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

by Craig McDonald

  The poet smiled. He pulled his arm from behind his back. Hector saw “Leek” was clutching a cat-o’-nine-tails in his hand. The poet said, “Torture, to use your term for it, isn’t exclusively a means-to-an-end, my friend. It can be an end in and of itself. I promise you pain.” The poet raised his arm. Hector instinctively twisted around so the blows would fall on his back. The poet lashed out three, four times. After the second swing, Hector gave up trying to suppress his own screams.

  The poet cast down his cat-o’-nine-tails. “Already it grows tiresome,” he said. “And you’ve already lost a good bit of blood from your earlier wounds. Can’t have you sliding into unconsciousness from blood loss. Not before the main course.”

  Between gasps, Hector said, “At least tell me Molly isn’t tied by blood to you, you diseased son of a bitch.” His back was burning and he could feel warm trickles of blood running down the small of his back and down his ass. If anything, the man more closely resembled Brinke.

  “Dying in ignorance can be its own form of torture, Hector,” the poet said. Leek turned, speaking into the blackness behind him. “Is it hot enough, yet?”

  A voice from the corner where the small fire had been set said, “White hot.”

  “Bring it.”

  Another man stepped from the shadows. The second man was wearing thick leather gloves and clutching a pair of iron tongs. Gripped in the tongs was a branding iron, its tip glowing blue-orange.

  The poet pulled on his own pair of leather gloves. He said to Hector, “You may have heard some stories about me. I’m told you confronted Crowley. Figure he told you all about my misfortune.”

  Hector said, “Did you enjoy killing prostitutes before your ‘misfortune,’ or does the resulting frustration drive you to that?”

  The poet took hold of the leather-wrapped end of the glowing branding iron. “I’m going to help you answer your own question, Lassiter.” The poet examined the end of the branding iron, then began walking toward Hector. “I say this with some authority: the pain you’re about to experience will eclipse any you’ve known, or will ever know.” He smiled. “Left, or right? Or perhaps split the difference?”

  Squirming, screaming, Hector tried to back away from the glowing end of the branding iron, so close now Hector could feel the heat radiating from the end of the molten metal on his thighs and genitals.

  Hector hit the end of his tethering chain as the iron moved closer between his legs.

  One instant, the poet was in Hector’s face, urging the iron toward Hector’s testicles and murmuring, “Similis simili gaudet.”

  A second later, there was a shot, and the poet was clutching at a red hole in his shirt, halfway between his heart and belly.

  The poet’s cohort began to run, retreating further into Les Catacombes, but now the cavern was awash in torchlight and there was a second shot and the other man fell, blood spreading around the place where his face struck the floor.

  “I’m deeply sorry, Hector,” Aristide Simon said, his voice echoing off the macabre walls. “You shouldn’t have had to suffer more than you already did back at the hotel. My men and I, we became lost in these damned tunnels.” Simon began working at Hector’s bonds. He said, “But it was, in the end, your screams that brought us here in time.”

  Hoarse, Hector said, “How’d you know to follow the ambulance?”

  “One of my men I’d posted to watch you is the reason,” Simon explained. “Just as I was arriving, he pointed out the ambulance was headed away from the nearest hospital.”

  Hector said, “Everything…blurred.” He could still hear the drugs in his own voice…the slurring. He said, “Brinke, I thought I heard…”

  His hands came free from the chains and Hector slumped into Simon’s arms. Hector heard William Carlos Williams say, “He’s in no condition for that, now. Give him more of these…make him dry-swallow them. I need to get to work on those whip wounds. We’ll tell him the other sorry part later. Collect his clothes. I want to get him warm. Put on his pants and socks and we’ll drape his overcoat over him when we carry him outside.”

  PART V

  jeudis

  (The First)

  36

  Hector was seething. Some fool had left a newspaper in reach of his bed. Hem would know better. Hector figured it had to have been one of Simon’s men — two men he figured to be stooges of Simon’s stood sentry outside his door. After what had happened to Leek, Hector wondered a bit at that: there couldn’t still be some threat, could there?

  Whatever the case, Hector had seen the article in the paper about Brinke’s abduction. An hour after Hector had unsuccessfully lobbied Williams for a discharge, and tried to press him for more information, Simon finally appeared. A sad smile.

  Hector’s heart kicked. “No…”

  The French cop stood at the foot of Hector’s bed. “There is little doubt, now, my friend. We’re still looking for her body, but one of her shoes, her purse, and Mademoiselle Devlin’s torn dress have been recovered at various points along the Seine. It’s possible she might have become attached or tangled in some way to the underside of some barge and dragged out to sea, in which case we may never find more. There is also much debris down there on the bottom of the river in which a body might become snarled for some time. Perhaps forever.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Hector said. “If the intent was to kill Brinke, why not do it right there in the ladies’ room, with a knife or a gun? Why risk capture to drag her out of a busy hotel? And that’s another thing — how’d they get her out of here past desk clerks and bellboys? Past elevator operators, hotel detectives, and doormen?”

  “You talk like a mystery writer, my friend,” Simon said, a bit patronizing, but his voice soft. “There are service and delivery doors all over the hotel. Nonpublic entrances and exits through kitchens and storage areas. Or, possibly, they had taken a room close by the ballroom. They might have held her there and waited until after hours to smuggle her out.”

  Hector said, “Now who’s talking like a mystery writer? And again, why go to that trouble when they just might have killed her in the ladies’ room?”

  “They intended to kill you, too, Hector. But not right away. They took the trouble to kidnap you with the intent of torture and then death. I don’t want to be morbid or give you more to pain you than you already have to cope with, but a similar intent might have directed their actions regarding Mademoiselle Devlin.”

  Hector couldn’t bring himself to think along those lines. And he couldn’t conceive of Brinke being dead. He said, “And Molly? Have you found her?”

  “Missing, still.”

  “I notice I still have guards.”

  Simon nodded slowly. “How much are you up for, Hector? How much can you sustain hearing?”

  “Everything. And I want out of here. I need to get out there, to look for Brinke.”

  That sad smile, again. “There’s been a colossal complication, my young friend. Either we had bad information from the beginning — from that treacherous Crowley, whom, by the way, I’ve initiated steps to have deported — or else we have been fooled in another way. Frankly, I think the latter.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Hector, the coroner provided some startling news regarding the body of the man we believed to be Victor Leek. The man I shot down in those damned tunnels. The dead man’s genitalia, they’re quite intact.”

  Hector was raging: “So that man who tortured me was a stand-in.”

  “So it would appear,” Simon said softly. “Particularly since my newspapers from the states have arrived and early.” Simon opened up his leatherette case and passed a yellowing copy of a broadsheet newspaper to Hector. Hector scanned the headline about the fatal fire, then, under a heading slugged “Survivors,” looked at the photos of the brother and sister Starr.

  Hector’s heart raced as he looked at the photo of Lenore Starr. It was a picture of a younger Molly Wilder, no question of that.

 
And her brother, Hamilton Starr, aka Victor Leek?

  He was Molly’s boyfriend, Philippe, her doting, mediocre painter.

  Simon was watching Hector. He said, “I’m sorry, Hector. Truly sorry. We will get this ‘Molly.’”

  “Or I will.”

  “Non — we’ll have no talk like that, Hector. The brother, do you recognize him?”

  Hector folded the newspaper, handed it back to Simon. “Non.”

  37

  Hem handed Hector the note he had found tacked on the door of their flat when Hadley and he had returned home the night before:

  Monsieur Hemingway:

  A flimsy door…a silly French woman… Only those between your son and I. Stand down or face the consequences.

  — VL

  Hector cursed. He said, “Where are Hadley and Bumby now?”

  Hem said, “In the waiting room out there. With a couple of boxer friends. Safe enough for now. Jesus, to threaten a child…”

  “That’s the powerful thing about embracing the void, Hem — anything goes when you believe your actions carry no consequences.”

  “Hadley wants me to take this letter to the police. To inform Simon of the threat.”

  “Normally, I’d agree,” Hector said. “But you do that, and Simon will put guards all over you. He’ll make you his stalking horse…you, and yours.”

  “Christ, I’m so sorry about Brinke, Lasso.”

  Hector raised a hand. “No. No. I haven’t accepted Simon’s theory on that one yet, Hem. It doesn’t seem plausible to me. Makes no sense to kidnap Brinke under those circumstances and with those attendant risks, and then toss her into the Seine. These nihilists kill with impunity, quickly and face-to-face…except for that poisoning. But whatever the means, they don’t haul you off to do the dirty deed.”

  “Except in your case, Lasso.”

  “You been talking to Simon? You sound like him about this.”

  “We talked a bit,” Hem said. “Simon told me Molly is confirmed as the sister. Simon didn’t have his newspapers handy, or I might have been able to identify the brother.”

  A lucky break. “Or maybe not,” Hector said. “Unlikely you would have known him. I’ve been thinking. My wallet is here in the drawer by the bed. Those train tickets are there. Take them and you and Hadley get on that train tonight. You go on to Italy. Bumby will likely be allowed to ride for free. If not, you can get a third ticket for him at the station. As he’s in-arms it’s not as though he’ll need a seat. Should be no problem.”

  “I don’t want to run, Lasso,” Hem said. “Or to leave you in the lurch.”

  “It’s not like that, buddy. I’m going to end this thing tonight, Hem. Alone.”

  “Guess you haven’t heard, Lasso. You’re in here for at least the next three days. Doc Williams’ orders. They’re worried about your back infecting. Besides, with your back shredded like it is, and the stitches in your thigh and belly, you aren’t going to be particularly agile.”

  “I’ll cope. And I don’t need agility. Just need to get back to my place and get my Colt.”

  “You need to get out of here first,” Hem said. “You’re under guard.”

  “That’s how you pay me back for those train tickets and how you best help me, Hem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Go out and quietly tell Hadley you’re leaving for Italy tonight, Hem. Tell her that, but also tell her that you’re going to be in here, in my room, for another hour or so.”

  Hem scowled. “To what end?”

  “You’re going to help me dress, Hem. Then you’re going to loan me your hat and coat so I can walk out of here past Simon’s guards. While I’m sneaking out, you’re going to take my place here in bed…cover up to the chin and hide that mustache. Give me my hour to get home and get my gun. Then you and Hadley and John get the hell out of this city. I’ll try and join you in Italy in a few days. Maybe I’ll even bring company.”

  Hem said, “Hector, I don’t want you carrying around a lot of false hope for finding Brinke…not alive. Simon is insistent she’s gone.”

  “He’s been wrong about other things, Hem. He may be wrong this time, too. You’ll do this for me, buddy?”

  Hem smiled uncertainly. He sighed, then reached out and shook Hector’s foot. “Let me go tell Hash. Tell her not to react or call out when I walk out of this hospital in a few moments. And thanks so much for those tickets, Lasso. If I was a lone wolf I’d have your back all the way on this, I want you to know that—”

  “Stop there, buddy. It’s a given. Just make sure you don’t have any black-clad, sullen-looking shadows when you get on that train tonight, Hem.”

  ***

  Germaine ran around her counter and embraced Hector through the door. She kissed him on both cheeks. He suppressed the urge to scream as she patted his back.

  She said, “I thought you were in hospital…the stories in the papers are terrible. And poor Mademoiselle Devlin. I’m so, so sorry for you, Hector. I hardly know what to say.”

  He squeezed her arm. “That story may yet have a different ending. A happy ending, I hope. Have I had any visitors?”

  “No. Some mail…that’s all.”

  “I’ll take it with me…read it as I can. That envelope the policeman left for me, do you have it?”

  “Right here.”

  Hector looked over the photos of Simon’s men. He committed their faces to memory. As least he’d be able to sort them from any of Philippe’s or Molly’s minions.

  Hector bit his lip at the pain as he climbed the stairs to his apartment. He put on some fresh, warm clothes — work pants and boots, a flannel shirt and sweatshirt, and long leather coat. He thrust his Colt into an interior pocket of his leather greatcoat, then wrapped the Mauser up in paper and twine, wrapped that in Hem’s coat and tucked it all into a bag. Hem would need his only winter coat in Italy, Hector figured. And the old German gun would provide Hem extra comfort.

  Hector left the parcel with Germaine along with a few francs to have it delivered to Hem’s femme de ménage. “If you can do it, it might be best you were away from here for a couple of days,” Hector told Germaine. “At least through Saturday morning. Let the others upstairs fend for themselves for a day or two.”

  “I’m not sure I can do that.”

  “You need to do that, please. These people — the ones I’m helping the police to catch, the one’s who took Brinke — they’ll stop at nothing. Please go: I can’t lose anyone else to this.”

  She nodded, squeezing both his hands. “Well, then. But you mind yourself, Hector.”

  “Nobody needs worry for me. Once I know you’re safe, well, they’ll have done all they can do to try and harm me.”

  Germaine shuddered. “What are you going to do, Hector?”

  “I’m going to teach them there are some things worse than nothing.”

  ***

  Watching behind himself in the reflections of storefronts, occasionally ducking down side streets and circling back around or turning on heel, Hector looked for shadows but eventually determined he had in fact escaped any surveillance.

  Assured of that fact, Hector began his search.

  Hector didn’t know where Philippe lived, but he did know where Molly resided. Hector started there; Molly’s landlady insisted she hadn’t seen Molly in at least two days.

  Hector next limped to the Rue Delambre, where the offices of Intimations were located. A grim smile: one in a series of glass panels next to the door was missing. A piece of cardboard had been taped in place of the broken pane to keep out the cold. Hector pushed aside the cardboard and found that he could just reach the interior knob and he unlocked the magazine office’s door.

  He went in gun drawn, stepping in quickly and moving to one side to avoid being backlit by the graying sunlight through the door — a potential target in silhouette.

  A mouse ran across the floor and scuttled under a barrister desk. The office smelled musty. Hector closed the door behind himse
lf, resecured the piece of cardboard, and wandered around the small cramped office. A few new mousetraps had been set up around the edges of the desk. Two had been tripped — dead mice lay with crushed heads in the bloodied traps. One was a very recent kill: its tail continued to twitch.

  A cot rested in one corner. Atop it was a small valise. Hector opened it…recognized the dress Molly had worn the night of the day of the ménage à trois. He lifted the small pillow, held it to his face, and smelled lilacs. A Franklin stove provided heat to the office. Hector tentatively touched his palm to the stove’s black iron surface. Still warm. There was a glow from the coals he could see through the grate. Molly, or Lenore, evidently hadn’t been gone for long.

  The place was otherwise empty…just various manuscripts from hopeful contributors stacked here and there…typed poems and short stories spread out on a battered white-pine worktable.

  Hector picked up one of the submitted poems, flipped it over, and pulled his fountain pen from his pocket. He wrote a short note on the back of the sheet of paper:

  M.

  I know it all now. I know about you and your brother and his masquerade as your painter-boyfriend.

  I know what you two did to your parents in order to buy yourself these new lives in Europe. I know, because the police know and told me.

  What I don’t know is whether your parents, the Starrs, were evil and abusive.

  What I don’t know is how much of all that, and this bloody business of recent weeks, was your doing and how much of it was Philippe’s.

  I want to know more about these things.

  And I want to know what you, or what Philippe, has done with Brinke.

  Depending on your answers — your honest answers — there may yet be some way out of all of this for you. Tonight at 9, and tomorrow at 9, I’ll stand on the Left Bank end of the Pont Neuf, on the easternmost side. I’ll stand there tonight and tomorrow until 9:15.

  I want to meet you, and only you. We’ll talk this out. I swear to give you a fair shake if your answers are the right ones.