“My son?”
Bowing her head like that, I realized, would allow Carol Masters to deepen and roughen her voice. And she’d been an actress. “Yeah,” I said. By answering, which was a kind of collaboration, I felt suddenly as embarrassed as if I’d been the one who was making strange noises.
“There is no need to fear, my son.”
“Right.”
“What is it you wish you know?”
“Who killed Quentin Bouvier?” A consultation with a phantom from Alpha Centauri. That would look great on the résumé.
“Death is an illusion, my son. And therefore, in the strictest sense, there can be no killing. Bear in mind that the bodily manifestations of you human beings are merely a transitory concretization of eternal vibratory phenomena. All your so-called physical characteristics—your size, your shape, your palpable existence—are in essence unreal, as fleeting as a ripple on a pond, or the path traced by a falling leaf through the autumn air. Even the sexuality of which you make so much, your maleness and your femaleness, is an illusion, as is, of course, your so-called ego, that falsehood which so often troubles you. Bear in mind that the underlying reality is nothing less than Love, Love dancing with itself Love in love with Love.”
I nodded, and then realized that neither Araxys nor Carol Masters could see me. “Right,” I said. “Do you think you could be a little more specific?”
A low, raspy chuckle came from Carol Master’s mouth. “You are a Quester, my son, a seeker after Truth. Hearken to my words and you shall discover the thing you ultimately seek. I bid you farewell now, and wish you a most fruitful journey.”
Carol Masters’s tiny frame gave a sudden start, her right foot kicking out, and then she jerked her head upright. She opened her eyes, blinking, and gasped in a breath. Leaning forward, thick eyebrows raised, she looked over to me. “What did he say?”
Gibberish, I almost answered. But actually, I’d kind of liked the notion of Love dancing with itself. “Not much,” I told her.
Still excited, the words rushing out: “Did he tell you who did it?”
“Not exactly.”
“What did he say?”
“Something about vibratory phenomena. Love in love with Love.”
She nodded quickly, waved a dismissive hand. “He always says that. But nothing about who killed Quentin and Leonard?”
“No.”
She pounded her small fist against the sofa cushion. “Damn.” Then, abruptly, she sat back. She frowned again, thoughtfully. “Well,” she said. “Sometimes, you know, what he says only sounds mystical, but it has a simple, everyday meaning. Sometimes he tries to be deliberately cryptic.” She bit thoughtfully at her lower lip.
“I’d say he succeeded.”
“So what he said didn’t mean anything to you.” Some lipstick had come off onto her teeth.
“I’m afraid not,” I said. I still felt a kind of residual unease. I had no idea whether I had just witnessed a nicely performed piece of theater, or a peek, provided without her conscious knowledge, into the subterranean mind of Carol Masters.
She nodded, and then leaned toward me. Lowering her voice, she said, “He’s wonderful, but sometimes, honestly, he drives me absolutely crazy.”
Spotless.
Just inside the doorjamb, the bleached oak floor of the office was spotless. Not a single bloodstain, not even a darkening in the cracks between the waxed planks.
It was as though the cleaning service had provided me with magic as well as reliability, had wiped away not only the stains, but the past. For a moment, I found myself almost believing that nothing had happened yesterday. That Paul Chang had never come here, that I’d never fired two slugs into his body. That he wasn’t lying in the hospital at the moment, attached to tubes and wires.
Life, unfortunately, doesn’t clean up as easily as hardwood floors.
Forget the guilt, I told myself. You did what you had to. At least he’s alive. Get to work.
I got to work. As I’d thought, there were messages waiting for me on the machine, including one from Rita. She was still in Albuquerque, and said that she’d call back. The rest, in the order in which they were recorded, were from a coy Justine Bouvier, Veronica Chang, a writer who worked for the Santa Fe Reporter, a patient Justine Bouvier, Eliza Remington, the writer again, a bored Justine Bouvier, and finally an irritated Justine Bouvier.
I took a deep breath and called Veronica Chang.
“This is Joshua Croft.”
“Yes,” she said flatly. “I’ glad you called. I wanted to tell you that I think you’re despicable.”
“Miss Chang—”
“Do you know that my brother almost died?” No flatness now in her voice. “If he hadn’t gotten prompt medical attention, he’d be dead right now.”
“He got prompt medical attention because I called for it.”
Her brief laugh was shrill and humorless. “How kind of you. How very thoughtful. Do you always call for an ambulance when you shoot someone?”
“Miss Chang, your brother ran me off the road two nights ago. He—”
“Liar! You liar! That is totally untrue. He was here with me that night. He was here when you had your accident. With me. And then you sent that big idiot of a cop after him, asking questions, pestering us with his clumsy suspicions—can you blame Paul for getting upset?”
“I can blame him for coming into my office with a loaded pistol.”
“All he wanted to do was talk.”
“I don’t talk to people who point guns at me.”
“No, you shoot them. You bastard.”
“Look, Miss Chang—”
“I just want you to know that you’re going to be very, very sorry for what you did. You’re going to regret it for the rest of your life.”
“Telephone conversations can be recorded,” I said. And so they can be; this one wasn’t. She was beginning to annoy me. “You might want to be careful what sort of threats you make.”
“I don’t need to make threats. I’m telling you. You’re going to be very sorry.” And then she hung up.
I sat back. Almost immediately, the phone rang. I leaned forward, picked it up. “Hello.”
Justine Bouvier’s expansive voice came trilling down the line. “Joshua! What is this I hear about you shooting Paul Chang?” A small quick bark of delighted laughter. “You certainly know how to bring a little excitement into a dull old town, darling. A shootout at the O.K. Corral! I want to hear every single delicious detail.”
“Sorry, Justine, I can’t talk right now. I’m hemorrhaging.” I hung up.
To prevent her getting through again, I lifted the phone once more and dialed Eliza Remington’s number. No answer.
So far, I still hadn’t been able to reach Peter Jones. I dialed his number.
This time, he answered.
“Peter, this is Joshua Croft.”
“Good. I just called you, about five minutes ago.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you for the past few days.”
“Yeah, I haven’t been answering my phone. Listen. Could you get out here? Out to my place?”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to say over the telephone. But it’s important. And I think it’ll be helpful to you.”
“I’ll leave now.”
The weather was still unseasonably warm as I drove north, out of Santa Fe, through the badlands. The snow had melted everywhere but in the mountains, where it lay bright blinding white against the powder blue backdrop of sky. A few big fluffy clouds hung up there, motionless, looking as though they’d always been hanging exactly there, would always be hanging there.
Despite the stiffness in my muscles and joints, my mood was better than it had been earlier. Partly, I suppose, because at some level, before I’d talked to her, I’d been concerned about dealing with Paul Chang’s sister. I had known that I would have to, and hadn’t known what I was going to say. As it turned out, she hadn’t given me a chance to say much of anyt
hing. In a way, her anger and her refusal to listen had let me off the hook. I felt, if not absolved, then at least relieved.
If she wanted to lay some Saku double whammy on me, that was her business. I’d just have to potter along, regardless.
I was feeling expectant, as well. Maybe Peter Jones did have information that would be helpful, that would let me crack this case.
And it was a beautiful day, and this was the first fairly long trip I’d taken in the Jeep. The beast rode well, its big engine purring comfortably beneath the expanse of hood. I was perched higher than I’d been in the station wagon, which permitted me to look down, disdainfully, at the drivers of lower, less aggressive vehicles. The car and I spent some time developing an intangible bond between man and machine.
It was about two o’clock when I pulled into the long, straight driveway worn in the flat caliche. The narrow tower in which Peter Jones lived was still huddling at the base of the immense red column of rock that loomed behind it. But today, with the sun nearly overhead and its light rolling out across the high desert, the building seemed less bizarre, less forbidding. It looked merely quirky, like a playhouse erected out here in the emptiness by some goofy kid.
A second car was parked beside Peter Jones’s ancient Karman Ghia. It was a Cadillac Seville, an old one, and I knew that I’d seen it before. After a moment, I remembered where. It had been parked outside Eliza Remington’s mock Tudor home, on the hill overlooking Santa Fe.
I knocked on the door. Peter Jones opened it. He was wearing black again: denim shirt, denim slacks. Maybe, I told myself, he always wore black. Maybe he was an existentialist. Maybe he was Zorro.
I’d been spending too much time with these people. My thought processes were becoming addled.
His handsome Gothic face suddenly looked puzzled. “What happened to you?”
“Automobile accident.”
He nodded. The puzzlement went away, but the face was still strained, the skin still tight, as though he were worried. “Come on in,” he told me.
Eliza Remington sat at one end of the futon sofa. She wore black shoes, black stockings, a gray silk dress buttoned all the way up to the Peter Pan collar, and a matching jacket. At her neck was a black silk scarf. In her hand was a glass of something that looked like it might have been poured from the bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey that sat on the coffee table. She had told me, I remembered, that she never drank.
“You want a drink?” Peter Jones asked me. He seemed awkward, tentative. “Or some tea? Some coffee?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
Peter looked at Eliza Remington, who said nothing, merely sat and stared bleakly at me. Peter turned to me. “Sorry,” he said. “Have a seat.” He sat down himself on the other end of the couch, glanced again at Eliza.
I sat in the black canvas director’s chair.
Eliza suddenly spoke. “Did Paul Chang do that to you?” She nodded toward the foam collar at my neck.
“Probably.”
“And you shot him?”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
“But you shot him. I heard about it this morning.”
“I shot him.”
She frowned, looked down, shook her head. She turned to Peter. She shrugged, quickly, almost bitterly. “You wanted to tell him. Tell him.” She drank some whiskey and sat back, holding the glass on her lap. She stared at me.
Peter glanced at her, turned back to me. “I haven’t been answering my phone,” he said. “This whole thing, Quentin getting killed, then Leonard, I guess it’s thrown me for a loop. So I’ve been hiding out. Meditating. Trying to make sense of it, I suppose. Anyway, Eliza’s been trying to reach me since this morning. She knows that I can go for weeks at a time without paying any attention to the phone. And so finally, a couple hours ago, she drove out to see me.”
He hesitated, glanced again at Eliza, who continued to ignore him and stare at me. “Look,” he said to me. “Can you make us a promise?”
“What promise?”
“Can you keep Eliza’s name out of this?”
“Out of what?”
“I …” He looked at Eliza, looked back at me. “If we tell you something, can you promise us that you won’t go to the police with it?”
“That’s not a promise I can make. In order to keep my license, I’m required by law to report any felony I learn about. Are we talking felony here?”
Peter frowned. “What if we discuss this … hypothetically? What if we—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Peter,” said Eliza. “Forget it. I told you he was a Boy Scout.” She tossed back the rest of her drink, looked at me, her face set, her shrewd blue eyes steady behind her spectacles. “My Tarot card. The Death card. It was a forgery.”
She leaned forward, loudly set the empty glass down on the coffee table, then sat back, her arms crossed, her head raised, defiant.
“A forgery,” I said.
She nodded. “Counterfeit. Phony.”
I nodded.
“Fake,” she said.
“I get the idea. You forged it?”
She shook her head. “My great-grandfather.”
“When?”
“When he was staying in Italy, with Crowley.”
“And you’ve known all along that it was a forgery?”
“Of course I have.”
I sat back in the director’s chair and looked at Peter Jones.
“Look,” he said earnestly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and holding out his hands. “Eliza never intended that any of this should happen. Quentin and Leonard getting killed. All the rest. The police can’t blame her for that, can they?”
“Did you know about the card?” I asked him.
He sat back defensively. “Not until today,” he said. “When Eliza came and told me.”
I turned to Eliza. She hadn’t moved. “Did anyone else know?” I asked her.
“Leonard.”
She was having no problems with her hearing today, I noted. “Leonard Quarry? For how long?”
She frowned impatiently. “For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t you get it? From the beginning. It was his goddamn idea.”
A few things suddenly began to make sense. “Quarry was never bidding for a third party,” I said. “The two of you were whipsawing Quentin Bouvier. Quarry was jacking up the price.”
She nodded.
“How much did he get?”
“He was supposed to get a third. Sixty-six thousand. Sonovabitch wanted half. I didn’t think he deserved more than a quarter. If that. We settled on a third.” She frowned, quickly, bitterly. That still bothered her.
“Supposed to get?” I said.
“Never gave it to him. All the money’s still in my account. After Quentin got killed, I was afraid to transfer the funds. Afraid the police might find out and think that it had something to do with Quentin’s death.”
“Maybe it did.”
She scowled. “Horseshit. Giacomo killed Quentin. Still pissed off about that little hippie girl in Albuquerque.”
“And who killed Leonard? Giacomo was in prison when that happened.”
Her face was suddenly splotched with red. “I don’t know, goddamn it.”
Peter Jones leaned forward again, back into the conversation. “Eliza’s been concerned,” he said to me. “Quentin’s death bothered her, of course. And so did Leonard’s. And when she heard that you’d … that you and Paul Chang had been involved like that, him ending up in the hospital—”
“Don’t be so mealy-mouthed, Peter,” Eliza snapped. “I don’t give a damn about Paul Chang. Sneaky little arrogant asshole. But too many people are getting hurt. Or killed. Maybe the card isn’t responsible. Personally, I don’t see how it could be. But if it is, I want all this stopped.”
I said to her, “You left a message on my machine this morning.”
“Before I came here. Yes. I wanted to find out what was happening.”
Peter said, “Eliza’
s just trying to do the right thing.”
“Horseshit,” she said. “I want this nonsense to stop.”
I nodded. “All right,” I said to her. “Why don’t you start at the beginning.”
She frowned, leaned forward, opened the bottle of Jameson’s, poured some of the whiskey into her glass. For a teetotaler, she poured a healthy shot. She capped the bottle, drank from the glass, and then sat back, once again holding it on her lap.
She said, “Everything I told you was the truth. About my grandparents and Crowley. They lived with him for almost a year, in Sicily. You know that Crowley designed a Tarot deck of his own?”
I shook my head.
“Well,” she said, “he was working on that deck while my grandparents were there. Kirby—my grandfather—was an artist. A damn good one. He was helping Crowley doing drafts of the deck. He and Crowley went to Catania, to look at the Borgia deck—there’s a museum in Catania, it’s got ten of the cards. Then, one fine day, Crowley had an idea. He asked Kirby if he could make up a copy of the Death card. A copy that could fool people into thinking it was the real thing. Crowley owned a card, genuine, dating from about the same period. Valuable, but nowhere near as valuable as the Borgia card. Same size, same kind of pasteboard. He told Kirby he could paint the card on that.”
I asked, “Why did Crowley want to forge the Death card?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? He was a fraud. Maybe he wanted to sell it. Maybe he wanted to brag that he had it.” She drank some more whiskey. “Anyway. Kirby agreed. There were enough descriptions of the card in the literature to make it feasible, and he knew Pinturicchio’s style. He stripped the original oils from Crowley’s card and painted the Death card onto it. He used the same oils, the same gilt. They baked it in an oven, he and Crowley, to age it.” She shrugged. “It fooled people. Everyone who saw it.”
“But there are tests now,” I said. “Scientific tests. They’d prove that the card was a phony.”
Again her frown was impatient. “Quentin was a believer. He’d never have the card tested. Give it up to someone else, maybe get it damaged? Get some idiot scientist’s vibrations all over it?” Scornfully, she pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Never. Not Quentin.”
The Hanged Man Page 21