Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  She’d saved up for the class with Richard, an overview of Hemingway’s early fiction. Hannah asked Richard out as soon as she heard that his third wife had left him and that he was, more or less, fair game. Then Hannah was pregnant and Richard was offering to marry her and bring her to Sun Valley while his researched his book on Mary Hemingway’s years with Papa. That was where the trouble between them truly began.

  Hannah’s heart pounded. It was all uncomfortably close enough to true to leave her reeling. And Jesus, she really was living a trite cliché, wasn’t she? Hell, if Mary could catch it all with such nonchalant accuracy it must be so. She sensed a lifeline in Hector Lassiter, but then, that would be a cliché, too, wouldn’t it? Leave this worm of a husband for the first masculine, seemingly worthy man to cross her path—consign her life to the first best man available…a kind of semi-celebrity and creative writer who probably wasn’t even interested in her. Not looking as she did now, and with the baggage of a baby arriving any moment.

  Hannah finished reading, then felt it coming again. She threw up twice more, seeing spots after. She tore up Mary’s composition and threw it in the bowl along with the rest, and flushed the toilet. She brushed her teeth, then started the shower. Fists clenched and trembling, she left the bathroom:

  “Up Richard. Get up.”

  He fought his way out of sleep. “What?”

  “Get your stinking self out of bed and into the bathroom. You smell bad — like cheap aftershave masking old sweat. And you need to dry out. Get in the shower, Richard. Now.”

  “Tired.” His voice was slurred: “’S a long, twisty drive from Boysee, ya know.” Hannah put her hand over her nose and mouth—his breath stank like kerosene.

  “One hundred and fifty-seven miles, Richard. I looked it up in the atlas last night while I was wondering which of those one hundred and fifty-seven miles of road you might be lying dead along. You better not have driven those one hundred and fifty-seven miles back to Boise yesterday like this. Just please tell me someone else drove.”

  “Someone else drove me. Ya feelin’ okay? Ya seem all—”

  “Angry? Could be that you infuriate me. No phone calls. Silence. Then you turn up days’ drunk here. What do you expect, a glad-yer-back-darling pat on the head?” She wrinkled her nose and turned her head away from him. “Your breath is disgusting.”

  Richard Paulson dug his knuckles into his bloodshot, sleep-encrusted eyes. “You’re right. I was wrong. Time just sort of flew. I know how lightly you sleep since the baby has gotten close. It was late when I got back to my room in Boise and I didn’t want to call and disturb you.”

  Hannah pressed a hand to her belly. “You also know that since you did this to me I’m up and in the loo about a dozen times a night. There was little danger of ‘disturbing’ me. And what about this morning?”

  “You know how you like to sleep in.”

  “Used to. And you could have left a message at the front desk. You could have thought to do that, if you didn’t want to ‘disturb’ me. I certainly thought to check at the front desk, many times.” She had—calling from the Topping House. “Bad things have been happening here and you were gone when I needed you most. Jesus, Richard….” She tugged at his arm. “Now get in the shower. I can’t stand the smell or the look of you right now. You look like you should be clutching a paper bag and begging coins in downtown Detroit. You smell like something that died. Judging by all the blood you left in the toilet, your liver is dying—either that, or you’ve got rectal cancer. Keep this up, and you’ve got a date with a straightening-board.”

  He emerged from the bathroom half an hour later, still drunk, but cleaner. While he was in the shower, Hannah had room service change the linens and bring a fresh stack of towels and a pot of coffee.

  Her husband sluggishly rubbed a towel over his head. “Mary have much to say? Anything I can use?”

  “She’s on to your true aims, professor.”

  “No way. That shambling liver spot doesn’t know her own twat from—”

  “Shut up, Richard, please.” Hannah thrust a cup of coffee into her husband’s shaking hands, taunted by the java’s acrid fragrance. “So much for you being sly. That little widow may be a bigger drinker than you, but Mary evidently holds her liquor better. You set off all kinds of alarms asking for death records. You’re so subtle.”

  “Huh?”

  “Somebody at the hall of records alerted her, I ’spect. Mary says all you do is pump her for information about the fatal final days, Richard.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It’s her impression. Perception is reality. You, as a literature professor, should embrace that aphorism above all else, right? It’s what you all do, isn’t it? Remake the works of others in your own sorry image? ‘Revise writers’ canons for them every ten or twenty years when the next voguish school of criticism festers into being? Impose your contemporary spin on their decades’ old works and then pat yourselves on the back for perpetuating interest? You’re all so pathetic. Laundry list critics and onanistic pilot fish.”

  Richard shook his finger at Hannah, his hand shaking. “Onanistic? You’re an aspiring fiction writer—the most solitary, self-gratifying creation of all. Everything fashioned at whim for your own pleasure. How masturbatory is that?”

  “Deliciously so. But you scholars are sicker still ’cause you like to watch and critique while we who know how pleasure ourselves.”

  “Take it easy, Hannah. That’s enough, really. Don’t put me to the test.”

  “Mary’s right. You’re all a bunch of parasites. Maggots who swarm and swamp an artist when he’s dead and can’t fend you off. You and that fat little strange nance Berle and ‘Barbara’ and that scholar Patricia with the raven hair who looks like a Charles Addams wet dream.”

  “What?” He looked genuinely perplexed. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m sick of you and of all of ’em. I’m sick of all you camp followers and scavengers. You all disgust me.”

  “Take it easy, Hannah. Please. I’m sorry, darling. I was awful not to call, of course. I was rotten to bring you out here, as you are now, when it is so close—your baby. I promise to take it easy on the Giant Killer.”

  “Take it easy? That isn’t good enough. Quit. Quit now. Quit or I quit you.”

  “You know you don’t mean that.”

  “I can lose you now, or lose you in a year when your liver fails or you wrap our car around a tree, Richard. Are you trying to drive me away? Just say so and I’ll subtract myself. If you’ve found the fifth Mrs. Paulson, tell me so. I’ll pack and say congratulations for finally beating your god at his forlorn game—for going him one wife better. Hell, even in that you can’t be original. Good God, Paulson, you’re such a misguided crook. Aping your god won’t make you understand him better. Not having four wives, nor growing and shaving off beards, nor boozing and cosseting your bent and bloated liver. And you’re so wrong-headed now you only steal the surfaces and copy the mistakes. You don’t fish or hunt and you don’t even own a gun. That would all be dangerously like exercise.”

  “That’s crazy talk.”

  “No it isn’t, and if it is, fine, because you think I’m crazy anyway. I say some stranger has followed us all over Idaho, and you think I’m paranoid. I tell you Mary has tumbled to your game and now sees you as a threat, and you dismiss my insights. I tell you you’re killing yourself a glass at a time, and you ignore me. And nothing I say now matters because you likely won’t remember any of this when the booze is out of your blood. You sad relic. You poor rummy.”

  “Stop, Hannah, I mean it, damn you.”

  “That a threat? You probably would hit me in this state. You lousy drunk. You’ve never figured consequences. Never looked ahead. Never lived smart. Never really loved your women.”

  “Stop now, Hannah!”

  She half-smiled at an insight—one she thought might reach him through his booze haze. “Have you ever stopped to think what
you do to yourself and to all your fellow maggots if you publish this dreadful book you’re planning?”

  He stared back, slack-jawed. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s the end of you. Of all of them. Worst of all, of Hem’.”

  Richard lost his balance and took a step back. Shaking, he turned around a chair and dropped onto it. “What the hell are you blathering about now?”

  Hannah lowered herself onto the bed, grimacing at some pain in her belly. “You truly don’t get it? Well, let’s say for a minute you’re spot on. Let’s say Mary shot Papa that July morning so many years ago. Let’s say you say so in print. If so, that’s the end.”

  “In what way? What do you mean?”

  “How can a man who has made his career studying another man’s work lack such fundamental insight?”

  Richard scowled. “I don’t get you, Hannah.” Startled, he blinked his eyes: for a moment, he thought Hannah had the head of a lizard. Jesus, maybe he was at last getting the DT’s….

  Hannah shook her head. “The gunshot in the foyer is the necessary capstone to the legend. It was foreshadowed in so many of Papa’s stories and novels. The end of For Whom the Bell Tolls is a meditation on his own eventual suicide. He lived a violent life and embraced blood sports. He lived by the gun, and it was necessary that he die by it—whether by accident, as Mary initially maintained his death to be, or by suicide. Papa’s death that July morning, and the ambiguity and mystery surrounding it—the lack of a note, the lack of eyewitnesses, the lack of a definitively-stated cause of death—are ingredients that combine to comprise a riddle that informs his legend. Informs it in the same way that the mystery of the frozen leopard’s carcass found at that unexplainable height near the summit of Kilimanjaro keys ‘The Snows.’

  “Don’t ye see, Richard?” Hannah’s eyes were wide now, beseeching. “Papa’s death, as things stand now, is wonderfully, fortuitously ambiguous, and it splits and energizes his critics and scholars. In apparently shooting himself, did Papa violate his own stoic code, and was it therefore fatally symptomatic of the ultimate failure of his artistic vision? Or was the gunshot in some way triumphant—the final, forceful, action of a failing man not content to live a diminished life? Was his end avoidable and therefore tragic, or was it foreordained—equivalent to the last honorable obligation of a too-long tortured samurai, as his brother insists?”

  Richard Paulson kneaded his fingers. “I can’t hurt him. Nothing can. Papa’s reputation has survived the apparent suicide. He’s more popular now than ever. He’s passed into the Western Canon. He’s immortal.”

  “Until the day you unleash this bête noire you’re lurching toward. I swear to God, Richard, if you turn Papa into a casualty of a crazy and unworthy wife, you surely diminish him past the point of no return. You destroy Papa, and you shut your own bloody business down. This swaggering, macho man of the world can’t survive characterization as a mother- and spouse-bound dependent who was ultimately murdered by his last, henpecking wife. And nothing in any of that is going to change the direction of literary criticism regarding his work. You’ll simply be regarded outside your little circle of scholars as a deluded ghoul.”

  “There’s something else,” Richard Paulson said. “What about justice? That old bitch may have gotten away with murder. What about that?” For a moment, Richard almost believed his own commitment to that falsely stated goal.

  “What about it? You know, Scottish law doesn’t draw the line at ‘guilty’ and ‘not guilty.’ We have a third and more sublime option: ‘not proven.’ If it helps your mind, take it for that, Richard.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Hannah.”

  “I’m finished with it, too. On Saturday I leave. You coming?”

  “I’m not finished yet.”

  Hannah hung her head. She decided it, just then: She was going to go find a payphone—call Mary Hemingway and accept her offer to write the widow’s biography, without Richard.

  “That trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills. My characters are galley slaves.”

  — Vladimir Nabokov

  28

  STALKER

  Richard was taking a second shower—blasting off the last layer of liquor he had been sweating out of his system all day.

  Hannah began picking up Richard’s smelly clothes that Hector has presumably tossed carelessly upon the floor.

  In one pocket of his jacket, Hannah found a vial filled with clear liquid. No labeling. Hannah feared her husband was now adding drug addiction to his list of demons. She hid the vial in her purse.

  Hannah found Richard’s wallet carelessly stuffed into another pocket of his sports coat, less the cash that he routinely carried in his breast pocket. Her hands were aching, her fingers feeling swollen. Hannah thought about it, then twisted off her rings and thrust them into Richard’s wallet. She’d already made the break; this just made it seem real. She frowned. Richard rarely carried his money in his wallet; now the thing was thick with bills—hundred-dollar bills. She agonized over it a bit, then counted out three of the hundred-dollar bills and slipped them in her own pocket. Drunk as he was, maybe Richard would just figure he didn’t remember spending them.

  A slip of paper fell out of Richard’s shirt pocket. She scooped the paper up off the bed, unfolded it, and read what was there: Donovan Creedy, Room 36, Ketchum Motor Court.

  That name, “Creedy.”

  Hannah remembered Hector asking her about a man with that name. Hannah slipped the paper into her breast pocket. She stepped out onto the small balcony to get some air; to try and think.

  A man was standing down there with small binoculars, watching her. The stranger was tall. His slick, dark hair was scraped straight back in a high-templed V. The man’s dark eyes were exaggeratedly large behind thick bifocals. His forehead was bandaged, now.

  Their shadow returned.

  Hannah yelled across the distance, “Who are you?”

  The stranger bolted. She watched as the stranger disappeared into the evergreens that ringed the parking lot.

  ***

  Hannah sat on the bed a long time, going over it all from every angle, scared, desolate…feeling poised at the edge of another abyss. Richard was in the shower again, his third, still trying to sober up with alternating blasts of cold and hot water. Must be at the coffee, too, from the sound of slurps and the click of the ceramic mug being set down, over and over, on the toilet’s water tank lid. Hannah dug some coins from her purse and finally went downstairs to a pay phone to call Mary Hemingway and tell the widow they had a deal.

  ***

  After she said good-bye to Mary, Hannah tapped her fingers on the phone receiver. Well, she was fully committed now. No going back.

  She pulled the three, hundred-dollar bills from her pocket and looked at them. Where had this money come from? What exactly was Richard up to? Had he gotten hooks into Mary in some way…maybe blackmailing her, or some other person of means?

  Hannah took a deep breath and opened the Yellow Pages to the Ps. She’d read her share of mysteries over the years, and with her recent reading of Hector Lassiter’s books, well, she had this inspiration. But were there such things as private eyes in real life? And in places like this? Small town that it was, Hannah found a single listing for a private investigator: a man named Harry Jordan.

  She spent about twenty minutes on the phone with the man. He said her three hundred dollars would buy a few days of his service—she need simply send the check to his office or wire the cash into his bank account. Hannah jotted down the account numbers as Jordan rattled it off to her. She could hear this smile in his voice… She convinced herself that maybe he was just glad for the business.

  Though it gave her butterflies, Hannah used the money stolen from Richard to cut the deal: She’d pay Jordan to follow Richard…to run surveillance on Richard until the three hundred dollars ran out. Wasn’t it funny—using his illicit funds to discover where his
illicit funds came from? Some fine web they were weaving with their secret-keeping from one another.

  She’d use Harry Jordan to maybe learn some things that would give her some sense of what was really going on with her husband and this mysterious roll of money he suddenly was toting around. Maybe Jordan would even turn something up that would help her with the divorce proceedings, which she now saw as another inevitable terror awaiting her down the road. She might need that edge—particularly if Richard and his lawyer decided to trash her as some kind of mental.

  Before she hung up, on an impulse, Hannah said, “There’s another man I want to know a bit more about, too. His name is Hector Lassiter.”

  When she hung up the phone, Hannah swallowed hard. Having Richard followed was the right and just thing to do—she was convinced of that. But having this stranger poke around after Hector? Hannah had gone ahead and arranged for that to be done, too.

  Hannah told herself it was because she was truly drawn to the elder novelist that she needed to know more about him—she had to have some assurance that this time she’d picked the right teacher, the right man for herself and her child.

  ***

  Hector asked to be connected to the Paulsons’ room. Hannah answered; said she’d meet him in the lounge.

  Hector had a Shirley Temple waiting for Hannah. He ordered himself a mojito.

  Hector smiled when he saw Hannah looking so fetching. But she also looked angry. Hannah told him about Richard—nothing he didn’t expect there. Hannah was selective, but gloomy. He could see well enough she was left unsettled by her husband’s sorry condition. Well, he’d pushed about as hard as he dared on that front.

  Then Hannah confided about her returned stalker.

  Hector said, “This mystery guy—he’s getting much more brazen. I’ve really got to shut his business down. I’ll work to try and do that today. Got some good notions about who and what this joker is. Meantime, you stay close to people. Better still, please get yourself back to Mary’s place where Jimmy can see to you. You should probably give Richard as wide a berth as you can manage from here forward. Let Dick sober up, at least.” As though that might ever happen.