The Hanged Man (9 page)

The woman who opened the door wore a white peasant skirt and a ruffled white peasant blouse that exposed a bit more bony brown shoulder and a bit more bony brown sternum than perhaps it should have. Medium tall, she was very thin, and her quick, nervous movements made the thinness seem almost febrile. But despite the gauntness, her face was an attractive one, deeply tanned, animated, her brown eyes round and lively, her nose elegant, her lips full and quick to smile. Her teeth were large and white, and her hair was a thick brown frizzy cascade, threaded with silver. She was perhaps forty-five years old.

“Mr. Croft?”

“Yes. Sylvia Morningstar?”

“Yes, please come on in, it's
such
a pleasure to meet you.” She was shaking my hand rapidly, pumping away, her thin fingers strong against mine. She emphasized quite a few of her words when she talked, like Justine Bouvier, or like someone who's read a lot of
Cosmopolitan
. And she strung her sentences together, plaiting them into a single bright encircling lariat of chatter: “This way, Brad's in the living room, I'm
so
glad you've come.” As I followed her down a tiled hallway, she said over her shoulder, “I'm just so
phased
, I can't tell you, that someone's trying to help out poor Giacomo, it's terrible what happened to Quentin of course, but Giacomo
couldn't
have done that, we've known him for
years
, he's been a
wonderful
friend, and I just
know
in my heart that this is all some kind of terrible mistake. Brad? Look who's here, darling, it's the private detective I told you about, Mr. Croft, from the public defender's office.”

The living room had been built on three levels, each two feet lower than the last, connected one to the other by wooden steps and creating a kind of broad amphitheater that circled a huge kiva fireplace where a sprightly yellow fire fluttered. Floating across the air was a faint smell of sandalwood and some soft melodic guitar music I didn't recognize. The curved white stucco walls towered up to a ceiling of dark brown shiny vigas and latillas. Except for a large cream-colored carpet on the lowest level, before the fireplace, the bleached and polished hardwood floor was bare. Sylvia Morningstar and I stood on the upper level, and Brad Freefall was lying on a long blue sofa against the wall on the middle level, his head against its arm, his knees raised, his bare feet flat against its cushion. Behind him, a curved picture window displayed a panoramic view of the courtyard and its Russian olives. He had been fiddling with a small drum, the size of a bongo, made of leather and wood. Now he grinned and set the drum on the floor, swung his feet down and stood, holding out his hand as I approached. “Hey, man, glad you could make it.”

About the same age as his wife, just as tanned, he was tall, my height, and comfortably overweight, his rounded belly drum-taut against a Grateful Dead T-shirt. His eyes were blue and very clear, his face boyish and pleasantly fleshy. With his long blond hair held in place by a beaded headband, he looked liked a surfer going amiably to seed. “Sit, man, sit,” he said, and waved a big flat hand toward an upholstered armchair. I sat.

Sylvia Morningstar asked me, “Can I get you some tea? We've got some regular, English Breakfast, I think, and we've got some really nice herbal tea. Red Zapper? Heavenly Herbal? Citrus Surprise?”

Hands in his back pockets, Brad Freefall offered, “Beer, maybe? Whatever.”

“Thanks,” I said. I told Sylvia Morningstar, “The English tea will be fine.”

“Good, that sounds lovely, we'll all have some. Brad, darling, I'm sure Mr. Croft's a busy man, why don't you start without me, dear, and tell him everything that happened last Saturday—that's what you wanted to talk about, isn't it, Mr. Croft?”

“Among other things, yes,” I said.

“Sugar?” she asked me. “We've got Equal, too, if you want it. Or date sugar? And I think we've got turbinado, too.”

“Plain sugar's just fine.”

“Lemon? Milk?”

“Lemon. Thanks.”

She bobbed her head at me. “I'll be right back.”

Brad Freefall sat back down in the corner of the sofa, left arm along the sofa's back. He extended his long legs out along the floor and crossed them at the ankles and he grinned at me. “A private eye,” he said. “Far out. Is it ever like they make it look on TV?”

“Not very often.”

He nodded. “Running around and shooting people, car chases, all that good shit. Never really happens, right?”

“Almost never.”

“Way I figured. Hype, man. Media moonshine. Anyway, no shit, I'm glad you're here. We both are. We've been talking about it a lot. Only natural, right? Considering it all went down right here at the house. Quentin getting offed and all. But I don't care what the cops say, man. Giacomo never did it. Never happened. The guy may be kind of a slob—who's perfect, right?—but he's got real purity of heart, man. He's got soul. He wouldn't be
able
to do something like that.”

“How long have you known Bernardi?”

He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Years, man. Giacomo's been around forever, seems like.”

“When did you first meet him?”

“I dunno. Ten years ago? You should ask Sylvie, she's good with dates and like that. We met him at a party or something. No, wait, I take that back—it was at a psychic fair at La Fonda. I was there with my drums and Sylvie was there with her crystals. We had a booth together. Giacomo was doing readings in the next booth and it was kinda slow. Dead, in fact. Back then, the psychic fairs were just starting up, and we didn't get the kind of traffic we get now. So, anyway, Sylvie asked him to do a reading for her. As a goof, mostly, you know? And so he did Sylvia's cards for her, and then he did mine. He was good, man. I mean really good. Intuitive. Way I see it, the cards are like a vehicle, you know? A channel, man, for you to focus your own energies.”

Hadn't Bennett Hadley said exactly the same thing, in almost exactly the same words?

“And Giacomo's intuition,” Brad said, “was right on. We were both kinda down about then, Sylvie and me. Things weren't working out, moneywise. We were even thinking of splitting, leaving town and heading back to California. But Giacomo said to fade that. He said that everything was gonna turn around for us, in a major way. And he was right on, man. Totally right on. Hey, Sylvie, I was just saying how Giacomo told us to chill out on the idea of splitting Santa Fe, back when we first met him. Remember, babe? The psychic fair?”

“Giacomo is
extremely
sensitive,” Sylvia Morningstar told me, lifting a mug filled with steaming tea from a round red metal tray and handing it to me, “and
extremely
talented, and probably, if we hadn't asked him to read our cards, we would've made a
terrible
mistake and gone back to California.” Holding the tray carefully, she sat down beside Brad and handed him a mug. “Here you are, darling.” She took the last mug for herself, and laid the tray to her left, on the sofa cushion. “And then
none
of these wonderful things would've happened.” She waved her arm lightly, to take in the wonderful lavish house, the wonderful high desert, the wonderful world.

I asked, “How did the wonderful things happen?”

“Well, it was incredible,” she said, “because the very next week, the week after the fair, I accepted a new client, a referral from a friend. She was a Swiss woman, the client, from St. Moritz, and she'd come here for the skiing and she was having these
terrible
pains all up and down her left hip, really
agonizing
pains. She was a wonderful woman, but
no one
had been able to help her, not the medical doctors, not the chiropractors, not even my friend, who did body work and who was just
wonderful
with it. So I worked with her, we were living in town then, off Agua Fria, and I had this little tiny office space with a rickety little massage table, the whole thing wasn't much bigger than a closet, and I set up the crystals along her body—you know how crystals work?”

“They vibrate?”

“
Exactly!
” she said, delighted. Beaming, she turned to Brad and put her hand atop his thigh. “You see, darling, I
told
you he'd understand.” She turned back to me. “I'm so
glad
. But of course, I'm sure you realize that it's just a teeny weeny bit more complicated than that, you've got to
sense
exactly where the blockage is, in your client, where the problem lies along the meridians, and you've got to
know
exactly which vibrational frequency is the proper one, and you've got to know
exactly
how much exposure to that vibration will produce the results you want.”

Before she could explain any further, I said, “But it worked. You healed her.”

“Oh no,” she said, “not
me
. The crystals, the crystals and her own recuperative powers, her own vital energy. No, I was merely an assistant, an agent.”

Brad Freefall grinned and ran his flat hand gently along her frizzy hair. “Yeah, babe, but you were the one who knew how to use the crystals.”

She looked at him, smiling happily, and she actually blushed with pleasure. He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the temple. She squeezed his thigh.

Feeling somewhat like a voyeur, I said, “And how did that make the wonderful things happen?”

She turned back to me, blinking. “Oh.” She said it as though she'd forgotten I was there. She blushed again. “Oh dear, I'm so sorry. Margarite, that's my client, she was so pleased with what'd happened that she moved here, to Santa Fe, and she built this house and put it into trust for Brad and me. And then while she was alive, we all lived here together and we set up a foundation, the three of us, the Crystal Center, to investigate and promote alternative healing. We've done some
wonderful
work here, Brad and I. And we couldn't have done any of it without Margarite's help.”

“While she was alive?” I said.

She took in a deep breath and she sighed it slowly out. “Yes.” She nodded. “It was a
terrible
tragedy. Poor Margarite died five years ago, cancer, ovarian, there was nothing anyone could do.”

I took a sip of tea and then I asked what might have been a rude question. “She didn't have the cancer when you first used the crystals on her?”

She looked shocked. “Oh no! She'd been examined by
hundreds
of medical doctors and none of them had ever found a thing, no, the cancer was something that happened later—it just suddenly appeared like some horrible monster and it took poor Margarite away from us.”

I nodded, but I was wondering whether poor Margarite might have survived her cancer if she'd sought out another medical doctor soon enough. And hadn't I read somewhere that ovarian cancer was sometimes difficult to detect? Despite what Sylvie believed, or said, had the dark unruly cells of Margarite's body already begun their deadly blossoming, unnoticed, undiscovered, when she first showed up at Sylvia Morningstar's door?

I hoped not. Against all expectation, and my better judgment, I found myself liking both these people. I didn't believe, myself, in the miracle of crystals; but it seemed clear to me that they did, sincerely. Whether that made them naive, or foolish, or absolutely right, or—as I suspected but preferred not to admit at the moment—fairly dangerous, those were questions for which I didn't at the moment have the answers. And questions to which, at the moment, the answers were irrelevant.

“Okay,” I said, “let's talk about last Saturday night. How long have you known Quentin Bouvier?”

Brad shrugged. “Four, five years?” He looked at Sylvia.

“Six, darling,” she told him. “Don't you remember? He and Justine came to the convocation out in Galisteo. Veronica's thing.” She turned to me. “Did you ever meet Quentin?”

“No.”

“Well, if you didn't know him well, he could seem a bit, oh, difficult, I suppose. He was extremely bright, and he'd spent all his life learning about High Magic, he'd really made a
tremendous
study of it, and I suppose he didn't have much patience with people who didn't share his interests, or know as much as he did. But, really, basically, he was a good person, I think. It's just awful, a terrible thing, that someone could kill him like that.”

I asked her, “Who do you think could've done it?”

“Well, of course, it couldn't have been anyone who was here that night. We know all of them, they're all good friends of ours and wonderful people,
spiritual
people. Brad and I've been going over it, trying to work out how it might've happened, and we've come up with a theory.”

“Yes?”

“Well, we never lock our front door, we've been living out here now for seven years and we've
never
had any trouble, none at all, but there's always a first time, isn't there? And it wasn't locked last Saturday night. What must've happened is that someone, a burglar, came in that night, looking for something—valuables, jewels, I don't know, maybe the stereo or the TV—and he went into Quentin's room and Quentin woke up and saw him, and the burglar got frightened and hit him with my quartz crystal, which would've been the first thing he found, it was right there on the nightstand, practically
begging
to be picked up.”

“Why,” I said, “after he hit him, would the burglar hang him?”

“Because Quentin had seen him. Quentin could identify him.”

“Ms. Morningstar—”

“Sylvie, please.”

“Sylvie. Burglars don't usually enter a house at night. They generally go in during the day, when no one's home. And how many cars were parked outside your house that night?”

“How many? I don't know.” She looked at her husband.