I said, “But you must’ve had something that indicated the card was genuine.” Even Quentin couldn’t have been fool enough to buy it otherwise.
“Letters from Crowley to my great-grandfather,” she said. “I told you, Kirby took the card with him when he left. Crowley was pissed off—the original card had been his, after all. Thing is, he never mentioned in the letters that the card was a fake, just said he wanted it back. Didn’t say it was a fake, maybe, because he’d already told everyone it was genuine. Afraid, maybe, that Kirby would come back at him with the letters.”
She drank some whiskey. “The letters would’ve been enough, probably, for Quentin. But Leonard wanted the card, too, or said he did, and that was what carried the day.”
“And jacked up the price.”
She winced slightly. Stiffly, she nodded.
I said, “How did Leonard get involved?”
She sipped from her glass. “I’d told Leonard about the card years ago. Just mentioned it in passing. But Leonard had a memory like an elephant’s, especially when it came to money. Last year, I had to sell him some of my things. Some gold, some jewelry. Trying to raise money for Adam, my cousin—that was true, what I told you about Adam. He was dying. And Leonard had the idea that I should get the card from Adam. Put it to good use.”
“By scamming Quentin Bouvier.”
Another scornful look. “Quentin had more money than he knew what to do with. Two hundred thousand dollars was peanuts to him. And my cousin was dying. He wasn’t much, Adam. I used to say, if brains were dynamite, Adam couldn’t blow his nose.” Still another frown. “But he was family. He was all I had.”
A touching moment, perhaps. And perhaps I spoiled it by saying, “But Adam died before Quentin bought the card.”
“Too late by then,” she snapped, her face red, her voice angry. “Quentin wanted that goddamn card.” I suspected that there was some guilt in her anger, and possibly some shame.
I could’ve been wrong. But at least she hadn’t tried to put all the blame on Leonard Quarry. Who was, at the moment, in no position to deny it, or anything else.
Peter Jones had been sitting off to the side, acting as audience to her story. Now he said to me, “What do you think we should do, Mr. Croft?”
To Eliza Remington, I said, “You’re going to have to go to the police.”
Peter Jones said, “Will it help them? Help them find out who killed Leonard?”
“I don’t know. Have they talked with you about the man at Agua Caliente?”
“The thin man with the tan? Yes. They were here two days ago. They asked me if Leonard knew anyone involved in the theater. The only person I could think of was Carol Masters.”
I asked Eliza, “Did they talk to you?”
She nodded bleakly. “Asked me the same question. Carol’s the only one.”
“Is going to the police absolutely necessary?” Peter asked me.
“I’m sorry, but yes, it is.” To Eliza: “If you don’t, I will. I have to. I told you, up front, what my situation is. And this is information that may be relevant to their investigation. They have to have it.”
“How is it relevant?” Peter asked.
“I don’t know yet. But if Eliza didn’t think it might be relevant, she wouldn’t have told you. Or told me.”
Eliza frowned. “I’ll have to give back that damn money, won’t I?”
I nodded.
“To Justine,” she said.
“Legally, it belongs to her.”
She sipped at her drink, frowned again, as though the whiskey had gone sour. “I can’t think of anyone else in the world I’d less like to give two hundred thousand dollars.”
“You’re not giving it to her. You’re returning it.”
“Somehow that’s not a hell of a lot of consolation.”
Peter Jones asked me, “But the police? What do you think they’ll do?”
“That’s something else I don’t know.” I turned to Eliza. “Do you have a lawyer?”
She shook her head.
“I know one,” I said. “Would you be able to see her today?”
“Her?” she said.
“Sally Durrell. She’s one of the best in the state. She can go with you when you talk to the police.”
Another sour frown. “And how much is she going to cost me?”
“You’ll have to discuss that with her. But the police, the D.A.’s office, they’re going to see this as major fraud. If I were you, I’d get the best lawyer I could afford.”
She pursed her lips. “I have some money coming in. From England. From the sale of Adam’s house.”
I shrugged. “It’s up to you.”
She drank some whiskey. Frowned again. Nodded. “I’ll talk to her.”
“Does this help you, Mr. Croft?” Peter Jones asked me. “With Giacomo? Knowing about the card?”
“Maybe. No way to tell right now.” I turned back to Eliza. “Did anyone else know that the card was a forgery?”
“No one.”
“Not even Quarry’s wife?”
“I told you. Sierra’s an idiot. Leonard would’ve never told her what he was doing.”
“So presumably, whoever has the card still thinks that it’s genuine.”
She nodded, sipped some whiskey. “Unless he’s had it tested.”
I doubted that he had, whoever he was. He couldn’t have had it tested without his answering a lot of questions.
She cleared her throat. “Mr. Croft?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Do you honestly believe that the card is the reason for all this? For Quentin’s death? For Leonard’s?” She was still sitting upright, her head raised, but there was a brittle note of tension in her voice, as though she were bracing herself for my answer, or daring me to give one.
I suppose I could have sugarcoated it for her. Even if the cops went lightly with her, she was in for a rough time. But if she and Leonard Quarry hadn’t tried to con Quentin Bouvier out of two hundred thousand dollars, then maybe Quarry and Bouvier would still be alive.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
Using Peter Jones’s telephone, I called Sally, told her what was going on. When I told her that the card was a forgery, she muttered another one of those technical legal terms. When I asked her about meeting with Eliza, she said that she’d be free at five that afternoon. Then she hung up. People keep doing that to me.
I said my goodbyes to Peter and Eliza. She was still sitting on the futon sofa, still sipping at her Irish whiskey, her face empty. Walking me out to the Jeep, Peter Jones assured me that he’d drive her into Santa Fe for the meeting with Sally.
I drove back to town, trying to think of a way that what I’d learned would help me prove that Giacomo Bernardi hadn’t killed Quentin Bouvier. I couldn’t.
At the office, there were three messages on the machine. One was from Hector, telling me that Paul Chang had been moved from Intensive Care. One was from Rita, saying she’d be late coming back tonight, asking me to come over to her house tomorrow morning. But the first message was from Justine Bouvier:
“Listen, Mr. Asshole Private Detective. How dare you hang up on me? No one treats me like that.” Click.
I was putting myself in solid with the New Age community. Pretty soon, if I wasn’t careful, evil spirits would start appearing in my refrigerator, hovering over the Cheez Whiz. Or one morning I’d roll out of bed and my arms and legs would fall off.
I finished my reports, thought about going to the pool, decided that my body was so stiff I’d probably sink like a stone. Went home, stir-fried some chicken, read for a while, went to bed. Lay there, trying to puzzle everything out. Didn’t succeed. Felt as though I never would. Finally fell asleep.
Next day, it was all over.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “I never really bought the idea that Leonard Quarry was killed by a hit man. Seems to me, a professional wouldn’t have screwed around with an ice pick, especially not in a pub
lic place. He’d have shot Quarry in private, and then walked. And a hit man is even less likely now, when we know there was no third party involved in the bidding for the card. Quarry was only bidding to raise the price, and his own share.”
Rita nodded. “Did Eliza Remington meet with Sally?”
With a temperature lazing in the upper fifties, the Sunday morning was warmer than any February morning in Santa Fe has a right to be. The air was clear and still and it smelled of pine. The sky was blue and cloudless. Rita was wearing dark brown boots with low heels, lightweight tan wool slacks, and a pale brown turtleneck sweater beneath her new leather jacket. The slacks and the sweater were also new, purchased yesterday, presumably, in Albuquerque. Her purse was slung over her left shoulder and she carried her cane in her right hand. So far, she hadn’t really used it. But at the moment we were only a hundred yards or so down the Ski Basin Road from the entrance to her driveway. We were making the walk that Rita had promised herself, and promised me, when she had first been imprisoned in the wheelchair. I had told her what I’d learned yesterday, from Eliza Remington and from Carol Masters.
Today she had been dressed and ready, cane in hand, when I arrived. “Let’s go,” she had said as soon as she opened the door.
“Go where?”
She had smiled. “To the Plaza. I told you I’d walk down there today. Are you up to it?”
I had frowned. “Are you sure you are?”
“Positive.” She had stepped out onto the front porch, shut the door behind her.
I had said, “It’s almost two miles to the Plaza, Rita.”
She had laughed. “Joshua, you’ve been trying to get me to walk down there for as long as I can remember. I must’ve walked twice that much in Albuquerque yesterday.” Slipping her arm into mine, she had smiled up at me. “Come on.”
When she saw the Cherokee parked big and bold in her driveway, she had concealed her enthusiasm for the machine, or possibly her envy, behind a merely casual comment: “It’s a pretty car.”
“Pretty?” I said. “It’s beyond pretty, Rita.”
She had smiled. “Are you going to give it a name? Ursula? Nellybelle?”
“No one likes sarcasm in a woman. It’s a scientific fact.”
She had grinned at me.
And now we were walking arm in arm along the side of the road, Rita on the outside. I was a bit worried. The surface here was uncertain—pebbles and grit, the occasional beer can—and the traffic was fairly heavy, locals and tourists driving up to the Basin so they could ride a pair of sticks down the sunlit slopes. We were walking on the left side of the road, just like they tell you to do in elementary school. Every time a car zoomed by, its slipstream slapped rude and cold against my face and whisked at Rita’s long black hair.
“Yeah,” I told her. “I talked to Sally this morning. She called Herb Maslow at the D.A.’s office. She and Eliza met with him last night and Eliza signed a statement. She’ll be charged on Monday. Sally convinced Maslow not to hold her until then. Pointed out that Eliza had come in of her own free will.”
“Will the police be releasing any information about the card?” Rita asked.
“Sally convinced Maslow not to. He’s like everybody else at the D.A.’s office—he thinks that Giacomo is guilty. But Sally persuaded him that if he is guilty, releasing the information wouldn’t make any difference. And if he isn’t, and it gets out that the card is worthless, then whoever has it will probably toss it. And then zap, no evidence.”
“Maslow’s being very cooperative.”
“I think he’s got the hots for Sally.”
“Joshua.” Mildly reproving. “What about bail for Eliza? Will that be a problem?”
“I doubt it. Sally says that Eliza can borrow money on her house, if that’s necessary. But she says she’ll probably be released on her own recognizance.”
“What sort of a sentence does she think Eliza will receive?”
“Whatever it is, she thinks it’ll be suspended. Eliza volunteered her confession, and on Monday she’ll be returning the money to Justine Bouvier.”
Rita smiled. “That must make Eliza happy.”
“I think there’s a part of her that would rather go to the chair.”
Her smile broadened. “At least it’ll make Justine Bouvier happy.”
“Yeah. I’m sure it’ll make Justine very happy.”
She squeezed my arm. “You don’t like these people very much, do you?”
A Porsche ripped by us, upshifting theatrically. Porsches tend to do that.
“Some of them I don’t like at all,” I said. “Justine. Veronica Chang. Did I tell you that Veronica’s going to put some weird kind of hoodoo on me? Turn me into a snail. Or a cockroach.”
“Or a grown-up,” she smiled. “Yes, you did. What about the others?”
“Well, Carl Buffalo’s a moron. What’s his name, the writer, he’s a jerk.”
“Bennett Hadley. You’re sounding a little bitter, Joshua.”
“Yeah. Did you ever get Hadley’s medical records off the computer?”
“No. I didn’t think it was necessary. It’s not likely, I think, that he killed Quentin Bouvier. And obviously he didn’t kill Leonard Quarry. So his headaches aren’t really any of our business.”
“Obviously none of them killed Leonard Quarry. The guy with the ice pick must be a figment of the imagination. Quarry must not be dead.”
The gravel crunched and clicked beneath our feet.
“What do you think about Brad Freefall and Sylvia Morningstar?” she asked me.
“As killers?”
“As people.”
“I don’t know. I suppose their intentions are good. I think they’re sincere about what they’re doing. But I don’t know. I wonder whether it’s not basically dangerous. Sylvia might be using her crystals to treat someone who really requires traditional medicine.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But on the other hand, perhaps there are people whom she genuinely helps.”
I frowned. “By giving them some kind of hope, you mean.”
“At least that, yes. But you know about the work that’s been done on the psychological side of healing. Imaging. Visualization. It’s possible that Sylvia is providing a belief system that these people can accept. And possible that the beliefs actually enable them to heal themselves.”
“Or maybe her crystals have some real mojo working.”
She smiled. “Or maybe that.”
“I think I’ll stick with penicillin.”
Another smile. “What about Sierra Quarry?”
“Kind of a space cadet, I thought.”
“And Peter Jones? You liked him, you said.”
“I did. I do. And I like Carol Masters, too. She’s what I’ve been searching for all my life. A happy medium.”
Rita’s elbow thumped into my side. I laughed. I said, “I’m not so sure about her friend Araxys, though.”
“He said some interesting things, from what you tell me.”
“Love dancing with Love? Yeah. I liked that.”
“I was thinking about something else he said.”
“What?”
She said nothing. When I turned, I saw that she was smiling one of her small secret smiles.
I stopped walking. Rita stopped beside me. “Shit,” I said.
She looked up at me innocently. “What?”
“You know something, don’t you, Rita? You only smile like that when you know something that I don’t. What is it?”
Rita laughed and tugged at my arm. “Come on. Let’s keep walking.”
A Ford station wagon whooshed by, skis tethered to the rack on its roof. We had stopped at a spot where the road dipped abruptly, rolling down into the city. All of downtown Santa Fe was spread out below us—the trees, the adobe walls, the tin roofs of the homes and shops, the mismatched towers of the cathedral. Far off to the west, the purple-gray slopes of the Jemez Mountains rimmed the horizon. I may complain about the tourists and the
sharks who feed on them, but all I need is a walk like this to remind me that I probably wouldn’t be happy living anywhere else.
We walked. “So what is it?” I asked her.
She smiled. “Let’s go back to the beginning,” she said. “What was the first assumption we made about the killer?”
“The killer of Quentin Bouvier? That he was probably one of the people who was at the party that night, down in La Cienega.”
She nodded. “And when did we put that assumption aside?”
“I love it when you do this. The Socratic method. They killed Socrates, you know.”
“When?” she asked me again.
“Jeez, I dunno. The fifth century before Christ, I think.”
Her elbow thumped me again. Harder.
“Why did we drop the assumption?” she said.
“I haven’t really dropped it. I just don’t see how I can justify it.”
“Why?”
“Because someone stuck an ice pick into Leonard Quarry.”
“And from his description, that person wasn’t one of the people in La Cienega.”
“Right.”
“And you want to believe that Bouvier and Quarry were both killed by the same person.”
“Yeah. The two of them die within a week of each other. They’re both involved with the Tarot card. It seems to me that the deaths have to be connected. But the guy with the ice pick—I don’t know who he is, or how he fits in. Like I said, it doesn’t make any sense.”
She nodded. “Have you checked with Motor Vehicles about the truck that ran you off the road?”
I turned to her, frowning. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Have you?”
I sighed. “Hector told me it didn’t belong to Paul Chang. It must’ve belonged to someone he knew. But I’ve been a little busy lately.”
“I checked. There are quite a few ten-year-old Chevrolet pickups in the state of New Mexico.”
“Yeah?”
“To be on the safe side, I asked for a list of all the Chevy pickups that were between twelve and eight years old. Would you hold this for a minute?” She handed me her cane, swung her purse around, opened it, pulled out a folded sheet of paper.
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