Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series)

by Craig McDonald

  I started to speak, but couldn’t figure out anywhere to go with it. I wanted to say, “And knowing what you think you know, you can sit here with me? Perhaps even stay with me?”

  Alicia carefully stroked the bruise fading under my eye from where Bud had belted me. “Maria — your woman — she failed you,” she said. “But worse, that woman failed your little girl ... in so many terrible ways.”

  My new favorite troubadour was singing “Prairie in the Sky” now — a wickedly beautiful ballad seasoned with imagery of big skies and dying sunsets and desert birds taking wing.

  I said, “Whatever she did, it could never excuse what I did.” I hesitated. “Do you need more from me? I’ve never really talked about it. But I would tell you, if you wanted ... in spite of everything it could cost me.”

  “No,” Alicia said, shaking her head. “No, Héctor. I know enough about what I think happened. If it is of any consolation, I would have maybe done it myself under similar circumstances. The men who raped me ... I think I could have killed them. Or at least maimed them. Understand — I love my daughter. But I would kill the men who gave her to me. So I understand these bloody thoughts you have ... and maybe acted on.”

  “Can you live with them? Live with me, and my having had them?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Perhaps not.” She sighed and her fingers traced my mouth. “Is it always like this being with you? Running and ducking and fighting to survive?”

  “Not exactly like this.”

  “But usually, you’re saying. Close enough, in other words ... you writer. Because you like it like this. That could be a problem for us.” She squeezed my hand and began moving our joined hands in time to the music. “When this is over — this of the heads — what do you do then, Héctor? Do you go on to the next bit of mayhem? Do you crawl into some bottle and start dying again? What do you propose to do?”

  My Mexican darling certainly pulled no punches. Down deep, I adored her for her candor. The women who can really lay a glove on me are always the ones I’m most a fool for. Alicia was the quickest study I’d yet crossed.

  I lied, “I don’t think that far ahead, these days.”

  “You should. You should think about the future ... and what form it might take for you.”

  “Marlene told me back there in Venice that I don’t have any more future.”

  Alicia smiled and looked up at me with bedroom eyes from under her black bangs. Her hand was warm in mine. “Well, you have no prospect of one with her, that much is certain,” she said. “And she’s merely a Hollywood actress: what can a narcissist such as she possibly know of anything that matters? You know what Hollywood women are like.”

  “But you’re trying to be what she is.”

  “I just want to support my daughter,” Alicia said. “I’m only interested in giving her a good life and in seeing that she goes to school so she can make her own way. That’s all ... it’s a means to an end.” Alicia smiled a tired smile. “You want to go ‘home’ now?’”

  I smiled and stroked her cheek. “Soon. But, for a time, can we just sit here and hold hands and listen to this guy sing?”

  Alicia smiled sadly and squeezed my hand. She scooted her chair around close to mine and curled into my arm, her head resting on my shoulder and her hand tapping time on my thigh as the troubadour began to sing “my song” about rambling: blinding sun and snow; mountains and oceans; gypsies; ghosts and lost darlings; and the San Joaquin — the most beautiful and wonderful goddamn place I’ve found on this increasingly sorry planet.

  I said, “I don’t really want to die you know.”

  Alicia twisted her head around. We locked gazes. Her dark eyes were glistening.

  “No,” she said after a time. “I don’t think you care a bit about dying. What you really don’t want is to grow old.”

  28

  I rose early and wrote for three hours — fleshing out my story I had started that was centered on Alicia. I could taste her on my mouth; the smell of her and us together clung to me. I started coffee and grabbed The Los Angeles Times from the front stoop. I flipped through it and found a review for my current novel, The Land of Dread and Fear.

  The book reviewer, this little pilot fish called Lee G. Todd, agreed the title of my novel was “well-chosen.” He said it was so because he “feared” my novel was terrible and filled him with “dread” of any more books from me.

  I could envision the little hack eunuch at his typewriter, wringing his hands with glee over that one.

  Lee savaged my novel. But his barbs and attacks were wrapped in too-carefully constructed prose and smarmy little sarcasms that screamed of more “creative” self-congratulation.

  My book wasn’t the anchor for the piece.

  The so-called reviewer’s reaction to my novel didn’t come across as the pivot for the review, either.

  This was all about the reviewer preening and prancing and playing to his presumed reader. And making a name for himself by tearing down a bigger man — a real writer.

  My book was a means to some twisted end whose true nature was known only to Lee and me. But it made my blood boil. “Lassiter can usually be counted upon to move matters along in pulpy and peppy fashion,” — (peppy?) — “but here he stalls out as he partners his aging, bitter gringo with a Mexican pin-up who couldn’t exist outside of a narcissistic old crime writer’s fetid imagination.”

  Mr. Lee G. Todd said my descriptions of La Frontera “bogged down the action” and the perceived “romance” derailed my “otherwise competent if not particularly original mystery story.” He wrote that chapter nine smacked of a sense of a “writer clearly trying to write above himself.”

  The diseased bastard said I should take lessons in mystery writing from Dame Quartermain.

  Mystery writing?

  I’ve never written a “mystery” in my life. I’m a crime writer.

  Lee said the “clipped and hyper-stylized” prose style that I’d employed kept “getting between” him “and the story.” He said that my prose-style “kept reminding” him that he was “reading a book.”

  Huh. Me, I’m always aware I’m reading a book when I’m, well, reading a book.

  But then the bastard really crossed the line. He dismissed any notion of “persona” and went and confused me with my protagonist. He said I was my “own worst-invented character.” And then he mentioned my dead wife and child. He implied the plot was calculated “to vent some sense of guilt the author might be experiencing ... to deflect some terrible culpability.”

  I tore the paper into pieces and beelined for the phonebook to look for his address. I would kill the bastard with my bare hands — let my fists “get between him” and the rest of his sorry fucking excuse for a life.

  Then I calmed down a bit, going cold inside like I always do before setting in motion terrible things that scare me later. I assessed angles.

  I dug through my wallet and found the number for my friend “Packy” Thompson. Packy was an old boxer who’d found the bottle and reluctantly but effectively transitioned into contract work for Mickey Cohen and other Left Coast takers.

  I dialed and found he was living in L.A. He gave me an address where I should leave the money — a “dead drop.”

  I was just closing the deal when Bud came in.

  “No,” I said to the aging former boxer, “Just his hands. That’ll be enough, Pack’.”

  Bud gestured at the phone as I hung up. “What was that about?”

  “Just responding to a critic.”

  29

  Get a look at Emil Holmdahl: a crisply-pressed, starched checkered shirt buttoned all the way up and accented with a black and silver bolero tie, lizard-skin boots and khaki jodhpurs. He cinched those crazy pants with a hand-tooled, turquoise-studded belt and carried a Stetson in his callused hand. His shock of full white hair was brushed neatly back from a high forehead. After all the years and the picaresque living Emil had packed in since I’d known him, I expected him to look older.


  We shook hands. The old man had a good grip on him.

  Not for the first time, I wondered if Emil suffered from a mild strain of dwarfism. He’d always had a horse face and arms too long for his body. Age had exaggerated his asymmetry. Emil’s shoulders were now narrow and sloped and his torso seemed even more strangely stunted. What height he had always seemed to reside between his waist and knees. His lower legs were too short and the brown cowhide boots he affected now didn’t make ’em look much longer, though I suspected he thought they did — no other way to justify wearing those things out in L.A. in 1957. He looked like a George Rozen pulp magazine cover in those damned boots whose heels probably gave him an extra inch and yet got him nowhere near proportional.

  Holmdahl had a few years on me, but I sensed maybe that that morning, anyway, I looked older, more tired.

  Alcohol withdrawal — now of all times — couldn’t be helping much on that front.

  And those of us who truly live in our heads seem to age harder. Probably the booze and the cigarettes and late nights and the whoring. Or, not enough of those things to kill us while we are young and beautiful.

  The soldier of fortune gave Bud a bemused once-over and a perfunctory handshake.

  The courtly old bastard bowed and kissed Alicia’s hand.

  He glanced over and said to me, “I remember you now.” His saying it gave me chills.

  We went inside the Aero Squadron with all its old military artifacts, and were led to a backroom I’d paid extra for where we could talk about things like lost treasure and stolen heads and grave-robbing.

  Emil smiled at me. He said, “The head close by?”

  The head — Emil was already rubbing me the wrong way. After all, he’d served under Villa for a time. It was bad enough he later turned on Pancho, but then to dig Villa up, saw off his head and stuff it with a map? Just what kind of sorry son of a bitch did it take to do all that? I shook my head, wondering how long I could hide the hatred seeing Emil again stoked in me.

  “Course not,” I said. “And I sincerely hope you haven’t done something stupid and obvious like have a confederate toss our place while we’re meeting here.”

  “That would be too obvious, wouldn’t it?” The old man waved his hand. “That would be amateurish. And it wouldn’t engender trust when I didn’t find it. I figure you’ve hidden it well. So, no, I ain’t that stupid.”

  “Sure.” Truth was, Pancho’s head was in the trunk of my car, just outside. Not that it was that an important an artifact now — now that we knew that I had accidentally torched the treasure map it once contained.

  I said, “So that something you’ve got stashed in Pancho’s head ... I figure it for a document. Invisible ink — something simple. What was it? Piss? Maybe lemon juice? Onion juice, or vinegar? Something like that, probably?”

  Holmdahl snorted and shook his head. “Christ no. That’s like something out of a pulp novel — no offense intended.”

  “None taken.”

  “Anyway, that’s Boy Scout crap,” he said. “I’m glad you didn’t try heating the baby up. We used magician’s flash paper. Sucker would have gone up, just like that. Glad you had the brains not to screw with it.”

  Alicia sipped her water, looking at me over the glass.

  I shifted in my seat. “Me too,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what we used, and do it just because it won’t help you anyway,” Holmdahl said. “That map — hell, I’ve never seen its contents either. But I’ll explain that part later. Thing is, you have to know exactly where to start in order to use the directions on the note.”

  “Tricky. And you know that place.”

  “I do. Just me, now. The other two guys who might have done something with it are dead.”

  Alicia set her glass down. She said, “Natural causes?”

  Emil gave her a nasty smile. “As it happens, yes dear. We wrote the note in ammonia with an eagle’s quill. You reveal it with a light sponge wash of red cabbage water.”

  “Neat,” Bud said.

  Emil smirked. “Those new boots hurting you, boy? Oh, and it’s impolite to keep your hat on indoors. Do that in Texas, and you’ll get your ass kicked by an old lady.”

  Bud’s cheeks reddened. “Thanks,” he said. I’d firmly admonished my young poet to stay stoic and silent. I sure as hell didn’t need Bud stirring Emil up with his angry remarks like he had that equally hair-trigger Yale pointdexter back at my hacienda.

  Emil said to me, “Where’d you find this boy?”

  “He’s my ward,” I said. “I’m mentoring him in the finer points of writing ... and in living the kind of life that makes the muse open her legs.”

  “Interesting,” Holmdahl said. He glanced at Alicia and back at me. “But coarse talk in front of a lady, Hector. Back in the forties, I read that book you wrote about the private eye and the Mexico City working girl — Border Town. I think the lad here’s got a distance to go to reach your level of worldliness ... and dissolution.”

  Now I found myself having to tamp down my own flaring anger. Or maybe Emil meant to say “disillusion.” But probably not.

  “I don’t second-guess myself much these days, Emil,” I said. “‘Maybe in error, but never in doubt.’ That’s my motto.”

  Emil Holmdahl snorted and sipped his iced tea — no liquor for him. “My motto is ‘In God we trust; all other’s pay cash.’”

  “It suits you,” I said. “I mean, you hunted your old buddy Pancho for what, just money?”

  “What else is there?” The old man gestured at my left side. “What do you pack?” The door to our dining room was closed. The wait staff knew to knock before entering. I unholstered my Colt and pushed it across the table. The old man whistled and picked it up. “My God, a ’73. She’s a beauty.” He turned her over, weighed her, ran his hands across her like he was stroking a woman’s inner, upper thigh. He passed my gun back to me and pulled his own jacket back. “I’m a Mauser man, myself.”

  “Very nice,” I said. “It’s a C/96, yeah? A horseman’s gun.”

  “Exactly. Ever done any time, Hector?”

  “Not really. Slept off a few drunk and disorderlies in some of the better cities, but just overnight stuff.”

  “Didn’t think so. You don’t have the look.”

  “I know you’ve done your stints ... for grave-robbing, for instance,” I said. “And for violating neutrality laws.”

  Alicia wrinkled her nose. “What does that mean, to ‘violate neutrality laws’?”

  Bud Fiske smiled. He’d taken off his hat and stowed it on the seat of the empty chair next to him. “I’m going to take a stab and say gun-running.”

  Emil Holmdahl winked and touched his nose. “Right-o. Not as callow as you look, boy. Sentenced to eighteen months in the federal pen. Then Pancho raided Columbus, New Mexico — killed those civilians and bought himself a chase from Black Jack Pershing. They needed guides and I fit the bill. When you’re in a spot like I was — prison — it always helps to have rare talents.”

  “But you never got us near enough to take a shot at Villa,” I said. “No offense, but history is history. Or will you tell me you purposely fucked it up because of some lingering fondness for Pancho?”

  “I still liked Villa well enough...but it was an impossible mission,” Emil said. He spoke now to Alicia and Bud. “It was a crazy piece of business. Villa hurt us. Hit the U.S. in its own backyard. Killed civilians. So Wilson had to make Villa pay. But his response was ill-considered. Like everything else that cocksucker blue-blood Woodrow Wilson did. Mark my words, son — never, ever serve in an army in a time of war under a president with no personal military service. And particularly under a Democrat — they don’t know how to win wars.”

  Bud, who I sensed had a touch of leftist in him, said, “What about FDR ... Truman?”

  “Atom bomb,” Holmdahl said. “Couldn’t lose with that device in the mix. FDR died before he could steal defeat from the jaws of victory. And then Truman
turned around and gave us Korea, where he couldn’t drop the A-bomb. My analysis holds. But back to Villa — terrible logic there. Sending 10,000 men into Mexico to hunt down and murder a native son — a national hero to so many? That’s bad judgment. It was only ever going to drive a wedge between us and Mexico. And we could have sent 100,000 men across the border and never found a single man who really wanted to hide in that desert country. They’d have been ahead to hire an assassin. In fact, I almost drew that duty.”

  This was news to me. I said, “Elaborate, wouldn’t you?”

  “Col. Herbert Slocum, he personally made me the offer to go in and kill Villa,” Holmdahl said.

  I shrugged, hating Emil again. “Money is money to you. And you’d killed many men by then. You agreed to hunt Villa. Why’d you say no to assassination?”

  “Because it smacked of a suicide run, mostly,” the old mercenary said. “I’m pretty attached to myself, having lived this long. And you know what? I actually did like Villa. I personally liked him. He was a good guy. A man’s man. Even though I came to fight against him, I could never hate the magnificent bastard. He had some good qualities. And, hell, I’m a lot of things — many of them very bad — but I ain’t no assassin. And, like I said, it was a suicide run — like those Japs in their Zeros, diving down at our boats. Yellow cocksuckers.” Holmdahl blushed and smiled awkwardly at Alicia. “Pardon my French, please, señorita.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. My Mexican beauty pointed at me. “I’ve been around him a while now. I’ve learned all kinds of new vulgarities since meeting Héctor.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” the old man said. “You’re a man’s woman, if you know what I mean. No better kind. Well, if I had killed Villa in Mexico, I would never have gotten out of the country alive to collect that money.”

  Bud, incorrigible Bud, couldn’t hold back. “But it was all right to cut off the ‘magnificent bastard’s’ head? To cut into and root around inside the skull of a man you knew and liked?”

  To my surprise and relief, Emil took that one in stride. He looked Bud in the eye and answered him — giving me the sense he was warming to Bud in his own way. “That was different, son,” Holmdahl said. “Villa was just rotting meat then. Everything that made Villa Villa was gone, fled to oblivion or Valhalla or wherever his kind finally flees to. Do you believe in an afterlife, Hector?”