A minute passed, then a small skinny blondish man with wall-eyes and a big nose emerged from the men’s room. He had a black wool coat or cape draped over one arm and a briefcase clutched in his other hand.
The agents both took note when the broad brim of large black slouch hat emerged through the door, but the man wearing the hat was an elderly Negro dressed in a double-breasted gray suit.
Another tall man soon followed that one of out of the bathroom. That man was slipping a cigarette between his lips and he flicked open a silver Zippo with one hand and held the lighter up to his mouth. He closed the lighter as he passed Agent Rice, nodding at the agent.
Three more minutes passed, and there was still no sign of Orson Welles emerging from the men’s room. The agents nodded at one another. Agent Rice took off his hat and glasses and slipped through the door.
There was nobody standing at the urinals. The stall doors were all ajar, as well. The FBI agent moved from door to door, confronted by empty stall after empty stall.
The men’s room stank of urine and disinfectant and cigar smoke.
Agent Rice stared at the blue-gray smoke from the cigar left resting on the marble ledge above the sinks.
***
Hector was sitting in the airport lounge, engaging in some serious eye-contact with a redheaded stewardess — furthering his cover story in case he was also being watched. He heard a crackle over the loud speaker and then a request that “Michael O’Hara” should “please pick up the courtesy phone.”
He grabbed the bartender and was directed to a red phone mounted on the wall kitty-corner to the bar. Hector scooped up the phone and said, “Can’t let go of that character, can you?”
Orson was deploying his Irish accent. “I’m just glad you remembered the name and made the connection.” Hector had heard better assumed Irish accents, but he wasn’t about to say that to touchy Orson. Welles said, “I’m taking your advice, Hector. We’re going to cross over from Arizona. Be a few more hours before we reach the California border.”
Hector said, “Where’d you scrounge up all the reporters? Particularly with this ‘Dahlia’ madness. I figured they’d all be spoken for.”
“A little last curtain call for the Mercury Players,” Orson said. “The woman with the Graflex, the one who helped you and me swap coats and hats, that was Agnes Moorhead.”
“God, I didn’t even recognize her,” Hector said.
“That’s the beauty and talent of Agnes,” Orson said.
“What will you do now?”
“Stay in Europe,” he said. “Finance my films from there. They appreciate me. I want to film Don Quixote, and to do it in Spain. I’d like to take another stab at Heart of Darkness.”
“Conceivably, this could all blow over by year’s end,” Hector said. “The LAPD isn’t on to you yet as a suspect for Betty’s murder. Only the Feds were thinking that way. And if I succeed in hanging her killing on some surrealists who can be made to flip on the others...”
“I’d have left the country anyway, Hector. And this facilitates things with Rita. She insists on staying in Hollywood. Who can blame her? She’s a movie star. The only thing that upsets me is not getting to finish The Lady From Shanghai. Cohn will probably fuck it up.”
Hector bit his lip: thus was another of Orson’s mutilated masterpieces being born.
“If I can shake loose soon here in Los Angeles, maybe I’ll catch you in Mexico,” Hector said. He was thinking again about journeying to Mexico...about straying over that border from his hacienda in La Mesilla.
“Just mind your own back, Hector, please,” Orson said. “Think of what they did to Beth, and she was an innocent in every sense. You’re actively engaging them. I’d hate to think what they’d do to you if they got their hands on you.”
“They’ve got their own problems now,” Hector said. “And I’ve got a long memory and short temper...loads of imagination, too. We’ll see what that trifecta maybe buys those cocksuckers. They’re my new hobby.”
Hector had just hung up the phone when another page came over the airport’s intercom system for him — this one paging Hector by his real name.
Edmond Tilly said, “What the hell happened?”
Hector said, “What the hell are you talking about? And thanks so much for broadcasting my fucking handle all over goddamn Los Angeles airport, dumbass.”
“Welles! Fucking Orson Welles has fucking disappeared!”
“Disappeared?”
“Yeah, fucking literally disappeared. My guys followed him into the men’s room. They stood guard outside the door. Only one way in or out of the fucking room. Time passed. They went in, and they found just his fucking cigar. Just his goddamn cigar!”
“These boys of yours maybe closet hopheads, Agent?”
“What did you see, Lassiter?”
“I saw nothing. Hell, I didn’t even see your boys, and I’ve got the eye. I got out of the car with Orson, then I moved my ass away...just in case your boys got jumpy and decided to arrest the poor bastard on the spot. Orson went one way, and I went another. As I speak, I think you’re queering my shot at nailing a redheaded stew.”
“I don’t understand this,” Tilly said.
“I’d kick your boys’ asses,” Hector said. “I’d see if they were really even here. Orson’s hard to miss. Sounds to me like they did just that, though. Maybe they showed up late and so they concocted this crazy-ass tale about him pulling a Houdini in the crapper.”
“Maybe.”
Hector said, “How are we doing on the surrealist front?”
“More bad news,” Agent Tilly said. “We got some more small fish, but the big targets seemed to have slipped our nets. At least we’ve dispersed them, anyway.”
“Maybe here,” Hector said, “but they’ll reconstitute in Europe.”
“So let France and the Brits cope with the bastards.”
“So Mercedes and her family walk?”
“I can only arrest the ones I can find.”
“Damn.” Hector said, “You ever get your hooks into an old bastard named Bernard Harper?”
“Never even heard of him — the name’s never come up.”
“He’s connected to all of them,” Hector said. “But he’s old and just enough out of the loop to maybe have gone unwarned. He might still be in Los Angeles...off everyone’s radar but my own.”
“Sounds worth a try,” Tilly said. “I’ve got to have something to take back to the director after this fuck-up. Where do I find this Harper guy?”
“I’m going to head over to his place now,” Hector said. “Have one or two of your boys meet me there, won’t you?”
“I’ve already got the two guys there at the airport, Hector. You could hook up with them and ride out together.”
Hector couldn’t risk being recognized by one of the agents as one of the men who emerged from the men’s “restroom of mystery.” And Hector’s hand still stank of Orson’s cigar.
Feigning indignance, Hector said, “You keep those two incompetent sons of bitches away from me. After the way they fucked up with Welles, why would I want them having my back? And I mean, Jesus — how does the bureau expect to win the war against communism fielding dumbasses like those two?”
***
The field agents dispatched to meet Hector at Bernard Harper’s house finally agreed to force the front door.
They did that and then kicked the broken door open. The smell of blood was thick on the stale air that burped from the house as the door slammed back against the interior wall.
The younger of the agents — a gung-ho, blond, former-All-American — edged through the door, then came stumbling out backward, doubled over and vomiting uncontrollably.
The other agent, an older guy named Fletcher Long, edged in, gun out. This choked voice: “Holy Christ!”
Frowning, Hector edged through the door, a hand already covering his nose and mouth from the stench.
Bernard Harper had literally been taken apart.
The old man’s living room looked like Orsons’ Crazy House set recreated with real body parts.
Every one of Bernard Harper’s digits, limbs and extremities had been disarticulated and arranged around the living room.
Ropes of intestine were coiled around banisters and curtain rods.
Painted in blood on the wall was the title:
OLD MAN EXPLODED OUT TO ALL POINTS
PAST REDEMPTION
OR REASSEMBLY
The photographer’s severed head sat on the bottom step of the stairs leading to the second floor. An envelope was balanced against the head. On the envelope was written “Hector.”
Arching an eyebrow, Hector said, “May I?”
“Use a handkerchief to pick it up,” Agent Long said, his face white. “And I’ll read it with you.”
Hector opened the envelope and unfolded the note with his display handkerchief. It read:
This time I almost helped them.
But in the end, I just gave them ideas.
For what he cost me.
For what he cost us.
— R/A
Fletcher Long’s voice was raw and cracking. “What’s it mean?” He waved his arms around at the bloodied room. “What does any of this mean? What do you even call something like this?”
Hector said, “A masterpiece.”
PART FOUR:
HOW THE GHOST OF YOU CLINGS
(1959)
“The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.”— Willem de Kooning
LIONS IN WINTER
41
Two prints of Salvador Dali’s hung on the wall of the travel agent’s office:
Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity and The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used As a Table.
Hector hoped it wasn’t some kind of omen.
***
Hector still doubted the wisdom of his trip to Cuba.
It was all Marlene Dietrich’s fault...he bitterly blamed the Kraut.
The German chanteuse’s siege had been focused and forceful and it was waged over many months. She’d finally appealed to Hector’s conscience — never an easy target, but all too effective when struck.
Hem, Marlene confided, was sliding into some sustained state of paranoia. Hem had become increasingly suicidal, she sobbed.
Hem’s current wife, Mary, had confided to Marlene that Hem was convinced he was under perpetual FBI surveillance, even in Cuba...that he was being stalked by unnamed enemies.
“He probably is under Hoover’s flunkies’ watch,” Hector had told Marlene. “I had him all but cleared of communist suspicion in Spain, then he started his crazy stuff about hunting Jap submarines with his drunken Cuban buddies on the Pilar. That earned him the kind of attention from J. Edgar nobody needs. Now the story is Hem’s getting cozy with Castro — even offering him publicity advice.”
“You’re truly the last of Hem’s old friends,” Marlene insisted. “You know one another best and you’re the only one either of you has left from the old days. Living as you both do, how long can you two have to fix it? How long can either of you have left to enjoy the other’s company before it’s too late?”
Repeatedly shamed by Marlene, Hector had eventually relented and agreed to be the one to reach out.
He’d called Hem at the Finca Vigía — the “Lookout Farm” — and they had shared a cordial, almost sentimental thirty-minute phone conversation...all the while Ernest holding the phone too far from his ear and shouting into it, as was his custom.
Hem said that he and Mary had just returned from wintering in Ketchum, Idaho.
They had returned briefly home to Cuba for a few weeks before pushing on to Spain, where Hem planned to follow a series of pivotal mano a manos between Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín.
Hem was going to observe the corridas in order to update, or perhaps even to write a sequel to Death in the Afternoon.
Hector would be welcome to come down for a few days. He could bunk in the Finca’s guesthouse and they would continue to patch things up, to catch up.
And Hector suddenly had some time on his hands.
He’d taken a meeting with Alfred Hitchcock, ostensibly to discuss a film project, but it had gone very badly.
When Hector had gotten to Los Angeles — and gotten there on his own nickel (That cheapskate limey son of a bitch, Hitch!) — he found he had really only been invited to receive a punishing lecture from Hitchcock for having dropped out of participation in the bloated director’s latest film, Vertigo.
“I’m frankly still miffed, Mr. Lassiter,” Hitch had said.
Months before, Hitch had sat behind the same desk, his short fat fingers interlaced over the immensity of his potbelly, his lips puckering, as he described the central conceit of his next thriller. An everyman man — Jimmy Stewart, Hitch’s favorite doppelganger — would fall in love with two women. But perhaps they would be the same woman. “There’ll be delicious kink, a whiff of necrophilia, even, underlying all that of course, dear boy,” Hitch had told Hector.
But Hector had begged off the screenwriting chores.
Angered, Hitch had blustered, and pouted, and accused. “What, you think the concept is too preposterous, Mr. Lassiter?”
“Quite the contrary,” Hector had said. “The son of a bitch has too much verisimilitude for me. I’ve lived that sucker.”
“Then you’re perfect to write it, dear boy.”
“Too perfect,” Hector had said, begging off.
So all of that had conspired to send Hector on to Cuba.
But in the end, a rather chilling revelation had truly tipped Hector over into making the trip.
Hem had been receiving anonymous, menacing letters...letters filled with ranting death threats over some unspecified injustice allegedly done the anonymous author by Hem.
That wasn’t particularly unusual in itself — Hem was famous and so he was bound to attract his share of kooks and cranks...mentals, all.
But a body had also recently been found not far from Hem’s rambling home and hilltop grounds — a woman’s disarticulated torso.
Hem had shrugged it off on face — dismissing it.
Ernest, Mary told Marlene, figured the torso was the handiwork of adherents to some secretive cult called Abaqua — an offshoot of the Santeria religion — some mystery cult centered around Havana.
But Hem had written the murder into a passage of one of his several novels in progress, Islands in the Stream. The mutilation murder had clearly made an impression on Hem. He kept bringing it up in odd moments of conversation with Mary — the fourth Mrs. Hemingway, and the one now looking to be Papa’s last wife.
For his part, Hector had made an instinctive linkage between the threatening notes and the mutilated corpse that reminded him too vividly of another torso of a murdered woman that had been left on display on a park bench along Miami’s South Beach decades before.
The last time Hector had seen Rachel, she had expressed a desire to kill her father and perhaps even to kill Hemingway, whom she most blamed for keeping her and Hector apart.
Since then, Rachel had certainly seen to — or helped to shape — the bloody murder of her own father.
The horrific destruction visited upon Bernard Harper had been so extreme that Hector had often wondered if Rachel’s fragile equilibrium had been compromised witnessing it.
He wondered if standing by and watching her own father’s dissection — even offering tips if her last note to Hector was to be believed — had tipped Rachel back over into committing murder herself.
For a dozen years, Hector had kept his ear to the ground...watching for news reports or wire stories that might indicate the surrealist murders had resumed somewhere else...maybe in Mexico where Rachel had said she might head next. Maybe in California, where he had last seen her.
Bu
t there had been nothing in North or South America until the revelation about the torso recently found near Hem’s house in Cuba.
Hector had immediately put out some feelers to some old Cuban friends and learned of two other mutilation murders that had occurred in recent days in and around San Francisco de Paula, where Hemingway lived. Both the victims had been prostitutes, and both of them had been “linked” to Hem during his randier late-forties and early-fifties.
When Hector determined to go to Cuba and visit Hem, he took the unprecedented step of first tipping celebrity gossip columnist Leonard Lyons to his pending trip: “I’m going down to Cuba to see my old friend Hem and fish and drink and maybe take Castro’s measure myself. Maybe get a crime novel out of that revolution. Can’t see why I should let Graham Greene have Havana all to himself.”
Hector figured the resulting blurb in Lyons’ widely distributed and wildly popular gossip column might draw Rachel out...draw her to him in Cuba, if she was indeed there...if she had broken inside again. If she had begun killing again and had now set her sites on Hem.
The door of the plane opened and passengers began de-boarding. Hector was seated near the rear of the plane and so had to await the departure of the other passengers. As he sat there, he could feel the heavy tropical heat creeping into the plane.
Hector stood and shrugged off his pale sports jacket and draped it over one arm. He slipped on his black sunglasses before stepping out into the harsh sunlight.
It was windy and the palm trees around the terminal were whipping furiously, their bending trunks creaking in the wind.
Ernest was standing by a red Chrysler, perspiring and grinning. A small thin Cuban in a gray chauffeur’s uniform was standing next to Ernest. Hem’s fourth wife, Mary, stood on the other side of Ernest...small and blond.
Hem was wearing a starched white guyabera shirt, khaki pants and brown moccasins without socks. He had a full beard now, snow white, and his white thinning hair was carefully parted at the back of his neck and combed forward in long strands.
Though there was less than a year or so between them, Hector thought Hem might have passed as Hector’s father. Hem’s magnificent, once-imposing musculature had all but collapsed and he had an enormous gut.
Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 28