Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series)

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Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 23

by Craig McDonald


  Bernard said, “That’s my daughter, Rachel. She passed away more than ten years ago.”

  “Twelve years ago, in Key West,” Hector said, his voice raw. “That’s where I met her.”

  The old man looked authentically startled. “You knew my Rachel?”

  “That’s right,” Hector said. “If you smoke, now would be the time.”

  “No, I don’t want my pipe.”

  “A pipe. Of course.” Hector remembered now seeing the old man smoking his pipe, staring off through the rain from Mercedes Marshall’s front porch.

  “How did you know my daughter, Detective?”

  “I knew her, but I’m no detective,” Hector said. “I’m not a cop. My name is Lassiter.”

  “How did you know my daughter, Mr. Lassiter?” He wet his lips and his eyes darted. “You’re not the man who...who did that to her?”

  “Murdered her? No.” Hector shook his head. “No, as nearly as I can tell, the man who did that was a ‘professional’ critic, a man named Quentin Windly.”

  “Where can he be found? I want the police—”

  “Too late,” Hector said. “He died in Spain, in 1937. He was on the wrong end of an explosion.”

  “At your hands?”

  “Or another’s who knew your daughter. But that doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “My daughter, Rachel and you, were...friends?”

  “Friends. Yes.” The radio was on low in the background. Hector recognized I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm. He said, “I met your daughter in Key West in 1935, just a few days before the Labor Day hurricane that swept through the Keys. I saw her through that Blow. She seemed to have a great fear of storms. I hear you’re responsible for that phobia. But we’ll get to that in due course. As I said, I helped her weather that storm, then I was called away to aid in recovery and rescue on the most affected Key. I left Rachel alone in my house in Key West. That’s when this critic—” Hector left it hanging there.

  “And now you’ve had your questions answered,” Hector said. “This is my meeting. I have my own questions, old man, and you’re going to answer each and every one of them. Understood?”

  “Who exactly are you, Mr. Lassiter?”

  Hector suppressed a smile. Evidently, Bernard wasn’t one of his readers.

  The crime writer said, “Who am I? I’m the guy who just said you don’t get anymore questions. This party last night...you’re a fixture at these things. You move in these surrealist circles. Do all of their get-togethers play like that one? Lots of politics and art talk between games of Exquisite Corpse and gangbanging underage girls?”

  “That’s a rather charged and distorted description.”

  “But essentially accurate.”

  The old man shrugged. “I believe I will have my pipe.”

  “Do it,” Hector said. “But again I ask, is that how all these parties play?”

  “I don’t agree with your characterization of last night, or of our other social gatherings, but I can see, you being the man you appear to be, how you might view them that way...as sordid affairs.”

  The old man got his pipe going. Hector always hated the smell of pipes. He said, “How, Bernard, do you justify all those things that happen at your ‘parties’? Particularly the abuse of some pretty young thing like Sarah Marshall?”

  Bernard shrugged and sniffed. “In some states Sarah would be of age. In some countries, Sarah would be considered an old maid.”

  “Relativism doesn’t cut it, old man,” Hector said sourly. “Not even in Los Angeles. At least not here in this room and not now.”

  “Certainly not for the likes of you,” Bernard Harper said.

  Hector snorted. He thought, That’s it: dig your own grave deeper.

  Bernard continued, pointing a finger at his own head. “We all share the belief that our created life eclipses, trumps, the lives we’re forced to lead out here. So, in safe zones, like the party last night, we attempt to actualize our interior lives together. To forge what Breton calls, ‘a shared Surreality.’ In that context, anything is acceptable, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be all the law.’”

  “I know that last line,” Hector said. “Aleister Crowley said that. I knew that cocksucker back in Paris.”

  “I envy you his association,” Bernard said, puffing on his pipe.

  “I nearly beat him to death.”

  “Oh.”

  “You said at these parties, ‘Anything is acceptable.’ Up to, and including, murder?”

  “That’s crazy talk,” Bernard said.

  “Not so much,” Hector said. “No I’m afraid it isn’t crazy at all. On the porch last night, I asked you if you attended many parties like that one. You said you used to throw them. I guess that was in Paris, and here in Los Angeles.”

  “That’s right.”

  “When I met Rachel in Key West, it pretty quickly became clear she was damaged in some ways. She told me about those parties you threw. About the naked pictures you insisted upon taking of her. And she confided to me about the two of you, together, after her mother died.”

  The color went out of the old man’s face. “Well, that last was wrong. It only happened a few times. I tried to make amends.”

  “Once was too many times,” Hector said, hearing his voice now, and scared by what he heard there. He suddenly wished he’d brought Orson along for restraint. “Once like that — doing that sick bad thing to your own child — would be an unthinkable crime,” Hector said. “Twice is perversion beyond possibility of redemption. And ‘several’ times? I’m a crime writer and I come up dry for terms to characterize that.”

  The old man’s head was bowed.

  “And the parties,” Hector said. “Did you pass Rachel around to your surrealist friends like Sarah was being used last night?”

  Bernard Harper kept staring at his hands. His pipe, trailing smoke, was clutched in his trembling right hand.

  Hector said, “In Key West, I saw, first-hand, what your ‘attentions’ and what your parties did to Rachel. So I look at last night and Sarah Marshall and I wonder what kind of casualty she’s being made to be every time Mummy and Daddy Marshall decide to ring up their surrealist pals for another orgy. What kind of mess or monster are they creating?”

  Hector realized his finger was sweaty and twitching at the trigger of his Colt. The gun had a hair-trigger. Hector aimed it away from Bernard Harper and slowly lowered the hammer. He holstered the gun. It was overkill: Hector could easily subdue Bernard barehanded. And if he wanted to kill him, well, he told himself he’d do that barehanded, too. Slowly. Surgically.

  “How do you live,” Hector said, “having done all that to Rachel? Jesus. And Alva, trying to rape her, too...”

  The old man was still staring at his hands.

  “Alva said you didn’t touch her because she wouldn’t let you,” Hector said. “I was told that Alva scared you. Rachel said you and Alva had a split that I assume you couldn’t forgive. I mean, I see you have no pictures of Alva on your mantel. Don’t even have one of Alva’s paintings.”

  The old man looked up, his eyes now red-rimmed and his chin trembling. He said, “What? Who? Who is ‘Alva’?”

  “Your youngest daughter, asshole, I—’’

  “No,” Bernard said, “I don’t know who this Alva is, but Rachel was our only child.”

  Hector felt cold all over. He saw black spots. The enormity of Bernard’s simple statement and all its implications ripped through Hector — it was nearly insupportable. He heard it again in his head: Rachel was an only child.

  “You’re a goddamn liar,” Hector said, hearing his own voice from far away. He had the old man by the collar now.

  The old surrealist screamed, “You’re insane. I have only one child. I don’t who this Alva is, but if you don’t let go of me right now...”

  Hector shook the old man again, raising a fist. He held it there, trembling, then swung past the old man’s head, narrowly missing his face. “Don’t you fucking lie t
o me you evil old bastard!”

  “Why would I lie?” The surrealist’s old hands clutched at Hector’s wrists. “There were problems...Rachel had problems, yes. But she was my daughter. My only daughter. I tried to get her help...doctors. I loved her. Loved her as a father loves his only daughter. But the damned psychiatrists, they said my poor Rachel’s mind had fractured, that she ‘divided inside’ and...”

  Hector remembered reading about something like that...he’d even used it in an early short story once. The damage done to Rachel’s mind, first by her incestuous rape by her own father, then being used as a party favor by all those sadistic surrealists had caused Rachel to “split”...that’s what the evil old bastard was claiming.

  That was what the headshrinkers called it.

  Hector had seen intimations of it during the Great War, and again during World War II — soldiers or nurses whose minds splintered under the insupportable pressures of combat and its bloody results. The victims created new identities for themselves and sometimes permanently retreated into those identities.

  Alva must have been something like a kind of “imaginary friend” of Rachel’s...a tough, mythical little sister who became Rachel’s protector and eventual avatar. In time, Rachel actually recreated herself as Alva and presumably found her “voice” as a painter.

  Hector stood and picked up his coat and shrugged it on. He picked up his hat. He walked over to the fireplace mantel and stared at one of the pictures. He found the one in which Rachel looked the most like he remembered her: probably twenty-one or -two in the picture, and said, “I’m taking this. I’m owed it. You keep your other pictures of her you evil old cocksucker. You keep the perverted photos you took of her...the ones that took so much from her.”

  “Who is this Alva person?” Bernard Harper shook his pipe at Hector. “I demand answers.”

  Hector pivoted. He placed the framed photo of Rachel on the chair where he’d been sitting and dropped his hat atop it. Then he shrugged off his trench coat and drew his Colt and put it on the chair, too.

  He strode over to Bernard Harper and punched the old man in the mouth. Hector continued hitting the old man, not as hard as he could, but hard enough.

  Drawing back for a fresh blow, Hector caught sight of himself in a mirror — this crazed looking guy whaling on a rickety old libertine. It didn’t square with any image Hector had of himself.

  The crime writer stood up and massaged his fists. Bernard Harper lay on his couch, bleeding from the mouth and nose. A few teeth lay scattered on the hardwood floor. Hector said, “You asked who I am. Well, tell your friends: I’m the man who’s come to destroy them. I mean to burn their surrealist circle down. Starting today.”

  Blood bubbling from his mouth, Bernard Harper said, “They’ll burn you down...you and yours.”

  “There’s just me,” Hector said. “I’m a lone wolf. I have no second heart to aim for. There’s nothing you can use to distract me from my task. I’m going to cut through Hollywood and your surrealist circle like Sherman moved through Atlanta. You spread that word, old man.”

  “We have powerful friends,” Bernard Harper said, coughing up blood. Hector figured he must have broken one of the old man’s ribs, and the rib must have found a lung.

  “I have powerful friends, too,” Hector said. “That party last night was full of communists. Like I say, I have powerful friends, too.”

  Hector holstered his Colt and put on his hat and coat. He picked up his photo of Rachel.

  Her father said, “I need an ambulance.”

  “You sure do. Phone’s still right there on the table, just where you left it. I’ve taken my share of beatings so I know: the bad news is, you’re going to live you diseased son of a bitch.”

  ***

  Sitting in his Chevy, Hector stared at the photograph of Rachel.

  She hadn’t died in Key West.

  Maybe she hadn’t died in Spain, either. But if she hadn’t been murdered on Bone Key, then she had faked her own death, or at very least, Rachel had participated in its staging.

  What did that say about Quentin Windly’s connections to the surrealist murders?

  What did that say about Rachel/Alva’s connection to the crimes?

  “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda...and woke up with me.”— Rita Hayworth

  SIREN

  33

  Hector keyed himself into his bungalow. As he did that, he cast a last glance over his shoulder: no black Ford sedan loitering out front. There was no blond spying on him from across the street.

  But there was a blond on his couch — a freshly minted blond, curled up on the sofa with the manuscript of Hector’s almost finished novel, Squeeze Play.

  “You haven’t seen the new ’do, Hector,” Rita said, pulling at her shorter hair. “What do you think of my reinvention?”

  Welles had created a tabloid scandal by having Rita Hayworth’s long, trademark red hair cut short and died platinum blond. Orson and Rita had invited the world press to observe her dubious transformation. Orson’s obvious aim had been to gen up publicity for their film. He’d certainly achieved that objective, but he’d badly underestimated the backlash to be suffered for tampering with a screen icon; most agreed Orson had mutilated their favorite screen siren.

  One of those who was most upset — and in a unique position to do something about it — was the film’s producer, Harry Cohn. Cohn had initially been impressed by the film’s central twist: the villain of the piece would be revealed to be a woman. Cohn also had designs on Rita...until he had seen her as a shorthaired blond.

  And Welles’ efforts actually represented Rita’s latest “reinvention.” Hector had known Rita for many years. He had known her in Mexico, long before Hollywood got its hooks in her. Rita Hayworth, performing under her real name of Margarita Carmen Cansino, was then dancing at the Mexican gambling resort of Agua Caliente. Margarita was being chaperoned by her mother, Volga, herself a retired Zigfield Follies performer.

  At Agua Caliente Casino, in the mid-1930s, vacationing Hector met Margarita, not too-terribly long before he met Rachel Harper.

  It was at Agua Caliente that an enamored Winfield Sheehan, Fox Film chief, later met Margarita Cansino and signed her to a film contract. Louella Parsons, omnipotent Hollywood gossip maven — the woman who pissed all over Orson’s Citizen Kane — witnessed that meeting and was incredulous when told of the contract. Raven-haired Margarita was, Parsons sniffed, “too fat.”

  Sheehan remained firm, above and below the belt.

  The Hollywood studio system worked its magic.

  Plump and dark-haired Margarita Carmen Cansino was transformed into svelte/shapely, redheaded Rita Hayworth.

  Hector smiled at Rita and said, “You look dynamite, sweetheart.”

  Rita shook her head, and pulled again at her bobbed, platinum hair. “I think I actually miss the red hair.”

  “You know me, I’m a brunette man. I’d like to see your hair that way again.”

  “Well, it won’t happen,” Rita said. “Harry Cohn is furious at Orson for my hair. Soon as filming wraps, I’ll be out of the public eye for a couple of months, growing it back out and dyeing it red. Crazy: dye and cut your hair, and get treated like a whole different person.”

  Hector said, “Orson said you were feeling badly.”

  “Feeling badly for Orson, is more like it. I’m trying to make this reconciliation work, but he isn’t. Or if he is, I’m sure not seeing it.”

  Hector nodded. “He in back, out cold still?”

  “No, Orson flew the coop. Studio tracked him down. He’s gone back to the set.”

  “Jesus, he should be asleep.” Hector figured Orson must have called and left word where to find him after Hector dropped him off and locked him in. It would explain what Rita Hayworth was now doing on his couch.

  “He left me to explain and defend his decision to run off without sleep,” Rita said. “So now I’ve done that. Orson also said that you told him to treat your plac
e like his own. So I’ve done that, too. Also helped myself to your bar. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Hector said. “I’m cutting back, in fact. The booze was a gift from a visitor.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Not more than last night.”

  “I helped myself to your manuscript, too,” Rita said. “Hope you don’t mind that, either. I love it. The tension is wonderful, and the way you’ve closed the net around the hero, Owen Walters, squeezed between these two crime families, that’s marvelous and tense, too. Can’t wait to see how it comes out. To see how he gets out.”

  “If he does. And it may be a bit of a wait,” Hector said. “The last five or six chapters are only up here.” He tapped his forehead.

  Rita was certainly a nice distraction...a pleasant surprise to come home to find stretched out on your couch. But Hector was still turning over the revelation of Rachel/Alva. He was still trying to sort it all out in his own mind. He’d intended to come home and stack on some records and close the drapes and sit in the dark, listening to torch songs and thinking.

  Rita put down the manuscript and stood and hugged Hector. “You’re looking well, if a little shaken up. Tell me it isn’t my hair.”

  “It isn’t your hair,” he said, kissing her cheek. He fetched himself a glass and poured himself some tequila. She grabbed her own glass and offered it for refill. Hector did that and they tapped glasses. “To absent friends,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said a bit uncertainly. “I came to talk to Orson and he promptly fled of course. He’s going to move out again after we finish shooting, I know it.”

  Hector took a breath. He poured himself another shot of tequila, drank it down, then poured another. It was almost too harsh. He went around the counter and opened the refrigerator and got some orange juice and poured it into his tequila. Rita said, “You’re a genius,” and held up her glass for some juice to be poured in on top of her tequila.

  Rita flipped on the radio: “I’ll Be Seeing You.” “You’re his friend, Hector. Orson confides in you. He’s not committed to reconciliation, is he?”

 

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