Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) (6 page)
Adios
Ten years ...
gone
.
I'm old and tired and used up.
I've lived too long. Gone and outlived my sorry-ass world.
It's been two years since I've written anything worth a damn.
This morning I read a list of the bestselling books of the year. I wasn't on it. The stuff that was? Books by these characters named Styron, Potok, Uris and Kazan. Poetry, according to the list, seems to be crap written by this dude, Rod McKuen. The really big-sellers this year?
Rosemary's Baby
by Ira Levin and Phyllis Diller's
Marriage Manual
.
Like I said, ain't much of real worth around anymore.
My daughter is still dead.
My country has gone to hell.
Our last two Democrat presidents have led us into another war --- but not the kind of conflict that a scheming mercenary like Emil Holmdahl would ever find a way to turn a buck on. In this dark year of our gone-missing Lord, only the industrial military complex gets rich on warfare. It's what the country gets for electing some dumbass, jug-eared, appendectomy-scar flaunting Texas politician to be president --- "Great frontiers" and a shadow government. Black budgets and bigger bombs. Or maybe JFK and LBJ just figured time had come to salt the street corners with a fresh crop of begging, one-legged and one-armed men --- boys with burned faces and missing eyes and noses.
Those World War II and Korean War vets
were
starting to get long-in-the-tooth.
Either way, it's all gone away now.
Kids are growing their hair and burning the flag and blowing up their schools. Women are burning their underwear.
I don't recognize the stuff on the radio as music. Whatever happened to Marty Robbins or Sonny James or Buddy Loy Burke?
My
Black Mask
stablemates are all dead. Lester Dent, the most decent, the most
civilized
, of us, died of a heart attack in March 1959. Chandler died March 26 of the same year in California. Hammett went nuts and communist and clocked out in January 1961 in New York. Dash was destitute and eaten up by lung cancer.
Ernest Hemingway, the Great Ape of American literature, shot himself in Idaho in the summer of 1961. Thank God we patched it up before he picked up that gun. Hem was old and sick and deprived everything he loved. When word reached me in July of that year that Papa had decapitated himself with his shotgun I fired up a Pall Mall with his engraved gift lighter and poured a second glass of Rioja and set it out for Papa's ghost ... but he wasn't thirsty that day. So I drank it for him. I understand why he took himself out. I understand it more every day. It's a terrible kind of wisdom and it's too late to do anything with it.
My hands shake now and I don't see too good.
Diabetes and cataracts --- they're an unbeatable tag team.
My caretaker --- or fifth "wife" as she thinks of herself --- sees to it that I'm deprived the cigarettes and liquor that would at least make these last days of mine maybe something like bearable.
The bedsheet falls flat just below my right knee where my leg now ends. I'm getting the strong sense that the sawbones has designs on my left leg, too.
Fuck him
--- I'll shoot myself first. The old Colt lays loaded and waiting under my pillow. I'll turn it on myself one day ... one day soon, perhaps.
In the meantime, I think a lot about walking.
It's been ten years and a few months since all that bloody business with Pancho Villa's head --- another of my reckless whims that went very wrong.
Emil Holmdahl died on April 8, 1963. Nearly 80, the old soldier of fortune was loading his car for a planned prospecting trip deep down in Mexico. Maybe he wanted to take another swing at our bogus map written in ammonia by Bud Fiske. Holmdahl suffered a massive stroke and died moments later. At least the bastard went out on both feet. The old head plunderer was buried in a crypt with his wife. I'm betting that tomb has got big strong locks and thick doors to keep the headhunters at bay.
Prescott Bush is still on the right side of the sod ---
that fucker
still gets around. He was born in central Ohio; he spent years in the hardware business in Missouri; he was senator from Connecticut from 1952 to 1963. No shocker here --- he was a Yale University trustee. He's since left politics and gone into banking back East. Word has it he's grooming his sons and grandsons to follow the family path into politics. May your God help us all.
Like Emil, I'd bet good money that Prescott will take exceptional steps to keep his bones intact when they finally plant the tight-assed bastard.
Orson Welles never steered another film into port with his artistic vision intact. The suits and the beancounters dicked poor Orson at every turn, mutilated every movie he tried to make after
Citizen Kane
. He's been reduced to voice-overs and guest shots on
I Love Lucy
--- a talk show regular who performs dime store magic tricks for Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin.
Marie Magdalena von Losch --- Marlene Dietrich, the Kraut --- she made one other real movie after
Touch of Evil
. That was
Judgment at Nuremberg
. It paled next to Orson Welles' disfigured noir classic. She's performing in nightclubs, but I don't get around much anymore. So we talk on the phone, we exchange letters. She misses Papa and he dominates our conversations. The Kraut says, "It's the friends you can call up at four a.m. that matter." She and me, we never speak in daylight.
Last night I couldn't sleep and called her --- she serenaded me to sleep with an
a cappella
rendition of "La vine en rose."
Luz Corral is still alive --- holed-up in that big old house/museum full of Pancho Villa memorabilia. She claims she'll live a hundred years. Stranger things have happened.
Eskin "Bud" Fiske: poet, sometimes country music lyricist, outsider writer. Screenwriter, raconteur, essayist,
busker
. Pop culture celebrity. He turns up in cameos on dumbass TV comedies and talk shows. I caught him on that loopy Bob Conrad TV series the other night,
The Wild Wild West
. It was some outlandish episode starring Bud and his Rat Pack buddies Sammy and Peter Lawford --- JFK's debauched brother-in-law.
Good ol' Bud --- son of a bitch can still turn a hell of a phrase when he's pressed too.
Alicia ... I sometimes lose an evening staring at the one photo I have of her. She's well ... her and her
children
.
So it ends here. I can hear my Brit' "wife" now, speaking with this journalist come to interview me. It's likely my last interview. That suits me just fine.
I switch off the shortwave radio --- a mariachi station I seem to be parked on these days. The last tune was by a woman singer performing Rita Arvizu's "Ejercito Militar."
"Wifey" is reading my last scribe the riot act now --- no booze, no coffin nails.
Holy Jesus
: Another trip down memory lane for some goddamned reporter looms. Thank Christ it's the last.
My tale of Pancho Villa's head, the last true tale I'll ever spin, ends here.
So it's
adios
, partner ...
vaya con dios
.
To better days.
Maybe we'll see you down some other world's road, buckaroo.
Dia De Los Muertos
Excerpted from
The El Paso Herald Post
, dated Wednesday, November 1, 1967:
MYSTERY AUTHOR FOUND DEAD
IN BIZARRE MURDER/SUICIDE
---------------------------------
Journalist suspected of slaying
last of the great Pulp writers
---------------------------------------
By Russell Hardin
Herald Staff Writer
NEW MEXICO --- Celebrated crime novelist Hector Mason Lassiter was found shot to death in his own bed yesterday afternoon.
The body of Lassiter and that of his presumed slayer were found by the author's wife, Hannah Lassiter, and their housekeeper, Carmelita Magón. The two women found the corpses when they returned from a brief shopping trip near the couple's home in La Mesillia, New Mexico.
Lassiter's presumed killer is Andrew Nagel, a Chicago-based freelance journalist who'd driven cross-country to interview the famous mystery writer for a magazine article.
Sheriff Dave Duhan said Lassiter, who had recently undergone the amputation of his right leg as a result of complications from diabetes, was found dead as the result of a single gunshot wound to the stomach.
Lassiter's suspected slayer, Nagel, age 22, apparently killed himself with a single shot to the head from the same weapon: a vintage, 1873-model Colt Peacemaker.
"It's a real museum piece," Sheriff Duhan said. "The gun belonged to Hector Lassiter, who often slept with the revolver under his pillow for security, according to his widow. We suspect that Nagel wrestled the gun from Lassiter and gut shot him with it, then turned the Colt on himself."
The sheriff said there were signs of a fierce struggle; the remnants of several broken cosmetic bottles were scattered across the bed and an adjacent nightstand.
"It's frustrating," Duhan said, "because there are some tantalizing potential clues that have been lost to us." Those clues, he elaborated, would likely have come from a tape recorder found with the two bodies. The reel-to-reel recording machine belonged to the journalist and appeared to have been running for some time.
Any possibility of recovering any conversation, or any sounds of the struggle and shootings, was "erased" when the gun was twice turned on the tape machine, the sheriff said.
Despite doctor's orders to the contrary, and strict instructions from Mrs. Lassiter, the journalist appears to have shared several cigarettes and a bottle of liquor with the ailing author.
The door to the bedroom/murder scene was found locked from the inside when Mrs. Lassiter and her housekeeper returned home.
Two mysterious initials were also scrawled in blood above the author's bed: "E.Q."
Sheriff Duhan said that several handwritten letters sent to Lassiter by fellow author Estelle Quartermain --- a British mystery author, whom, ironically enough, is famed for her own so-called "locked-room" mysteries --- were found by the victim's bedside. Perhaps significantly, Nagel had interviewed Dame Estelle Quartermain several weeks before soliciting the interview with Hector Lassiter.
Sheriff Duhan refused to comment on any possible connection, or to divulge the contents of the letters. Repeated calls to Dame Quartermain went unreturned.
Mrs. Lassiter also refused to speak with the
Herald
. There are as-yet-unconfirmed reports that she is engaged in a bitter legal dispute concerning her late husband's estate. Lassiter's will, according to attorney Hobie Meed, left the bulk of his estate, including the home in La Mesillia, to his client, former actress Alicia Vicente, and her three children. A second home, located in Key West, Florida, was left to Hannah Lassiter.
When contacted for a comment about his death, longtime Lassiter friend Marlene Dietrich, famed German-born actress and chanteuse, said simply, "He was a hell of a man. What more than that can I say that would matter a damn? When you're dead you're dead. End of your story."
Another longtime friend, noir poet and
Hollywood Squares
regular Eskin "Bud" Fiske said, "Hec was the last great one ... the last true writer of the old
Black Mask
school. I hope they have enough room in Valhalla for the magnificent (expletive deleted)." Fiske then added, somewhat cryptically, "And I find it very significant that some hophead from Yale took Hector out. That doesn't go unnoticed by me. And I mean to look into that a bit more myself. 'Prescott' will know what I mean."
Fiske resisted repeated requests by this reporter to elaborate on his rather bizarre statement, or to explain to whom the name "Prescott" referred.
Sheriff Duhan, however, did confirm that a syringe and heroin were indeed found among Nagel's personal effects recovered from the Lassiters' guestroom. He also confirmed that both of Nagel's forearms were covered with old and new needle scars. "He was a longtime and frequent heroin abuser," Duhan said. The sheriff also confirmed that Nagel was indeed a Yale graduate, "Although I frankly fail to see what that has to do with anything," Duhan said.
Funeral arrangements are being determined.
Hector Lassiter was pre-deceased by a toddler daughter, Dolores, who died of complications of a congenital heart defect in April, 1956.
His fourth wife, Maria Lassiter, died of an apparent heroin overdose in New Mexico on May 13, 1956.
La Cabeza de Héctor Lassiter
Excerpted from
The El Paso Herald Post
dated Saturday, November 1, 1970:
AUTHOR'S GRAVE ROBBED
AND CORPSE MUTILATED
...Local authorities are continuing the investigation into the robbing of crime novelist/screenwriter Hector's Lassiter's grave on Halloween night.
The grave was found uncovered and the coffin pried open. The body of Lassiter was found partially exposed and decapitated. The head of the famed author --- the victim of a bizarre murder three years ago to the day --- remains missing.
Authorities say they are baffled...
---
1970:
THE
WASTELAND
Bud Fiske, speaking.
Perhaps local authorities really were baffled.
But I wasn't.
And I owed Hector.
I'd spent too many years away from my friend after the late 1950s. Always meant to get down to that big, old, beautiful and sad hacienda in New Mexico. But my own career was taking off then.
So I delayed.
I procrastinated.
I figured,
There's always tomorrow
.
But one day there isn't --- just a string of successive, unsatisfactory todays and mounting yesterdays that mean to bury you.
Hector and I stayed in touch, exchanged letters and phone calls. We sent one another inscribed first editions of our respective works.
Hector floated some of the script work he no longer had the heart or stamina for my way and got me through some lean times.
Then I became a kind of half-assed pop culture celebrity, waxing while Hector waned.
I became a second-string Rat Pack member.
I scored voice-overs on
Underdog,
frequent guest shots on Carson and Merv Griffin,
LaughIn
gags and
The Hollywood Squares.
And that fucking cameo on
The Wild Wild West
with Bobby Conrad, Sammy Davis Jr. and that whack-job Peter Lawford --- the fucker who clawed out my right eye at the series' wrap party in 1969.
When Hector went down under Nagel's gun in 1967, I almost went after the Skull and Bones right then. But there were enough odd, attendant angles to stay my hand. The stuff with Estelle Quartermain vibed something very close to credible. Maybe the junkie journalist
really did
take Hector out as a result of unfathomable loyalty or fucked-up fealty to the daffy old Brit mystery maven.
Through channels, I heard dirty secrets about the letters written by Quartermain that were found by Hector's bed, about Hector's "crude" annotations on the letters, indicating he'd bedded a drunken Dame Quartermain at a party many years before --- shaming her husband and embarrassing the "Queen of the Locked Room Mystery."
So I waited.
I
watched
.
I came to think Nagel's Yale credentials were just some spooky coincidence.
And, hell, you know what? They may be.
But then the rotten cocksuckers broke into the Orogrande graveyard and hacked off my best friend's head.
Then I
knew
.
And then I went for them.
It's raining hard in Connecticut tonight.
I've dialed around the radio and found myself a country station. Buddy Loy Burke is crooning now. He was Hector's favorite singer/songwriter and it's maybe an omen --- a cover of "Ghost Riders in the Sky."
The roads and sidewalks are slick with a thick layer of sodden leaves. The "Tomb," the gray, imposing sanctum sanctorum of the dumbass Yale Skull and Bones Society, squats sinisterly under bare-limbed trees and forked tongues of lightning. It looks like a high-end mausoleum.
I pull over two blocks past their HQ. Before heading in, just in case things get rough, I take out my glass eye and put it in a small velvet pouch on the passenger's seat. I tug on my despised black eyepatch. I only hope to hell I don't have to shoot anyone. I'm still adjusting to the one eye --- my compromised depth perception plays hell with my pool game and marksmanship.
This time, I know some more things about this "secret society" of "Bonesmen" than we knew in 1957. Getting that information cost someone dear. (Look for a Skull and Bones member, class of '66. He's got two black eyes and a new limp, tall, horse-faced, too much hair --- like Andrew Jackson's latter-day, sour-faced love child, maybe.)
Inside The Tomb, they run things five minutes ahead of the rest of the world.
For the record, Jesus, I do so hate this dipshit, secret handshake stuff.
Thursdays and Sundays they gather in the "Firefly Room" for dinner at 6:30, their time.
So now I wait outside, wearing a black slouch hat and draped in a long black great coat that obscures the sawed-off .410 underneath. I have a holdout derringer tucked up my right sleeve and two chrome-plated .45s thrust down my waistband. It's a little after 8 now in the real world. They don't drink in the Tomb (some stupefying prohibition that even Yale's myriad and chickenshit hard-partying secret societies observe), so by 8:15 p.m. (their time), they get thirsty and go wander off campus to get plastered.
Dinner's breaking up. I let a few Bonesmen pass by. Then I grab a lone straggler. I press my shotgun to his belly: He checks my face; looks like maybe he half-ass knows me from somewhere, but can't quite place me. (Goddamned
Hollywood Squares
!)
He's perhaps foxed by the eyepatch. And in these environs, that wicked black patch makes even
me
look like some flavor of bad ass.
I explain, tersely and quietly, what I want --- to be escorted to the "Trophy" room where they keep Geronimo's skull. Where they would have put Pancho's noggin. Where I'm sure they have squirreled away Hector Lassiter's stolen head.
Dig this shitty, spooky ambience --- Jesus, so dark; like some frat boy's vision of Anton LeVay's West Coast fuck pad.
I hear voices up ahead in what they call "the Inner Temple," or room "322." I hear a young man's twang. I duck in, steal a glance at the speaker, and duck back. The voice comes from a guy with big ears and a medium build and Texas accent. He's emphatic. "This is just diseased," the young guy says. "Christ, what the hell is the fascination with this sick stuff? What a bunch of major-league assholes you all are."
An impatient, older voice now: "Quiet, Temporary. We asked you back for this because your grandfather couldn't travel and this is important to him --- as you well know. And your poor father. How in hell could he lose that senate seat to fucking Lloyd Bentsen? He must be devastated. I know that I am." A pause, then, "You know, Temporary, what Villa's head meant to
Mog
. This drunken scribbler Lassiter cost us another chance at acquiring Villa's head. It was important for a member of your family to be here for the installation ceremony. Even if it is only you."
"Fuck this," the returned Skull and Bones member dubbed "Temporary" says. He grouses on, "And drop the 'Temporary' nickname. You know I don't go for this secret handshake and handles crap. Never have. And I really gotta get back to the Guard base."
The older voice again: "To hell with that. It's only the Texas 'Champagne Unit.' You'll leave when we're ready for you to go, Temporary."
A snort. "'Temporary.' It's 'George.' 'George W.' Short and simple, yeah?"
"You mock and sully us," the older man says. "For decades we've chased Villa's skull, and this bastard, this boozing pulp magazine writer, took it from us when we almost had it in our grasp again. That Mexican barbarian invaded the United States and killed Americans. Now we avenge that."
"Christ's sake," this "George W." says, "you avenge all that by putting some other poor bastard's rotting skull in a glass case? How exactly does that work?
Man
. It makes no sense at all. It's never made sense --- not even taking Villa's head. None of it makes a lick of sense."
The old man: "Granted, the Punitive Expedition failed in its central aims. We---"
George W. cuts the old bastard off. "Whatever made any of 'em think sending Jack Pershing and all those soldiers south of the border would accomplish anything? Hell, it's a crazy-ass notion --- getting some wild hair and chasing a single man in another country's desert. Especially a man whose countrymen are bent on protecting him. Hell's belles, even the ones that hated Villa covered for him. The Mexicans, to a man, saw Pershing as an invader, not an avenger. The Pershing Expedition was a farce. Pure folly. It just genned-up anti-American sentiment in the Mexicans. President Wilson would have been ahead to pay some of Pancho's cronies to take him out or turn him in. But to send Pershing and the Army in? Nuts, man. Just nuts. Like Teddy Roosevelt and that Berber chieftain --- where was President Roosevelt's good counsel that time out? Same thing with Wilson, sending Pershing into Mexico --- wrong-headed and shortsighted. It was just vengeful."
"It matters to your grandfather," the old man says. "Probably matters to your father, to 'Poppy.' And my God, I sincerely hope you don't follow them into politics. Not with these naïve, simpleton notions of yours."
George says, "You're one major-league asshole, you know that? It doesn't matter to me --- none of this dipshit mumbo-jumbo and secret crap does. It's just damned nonsense and so much horseshit. My father has always seen the world in shades of gray and, you know, nuance is the father of hesitation. And, hell, you're just a bunch of grave-robbers. You defiled a fellow American's grave taking Lassiter's head. So tell me, who's the real evildoer?"
Well hell:
That strikes me as an entry line.
I shoulder in, my Skull and Bone's hostage thrust out front. Heads turn, wide-eyed to see a one-eyed invader in their granite and marble hidey-hole.
"Just so you know, up front," I say, "I've got a sawed-off shotgun at this man's back. And I
will
use it."
This old man with a moustache, dressed as Don Quixote, is sitting there looking rusted and rickety. There's another bastard perched there beside the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, dressed in a devil's suit.
Must be initiation night.
The ersatz Quixote is so flummoxed he spits as he says, "Who the hell are you?"
"Nobody," I say. "Just some unwashed nobody with no college degree. But I'm here to pick up a friend. I want Hector Lassiter's head, and
muy pronto
."
That declaration triggers more bluster from the Don.
"George W." shoots the old bastard a look of genuine contempt. George cocks his thumbs at me. "See, this is where this bullshit --- this morbid plundering of graves and this vindictiveness --- gets all you ghoulish old assholes. I should let him shoot all of you."
"Where's my friend's head?"
George W. waves at a glass cabinet. Maybe five or six skulls and some assorted bones are displayed in there. I try not to look too hard; Hector was my friend --- and not in the ground (or out) as long as Villa's head had been when I made that skull's accidental acquaintance. I toss a folded-up carpetbag to George W. and say, "Put it in there for me, would you, Ace?"
George grimaces, but nods. He picks up a couple of folded, red-linen napkins --- he's not going to touch the head with his bare hands and who could blame him? He saunters over to the "trophy" cabinet.
Sour-faced, he lowers a not-too-mummified-looking something into the bag and seals it up. I remember Hector long ago lobbing a severed head in a similar bag at a gunpointing Texas Republican down El Paso way. So I caution George, "Hand it over to me, slowly and carefully."
He does. George smirks and winks. "You've got a pair on you,
amigo
."
"You know," I say, smiling back, "I didn't think it would be this easy."
George tugs on his ear lobe and bites his lip. Poor bastard's eyebrows meet in the middle. He's going to need to fix that if he really wants to go into politics. "It ain't
that
easy,
hombre
," he says. "
This
is the easy part. Getting out of here, that likely won't be too tough, either. And you'll have a few minutes' head start. This joint is lousy with intelligence types --- past, present and future. They distrust electronics because they all know what they can do with 'em on a surveillance front. So there are no phones here in The Tomb. You'll have a head start --- no pun intended --- but out there ... well, they can bring a lot of heat to bear on you,
amigo
. I don't envy you the pursuit. Pancho Villa at least had the advantage of the border and several days of running time."
Christ, my new friend George probably has a point. But I brass it out, backing out now, Hector's head in a bag clutched in my left hand, the shotgun leveled in my right. "You said it yourself, George --- one man lost on a continent ... it's a fool's mission to try and find him."
George nods and smiles sadly. "But that was a long time ago and in another country. You're back east,
amigo
. Ain't no frontiers left here in the land of the brave and the free."
Argue with
that
. I smile and say, "I hear you." Then, "Thanks for the assist."
Don Quixote: "Temporary is right: We'll crush you, little man."
The Devil: "You can run, but you can't hide. If you run, you'll only die tired. We'll soon have your head in this cabinet. I promise you that."
The last voice I hear is George W.'s, urging me to change cars
often
. His last bit of advice: "Lose that eyepatch and fast, partner --- damn few pirate look-alikes roaming the Yale campus." It's good, if obvious, counsel. I throw my Skull and Bone's hostage to the floor and back out fast. Outside, I slam the door behind me. Checking to be certain nobody is following, I ditch my black coat and fedora in a trash bin.
I stow Hector's head on the floor behind the front passenger's seat and toss my eyepatch out the window. I slap in the glass eye. For old time's sake, I've brought along my old white
vaquero's
hat --- the one Hector took for me from a Texas Republican. It's conspicuous as hell here in the East. But that's the point: "Naked is the best disguise." And a white cowboy hat is 180-degrees out of phase with a black slouch hat. So I put it on.
George's admonition about changing cars eats at me. I palm into the Greyhound lot and park there. I'll let the fuckers chase cross-country buses assuming they ever identify my car. I snag a cab across town and then hoof it two blocks to a used car lot. About that time, I start to hear and see all the black helicopters. There are maybe a dozen of them, hovering ... searching.
I wonder what they've been told to look for?
Through the curtain of rain, the choppers all look big and black and unbeatable.
Getting the sweats now, I pay cash up front. Twenty minutes later, I drive off in my new, used, midnight blue '66 Impala with a red replacement hood. She's got a lot under that mismatched hood ... a real power car.
I fill up the tank and head southwest --- highways all the way.
Twenty-four hours of white-knuckle driving, sustaining myself with gas station coffee, BBF burgers and little pills they sell truckers.
Twenty-five hours in --- heart racing, sweating furiously, hands shaking --- I start talking to Hector's head.
More troubling: Hector's head starts talking back.
Hec gives me some advice.
Hector says,
Call Alicia,
now
. Have her meet you somewhere. Tell her to make sure she's not followed.
I say,
Why?
Hector says,
Because they are going to expect you to go to New Mexico to put me back together. They'll watch my old place --- Alicia's new home.
Goddamn, Hector's
so
right. I slide off the interstate and drop some quarters. Her phone might be tapped, so I tell Alicia to get to another phone and call me back. She does. I instruct her to cross the border, follow the Rio Grande down to Matamoros. I'll meet her there in a week.
But damned if that wait by the phone for her to call me back doesn't cost me, lets them get a bead on me, somehow --- the fucking CIA spooks and their Yale cronies.
Ten minutes down, thinking maybe I finally see some light at the end of this hellish tunnel that I'm locked into, it happens. A sniper on an overpass puts three bullets through my windshield. One goes through my hat, just missing my head. Another misses me, but flying windshield glass nicks my cheeks.
The third bullet takes out my radio. No more country tunes to drive to.
Those
cocksuckers
!
Time for some new wheels.
It's a zombie's sprint.
No safety.
No hiding.
No sleep.
I'm reduced to running with the bag with Hector's head, a trenchcoat to cover all my guns, a duffel bag filled with wadded up clothes, pills to keep me awake and a thermos filled with black coffee. My left kidney's burning --- probably first intimations that I've built for myself a hell of a set of kidney stones with all this undiluted high-octane java these past few days.
I look like a hollow-eyed bum, unshaven, unshowered.
All those cuts on my face courtesy of the exploding windshield don't make me less conspicuous.
I'm nearly always nauseous from lack of sleep. My junk food, caffeine and pep pill diet is playing hell with my diabetes; the insulin is hard-pressed to compensate.
And some
pachuco
with a big old knife recently left a deep wound in my left arm. I'm watching it, afraid it'll infect. Bandit bastard wasn't good, but he made up for it with feral viciousness and a high-tolerance for pain. He must have been hired on the cheap when they somehow got another bead on me in Shreveport. They got their money's worth, whatever they paid him: it took five slugs to his upper torso to take him down for keeps.
It's tantalizingly close now, but I figure the Texas border is too tough for me to cross at checkpoints without
them
picking me off.
I've had an entire nation to hide in and they've nearly gotten me six times in three days. Now that they've located me in Shreveport, I double back a bit --- head back east. Then I veer south.
There's a charter boat waiting for me in Morgan City, an old rumrunner with a thirty-footer. He's agreed to take me across the Gulf, despite the fact we run the risk of running right into the eye of a tropical storm.
But you know what? Money really
does
talk. And that's a good thing --- it can keep up my end of the conversation, 'cause I figure to spend the next few hours vomiting; I don't do rough seas.
Here's my plan, such as it is:
Hector and me'll track toward the Rio Grande and the old rumrunner will drop me someplace along the Mexican coast.
Then what's left of Hector and me will make our way along the Rio Grande to find Alicia.
Money isn't the only thing talking.
Hector's head is going on, a mile a minute. He likes this plan. And he feels like writing. He starts dictating this tale to me he wants to call
The Big Comb-Over
.
It's a new crime novel --- a harrowing collision of male-pattern baldness and tattooed treasure maps.
The boat is a rolling sanctuary. My skipper is a grizzled mad man --- like the crazy captain who'd run you up the river to search for King Kong or to kill Kurtz.
And what do you know? He's a fellow cyclops --- he's got an eye missing on the same side. That shared loss seems to make us brothers in his eye(s?).
Three hours in, he convinces me to go below --- to wash up, rest, whatever I want. I take him up on his proposition.
Below, I make the mistake of checking the mirror.
Jesus God
... I look like a wild-eyed vagrant.
I borrow the skipper's razor and put in a fresh blade and shave for the first time in nearly a week.
I slap on some "borrowed" Old Spice --- I'm in deep clover now. I take a whore's bath and wash my hair in the sink. I check my reflection again. Ain't great, but at least I no longer look like Peachey Carnahan in those last few paragraphs of
The Man Who Would Be King
. But like poor Peachey, "I've urgent private affairs --- in the south." And just a little left of a friend.
The knife wound in my arm is looking a little better now and that's a relief. I fear the gangrene.
I slick back my wet hair and change into some "fresh" clothes. I feel almost human. I gaze at the cot ... so inviting.
But then the sea begins to pitch. Rain lashes the cabin's portholes. The storm is on us. Can't sleep through this --- hell, I can't cross the room. When the cabin goes nearly 65-degrees sideways, I start thinking Hector's going to get a burial at sea --- and I figure he won't be going under alone.
I curl up in the captain's cot and try to close my eyes. But there is no sleeping through this storm. I see the carpetbag tumble across the floor. I untangle myself from the sheets and toss them carelessly over the pillows of the cot. I retrieve the bag with Hector's head and duck under the steps leading to topside, figuring I'll wedge the bag under the lowest runner to keep it in place. Then I see the feet descending.
I don't remember
those
pants
.
It's supposed to be just me and the one-eyed skipper on the boat.
So who is this skulking cocksucker?
He's wearing white slacks and matching white deck shoes with no socks, a cordovan belt and a pressed blue shirt with rolled up sleeves. He's got a twenty-dollar haircut. Sucker looks like an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue version of a sailor.
I smell Yale --- maybe CIA.
He crosses to the cot, closing in on that shadowy pile of pillows and sheets. He goes at the sheets with a big buck knife --- a flurry of stabs and feints as he struggles to maintain his footing against the pitch of the ship. I cross behind him like some sleep-deprived drunk --- trying to get to my overcoat and my guns. He senses movement, pivots on heel and raises his knife. The ship rolls again, in the opposite direction, and me and my would-be killer slam into the same bulkhead. I shake it off, rising. The impact did the other guy real harm: he's standing there dumbfounded, staring at the knife that's now buried hilt-deep in his own aorta. He drops to his knees, then falls forward, hands at his side ... no attempt to break his fall. A dead man's fall. The knife's point digs out a little deeper through his bloodied back.
So I figure I'm gonna be made for this death --- nobody's gonna believe that this likely-to-be psychopath, this orders-exceeding frat boy, somehow butter-fingered himself to death.
While the traitorous captain is busy keeping us afloat, I wrap the dead bastard up tight in the bedsheets and get him shouldered up into a fireman's carry. It's hard work with all that dead, loose-limbed weight ... with the shifting stairs and a rolling ocean underfoot. But I creep topside behind the captain who is intent and white-knuckled at the wheel. The captain's not seeing and not hearing me.
I pitch Mr. Yale overboard and creep back downstairs. I'm sweating like a pig. I wash up quickly again, change into yet another shirt --- an unbloodied shirt --- and take a couple shots of the captain's bourbon.
Then I grab my guns, grab Hector's head and head back topside.
My gun pressed tight to the back of the skipper's head, I say, "I hope for your sake we're still headed toward Mexico."
"Not much choice," the one-eyed old man says sourly. "The storm is moving west to east. We're nearly through it, I think. I'm sure as hell not about to go back in. I'll make port in Mexico where I drop you, then head back when it clears."
Uh-huh
.
Jesus, I'm so tired. But I sweat out several hours there, my gun pressed to the back of the old bastard's head. He accepted
a hundred dollars
to let them kill me.
I
was paying this cyclopean cocksucker
five hundred
to take me across.
The math slays me.
And that same math may yet slay him.
Fifty yards offshore, I pistol whip the skipper behind his right ear.
I've watched him work the controls for hours now, so I figure I can hit the shoreline just fine on my own.
I line her up and set the controls to go in rather slow.
Or so I think.
I'm shooting for a semi-remote stretch of beach, about a half-mile south of some lights --- some fishing village or vacation bungalows, maybe. I climb up on the prow, leaning into the offshore breeze. I have my bags full of guns, my insulin, and Hector in hand --- ready to leap when the impact comes.
That "impact" --- that's too gentle a word.
It's more like ramming a car into a wall at thirty or forty miles an hour ... while you're standing on the hood.
There's something to be said for wet sand, and this is it ---
it's too fucking hard
.
I struggle up, seeing lights and now nauseous as hell. I find my bags and start walking toward the real lights strung out along the shoreline.
Then I trip over something, and I fall.
I struggle back up and turn to see what took me down. It's a body --- the body of the one-eyed skipper. The luckless sucker shot right through the bridge's window and way out in front of his own boat. He's staring up at my with that one good eye.
Thing is, the rest of him is spread-eagle, face down. I'm no doctor, but I'm pretty sure necks aren't supposed to do that.
Hector's head starts whistling the old sea shanty, "What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor?":
Put him in the guard room till he's sober
Put him in bed with the captain's daughter...
Turns out those coastal lights are those of a humble Mexican "resort complex."
"Resort complex."
Feh
. Mostly, it's just your typical roadside hotel with a beachfront view.
I pay cash. Then I buy some khaki pants, a couple of Hawaiian shirts and pair of black Wayfarers in the resort's gift shop --- such as it is.
Dressed in my new togs, I look like Jack Lord on his day off from
Five-O.
Back in our room, I check to make sure the alarm clock is off, take the phone off the hook, shove a chair under the door knob and Hector's head under the bed and I eat some room service eggs, toast and orange juice.
Then Hector and me sleep the sleep of the dead.
Exhausted, I hit the shower.
Seeing myself naked for the first time in seven days isn't a happy experience. I'm one long and scrawny bruise. I've always run to bone, but the prominence of my ribs is scaring even me. You could slice open envelopes with my cheekbones. My knife wound is starting to worry me again and my shoulder doesn't feel quite right ... not dislocated exactly, but surely separated.
I check my belly: those old wounds where the maguey spikes bored into me ... they'll never go away.
The bullet wound in my right calf.
All my broken and poorly set fingers and toes.
And my goddamned lost eye.
Jesus Christ
. I'm a fucking poet! How did I end up with the body of a middle-aged mercenary?
I dress and walk to the lobby. There I pick up newspaper and read the literary section over breakfast.
The number one book in the land?
Love Story
.
Dear God.
But Hemingway, nine years dead, has managed to come in at number three ---
Islands In the Stream
. It's a book I remember Hector telling me he read in typescript in Cuba in 1959. His reviews of the manuscript were mixed. Hec said it suffered from Hemingway's "lack of aesthetic distance from himself." Back then, I didn't quite understand what Hector meant.
Graham Greene has made the list, too, and that isn't bad.
But Irwin fucking Shaw?
And two Rod McKuen poetry books:
In Someone's Shadow
and
Caught in the Quiet
.
Try to soldier on through that sad success.
The hotelier is one of those Mexicans who crossed the border to fight the Nazis in a U.S. unit. He is totally blind, but managing to kick my ass at chess. We share a bottle of Scotch and play three games.
No
. Put it this way: I lose three games. We are starting the fourth when the call comes through.
"It's for you, Mr. Fiske," the hotelier's wife says. She is a delightful, charming little woman who can't be an inch over four-eleven.
A "call" for
me
. That can't bode well.
Wary, I say, "Hello?"
"Hey, pardner!"
I know that voice, but I can't quite place it. Sounds a little drunk, but plenty affable.
"Clearly, I know where you are, pard'. So you can figure I know that because Pop and Grandpop know where you are ... you follow?"
"George?" I say, "George W.?"
"Get out of there,
hombre
. Go now and you can have maybe thirty minutes' headstart. But you gotta go now. Vamoose."
"Why warn me?"
"They need to be humbled. And stealing an American's head? That ain't right. Geronimo is one thing, but Lassiter? That's unacceptable. And you're pissing away your lead, jawing like this. I'm buckin' big horses, Fiske. Don't make it all for nothing --- for either of us. Fuck Dad."
I hang up; settle up. My heart pounding, I gather my stuff and Hector and run across the street, looking over my shoulder for spies.
A few blocks north of the hotel, I hear a train whistle. I run to its sound.
There is a big old diesel hauling a long chain of freight cars. It seems to be bound west. I find an unsecured door on one of the boxcars, sling my stuff and Hector's head up and in, and then I vault in after them.
We have the boxcar to ourselves.
Then I wonder if railroads still pay to employ railroad bulls.
Panting, sweating, I sit back in that sweltering car, thinking of Woody Guthrie and Hector's and Hemingway's tales of hopping freights. Feels like I should have a harmonica or something.
Hector must feel the same way ... he is humming some song and mumbling its lyrics. Some tune called
something
"Mixteca."
Matamoros: against all odds, I made it here alive.
I hole up in a hotel room for three days, room service food and hotel papers and pens, collaborating on this new novel with Hector.
There is a knock at the door. A woman's voice that I know says, "Bud, it's me. It's Alicia."
Oh my God, look at her. She was always beautiful ... and now she's handsome, too.
Her black hair is cut a bit shorter and she's lost some weight.
She hugs me hard, then half-turns.
Three children move into my room with her. One is older --- her first daughter, I guess.
The other two, a bit younger, are twins --- a girl and a boy.
I have no doubt about whom their father is.
It is so strange, so moving, to see Hector's blue eyes staring up at me from these dusky little Spanish faces.
There is a younger man behind Alicia, too. He resembles her. She introduces him as her brother, Augustin.
"Take the children downstairs," she tells him. "I need to speak with Bud."
They leave and she comes and sits on the bed beside me. She takes my hands and rests them on her hap. "You look like hell, Bud. There have been many close calls?"
"Many," I say. "I'm clean for now, I think."
"You won't be for long. We somehow picked up a tail yesterday. Some bad people from back in New Mexico. Three brothers --- triplets. Very,
very
bad. We've lost them for the moment, but they know we are in town. So we only have a few minutes, I'm afraid. I wish..."
Have to confess that I'm not sure where she is going with that.
I suddenly have the urge to kiss her, hard.
But Hector's memory hangs between us like a ghost.
And in actual fact, he is hiding under the bed.
"These men who will chase you, soon, the Castillo Brothers, they are very bad, and very focused."
"I understand."
"We came in two cars," she says. "Me and my brother and my children will leave in one. They have not identified that car with us yet." She reaches in her purse and hands me a set of keys. "These are to Héctor's old Chevy," she says. "You remember the car?"
"Sure." I loved that Bel Air: sucker
spanked
.
"They followed Augustin, who was driving that car," she says. "I suppose they knew following us would eventually get them to you, and therefore to Héctor." She shakes her head. "There's not even treasure to justify them wanting Héctor's head. It's all hubris --- stupid pride.
Machismo
, I suppose."
"Sure," I say again.
"Héctor's car has a full tank of gas," she says, searching my remaining eye. "There are guns, loaded and ready, in the trunk and glove compartment. There is another head in the trunk --- a decoy."
I'm tempted to ask whose head. Instead I say, "Don't be specific --- it's better I don't know details --- but once I get out there, and they come after me, vaguely, what will you do?"
"I need a day. That's all." She shakes her head. "'That's all.' That's like an eternity with those bastards who will be following you. But one day, if you can give us that day, will let us get to the plane we have chartered. We moved Héctor not long after the bastards took his head. We also exhumed his daughter, Dolores. We will bury them somewhere safe in the San Joaquin valley. In a good and secret place."
"The San Joaquin was Hector's favorite place," I remember. "He once told me it was the only place on earth he ever wanted to see twice."
She squeezes my hand, hard. "We have to do this soon. If they find Héctor's Chevy before you go..."
"Just tell me where to find it. You'll have your day."
"It's parked in the alley out back. Augustin has thrown a tarp over it."
I stand up and begin gathering my things. Hesitating, I say, "Your youngest children --- they're his, aren't they?"
Alicia nods.
"Did he know?"
"Not at first. When he did ... it was too late for any of us."
"They're beautiful."
She smiles and strokes my cheek.
I want to say, "Are you happy? Happy out there without a man, living in Hector's old house?" I want to keep talking with her...
But I stroke her hair behind her ear and cup her chin. "It's good to see you a last time. Even like this."
She hugs me tightly and then kisses me hard on the mouth.
I reach under the bed and hand her the bag with Hector's head. She squeezes my arm with fierce pressure. "You run hard and fast now, Bud. Don't let them get you. Then one day, a day soon, I hope, you'll come to New Mexico and stay with us. You can tell the children stories about their father."
"Sure. There's nothing I'd love more than that."
We hug a last time and then she is gone.
Dazed, I wander to the mirror --- rub the remnants of her lipstick from the side of my mouth. I can taste her lips. I wash my face a last time, call downstairs and ask that a large travel cup of black coffee be made ready for me. Then I pull on my boots.
The tarp comes off easily and I cast it onto the street. I pop the trunk and look at the bag with the phony head. There is a Magnum in the trunk, too. Big wicked looking thing. I take the gun out and close the trunk on the stranger's head.
The engine turns on the first try --- the Bel Air has been well cared for in the intervening thirteen years. I push down the button to release the top --- make it easier for those cocksucker triplets to spot me. Then I pull out on the streets and drive around town slow for a time, the radio turned up to blasting.
Within a half-an-hour, I know that I have been spotted by those wicked triplets.
They are driving a blue Charger: three skinny, dark-faced men with long, black hair.
Only their individual scars --- many, many of these --- set their faces apart from one another.
Spooked, I run three red lights just to avoid being stopped in traffic where they might lay hands on me.
When we hit the outskirts of town, I put my foot to the firewall.
Three hours in, Hector says to me, "You realize the math just isn't on our side, Bud."
I look over at him. He's sitting there, the wind pushing around his hair, his elbow on the window. This sad smile. I say, "Explain."
He shrugs. "Three of them, Bud. One of you. Well, only you, because I can't drive anymore. First time you stop to fill the tank, they'll probably move on you. But even if they don't, they can sleep in shifts. You can't. Any way you slice it, they're foreordained to win this pursuit race."
Hector is right.
Again
.
If I were one of those Tarahumara Indians Hector's talked about, I might withstand the tyranny of the math. But I'm not.
And I started this chase already beaten down by a week of running. So I say, "Any ideas?"
"No good ones," Hector replies, tossing a Pall Mall out the window. "If I could still do it, I'd slide over into the back seat and cut a hole through to the trunk. Grab me one of those Tommy guns and strafe those bastards as you hit the brakes to bring 'em closer."
Then I remember that long-ago day in downtown Los Angeles, when Hector played chicken with Rodolfo Fierro and his friends. I check the mirror. There's a cloud of dust, perhaps a mile back. I slow and palm the wheel, belling out in a big curve and heading back the way we've just come, foot pushing the pedal to the floor.
I reach for the Magnum.
Steering with my right hand, I extend my left out the window, the butt of the gun braced on the rearview mirror.
At this speed, and pointed at one another, it's going to be dicey. But if I succeed in shooting the driver before he shoots me or actually rams our Chevy, well, the rest should take care of itself.
I glance over a last time.
Hector smiles and winks back at me.
Above the roar of the wind sheer, Hector hollers, "If we survive this Bud --- if you take those cocksuckers out --- well, then I've got a hankering to head into the high country. What do you say we go find those Tarahumara Indians? See if we can't figure out what makes those bastards run like they do."
THE END
Les ruego que me perdonen
Si al narrar meti la pata
Pero asi cuentan murio
Don Francisco Villa.
--- Anonymous
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Svetlana Pironko, Michael O'Brien and Ben LeRoy for their support and belief in this novel. I'm also grateful to Alison Janssen for her superb edit and suggestions.
Special thanks also to Debbie, Madeleine and Yeats McDonald.
Head Games
is a work of fiction rooted in historical fact. As such, it draws on contemporary newspaper accounts regarding the theft of Pancho Villa's head and the arrests that followed that crime. The whereabouts of Villa's head actually became a campaign issue during the U.S. presidential race between George Herbert Walker Bush and Michael Dukakis. Some within the Mexican government continue to press George W. Bush to use his status as a Skull and Bones member to return the missing skull. Two books were of particular use in the writing of this novel. The first is a biography of Emil Holmdahl entitled
Soldier of Fortune
, by Douglas V. Meed (Halcyon Press LTD, 2003). The second is
Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed
, by Mark Singer (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005) which contains a chapter on Pancho Villa's missing skull and those in Texas still obsessed with its return.
Dangerous Friends
, by Peter Viertel (Doubleday, 1992), also provided useful information about Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles.
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS/PREVIEWS
Following are Book Club discussion points for HEAD GAMES. Also included is the short story "The Last Interview" that introduced Hector Lassiter and casts fresh light on some events in the novel you've just read. Also, excerpts follow from other novels in the Hector Lassiter series, all available in eBook format.
Reading Group Questions/Topics for Discussion
1. Hector Lassiter, narrator of
Head Games
, is himself a fiction writer. How credible does that make much of what Hector is relating to the reader in the narrative? Is it possible, as a fiction writer handing down a supposed memoir, Hector might knowingly make himself "unreliable" in a literary or factual sense?
2. Rodolfo Fierro, Emil Holmdahl, Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich are all historical figures. Do Hector Lassiter and Bud Fiske remind you of particular historical figures or real personalities? If so, whom?
3. Hector seems to regard himself as a maverick and a kind of loner. Yet he's been married several times, and apparently sees in Alicia and her toddler daughter a chance to recover the family life he's recently lost. What is your sense of Hector and his notions of family and marriage?
4. It's been said those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. How does the attack on Columbus, New Mexico by Pancho Villa and the resulting "Punitive Expedition" to capture Villa in the deserts of Mexico compare/contrast to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing hunt for Bin Laden?
5. How does the character "George W's" remarks about the Punitive Expedition and the resulting theft of the head of someone other than Pancho Villa's compare/contrast with George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in the wake of 9-11?
6. "George W." appears to disdain the timeworn rituals and secrecy shrouding Skull and Bones, and he seems highly critical of his own father and grandfather. How would you characterize George W.? Heroic? Naive? Misguided? Or something else?
7. Hector has been called "the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives." He tells Bud Fiske writers "have to try to live in every moment and then live to write about it." How much of what you read in a novel do you presume to be drawn from its author's own experience?"
8. Bud asks Hector, "Do you deliberately make a mess of your life just to keep yourself interested?" How much of Hector's grief do you think is self-inflicted? Do you sense Hector courts disaster in an effort to generate source material for his novels?
9. Is Hector a heroic figure? A tragic character? Do you have some notion apart from those two extremes in terms of the kind of man Hector might be?
10. Bud Fiske, Hector's young sidekick, assumes narrative responsibilities in the last third of
Head Games
. What do you think is the state of Hector and his relationship to Bud as the book concludes? What form do you think the concluding dialogue between Bud and Hector assumes?
11. The novel concludes in 1970. How would you characterize the effect Hector has had on Bud's life since 1957? On Alicia's life?
12.
Head Games
has been released as "the first Hector Lassiter novel." Having read the book, what do you anticipate in terms of future installments in the series?
Following is the short story, "The Last Interview," that first introduced the character of Hector Lassiter.
THE LAST INTERVIEW
(New Mexico, 1967)
More than a thousand miles from Lake Michigan to the borderlands --- this hellhole of red dust and terra-cotta tile roofs.
The Las Cruces sun tumbles down legless drunk behind Picacho Mountain, making the reporter squint. Jug-eared LBJ is yammering on through the radio's static: more lies about Vietnam.
The last three hundred miles are a shock-absorber punishing, pothole-peppered agony. The '65 Ford Galaxie's been making new noises since somewhere south of Santa Fe. Expensive-sounding noises.
The rolled-down windows and strategically angled wings do little but push around the fidgeting journalist's beads of sweat.
But the struggling Ford delivers the interviewer to his destination: A posh hacienda in La Mesilla --- two stories of stucco with a wrap-around second floor porch, hard by the Rio Grande.
The author's English wife greets the journalist...leads him to a first-floor guest room. "Sleep," she says. "Tomorrow you two talk."
Hector Lassiter, burly, unshaven, brindle hair askew, lays in his deathbed, contemplating the stinging stump of his truncated right leg. The leg was lost last month to gangrene borne of diabetes...diabetes borne of alcoholism...alcoholism borne of living the life that feeds the books that pay for the life, and the liquor, that cost him the leg.
The doctor has lately eyed Hector's tingling left leg with intent.
Or so the dying novelist believes.
Hector's also taken to sleeping with a loaded antique Colt '73 Peacemaker hidden under his pillow, preparing to take himself out --- do it before they can amputate his throbbing hands ... take those critical, increasingly-tingling trigger fingers.
The doomed author listens to his caretaker, or fifth "wife," as she regards herself, reading this likely last-journalist-come-to-interview-him the riot act: no smuggling in liquor...no loaning of cigarettes.
A promise she'll be back in three hours' time. She tells the reporter she means to take advantage of her husband's company to venture out with Carmelita, their long-suffering Tarahumara-born servant for some goddamned misbegotten, budget-busting shopping spree.
Now the door opens, and the reporter --- gaunt, straw-haired and bespectacled ... perhaps vaguely tubercular --- shoulders in, lugging a big black leather bag. Can't be more than 22. He's sporting thick-lensed glasses that probably spared the poor bastard the draft.
Hector spreads his arms, smiles...those famous dimples, nearly buried under his hoary beard. "Holy Jesus," the last of the first-wave
Black Mask
writers says out of the side of his mouth, in full Texas drawl, "a thousand fucking miles to record the last ruminations of a fitfully lucid, one-legged hack writer. How empty must your life be, eh lad? Fuck on a bicycle: Hope I live down to expectations. Who's this one for?"
The reporter smiles crookedly, revealing crooked teeth. "
Esquire
." He plugs his reel-to-reel recorder in and lays the microphone on the pillow by Hector Lassiter's head. He presses the "record" button with a nicotine-stained thumb.
"If you don't mind, thought we'd start with some impressions regarding your peers," the reporter says, extra loud for the recorder.
"
Peers
? Yeah...shoot," Hector says, already disappointed.
"Right: Dashiell Hammett?"
"Pussy-whipped communist."
"Raymond Chandler?"
"Unwitting homosexual."
"Cornell Woolrich?"
"Overtly queer." Hector winks. "But I feel a gimpy affinity with old Corny. He's a fellow cripple now...same circumstances. Or so I hear."
"Agatha Christie?"
The writer's brows knit. "Faker. Fucking
mystery
writer."
The reporter scratches his head. "You're a mystery writer."
"I'm a crime writer. She's a 'mystery' writer. It's different."
"You sound resentful."
Hector smiles, shakes his head. "I out earn her. And her stuff is shit...stupid puzzles solved by a daffy old bitch or an effete fucking Belgian. Fuck that. Ever meet a loveable old bitch or effete fucking Belgian who could do more than rub you the wrong way? They'll still be reading me long after the worms have done with Dame Christie. Her audience is nearly as old as her."
Hector Lassiter gestures at his side table with a hairy, shaking hand, pointing to a haphazard stack of hardcovers and softbound galleys in danger of falling. "Look at those damned things. Pretty high pile, eh? Cocksuckers all still crave jacket comments from me. Crap, most all of it. Fucking book about a detective cat in there somewhere. No shit, an actual fucking pussy detective. Holy pleading bleeding Jesus. It'll probably win the Edgar. If I'm not dead when it happens, some dipshit will come after me to write an introduction for the reprint for the Limited Editions Club. Mark my words."
The reporter smiles; crosses one leg over the other. Hector thinks
: Six weeks ago, I could do that, too
.
The reporter tugs at his shirt's sleeves...Hector thinks he sees needle scars, just peeking under the cuffs. He frowns. Hector thinks
: Another fucking junkie
.
The reporter says, "How about Rex Stout?"
"Another lefty."
"Estelle Quartermain?"
"Fucking
mystery
hack of the first water. Bad as Christie. Hell, worse --- her stupid 'locked room mysteries.'" Hector waves a hand. "Ever hear of anyone really getting whacked in a locked room?"
The reporter shrugs...he's got those telltale nervous hands and feet. And he's sweating out of proportion to the undeniable heat. Hector knows the signs. He thinks, certain now:
Junkie
.
Hector snorts. "Exactly. No damned way. People die over a $10 drug deal. They kill over a dumpy woman in some peanut-shell-strewn, cigarette smoke-laden cantina. They cuff their wife 'cause she won't shut up during Carson's monologue. Her head hits the bedpost, and she falls to the floor, her neck at some impossible angle. I've written those scenes. Scenes I've lived or witnessed. Fucking Dame Quartermain dismisses me for those scenes. Says I only write about whores, drunkards and bottom-feeders. Of course, she doesn't use those terms. But I know what she means. Says I'm sordid. Says I'm seedy. All because I don't have some humpbacked dowager with some shaking, beloved Chihuahua solving murder cases in vicarages...murders involving exotic poisons. All that dainty dialogue and 'action' in service to some fretted-over puzzle plot. Know what, scribe of mine? When you have to run to the reference books, you're not writing. Use that windy passage as a pull-quote, eh lad?"
Bouncing one leg, the wired reporter says, "I interviewed Estelle Quartermain a couple of months ago. She's a nice lady."
Hector grunts and says, "And that should matter to me --- her being 'nice' --- that should matter to me as a reader? Why should that be, exactly? There's a letter on the nightstand over there from her somewhere. Arrived last week. She's still nursing a grudge over something I said to her at a party 10 years ago. Writes religiously, about once a month, stubbornly pushing for an apology to her husband. I said something in my cups, or so she says...I don't remember what. Her husband left early. Do remember that. Ruined her night, or so the purple-haired bitch says...stewing under that fucking beehive. Estelle says I hurt her man's pride...in a 'lingering' way." The writer waves it away with a thick-fingered hand. "She says I 'don't have the brains' to write the kinds of books she writes. The point is, I have the brains not to write the kinds of shitty books she writes."
The old writer's big bed is bracketed by double-doors. The doors open onto the upper porch. There is heat lightning on the horizon now. Black clouds roil either side of Hector Lassiter's head. The old writer smiles crookedly, says, "My witchy warden's words of warning aside, got some smokes?"
The reporter smiles and roots around in his jacket pocket; passes Hector a virgin pack of Pall Malls. The crime writer slits the pack with a long, yellow thumbnail and the reporter fires him up with a battered silver Zippo. Hector's cheeks hollow once, twice. He blows some smoke rings, says, "Who do you read, son? When you read for yourself, I mean."
"Some Hesse. Burroughs."
"Skinny Billy. Junkie. Fucker shot and killed his wife playing William Tell, ya know. And Hesse? He's a fuckin' kraut. What about crime fiction --- who do you read?"
"Uh, been reading some Kenneth Robeson."
"Kenneth Robeson? Ain't no such beast, boy. You reading those fuckin'
Doc Savage
paperback reprints?"
The reporter squirms. "A few here and there...good camp. And Robeson's stuff is --- "
Hector draws deep and blows smoke out both nostrils, like some paunchy, mutilated dragon. "'Robeson' was a house pen name, invented by Street & Smith so they could fire the real hard-working pulp writer on a whim if need be. Same shitty kind of outfit that published
Black Mask
. 'Maxwell Grant,' who wrote the bulk of
The Shadow
novels, he was really a guy named Walt Gibson. Buddy of Houdini's. Wrote two novels a month for more than a decade for old S&S. Had a battery of typewriters; the keys all stained with blood. No shit: Old Walt typed his fingers bloody. All the time. Let's see your affable Mrs. Quartermain match
that
."
Hector turns his mouth down. "Anyway, nine times out of ten, your 'Ken Robeson' was a fella name of Lester Dent. Great guy. Born out west, like me. Lonely childhood to stoke that imagination. Just like me. Used to hang with him in Florida. Good as Hammett and funny to boot --- when he wrote his own stuff. Look for the books under his own name, sonny...look for a short story --- 'Sail.' Good as anything the best of us have done."
The reporter nods and smiles. "Will do. Florida: You lived there for a few years, in the Keys. Knew Hemingway. You two had a falling out."
"Old news, boy. Put it this way, my Florida P.I. novel,
Wandering Eye
, was ten times the novel
To Have and Have Not
was...and published the same year. Outsold Papa, in those early Depression days. Hemingway dismissed me as a 'mystery' writer. Still, he knew his shit in the 1920s...those great short stories. His notion of 'one true sentence.' Too bad he forgot all he knew, down there on Bone Key."
Hector chews his lip, considering the junkie journalist. He weighs angles. Decides to play with a notion, just a bit...probably never go the whole course...just flirt with it a bit. Keep himself interested.
Hector reaches over to the sidetable for a legal pad and pen. He hands them to the reporter. "Game I used to play with Hemingway. We'd challenge each other to top one another's one true sentence. Write this down, eh?" Hector recites: