Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  “There wasn’t time for that,” Richard said. We struggled for the gun, but—”

  Creedy was in his face, like that: “That’s a lie, Richard. I have the house bugged. More, I was standing behind you. Looking through windows. I heard you scream like a woman. Heard your feet pounding up those stairs as you ran in terror. I heard the door slam. Then, peering around the corner, I saw you run from the house. Coward!”

  Creedy gave Richard a long, hard look. Creedy’s lip curled. In theory, it should be easy enough for him to get into the Topping House on his own. Drug the widow, steal the key, and not rely on this drunken, yellow academic.

  But procedure and protocol in such situations was always to use cutouts. Plausible deniability was the watchword. Compartmentalization a religion. It was tried and true: Find the guy who had the most to lose by going in, then push pressure points to make the cretin do just that. Then you owned him, all the way up and forever. All you had to do was to find the guy with a passion so desperate he’d go in on nearly no urging.

  A guy like Richard Paulson.

  A guy who lived far out to the margins—far outside any lifestyle that conformed to majority opinion and normative acceptance. Then, when that guy ran off a cliff or slammed into a wall with bloody consequences, well, nobody wondered too much or poked around too hard to see what pushed that guy over the edge.

  Such guys were clearly crazy—loners who snapped. Something to be expected…to shake a head over, and then file away and forget.

  Yes, that was the way the game was played.

  Richard said. “Are we done now? You’re finished with me, now, right?”

  The professor had this hopeful smile pasted on that made Creedy want to swing at him.

  Instead, Creedy smiled back at him. “No. You see, Richard, there’s no such thing as opting out once you’re working for me. I don’t fire people, and resignation isn’t an option. But failure? Failure can be punished. The consequences for that can be unthinkable. And now I know you’re capable of lying to me. So you have much to make up for.”

  Richard nodded feebly.

  Creedy said, “When do you go back to the Hemingway house?”

  “I have to go to Boise. But I’ll be back in a couple of days. I’ll be meeting with Mary again, then. Or I would but for today…”

  “Mary won’t remember any of this, not really,” Creedy said sharply. “She won’t even reliably remember you or Lassiter having been there. She’ll have flashes. Maybe recall bits and pieces, but she’ll write those off as fragments of dreams or DTs. The ones who take that stuff always react that way.”

  Richard shook his head. “Lassiter will know what happened.”

  “Yes, he will,” Creedy said. “But if Lassiter has further aims in all this, and he notices Mary has ‘forgotten,’ so to speak, then he’ll have reason not to tell her about you or what you all experienced. Not after his own snooping around. It’ll be a Mexican standoff—a tactical draw that affords both sides operational latitude. Call it a lie agreed upon.” Creedy was sure of all that: He had cased every angle.

  Richard said, “I don’t know….”

  “I don’t care what you think or believe, or what you kid yourself that you ‘know,’ Richard,” Creedy said. “You have no choice in any of this. You’re mine. I’m counting on you, Richard. You don’t want to disappoint me again.”

  “I understand,” Richard said, feeling sick and twisted inside. He wanted to find a bottle and a remote island.

  “Do you really understand? It’s important that you really understand, Richard. Because if you fail me again, you stand to lose a hell of a lot more than mere money.”

  “Criticism hurt me when I had failures. I thought: I’ll never write another play. But I’m an alligator. Only the alligators remain. The others get out of the water.”

  — Arthur Miller

  15

  SPADE WORK

  Hector sat in his corner booth in the lounge, nursing a white bull and thinking about Mary Hemingway. His mind’s eye kept circling back to that crazed little woman standing on the bottom step, pointing a shotgun at his head and snarling, “I killed Ernest!”

  He was of two minds about all of that: A part of Hector almost believed Mary; another part dismissed it as some drug-stoked rant, a crazed hallucination.

  He’d left Mary unconscious in her bed; the maid phoning for a doctor.

  What if Mary kept ranting on? Telling every ear in proximity she’d blown off Hem’s head?

  Hector felt he should probably go back to the Topping House soon and check on Mary. But she might draw down on him again, and this time, she might not blackout before pulling the twin triggers of the shotgun.

  Hector took another sip of his drink and hefted the paperback he’d brought along to the bar—the single Donovan Creedy paperback thriller he’d found in a wire rack at the local pharmacy.

  The book was titled The Krushchev Kill and featured a cover illustration of a grimacing man who looked more than a little like Sean Connery. Pseudo-“Sean” was snarling handsomely while emptying his automatic into the face of some bald, musclebound type. Sean managed to do this despite the near naked blond wrapped around his torso while he was in the heat of combat. Hell, the babe was literally hanging on the James Bond manqué’s gun arm. Christ…

  Hector checked the spine—Silver Medallion Press. He knew the publisher. The fella had been after Hector for several years to write introductions for, or to blurb, his paperback originals. Even once offered to give Hector his own imprint, affording Hector the opportunity to shape his own wing of crime and thriller writing. Hector had responded with a curt, “Fucking no….”

  He took another sip of his lackluster drink and then Hector read the opening paragraph of Creedy’s novel:

  Esther Pryl was a long tall drink of woman. She had pretty long hair, eyes as blue as cobalt vases and brother, she had a body. She sure knew how to use that body.

  Hector shook his head. He caught himself reaching for his fountain pen. Instead of going at the book in the margins, Hector began to edit the thing in his head. That name, Esther Pryl, didn’t work at all. If the woman was a dish she should be…oh, maybe…Mitzi Bishop. Yeah, that had some sex appeal. She’d be a redhead with pert breasts and lush hips. And there surely needed to be a comma there between “pretty” and “long.” As to the rest, well, “She had blue eyes and a fetching figure” would do well enough for the readers of this kind of book… Readers who would just want to see the hero get Mitzi out of her dress and busy putting a passionate snarl on Mitzi’s face in three or four paragraphs of knowingly tossed-off soft-core pornography.

  Snorting softly, Hector pitched the paperback atop an adjacent table. Let some Hemingway egghead loose himself in that sorry tome.

  He squeezed the back of his neck and rolled his head. Hector had burned his copy of the lost chapter, and then hidden the stolen original in a secret compartment he’d had installed years ago in the undercarriage of his Bel Air. He’d also read the strange long manuscript he’d stolen from the Topping House—this bizarre novel-in-progress that read as a love letter to Fidel and Che Guevara. It was meant to be interpreted as a work of Hem’s, but even as a parody, it didn’t come within striking distance. Hector had burned it in the fireplace in Hem’s old lodge room.

  Even though it was safely destroyed, Hector was desperate to learn where that document had come from…how it had gotten there, and most importantly, who the hell had written it. Having read that opening paragraph of Donovan Creedy’s Krushchev Kill, Hector now had some suspicions in relation to that Castro manuscript’s origins. Seemed unlikely two hack writers could be inept in so many of the same ways when it came to describing hot women.

  Hector sipped his too-sweet drink, slipped off his reading glasses and rubbed his tired eyes. As they refocused, Hector saw a dark-haired female scholar he’d been noticing around the lodge the past day or so. He narrowed his eyes; hell, she was a nice distraction from thinking about goddamn, m
aybe-murderous Mary Hemingway.

  The scholar’s black hair could use a brushing—it didn’t look careless, but uncared for. She wore it long and down, against fashion. Hector couldn’t be sure, but he thought she might have a nice-enough body under her poorly chosen, ill-fitting clothes.

  Hector knew his own tastes too well: he was always a goner for pretty, troubled women. “Birds with a wing down,” as his fellow “potboiler” writer Ian Fleming had described them. But the female scholar struck Hector as sad and neurotic by choice or inclination, and so not so much his type. But she might know some things about this other egghead lately preoccupying Hector’s thoughts.

  She was drinking something girly looking in a Tom Collins glass.

  He drained his own drink and waved his friend the bartender over to his booth.

  “Hey, Mr. Lassiter.”

  “Hey, Dave. The woman at the bar—what’s she drinkin’?”

  The bartender made a face. “An apricot fizz.”

  Hector winced. “Well, when she hits bottom on that sucker, make her a double and then point at me, would you?”

  The bartender nodded, frowning. “She’s pretty, in her way, Mr. Lassiter. But she’s been in a few times. Some kind of teacher, I think. You know, here for the conference.” The bartender shook his head. “Jesus, but the mouth on that one.”

  Hector winked. “What? You mean vulgar? Profane?”

  “I mean never shut. Not ever.”

  “Ah. Well, do it anyway, okay?”

  “Sure. Another white bull, Mr. Lassiter?”

  “Christ no,” Hector said. Dave looked relieved. “I’m writing a novel about surrealist art,” Hector said. “The white bull is a prime surrealist motif. They say a surrealist invented that drink in its honor. So sampling it was kind of…research.”

  “What did you think?”

  Hector made a face. “It tasted like a milk shake in which the milk was turned. God never intended for tequila to be abused in that way.”

  “So what’ll it be, Mr. Lassiter?”

  “Three-fingers of Talisker. Can do?”

  Dave shot Hector a thumbs-up. “Want some pretzels, too?”

  “Love some.”

  Hector broke out his old notebook and began reviewing some notes he’d made to himself back in 1947.

  The sound of a cleared throat made him raise his head:

  She said, “Hector Lassiter, yes?”

  Hector smiled at the dark-haired academic. “That’s right…Miss…?”

  “Patricia Stihlbourne.”

  “I saw you in here the other day, Patricia,” Hector said. “You’re a professor?”

  “Louisiana State.”

  Hector smiled and gestured to a chair. “That where you discovered the apricot fizz?”

  She shrugged. “They were out of Prunelle.”

  “Well, it is Idaho, after all.” He slipped his notebook and pen into the breast pocket of his sports jacket.

  Patricia smiled and said softly, “Don’t tell any of my snooty peers, but I’m a tremendous fan of yours, Mr. Lassiter.”

  “Hector.” He was surprised by her admission. He said, “Really? You’re a reader of mine?”

  “Really,” she said. “The Land of Dread and Fear was one of my three favorite reads last year.”

  She’d gotten the title right. Hector thought she might really be a reader of his work. “How’d you get onto me? So far as I can tell, I’m mostly off the Norton Anthology’s radar.”

  “You might be surprised.” She sipped her extra-tall drink and said, “A couple of years ago, a precocious and percipient student of mine wrote a paper: ‘Hector Lassiter and the Agony of the Postmodern Detective.’ My pupil made a compelling case for you as one of the pioneers of postmodern fiction, despite your classification as a genre writer by most critics.”

  “Some smart kid,” Hector said. “Male, or female?”

  “Female.”

  “More’s the better. I need to broaden my fan base.”

  “Of course I already knew of you as a personality,” Patricia said. “Hemingway has been my area of specialization for years, so I knew of you through your association with Ernest. But my student’s paper was what made me one of your readers.”

  He said, “I’ll confess, I was eavesdropping on you the other night in here. I was watching you, Patricia.” She’d been at a table with Richard Paulson and some other academics.

  She smiled, already looking a little drunk. “Why?”

  “Because I have to stand up in a room in front of a couple of hundred just like you and jaw. That’s a harrowing prospect for a pioneering postmodern pulp writer with a high school education.”

  She stirred her drink with her finger, plucked out a cherry, ate it then put the stem in her mouth. Narrowing his eyes, Hector watched her. She smiled then pulled the stem from her mouth with thumb and forefinger and dropped the stem on the table. She’d tied a knot in the cherry stem with her tongue. Pretty tight knot, at that.

  Hector thought, Well, well!

  “Word is you’re ducking every scholar who’s tried to strike up a conversation, Mr. Lassiter. But here we are.” She smiled at his reaction to the stem. He bit his lip and looked up from it and searched her eyes.

  “Well, Patricia, there’s conversation and there’s interrogation. The latter doesn’t interest me. And those others don’t have your eyes and smile.” And, he thought, they can’t do that to a cherry stem with their little pink tongues.

  “So I should be flattered we’re talking now, Hector? This is a conversation to some end?”

  Or someone’s end, Hector thought. He shrugged. “Tell me about this Richard Paulson. I know him a little but not nearly enough. Saw you at his table the other night.”

  Patricia smiled. “He’s got one great book about Hemingway’s Paris years.”

  “Yeah, I read it. Wasn’t terrible.”

  “How close did Richard come?”

  Hector smiled. “Close enough, I guess. Caught the spirit of the times, anyway.”

  “Tell me more,” she said, unclasping her purse and taking out an enameled cigarette holder.

  Hector fished his old Zippo from his pocket and fired her up. She looked at the inscription:

  To Hector Lassiter:

  ‘One true sentence.’

  — E.H.

  Key West, 1932

  Patricia said, “My God, I’ve read about this lighter, and about your game you two played—finishing one another’s sentences.” She smiled. “The famous ‘true sentence’ challenges you and Papa set for one another: perfectly crystallized phrases that reveal an immutable truth put forth with an eye toward economy and uncluttered stylistic perfection.”

  Not the way Hector would have put it, but she got the gist. He said, “On the nose.”

  “And, wow, 1932. They built these lighters to last, didn’t they?”

  “Zippo offers a free repair program,” Hector said. He watched her hand drift from the lighter to his fingers…her slender fingers stroking his. Patricia’s nails were varnished red but chewed down. Hector didn’t know if he would go in this direction in life, not just yet, but the opening line of a story or novel suddenly occurred to him: When you start sleeping with women younger than your cigarette lighter, you know you’ve turned a sorry corner.

  He filed it to fret over later. He said, “What are Richard’s politics? He kind of right wing?”

  Patricia wrinkled her nose. “Good God, no. We’re nearly all Marxists, and Richard is left of me.”

  “I’d always heard it was so—all you longhairs being lefties, I mean.”

  “Then why’d you ask that?”

  Hector smiled back. “Suppose I’m just trying to draw out this time with you.”

  She gave that the smile it deserved.

  She looked prettier to Hector now: bedroom eyes, sultry mouth and a long neck. And Hector was suddenly aware of her leg pressed against his, moving slowly up and down.

  She frowned suddenly. �
��What time do you have?”

  Hector checked his Timex. “Ten to noon.”

  “Damn,” Patricia said. “I have to fly—I’m moderating a panel. ‘Hemingway and the Hidden Other.’ Sort of considering Papa through the prism of Jung. You could come, and after….”

  Her leg ran up and down against his again.

  That felt good, but he had no patience for that panel. He said, “Got some things I have to handle over the next couple of hours. So I’m afraid I can’t make it, darlin’. You here for the whole conference?”

  “Yes,” she said, disappointed. “You, too?”

  “To the bitter end. Let’s pick this up later, yes?”

  Patricia smiled. “It’s a date.”

  “Unless the bastards (critics) have the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore them.”

  — John Steinbeck

  16

  JACKALS

  As she roamed the dark paneled halls of the lodge, Hannah’s fingers trailed across the frames of the black-and-white photos of the Hollywood elite of the 1940s and ’50s who made Sun Valley their winter sports Mecca: candids of Ingrid Bergman and Clark Gable and Howard Hawks and sundry Olympians. Hannah lingered on glossies of the great man with his three sons and his drunken toadies and the two wives who made the annual treks to Idaho with him—Martha and, predominantly, Mary, who made the last trip, and stayed on to bury him.

  Hannah—the fourth Mrs. Paulson, as she had come to think of herself since her brief visit with widow Mary—grabbed a corner booth in the cozy, lowly lit Duchin Lounge. She positioned herself under a picture of the fortyish, paunchy Papa, sporting “that fat married look,” mustached and grinning, kneeling with Gary Cooper and a forgotten other outdoorsman and two alert, black hunting dogs, all of them seemingly proud of the game birds they had killed.

  “The fourth Mrs. Paulson.”

  Hannah still wondered how Mary knew so much about Richard’s private life. And so far she couldn’t bring herself to read the rest of Mary’s impromptu sketch about Hannah and Richard’s marriage. Just the paragraph or two she’d read in the Topping House had unnerved Hannah terribly. She quizzed Richard later. Pressed, Richard claimed he had not shared anything about his marital history with Mary in their correspondence or during phone calls leading up to the Idaho trip.