Forever’s Just
Pretend
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 978-0-9926552-9-7
Forever’s Just Pretend 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.
ALSO BY CRAIG MCDONALD
The Hector Lassiter Series
One True Sentence
Forever’s Just Pretend
Toros & Torsos
The Great Pretender
Roll the Credits
The Running Kind
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 FOR FOREVER’S JUST PRETEND
“I really hope Brinke Devlin comes back. I loved her the first time she came on the page and I loved her at the end, too. She’s a fascinating character. Those of us who are male writers can really appreciate how difficult it is to write such a strong and believable female character.” —James Sallis, author of Drive, regarding the character of Brinke Devlin in One True Sentence
“Experiencing the work of Craig McDonald is akin to experiencing a painting by Picasso, a dance by Baryshnikov, music by Tchaikovsky. No two people will experience it exactly the same, but everyone who does experience it will walk away richer.” —Jen Forbus, Jen's Book Thoughts
“The competition for the future of crime fiction is fierce, as it should be, but don’t take your eyes off Craig McDonald. He's wily, talented and—rarest of the rare—a true original. I am always eager to see what he's going to do next.” —Laura Lippman
“James Ellroy + Kerouac + Coen brothers + Tarantino = Craig McDonald” —Amazon.fr
“The best new crime writer in the country.” —Wisconsin State Journal
INTRODUCTION
If any label best describes the Hector Lassiter series, it’s probably “Historical Thrillers.” These books combine myth and history. The Lassiter novels spin around secret histories and unexplored or underexplored aspects of real events. They’re set in real places, and use not just history to drive their plots, but also incorporate real people.
As a career journalist, I’m often frustrated by the impossibility to nail down people or events definitively. Read five biographies of the same man, say, of Ernest Hemingway, and you’ll close each book feeling like you’ve read about five different people. So, I’ve concluded, defining fact as it relates to history is as elusive a goal as stroking smoke or tapping a bullet in flight.
History, it’s been said, is a lie agreed to. But maybe in fiction we can find if not fact, something bordering on truth. With that possibility in mind, I explore what I can make of accepted history through the eyes of one man. The “hero” of this series, your guide through these books, is Hector Mason Lassiter, a shades-of-grey guy who is a charmer, a rogue, a bit of a rake, and, himself, a crime novelist.
Some others in the novels say he bears a passing resemblance to the actor William Holden. Hector smokes and drinks and eats red meat. He favors sports jackets, open collar shirts, and Chevrolets. He lives his life on a large canvas. He’s wily, but often impulsive; he’s honorable, but mercurial.
He often doesn’t understand his own drives. That is to say, he’s a man. He’s a man’s man and a lady’s man. He’s a romantic, but mostly very unlucky in love. Yet his life’s largely shaped by the women passing through it.
Hec was born in Galveston, Texas on January 1, 1900. In other words, he came in with the 20th Century, and it’s my objective his arc of novels span that century — essentially, through each successive novel, giving us a kind of under-history or secret-history of the 20th Century.
Tall and wise beyond his years, as a boy Hector lied about his age, enlisted in the military, and accompanied Black Jack Pershing in his hunt down into Mexico to chase the Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa who attacked and murdered many American civilians in the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Villa’s was the first and only successful assault on the United States homeland prior to the events of September 11, 2001.
Much of that part of Hector’s life figures into Head Games, the first published Hector Lassiter novel and a finalist for the Edgar and Anthony awards, along with a few similar honors. That novel is set mostly in 1957. Its sequel, Toros & Torsos, opens in 1935. Subsequent books about Hector similarly hopscotched back-and-forth through the decades upon original publication.
The Betimes Books release of the Hector Lassiter series will try for something different, presenting the books in roughly chronological order—at least in terms of where each story starts as the novel opens. The series now opens with One True Sentence, the fourth novel in original publication sequence, but the first novel chronologically.
Set in 1924 Paris, that novel is now followed by its intended sequel, Forever’s Just Pretend, enjoying its first-ever publication and completing a larger story revealing how Hector became the guy we come to know across the rest of the series: “The man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives”; friend to Hemingway, Orson Welles and other 20th-Century luminaries.
The rest of the repackaged series unfolds in similar fashion, a mix of the old and new titles.
The Lassiter novels were written back-to-back, and the series mostly shaped and in place before the second novel was officially published. It’s very unusual in that sense—a series of discrete novels that are tightly linked and which taken together stand as a single, larger story.
Welcome to the world of Hector Lassiter.
Craig McDonald
This novel is for James Sallis
CONTENTS
PARIS
KEY WEST
CAYO HUESO (BONE KEY — THE LAST KEY)
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
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 2
7
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CRAZY FROM THE SUN
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
Independence Day, 1925
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
Labor Day, 1925
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
Reader Discussion Questions
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“Dream as if you’ll live forever;
Live as if you’ll die tomorrow.”
CHRISTMAS
1924
“Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed and the rejected.”
—Jimmy Cannon
PARIS
Hector & Victoria
It was warm and crowded in the café. The liquor was flowing and everyone was laughing and wishing one another a Happy Christmas. Back slaps, cheek kisses and toasts all around.
Victoria sat in a corner of Le Select next to a sprawling, slightly overweight cat, watching Hector at the bar chatting with his fellow writer, Hemingway. The two authors had already spent most of Christmas Eve together. Victoria envisioned a good deal of the day and perhaps even the holiday evening would be spent with the Hemingways, as well.
Oh, Vicky liked the Hemingways just fine. They were fellow Americans, and Midwesterners, at that. Hadley and Hem recalled the people Victoria had grown up with back home. But they also had a young son, “Bumby” or Jack. The Hemingway child was a kind of knife twist for Victoria just now.
Quite soon, she would be going back there, back to the States, and going with Hector who had at last decided to return home after several years roaming Europe, an unintended odyssey that began with his ill-fated service in the last war.
Hector had met Victoria under bizarre circumstances earlier in the year, right around Valentine’s Day, she guessed. Hector had actually saved her life, rescuing her from a killer. She had heard another woman close to him—his lover before Victoria, a woman named Brinke Devlin—had fallen prey to the murderer.
Although Hector had eventually taken Vicky into his life, then into his bed—although he was paying her way back to the States—he’d always made it clear he wasn’t looking for a permanent entanglement with her. Hector had warned Victoria from the start that the New Year would find him returning to America, and then moving on from New York alone, headed for parts unknown.
Yet it should be different now, she thought.
Hadn’t they been mostly happy together these past few months?
Seemingly, Hector respected Victoria’s remaining secrets, and she respected his—including the sense that some other woman evidently waited for him back there in America. She never confronted Hector about that. She never put the question to him directly.
But sometimes the pale-skinned, raven-haired Victoria caught Hem or Hadley looking at her with this curious mix of affection and concern, almost as if she reminded them too vividly of someone else, someone Victoria could only believe must have been close to Hector. Maybe it was the dead woman? Perhaps it was this Brinke?
It should be different, she thought again, watching the handsome young author.
It was Christmas, and they were lovers, and Hector had at last secured publication of his first novel. They should be returning to their homeland as a triumphant married couple, Victoria thought. Returning to celebrate Hector’s new novel and their departure from this old European city that had stripped so much from them.
But it wouldn’t be like that.
Tonight Hector would be in her arms of course.
This Christmas night he would be hers, but not in the ways that truly counted or mattered most to Victoria. And of course it wouldn’t endure.
This night in the City of Lights, engulfed in laughter and music, Victoria already viewed Hector Lassiter as the one who got away.
KEY WEST
Brinke, Miguel
& Mike
Christmas? It didn’t feel that way at all to Brinke Devlin.
Oh, someone had tipsily strung some colored lights around the bar, and a drunken Creole was playing plinking Christmas tunes on a ukulele, but for a Midwesterner like Brinke, an Ohio girl who had grown up with snow on the ground most Decembers, it felt like a false holiday.
Yet she couldn’t bear to spend this night of all nights alone, holed up somewhere in silence and solitude, wondering what Hector Lassiter might be doing this Christmas night back in their city, so far back there in the City of Lights: Hector, handsome, charming and solo lobo.
So Brinke had brought her notebook to this “blind pig” and found a corner table. She was bent over the table now, all concentration and writing by candlelight, about halfway through the first draft of a new novel.
Her efforts to compose worthy prose in this bar were so far a mixed success. The noise and the music was a welcome distraction from her thoughts. Brinke was making some progress in her writing.
Yet as an unattached, fetching woman in a bar full of drunks, Brinke was also a target of opportunity.
So far, she was successfully rebuffing occasional approaches, rejecting all offers of free drinks calculated to lead to something more.
Brinke was mostly so far successful in ignoring the lustful, baleful gazes she felt upon her, including those from the tallish, rather strapping Cuban man at the bar. She’d heard the bartender call the man “Miguel,” or something like that. This Miguel was the one she sensed might be the most difficult to cool off at this point. He seemed full of passionate intensity.
Fortunately, he was also nearly legless drunk.
So for her part, Brinke figured she could wait out Miguel: let him get so plastered he wouldn’t be a threat of any kind, so there’d be no danger of him following her out of the bar.
Focused on Miguel, Brinke never really registered the rather fat, balding man sitting in a corner opposite hers. Mike Rogers, publisher and editor of one of the island’s two local newspapers, was sitting at a table with his own notebook and pen.
But Mike wasn’t writing a book, or even penning a news article tonight for his rag.
Mike was instead putting away the rum and colas and drawing pictures of Brinke nude in his notebook.
Focusing again on her prose, Brinke drifted in and out of the bar in a sense, trying instead to stay immersed in the country of her story. She was determined to use her creativity to distract herself from thoughts of Hector at ends in their former city. From thoughts that at least two months remained before she might possibly see Hector again.
Hector Lassiter. Just thinking of the name made Brinke smile.
CAYO HUESO
(BONE KEY — THE LAST KEY)
Valentine’s Day, 1925
“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
—Oscar Wilde
1
The man sat sweating in the shade, awaiting the sunset and watching the child.
The room the man had rented for the past three days had a patio that faced the narrow, stingy beach. Each day he’d sat sweating in the shade of that patio, wearing shorts and a damp T-shirt, brooding and watching the other hotel guests laughing and loafing by the shoreline.
Most of them were older, retired men on holiday with their wives. Probably refugees from the Midwest based on what he could hear of their a
ccents. “Snowbirds,” the Floridians called them.
There were a couple pairs of newlyweds, and, now, another, still younger couple who wore no rings. Probably those last two had sneaked off from some other part of the Sunshine State for a first night of lovemaking. That girl would probably wind up pregnant.
Or, given what the man was going to do to the hotel once the sun went down, maybe not.
There were two or three families; some with young children.
One of those families had a single child. She was a cute, pudgy little blond girl whose coloring echoed her mother’s eyes and hair. The girl was clearly a first child, doted on and fretted over.
The man had noticed the girl and her parents the first day he’d checked in. He’d made a point to find their room number.
If it wouldn’t put him at risk, perhaps later in the evening he’d go ahead and knock on their door, try to give them a fighting chance. Call it salve for his conscience.
Now the little blond girl was waving at a distant ship with a tiny shovel. The man’s stomach churned. Yes, maybe he would do that, try and give them that chance for flight.
The hotel was old, hell, just this side of dilapidated. The man figured none of his fellow renters could be well off.
The hotel, more of a motor court when you came down to it, was the kind of place you booked sight-unseen because it fit a price-range. Or perhaps because it was the kind of place you just ended up in, road-ragged and beat to the wide, exasperated after exhausting all better possibilities. The last rooms on the last Key.
The man looked up at the paint peeling from the wooden overhang above his room’s patio, then at the crisp scrub grown up close to the hotel’s perimeter. It was the dry season and it hadn’t rained in more than a week. The place was a tinderbox for certain. With the sea wind whipping across the shoreline, combing that dry beach grass, the man figured he’d only have to focus on two or three units. The blast-furnace wind would see to the rest.
The man checked his pocket watch. Two more hours until sunset.
Sighing, his stomach sour, he poured himself another glass of lemonade, frowning and then belching from the stomach acid that bittersweet lemon concoction brought up.
Forever’s Just Pretend: A Hector Lassiter novel (Hector Lassiter series Book 2) Page 1