Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  Creedy slapped Richard then, hard. He tangled his fingers in Richard’s thinning hair. “What did you take from the Hemingway papers, Richard?”

  Richard said, “Fucking Papa—grinning at me. Why is Hemingway grinning at me?”

  Creedy scowled. “What the hell is this?”

  Richard said, “Look at Hem back there, grinning at me…giving me the finger. And turtleneck sweaters? Look at all those asshole Papas in their turtleneck sweaters. Who the fuck wears a sweater in Key West in August?”

  One of Creedy’s minions said softly, firmly, “He’s really tripping now, sir, like I said. Hallucinating. They usually black out about now.”

  Soft curses, then Creedy’s voice again: “Get him out of here. Bring in the other two. We’ll tackle that crisis, instead.”

  “What do we do with Paulson?” Creedy cursed. The professor was washing out on all fronts. It might do better just to go in balls out…personally raid the Ketchum home and take every scrap of paper in it. Hang the theft on some scholar like Paulson or consortium of rare-book sellers, maybe.

  Creedy said, “Take him back to the university. Dump him on the front lawn. Maybe he’ll die there. If nothing else, we’ll further damage his reputation that way. I hope this stuff gives Paulson brain damage.” If often did just that—about three times in six, in fact.

  Hector stepped down off the chair and slid back down the hall. In the main meeting area, things had gotten worse: the Bull Moose Brothers were engaged in acts that would make Caligula blush. It was like Pamplona in the old days, but raised—or rather, lowered—to some new depths of carnal debauchery.

  Hector cut a quick swath through all that toward the front door, intent upon following the Ford back to the university. The FBI boys were dragging Paulson right out through the main hall, oblivious to the orgy unfolding around them.

  But something wasn’t right…there was man, crouched down over a lodge brother, but not toward some sexual or violent end. Then it clicked for Hector: the crouching man was the Paulsons’ shadow—the man with the widow’s peak and red face. He was bent low over an unconscious Bull Moose, stripping the man of his fez and dark sunglasses.

  Evidently, he figured to infiltrate the lodge just as Hector had.

  The man saw Hector and snarled, dropping the fez and scrambling to his feet, moving for the door. Hector was still too far away to overtake him. Instead, he picked up a bottle of Tanqueray and flung it at the man’s back.

  The bottle hit him in the head and sent him sprawling toward the front door. With a crash, he fell through the plate glass. The stranger struggled up, clutching a hand to his gashed forehead.

  Hector gave chase to the parking lot. The bleeding man was already in his green Impala, his forehead and hand slick with blood. He gunned the engine and drove straight at Hector, sending the crime writer rolling across the hood of a Buick to be avoid being run over.

  Hector heard more squealing tires; headlights washed over him: It was the sedan with Paulson inside.

  Hector ran to his Bel Air; the stranger in the Impala’s taillights had already disappeared into the darkness—too far gone to follow. But Hector knew where the car transporting Paulson was headed. He cursed and set off toward the university, giving the Chevy some gas to close the distance on the black sedan.

  He thought more about the man with the widow’s peak. Guy seemed like hired talent…a low-rent private eye, maybe. Hector made a note to himself to break out the Yellow Pages when he got back to Sun Valley…see if any private dicks had set up shop in the Sawtooths.

  ***

  Creedy’s stooges did just what their master had ordered: rolled up in front of a lecture hall and flung his body there onto the dewy grass.

  Hector waited until the agents drove off, then hauled himself out and checked Paulson’s pulse. The scholar was hanging in there.

  Hector dragged the professor back to his Bel Air by his heels and then wedged Richard into the passenger seat. He said, “If you piss your pants or puke in my car, I swear to God I’ll kill you with my bare hands, Dick.”

  ***

  Back at the Bull Moose Lodge, Donovan Creedy surveyed the clot of naked, writhing bodies and said, “Call in the local law. Let’s arrest them. Morals charges…bringing those hookers in from out of state, that might even be a trade offense, cast in the right verbiage. I’ll think of other charges.” Watching one copulating couple, Creedy said, “Hell, there are probably still sodomy laws on the books in this hick state.”

  “No one, ever, wrote anything as well even after one drink as he would have done without it.”

  — Ring Lardner

  26

  BIRDS OF PREY

  “You two are having problems, aren’t you, Daughter? Is it the drink?” Mary rang a bell to signal her Spanish housemaid for another cocktail before lunch with her guest. “Dickie does love the Giant Killer.” Mary looked sad, then: “Does he hit you?”

  “Never,” Hannah said. “He’s mean when he’s drunk, but not physically abusive. Just gets more critical of anyone in striking range. Always targets of opportunity. It’s nothing I can’t cope with.”

  Mary said, “Papa hit me more than once.”

  “Sorry to know that. Why’d you stay?” Hannah was skeptical: Papa’s life had been combed over exhaustively, and Hannah couldn’t remember credible reports of physical abuse against any of his wives. Psychological abuse? That was quite a different matter.

  Mary said, “I was right for him.”

  Hannah said, “We’ve a saying in Scotland: ‘God shapes the back for the burden.’”

  The temperature had dropped double digits since dawn.

  But Hannah and Mary sat out on the Topping House’s deck, watching four black-winged turkey vultures glide low over the pines that ascended the mountainside. The unflapping vultures wheeled on the rising thermals, stalking something dead or dying and hidden amidst the densely-growing evergreens—perhaps some animal wounded and lost by a thoughtless hunter—deprived what Papa termed “the gift of death.”

  Hannah shivered and pulled closer the Navaho-pattern blanket that was the twin of the one draped across Mary’s hunched shoulders. Hannah tipped her head back and breathed deeply, smelling rain on the wind.

  They both turned as Jimmy Hanrahan stepped back out onto the porch with them.

  Jimmy handed Mary her cocktail, then passed a mug of hot chocolate to Hannah. Jimmy was sipping coffee he’d spiked with Jameson.

  Hannah said, “Anyway, this morning when he called, Richard swore that he’d be back tomorrow.” That was a lie—she’d had no contact with her husband. “This thing in Boise with the study center is going more slowly than planned. You know how these academics are—everybody wants to leave their mark on this center to be named for your husband; makes it treacherous to reach consensus.”

  Mary giggled. “Jesus Christ, do I ever know how it is. I know how all the fuckers are. They’re a shitty bunch, these so-called scholars. Every last rotten one of ’em. In fact, that’s our only real satisfaction now. It’s been so long since they’ve had the man alive and moving and working to attack, that the poor damned critics and academics have turned on each other. Undercutting each other’s work; pissing all over one another’s dearly-held interpretations and supposedly startling insights into Papa’s books and stories. It’s the same way with sharks and rats—wound one, and their blood drives their brothers and sisters crazy. They turn on each other and suddenly they’re just a pack of wild, fucking cannibals, as likely to tear at themselves as one another. Serves the maggots right, though. And the goddamn women are the very worst. They’re all blind to the art and crazy to kill the man. The clapped-up cunts are all bulto. Simply bulto.”

  Mary winked at Hannah. “Too bad you didn’t get my little tirade about the critics down for our book. I’d love to see that in my biography. What would they say to all that?”

  Hannah rubbed her arms. “You don’t savage critics and expect charity. Going into print with somet
hing like that would be a little like opening a vein in a piranha pool.”

  Mary said, “Guess. But you’re a literary writer, Hannah—you know what I mean.”

  Jimmy said, “Papa was a great one for taking ill-considered shots at critics. He sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind, wouldn’t you say, Mary dear?”

  “Yeah, Ernest should have clammed up,” Mary said, “but it’s hard when they savage you. Ask Hector, if you doubt me. And Hannah, you want to write, so you’ll learn the hard way.”

  Hannah shrugged. “Sixty-percent of me agrees. The other forty-percent knows serious critics and literary scholars help separate the wheat from the chaff. And as cloying, misdirected, and downright harebrained as their attentions may sometimes be, even the worst of them make some contribution toward the perpetuation of interest in a writer’s work long after the artist is dead. From my perspective, they’re a necessary evil.” Those were actually Richard’s words, not Hannah’s own. Hannah had to check her tongue from straying to her cheek.

  Mary snorted. “‘Serious critics.’ What an oxyfuckingmoron. And wait until they have a go at something you wrote. Then we’ll talk again. We’ll see how charitably abstract you can be about the critics then, missy.”

  The vultures were moving in now, tightening their circle, each dipping one still black wing as they closed on their likely long-dead prey. Mary handed Jimmy the pair of binoculars she had been intermittently using to survey the scavengers. Jimmy squinted through the eyeglasses at the vultures, each with their slightly angled, unmoving black wings, the underside of whose six-foot spans were silver. The turkey vultures’ heads were too small and bare and red—devoid of feathers that might be soiled and infected while rooting amidst the bloated, messy debris of stinking carcasses. Jimmy said, “What do you think they’re after?”

  Some motion at the periphery of his field glasses caught his eye. Jimmy tilted the binoculars low and left: There was a man down there in the fields, looking back with his own pair of binoculars. The man was tall, thin; a black suit and tie. Jimmy knew fecking FBI when he saw one.

  Mary laughed. “Oh, some dead rabbit or stray, dead sheep. A still-born deer, maybe. Papa used to sit out here and watch them for hours. He’d name them, too—Fenton and Edmund and Young and Carlos.” Mary began gathering up her blanket. “Too cold out here.” The vultures plunged below the tree line. “Let’s go inside,” Mary said. “I have to find that girl of mine so we can eat.”

  The old widow suddenly paused at the door and smiled back at Hannah. “You know, I think more and more I want you to write my biography solo lobo. To hell with Richard. You’re a writer, not an amateur shrink with a book contract and an ax to grind. And you and me, Daughter, we have too much in common, God help us. I have a hunch that you can write it truly, like nobody else—especially a man. Maybe, especially, your man—ever could.”

  Hannah shook her head. “All I’ve got is an unfinished novel that isn’t publishable. Richard says it’s a typical first novel: ‘all bombast and self-confession’. Too much description, he said. Still, I never could cut a word of it—though it probably really badly needs it—because they’re my first real words.”

  Hannah felt Jimmy’s big hand at her back. He said, “Hannah’s being self-deprecating, Mary. Hector’s been reading some of her stories. He says she’s quite good. And the lass is working on a new novel now, with Hector’s help. She’s no biographer.”

  Hannah shot Jimmy a look: What, had Hector enlisted the Irishman in his campaign to stop her writing this book with Mary?

  The widow smiled crookedly. “And I would love to see the stories, too, then. I’m sure it’s all worthier than you think, just as Hector, the old swain, says it is.”

  Jimmy bit his lip at “old swain.” He’d known Hector long enough to know there was some truth in Mary’s bitter assessment. Jimmy was forever shaking his head at Hector’s young flames. Why, he remembered one colleen, back in Ohio in 1950 who—

  Mary said, “And I don’t need any bloody fucking biographer, anyway. I require an interpreter. Either way, you really should give me something of yours to read—a short story, perhaps. Or let me have a swipe at cutting what there is of your first novel. Maybe after, I could send it on to Charlie, you know? Get it placed with Papa’s old house. Help you package it. I’ve got a solid résumé now in that respect. After all, I cleaned up Papa’s Feast and the damned thing instantly entered the canon. It’s a modern classic. Done pretty well for ourselves since that little bump back in summer of ’sixty-one, haven’t we?”

  Jimmy said, “Very well indeed. Listen, I need to get some cigarettes, Mary darling. Going to run into town…be right back.”

  Instead, Jimmy let himself out the front door and circled wide around the Topping House, staying low and behind the tree line, stealthily working his way back to where he’d seen the FBI agent.

  When Jimmy finally reached the spot, the man was gone.

  ***

  Jimmy was perspiring and short of breath by the time he got back to the Topping House’s front door. This cloak-and-dagger bullshit was a younger man’s game. He heard a car horn honk—Hector waved from his approaching Bel Air. Hector swung into the garage and climbed out of the Chevy.

  He strode up to shake Jimmy’s hand, said, “I just left Paulson at the lodge. Professor was out cold. Guess I better go and tell the wife her husband’s back. And a hell of a lot worse for wear.”

  “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.”

  — Frank Sinatra

  27

  PRODIGAL

  “I’m not so sure seeing Dick now is the best thing,” Hector said. He pulled out a little ways to see better, then palmed the wheel and hung a right, headed toward downtown Ketchum. “He’s frankly a wreck. I mean, really a mess.”

  Hannah just stared through the windshield. “Drunk you mean.”

  “At least that. Maybe something else, too.” Hector didn’t say “drugs” because he didn’t know how to put it to her in a way that wouldn’t involve expanding the discussion to encompass Donovan Creedy, and all the other crazy stuff that he was, so far, sparing Hannah.

  “I left him there in bed, incoherent. Dead to the world.”

  Hannah said thickly, “Maybe I should call a doctor.”

  Hector nodded, chewed his lip. Hell, couldn’t hurt.

  “He’s killing himself with the liquor now,” she said. “I don’t think he can stop. Ever.”

  Hector took a deep breath, said, “About how I see it too, darlin’. You should be thinking about getting away. Pronto. It’s my strong instinct. Dick’s circling the drain, honey. There’s no good end coming.”

  Hannah said, “Mary’s going to cut him loose.” She hesitated, then said it, hedging just a bit: “Mary asked me again write her biography. I’m going to say yes.”

  Hector gave her a sharp look. “That’s a different kind of trouble. You don’t jeopardize your fiction career for some goddamn whitewash about that daffy old bitch.”

  Christ: That came out much sharper than Hector intended. He said, “I just mean, it’s a dangerous distraction. You don’t want to be typed as a biographer.”

  “The biography will give me profile as an author,” Hannah said. “It’ll put me on the map and open doors for my first novel. Get me a much bigger push for that. More attention. I’m…I’m thinking of my own long game, aye?”

  He reached across and squeezed her hand. “If that’s so, then veering off into nonfiction is the last thing you want to do.”

  Hannah faltered: “I haven’t said yet that I’d definitely do it…I mean, I haven’t signed the contracts yet.”

  He smiled sadly: “Then know this, Hannah: I’m going to be doing everything I can to keep you from doing that book with Mary. It’d be a disaster—I truly believe that.”

  Hannah nodded, unable to meet his sensed searching gaze.

  ***

  Hanna
h found Richard sprawled naked on the bed, sweating booze, reeking of alcohol and something else she couldn’t define. His mouth was open and he was snoring.

  Hannah took a deep breath and drew herself up.

  A half-empty glass of wine sat on the nightstand. Next to it was an oversized jug of cheap Beaujolais, mostly gone, that smelled of vinegar—gone sour as if the cork had been left out for a day or more. But Richard drank it.

  Hannah emptied the glass and poured the dregs of the vinegarized bottle of red wine down the bathroom sink. She paused, then doubled over the sink as the baby kicked. She took another deep breath, fighting a wave of nausea. She flipped back the toilet lid in case she got sick. The bowl’s basin was speckled with blood flecks. That did it: Hannah threw up twice and flushed the toilet. Biting her lip, she pulled out the folded over paper filled with Mary’s sketch about Hannah and Richard and finally read it through:

  She was young and pretty but always off-footing with her European-Catholic raising and her Scots’ burr…her accent with her funny R’s that the other children teased her for. As she grew into a young woman, pretty and busty, the boys got around her accent well enough. But by then, Hannah was more drawn to her boyfriends’ fathers—to men who had been places and seen things. An aspiring writer herself, Hannah was most drawn to men who lived in their own heads. She chased aesthetic experiences—drawn to them like a nail to a magnet.

  Her professor was a man who was already spent when she came to him as his student. But in those early days listening to his lectures, his scholarship and easy ability to weave words before a classroom of fellow Hemingway aficionados enthralled Hannah and blinded her to his numerous shortcomings. Hannah admired Richard’s studies of Hemingway and Anderson and Fitzgerald. Best of all, she loved his account of Papa’s Paris years more than almost anything of its kind she had ever read, and she’d read it nearly all by then.