One True Sentence: A Hector Lassiter novel (Hector Lassiter series Book 1)

by Craig McDonald

  “It is very good news,” Hector said, sipping again and winking. He took out his fountain pen and signed one of the checks over to his landlady and kissed her cheek. “So you won’t have to set me out.”

  “You’re not even late,” she said, touching her cheek where he had had kissed it. She was an older woman and stocky and she had appointed herself his surrogate mother, Hector thought, though she was closer in age to his grandmother, if he still had one.

  “This will ensure we stay on our good footing,” he said.

  He climbed back up to his room, carrying the breakfast tray she had prepared for him: eggs over easy, toast and bacon, and a cup of yogurt. She’d also added a flask filled with more of the strong coffee Hector favored. He smothered his eggs in salt and pepper and dug in, reading a couple of newspapers while he ate.

  Hector was startled to see that an acquaintance had been murdered…found stabbed and left propped in a doorway of a vacant shop on the Rue de Moussy. Death had come from a single puncture to the heart, probably administered with a long stiletto, according to the report.

  Hector sipped his coffee, added a little more cream and sipped it again. There would be no shortage of suspects for the murder, Hector figured.

  Hell, most of the young writers on the Left Bank — Hector excepted — had good reason to want Murray Panzer dead.

  Murray had come to Paris from Greenwich Village in ’21, a trust fund intellectual with heady notions of starting a literary magazine. He kept his overhead down by paying his hungry contributors in extra copies of his magazine…in itself not an unusual practice. Paris was lousy with little magazines that did the same — “little reviews” and chapbook periodicals filled with drivel Hector couldn’t read.

  But Panzer, it had recently been learned, had been reselling his unpaid contributors’ stories to other, paying publications in Spain and Germany…passing the material off as the work of writers whom Panzer invented pen names for, and then pocketed the money. Panzer’s subterfuge had been found out by Constance Wright…a poet who’d been traveling with her lover in Berlin and who had found her own poem featured in Der Querschnitt — but now allegedly the work of a poet named “Gwendolyn Roquelaure.”

  Several of the literary writers and poets of the Left Bank were bitterly calling for Panzer’s head.

  Ernest Hemingway had not been among those burned, but he could vividly imagine himself having been one of those taken in. Hem had insisted that Hector should join him in a “visit” across the river to Panzer’s apartment on the Rue Coquillière: “We’ll knock him back on his ass, Lasso. Get a little money back for ours.”

  “No way,” Hector had replied. “And I only write for paying markets, where they find other ways to screw you.” Hector was forever taking shots for writing for the crime pulps back home, for “whoring” as some other young writers put it.

  Hector had decided to use it to his advantage for once. “But at least I get paid in currency for my stuff,” he’d told Hem.

  “Well, someone should sure do something about that thieving son of a bitch,” Hem had said, frowning.

  Hector finished with the newspapers. He saw nothing about a body having been pulled from the Seine. He dressed to go out — pulling a cable-knit sweater on over his undershirt, shirt, and the sweatshirt he’d already put on. He shrugged on his big leather jacket with the fleece lining. He pulled on his leather gloves and scooped up his chocolate brown fedora.

  It was cold on the street and exhaust from the cabs roiled in the chilly wind. The snow had hardened and it crunched under Hector’s work boots.

  “Lasso, wait up!”

  Hector turned and saw Hem running toward him…running with that limping, shambling run of his caused by a weak, reconstructed knee. Hem was dressed in layers, like Hector — sweaters over sweatshirts, a scarf and black fisherman’s cap and gloves with the fingertips cut out. Hem was four or five days unshaven and his clothes smelled of peat fire. “Where are you headed, Lasso?”

  “Sylvia’s…figured to browse awhile.”

  “Me too. Walk together?”

  “Always,” Hector said, “But just a minute.” He rested his gloved hand on Hem’s shoulder to steady himself, then raised his right leg and fished around under the cuff of his pants. Hector pulled the silver flask from his boot and smiled. “For the cold walk.”

  Hem beamed and accepted the flask and took a swig as they crossed the Rue d’Assas. “Gotta get myself one of these,” he said, handing the flask back. “And Pernod…that’s sure the right stuff for a morning like this.”

  Hector took a swig and slipped the flask in the pocket of his leather jacket. He took his off his glove and fished loose a cigarette and a match and got his smoke going. They were headed north on the Rue Guynemer, skirting the gardens. Hector slipped back on his glove and said, “See where somebody punched old Murray’s ticket?”

  Hem was surprised by that. Hector then told him about what he had read. When he finished, Hem said, “That’s two, then. Hear word they found Lloyd Blake dead in his bed yesterday. His throat had been cut.” To stay warm, Hem was trading punches with his shadow on the passing walls; with his reflection in the storefront windows.

  Lloyd was another of the little magazine publishers. He’d taken on several investors recently to try and keep his little magazine going — much of it money taken from aspiring or struggling writers who couldn’t afford to be underwriting little magazines. When he’d apparently garnered all the “contributions” he was apt to obtain, Lloyd had announced he was shutting down the publication after all.

  Rather than refunding the money taken from his contributors, Lloyd had instead upgraded his living quarters and begun hanging out with a smarter set on the other side of the Seine. Or so the gossips claimed.

  Hector said, “Seems the literary life is suddenly becoming bloody.”

  Stopping his shadowboxing, Hem smiled and said, “Couldn’t have happened to two better prospects, though. You can’t disagree with that.” He reached into Hector’s jacket and took out the flask. Hem took a drink and raised the flask and said, “Farewell to that son of a whore.”

  Hector accepted his flask back and took a swallow. “To both the dead sons of bitches,” he said.

  2

  Because of the raw weather, foot traffic was light on the Rue de l’Odéon. Heavy wet snow was drifting down again, but it didn’t seem to want to stick to the cobblestones.

  The writers stamped the slush from their feet and ducked into the bookshop…into the dry warmth from the shop’s fireplace with its low-set mantel. Sylvia Beach, the owner of Shakespeare and Company, clapped her hands and ran around her desk to embrace them. Hector brushed her dark brown hair back from her forehead where it had been pushed by the brim of his hat when she hugged him, then placed his fedora on her head. Sylvia adjusted it to a rakish angle and winked one brown eye as she checked her reflection in the glass panel of a barrister bookcase. “You may have trouble getting this back from me, Hector,” Sylvia said. “I look dashing in a chap’s hat, don’t I?”

  “Very fetching,” he agreed.

  Hem squeezed her arm. “Mail for me?”

  She smiled and walked back around her desk, still wearing Hector’s hat. She reached in a drawer and handed Hem a thin sheaf of envelopes bound in a green rubber band.

  Hem said, “Think I’m gonna browse.” Then he drifted off somewhere to read his mail in private. Hector figured that was in case any of the letters were from the slick magazines back home. Given Hem’s raw subject matter, they would probably be more rejection letters.

  Hector slipped off his gloves and wadded them into the pockets of his leather jacket and then shrugged off his jacket and slipped it over the back of a chair by the fireplace. From behind Sylvia, a pantheon of writers’ photographs stared down on Hector — Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad, among others. Scattered throughout the bookstore were the photographic portraits of more writers, living and dead. Hector and Hem had a friendly bet
about which of them would be the first to be honored with a glossy posted on Sylvia’s walls.

  With his steady stream of short stories appearing back home, Hector figured he should have some kind of edge, but he also figured Sylvia was waiting until one or both of them had a published novel under their belts.

  Hector said, “How’s Ade?” Adrienne Monnier was another bookseller on the Left Bank, and Sylvia’s lover.

  “Oh, she’s just fine.” Hector checked the spine of the book Sylvia had been reading when they came in: Havelock Ellis’s Erotic Symbolism. Sexually charged books, a lesbian love affair, publishing Joyce’s Ulysses… Hector thought Sylvia had come a long way from her American roots and puritanical childhood as the daughter of a Maryland minister.

  But Paris seemed to do that to young Americans.

  Sylvia was also an avid gossip: “I haven’t seen the newspapers yet, but I heard that someone murdered Murray Panzer,” she said, warm brown eyes inquiring. “Is that true, Hec?”

  “And how.” Hector gave her a lurid account of the murder…embroidered a bit by his own imagination and the way he saw the crime scene in his head.

  He finished and Sylvia said, “And now I hear that awful Lloyd Baker was killed, too.”

  “Hem was just telling me about that one. Seems to be hard times for underhanded literary lights, eh?” Hector smiled and accepted the cup and saucer she handed him. The coffee tasted of vanilla but he was glad for the warmth of it, and for the effects of the caffeine. She handed him a brioche.

  “Well, that makes three of them,” Sylvia said, sipping her own coffee. She pushed Hector’s hat back a little on her head so she could see him better.

  Hector scowled. “Three? Christ, who else is dead?”

  “Natalie Champlin — you know, who runs the quarterly poetry magazine Janus. They pulled her out of the river this morning.”

  Hector could hear the scream and the breaking ice and the splash again in his head from the night before. Maybe it had been Natalie he had heard going off the bridge. He said, “Suicide? Creditors at the door?”

  “Might have been taken for that but for the wound. Natalie was stabbed through the heart.”

  “Just like Murray,” Hector said, shrugging off a little chill.

  He finished up his coffee and rose. “Going to wander the stacks,” he said. “And see if I can find Hem. Soothe whatever his mail might have done to him.”

  Hector pushed his hat down lower on her head and kissed the back of Sylvia’s neck, taking delight in her husky giggle. He thought again what a shame it was she was only attracted to other women.

  3

  It was half-past-four and Hector and Hem were still making the circuit together…still catching up.

  “Christ, but it’s good to be home,” Hem said. The Hemingways had been back in Paris for just a few days. Ernest and wife, Hadley, had spent several ill-fated months in Toronto awaiting the birth of their first child. There, Hem had briefly returned to newspaper work under the direction of a sadistic editor — “A son of a bitch of the first water,” as Hem put it.

  The Hemingways had broken their lease and snuck out in the night, fleeing back to Europe on storm-swept seas with their newborn son, Jack. With Hector’s help, they had found a new apartment above a sawmill at 113 rue de Notre-Dame-des-Champs, behind Montparnasse.

  Hem said, “Any good plans for tonight, Lasso?”

  “Just the usual. Starting out at the joint under your old place tonight I think.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll be there by six.”

  Hem glanced at a clock in a shopfront. He said, “You checked out the Café du Dôme since it reopened?”

  “Nah,” Hector said. “Why don’t we do that now?”

  ***

  Hem had gone to fetch Hadley.

  Hector sat at the back of the raucous bal musette, a tiny place on the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. An old man was playing accordion and stamping time on a tambourine he’d tossed on the floor.

  “Hello there, Hector.”

  He smiled and pulled out a chair and then scooted it in for her. “Hey, sweetheart. What’ll it be, Molly?”

  “White wine.”

  Margaret Wilder was two years in Paris from Elgin, Illinois. Margaret — Molly — was an aspiring poet. Soft-spoken and virginal (at least Hector figured so), she was blond and pretty in a fresh-faced way. Her eyes were violet and her thick, wavy hair was bobbed to the angle of her jaw. She wore little makeup. She slipped off her coat and let it fall carelessly across the back of her chair and held her hands up to the candle on the table between them. Hector said, “Where’s Philippe?”

  That was her boyfriend, though Hector wasn’t sure how serious that relationship was from Molly’s perspective. As nearly as Hector could tell, Philippe Martin worshipped Molly…very protective…obviously adoring of her. Philippe was an aspiring French painter of meager talent, in Hector’s estimation. And her boyfriend spent much of his free time in the Rotonde, that sorry catch basin at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail where it was always amateur hour — a kind of magnet for bohemian poseurs. The kind that talked more than worked. All of that only furthered Hector’s assumptions about the young painter’s low talent. In Hector’s experience, the Rotonders were a sorry lot.

  “Still plugging away at the day job,” Molly said. “But he should be along soon.” The waiter leaned in and Molly said, “Un petit vin blanc.”

  Hector said, “Whisky for me, neat.”

  “I was by your place earlier today to see if you wanted to get lunch, Hec,” she said.

  He smiled. “Sorry I missed you. It’s the first day since Hem has been back that he and I have gotten to spend any time together,” he said. “So we’ve been making the bar and book circuit. Sylvia’s and La Maison des Amis des Livres to see Adrienne Monnier. Spent a little time in the Place Saint-Sulpice trying to sober up. But the lions are all covered in ice and it’s just too damn cold for sitting outdoors, even for a couple of lit writers. So we went back to the bars…and coffee drinks. You know — get sober and tight all at once.”

  She smiled. “Are you tight now?” Candlelight played in her violet eyes that seemed almost too exotic for her face. The man with the accordion was playing “Parlez-Moi D’Amour.”

  “No,” Hector said, smiling. “Not between the cold and all the walking.” He accepted his whisky and hefting it said, “But I am working on it.”

  Molly sipped her wine and said, “Me too.”

  He winced a little at the burn, then licked his lips as the whisky began to warm his belly. He said, “You had something in last month’s issue of Panzer’s magazine, didn’t you, Molly? Did you hear about Murray Panzer?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I did hear about that,” she said. “Everyone is talking about that. A horrible end for a horrible man. But not so horrible as to deserve that.” She shook her head. “Nobody deserves that. And I suppose now there’s one fewer market to publish in.”

  Hector almost balked at the term “market” being applied to a little magazine that paid in copies. But he held his tongue on that front. Instead, he said, “And then Lloyd Blake, too.” Hector toyed with his glass. “Christ, I hope you weren’t one of Blake’s investors. You weren’t, were you?”

  Molly shrugged, looking away. “Just a few francs. Nothing I’ll miss, really.”

  Molly’s Parisian lifestyle was grudgingly underwritten by her mother back in Illinois.

  The old woman, Molly had confided to Hector, hoped her daughter would soon come to her senses and return to the States and be a poet back there. She had written Molly again about that wish in the most recent of her letters to her daughter. Molly occasionally read her letters from home to Hector. She was nearly always left badly shaken by her notes from home…by their cold tone and their harsh words regarding her poetic ambitions.

  A letter from home almost always resulted in days of sulking.

  In one of the last letters Moll
y had shared with Hector, her father had threatened to disown Molly for the “deplorable example” she was setting for her younger sisters.

  When she had spoken of the last batch of correspondence to Hector, Molly had said, “And of course my mother’s notion of poetry is of something that’s lightly lyrical and that rhymes. Like the stuff back home — you know, in all the slick magazines.”

  Hector didn’t have much interest in modern poetry, or really any sense of it at all, so he couldn’t render a judgment as to whether Molly was hopeless, a mediocre talent, or a real prospect. Hector did think that Molly was out of her depth in bohemian, Left Bank Paris. It was good she had found Philippe, Hector thought. He hated to think what might have happened to Molly if she hadn’t had the good fortune to find what seemed to be a decent enough young man in her middling painter.

  Molly seemed to Hector a little like the girl-next-door slumming in Sodom and Gomorrah. The town hadn’t yet worked its dubious wonders on Molly. At least not so far as Hector could see. Hector thought he was mostly unchanged, too. He found that his own solitary childhood in coastal Texas was a stubborn thing to grind out.

  Yet, in Paris, Sylvia Beach had turned from a prim minister’s daughter into a lesbian bookseller and sometimes purveyor or even publisher of smutty, erotic, or banned books. Sylvia was the template for Parisian self-reinvention.

  But Molly?

  In most respects, she was still like a pretty, young wide-eyed thing from Illinois.

  “I’m sorry I missed you for lunch,” Hector said again.

  “Me too.” A sad smile.

  Hadley Hemingway had confided to Hector her suspicion that Molly was infatuated with him. But Hector had met Philippe before he had met Molly and so he had a hard time thinking of Molly in that way.

  And Molly seemed to cling to Philippe — to demand too damn much of his time.

  Hector savored his solitude. He valued the options engendered in his lone-wolf lifestyle that assured him the time to write whenever he wanted. For Hector, it was solo lobo, all the way…or so he was always telling himself.