THE RUNNING
KIND
A Hector Lassiter novel
Craig McDonald
First published in the English language worldwide in 2014 by Betimes Books
www.betimesbooks.com
Copyright © 2014, Craig McDonald
Craig McDonald has asserted his right under the Universal Copyright Convention to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, sold, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, print, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and the copyright owner.
ISBN 978-0-9929674-3-7
The Running Kind is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by JT Lindroos
Also by Craig McDonald
The Hector Lassiter Series
One True Sentence
Forever’s Just Pretend
Toros & Torsos
The Great Pretender
Roll the Credits
Head Games
Print the Legend
Three Chords & The Truth
Write From Wrong (The Hector Lassiter Short Stories)
Standalones
El Gavilan
The Chris Lyon Series
Parts Unknown
Carnival Noir
Cabal
Angels of Darkness
The Daughters of Others
Watch Her Disappear
Nonfiction
Art in the Blood
Rogue Males
Praise
“With each of his Hector Lassiter novels, Craig McDonald has stretched his canvas wider and unfurled tales of increasingly greater resonance.” —Megan Abbott
“Reading a Hector Lassiter novel is like having a great uncle pull you aside, pour you a tumbler of rye, and tell you a story about how the 20th century 'really' went down.” —Duane Swierczynski
“What critics might call eclectic, and Eastern folks quirky, we Southerners call cussedness -- and it's the cornerstone of the American genius. As in: "There's a right way, a wrong way, and my way." You want to see how that looks on the page, pick up any of Craig McDonald's novels. He's built him a nice little shack out there way off all the reg'lar roads, and he's brewing some fine, heady stuff. Leave your money under the rock and come back in an hour.” —James Sallis
“Craig McDonald is wily, talented and - rarest of the rare - a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either.” —Laura Lippman
“James Ellroy + Kerouac + Coen brothers + Tarantino = Craig McDonald” —Amazon.fr
This novel is dedicated to Charlie Stella
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
PART I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART II
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
PART III:
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
PART IV:
Chapter 47
Reader Discussion Questions
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
FOREWORD
By Craig McDonald
The year is 1950: Author and screenwriter Hector Mason Lassiter stands at his own half-century mark as this book unfolds in a snowbound, Youngstown, Ohio, hotel.
Hector’s sidekick in this book is the Irish cop prominently featured in the previous novel, Roll the Credits, James Butler Hanrahan.
As fictional characters in Hector’s universe go, Jimmy has his own secret history. Jim was originally a key player in what was my long-ago first completed novel, Parts Unknown, a fictionalization about the Cleveland Torso Slayer that I penned as the 1980s wound down. The Torso Slayer, or so-called “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” was a puckish fiend who killed upwards of a dozen people in and around Cleveland—always by beheading—and was never officially caught.
Eliot Ness of Untouchable’s fame—then Cleveland Safety Director—doggedly pursued the serial killer through the dark Depression-era years to no successful legal end. The postcards mailed to Ness mentioned in this book (as well as Parts Unknown, now available as an eBook original as part of my ongoing Lassiter-companion Chris Lyon series) are based on historical fact. So is the hinted-at, identity of the murderer portrayed here and in Parts Unknown (that latter book functions as Jimmy Hanrahan’s elegiac swansong in the larger Lassiter-Lyon universe).
As is always the case, the historic figures cropping up along the way in The Running Kind are portrayed in as close to their actual historical settings and contemporary locations as possible.
Rod Serling of Twilight Zone fame came and went through Yellow Springs many times in the course of his woefully foreshortened life and as dictated by the ebbs and flows of his career.
Many years back, I sat writing in the same booth as Hector in the particular stagecoach stop-cum-bar faithfully described in this book, writing and also listening to some academic old-timers reminisce about Serling’s informal writing lectures delivered in that place over countless beers.
The Kefauver hearings were every bit the TV sensation described in the pages that follow, and an abject embarrassment to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who spent decades denying the existence of the mob until the televised hearings forced Hoover to a hated capitulation that, Yes, Virginia, there is a Mafia.
This novel also marks a kind of cresting of a last hill, in a sense.
Although I reserve the right to compose future, standalone Lassiter novels, the series was originally conceived as a nine-book, unified arc, as I’ve said many times since the series launched in 2007.
Just three more novels in the original arc remain to be published by Betimes Books, but only one more will be entirely new.
The Running Kind, then, is in every real sense, the penultimate Lassiter adventure. Call it the beginning of the end.
—Craig McDonald
October, 2014
PART I
— YOUNGSTOWN, OHIO —
December 1950
“You often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it.”
— French proverb
“It is a long road that has no turning.”
— Irish proverb
1
No happy ending ever started in a bar.
The old friends had chosen
to murder the afternoon drinking in the shadowy hotel pub mostly to evade December’s bitter chill.
“All I’m sayin’ is that any son of a bitch who sets off in a plane for California—and who then ends up landing in feckin’ Ireland—that son of a bitch is deserving of something far better than simple scorn,” Jimmy Hanrahan said, tapping a blunt finger against the other man’s chest. “Besides, he’s from your neck of the woods, Hec. He’s another Galveston boy.”
Jimmy looked out the hotel pub’s window at the fresh flurries accumulating atop old, too-high drifts. He shook his head and sighed.
Hector Lassiter rose and fished change from his pocket. He said, “Jimmy, only a romantic Irish expatriate like you would still think of defending Corrigan. Mention your motherland and you get positively dewy. As calamitous decisions go, you leaving Ireland was some flavor of tragic, I think.”
Jimmy was big and beefy and about Hector’s height—topping out over six feet, but also coming in a good bit over Hector’s weight. Jimmy went at least two hundred fifty pounds. He had graying-brown hair, blue eyes, and a nose broken so many times it looked like something no anatomist had invented a word for yet. Jimmy snorted and sipped his Irish whiskey. “Not already calling it a day, Hector? Eager to get back to the writing table? Or maybe you’re just off to siphon the python?”
“Huh-uh,” Hector said, flipping a nickel and then catching it in his hand. “Just going to improve the music.” He didn’t call it loud but checked: the coin came up tails.
Nat King Cole was singing Mona Lisa, a song Hector regarded as syrupy, yet it had been played nearly to death the past few months. Increasingly, Hector felt out of touch with the sorry drift of popular culture. The crime novelist sauntered over to the jukebox, scanned his options and plugged in a Percy Mayfield tune as well as Vaughn Monroe’s cover of Riders in the Sky.
Returning to his stool, Hector held up a finger for another shot of Jameson. Jimmy said, “What’d you opt for, Hec? Not more of that hillbilly crap you favor these days, I hope?”
The rangy Irishman had been Hector’s good friend since their late teens, going all the way back to Europe, and, later, to the bloody bootleg wars waged along the Great Lakes.
Back then, Jimmy was a relatively new cop. In ’36, the year Hector last reconnected with Jimmy in the Buckeye State for any real time alone, “Untouchable” Eliot Ness had been fresh from Chicago and chasing Al Capone. Ness had recently been appointed director of public safety for the Mistake on the Lake. Jimmy was swiftly tabbed as one of the force’s rising stars and promptly promoted to detective by Ness.
Because of the most recent European war and some lingering, bloody business spinning out of all that, it had been a long time since Jimmy and Hector had last crossed paths.
Jimmy was taking a rare vacation in Youngstown, of all places. Because Hector was also roaming the east on the way back south from a meeting with his New York-based publisher, they’d agreed to risk hooking up close by the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.
Mostly, their first couple hours together had been spent in grisly, Police Gazette-style shoptalk. Seemed Jimmy was in Youngstown chasing clues to a long unsolved series of mutilation murders—still doggedly pursuing his bête noire, the so-called “Cleveland Headhunter,” a.k.a. the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.”
The Butcher was credited with disarticulation and decapitation murders across the upper Midwest, crimes spanning decades and thousands of miles, but mostly grisly slayings committed around Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh.
Hector had relatively recently gotten caught up around the edges of a similar crime in Los Angeles, the harrowing case of the “Black Dahlia” as the breathless newspaper boys dubbed the tragically murdered and mutilated would-be actress Elizabeth Short. Some in police and conspiracy-theory circles thought the “Black Dahlia Avenger” and “Headhunter” killings linked. A letter sent the press a few years before the Dahlia’s mutilation murder claimed the Cleveland killer was fleeing the chilly Buckeye State for the City of Angels. The letter writer even referred to a severed head buried in almost exactly the location where Beth’s bisected body was later found.
For reasons of his own, Hector didn’t buy the theory of the Dahlia-Butcher link, not even a little, but he wanted to see Jimmy, so he’d made the icy run down from New York.
Percy Mayfield began crooning Please Send Me Someone to Love. Hanrahan listened to a few bars, grunted and said, “This isn’t so bad a tune. It’ll do.”
“It’s a great song,” Hector said. He stared into his glass, then said, “Jimbo, you’ve really gotta commence letting go of this Kingsbury Run business. You’ve been decades on this mess. The guy who murdered all those folks around these parts, that hombre’s gotta be long gone south of the sod by now. Please don’t let yourself be run crazy by it anymore, buddy.”
Jimmy rolled his eyes. “If only that seemed so, Hec. It bein’ over, I mean. But another lassie was cut up this past July. Just like the others. Exactly like the others. It’s the same fiend. I’ll stake my life and reputation, such as it remains, on all that.”
Hector narrowed his pale blue eyes. “You really believe that?”
The cop shook his head. “Not a scrap of doubt. And something else happened at an industrial site in Cleveland recently. A fairly large fellow was seen sunning himself on some steel girders that had been sitting there for almost two years. The man showed up every day for nearly six weeks. He spent about twenty minutes in the sun there each day.” Jimmy sipped his whiskey and shook out a Lucky Strike. He shrugged off a little chill.
Hector picked up his old Zippo and tossed it to the Irish detective. Jimmy caught it and said, “Now, this place is not the kind of place you lay out to catch some rays, Hector. Really not that kind of garden spot.” Jimmy said that last through a haze of smoke. He closed the lid and glanced at the engraving on Hector’s lighter that read, “One True Sentence.” Jimmy ran his fingers over the surface of the Zippo then handed it back to its owner.
Hector slipped the lighter into his sports jacket’s pocket. He said, “What’d this fella look like?”
“Fiftyish, like us,” Jimmy said. “That’d make him a young man when the Butcher was in his natural prime. This man, he had thinning gray hair and he was heavyset.”
Hector bit his lip. “How exactly does this tie back to the Kingsbury Butcher?”
“The boyo stopped sunning himself, stopped right in the middle of summer. About the time he ceased cosseting his tan, the workers around the area started to notice this stench. Then, on July 22, a couple out for a walk found a severed leg in a field. Limb was still fairly fleshy. That set minds working about the stink under that steel pile, and we started poking around there. Under the steel, right where that sunbather had sunned for six weeks, we found a torso. Also some severed parts. One leg and both arms. The head turned up a few days later, close-by. Under the body was a May 1949 copy of the Cleveland News’ sports pages and a couple of pages torn from a phone book. Listings under the letter K.”
Hector blew smoke out both nostrils. “K for Kingsbury, you’re thinking?”
“Who’s to say with certainty?” Jimmy said. “But even our crazy coroner back in Cleveland, Mariposa, he admits it looks like the Kingsbury Butcher all over again. What do you think?”
“I think it’s just this side of chilling,” Hector said. “More than a tad skin-crawling, even. I think maybe—”
Hector was cut short by an urgent tug at his sports coat’s sleeve. He glanced to his side; saw nothing. Another tug. He looked down.
A blue-eyed, blond girl, maybe five, perhaps six, looked up at him, scared and imploring. “Please, mister, my mommy needs help!”
Hector exchanged a glance with Jimmy and they rose together. They drained their drinks and ground out their cigarettes. Hector called to the keep, “Room 301. Put it on my room’s bill, won’t you, sport?” Then he took the little girl’s tiny hand and looked around for a parent.
The little girl was d
ressed well and had festive ribbons in her hair. She was wearing a Black Watch plaid wool coat with attached cape and a furry muff dangling around her neck. High-gloss, black patent-leather shoes on her tiny feet. The girl clutched tightly to a lookalike doll dressed in a miniature version of her own outfit.
Jimmy lifted the little girl up and wrapped an arm under her to support her. Getting her face up even with his own and smiling, he asked, “And where’s your mother, angel?”
“Down there,” the little girl said. She pointed across the lobby to a descending flight of stairs under a sign that read “Restrooms & Shoeshines.”
The little girl said, “Mommy really needs your help, right now!”
Hector jerked his head for Jimmy to follow. He said over his shoulder, “What’s your name, honey?”
“I’m Shannon,” she said.
“Let’s hurry then, Shannon,” Hector said, patting his left side and then remembering he’d left his big old Colt ’73 hidden in his luggage upstairs. He cursed under his breath.
Hector took the steps three at a time. A sign at the bottom pointed left for the women’s restroom, and right for the men’s. He drifted leftward but the little girl in Jimmy’s arms said urgently, “No mister, the other way!” Hector obeyed.
An old black man was sitting in his own shoeshine chair near the door of the men’s room, fiddling with a brush and looking scared and ashamed for his own fear.
A woman yelled, “No!” There was the sound of a slap, then she snarled, “I said no, damn you!”
A man yelled back, “Bitch! You are coming back! Now do it quiet-like or we’ll hurt that kid. Boss man gave the all clear to rough her up good. Joe is up there right now looking for her. If he finds that girl first, it will not be a good thing for anybody. Do you get me?”
Jimmy deposited the little girl in a vacant stall. Closing the door on her, he pressed a big finger to his lips and said, “Sit tight, angel eyes. And do please hush!” A reassuring smile as he closed the door on her.
Hector could see the woman now—two women, really.
A pair of men were waving guns at the ladies. The thugs were dressed in down-market hats and overcoats but expensive-looking shoes. They turned at the sound of Jimmy’s instructions to the scared little girl.
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