The Hanged Man

by Walter Satterthwait

  “Croft?” he said.

  “Yeah. Carl Buffalo?” Silly question.

  He nodded, held out his hand, took mine, tried to flatten it. Failed, stood back. “Come on in.”

  I walked into a billow of Brut cologne.

  Personally, I thought that the Indian motif was maybe just a tad overdone in the living room. On the white walls hung bows and arrows and quivers, war lances and shields. The furniture—some chairs, a long sofa—was draped with deerskins. Crowded onto the shelves of the bookcase to my right was a collection of Navajo and Pueblo pottery: bowls, plates, statuettes. Under the glass top of the long wooden coffee table was a ceremonial Navajo sand painting—a fake; the real ones, I knew, were destroyed at the end of the ceremony for which they were constructed. An enormous buffalo hide, complete with legs, tail, and huge shaggy head, lay sprawled out along the wooden floor, as though its former occupant had just toppled from the roof of a ten-story building and landed there in a splatter.

  “What happened to your neck?” Carl Buffalo asked me.

  “I was water-skiing.”

  He frowned, puzzled. “There’s no water-skiing around here.”

  I smiled. “I was misinformed.”

  He frowned again.

  “May I sit down?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. Anywhere.” He frowned once more, probably still attempting to work out the skiing accident.

  I sat in one of the chairs; he sat at the end of the sofa.

  I told him, “I’ve been trying to reach you for a while.”

  He nodded. “I was with one of my groups, up in the mountains.”

  “Must be fairly cold up there, this time of year.”

  “A warrior learns to endure.”

  He delivered this as though he had a lot more pithy epigrams stored away. I managed, just barely, to keep my eyeballs from rolling around in their sockets. “What kind of people go up there with you?”

  He shrugged his enormous shoulders. “Doctors. Poets. Businessmen. Anyone, right? Anyone who wants to learn the ancient skills. Anyone who wants to get back their forgotten warrior tradition.”

  “Forgotten?”

  “Modern Man,” he said, “has lost his connection to Nature, and to the Great Spirit. What I do, I show the men in my groups how to do their own Vision Quest, so they can find their personal totem animal, right? That way, see, they can learn about their own personal intimate involvement in the natural world. We’re all part of it, right?—each and every one of us, but sometimes we lose sight of that basic fact.”

  “Right,” I said, and nodded. “So how’s business?”

  He shook his head. “This isn’t a business. Not for me. This is part of a sacred shamanistic tradition that goes back to the dawn of time.”

  “Sure. I was just wondering how much you charge for these trips.”

  He frowned again. “It’s all in my brochure. But you said over the phone you wanted to talk about Giacomo.”

  “Yeah.” A shaman with a brochure. Neat. “What do you think of Giacomo?”

  “I’ve seen him around, here and there, right? I wouldn’t say I really know him very good.”

  “You were at La Cienega last Saturday night. Were you surprised when you learned that Quentin Bouvier had been killed?”

  “A warrior is never surprised. He understands that everything that happens is the will of the Great Spirit.”

  My eyeballs were beginning to cramp. “So you weren’t surprised, either, when Giacomo was arrested for the murder.”

  He shrugged. “It happened, right? So the Great Spirit must’ve willed it.”

  I nodded. “Sort of like karma.”

  He frowned as he thought about this. I could sense the effort involved. “Well, karma, the idea of karma, that isn’t really a part of my own personal tradition, right? But I’ve studied it, naturally, and sure, you could say it’s something like the will of the Great Spirit.” He nodded sagely. “There are many paths to the top of the mountain.”

  And a lot of jerks along the way. I nodded again. “How long were you involved with Justine Bouvier?”

  The warrior tradition must have briefly slipped his mind, because he blinked at me for a few moments and then he said, “Huh?”

  “I understand that you and Justine were an item a few years back. I wanted to know for how long.”

  His face was petulant, which made it look a bit silly perched atop all that beef. “Who told you that?” he asked me.

  “Just something I heard.”

  He shook his head. “Justine and me, we’re friends. We been friends for a long time, right? Quentin and me were friends too.”

  “Sure. But for a while there, weren’t you and Justine a bit more than that?”

  He frowned once more, and then he narrowed his eyes, as though he were trying to figure out what kind of trick I was playing. “What’s all this got to do with Giacomo?”

  I went through the spiel that by now had become standard: if Giacomo didn’t kill Bouvier, then someone else did. In order to discover who that might be, I needed to know as much as possible about everyone who was present in La Cienega last Saturday night.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Hold on there. You saying you think I had something to do with all that? With Quentin getting killed?”

  “I’m saying that I’ve got to learn everything I can.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re way off base there. Justine and I were only friends, right? I don’t care what you heard. And listen, I resent the implication.”

  “Which implication?”

  “That Justine and me, um, that her and me were something besides friends.”

  “I thought maybe you resented the implication that you were involved in Bouvier’s death.”

  “That one too!” His face was flushed. “I resent that one too. I told you, Quentin was a friend of mine, right?” He frowned again. “What are you trying to do?”

  “Like I said. I’m trying to find out who killed Quentin Bouvier.”

  “Yeah, well I didn’t.”

  “Who do you think did?”

  “How the hell would I know? Giacomo, probably, right? Cops think he did. And he never liked Quentin.”

  “Why?”

  “He just never did. He told me.”

  “Ever heard of a girl called Starbright?”

  “Who?”

  I repeated the name.

  “Who’s she?” he asked me.

  “A girl who committed suicide down in Albuquerque.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Quentin Bouvier dumped her.”

  “When was this?”

  “A few years ago. Did you know her, know about her?”

  “Uh-uh. No.”

  “How well did you know Leonard Quarry?”

  Once again, his face flushed. “I never killed him, neither.”

  “I know that, Carl. How well did you know him?”

  “Not hardly at all.”

  “He wasn’t a friend?”

  “No way.”

  “Do you know anybody who’d have a reason to kill both Bouvier and Quarry?”

  “No.” He frowned. “Kill both of them? The same guy? But the cops, they told me it had to be somebody else killed Leonard.”

  “Which cops?”

  “State cops. They were asking me about Leonard yesterday.”

  “Asking about any of Leonard’s friends who had an interest in the theater?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Do you know any?”

  “No. Carol Masters, maybe. But I hardly knew Leonard, right? I told you.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you run me through what happened last Saturday night.”

  He frowned again. “I already told the cops all about that.”

  “I know. But the sooner I get your testimony, the sooner we can wrap this up.”

  He considered that. Finally he nodded. “You want me to start at the beginning, right?”

  “That would be nice.”

>   He leaned forward, Lifted a leather pouch from the coffee table, opened it, pulled out some rolling paper. “You smoke?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “This is special stuff,” he said. He took a pinch of brown shreds from the pouch, began to dribble them along a curled sheet of paper. “Natural tobacco, no additives, mixed with real kinnikinnick.”

  “Yeah?”

  He licked the edge of the paper, rolled the cigarette. “Kinnikinnick, that’s Indian tobacco.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He stood up and then he held the cigarette with a certain amount of drama to the south, then the west, then the north, then the east. Having completed the circle, he slipped his hand into the pocket of his suede pants, pulled out a gold Dunhill lighter, sat down, lighted the cigarette. He snapped the lighter shut and placed it on the table, so I could admire it at my leisure, presumably. Exhaling, he said, “That’s one of the problems of Modern Man, right? He’s lost his rituals.”

  I nodded, trying to imagine serious chain-smokers going through this particular ritual whenever they lit up. Half of them would collapse before they reached their morning coffee.

  It occurred to me—had been occurring to me since I arrived here—that Carl was about as genuine, Indian-wise, as the sand painting on his coffee table. I knew some Indians who smoked, and none of them, and certainly not in front of an Anglo, would make a production out of it.

  “Okay,” he said. He sat back, crossed his leg, left ankle over right knee. The fringes on his leggings flapped. “I got there, at Brad and Sylvia’s at about five, I guess …”

  After the gaudy overture, the opera was something of an anti-climax. Nothing he told me contradicted anything that he’d originally told the police in his statement, or anything that anyone else had already told me.

  From the way he spoke of them, I got the sense that Carl felt a bit uneasy about most of the other New Age folks. He was a not-very-bright guy, I thought, who had stumbled onto a pretty good scam for himself, this shaman thing, and who wasn’t certain how the others reacted to it, or to him. The role he was playing required him to pretend a wise and compassionate acceptance of them all, but I felt that he had been truly comfortable only with Brad Freefall and Sylvia Morningstar. Brad because he, too, was something less than a genius; Sylvia because she was so relentlessly nonjudgmental about everything and everyone.

  He had heard nothing, seen nothing, sensed nothing that might help me determine who had killed Quentin Bouvier.

  When he was finished, I closed my notebook, slipped it into my jacket pocket, and rose from the chair. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

  He stood up. “So I’ll get you one of my brochures, right?”

  “Great.”

  Maybe, stalking across the forest glen with his happy band of poets and proctologists, he moved as silently as a shade. Here he just lumbered off, his moccasins thumping against the floor.

  He came thumping back after only a moment or two, and handed me a slim brochure printed on heavyweight paper. I glanced at the bold type on the cover. “Discover the Warrior Within,” I was advised. I decided to read the rest of it later. Next year, maybe.

  “Thanks again, Carl,” I told him as he walked me to the door.

  He nodded solemnly. “May the Great Spirit be with you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Happy Trails.”

  Back at the office, I hung up my coat again and rearranged things on the desk. There were more messages on the machine. Rita had called at twelve-thirty, fifteen minutes before I arrived. Her message said that she’d call back in half an hour. Justine Bouvier had called, returning my call of yesterday. What with one thing and another, I’d forgotten that I’d called her.

  I dialed her number.

  “Joshua,” she said, her voice lilting. “How are you?”

  “Fine. And you?”

  “As well as can be expected, I suppose. I’ve been thinking about you, you know.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you. I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Yes? Please do.”

  “Did you know any of Leonard Quarry’s friends? Any of them who might be involved in theater work?”

  I heard her sigh. “God, Joshua, I was hoping for something a teeny weeny bit less dull from you. I’ve been talking to the dreary old police about the same thing for ages.”

  “The cops tend to get dreary when someone’s been stabbed with an ice pick.”

  “I heard that you were actually there, darling. When it happened.”

  Darling?

  “And who told you that?” I asked her.

  “I honestly can’t remember. But you’ll have to tell me all about it, all the horrifying details.”

  “You sound pretty broken up about all this, Justine.”

  “Well, it’s a shame, naturally, and I do feel sorry for poor Sierra. But then I’ve always felt sorry for poor Sierra.” She laughed lightly, musically. “And I’m not the sort of person, Joshua, who makes believe she’s grieving when she’s not. I’m no hypocrite.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Besides, Leonard’s gone to a better place. And he’s definitely improved this one.” She laughed again.

  “And what did you tell them, Justine? The police. When they asked about theater friends of Leonard’s.”

  “I told them I haven’t the faintest idea who Leonard knew. And I really couldn’t care less.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  “When are you coming up here again, darling? I’d love to do your past-life regression for you.”

  “Sorry, Justine. Right now I’m still fairly busy with my current life.”

  “You’ve got to learn to loosen up, Joshua. Get rid of some of that armor you carry around.”

  “Yeah. Pawn it, maybe.”

  She laughed. “Well, don’t forget to give me a jingle.”

  “Right.”

  “Bye now.”

  “Goodbye, Justine.”

  As I hung up, I realized that I hadn’t yet asked Peter Jones about Leonard Quarry’s theatrical connections. Probably, like all the others, he would know of none. But I still had to speak with him.

  I was going through my notebook, looking for his phone number, when the door to my office opened and Paul Chang stepped in, holding a large automatic in his right hand.

  I know a few people who claim to feel an enormous affection for the M-1911 Colt .45 automatic. They mention, and sometimes keep mentioning, its reliability and accuracy, its size, its weight. But the feature they most esteem is what they call, with a certain relish, its stopping power. One slug in the arm or anywhere else, they like to say, and a guy goes down, and he stays down.

  The slug in question is nearly half an inch wide and weighs nearly half an ounce. Propelled from its casing, it moves more slowly than the .38 or the nine-millimeter, but it carries quite a bit of momentum.

  While I’m not personally fond of automatics and the maintenance they require, I’m prepared to admit that the Government Colt, when its big muzzle is aimed at my head, does get my attention.

  “Hello, Paul,” I said. “Nice gun.”

  He shut the door behind him and leaned against it. “Asshole,” he said.

  I realized that this was the first time I’d heard his voice. Yesterday, when I met him, he hadn’t spoken a word. Like his sister’s voice, his was low and nicely modulated.

  He was wearing black leather gloves, a black leather jacket with its collar up, a black silk scarf, a black silk shirt, black twill trousers, black socks, black slip-on shoes. The Contemporary Ninja look.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked him. My voice was nicely modulated, too, but it may have been higher than normal by an octave or two.

  “Get up,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”

  I sat forward in the swivel chair, put my hands on the desk. “Have you thought this out, Paul?” The important thing, it seemed to me, was to keep jabbering away until something distracted him. I
glanced at the phone, willed it to ring.

  “Get up,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because if you don’t, I’ll kill you where you sit.”

  “Why should I care where you kill me?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Get up.”

  “Are we going to be using the car?”

  “I’m not going to tell you again. Get up.”

  “Because if we are, maybe you should start thinking about who’s going to drive. If you’re the driver, you won’t be able to hold the gun. If I drive, how are you going to stop me from piling into a dump truck and taking you with me?”

  He took a step toward me and cocked the pistol’s hammer. His hand was trembling, the gun barrel wavering slightly. “Shut your fucking mouth. And get up out of that chair.”

  The phone rang. He turned toward it. I shot him. He shot back.

  “You’re lucky,” Hector Ramirez told me.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you were smart for a change, putting the gun where you could reach it.”

  I shrugged weakly. “He tried to kill me yesterday. I didn’t want to give him a second chance.”

  “Where’d you have it?”

  I was sitting in one of the client chairs, Hector was sitting in the other. I jerked my head toward the desk. “Behind the box of Kleenex.”

  He nodded. “How are you feeling?”

  I shook my head. “Just great, Hector. Just fucking great.”

  “The paramedics said he’s probably going to pull through.”

  “Yeah.”

  The paramedics had left; and so, after taking my statement, had the uniformed cops. Hector, who was supposed to be off duty today, had arrived sometime in the middle of all the excitement, cops asking me questions, paramedics sliding Paul Chang onto a gurney and hooking him up to an I.V. Everyone, or so it seemed, had been furiously talking into walkie-talkies while they bustled about. One of the paramedics had been in the ambulance with me last night, when I was carted down from the sky basin. He had looked at me today as though I were Charlie Manson.

  I felt a bit like Charlie Manson.

  Over by the doorway, the hardwood floor was puddled black with blood. Black footprints crisscrossed the room, some of them smeared, some of them as distinct as if they’d been painted there with a stencil.