Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series)

by Craig McDonald

  Alicia couldn’t help herself. She said, “And here we sit, getting ready to negotiate with you.”

  “We’re in Los Angeles,” Emil said to Alicia, as if that abrogated decades of duplicity.

  “But the treasure is still down there in my country,” she persisted. “And we have to trust you to recover it and give us a cut.”

  “Don’t sweat that,” I said. “That’s my territory. There’ll be no double-crosses along those lines on my watch.” I turned back to Holmdahl. “So, apparently, Jake Chrisman pulled you through and you both got back up to the border.”

  “Close to it,” Emil said. “Very close. But it was getting dicey. The strain and the distrust started to accumulate on Jake. He started bleeding rectally — ulcers. Started drinking heavily. We both became afraid he might forget the map he had in his head. I was afraid he might die before he shared his secret. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to write it down. He knew once it was out of his head, I’d redouble my efforts to get that treasure for myself. He just knew me too well.”

  Fiske nodded and closed his Zippo, blowing smoke through his nostrils from another Pall Mall. “So what happened? How’d we get to the point we’re sitting here negotiating for a severed head?”

  “That’s exactly what happened,” Holmdahl said. “That fucking head of Pancho Villa’s. That’s where I finally lost the treasure. Or so I thought.”

  31

  “I needed cash,” Holmdahl said. “As I often did in those days. I was still weak and half out of my head from the sickness. Some old associates caught up with me across the border from El Paso as Jake and me were dancing around our dilemma. I was offered twenty-five grand to go in and cut off Pancho’s head. You know that part of the story — or at least you know it close enough to the probable truth of the events. So we’ll gloss that. Suffice it to say that I stole the fucking head — me and another old crony, Alberto Corral. I tried to talk Jake into doing it with me. But he refused. He tagged along though ... I’d insisted he stay close. And he needed me alive to provide that starting point in order for his goddamn map to make any sense.

  “Me and Alberto got the head,” Holmdahl said. “But the resulting heat on us was terrible. Biblical. Seems I’d been graceless doing my recon’ before we dug up Pancho and hacked off his head. Again, I chalk it up to my sickness. My brain was soup. Anyhow, it quickly became clear to me that I was the prime suspect in the theft of Pancho Villa’s head. So, in a kind of epic desperation, I entrusted Jake with the bandit’s head. Jake knew most of my plan. He knew I was to hit an airfield that night and pass the head off to a pilot and get my money. Well, then I got arrested for robbing Villa’s grave. I was put in jail and told I’d be shot by a firing squad for stealing Villa’s head.”

  “But Jake Chrisman really had the head,” Alicia said.

  “That’s right,” Emil said. “Jake bought himself some magician’s flash paper in a novelty store. That paper explodes when it’s exposed to any kind of heat. Then he bought himself some books on codes and invisible ink and the like. Jake came up with the gimmick of using ammonia and red cabbage water. He then emptied his head of his remembered map. Got it all down on that fragile magician’s paper and hid it in Pancho’s head. Then he went out to the airport and handed over the head and got my twenty-five grand, the cocksucker.”

  Bud smiled at me. I said aloud the words I knew we were all thinking. “Honor among thieves. Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” Emil agreed. “What a crock. But I was in a fix, make no mistake about it. Jake said he was my attorney and visited me in the Parral jail. Said he’d act as an intermediary and get word back to some people in high places back in El Paso about my plight. They had helped set up the deal with Pancho’s head and they had ties to Skull and Bones. They couldn’t afford the embarrassment of me potentially finger-pointing at them to the press. But Jake, he’d only do this if I gave him the location of the farm where we’d found the treasure. He had me by the short hairs and we both knew it. He was so confident of his plan, he told me about the clever little map he’d hidden in Pancho’s head. He smiled smugly and said he figured he’d remember the directions, and if he didn’t, he could always go to Yale and steal the map back. But either way, he meant to have the treasure before I got out.”

  “So you lied to him,” I guessed. “Gave him a false starting point.”

  “Fuck yes,” Emil said, grinning. “I lied through my teeth. And the dumb cocksucker believed it. I could tell. Me? I know when I’m being lied to. Like I warned you.”

  Emil was getting passionate now. He’d apparently forgotten all about Alicia and her delicate sensibilities, just spewing that profanity now.

  “Way I figured it, when I got sprung, I’d go steal to Yale and steal that fucking head a second time. Then I’d go down to Urbina’s whore’s ranch and take that treasure for myself while Jake and his crew dug dry holes in Dogdick, Durango.”

  Bud asked, “So what went wrong?”

  “Well, I knew something went south on me when Prescott Bush called me up at the jail; well, one of Prescott’s flunkies called, to be strictly accurate. He wanted to know why I’d ‘screwed Bush.’ Why I had ‘taken’ the Bush money and not ‘supplied’ the head. Well, it became clear to me that the pilot who’d taken the head from Jake Chrisman had cut his own deal with some previously unknown and scheming cocksucker. Never really knew who the mystery man was, or where Villa’s head finally ended up, but suffice it to say that Pancho’s skull never got to Yale. Some say the pilot was bought off by Brigadier General Francisco R. Durango, who drilled holes in the skull to use it as a caddy for his fountain pens. Others say it was Alvaro Obregón. Some say it was sold to a medical institution in Cleveland to some quack sawbones obsessed with severed heads. Either way, the skull was lost, and the treasure map with it.”

  Alicia sipped some iced tea. She said, “But Jake Chrisman knew the path to the gold, presumably.”

  “Right,” Holmdahl said. “Presumably he did. But like I said, you gotta know where to start. He was provisioning in El Paso, I heard, for a ‘prospecting’ job. He was going to go to that bogus locale I’d given him. But as Jake left the hardware store, probably distracted by dreams of all the treasures he envisioned having to himself, he was run over by a beer truck. The driver’s side tire flattened Jake’s head — squeezed his brains and all those precious memories out his ears. And, so, poor put-upon and long-suffering Emil was fucked up the ass by the fates ... again.”

  “Sometimes luck runs that way,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Well, now we’re all up to speed and know the lay of the land. And we’ve pretty firmly established you’re not to be trusted, Emil, and, well, let’s be frank — I just can’t be trusted, either. We’re both just old and greedy campaigners who mean to dick one another.”

  Emil smiled. “About how I read it, too. So what do you suggest?”

  I tapped the table with my fingers. “I suggest you buy me out right now. Well, me and my two young associates. I can’t trust you to go and get that gold and give me an honest cut. The young lady here has already pointed that sad fact out. And, you know, I have no interest whatsoever in going down to hell and living that Treasure of the Sierra Madre motif you alluded to earlier. I’m too old and happy in my air conditioning. I ain’t gonna bust my hump over a shovel in Durango ... all the while waiting for you to put a bullet behind my ear. Fuck that. You give me a hundred grand — ’cause I’m cheap — and we give you your map and we all walk away happy.”

  The mercenary snorted. “Where in fuck would I get a hundred grand?”

  “Get it from some of your real estate cronies ... from Texas Republicans. Maybe you can sell a replica Villa head back to the Mexican government for some recovery fee. That’s not my problem. I want to do this tomorrow. Get it over with. Your homework is to find that money. And don’t use the next few hours to try and fuck-over me and mine by stealing the head or sending hired guns after us to take it. The head is in safety deposit box. I have one key.
An hour before we sat down to eat here with you, I dropped the key in a mailbox. I mailed it to someone somewhere here in Los Angeles, who’ll have it delivered somewhere special in time for our exchange.”

  “I can’t get that kind of money,” Emil said.

  “Don’t insult me. I’m convinced you can. It’s your problem to solve, either way.”

  The old soldier of fortune licked his lips. He said, floating a compromise, “Maybe half that I could do.”

  “Negotiations were never opened. One hundred grand.” I handed Emil a slip of paper. “You call there with questions or comments. It’s my answering service. Failing word to the contrary from you, before ten in the morning tomorrow, you’re going to contact the bank on the flip side of that piece of paper and you’re going to make a deposit. The account information you’ll need is all there. You’ll do this by ten a.m. At ten-thirty tomorrow morning, I’ll call and confirm the deposit has been made. When I know it has, I’ll meet you in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. High noon. I’ll give you what’s in the head there and then we’re quits for keeps.”

  The mercenary shook his head. “Unacceptable. The risk is all on my end. You might take my money and run.”

  “Might. But it’s the deal I’m offering. Simple.”

  “I don’t think we’re through figuring this one out,” Emil Holmdahl said.

  “I do.”

  “I’ll think about it,” the old man said bitterly.

  “Sure. You do that if it helps you feel better about yourself. But it makes no difference in the end. We’re going to do this my way. That’s it.”

  I settled the bill. Alicia unnecessarily wanted to touch up her lipstick. Bud had gone to take a piss, or maybe shoot up some insulin.

  Alone with Holmdahl, I said, “While back, Bud asked a question you never answered, Emil. How’d you avoid getting yourself killed by Fierro all these years?”

  “We had a run-in a time back — pretty ugly. But we reached a kind of stalemate.”

  “What? Made a ‘separate peace’?” I couldn’t quite buy that.

  “No,” Emil said. “More like mutually assured destruction. I don’t fear that cocksucker.”

  Emil and me walked out front. It was raining and we stood under the awning, looking out at the palm-tree-lined streets of Los Angeles in the softly falling rain. “I never thought I’d end up here,” Holmdahl said.

  I nodded as I lit my cigarette. “I was surprised to find you here. Figured you’d be in some border town around El Paso, one side of the river or the other.”

  “Ain’t much of any account left anywhere, you know? Used to be a man could make his way in this world ... make his money and live a good life doing it. But now? The world’s gone to hell. Apart from this thing we’re partnering on, well, I’m reduced to doing real estate finagling. What the fuck is that?”

  “I hear you.”

  Emil spat. “It’s a bitch to outlive your world, ain’t it?”

  “It surely is.”

  Emil looked at me and then gave me a nasty smirk as he gestured at my cigarette. “Well, at least I’ve had the good sense to take care of myself. I won’t end up old and a cripple.” The “like you will” was implied.

  Christ, but the old bastard knew how to go for the jugular.

  “Mañana,” I said as I headed to my Chevy to wait for my young friends.

  32

  Holmdahl climbed in a cab. Through the rain-smeared windshield of my Chevrolet, I watched him leave.

  Across the street sat another blue Chevy. There was an old Mexican in a Stetson behind the wheel. I got this strange feeling ... muttered to myself, “Fucking Fierro.” I climbed out and locked my Chevy and trotted through the now-harder rain back to the Aero Squadron. Alicia and Bud met me at the door. My lady squeezed my arm. “That man — Holmdahl — he is not to be trusted,” Alicia said. “He’s truly evil.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Go to the bar, Alic. We all need to kill a few moments.”

  Bud’s eyes narrowed: “What’s up?”

  “There’s an old Mexican running surveillance from a car out front.”

  “Fierro, you think,” Alicia said.

  “Sí. I think. Go get yourself a drink, honey. We’ll join you in a moment.” I turned to Bud. “You’re with me, poet. While I call the cops, you check the yellow pages for a magic supply shop.”

  “Flash paper?” Bud said.

  “Flash paper,” I confirmed.

  As Fiske thumbed through the Yellow Pages, I called the cops. Breathless and strident, I told them I saw “some old Mexican pervert” sitting in his car, masturbating and trying to entice children into his Chevy. I gave the location and hung up.

  We collected Alicia. When the squad car pulled up behind Fierro, the three of us walked to my Chevy and drove away.

  Of course I figured that we had other tails.

  Maybe frat boys.

  Certainly federal agents.

  The good, the corrupt ... and Christ only knew what other kinds.

  * * *

  There was a bookstore next to Gibson Walter’s Magic Shop. Alicia and me roamed the bookshop while Bud bought that flammable novelty paper.

  As she browsed in the fiction section, I picked up a final edition of the day’s L.A. Times and leafed through it. There was a small but shrill late-breaking item in the rag regarding a mysterious and brutal attack against the newspaper’s book reviewer. The police blotter item indicated that the reviewer, Lee G. Todd, might permanently lose the use of his right hand. I felt a slight thrill, but I also felt slightly sick inside.

  I studiously folded up the paper and replaced it and joined Alicia.

  The store stocked seven or eight of my novels. There seemed to me to be a few too many copies on the shelf of The Land of Dread and Fear, my newest novel. Only one or two copies of each of my other titles were stocked. But there were perhaps nine copies of my new novel. Hmm. I felt a little less guilty about Lee G. Todd, suddenly.

  “Which should I read?” Alicia fanned paperback copies of four of my novels that she apparently hadn’t got to yet. I selected my Florida crime novel, Last Key. It is my most autobiographical. She smiled and nodded. While she paid, I checked a table up front where the bestsellers were laid out. I thumbed through a few, here and there: Peyton Place by Grace Metalious Messner; Compulsion by Meyer Levin; Rally Round The Flag Boys by Max Shulman; Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and this fucking phone book-thick mess by Ayn Rand dubbed Atlas Shrugged. (Probably did so because he couldn’t support the weight of this undisciplined and self-indulgent mess of words.)

  Sweet Jesus.

  We walked back outside and waited under the awning in the drizzle for Fiske.

  “Your grandmother is in town,” I said to Alicia. “This could be a good time to visit your little girl. I’d love to meet her.”

  She shook her head. “No, Héctor. It is too risky. Too many people are maybe watching us now. Our danger is probably greatest about now, don’t you think? I don’t want to put my baby or anyone else I love at risk. And it would also be cruel to visit her, and then to leave right away again. I can’t do that to either of us. I’ll wait until this business is over. It’s only one more day, yes?”

  There was something more, I could tell. So I blundered ahead and said it. “You’re also not sure you want her to know me. Not yet anyway. Yes?”

  Alicia searched my eyes. She said, “Yes. That’s right. I’m not sure yet.”

  33

  The rain was picking up when we got back to our rental.

  I searched our “home,” then let Alicia come in after I found nobody lurking in closets or under the beds.

  We unloaded the real Pancho head and the good fake head with the underbite that we would foist on Emil Holmdahl. We also pulled out two of the back up heads.

  We’d prep them, too, just in case.

  We took out the little slip of paper we’d cut to match the original map and used it as a template to cut down the magic store flash pape
r to the right dimensions. Alicia searched the back yard and found a crow’s feather we could use as a quill. I sat Bud down at the table and we concocted a Byzantine set of instructions involving trees that credibly might have been cut down or fallen over in the intervening twenty years, creek beds that might have run dry, boulders and swales. With any luck, the greedy bastards following the instructions would waste years of their lives in fruitless pursuit. Leave us all the hell alone.

  The tough part for Bud seemed to be getting started. So I said, “There had to be a front door at the place Urbina built for his whore. Instruct them to walk one hundred paces straight out from the front step.” We built our false map from that starting point.

  Then I directed Bud to fill three more identical slips of paper with similar though slightly varying directions.

  I privately relished the image of that bent federal agent and Holmdahl and maybe Fierro or Prescott Bush’s lackeys all suddenly bumping into one another somewhere in the wastelands of Durango, all of them clutching identical slips of flash paper and counting their wasted footsteps.

  Bud started to complain about writer’s cramp. I shook my head and said, “At least you’re not writing in your own piss. Soldier on, son.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Bud said. “I just can’t stand the thought of all that treasure lost out there at that ranch. Think there’s any chance at all we could find it sans the real map?”