Read Online The Hanged Man by Walter Satterthwait - Free Book Online

because no landscaping had been done, a bit more stark—one tall story of khaki brown, buttressed adobe rising from what had obviously been, only recently, a construction site. Where the dank earth showed between clumps of snow, it was stripped and empty.
    I parked the car, got out, hiked up the cement walkway, pushed the doorbell. After a few moments, it opened.
    He was somewhere in his forties and he was an inch or so above six feet tall. His gray hair was parted on the left, above a ruddy, good-looking face that was, at the moment, smiling in welcome. He wore a plaid flannel shirt, gray slacks, white cotton socks, expensive running shoes. In his left hand he held an amber bottle of Pacifico beer by its neck. He didn’t look like an expert in the occult. He looked like an actor, the kind of actor who plays the dependable family doctor in a soap opera. A sensitive and caring man, but still a manly man. And his voice, too, was an actor’s baritone as he said, “Croft?”
    â€œYes. Bennett Hadley?” I put out my hand.
    â€œThe one and only.” We shook hands. His grip was unnecessarily firm; but manly men, in the midst of ritual, can sometimes forget themselves. “Come on in. You drink beer?”
    â€œI’ve been known to.”
    â€œThis way.”
    I followed him down a tile-floored passageway into the kitchen. A high ceiling with square wooden beams and clerestory windows. More tile on the floor. A big butcher block table in the center. Oak cabinets all around. Hadley set his beer bottle on the table, opened the door to a large refrigerator, took out another bottle, used a church key to snap off the cap, handed the bottle to me. I thanked him, and he lifted his own bottle by the neck and said, “Let’s go outside. Nice out there today. No wind.”
    Once again I followed him. Down another tiled passageway and then through a glass door, out onto the semicircular flagstone patio. Hadley shut the door behind us and waved his bottle toward a wooden picnic table and two wooden benches. “Grab a pew.”
    The patio was warm and dry because it took the southern light and because it was mostly enclosed, a viga ceiling overhead and two low adobe walls that would cut off any wind from west or east. It was bisected, south to north, by a line of three upright, stripped pine logs that served as pillars. Hadley positioned himself against one of these, the outermost, three or four feet from where I sat. He leaned back against it, in profile to me, his arms folded across his chest, the beer bottle dangling loose. He narrowed his eyes and looked out across the unfolding hills. “Beautiful here, isn’t it?” In his voice was the same comfortable pride of possession you sometimes heard in Ben Cartwright’s voice when he gazed out at the Ponderosa.
    â€œIt’s a mighty fine spread,” I said.
    He nodded. He hadn’t heard the irony. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “an old Sufi master once told me that there was nothing so wonderful, and nothing so mysterious, as the world. Turns out he was right.” He nodded again, pleased with the notion, or pleased with himself for appreciating it.
    Although it meant shattering what was clearly a deep mystical communion between man and real estate, I said, “I wonder if I could ask you a few questions, Mr. Hadley.”
    He roused himself from his contemplative state, looked over at me, and smiled. “Ask,” he said, “and you shall receive.” He leaned away from the pillar and came and sat down opposite me, sideways, then swung his legs over the bench to face me, beer bottle on the table and held between both hands, fingers interlocked around the neck.
    I said, “Do you think Giacomo Bernardi killed Quentin Bouvier?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œWhy?”
    He shrugged. “Bernardi’s killing him was appropriate. Killing him that way, hanging him. In Bernardi’s eyes,