Forever’s Just Pretend: A Hector Lassiter novel (Hector Lassiter series Book 2)

by Craig McDonald

  “You’ve now seen the scars on my back from our last bout of playing detective, honey. And all our dead back in Paris? Hell, our best friends in the Quarter think you’re among the fallen. Leave it to the local law, darlin’.”

  Brinke shook her head. “No can do, love. The local law is an elected official in the hip pocket of other elected officials. A rube. Probably a crooked rube.”

  “Yet all of these elected officials must have wives and sisters and daughters who could fall victim to this so-called Clubber,” Hector said. “Way I see it, there’s no damn percentage in this top cop doing flat nothin’. Not if he wants to stay in office, sweetheart.”

  Brinke shook her head. “It’s against my instincts. And against my conscience. Against yours too, if you knew the whole story.”

  “This is sure ghoulish pillow talk for our first night back together, Brinke.”

  “Then we’ll save that chat for breakfast. For now, let’s spoon and neck and pet some more.” She kissed her way up his chest. She bit his neck. Then Brinke sat up suddenly. “Oh, I need you to inscribe my copy of Rhapsody in Black. You wrote a great crime novel, Hector. It’s a hell of a debut. And you surprised me with that ending. That never happens anymore.”

  “Thanks. You’re the one who prodded me to write the novel, you know. Wouldn’t exist without you. Hence the dedication.”

  She kissed him. “And I thank you for that. But only you could have written that book, Hector. It’s dark and sad and wonderful. Fearless in its way.”

  “Your first Bud Grant novel, Triangle. Now, that was a hell of a book.”

  She kissed him. “You’re so good to say so.” Then she put her fingers to her lips to hush him. She slipped naked from the bed and turned off the fans. Brinke was all Sheba—Hector never tired of looking at her.

  Brinke settled back on the bed with Hector and said softly, “Just shush and listen for a minute, please? This is my favorite time of night. Only the wind chimes and the ocean. Sometimes the horn from some far-away ship. But it’s wickedly hot without the fans, so I don’t do it often.”

  Hector gently kicked off the sheet. “Well, then we’ll just sit and listen for a while. Heat’s no big thing. A nice change from your drafty garret in the Quartier Latin. Let’s just listen to those sounds you love.”

  5

  Terrible shrieks wrenched Hector from his sleep.

  “Holy Jesus, I feel like I’m on a farm.” Hector struggled up onto his elbows, bleary-eyed and frowning at the screeching outside.

  “Those things are fighting cocks,” Brinke said, making a face. “The island is lousy with them. They roam the streets, sometimes attacking even the dogs. There are cock matches held all over the island. Horrible blood sport. Makes bull fighting look almost palatable.”

  Hector stroked her longer hair. Smiling and shaking his head, he said, “Christ, this sand dab really is like some border town.”

  Brinke kissed his shoulder then playfully bit it. “Already having second thoughts about living here?”

  Hector leaned over and kissed her breast; tasted heady salt. “Nah, it feels right. Definitely my kind of place.”

  Brinke pressed his face to her breast again. She stroked his unshaven cheek and stood and stretched. She pulled on a light silk robe that didn’t reach her knees. It was something Oriental that Brinke had picked up in her travels, Hector figured. He saw himself as quite the maverick, but Brinke was five years older than he was and consequently had covered that much more ground. The woman was the consummate explorer. She looked at him and said, “For weeks I’ve imagined this morning, waking up and seeing you there in that bed. Our bed.”

  “With the imagination you’ve got I can’t imagine reality is shouldering up too comfortably to your dreams.”

  “You’re right,” Brinke said. “This is so much better.”

  Hector cupped her chin in his hand and kissed her, soft and slow. He whispered in her ear, “They say you should be careful what you dream, because eventually, your dreams will be dreaming you.” He softly nipped at her ear lobe with his teeth.

  Brinke hugged him closer. “You pinch that pearl of wisdom from Gertrude Stein? Perhaps Jim Joyce?”

  “My grandfather.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “He is at that,” Hector said. “Men that side of my family live a long, long time somehow. He lives on Corpus Christi Bay. Well, mostly. He’s on the road a lot, too. Lives large and wide.”

  Brinke bit her lip, said, “We have an extra room here. See if he’ll cross the Gulf. One of us should have family at our wedding and my side’s not an option. Think he’d come?”

  Hector stretched back out on the bed. He crossed his hands behind his head. “Asked? Sure. He’d likely be flattered. I could send him a wire later today.”

  “So let’s do that very thing, Hec. I’d love to meet him. Now, you loaf, lover man. I’ll make us breakfast.”

  Hector arched a dark eyebrow. “No offense intended, but you cook, honey?”

  “Didn’t have to in Paris where there was always someone offering to buy me a drink or dinner,” Brinke said. “But yes, I can cook. Tomorrow it’ll be your turn in the kitchen.”

  “What makes you think that I can cook?”

  “Rhapsody in Black. Specifically, chapter eight.”

  “Could have been researched.”

  Brinke shook her head. “You’re not that kind of writer. You’re like me, the write-what-you-know sort. The write-what-you-live breed.” Hector wasn’t so sure about that, so he just bit his lip.

  ***

  Hector pulled down a black T-shirt over his khaki pants and slipped on a pair of leather sandals. His dark brown hair was wet from the shower and still showing comb tracks. Brinke whistled lowly. “Wow. Quite a change from my Paris Hector with his sweaters over sweatshirts and his leather jackets.”

  Brinke was wearing white shorts and a worn white fisherman’s shirt with faded blue stripes. The soft fabric draped her breasts. She had a pair of sunglasses resting atop her head. She wore white sandals. “You look like an ad for a cruise,” Hector said.

  “Too studied?”

  “Too beautiful to be real. A living doll. I feel like undressing you again. But I’ll soldier on. What do we do, our first full day together on Key West?”

  Brinke pulled down her black cheaters, hiding her blacker eyes. “There’s a restaurant down by the docks I want to introduce you to. Well, restaurant is pretty much overstating it. More like a shanty shack. But it has the freshest seafood you can imagine. It’s pretty rustic décor-wise, but sits on a dock and it’s great. We can watch the tarpon roam between the pilings, eat in the breeze.”

  “Sounds like a diamond in the rough,” Hector said. “But let’s hit a store on the way. Need to get myself some sunglasses.”

  ***

  They were on foot. Hector said, “Not much point in owning a car is there?”

  “There are a surprising number of flivvers on this rock.” Brinke took his hand. “But, no, most things are in walking distance if the heat isn’t on. If it’s too hot to walk, you just hop on the streetcar. But the island kind of shuts down in the afternoons. Like an island-wide siesta.”

  Hector could smell the docks before they reached them. There was some commotion as a sport boat’s catch was hoisted up on onto the big scales. The tuna, dripping and oily gray-blue in the sun, topped three hundred pounds.

  Brinke said, “Some monster, huh?”

  “Very surely a big boy,” Hector said. “Catchin’ ’em looks like some kind of exercise.”

  Brinke led him down an inclined ramp, encrusted with salt spray. They ducked into a tin-roofed shanty. From outside, it looked like the next tropical storm would lay waste to the dump. But it was cooler in the shade and a single, intricately weaving pulley band drove several overhead fans. Those fans and the sea breeze made the open-air clam shack pleasantly cool.

  Hector slipped off his sunglasses and hooked one of their arms in the front of
his T-shirt. The day’s offerings were scrawled on a chalkboard above the bar—many misspellings there.

  “Think I crave something new and different,” Brinke said. “Maybe something like that leviathan they’re weighing out front.” After some questions put to the bartender, she instead settled on grilled grouper with raw artichokes and a side of conch fritters. Brinke slid onto a stool at the bar and asked for a daiquiri. A tune played from a distant boat; they could just hear snatches of “Rhapsody in Blue,” then of “Dixie.”

  Hector took the stool next to Brinke’s and ordered himself a mojito. He selected tarpon with some dirty rice. Hector sipped his drink and watched the cook go to work with a knife, slitting the fillets into strips running nose to tail. “I’m wondering what else I should order,” he said. “I mean as you’ll no doubt be eating mine.”

  “I’d stick my tongue out at you now if it wasn’t so childish,” Brinke said. “And I’m not that hungry this second.”

  A woman edged behind the bar. She was fiftyish and overweight. She wore a floral print dress and a white headband that held down the hairnet on her head. The woman said, “Hey there, Dev. You’re nearly becomin’ a reg’lar.”

  Brinke said, “Hey, Rose.” She waved her arms around them. “You know I love your place. And it’s the best seafood in town.”

  The woman gave Brinke a half-smile and said, “Who is this big lug with you? This your fella, the Texan, you’ve been gabbing about since Christmas?”

  Brinke smiled and slipped her arm through Hector’s. “That’s right. Hector Lassiter, meet Rose Thorpe.”

  Rose wiped a hand on her apron and stuck it out. Hector shook it. “Great place,” he said.

  The older woman said, “God, they do grow ’em tall in Texas. He’s the bee’s knees, okay.”

  “Smart, too,” Brinke said. “Capable. Boasts what a French cop calls grace under pressure.”

  Rose nodded and said, “On that note, Dev says you may be able to help figure out who hurt my baby girl, Mr. Lassiter. Help get to the bottom of what happened to my Louise.”

  Hector raised his eyebrows. “Your Louise?”

  Rose nodded. “She was murdered, Mr. Lassiter. A month ago, yesterday. Sheriff Mel hasn’t done a thing about it, so far as I can see. Mel is such a goddamn Palooka.”

  Hector shot Brinke a look. Brinke said, “It’s true. ‘Sheriff Mel’ is Melvin Hoyt. He’s useful as a pair of tonsils.”

  Hector smiled sadly at the older woman. “Sorry, darlin’, but cops don’t much cotton to private folks playing flatfoot. Trust me, Rose, I have painful first-hand knowledge of that.” He felt the scars on his back chaffing his damp shirt. “So does Brinke. She has more experience on that front than me, in fact.”

  Brinke squeezed Hector’s knee. “Hear her story, Hector. Please.”

  The old woman looked at him hopefully, big, sad eyes that implored.

  No graceful way around it, goddamn it.

  Hector shook out a cigarette and struck a match on the underside of the counter. He cupped his hands to protect the flame from the warm wind off the water. He smiled. Letting a little smoke into his voice, he said, “What happened to your daughter, Rose?”

  ***

  Word ’round Bone Key was the crime wave started with the Great Fire of 1923. The flames licked house to house, driven by the sea wind and falling, spiraling and burning palm fronds that touched off the dried grass. The blaze left a big burned wasteland in the middle of the Key.

  In 1924, in late October, came another fire at the lumberyard, then, a week later, the church-furnished home of an island clergyman burned down.

  After that arson against the padre, the attacks on women commenced. The first of those came in December of 1924.

  The woman was raped and then beaten to death with a club or metal pipe. Possibly a baseball bat. Three more similar attacks quickly followed.

  Rose’s daughter, Louise, was killed in late January. Louise was a schoolteacher, twenty-six-years old. She was beaten and molested and then clubbed to death less than twenty yards from her schoolroom, apparently attacked on her way to work. A student found Rose’s body. That same day, another woman was found dead in her home. She had also been molested and murdered.

  And now, with the recent hotel fires, the arsons seemed to be resuming.

  Hector ground out his cigarette. “Louise had no boyfriends who were questioned? No students who may have been infatuated with her?”

  Rose’s eyes were hard. “She had no boyfriend, mister. And she taught elementary school. Her students were too young for infatuations, Mr. Lassiter. In fact, the boy who found my Louise, all naked and bloody, he was seven. Hardly more than a baby. No child did this.”

  “It was a question that had to be asked. And please, call me Hector.” He thought a second and then said, “These fires and rapes—the murders—how’d they come to be linked? They’re pretty different beasts as crimes go. Frankly doesn’t make sense to me one man would do all of them.”

  “Sheriff Mel says it’s so,” Rose said. “He said clues at the crime scenes leave no doubt. The sheriff’s said so to the newspapers. ’Course he hasn’t said how the clues tell him that, ’xactly. Hasn’t said what those clues are.”

  Hector nodded. “And it was that local newspaper that came up with this spooky moniker, the Key West Clubber?”

  “That’s right.” Rose passed Hector his plate of fish. She said, “Brinke said you two might could figure out who did this, since the police here ain’t showin’ signs of doin’ it. She said you two helped stop some murders back in Paris, France.” She handed Brinke her plate.

  Hector rose, his plate in hand. “Let me think on all this a few minutes, okay?” He took his food and walked to a tall table, seaside. He glanced over the rail and saw more tarpon sliding, long and silver, just an inch or so from the surface, gliding between the piles, just as Brinke had predicted.

  He looked up from the cruising tarpon as Brinke pulled out a stool and sat down across from him at the table. He said, “You’re some kind of unbelievable, sister.”

  Brinke nodded and combed her fingers through her black hair, getting it off her damp forehead. The heat was already taking hold. “So sorry to snooker you like this, darling. But you see now, Hec? And Rose is a friend. One of the first people here to be really nice to me. She helped me find our house. I like her. I really want us to help her.”

  “Was it all this that prompted you to get that gun you gave me to hold for you last night?”

  Brinke forked off a sliver of Hector’s fish. “Yes.” She hesitated. “Well, it was what you know now that drove that purchase.” She bit her lip. “That, and some more, actually.”

  Hector said, “More?” His voice went hard. “What more is there?”

  “A week ago, a man followed me down Duval, Hector. I’d been in a coffee shop, a Cuban place, writing. Stealing speech patterns. You know, snatching bits of overheard dialogue that rang true as sentences. Anyway, this man followed me. Never got a good look at him, but he was shadowing me, dogging my steps, no question about that.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I ran half-a-block. He gave chase. I ducked into a hotel. Then I took a taxi back to the house. The next day I went to a pawnshop on Simonton Street and bought my own Colt.”

  Hector sipped his mojito. “Okay, I’m gettin’ my back up now. Hope you’re happy.”

  “I am, but not like you mean. But now you will help me to help Rose?” Brinke took another forkful of Hector’s tarpon. “If it isn’t quite enough, there’s more I could tell you.”

  Hector scowled. “What? You mean still more involving you? Some direct threat, or what exactly?”

  “That’s right, a threat. Or I think so. The last couple of nights, I spotted someone sneaking around our house. Or maybe he was sneaking around the neighbors’ houses. Either way, whoever it was, they were lurking with intent. Of that much I’m certain.”

  Hector sighed. “Okay. Obviously you’ve been
nosing around already. What do you know so far, darlin’?”

  “Nada,” Brinke said. She made a face. “Or given the events of last year, I should say nothing. Nothing that makes sense yet. I’m with you, Hector. Based on past experience, and being an above-average student of crime, I don’t see how you have an arsonist and a rapist-killer inhabiting the same body. This is something more than just one lunatic. I’m convinced of that.”

  Hector sampled a little of his quickly disappearing tarpon. He might have tried a little of Brinke’s grouper, but it was already gone somehow though he’d never seen Brinke touch it. He said, “Me either. So what exactly, then?”

  “I’m at a loss, so far,” she said.

  “These women, did they all live alone?”

  “I don’t think they were married, anyway,” Brinke said. “I scrounged around and found some news articles. I checked some obituaries. No mentions of husbands.”

  “That doesn’t preclude shack-ups,” Hector said.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Shack-ups?”

  “Couples living in sin.”

  “Oh,” Brinke said. “Sinners like us, you mean.”

  “Right.” He smiled. “But not for much longer, yes?”

  “No. That reminds me, you should wire your grandfather after this.”

  “Sure. Once we do that though, we’re fully committed. You know that, don’t you?”

  Brinke smiled. “Exactly! I want this, fiercely. I’m furiously in love with you. On that note, you’ve seen the house is pretty Spartan. Thought we’d shop together for more furniture, and soon. But I get right of refusal. You being from Texas, God only knows what you regard as décor. Maybe steers’ skulls and lariats or the like.” She feigned a shudder.

  Hector smiled. “Place I was born wasn’t all that different from here in some ways. Just the other side of the Gulf.”

  “So where do we start together working on these crimes?”