The Hanged Man (4 page)

“It was the Death card,” I told her.

“How can I help you, Mr. Croft?” she asked me from across the white marble coffee table.

I had expected her to be short, probably because Sally had told me that her husband was short, but she was a tall woman, at least five foot ten. Her hair was silver—prematurely silver, and probably chemically enhanced, because I doubt that she was much older than thirty—and it was cut close to her skull, like a small boy's. It was the only thing about her that reminded me of a small boy. Above large brown eyes and long, thick lashes, her eyebrows were dark black arches that contrasted dramatically—as they were supposed to, I suspect—with the color of her hair. Her nose was small and even; her small round mouth was shiny with burnt-sienna lipstick, the lower lip slightly swollen, bee-stung, which gave her long oval face an expression that was at once petulant and sensual. Lithe and slender and high-breasted, she wore black pumps, black nylon hose, a black miniskirt, and a tight-fitting black jersey top that had a turtleneck but no sleeves. Her long tanned arms and her square shoulders were bare. New Age Mourning.

I said, “As I told you over the phone, Mrs. Bouvier, I'm working with Sally Durrell for the public defender's office. I need to learn as much about what happened last Saturday night as I can. And also about your husband. I know this is a bad time for you …”

The black arches of her eyebrows arched still more. She smiled slightly. “Why should it be a bad time?”

Because your husband just had his collar size reduced by fifty percent? I said, “Well …”

“I don't believe in death, Mr. Croft,” she said, and took a drag from her cigarette. This was one of the ultrachic numbers, pastel paper and looking too thin for someone to suck smoke through it without sprouting a hernia. “Not in the sense you probably mean it,” she said, exhaling.

“I mean it in the sense that you stop breathing.”

“Exactly,” she said, and slightly smiled again. “You're speaking, of course, of the corporeal body, which is merely one of the many vibratory forms taken by our ka.”

I nodded. “Our ka,” I said. As occasionally happens when someone starts explaining vibratory forms, I found my attention wandering around the room. This was the living room, an enormous space in an enormous and isolated and extremely expensive house in the hills to the east of Santa Fe. The wall of glass to my right, looking down over the town and the peasants who inhabited it, made the room seem even larger, and so did the broad mirrored wall behind the silver leather sofa that held Justine Bouvier. The rest of the furniture was silver, too, including the leather chair in which I sat. Probably it wasn't entirely a coincidence that the color matched the color of the woman's hair.

The basic motif here seemed to be Egyptian: a couple of pale blue scarabs the size of bullfrogs on the coffee table, a black bust of Nefertiti atop a white column, a large hieroglyphic tapestry on the wall to my left, a small marble statue of a stylized naked young man standing in one corner, his face blank, his arms held stiffly at his sides. The Siamese cat, sitting near the huge white marble fireplace, was clearly going along with the plan. He was trying to imitate a photograph of some cat god he'd admired while he was leafing through
National Geographic
.

There was enough marble in the room to slap together a life-sized replica of the Parthenon. Even the floor was marble, black, as shiny as obsidian. That floor might be pleasant in the summer, on the two or three days when the temperature in Santa Fe rose above eighty-five degrees. During the winter, it was probably a bitch to keep warm. But I suppose that if you could afford a marble floor, you didn't worry about heating the thing. You just marched your Nubian slaves in from time to time and had them breathe on it.

“You might think of the ka,” she was saying, “as something like the soul, in Christian terminology. In addition to the corporeal body, it manifests itself both as an ethereal body and a spiritual body. Only my husband's corporeal body has left us. Quentin and I, his ka and my own, were karmically intertwined long before we met on this particular plane, and we'll continue to be intertwined, probably for many lifetimes to come.”

Well, as Frank Sinatra once put it, whatever gets you through the night.

“I understand,” I said, “that it was you who found him that morning.”

“Yes.” She inhaled, took the cigarette from her lips, opened her mouth, inhaled the little billow of smoke that was about to escape, and then, exhaling, she frowned. “It was …” She searched for a word. “Unpleasant.”

A nice choice, I thought. “I'm sure it was. According to your statement, the door was shut when you arrived.”

“That's right, yes.”

“Who was it who actually discovered that the Tarot card was missing?”

“Me. As soon as I saw that dreadful red scarf around poor Quentin's neck, I knew that that nasty little Italian person had killed him. And I knew why, naturally. The card. I looked all over for it. Quentin brought it with him to the bedroom, the night before. It was gone. He took it.”

“Bernardi.”

“Yes, of course Bernardi.”

“Who removed your husband's body from the beam, Mrs. Bouvier?”

“Someone from the state police. They told me, when I called them, not to touch anything.”

“And did you search for the card before or after they arrived?”

“Before, naturally. It was the first thing I did. Even before I called them.”

So she'd gone rummaging around the room, opening and closing drawers, or suitcases, or whatever, rifling through the shirts and the underwear, while the late Mr. Bouvier had silently dangled from his beam, watching her with empty bulbous eyes.

Maybe she guessed what I was thinking. Or maybe, being who she was, she read my mind. She took a drag from the cigarette, smiled, and said, “Are you shocked?”

“Shocked?” I smiled. “I haven't been shocked in a long time, Mrs. Bouvier.”

She smiled again and those big brown eyes narrowed slightly as she nodded. “I sense that about you. I'm the type of person who can sense things intuitively. And usually, almost always, my intuition is right. You have a kind of internal armor, don't you? Emotional armor. Very strong, very powerful. It's something that serves a valuable purpose, by protecting you. But it's also something that limits you, too, reduces your possibilities for growth. It seems to me that it goes back for many lifetimes. Have you ever done a past-life regression?”

“Once. When I was audited by the I.R.S.”

She smiled. “You have a sense of humor. I like that. You're a Virgo?”

“Intacta.”

She frowned, puzzled.

“I'm an Aries,” I told her.

Another smile. “Of course.” Without missing a beat. “The Ram. But you haven't, have you? You've never been hypnotized and helped to recall your former lives?”

“No.”

Exhaling smoke, she leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette. “How come?” she asked me.

“I've been too busy with this one.”

“But you should try it. I think you'd find it intensely rewarding. Maybe even liberating.” She drew her long legs beneath her, gently holding on to the slender calf of her right leg with her hand, and she sat back against the couch, her arm along its back, which provided me a three-quarter view of her upper torso.

“I could do it for you, you know,” she said. “It's a skill, and I'm very good at it. I've helped people learn things about themselves that they couldn't
believe
.” She smiled. “We could do it right now, if you want.”

I've read somewhere that when men anticipate any sort of sexual activity, their whiskers begin to develop more rapidly. I believe it. Sitting opposite Justine Bouvier in her living room, across from those long shapely legs and those small perfect breasts unencumbered beneath taut black fabric, I could feel my beard growing.

“Some other time, maybe,” I told her. Some other lifetime, maybe.

“Maybe,” she said, smiling, “you'll discover that you were a king in ancient Mesopotamia.”

More likely, I thought, an auto mechanic in ancient Newark. But I smiled pleasantly. Over the years I've gotten fairly good at smiling pleasantly. Even when I'd rather be in ancient Newark. “Getting back to last Sunday morning, Mrs. Bouvier. What made you so sure that Bernardi had taken the Tarot card?”

“You know about his jumping at Quentin the night before?”

“I understand that there'd been an argument.”

“Worse than an argument. Much worse. He
attacked
Quentin. With his hands. He was trying to
strangle
him. And if it hadn't been for Peter and Brad, he would've. They pulled him away.”

“That would be Peter Jones and Brad Freefall.”

“That's right, yes.”

“And why would Bernardi attack your husband?”

“He wanted the card, of course. He could never afford a thing like that himself, naturally. He was practically a pauper. But if he couldn't have it, he didn't want anyone else to have it. Especially not Quentin.”

“Why especially not Quentin?”

“He envied him. Many people did. Quentin was a genius.” I noticed that even though Quentin was still bobbing around in the etheric currents somewhere, she had no problem with the past tense.

“In what way?” I asked her.

She smiled at me. “Do you know anything about Magic, Mr. Croft?”

“Are we talking about pulling rabbits out of hats?”

She smiled again, and now there was a condescending sympathy in her smile.
The dear sweet soul simply doesn't understand
. “No,” she said. “We're talking about High Magic. True Magic.” I could hear the capital letters in her voice. “Putting ourselves in touch with the elemental forces and developing a power over them.”

“Then, no,” I said, “I don't.”

“Quentin did,” she said. “It was his life's work. He studied magic from the time he was a child. He learned Greek so he could read the works of Hermes Trismegistus—a collection of magical and mystical texts, very old. He learned Latin because a number of the ancient Grimoires—you know what they are?”

“Nope.”

“Magical texts again, guides that explain the different rituals. Many of them are written in Latin, and so Quentin learned Latin. He learned Hebrew so he could study the Kaballah. He spent an
enormous
amount of time and effort, Mr. Croft. He was an extremely dedicated man.”

I glanced around the huge living room, the expanse of black marble floor, the vista of a diminished Santa Fe down there beyond the pinon and the juniper, and then I glanced back at her. “Looks like it paid off for him.”

She lifted her right hand from her calf and waved it lightly, dismissively. “Money is nothing.”

I've noticed that the people who maintain this are generally the people with the most of it, and usually those among them who've never had to work for it.

“He inherited money from his family,” she said. “And he made some good investments. But he spent most of what he had on the pursuit of knowledge. Naturally, there were people who resented his money, just as there were people who resented his knowledge. And there were people who didn't understand Quentin, who'd
never
be able to understand him.”

I was beginning to wonder if there was anyone who'd actually liked poor Quentin. I asked her, “Would any of these people want him dead?”

She frowned. “Why ask that?”

“Because, as I told you, I'm working for the lawyer who's defending Giacomo Bernardi. She thinks he's innocent. And if he didn't kill your husband, then obviously someone else did. Almost certainly one of the other people who were there at the house in La Cienega on Saturday night.”

“That's impossible. That horrible little man killed him. He used his own scarf to do it.”

“That's the problem I have with this, Mrs. Bouvier. Even if Bernardi did use his scarf to kill your husband, how could he be stupid enough to leave the scarf at the scene of the murder?”

“He's an idiot. You should've seen him the night before, raving and ranting like a lunatic.”

“Lunatics aren't always stupid.”

“The police
arrested
him.”

“The police aren't always right. I wonder if you could tell me something about Leonard Quarry.”

She frowned again. “About Leonard? Tell you what?”

“Anything. I know he was there that night. I understand that he'd wanted to buy the Tarot card your husband purchased from Mrs. Remington. I've heard that he was a bit unhappy that your husband outbid him.” All of this I'd gotten from Giacomo Bernardi.

“You don't think that
Leonard
killed Quentin?”

“I don't think anything, Mrs. Bouvier. I'm just trying to learn whatever I can.”