The Hanged Man Read Free

room.”
    â€œBut the blow didn’t kill him.”
    â€œNo. He was still alive when the scarf was tied around his neck.”
    â€œBlood?”
    â€œSome. In his hair, on the bedsheets. Some on the floor.”
    â€œWould it have gotten on the murderer?”
    â€œPerhaps. Perhaps not. There was none found on Bernardi.”
    â€œPrints on the quartz?”
    â€œWiped clean.”
    â€œBernardi wipes the quartz clean but he leaves his scarf wrapped around Bouvier’s neck.”
    Sally nodded. “I pointed that out to the state police. In the heat of the moment, according to them, Bernardi simply forgot his scarf.”
    â€œWhat about the Tarot card?”
    â€œIt hasn’t been found.”
    â€œSo it wasn’t on Bernardi.”
    She shook her head. “But he would’ve had time to hide it. So, at any rate, says the investigator for the state police, an Agent Hernandez.”
    â€œRobert Hernandez?”
    â€œYes. You know him?”
    I nodded. “Yeah. But we’re not exactly the best of friends.” A few months ago, Hernandez had come close to arresting me for murder. “What does Bernardi say about all this?”
    â€œTo the cops and the D.A.’s people, nothing.”
    â€œNothing?”
    â€œApparently the state troopers who picked him up were a bit rough. Bernardi refuses to talk to the authorities. Any of them.”
    â€œA bit rough.”
    â€œThey beat him. Bernardi was resisting arrest, they say.”
    I nodded. It was a rough work, being a cop, and sometimes it didn’t bring out the best in the people who did it. And sometimes, with a few of them, their best wasn’t any good at all.
    I asked Sally, “What does Bernardi say to you?”
    â€œThat he didn’t do it. I believe him.”
    â€œYou always believe them.”
    â€œNot always. But certainly in this case. I think he’s being railroaded.”
    I nodded. “Okay. Standard deal. I find out what I can. If it’s in your client’s favor, then you and the cops get it. If it’s not in your client’s favor, then you and the cops get that.”
    She smiled again. “You don’t have to tell me, Joshua.”
    I shrugged. “Just so you know.”
    â€œI already knew.”
    â€œWhen do I see Bernardi?”
    I saw Giacomo Bernardi at ten-thirty that morning, at the Santa Fe Detention Center on Airport Road. We talked in the interview room off the medium-security wing. A neon light overhead, cement block walls, linoleum floors, a Formica table, three plastic chairs. Penal Moderne. The Center was run by a private company, Corrections Corporation of America, and it was as clean and humane as a place like that could possibly be. No rats scurrying off into dark corners, no far-off wails and moans. No leering cons rattling tin cups along the bars. From the outside, it could’ve been one of those drab commercial buildings that optimistic realtors like to call an executive office park. And yet I’ve never walked into it without feeling sweat trickle down my sides. You left it, even as a casual visitor, only when someone said you could.
    Wearing baggy, standard-issue C.C.A. orange cotton pants, a sagging T-shirt, white socks, and a battered pair of running shoes, Bernardi was a man of medium height, overweight, with thick, tousled black hair and a day’s worth of thick black stubble salted with white. He was thirty-six years old, according to his arrest report, but he looked closer to forty. His jowls were fleshy, his lips were thick and sensual, his dark brown eyes were half hidden behind sleepy lids. The right lid was puffy, and there was a bruise, turning from blue to yellow, just beneath his right cheekbone. He sat slumped in the chair with his hands in his pockets, looking surly and morose. But, guilty or innocent, if I’d been beaten up and tossed into a cell, I’d probably look surly and morose