The Hanged Man Read Free Page B

a gratifying mixture of surprise and pleasure whenever I looked across the desk and saw her sitting there, saw her hair, black as raven wings, outlined against the pale blue sky beyond the window. I felt other things, as well, but Rita preferred that we didn’t discuss those in the office.
    Rita said, “You’re sounding a bit provincial, Joshua. But I imagine that’s because, unlike Bernardi’s English, your Italian is absolutely fluent.”
    â€œWell,” I said. “I admit that it’s not up to my Urdu. But then, few things are.”
    â€œYou’re not happy with this case.” She was wearing a black bolero vest over a blue silk blouse, and her hair was swept back over her ears and gathered into a chignon. She had an extremely good neck, and her neck was far from being her best feature. I’ve never been able to decide just what, exactly, her best feature is. Her large dark eyes? The regal Hispanic nose, the arch of Indian cheekbones? The wry parentheses at the corners of her wide red mouth?
    â€œAre you kidding?” I said. “I love it. Astrologers, Satanists, Tarot readers, spiritual alchemists. My culture heroes, all of them. I can’t wait to sit down with these honchos and shoot the shit. I can get my aura polished. I can get my chakras looked into. I’ve been worried about my chakras lately. I think they need recharging.”
    â€œI love it when you whine,” she said. “You know you’re going to take the case. Sally asked you to.”
    Three years ago, a man named Martinez had shot Rita and her husband, killing him and wounding her so badly that her doctors had been convinced she would never walk again. She was walking now, but she’d been in a wheelchair for a very long time. Three years ago, I had gone looking for Martinez. I had found him, and things had happened, and shortly afterward I had found myself in court, accused of attempted murder. Sally had defended me, successfully, and she had refused to accept any payment.
    â€œYeah,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
    â€œWhat else did Bernardi tell you?”
    â€œThat he didn’t kill Bouvier.”
    â€œYou believe him.”
    â€œI’m inclined to. Doesn’t make sense to me that he’d wipe prints off the chunk of quartz and then leave his scarf hanging there.”
    â€œHow did the scarf manage to wrap itself around Bouvier’s neck?”
    â€œHe doesn’t know.”
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    What Giacomo Bernardi had said was that after the argument with Bouvier, he had gone off to brood in the library, taking with him a bottle of sambuca—the Freefall-Morningstar household, New Age or not, evidently kept a well-stocked bar. He had sat in the library, alone, watching a soccer match on cable TV and hitting the sambuca vigorously. I’d gotten the feeling, talking to him, that hitting sambuca vigorously was an activity with which he was not entirely unfamiliar.
    Eventually, he said, he fell asleep, still sitting in his armchair. He was awakened by what he described as a noise.
    â€œWhat kind of noise?” Rita asked me.
    â€œHe doesn’t know. A noise. Whatever it was, it woke him up. And then, he says, he heard someone running in the hallway. He said it sounded like someone running barefoot.”
    Still groggy from the aftereffects of half a bottle of vigorously hit sambuca, Bernardi had stumbled out of the library and into the hallway. Looking down the hall, he saw that one of the bedroom doors was open—Bouvier’s. Without thinking much about it, probably without thinking at all, he shambled down the hall and looked into the room. Hanging immobile at its center, attached to a beam by a scarf that Bernardi recognized as his own, a long red silk scarf trimmed with gold, was a very dead Quentin Bouvier.
    Rita said, “Where had the scarf been before this?”
    â€œIn