Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series)

by Craig McDonald

  “A woman? What’s her name?” Hector’s stomach felt sour...he was swarmed by visions of paternity suits or the like.

  “Harper,” the man said. “She said her name is Rachel Harper.”

  Shaken, Hector hung up the phone.

  “The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights.”— André Breton

  RACHEL

  49

  She was standing on the front porch of his old Key West house. She was wearing a white dress...the blast furnace wind fingering its hem and her long blond hair.

  Hector guessed she was in her mid- to late-40s. Still beautiful, if a bit pale looking...a little tired looking, too. Hector figured that was probably from the running and the hiding from the other surrealists.

  Rachel smiled. “God, it’s so good to see you, Hec.” She spread her arms. Hector dropped his bags on the porch and hugged her back.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  “This place is still my favorite place,” Rachel said. “My querencia, like you said.”

  “Or maybe just your safe harbor,” Hector said.

  The house was cool inside. He’d sprung for window air conditioners a couple of years before — trying to goose sagging rental traffic.

  “You look wonderful,” he said.

  “Yeah...?” She said, “I was poking around in here...trying to see if I might find something of yours still here. I found a little storage closet and those blank canvasses you bought me so many years ago. I bought some fresh paints to go with them. You said I owed you some paintings. I’m working on them. And I want to paint one of you. Maybe you can put it on a book jacket.”

  “So you do still paint?”

  “Sure. It’s all I do. Even a few more posthumous ‘Alvas’ now and again. Just to make the crust. Not everyone knows the story about Rachel and Alva — Quentin Windly’s reach didn’t extend that far beyond the Marshalls.”

  “On that note, have there been many close calls, Rachel?” Then Hector frowned. “What am I calling you, by the way? Rachel, or...?”

  “Rachel’s what you call me,” she said.

  Hector shook loose a cigarette and offered one to Rachel. She shook her head. “No, thanks.” She took the lighter and his unlit cigarette from his hands. She hugged him close again, her mouth finding his.

  ***

  They had been lolling in bed together for a couple of hours.

  “The ones who don’t create,” she said, “what sustains them?”

  “Maybe the simple fact they’re spared the compulsion,” he said.

  “That’s a terrible thought.” Rachel got up to go to the bathroom: a long back with the sheet slipping free. He watched her naked body...still fit...still voluptuous...though thinner than she had been in Key West. Now she looked more like her undernourished self in Spain.

  Hector tried to get a cigarette going, but his Zippo’s flint seemed to have died. He reached across to the nightstand on Rachel’s side of the bed...opened the drawer looking for matches.

  Inside the drawer was hidden a long knife... honed to razor sharpness.

  Going cold inside, Hector picked up the knife. He slid the blade under the sheets on his side of the bed.

  ***

  They were still in bed together...well into a second bottle of wine. Billie Holiday on the phonograph: “That Old Devil Called Love.”

  Rachel said, “We’re really something aren’t we — the three of us?” They had been talking about Hem. Talking about how Hector had found Ernest in Cuba and his resulting pessimistic thoughts for Hem’s future.

  “I was insane, so badly damaged, doing what I did to find a path to my own art...my own artistic voice,” Rachel said. “As I became a painter, I healed...put the past — the need to destroy in order to create — behind me. Now I’ve evolved further — no longer even paint anything I can describe as surrealist. I mean other than the increasingly rare, tossed-off ‘Alva’ to pay the bills.”

  “I want to see that art,” Hector said. “I want to see your new stuff.”

  “You will, when I finish my new paintings for you, and no peeking,” Rachel said, smiling. She said, “And then there’s Hem. I always figured Hem could only write what he figured he could live. Now the distance between himself and his macho subject matter is tearing him to pieces — he’s incapable of maturing as an artist. He rode his style into the ground. I still hate Hem, still feel a need to punish him for keeping us apart. But I wouldn’t wish his present life on him. How terrible it must be for Hem.”

  “And me?” Hector wasn’t certain he really wanted Rachel’s assessment.

  “I think your books have gotten richer as you’ve gotten older and as you’ve used more and more of yourself,” she said. “Maybe that’s because unlike Hem, you’re not your own number one fan. I read a piece someone wrote about crime writers. They said Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be. I guess that’s why I can’t read Chandler — too sentimental. This writer — this critic — said Hammett wrote the man he feared he was. And you, Hector, you increasingly write about the man you don’t want to be anymore. I’ve heard the stories like I guess everyone has. About your last wife, Maria, about your little girl and why you maybe did that to your wife.”

  Now Hector felt very cold inside. The topic of his daughter’s death, a death precipitated by her mother’s hidden drug addiction — and what Hector had done to Maria when he’d learned the true cause of their daughter’s death — was one of Hector’s only no-go areas.

  Rachel said, “When I heard the rumors about your wife’s death, and thought about the blurring of the lines between yourself and your characters, and about my own path to becoming a painter, I felt a strange kinship with you. You — always writing with regret about the man you’ve made yourself become. The thought that you might have killed your wife — for ‘revenge,’ of course — but the thought of your committing crimes like that and then writing about them...confessing in print and being rewarded for it... I thought that maybe meant we’re the same. We both destroy to create. Or I used to. And I thought that now, with all of that bloody business behind both of us, that we could really be together. That we could trust one another.”

  Hector bit his lip. “Funny you should say that.” He pulled the knife from under the bedsheets and then moved it quickly between Rachel’s bare breasts, the knife’s tip pressed there, just breaking the skin.

  Rachel searched his eyes, scared looking — frowning deeply.

  Her arms were stretched above her head...poised in the position of Man Ray’s Minotaure. It was all too perfect.

  All he had to do was press down. Hector dipped his head so he didn’t have to look at her face, or even to see Rachel’s head. He narrowed his eyes until she was just The Minotaur — her arms its horns, her breasts its eyes...the hollow of her flat belly the bull’s maw.

  The knife there between the “eyes” was like the matador’s estoque.

  The sword was poised high up on the bull, for the estocada — the killing thrust.

  Billie was crooning “You Better Go Now.”

  He sensed Rachel’s hand drifting. It happened fast. She pulled his Colt from under his pillow and pushed it to his throat. “I remembered,” she said. “Remembered where you keep your gun from the old days. Take the knife away, please.”

  Sick inside, Hector said, “I remembered you might remember. The bullets are under your pillow.”

  Rachel looked like she’d just failed some test. She dropped the Peacemaker atop his pillow and said, “I don’t know that I deserve to live after all I’ve done, Hector. I probably don’t. But I am better, and I have been for a long time. Like that painting of mine you bought all those years ago in Paris, I’ve made my choice, Hector. I made it years ago, my love. I’ve been in this house for two days. I put the knife in the drawer that first night for self-defense — in case the others found me before you did. I’d forgotten it was there. I could never hurt you...not more than I already have over the ye
ars, by running from you and making you think I was twice dead. I just wanted to have a few last weeks with you, Hector. Try and have a last good time together. So it’s your turn to decide.” She looked down at the knife between her breasts. “You told me long ago that your father said you have to ‘find what you love and let it kill you.’ Guess maybe I’ve done that.”

  Hector thought about that. He raised the knife and said, “Me too...and I’ve made my choice as well.”

  He put his weight behind the thrust.

  They both watched the knife’s blade quiver after it sank into the wall above the bed.

  Rachel wrapped a leg around his. She said, “I’m very sick, Hector. All the cigarettes... The doctors say I can’t be fixed. They say for six or seven weeks, maybe nine at most, I’ll have what they describe as ‘a quality of life.’ After that, it will go very quickly, they say. So I’ve rented this place of yours for the next two months. But I won’t have you see me sick, Hector. I’ll never have you watch me waste away and die. As soon as I know the end is beginning...”

  There were tears in her eyes. Hector wiped them away with his thumbs. Rachel said, “So you see, in some ways, it would have been better for me to let you use that knife. But you’ve suffered enough for me...and because of me. So you have another choice to make, Hector: eight weeks, or should I leave now?”

  He’d never consent to her going off there at the end, never consent to Rachel crawling off to die alone. Though it nearly killed him, Hector had stood vigil over his dying daughter. He’d do it again for Rachel.

  Rachel lay there with her arms over her head, searching his blue eyes. “What are you thinking?”

  Hector stroked Rachel’s torso, wiping away the droplets of blood from the small pinpoint wound between her breasts, his hand moving further down her belly.

  He said, “I’m thinking of all we’ve been to one another. Thinking of the things we’ve shared and done to one another in the last twenty-four years. And yet, in all that time, we were really lovers for maybe less than a week, total.”

  Rachel nodded. “And...”

  Hector was bending his head toward hers for a kiss. He said, “And so, for the likes of us, eight weeks could maybe feel like forever.”

  EPILOGUE

  (JULY 2, 1961)

  “The artist is his own most severe judge.”— Man Ray

  50

  REMATAR

  At first Hector wasn’t sure to whom he was talking.

  The newly minted widow started simply: “Well, Lasso, Papa finally got the job done.”

  It dawned on him slowly who was calling and Hector, living one time zone behind Idaho, said, “Mary?”

  “He shot himself this morning,” Mary Hemingway said. “Papa got up early, found the key to the place where the guns were locked away, and he killed himself. As you’re his oldest remaining friend, I wanted to call personally. Wanted you to hear it from me...the world will be told it was a gun accident. You are hearing it first from me, aren’t you, Hector?”

  “...Yes.”

  Hector realized he was sitting down. He’d been standing when he picked up the phone.

  It felt like the world had suddenly tipped on its side.

  Hector said thickly, “I knew Hem had been sick. Dos had somehow gotten word...and then got word back to me. I know about...” Hector hesitated, then said, “I know about the Mayo Clinic, and the electroshock therapy.”

  “That damned chickenshit voodoo,” Mary said. “That killed him. That put Papa under.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “No,” Mary said quickly. “No, he didn’t. That was the real problem, don’t you see? He couldn’t write anymore. After the shock treatments, Papa’s long-term memory was scrambled. And he couldn’t put words together on the page. They said it would come back, but Papa didn’t believe the doctors...or he didn’t have the patience.”

  “I’ll see if I can catch a plane,” Hector said.

  “No, it’s all fine so far as that goes,” Mary said firmly. “Family is coming. It’ll be a family-only affair.”

  “How are you then, Mary?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Numb.”

  “If there’s anything...”

  “Maybe one thing,” she said. “It’s strange. I didn’t find a note with the envelope, so I assume Ernest must have torn it up or burned it. But Papa’s memory was scrambled, like I said. He forgot to get rid of the envelope. I found the envelope in the pocket of his robe...the robe he was wearing this morning when he....”

  “What envelope? Who was it from?”

  “That’s the thing, I don’t recognize the name,” Mary said. “It’s funny. There was a lot of mail delivered to the Finca just after we left Cuba that last time, and left so quickly. We’d finally just had a bundle catch up to us here in Ketchum a couple of days ago. A big bundle — some of the mail in it many many months or even years old. This letter must have been among that batch, I guess. Looking at the date of the postmark on the envelope I have to guess that. It was mailed from Key West in 1959.”

  Hector said softly, “Who was the sender?”

  “That’s just it. Do you know, or did you know, a woman named Rachel Harper?”

  Hector was tingling. He said simply, “She was someone I knew quite well, in Key West in the old days. A woman I loved. Hem met her once or twice. But that’s all so far as those two go. She died the year that letter was sent.”

  “How strange for her to write Papa after so many years,” Mary said. “I wonder what was in this Rachel’s letter?”

  Hector said, “Me too.” He had, he supposed, badly underestimated her grudge against Hem.

  “Maybe this Rachel was trying to reach you through Papa.”

  “That’s probably it,” he lied.

  “Sure,” Mary said. “It must be. That must be how it was.”

  Mary and Hector talked for a few more minutes and he wished her well again and promised to check back with the Widow Hemingway in a few days to see how she was faring.

  Shaken, Hector walked to the bar in his library-office and poured a glass of Rioja Alta. Then, smiling, he poured a second glass and set it out for Hem’s maybe thirsty spirit.

  Sipping his wine, Hector wondered what Rachel had written in her letter to Hem.

  Had she told Hem the truth about what she had been...about what she had done?

  Had she sneered at Hem and taunted him with the knowledge that he’d been complicit in the murder of an innocent man in the person of Quentin Windly?

  Had she twisted the knife and mocked half-crazed Hem for being manipulated into helping to commit an unnecessary murder?

  Scrambled as his memory was, would Hem have even remembered Rachel, or Alva? Would he have remembered what had happened in Spain with the critic, or later, in Cuba? Hector didn’t think so. Hector didn’t think Hem could have brought any useful context to anything that Rachel might have written.

  And, more importantly to Hector in some ways, he wondered if Rachel had written and mailed the letter to Hem before, or after she had confronted Hector in his own Key West house that last time when he returned from Cuba.

  The crime author sipped his red wine and shrugged.

  What had Rachel written to Hem?

  Hell. It didn’t matter now, Hector tried to convince himself.

  Either way, with or without Rachel’s possible push, Hem had judged himself.

  “Papa” just didn’t measure up to his own standard for a man, Hector figured.

  Writers don’t retire and Papa couldn’t write anymore.

  And knowing, or unknowingly, deliberately or accidentally, in her long, crazed bloody game of ‘last tag’ with Hector, Rachel might just have scored the last and most devastating touch.

  But in a way, given Papa’s state, maybe Rachel had done Hem a favor if she had in some way firmed his resolve for the last of it.

  Viewed in that light, it might almost be regarded as a gift.

  Hector raised his glass to one of
Alva’s, or rather Rachel’s self-portraits, hanging there on the wall above his fireplace mantle.

  Toasting and winking at the painting, Hector said, “Olé.”

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks again to Svetlana Pironko, Michael O’Brien and Bleak House publisher Ben LeRoy.

  A very special note of gratitude to my editor, Alison Janssen: every author should be so fortunate to have such a remarkable and gifted editor.

  I also thank my parents, Betty and James McDonald, my wife, Debbie, and our daughters Madeleine and Yeats, for making room for the writing.

  For special help with obtaining permissions for the Diego Rivera painting that graces the cover, grateful thanks to Alexander Civico and Metze Mur Effing, Rubén Marshall and Erika Hernandez-Sanchez. Also, special thanks to Amy Lyle and Erin Holl.

  Toros & Torsos is a work of fiction but it rests on a foundation of unsettling historical fact and informed supposition and scholarship, nearly all of which is based on official documents and public records.

  Many nonfiction books were consulted during the writing of this novel. Among the most useful were Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss; Orson Welles, Volume 2: Hello Americans by Simon Callow; The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos and the Murder of José Robles by Stephen Koch; Black Dahlia Avenger by Steve Hodel, The Lives of Lee Miller by Anthony Penrose; The Best Times, An Informal Memoir, John Dos Passos; Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways, by Valerie Hemingway and Hemingway’s Hurricane: The Great Florida Keys Storm of 1935 by Phil Scott. Also consulted were Hemingway: The 1930s and Hemingway: The Final Years, both by the finest of Hemingway’s biographers, Michael Reynolds.

  I am indebted to these and the other authors, memoirists and biographers whose scholarship contributed to the tapestry of Toros & Torsos.