Free The Hanged Man by Walter Satterthwait Page B

her on Thursday. I told you about her using the computer to fake the astrology stuff?”
    â€œSeveral times.” She smiled. “You know, Joshua, this affection you have for petty fraud is a little bit worrisome.”
    â€œI get a kick out of a sixty-one-year-old woman who uses a computer base to scam people.”
    â€œYou’ve only got Bennett Hadley’s word for it that she does, you know.”
    â€œI know,” I said. “But even if she doesn’t, it’s a good story.”
    â€œWhat do you think of his story about Bernardi killing Bouvier?”
    â€œI don’t like that one as much. If the whole point is that Bernardi killed Bouvier because Bernardi saw him as a traitor, then why didn’t he hang him up by his ankles? Which, on Hadley’s argument, is what Bernardi would’ve done. Should’ve done.”
    â€œThe argument is specious, obviously.”
    â€œI love it when you talk dirty.”
    She said, “Hadley feels that no one else makes a likely suspect?”
    â€œSo he says. He admits that no one liked Bouvier, but he’s convinced, or says he is, that no one disliked him enough to kill him. Except Bernardi.”
    She said, “What about the connection between Bouvier’s wife and Veronica Chang?”
    â€œHadley says they were an item for a while last year. Before Justine Bouvier became involved with Peter Jones.”
    â€œThese people lead complicated lives.”
    â€œThey surely do.”
    â€œMa’am.”
    â€œWhat?” I said.
    She smiled. “When you say something like They surely do , aren’t you cowboys supposed to add ma’am? ”
    â€œYes, ma’am,” I said. “I plumb forgot.”
    She laughed. She reached out and, lightly, she put her hand on the back of my head. “Give me a kiss, you big galoot.”
    â€œYes, ma’am,” I said, swooping slowly down off my elbow. “I surely will.”
    La Cienega is a small community south of Santa Fe, hidden behind the hills to the west of the interstate. The older homes, built and still owned by Hispanic families, sit close together among the tall cottonwoods that crowd the banks of the narrow creek. Today the neat vegetable gardens, the carefully constructed chicken coops, were beginning to poke themselves out from beneath the flimsy pelt of melting snow. The trees, winter-stripped and streaked with meltwater, groped with gray spidery branches toward the faraway blue sky.
    The newer homes, most of them built by latecomer Anglos, sit farther out on the plateau, away from the water and the trees, isolated from each other by the open spaces of high desert. The house of Brad Freefall and Sylvia Morningstar was probably the largest of these. A huge compound encircled by a pale brown adobe wall, it sprawled like a fortress along the top of a long bare hill where snow lay in veins along the gullies. The rutted mud of the driveway swung through a broad wooden gate in the south wall. A sign over the gate announced to the weary, and possibly puzzled, traveler that he was entering Rancho Nirvana.
    In the courtyard, I parked the Subaru between an old Dodge pickup truck and a boxy Mercedes-Benz four-wheel-drive wagon, a vehicle that had cost more money than I earned in a successful year. Financially, these New Agers seemed to be doing okay for themselves. Justine Bouvier lived in an Egyptian eagle’s nest paneled in marble, Bennett Hadley in a dandy La Tierra minimansion, and the Freefall-Morningstars in an adobe version of Xanadu. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that perhaps I was in the wrong line of work. Maybe it wasn’t too late for me to begin a new career—foretelling the future, maybe, by squinting thoughtfully into a handful of chicken gizzards. If worse came to worst, and I bombed, I could always make gravy.
    I clambered out of the Subaru, clomped up the damp flagstone walkway that ran through the spindly