Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) (7 page)

"I killed him because..."

He says, "Okay kiddo, finish it. Make it the truest sentence you can, but keep it fucking short."

Smiling crookedly, the reporter nervously bounces the point of the pen on the paper. He weighs the words: "I killed him because..."

"...he was bitter and used up"?

No. Might piss the old man off.

"...of what he said to me"?

No. Too weak.

The reporter searches, sensing the old man's eyes on him...on his wrists, sending him off, tugging down his sleeves. He thinks of what Hector Lassiter has said about Estelle Quartermain. He remembers what Estelle told him about the used-up old one-legged man laying before him now. With his left hand, the reporter writes:

"I killed him because of what he did to her."

Hector Lassiter takes the notebook back, reads. He beams. Still has a pretty solid set of teeth. "Good, son. Perfect, really. Short, simple, evocative. And it's gotta all come down to a woman in the end, eh? Always does. Even for Woolrich...at least in his books.
Cherchez la femme
." He hands the notepad back to the reporter. He says, "I feel like a proud teacher. Sign your work for the old man, huh?"

The reporter smiles crookedly again. Under his "one true sentence" he scrawls "Andrew Nagel." He passes the legal pad back to the old writer. Hector looks at it again and smiles, shaking his head approvingly. "Good fucking start, Andrew. You get back to Chicago you write what comes after, yeah? Send it to me. Deal?"

"Sure, Mr. Lassiter."

"Hector. We're fellow writers now, Andy."

The old author is seized by a thought. He abruptly asks: "Andy, what have you read of mine, huh, kid?"

"Read
Rooster of Heaven
. And I really loved the film."

"That was a novelization, sonny, not a novel. I wrote a straight-to-paperback treatment just to put back the parts of my story that that one-eyed fucker Sam Ford tore out for his fucking waste of a film. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man might be king, but in the land of the two, or, even the three-eyed? Well, he's just another myopic dumbass. What else of mine have you read? Anything? Tell the truth."

The reporter shrugs. "
Inside Job
."

"Famously --- some would say infamously --- done for money. I had a daughter born with a hole in her heart. Needed the cash for a surgery that killed her. My baby girl was named Dolores. She hung in until the age of three. Her first --- and last --- word, was 'Daddy.' Quote that, Andrew."

The reporter searches the old man's filmy blue eyes. Hector's cataracts look like some inept impressionist painter's notion of drunkenly dispersing clouds.

Well, it's a line Andy is toying with...maybe needs work.

Hector grunts and points a shaking finger at the reporter. "You drew this assignment, didn't you boy? You didn't come all this way because
Rhapsody in Black
rocked your world? Never read
The Shortest Story
, and so experienced no revelations, right?"

The reporter straightens his shoulders; feels his sweaty shirt peel loose in a few places from his acne-dappled back. He says softly, "I drew the assignment, sir...like you said."

Hector credits the reporter's candor. At least the scrawny fucker has that going for him. "Hell...doesn't matter," Hector says, resigned now...sadly settling on his scheme. "What do you want from me, Andy?"

"There was a hotel in El Paso. It was May 13, 1956."

The old writer tips his head on side. And so it comes. As it always does.

The eternal question.

The one he has never answered.

Hector Lassiter says, "Now that's a locked room, boy. That's my private mystery. The pain too private to trot out."

"You might never get another chance to go on record, Mr. Lassiter."

Hector bites his lip, sighs. "'There was a ship.'"

The reporter catches that one on the first bounce. "Coleridge ... right?"

"Just so. So you do read more than just bad pulp fiction and my toss-offs."

"It's a classic."

"Sure it is, Andrew." The bearded writer puffs his cigarette and gestures at his missing leg. "'It was that accursed white whale that razed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day.'"

"Ahab," the reporter smiles.

"Like old Melville, do you?"

The reporter shrugs again. With two fingers, Andy stabs his slipping glasses back up the bridge of his damp nose. "So long as you don't start regarding me as your Moby Dick ... sure, why not?"

Hector winks and shakes his head. He reaches to the sidetable for a box. "Only 'Moby Dick' I regard lately is the one between my one-and-a-half legs, and he's not breaking surface much these days." The old writer roots through the box, pulls out a hypodermic and a little vial of liquid. "Insulin," Hector explains. "You'd think three years of heroin addiction back in the late 1950s," --- a damnable lie --- "would have given me some facility with this damned rig." He looks for a reaction from the reporter and doesn't get much...the kid licks his lips and averts his eyes. "Don't suppose you'd be able to help me out with this, huh Andrew?"

The reporter says, with little conviction, "Wouldn't know how." He shoots his sleeves again.

Hector snorts and spikes his remaining leg and grimaces. He sits back and retrieves his Pall Mall. He feels himself leaning harder into his dark notion. "Don't suppose," Hector says, "you smuggled in anything to drink?"

"Couldn't be good for you, Hector."

"Think I'm going to bounce back from this? Nah. We enjoy the moments left us. Solid advice, Andrew."

The reporter grins and reaches in his bag. He holds up the Jim Beam bottle. Andy Nagel smiles wider --- meaner --- at the dying writer's hungry smile and cracks the seal. Hector points to a sideboard across the room. Five glasses sit on a serving tray there, gathering dust. The reporter rubs clean two glasses on the untucked tails of his shirt and pours two generous doses. He passes one to the dying novelist.

Hector savors the delicious bite and burn. He sighs: That warmth infusing his chest ... fucking sublime. He settles back into his pillows.

"Now," the reporter says. "It's 1956. Your wife dies, some say suspiciously. You're a fleeting suspect before it's reluctantly ruled a heroin overdose. The case remains...inconclusive. What really happened, Hector?"

The old writer stubs out the butt of his cigarette. He snags the soft pack and shakes out another; leans in for the reporter to light him up again. "No. Not like that Andy. You want the story? The story nobody has ever had? Well, a couple of favors, Andy my boy. 'Cause, ya know, I have to go on living this shitty excuse for a life after you've gone on to your next 'assignment.'"

There's a languishing writing desk in the northwest corner of the room. Hector gestures at a straight-back wooden chair. "For starters, tuck that sucker up under the doorknob," he says "--- can't have the she-bitch and her taco-bending sidekick finding us with the booze and coffin nails, can we?"

The reporter winks and rises. He wedges the chair's back up under the brass knob and nudges it tight with his toe.

The old man gestures at the windows next. It's raining now, and the rain is blowing in. "Best close and lock the windows, too," Hector says. "Won't be able to do much about the scent of the cigarette smoke...but wet walls and floors ---
trés
more suspicious. And the heat? Well, it's a dry heat, right?"

The sweating reporter closes and secures the doors on either side of the author's bed. He sheds his jacket and is about to sit down when the old man says, "Last favor. Grab another glass over there, eh? Might need to go two-fisted for this...dark waters my boy, dark fucking waters."

The reporter sets the spare glass down on the nightstand and then holds up a finger. "Hold on a minute --- need to flip the tape." The reporter plays with the spools; tightens them. He hits "record" again. "Okay. It's 1956. It's your wife's last day on earth."

How do you tell a man why you murdered a woman you loved?

How to start?

How do you give it context? Not to alibi yourself or excuse what you did. How do you show why you were driven to do
that
bad evil thing to her?

Your baby's Mexican mother's secret drug addiction...that's at the dark heart of it all.

Your woman's heroin Jones: it weakened your unborn daughter's frail body, condemning her to death before she was even born.

It was an addiction that was well hidden by Maria. She injected through the soles of her callused feet. She kept it hidden through your courtship...a year of marriage...and through nine months of pregnancy.

She hid it well, through three years of your daughter's short life.

Then it comes: These perplexed words from a doctor, chewing his lip over your daughter's death bed ... hints of congenital birth defects perhaps goosed by...well...perhaps some narcotic influence. For there were other things wrong with your little girl...things only just being discovered...or suspected. A welter of birth defects.

Dolores dies in your arms, whispering "Daddy."

Unable to face your house, or your daughter's empty bedroom, her absent voice and laugh, you booked yourselves into a hotel room --- paid up two weeks in advance.

You feel sorry for Maria for a time, until when, confronted, she confesses her addiction a week after your daughter's funeral. Drunk, scaring yourself with your thoughts about killing this woman who bore/murdered your child, you reluctantly let her shoot you up.

Once.

It's shitty strategy on Maria's part...drug monkey logic. She stares at you with the addled echo of your dead daughter's dark eyes, lips parted, watching for signs of your capitulation to the heroin.

But the drug that mellows her makes you go
dark and cold
. You let the resentment fester --- let the poison stoke your darkest impulses. Let it build on the hate you feel for Maria for letting her worthless devotion to this wired short ride cost you your black-haired, black-eyed baby girl.

Maria condemned your little girl to a slow death that dragged on for three years --- three years to let you grow to achingly love the poor little girl born with no future. Three years of hollow hoping that age will grant her frail body the strength to swamp her damaged heart --- render that fierce fucking hole irrelevant.

But your love and hope, your fame and talent, can't fill the hole in your baby girl's heart.

Little Dolores dies whispering "Daddy."

You ride that one and only heroin high --- free-associating. Plotting.

You scope the room...assess angles.

In the end, you go the easy route.

As Maria lays naked on the bed, black hair spread on the pillow, luxuriating in her high, begging you to fuck her --- to make a new baby --- you instead berate her ... leave her alone to her tingling trip. Soon enough, she's asleep. You grab the hotel ice bucket...25 trips...and the tub is sufficiently full of cold cubes.

Holding it through a handkerchief, you pick up her hypodermic, surveying the bottoms of her feet. Their soles are covered with scabbed-over punctures, like the scars of a thousand scorpions' stings.

Fuck it --- go for her arm. Three shots...of
air
. Give the junkie bitch an embolism of epic proportions. You follow that with a massive injection of heroin.

You carry her naked body into the bathroom and drop her in the ice, spreading it over her. You lay the needle on the closed toilet lid by the bathtub, next to the empty vial.

You write an angry note to her...all the expected words. You lay out in the letter your disgusted discovery of her drug addiction...what it did to your dead daughter. Now you're leaving her...and you wish your wife in hell. You date it yesterday. You stick the note in her dead hand, flung out strategically over the side of the tub.

You pack your stuff, and, still using a handkerchief, drop the Do-Not-Disturb sign on the doorknob. The air conditioner is full up: May take twelve, fifteen hours for the ice to melt. You'll be buying drinks and slapping backs ---
conspicuously
--- in Ciudad Juárez in less than two.

Tell this junkie reporter the truth?

You do. Baldly.

Andrew Nagel stares out at the storm raging on the horizon, says, "Jesus, this could make me."

It could indeed. Hector says, "That's your last one true sentence, Andrew."

Then Hector Lassiter reaches under his pillow, grasps the well-worn butt of the Peacemaker, and, cocking, reaches over and presses the barrel to the reporter's left temple. He tugs the hair trigger.

Adios
Andrew.

Alone again...as he always seems to be.

Alone at the typewriter.

Alone in his own head.

Only time Hector didn't feel alone --- those scant moments spent with his baby girl.

Two more shots --- fired through each spool of tape...reduced to magnetized confetti. The ruined recorder kicks twice.

Andrew Nagel was a southpaw --- Hector was careful to note that when Andrew wrote his first true sentence. Using the edge of the bedsheet, Hector grabs the legal pad from the bedside table and tears off the top sheet of paper with its signed, unwitting confession. He slips the note into Andrew's dead right hand. He gingerly raises the reporter's sleeve --- a welter of needle scars ... several of them look fresh.
Worthless junkie
.

The old one-legged writer grabs a pen and Estelle Quartermain's languishing letter. Hector annotates it with lies. He scrawls vile notes in the margins --- a punched up version of that night of the supposed big slight he can't recall. At the top of her letter, Hector Lassiter writes, "Estelle, you clapped up cunt, I'm
so
fucking grateful I slept with you that night. Fond fucking memories...so to speak."