suck and hiss of lung, the reassuring pump of heart. It's a kind of meditation, I suppose. I no longer count the laps. I know that once I've found my rhythm and reached my speed, a mile takes me exactly thirty-seven minutes, and now and then—when I remember—I glance at the big one-handed clock on the north wall. When the time is up, I'm done.

Today, though, my rhythm was off. I couldn't seem to empty my mind. Justine Bouvier and her story kept intruding.

“How did the argument start?” I had asked her.

“I told you,” she said. “It was that Bernardi. We were all sitting around, having a very nice, very quiet conversation, when all of a sudden he gets up from his chair and he starts
bellowing
at Quentin. “‘
Why you want dees card? What you do with eet?
'” It was a cruel, mocking burlesque of Bernardi's accent; and, recognizing my own prejudice in hers, I felt more than a little guilty.

“He was drunk, naturally,” she said. “So drunk that he could hardly stand upright. But that's no excuse. Quentin said something to him, I don't really remember what—”

According to the reports, what Quentin had said was, “Why don't you go away, you boring little man.” Quentin had obviously been a better magician than he'd been a diplomat. Even if he'd been a terrible magician.

“—and Bernardi just
exploded!
He threw his drink away and he ran across the room and threw himself at Quentin. He hit me, too, with his arm, and I spilled my own drink. All over myself. It
ruined
my dress. It was silk, a Versace! And then he had his hands around Quentin's throat and he was
choking
him, and Quentin was sort of hitting at him, trying to get him away, and then finally Brad and Peter were there, pulling him off. They dragged him over to the corner, and his face was all red and loose and absolutely
crazed
. He was practically
slobbering
, like a dog. Brad was talking to him, probably giving him all that peace-and-love nonsense from the sixties. Brad's never really gotten over the sixties. And Sylvia was fluttering around the room, chirping away, trying to dry me off with some filthy rag she found someplace.”

“Where was the card while all this was going on?”

“Quentin had it in his lap. In its leather folder. It fell when Bernardi attacked him, and I picked it up off the floor.”

“Has Bernardi ever had any kind of dealings with your husband before?”

Indignant: “Of course not. Why would you even ask?”

“Just that it sounds like a fairly extreme reaction on his part.” Even if Quentin had been, as I suspected, a gold-plated asshole.

“He's
Italian
. You know how excitable they are. And he's a lunatic.”

Brad had given Bernardi a bottle of sambuca and Bernardi had gone bumbling off. Everyone had gathered around to commiserate with Quentin. (“Except for Leonard Quarry and his wood sprite wife. Leonard just sat there, gloating.”) Shortly afterward, the party had begun to break up. Carl Buffalo had been the first to head for bed, Justine said, and he was soon followed by Leonard Quarry and his wife, Sierra. Then by Peter Jones, who was followed by Carol Masters, the actress. “Carol's been after poor Peter for ages. It's a shame she's not his type. He likes women who are still capable of breathing.” This she said with a self-satisfied smile.