Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series)

by Craig McDonald

  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.”

  The crime writer — the last of the first wave Black Mask writers — surveys the room. It’s a plausible enough murder-suicide scene for these backwater environs.

  But now for the vexing nuance — drive that old mystery writing bitch up a wall.

  Fox those cops.

  Reaching to the other side of the bed, Hector Lassiter picks up a tube of his wife’s lipstick. He applies it to his dry lips, careful to avoid the stray hairs of his moustache and beard. He picks up the derelict bottle of whiskey and the virgin glass, pours four fingers and downs it, leaving a glass rimmed with lipstick. Then he smokes two cigarettes, stubbing out the lipstick-smeared butts in the empty tumbler.

  Enter the mystery woman.

  He rubs the lipstick from his mouth with his fingers and licks those clean, washing away the taste with swigs of whiskey straight from the bottle.

  Now, reaching again to the sidetable on his wife’s side of the bed, Hector Lassiter grabs a bottle of perfume. He breaks it on the edge of the table and slathers perfume on his gun hand and arm — voiding any possibility of a paraffin test that could reveal Hector fired a weapon. He tosses his arm across his wife’s sidetable — feigning the spastically flung arm of a dying man. Glass breaks...costly cosmetics fly.

  Satisfied with the effect, Hector wedges the Peacemaker in Andrew Nagel’s dead left hand, finger on the hair trigger...barrel pointed at a one-legged pulp novelist. Hector reaches for the never-used cane that his fifth “wife” has hopefully placed by the headboard. He positions Andrew’s dead hand...scoots himself in place. With the rubber stopper of the cane, he pushes the dead reporter’s dead index finger back against the hair trigger.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  That burn.

  Like a thousand shots of whiskey, received at once.

  That sound.

  The Peacemaker tumbles to the tile floor.

  Groaning, Hector returns the cane to its former position.


  Gut shot.

  A bad way to go.

  Call it half-assed penitence.

  And his remaining leg...there’s no feeling left. Must have nicked his spinal chord. Maybe severed it.

  So: Paralysis to boot.

  Dipping his finger in his own wound, light-headed now, Hector grimaces and twists, reaching up over his headboard. He writes above his bed, wincing with the pain:

  FOR

  EQ

  For a moment, he frets, thinking of pillow-biting Cornell Woolrich...fearing the “EQ” might be misconstrued — suspected of standing for “Ellery Queen”...hinting of sodomistic shenanigans.

  Then he remembers Estelle’s newly annotated letter.

  Hector gingerly rubs a little blood from his gut on Andrew’s dead trigger finger.

  Hector sucks his blood from his own finger. Then the dying crime writer lays back for a last time on his pillow.

  Hector lets that old whore death settle in with him, warm and slow.

  Death with imagery: scenes from his books in montage. A melodramatic mélange the punchy pulp writer confuses for his own memories:

  * * *

  His lonely office.

  Guttering light from a neon sign pulses through slanted shades.

  A slow-turning ceiling fan stirs old dust.

  Enter the woman: at first, just a busty silhouette through stenciled pebbled glass. Then, she’s standing before him in silk stockings with seams up the back. Raven hair and ruby lips. He’ll learn she likes to bite his shoulder while peaking. Betrayed, tricked, played for a fool, he’ll shoot her during a last shared orgasm...

  Mean streets: It’s Chicago. It’s 1936. He’s sent to settle a union strike. He settles that strike. But there are casualties. Talk about a killing floor...

  A sibilant homosexual lackey (Street & Smith will balk at that ... so call him “a Nancy boy”) comes calling. Nancy boy is in thrall to an endomorphic European of indeterminate origin (adapted for film, the part will be played by Sydney Greenstreet). The pair slays his partner, seeking some elusive bronze statue of a wolf with a treasure map stowed inside. A man owes his partner...even if he is banging his dead partner’s dipsomaniacal wife. So he sets off again down those mean streets...

  * * *

  From his far off place, Hector can dimly hear screams now...screams from somewhere. Fists pounding on a door.

  The screams grow closer and he thinks he hears breaking glass in the distance someone shouting for him. But it’s too late...and now drowned out by music...some march maybe, played on a hammer dulcimer...drums, tiple and accordion...“Tramps & Hawkers.”

  Hector reaches out his hand and the little girl takes it and smiles. He towers above Dolores, beaming, standing there on his two solid legs.

  They march up the side of the hill somewhere near Creel, half-walking half-running through prickly pear, maguey...sage and heather.

  There’s a dark-haired woman at the top of that hill, astride a strawberry roan, silhouetted against some bloody sunset.

  The End

  TOROS & TORSOS

  Hector Lassiter returns in TOROS & TORSOS, the second novel in the Edgar-/Anthony-nominated Hector Lassiter series (available in eBook format):

  It’s not art until somebody dies: Toros & Torsos pits novelist Hector Lassiter against a cabal of killer surrealists in a historical saga spanning decades and continents... a noir love story turning on dark scholarship pointing to an underground of killer artists who might have gotten away with Hollywood’s most infamous, unsolved murder.

  Excerpt:

  Chapter 1

  NO GOOD DEED

  “Can I sit with you for a time, sir?”

  A silky voice — alto, but strained. The young woman said, “I think a man in this place may mean me harm.”

  Hector Lassiter looked up from his notebook.

  She was 23, maybe 24. Pretty, poised and flustered.

  Hector had seen her come in an hour or so before, when he’d looked up to check the weather, which was still strangely calm. Although Hector had at least a dozen years on her, he’d been attracted to her. Then he’d become absorbed in his writing...lost track of the young woman and of his interest in her while he wrote.

  The crime novelist closed his notebook, capped his pen and slipped it into the pocket of his faded and striped fisherman’s shirt. He gestured at the empty seat across from him and said, “Sit, please.”

  The short story he’d been trying to shape was showing every sign of being a dog, anyhow. He’d been trying to write the forecasted hurricane into the story, but it wasn’t coming together.

  Hector sipped his mojito, watching her. The woman sat down and Hector rose, walked behind her, and scooted in her chair. She was wearing a white dress that bared her shoulders and most of her back — more than a little sunburn there. He sat back down and gestured at his glass. Hector said, “Ever have one?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t think so. Not even sure what that is. Is that mint in there with the lime?”

  “Mashed in, then some more as garnish.” Hector raised two fingers at his bartender friend. He pointed at his nearly empty glass and then at himself and the woman. “You’ll love this, trust me,” he said. “Calm your nerves. Like my Daddy said, ‘You’ve got to find what you love and let it kill you.’”

  She was blond. Blue eyes and long legs. The woman was bustier than most regarded as the vogue. But Hector never bought into the flapper physique and mystique. That aesthetic bewildered him: Hector liked curves.

  “I feel I know you,” she said. “I mean, as if I’ve maybe seen you before. I’m pretty sure I have...just yesterday.”

  Hector winked. “Sure. And likewise. Think I saw you come in on the steamship. I was out fishing with a friend.”

  “The man with the black boat? I heard that is Hemingway’s boat.”

  “That’s right,” Hector said. “The Pilar. Now, this man who scared you...”

  She nodded and fidgeted. “He’s across the bar. He keeps staring and smiling at me. He has a big knife. He’s been running his finger along the blade as he smiles at me. I mean, it’s not so much of a smile...more of a...” She searched for the right word.

  “A ‘leer’?” Hector offered.

  “Perfect — a leer. And he doesn’t have so many teeth.” She paused as the bartender placed her drink on the table.

  Hector said, “Here, Josie,” and slipped a couple of bills to the man. He raised his fresh mojito and extended his arm for a toast. “To new friends,” Hector said.

  She nodded distractedly and they tapped glasses. She sipped her drink and said, “It’s delicious.” She took another sip and said, “If I leave here alone, I’m afraid he’ll follow me. I’m pretty sure that he will do that.”

  Hector was pretty sure, too. But he said, “Well you can stop worrying about that. I’ll see you safely out of here.”

  She smiled. “Thank you so much, Mr. Lassiter.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You know my name?”

  She blushed. “I’ve been holding out on you a bit. I do know who you are. My friend recognized you. She recognized Mr. Hemingway first, and then you. She’s read his books, and yours, too. I’ve read you as well. She loaned me one of your novels she had along — one I seem to have missed.” She rummaged through her purse and pulled out a well-thumbed copy of Rhapsody In Black. “I checked your face against the photo on the back of the jacket. You look just like your picture, Mr. Lassiter. I love it. Your novel, I mean...although your photo is certainly very nice, too. It’s gripping. Your book, I mean. It cost me sleep. I’m truly afraid how it might end.”

  Hector shrugged. “Figure on it ending darkly. They all do. And hey, please call me Hector. Now, what do I call you?”

  “Rachel Harper.”

  He shook her hand and gave her his best smile — strong white teeth and dimples. “Okay then, Rachel. This man — where is he?”

  “Is it a good idea to point him out? I wouldn�
��t want to provoke him.”

  Hector nodded at the bar. “The mirror there behind you...I have the angle. I can see the whole room. So describe him to me.”

  “Not hard to spot,” she said. “He’s swarthy...maybe Mexican, or Cuban. He has a patch over his left eye. Very few teeth. He is perhaps six-feet tall, although I haven’t seen him standing. But to me he looks rather tall. He’s thin. There is a scar on his forehead above the eye patch and also below it.”

  “He is a nasty looking piece of work,” Hector said. “Any reason you can think of as to why he might be after you, Rachel?”

  “None at all, Mr. Lassiter.”

  “Hector. Well, you’re a very pretty young woman. That’s too often reason enough in these sorry parts.”

  “Do you know him, Hector?”

  He hesitated, then shrugged. “What makes you think I might?”

  “Key West is so small, and you live here.”

  “Me and twelve thousand others. And God only knows how many tourists. Scads of sightseers. Boatloads of ’em, in and out, every day. They come in like you and your pal, on steamships and on ferries or on private yachts. They ride in on that damned crazy over-ocean train. This friend of yours, by the way — you indicated this friend is a woman?”

  “Her name is Beverly.”

  Hector nodded, pleased. “You and Bev — there are hundreds like you two through here every day, bound from Miami or headed back there,” Hector said. “Or they’re headed for Cuba, intent on slumming in Havana.”

  Rachel’s cheeks reddened. “Funny you say that. Beverly — Bev, as you call her — she met a man last evening. She’s gone on to Cuba with him for a day or so. She left me here alone.” She shook her head at her abandonment by her friend. “She left me here, alone,” she said again.

  Better and better. Hector sipped some more light rum and lime juice. He licked his lip and said. “Well, for now at least, you’re not alone, Rachel.”

  “No.” She half-smiled. “I was a fool to let Bev talk me into this trip. And we weren’t keeping up with the news. Never occurred to us, either, that August and September are hurricane months in the Atlantic. We didn’t know about the big storm headed this way.”