Print the Legend: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  ***

  Standing at the door, hefting Hem’s long-lost valise, Hector said, “Now, that last thing: that morning, July second, 1961. What did you see? Did Mary really shoot Hem?”

  Creedy shrugged. “The window was covered with dew. The rising sun cast a glare on the window glass. Honestly? I saw more of my own reflection than anything that happened inside that damned house. I just don’t know.”

  Hector thought Creedy was telling the truth…and really, deep down, did he truly want to know? The prospect Hem shot himself wasn’t much more comforting than the notion Mary might have done the deed at his request. He said:

  “There’s one more thing you can tell me. Victoria…did she really kill herself?”

  Creedy searched Hector’s blue eyes. Hector looked resolved. Creedy figured if he told Hector the truth he’d get himself shot.

  He’d come to Victoria, vengeful, angry out of his mind. They’d argued and he had strangled her. Creedy had meant to subdue her, to scare her. But he’d choked her to death before he realized what he was doing.

  He put her head in the oven and turned up the gas to make it look like a suicide.

  Still searching Hector’s eyes, he said, “I think she killed herself because of all the things that went wrong in her life. I blame you.”

  Hector considered that…then strode over and drove the butt of his Colt into Creedy’s temple.

  ***

  Hector sat in a booth alone in the back of the Italian restaurant. The freezing rain was lashing the windows and the trees lining the streets of Georgetown looked like glass sculptures. He took another sip of red wine and pulled the letter from his pocket. He read it five times:

  Poor dearest Pickle:

  There is no surprise in this.

  I’m awfully sorry for the mess.

  The body’s been dying for some time (from the moment really, that second plane went down at Butiaba), and the rest has raced in pursuit these past months. It has all finally gone to pieces and I am beat to the wide beyond promise of recuperation or recovery.

  Now it’s over and you can get on with your life.

  I’ve spent my mornings since the last war working at four books I can’t finish. And all of these last, unfruitful years spent rummaging through the remise of my memory for likely material has only stirred up old ghosts and guilts. Untenable regrets that all of the bottles of giant killer I am now denied and all of the last bits of love that you might still muster towards me cannot palliate.

  A writer who can no longer write can no longer live.

  The books I can’t bring to term have only underscored the sad fact we both have known for too long: I can’t pull out of this one by simply enduring and sweating it out as I have so many times in the past. I have come to accept that I am now one for whom there’ll be no belle époque.

  It’s bad now darling, worse than it has ever been. I could wait and waste time hoping for a change, but hope is such a taunting, bloody moveable feast and I would probably be left worse off and maybe unable to act when I later truly knew change was not to be.

  I’ve just lain awake for hours in that dark time you well know is worst for me—hours spent thinking about it all and weighing the bloody, unsatisfactory options. Awake or asleep (and it’s harder to discern the difference with all the pills and disrupted memory from the shock treatments) it is all a horrible bloody fucking nightmare from which there is no awakening. All things toil to weariness and a man cannot (satisfactorily) utter it—not deprived of his instrument.

  So this: Self-indictment and self-contempt, contrition and release, self-administered at the tug of a trigger.

  Please try to make the boys see how it had to be this way.

  I’m truly sorry again, sweetheart, for all the mess.

  Love always,

  Ernest

  P.S. Kitten, destroy this note before calling anyone.

  Hector read it over a last time. He’d decided to honor Hem’s wishes—the last thing he could do for his oldest friend.

  He scooted the ashtray closer and got out the Zippo given to him by Hem so many decades before.

  Hector flipped the Zippo open with one hand and set fire to the corner of Hem’s note.

  The letter curled to charred ash. Hector looked at the suitcase…thought about reading a few pieces of Hem’s or his own over another glass of wine, but the restaurant was closing down early for the ice storm.

  Sighing, Hector slipped on his overcoat, buttoned it over his scarf, and slid out the door into the eye-stinging storm. He walked about twenty yards when the young tough stepped from a door and shoved a gun into his throat. “Your wallet,” the kid said, “And the bag.”

  Hector said, “Whoa there, son. You do not—”

  Another young tough snuck up behind Hector—hit him in the back of the head with a bar of soap shoved into a sock. The blow sent Hector sprawling to the sidewalk.

  ***

  Hector came to ten minutes later. He retched once and looked around at the icy, empty streets: his wallet lay at his feet, less the money inside.

  Hem’s suitcase was missing. Hector struggled to his feet, cursing.

  ***

  Donovan Creedy drove through Silver Spring, trying to outrun the storm, stealing glances at the precious old suitcase on the passenger seat next to him.

  “The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair.”

  — J. Edgar Hoover

  CREEDY:

  LOS ANGELES, 1969

  The first time it happened, Creedy was running surveillance on the Watts Writers Workshop headquarters. The Workshop was a creative writing group for young black writers that had been founded by screenwriter Bud Schulberg after the disaster of the Watts riots. Another gambit gone awry: Creedy and his fellows had finessed racial tensions to a fever pitch. The hope had been the riots would go on a good bit longer…require more military and civilian intervention. With luck, the whole lot might have been annihilated. Schulberg was ex-OSS…among the first to the concentration camps. A bleeding heart. Cocksucker.

  Creedy had watched actor Yaphet Kotto leave the Workshop HQ—marveling the actor could both be a Negro and a Jew. Creedy saw some members of the Watts Prophets, joking with one another.

  The Bureau had deeply penetrated the Workshop, salting the group and much of its literary output with radical, “Kill Whitey!” sentiments as an excuse to crush the Workshop under the boot heel of COINTELPRO.

  A bit later, Creedy was paying off his informant, Darthard Perry, behind a Watts record store. Creedy had identified Perry as his best candidate to destroy the Workshop. Creedy had just finished with Perry when he saw Hector Lassiter in a window reflection, smiling at him.

  Startled, Creedy turned, searching for Lassiter’s face, but seeing only black faces looking back at him. He shrugged it off that time: After all, Hector Lassiter was famously two years’ dead—shot to death in 1967 by a junkie journalist come to interview the dying crime writer at his home in New Mexico.

  But then Creedy thought he saw Lassiter again in Georgetown, and once more in New York City at a signing for Creedy’s latest thriller.

  That last time, as Creedy autographed books, Lassiter seemed to be standing at the back of the line, smiling mockingly at Creedy for several minutes.

  After that last episode, Creedy almost began believing in ghosts.

  Then, a month later, he received a letter that chilled him:

  “So, Donovan, you’re Russian by birth, and I hear connections with your Red motherland linger via Cuba. And there’s the matter of your mother’s affair with that Jewish fella from Odessa—a coupling that produced you. They say the child is the father to the man. In your case, I’d swap out “man” for “monster.” Rest assured, I’m going to pass this intelligence on to your D.C. superiors at the proper moment—the precise instant that it will do you the most damage. Wait for it, cocksucker.

  — HL

  Creedy had been so unnerved by that note, he’d gone
straight to Hoover…eventually talked the Director into ordering exhumation of Hector Lassiter’s body to confirm his death.

  The night before the body was to be dug up, someone else had allegedly broken into the grave and stolen Lassiter’s head—some prank attributed to Yale’s Skull and Bones Society.

  What was left of the body—along with the remains of Lassiter’s daughter—had been briskly moved to some other, unmarked grave before Creedy or Hoover could intercede.

  Hoover’s reaction to all that had been predictably self-centered: “Stands to reason Skull and Bones would do that with Lassiter’s head, Mr. Creedy. They’re closely knit to the CIA, and when those bastards heard I was interested in exhuming Lassiter? Well, they had to do something like this. Best to just let it go, Agent Creedy.”

  But Donovan Creedy couldn’t let it go. He still harbored these fears….

  Creedy kept seeing Hector Lassiter, everywhere he looked.

  Hoover said, “Maybe you need a leave of absence, Mr. Creedy. Perhaps those chemicals Lassiter slipped you all those years ago are having a residual effect of some kind.”

  That thought horrified Creedy—he couldn’t countenance the loss of his own faculties.

  He snarled back at Hoover, “I’m fucking fine.”

  BOOK SEVEN:

  WINNER TAKE NOTHING

  “Justice is incidental to law and order.”

  — J. Edgar Hoover

  53

  ENDGAME

  (Washington, D.C., May 2, 1972)

  Andrew Langley looked up from his lobster bisque and nearly choked. He stammered, daubed at his chin with a napkin, then managed, “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “I am dead,” the man said. “Keep thinking of me that way. But I’ve brought you something.” The man tossed the file on the table next to Langley’s boilermaker.

  “I’ve been watching your career with interest, Andy. You’ve come up in Hoover’s world. I think what’s in there can take you over the top. You have an old agent in the Bureau named Donovan Creedy. I know you know the fella, but you don’t know this: Since the 1920s, Creedy’s been a loose cannon—running some crazy schemes against writers and artists for Hoover. It’s threatening to become an issue for the Bureau—to go wide. The folder will explain it all. Creedy would make a useful scapegoat if the public ever learns. He’s also got some troubling ties to Fidel…stuff I don’t think Hoover knows.”

  The man lit up a cigarette with an old Zippo. He smiled through smoke, said to the FBI agent, “You feds do still execute your traitors, don’t you, Andrew?”

  The FBI man shook his head. “Afraid not. Not anymore.”

  The man nodded, thought about it. This wink and a wicked smile: “You know, I think I have a better option for you. Some nice and fearful symmetry in this one.”

  ***

  J. Edgar Hoover sat in the booth, fidgeting with the white linen napkin, looking around the restaurant. The diners looked back; everyone knew his face. Not just in this town, but everywhere.

  His hands were damp; he rarely went anywhere without security, but knowing what could be done with taps and mikes and lip-readers, the Director couldn’t risk anything less than being here alone, just as the man who arranged the rendezvous had insisted.

  The Director stared at the capital dome in the distance; the sun burned across its ivory surface—so white it hurt his eyes.

  He’d come so far from so little.

  Now this man, goddamn him, was threatening all that, just as the other, Hemingway, had.

  This motion; a long shadow falling across him.

  The well-dressed man slid into the booth, smiling.

  Hoover searched the pale blue eyes, said, “You’re remarkably fit for a dead man. I congratulate you on your ruse. You even fooled me.”

  “Fooling you, and those like you, was a major objective,” the man said. “You made 1966 and ’sixty-seven a living hell for me, just as you intended. I needed breathing room. Time to savor what’s left of life. And time to dig. Hem savored reading his own obituaries; I enjoyed writing mine.”

  Hoover grunted. “What do you propose to end this stalemate?”

  “Your resignation,” the man said. “It’s in all the papers that Nixon wants it, too. It’s well past time you packed it in. It’s forty-eight years, to the month, since you were put in charge of the Bureau. Too long for any man, even a good one, which you certainly aren’t, to hold so much power, hombre. Christ knows you’ve abused that power, terribly.”

  The man threw a parcel on the table between them. “There you go, Director. All the documents I’ve found these past years, plus odds and ends from Hem. Taken together, it’s incontrovertible. But you’ll note those are all copies.”

  “This isn’t what we agreed to,” Hoover said, his face growing red. “Where are the originals, goddamn you?”

  “I’ve been reading the local papers. I’ve come to enjoy the work of these two young, enterprising reporters. This stuff on Watergate they’ve been doing fascinates me. So, I’ve given them the documents. Expect you’ll make the Post’s morning edition. It’s a hell of a revelation. Particularly after the Bureau’s actions related to the Ku Klux Klan…to the Watts Writers Workshop.”

  The man stood, preparing to leave.

  The Director stared up at him; spittle on his chin: “What? No asking for money to stop this? What do you get from this?”

  The man smiled at Hoover, shrugged. “Satisfaction, I guess. I mean, seeing your face like this after so many years bumping up against your minions and machinations? Well, it does my heart good. That, and maybe getting a big piece back for an old friend you and your goon squad put in the ground.”

  He left the FBI director sitting there, desolate and sputtering…Hoover’s fat, bulldog face red with fury.

  ***

  The man swung into the vintage Chevy. His one-eyed chauffeur said, “I put the top up; looks like a storm coming.”

  “A big one,” the man said, smiling. “Gonna be worse for some than others.”

  Rolling past the Washington Monument, his driver said, “He bought it?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “What are you really going to do with those documents?”

  “Hold on to them. Wait and see how Hoover jumps. I’ll bide my time.”

  “This was probably crazy….”

  The man waved a hand; shook out a Pall Mall. “Time will tell. Let’s try and be patient.” Age had finally given the man some of that—some patience.

  The young poet asked, “Where to now?”

  The click of a Zippo closing. “Not sure yet, Bud. Let’s just keep driving….”

  ***

  From the A.P. wire, May 3, 1972:

  J. EDGAR HOOVER DEAD

  Legendary Bureau chief dies of massive heart attack

  ***

  Andrew Langley watched Creedy in the padded room through the one-way glass.

  It was the perfect solution in terms of making Creedy’s other masters squirm: Creedy as a corpse would allay fears. A mentally unbalanced Creedy on the other hand? Donovan Creedy rendered a drooling loon deprived of any self-control or will? That would give his CIA handlers and some others cold sweats.

  They were just fitting the rubber bit in Creedy’s mouth, preparing to administer the juice.

  The young doctor fidgeted. He was in a fix sure enough: The organizations he’d belonged to in college were, well, sure, they were lavender.

  But this FBI honcho had told him they could make his dubious school affiliations appear Red—cost him his position at the hospital. Maybe nullify his very medical license.

  Still, he had to try: He said to the man, Langley, “Seven consecutive courses of ECT at this level? That could destroy Mr. Creedy’s higher brain function.”

  Langley smiled sadly and patted the young doctor’s shoulder. “A chance you’ll just have to take.”

  BOOK EIGHT:

  IN OUR TIME

  “I know that ghosts have wandered
on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me with this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

  — Emily Bronte

  54

  R.I.P.

  Hannah and Bridget left Ketchum and returned with Hector to his home in New Mexico. Hannah MacArthur-Lassiter spent a year writing Mary’s story on the nights her own writing was difficult.

  Usually these nights came when the milk wouldn’t come, and her breasts ached. Worrying about its failure to come—the milk or the words—only made things worse.

  Gradually, however, the manuscript took shape and Bridget was weaned.

  Hannah had completed her manuscript and locked it away in a succession of safe-deposit boxes.

  Years later, single again, Hannah read the posthumous books as they continued to appear: A collection of Papa’s Toronto journalism and The Dangerous Summer and the edited, bowdlerized The Garden of Eden. Gutted as the latter was, it sparked pride in Hannah—Papa was trying for something new and fresh and far beyond anything he or anyone else had done before or even tried, and she found herself goaded on by her master’s example.

  Over the course of many years, she continued to correspond with Mary, the flow eventually slowed to a trickle…exchanging phone calls on birthdays and holidays.

  Hannah was weighing an offer to teach in Glasgow—everything in her said, Go.

  In November 1986, six weeks before she was to leave for Scotland, Hannah was sitting in a lounge at The Ohio State University with her research assistant, Chris Lyon. He was just a few years older than Hannah’s daughter and a former student of Hannah’s. When Chris was an undergraduate, and a student of Hannah’s, following a long night with her class in a campus bar— a night of drinking and discussing the works of Hemingway and Hector Lassiter—Hannah, the worse for wine, had taken Chris to her bed, and he remained her occasional lover. Chris insisted on writing material that was closer to crime fiction than the novels Hannah thought he should be writing. Because of his proclivities, and his enthusiasm for Hector’s work, she had recruited Chris to help her assemble a collection of Hector’s neglected short fiction.