Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) (9 page)

Hector Lassiter returns in PRINT THE LEGEND, the third novel in the Edgar-/Anthony-nominated Hector Lassiter series (available in eBook format).

It was the shot heard 'round the world: On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway died from a shotgun blast to the head. It's 1965: two men have come to Idaho to confront the widow Hemingway---men who have doubts about the true circumstances of Hemingway's death. One is crime novelist Hector Lassiter. What Hector finds are pieces of his own, long-ago stolen writings, now in danger of being foisted upon an unsuspecting public as Ernest Hemingway's work. As Hector digs into the mystery of his and Hemingway's lost writings, he uncovers an audacious, decades-long conspiracy tied to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Excerpt:

"
There are never any...

successful suicides."

--- Ernest Hemingway

July 2, 1961

He rose with the sun as he had every morning since childhood.

It was Sunday and the old man was alone in the house with his wife, Mary.

George, his ex-boxer pal, was in the cinder block guest quarters next door. He trusted his damaged memory on that much.

The old man shrugged on his "Emperor's robe" which draped his wasted frame like a red circus tent. He hardly recognized his own face in the bathroom mirror --- his wispy, white fly-away hair was going every which way and his smile back at himself was something terrible to behold. Passionate brown eyes each of four wives praised as his best feature were now as empty and dead as those of the trophy heads gathering dust at his abandoned Cuban Finca.

He reached for his toothbrush with a trembling hand, then thought better of it: perhaps the funk of morning mouth would mask the taste of the oiled barrels of the shotgun.

Mary had locked his guns away from him in the storeroom. She left the key to their hiding place resting on the ledge over the kitchen sink. He had seen the key there last night --- as she had perhaps intended...left the key just sitting there on their first night back from the Mayo Clinic. The old man's rattled brain kept wondering at Mary's reason for hiding the key in plain sight.

A taunt, or invitation?

A characteristic half-assed kindness?

He snorted at the mystery of his last wife's motive for making this he was about to do possible, and, grimacing, tiptoed down the stairs to the storeroom.

The old man selected a silver-inlaid, 12--gauge double-barreled Boss bought years before at Abercrombie & Fitch. He broke open his carefully cared-for shotgun and cradled it in the crook of his left arm. He pulled open a drawer and selected a box of shells. The old man's hands trembled so badly he couldn't draw any from the container. Disgusted, he emptied the shells into the drawer and scooped a handful in a fast reach for his robe's puckering pocket. Two cartridges --- more than enough to do the job --- fell true; the rest pinged as they hit the floor and rolled to the four corners.

The self-declared "former writer" would normally be deep into his morning's composition at this early hour, but that was in another country, the old man thought bitterly, and his muse was at last dead.

He trudged back up the stairs, lugging the big English-made gun. He thought of his father, making a similar last climb up a flight of stairs, intent upon effecting a bloody escape from his own intolerable half-life. He now had the answer to the question he had posed so many years before, in a story inspired by his father: "Is dying hard, Daddy?"

He knew now how easy it could be, denied your desires and the things you are driven, for better or worse, to do.

He crossed the living room to the foyer directly under Mary's bedroom, pausing to stare out the window at the cloudless sky and rising July sun glistening on the ripples where the rocks lay thickest on the bed of the Wood River from which two deer now drank.

Gnats sported in the rapid's spray in easy reach of the trout that gorged on them.

Chipmunks darted through the dew-kissed grass, unaware of the old man's stalking cats.

Bald buzzards wheeled on the rising vapors.

It would be a good morning for others to hunt or hike or to go fishing.

As he turned, he was startled by a reflection in the mirror on the wall --- thought he saw a familiar, hated face peering through the window. He whispered distractedly, "Creedy? Creedy, is that you?" He turned but there was no one at the window. He shook his head: What did it matter if he
was
out there? He was so tired of looking over his shoulder.
So tired
...

Seppuku by shotgun: If he could wait nineteen days, he could celebrate his sixty-second birthday.

The old man's trembling hand rooted the pocket of his robe for the first shotgun shell. His heart beat faster. Robbed of his own words, he resorted to those of another to whom he had once been improbably compared. He muttered the favorite quote over and over to himself:

A man can die but once...he that dies this year is quit for the next.

August, 1961

Fidel Castro stood behind the Finca Vigía, Hemingway's Cuban "Lookout Farm," watching the Widow Hemingway fussing over the boxes stuffed with her husband's papers and manuscripts she had traded the house and nearly all of its possessions to "liberate."

The young Irish woman with the widow had started a fire below the tennis court, and some of the papers --- just selected letters and old magazines, Mrs. Hemingway insisted --- were being burned.

What a strange little woman this widow was.

Castro tried to reconcile Mary Hemingway with the sense of the man and writer he had gotten from reading
For Whom the Bell Tolls
--- one of the books that had actually guided him in the guerilla warfare he had so successfully waged against Batista --- and, much later, with the old but boisterous man he'd met at Hemingway's fishing tournament.

Mary Hemingway struck Castro as a bizarre, poorly chosen woman for the great Papa.

Sensing motion behind him, Castro turned. Smiling at the foreigner, Castro fired up a fresh cigar. He gestured with his cigar at the little blond woman bustling around, supervising the loading of the precious boxes; directing the burning of her husband's papers. "I suppose you have plans for those containers, too, eh, comrade?"

The man, this "Creedy," smiled and said, "In time, certainly,
Jefe
. Papa loved your country very much. It's important his readers see some of his writings in those boxes, so they, too, can see how much Papa loved Cuba. Particularly how much he thought of you,
Jefe
." Inside, Creedy was cursing himself. If he'd only gotten here
sooner
--- gotten first access to all these manuscripts squirreled away in various Cuban safe deposit boxes.

Castro grinned and hefted the ornate shotgun Mary had gifted him. He said, "She is nice,
si
?"

Creedy didn't really know guns --- not his weapons of choice. Winking, Creedy accepted a cigar. He leaned in for a light from one of Castro's lice-ridden stooges. It grated to have to be deferential to this son of a rich plantation owner now playing the role of revolutionary, but Creedy managed a short, "It's swell,
Jefe
."

Standing on the tarmac of the Miami Airport, Creedy wiped fresh sweat from his forehead. Like Cuba, south Florida was sweltering. Creedy cursed and waved his men away.

Airports were a vexed fixture in his life: More gambits and schemes had been saved by a hasty flight out of some theatre of operation or blown to pieces on tarmacs, runways and concourses than he cared to count. Seemed he was forever checking mirrors and over his shoulder every time he crossed a frontier, his stomach in knots; always waiting for some ticket taker to say, "So sorry, Mr. Creedy, but there seems to be a problem..."

And how many running from him had Creedy managed to ensnare at passport desks and ticket counters? Dozens, at least. There'd be dozens more, he was sure.

This time, the system was working against Creedy, threatening to slide this gambit over into his airports-of-the-world loss tally.

Creedy had hoped to get some time alone with the Hemingway manuscript boxes when they reached Miami, but the indomitable little widow was standing guard over them like some goddamn bottle-blond sentry, ordering around airport staff and staying constantly in sight of the precious containers as they were loaded in the plane's cargo hold.

Mary might have unwittingly beaten him in Cuba, and beaten him in Miami, but if that toad Hoover back in D.C. went for Creedy's pitch, he figured he'd yet carry the day. After all, what was this boozy widow really, when ranged against a man of his talents and dark imagination?

*

The Topping House was bound in the season's first mountain snow.

In the storeroom of the Idaho house where Papa had found the shotgun that killed him, Mary stared at the boxes and shopping bags full of priceless manuscripts arrayed around her.

She fingered the key to the storeroom, now worn on a chain around her neck where it would always be safe. Mary looked around at the small room --- its locks fortified at a time when she was still trying to keep her suicidal husband from his guns.

It was a good and safe place.

Mary turned her attention back to the manuscripts, thinking of the enormous job and responsibility before her. Knuckling down to the grand task, the thought made her smile --- she'd been preparing for this for
years
.