The Hanged Man (5 page)

She smiled. “Leonard is a disgusting man, absolutely revolting, and I can't imagine how that brainless little wood nymph of a wife of his could
stand
to have him touch her”—she gave a delicate, feathery shudder, and her silver hair shivered—“but believe me, he's not the type of person to murder someone.”

“It
is
true that he was unhappy about being outbid.”

“He was unhappy, yes, that Quentin had bought the card.
I
was unhappy. I wish Quentin had never seen that horrible thing. I
knew
there was
something
about that card. I could
sense
it—I told you, I'm an extremely intuitive person. And the
money!
That Remington bitch is as tough as an Arab in a street bazaar.”

This, I reminded myself, from the woman who'd just told me that money was nothing. “How much did your husband pay for the card, Mrs. Bouvier?”

She rolled her eyes in mock exasperation. “Oh, could we please
stop
with that
Mrs. Bouvier
nonsense.” She put her hand, fingers splayed, to her chest—which had the effect, no doubt inadvertent, of drawing my attention to the same locale. “You're making me feel a million years old. My name is Justine. And yours is—Joshua, isn't it?”

“Joshua, right.”

“Good.” She leaned forward, picked up the pack of cigarettes and a slim gold Dunhill lighter. “Joshua. I like that.” Smiling, she slipped a cigarette free, put it between her red shiny lips.

“About the card?” I said, smiling pleasantly.

She lit the cigarette, eyeing me over the flame. Cigarette jutting from between her small, even teeth, she exhaled through her nostrils and said, “Two hundred thousand dollars.”

She said it flatly, to heighten the drama. I think I was supposed to say something like “Yipes!” or “Zowie!” I restrained myself.

“So you can understand,” she said, exhaling, plucking away the cigarette, “why I might be a little bit concerned about it.” She leaned forward and placed the pack and the lighter on the table. She sat back. “It was worth thousands more, of course. If that Remington witch had put it up for auction at Sotheby's, she might have gotten as much as half a million.”

“Why didn't she?”

“A cash flow problem, Quentin said. She didn't want to wait. She couldn't. And neither could Quentin. He
had
to have the damned thing.”

“Getting back to Leonard Quarry, Mrs. Bouvier.”

“Now now now,” she said, smiling, tilting her silver head to the side as she admonished me with the two fingers that held her cigarette. “What did we agree?”

I smiled pleasantly. It hurt some, but not enough to kill me. “Getting back to Leonard Quarry, Justine.”

She laughed. It sounded light and musical and mostly artificial. “You
are
persistent.” Her glance moved down my length, back up again. “Are you as persistent about everything as you are about asking questions?”

“Not usually.”

She inhaled, then smiled as smoke streamed from her nostrils. “What a pity.”

“Leonard Quarry?” I said.

She laughed her coy, musical laugh. “All right. What do you want to know about Leonard?”

“Why would he want the card?”

She shrugged. “To resell it, of course. And knowing Leonard, he probably already had a buyer lined up. Leonard's a dealer. Books and art. Most of it has to do with the occult, but not all. He pretends he's interested in the spiritual world, but at heart he's really only a petty little businessman.”

“And why did your husband want the card?”

“It was part of a long magical tradition. I didn't want him to buy it, I sensed that it was karmically
wrong
, but I could understand his reasons for wanting it. You know that the Tarot itself, the symbols represented, go back to ancient Egypt?”

“No, I didn't.”

“And this particular card has been handled by some of the most famous Magicians in the world. Cagliostro, Court de Gebelin, Aleister Crowley. Objects pick up vibrations, Joshua, from the people who handle them. They attract, they assimilate, some of the power possessed by the people who own them.”

“And once he had it,” I said, “what did he plan to do with it?”

“Use it. In his practice.”

“His practice.”

“In his rituals.”

“And what sort of rituals were those?”

“I told you. Magical.”

“I've heard it said, Justine, that your husband was involved in Satanism.”

Her face pinched up with scorn. Scorn is seldom attractive, and it wasn't attractive now. “By who?” she said. “By that grubby little Bernardi? You can't expect someone like him to understand Quentin and what he was doing. What does he mean by Satanism, anyway?”

“Beats me.”

She leaned slightly forward. “Satanism. It's a meaningless concept, Joshua. There is no
good
and
evil
. Those are relative terms—useful, yes, but only in this relative, dualistic world. On the cosmic level, everything is One. There are no opposites, no contradictions. The forces, the powers that exist out there, they're neither good nor evil, satanic nor godly. They simply
are
.”

I nodded. “Right.” I had noticed something about her. Usually, and particularly when she talked about magic, the syntax and vocabulary of her language was refined, almost elegant. But occasionally, when she spoke about something for which she had no prepared script, her language slipped a notch or two.
How come
for
why. Who
for
whom
. I didn't know what this signified, or that it necessarily signified anything. I suppose I was merely exercising my incredible powers of observation. “Let's go back for a minute to last Saturday night,” I said.

She sat back and sighed elaborately, then shook her head once again in mock exasperation. Or maybe this time it was real exasperation. “All right, Joshua. Yes. What?”

“I understand that you and your husband were sleeping in separate rooms.”

She smiled, took a drag from her cigarette, and said, “Yes.”

“You were with a man named Peter Jones.”

She smiled again, nodded. “That's right.”

“According to the police report, neither one of you heard anything that night.”

“Yes.”

“And you told them that neither of you left the room that night.”

“That's what I said, yes.”

I nodded. “Is that still your recollection?”

“Yes.” She leaned forward, put out the cigarette, looked up at me, and smiled. “But are you sure that's all you want to ask? Aren't you a teensy bit interested in the sleeping arrangements?”

I smiled. “I hadn't thought that they were any of my business.” And I hadn't thought that I'd have to ask. All I had to do was bring them up. She was an explainer, loved explaining the things important to her; and one of these, clearly, was herself.

“I told you,” she said, putting her hand back on her calf, “that the link between Quentin and I was karmic. We had transcended, both of us, the physical link. When we did come together physically, we only did it as a part of Quentin's rituals, a way for him to draw upon my feminine strength, my feminine powers. You can understand that women have a specific type of power?”

I nodded. You bet.

“I was happy to help him. But I had a life of my own, just like he did, and sometimes”—she smiled—“you know the Cyndi Lauper song? Sometimes, you know, girls just want to have fun.”

I nodded. “And so your link with Peter Jones was …?”

“Physical.” She smiled again, and again she tilted her head slightly to the side. “Still not shocked?”

“Not yet. How long have you been involved with him?”

She arched a jet-black eyebrow. “Involved?” A smile. “That's a very heavy word for something that was basically just an itch being scratched.”

“How long have you two been scratching?”

Another smile. “Oh, a year or so. Quentin knew, naturally.”

“Did anyone else know? Anyone who was at the house last Saturday night?”

She shrugged lightly. “They all knew, I imagine. I mean, we were
discreet
about it, naturally. Quentin and Peter and I. Quentin and I went to our rooms and talked for a while, and then, when the coast was clear, I tippy-toed off to Peter's room. It was just down the hall. But Santa Fe is a small town. There aren't many secrets here.”

If she were right, and they did all know about her and Peter Jones, then any one of them would've known that Quentin could be raised to the roof beams without an audience watching.

I nodded. “Let's do this, Justine. Let me run these names by you, the names of the other people who were there that night, and you give me a brief description of each of them.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh God. How boring.”

“Won't take long. And it would be helpful. Let's start with Peter Jones.”

She smiled, raised her hand from her calf, and put her right arm, like her left, along the back of the sofa. Pressed tight against the black jersey, her breasts were looking less small than they had before, but just as perfect. “Poor Peter,” she said. “He tries so hard to be a saint. But he's just so crazy about being a sinner.”

I echoed Rita's question to me: “What
is
a spiritual alchemist?”

“I don't have any idea. Something to do with meditation, according to Peter. But you'd have to ask him.”

“He's never explained it to you?”

She smiled. “We're usually too busy with other things.”

I nodded. “All right. You've told me something about Leonard Quarry. What about his wife, Sierra?”

A bit more scorn. “
Sierra
. Can you imagine? I mean, if you're going to invent a name for yourself, why not use a little more imagination?”

“What kind of a woman is she?”

“One of those breathless, wispy little things who sob at the death of the daffodils. She can't really be all
that
wispy, if she's a psychic, and she's
supposed
to be. If she can see inside Leonard's head, she must have an extremely strong stomach.”

I nodded. “What about Brad Freefall?”

“Brad? Brad's harmless, I suppose. Although God knows I wouldn't want to trade places with Sylvia. Brad's into drums, the harmonic vibrations. I mean, how would
you
like to live with someone who was pounding on a tom-tom all day?”

I smiled. I'd like it about as much as I'd like living with Justine Bouvier. “And Sylvia Morningstar?”

“Sylvia's into crystals. She's all right. Scatterbrained. But like Brad, she's harmless.”

“Carl Buffalo?”

More scorn. “God. Carl Buffalo. The New Age Sioux Indian. He takes sad little men up into the mountains and teaches them how to get in touch with their warrior selves. I can't imagine anything more dismal.”

“You mentioned Eliza Remington. She's an astrologer?”

“She's a witch. A ruthless, conniving witch.”

“What about Carol Masters?”

She tilted her head slightly to the side and shook it, smiling. “Poor Carol. Her career as an actress hasn't been doing so well in the past few years, so she's discovered reincarnation. It's really too bad that Shirley MacLaine got there first. Carol's pathetic, really. Do you remember Carol Burnett doing her imitation of Norma Desmond? That's what Carol Masters always reminds me of.”

“And Veronica Chang?”

For the first time, her face showed the shadow of something substantial. Like thought, perhaps. “Veronica,” she said. She took her arms from the back of the sofa and folded them beneath her breasts. “She's a powerful woman.”

“She's supposed to be a Saku master. What's that, exactly?”

“It's Brazilian. A healing technique. A type of laying on of hands.”

“Chang doesn't sound like a Brazilian name.”

“She's Korean.” I could see her closing up on me, the small petulant mouth tightening.

“What's her relationship to Bernardi?”

She looked surprised. “Relationship? To that slob? No relationship at all. He didn't have a car, so Sylvia asked her to give him a ride.”

Which is what Bernardi had told me. “Okay. What about Bennett Hadley?”

“Bennett?” she smiled. She leaned forward to pick up her cigarettes. I think that she was relieved to change the subject. “He's our resident expert. He knows everything. Just ask him. He'll tell you.” She lit a cigarette, blew smoke out across the marble table. “He'd be attractive, really, if he weren't such a pompous jerk. Have you read his book?”

“No.”

“
A Guide to the Invisible
. It's sort of an encyclopedia of the occult. He's done his homework, you can see that, but his understanding of the spiritual world is basically shallow. Second hand, out of books.”

And that was all of them. All thirteen people who had been at the house in La Cienega that night. The number thirteen, at least in this instance, had proved unlucky. One of the thirteen had killed, one of them had been killed, and one was under arrest. All the rest, so far as I was concerned, were under suspicion.

“All right,” I said. “Let's go back to last Saturday night again.”

She blew out a small puff of smoke and exasperation. “
God
,” she said. “Haven't we been doing that?”

“I mean the party, specifically. What happened?”

“But I went all
through
that with the police.” The petulance I had glimpsed in her face had moved to her voice and become more real.

“I know,” I said. “And I appreciate your taking the time to do it again.”

“Ugh,” she said.

“We'll try to keep it as brief as possible.”

She inhaled on the cigarette, exhaled. “It's a good thing I like you, Joshua.”