The Hanged Man by Walter Satterthwait

in danger of forgetting.
    â€œI mean,” she said, “even though I’m absolutely convinced that Quentin is still with us, the essential Quentin, it was still a terrible shock for me to wander into that room and see him hanging there.”
    â€œOf course it was,” I assured her. “How would Veronica Chang know that Leonard Quarry had wanted the card?”
    She shrugged. “I can’t imagine.”
    â€œWhat did Leonard say?”
    â€œOh, the big fat fool tried to pretend that it didn’t matter. Tried to pretend that he was being gracious about the whole thing. But you could tell, anyone could tell, that he was furious.”
    After dinner, she said, more drinks were served in the living room. Eliza Remington, who never drank anything stronger than tea or mineral water, went off to her room around nine o’clock. About fifteen minutes later, Justine Bouvier told me, the argument started.

To keep its wounded engine happy, I let the Subaru coast at fifty down the long winding run of the Ski Basin Road, past the adobe homes and the clutters of condominiums sprinkled amid the scrub pine. Most of these yuppie haciendas had been built fairly recently, after the California and Texas money flooded into the real estate market and sent prices floating skyward. Twenty years ago this had all been windswept arroyos and sunswept trees. The only occupants had been the coyotes and the rattlesnakes. The coyotes were gone now, and the rattlesnakes had become investment bankers.
    At the bottom of the hill, at the Stop sign, the road met Washington Street, and I crossed this and drove along the asphalt entrance to the Fort Marcy sports complex. I parked the wagon in the lot, the engine coughing twice. It was two o’clock. The air was warm and the sky was blue. A few men and women in shorts and sweatshirts were running doggedly around the damp dirt track that circled the field.
    Inside, I took a shower first, and sudsed myself up like Lady Macbeth on a bad morning, then spent a long time letting the scalding spray sluice off the soap. I didn’t feel dirty, exactly, after my time with Justine Bouvier; but I didn’t feel exactly clean, either.
    The municipal pool was heated just enough to prevent sedentary types from leaping into cardiac arrest after they leapt into the water, and the air that had settled over it was warm and soupy and it held the tang of chlorine. At the moment, the pool was almost empty. A heavyset older woman in a floral one-piece and a floral swim cap wallowed in a tired but determined doggy paddle. A teenage girl, her eyes invisible behind her goggles, her body beneath the gleaming black nylon suit as sleek and graceful as a young seal’s, went sliding in a sturdy and deceptively slow-looking crawl. And in the center lane, a bemuscled lout executed loud and splashy power strokes, arms furiously flashing, feet furiously flailing, flat palms smacking against the water as though hating it, flogging it. Water spattered and splattered, great gouts of silver, into the lanes on either side.
    I chose the lane at the far side of the pool and I dove in.
    My own stroke is a fairly sedate, grandmotherly affair, a kind of aquatic jog. Swimming a mile—seventy-two lengths in a pool that size—is a tedious business if you see it merely as exercise. So what you do, you don’t think about the exercise, or about anything at all. You concentrate on the sensations. The water supporting you and sliding like silk along your flanks. The smooth entry of each arm into its surface, the smooth downstroke against the density of liquid, the smooth exit. The stretch and pull of muscle. The steady suck and hiss of lung, the reassuring pump of heart. It’s a kind of meditation, I suppose. I no longer count the laps. I know that once I’ve found my rhythm and reached my speed, a mile takes me exactly thirty-seven minutes, and now and then—when I remember—I glance at the big