The stranger smiled and looked Hector over a long moment. She smiled and said, “That might just be wonderful.”
They moved to a table, drinks still in hand. The young woman sat down across from Hector and he ordered them some fresh tequila and fish tacos.
The girl was even lovelier up close. She had a sultry mouth and a husky voice.
And something positively wild there in her eyes—something Hector might be a long time coming to understand.
But he wasn’t thinking about any of that just then. He had no such eye to the future.
Hell, he wasn’t thinking much beyond the next minute.
He said, “My name is Hector Lassiter. How do they call you, beauty?”
In a smoky voice, the woman smiled and said, “Me llamo Maria.”
PART IV:
— SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS
July, 1966 —
“If we knew the road’s end, would we ever set off down that sorry path?”
— Bud Fiske
(Excerpt from the liner notes for a rare, 1969 Irish
pressing of Frank Sinatra’s My Way)
47
The line of book-buyers was finally dwindling down. The author’s signing was nearly finished, just some straggler book-buyers, Hector and the author’s lately FBI shadow, one callow young agent named Andrew Langley.
Hector signed hardcovers for three more elderly fans, then looked up and saw a ghost.
A pretty young woman who looked just like Megan Dalton said, “Hello, Hector. Gosh, but it’s been a long time.”
He did some quick math: Meg should be about forty. This woman didn’t look much older than her early twenties. She smiled and said, “It’s me!” She held her hand about waist-high and said, “Shannon! Don’t you remember?”
“I’ve never forgotten,” Hector said thickly. It was true—he was a man positively cursed with memory. He stood up on shaky legs and hugged her tightly to him. “God, hardly a day’s gone by I haven’t wondered about you and your mother,” Hector said. “She doin’ okay?”
A too-enthusiastic smile. “Yeah… Sure she is.”
Well, that didn’t sound too awful convincing. But Shannon hurried on: “We ended up in Veracruz. She talks about you all the time. Mother buys all your books as soon as they appear. She sees every movie your name is attached to.”
Hector caught Shannon looking at his left hand and the new wedding band there. Her demeanor shifted a bit. “And you? You’re still well?”
“Still north of the dirt, anyways,” Hector said. “Vertical and published—every author’s dream. God, look at you. You’ve gone and gotten beautiful, kiddo.”
Now he checked Shannon’s left hand. There was an engagement ring there. She saw Hector looking at her ring and said, “That’s why I’m here. I saw you’re touring around Texas in support of your new novel. So I decided to come up here and pop the question, so to speak. I’m to be married myself next month. I wanted to ask if you’d consider giving me away. It would mean the world to me.”
Hector surprised himself with his own near-loss of self-composure.
“It’d mean the world to me, too,” Hector said with a cracking voice. He dug a knuckle at his eye.
***
They went to dinner that night, just the two of them.
Later Hector couldn’t remember much of what was said. He just spent most of the time staring at Shannon, struck by how much she resembled her mother. Dazed by how similar their mannerisms and voices were.
Even more though, Shannon reminded Hector of Hallie, and that hurt. That similarity fired a pain Hector savored in some strange way, maybe just because it made Hallie seem somehow close by again.
Hector got the sense Meg was still unattached. He sat there, twisting his wedding band, listening as Shannon talked of their lives in the years since Hector and Jimmy had watched them drive away down that dusty Mexican road sixteen or so years ago.
Hector listened to tales of sixteen years he might have shared with them if he’d chosen to go that way.
They parted after Hector promised he’d escort Shannon down the middle aisle of some pretty, crumbling old candle-lit mission in balmy coastal Mexico.
***
That night Hector called Jimmy long-distance and told him whom he’d seen.
They talked about old times, lost loves and lingering mysteries.
Between them, Shannon and Jimmy stirred old ghosts who dogged Hector’s dreams that night. Half-forgotten faces and long unthought of names, dead enemies and lost loves:
So many specters.
Estes Kefauver, grandstanding, buck-toothed politician: in the end, that cocksucker’s mob inquiries probably sold several hundreds of thousands of television sets, Hector figured. People sat in bars or in living rooms, eyes glued to that flickering cyclops as mobsters straight from central casting played to or fell apart in front of the unblinking cameras.
Some crazy show, but that’s about all it really proved to be in the end. The mob soldiered on when it was all over. Just pushed on unfazed and largely untouched. Always the grandstander, Kefauver later shifted his sights to the comic book industry, and then later still, to the men’s magazines whose short story markets still sometimes buttered Hector’s bread.
That pissed the author off, plenty.
Then toothsome Estes made the mistake of going after a fleeting, panting acquaintance of Hector’s—Bettie Page, she of the black bangs, buttery curves and casual nudity.
One December night a few years later, while hanging out with a country musician friend in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, Hector caught sight of Senator Kefauver leaving a restaurant.
Buddy Loy Burke and Hector trailed the senator to a parking lot. Hector kicked Estes in the back of the knees and then slammed Kefauver’s face into the trunk of his own car. Twice. Shame on me, Hector thought, standing over the unconscious politician as the snow sifted down around them.
True Crime magazines got a lot of mileage out of Vito Scartelli’s mysterious disappearance in January of 1951. Wild stories still abounded about lieutenants so nonplussed by their skipper’s burgeoning senility they allegedly drove him down to the Everglades and fed him to the gators.
Other canards placed Vito’s corpse in the cornerstones of various buildings around the Buckeye State.
Of course, the wildest of the conspiracy buffs never came close to the true circumstances regarding Vito’s Houdini-like disappearance at Hector’s hands.
Eliot Ness died a virtual pauper on May 16, 1957 after a string of failed business enterprises.
Ness stopped to buy himself a bottle of scotch, walked into his kitchen and keeled over, dead of a massive heart attack. He’d recently finished working on a book about his life with a hack writer named Oscar Fraley. The book came out after Eliot’s death and made Ness and his “Untouchables” legends when the wildly exaggerated accounts of their Chicago exploits made the leap to television. But Desi Arnez and Lucille Ball made plenty more on that TV series than Eliot’s struggling survivors ever did.
Christ, but Eliot had the rottenest sort of luck.
Eliot’s prime suspect for the Kingsbury run murders long survived him, was indeed still rotting in some Buckeye mad house, so far as Hector knew.
Jimmy Hanrahan had finally retired and went private. He still endeavored to put the Cleveland Butcher away, for keeps. Eerie thing was, about every six months or so, some torso or headless corpse still turned up here or there around Ohio, often times around Dayton or neighboring Yellow Springs and that particular crumbling veteran’s center.
Rod Serling carved quite a name for himself as a screenwriter. He made his fame with some killer teleplays, to Hector’s mind—Requiem for a Heavyweight and the like. Hector would catch Rod’s anthology show on the television now and again. The kid did okay for himself, Hector figured. “Shadows and substance,” indeed.
Rod had offered Hector a chance to script an episode of his Twilight Zone follow-up, a Western called The Loner. Hector was
still toying with trying.
Francis Sinatra found his way back to the top, and plenty fine. The Chairman of the Board successfully mounted his campaign to “Comebacksville.”
Yet rumors of mob ties still dogged the crooner.
Frank and Ava split, and by all accounts Sinatra always carried a wicked torch for her.
For her part, Ava bedded bullfighters down in Old Meh-hico. She swam nude in Hem’s Cuban pool. Hector and Ava, eventually—a time or two—became better acquainted, horizontally.
The critics claimed Frank’s grief at Ava’s loss pushed him to some of his best work. Seemed the silver-tonsiled magnificent bastard did what all the real artists were supposed to do: Francis “used the pain.”
***
Hector managed to shake his latest, much-younger Scottish wife for a few days and made that trip down to Vercruz solo lobo to give away Shannon on her wedding day.
Meg didn’t look so good. Too much liquor over too long a time had put some serious weight on her. The Mexican sun had done no favors to her skin. A few minutes into their reunion, Meg asked, “Is James still alive?”
Hanrahan, she meant. Hector nodded. “Not in the best of health, but, yeah, Jimmy’s still around, thank Christ.”
Meg smiled sadly. Sometimes I remember that song he sang a time or two to put Shannon to sleep. Do you remember it, Hector?”
He rolled his neck, some part of himself wishing he was far away, too. “Yes. ‘Carrickfergus’, sure. Always had myself a soft spot for that tune.”
Meg cleared her throat a little and sang a bit:
My childhood days bring back sad reflections
Of happy time there spent so long ago
My boyhood friends and my own relations
Have all passed on now like the melting snow
So I’ll spend my days in this endless roving.
***
Much later, as Hector was preparing to hit the trail north, Meg, slightly drunk, confessed what she’d done to Katy.
Studying his face, she said carefully, “You don’t look at all surprised, Hector. Why is that?”
“Jimmy pieced it together years ago,” he said, raw-voiced. “Jimmy suspected the night we were both shot there in Dayton.”
Meg had this pained expression. “And James told you?”
“Eventually.”
She said, “And you did nothing, either of you?” Her eyes searched his. “Why not?”
“Hell, was a time I maybe flirted with just standing back and letting Kate fend for herself if the chips were down and those bullets started flying,” Hector said. “Jimmy even confessed to me that he feared I’d do just that. But my conscience got the best of me. I saved Kate in that shootout outside that Cleveland brownstone, even though I thought I had all kinds of wrong-headed good reasons not to do that right thing.”
Meg smiled sadly. “For my sake, I have to say I wish you’d hadn’t done the right thing.”
Hector looked at her, at this wreck of the woman he once had feelings for.
Meg was younger than Hallie had been when Hector had fallen in love with Meg’s mother back in 1950. Yet Meg now looked much older than her mother ever had.
“Maybe I wish I had too,” Hector lied. Hindsight: what a wicked old whore.
Meg said, “I read all that about what happened to you. The stories about your wife—you know, Maria. The rumors about you maybe having, well, you know…
In his head, Hector supplied the words Meg couldn’t give voice: The rumors about you maybe having killed Maria. You killed your own wife, Hector. That’s what they claim.
“I’m sorry for all that,” Meg said. “So sorry for you losing your daughter like that.”
Goddamn Maria…
Maria—the one subject Hector never discussed, not even ten years on.
At that moment, Hector just wanted far away from Megan Dalton and all the lashing memories she brought raining down on him.
The keys to Hector’s fifty-seven Bel Air and his hacienda weighed heavily in his hand. They also seemed to carry the weight of so many regrets, losses and sins.
Meg smiled sadly and said, “So it’s back on the road then, Hec?”
“Have to get back north,” Hector said.
“Me, too, maybe. With Shannon married now, I’ve been thinking about crossing the border, seeing some old favorite places. To see how the country’s changed.”
“I can tell you here and now it’s not changed for the better,” Hector said, sour-voiced. “This war? This incompetent accidental president? Cocksucker shames me to be a Texan.” His voice softened a shade. “But sure, go see the States, Megan. You should do that if it’s what you really want.”
“Yeah, just get a car and ramble,” Meg said. “Maybe I will do that.”
“Rambling can be good,” Hector said. “You can be new everywhere you go.”
Meg looked at their feet. She said, “Your present wife, is she like you? Is she like us?”
“You mean Hannah?” Hector frowned. “Is she like us? How?”
A funny smile played on Meg’s mouth. “You know—is Hannah our kind?”
What? What exactly was our kind, to Meg’s mind?
Did she mean a maverick—some flavor of rootless runner?
Or did Meg mean a killer?
Hector decided to decide that Meg surely meant the first.
He decided to choose for both of them, one more time.
“No, Hannah’s not like us,” Hector said. “She not like you, or me, not at all.”
He smiled a sad smile and said, “She’s just not the running kind.”
THE END
THE RUNNING KIND
Reader Discussion Questions
1.The Running Kind shares a key plot similarity with the prior Lassiter novel Roll the Credits: namely, the attempted delivery of a child into safe hands against overwhelming odds. If you’ve read Credits, how do the two novels compare and contrast, to your mind?
2.Legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover looms over much of Hector Lassiter’s life, just as he did that of many writers of the early- to mid-20th Century. What do you make of Hoover and Lassiter’s lives crossing as the series unfolds?
3.Hoover famously denied the existence of the Mafia for decades, finally forced to do so partly as a result of the televised Kefauver hearings (an event indeed credited for massively spiking TV sales, by the way). Why do you think Hoover resisted admitting the mob’s existence? Had you heard of the Kefauver committee before reading this novel?
4.On the subject of television, a certain TV pioneer named Rod Serling crops up along the way. The Lassiter series has centered books around writing, painting, radio, film and now, television. What other mediums or artistic movements do you think lie ahead as the series reaches its climax?
5.Mid-book, Hector falls in love with a woman named Hallie Dalton and begins to plan a settled life with her. If you know the other Lassiter novels, what most strikes you as different about Hallie when compared to most of the other women Hector falls for in other novels?
6.By this novel’s end, what were your attitudes or perspectives on Hallie’s daughter, Meg?
7.Jimmy Hanrahan has now appeared as a primary sidekick in two Lassiter novels (as well as making significant appearances in Craig McDonald’s overlapping cycle of Chris Lyon novels). Bud Fiske was Hector’s sidekick in Head Games. In other novels, Hector’s primary foils have been historic personages including Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles. Do you prefer Hector operating in tandem with real, or instead with wholly fictional characters?
8.Most of the Hector Lassiter novels tend to sprawl across continents to varying degrees. Apart from a late-novel trip across the border, The Running Kind hews largely to American soil. Do you have a preference in whether your Lassiter’s are “foreign” or “domestic”? If you do, why?
9.This novel finds Hector at his own half-century mark and starting to look backward a good bit more. Are there certain ages or periods of his life when you prefer t
o read about Hector? As many series turn on seemingly ageless heroes and heroines, are you attracted to or rather put off by a hero who actually ages across books, just as we do?
10.If you’ve read Head Games and recognize the name, what was your reaction to the introduction of Maria?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Craig McDonald is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hector Lassiter series has been published to international acclaim in numerous languages. McDonald’s debut novel was nominated for Edgar, Anthony and Gumshoe awards in the U.S. and the 2011 Sélection du prix polar Saint-Maur en Poche in France.
The Lassiter series has been enthusiastically endorsed by a who’s who of crime fiction authors including: Michael Connelly, Laura Lippmann, Daniel Woodrell, James Crumley, James Sallis, Diana Gabaldon, and Ken Bruen, among many others.
Hector Lassiter also centers short stories that appear in three crime fiction anthologies, Dublin Noir (Akashic Books), The Deadly Bride & 19 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, (Carroll & Graf) and Danger City II (Contemporary Press).
Craig McDonald is also the author of two highly praised non-fiction volumes on the subject of mystery and crime fiction writing, Art in the Blood and Rogue Males, nominated for the Macavity Award.
To learn more about Craig, visit www.craigmcdonaldbooks.com and www.betimesbooks.com
Follow Craig McDonald on Twitter @HECTORLASSITER
https://www.facebook.com/craigmcdonaldnovelist
The Running Kind: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 26
