Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel

by Craig McDonald

  “But Höttl is dead now?”

  “Blown to dust,” I said.

  Marie hugged me again. “In Hollywood, I told you I couldn’t fathom revenge. But now I do. Problem is, Höttl’s dead, and there’s no way to kill him again.”

  I wrapped an arm around her slim shoulders and steered Marie back toward the house. “There’s the two guys who did this to Duff who still sorely need killing. If I can get a line on them, I’ll give ’em even worse that they gave Duff. I’ll make hell seem a holiday.” Even with my imagination, dark as it runs, I couldn’t conceive how I could top the suffering and carnage they’d visited upon my darling. But I’d take a bloody shot at it, afforded the opportunity.

  Marie said, “What are the odds of you ever finding those men? Really?”

  Too slim. But I said, “I’m wicked patient, kid. There’ve been times I’ve waited decades to get my revenge. But I do get it.”

  ***

  Jimmy caught me on my way out to a payphone. He grabbed me in this big awkward bear hug. The look he gave me, the pain in his eyes, rattled me. He said, “Hector, if I hadn’t insisted on staying with you back there in Lotus Land…? If I hadn’t insisted Duff bring Marie down here?” He pressed his fists to the sides of his head. “Christ, I truly believed this trip down here would be a milk run.”

  I gripped the back of his neck in my mitt and got up in his face. “You couldn’t know how this would turn out, and neither could Duff or I,” I said. We all agreed to this, Jimmy. Much as you might want to try, you can’t take the blame for what’s happened here. There’s only a few sons of bitches that can do that. The ones who killed Duff, and the ones back home who told them where to find our girls. Now, to address that last bunch, I’ve really gotta find a phone.”

  ***

  I burned through four cigarettes and pocketful of change as the bastards passed me around from agency to agency. From no-name stooge to no-name federal stooge.

  At last, a familiar voice:

  Agent X said, “I’ve been apprised as to what’s happened down there, Mr. Lassiter. My sincere and heartfelt condolences. Höttl’s threat to you and yours was clearly greater than I thought possible. I am so sorry for your loss and very relieved Miss O’Rourke, at least, is unharmed. If it’s of any consolation, I’m making it my mission to identify the leaker and to see that man prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

  “Nice speech,” I said. “Fact remains, this didn’t need to happen. If you hadn’t protected that son of a bitch Höttl for all these years things would be different now.”

  “Well, that’s a moot point, all around,” Agent X said. “You’ve seen to that, haven’t you? You and your friends certainly ended that intelligence enterprise earlier today when you blew Höttl to hell along with all our uses for him.”

  “That’s another thing that’s eaten at me for too damned many years,” I said. “What was that intelligence value that had you boys all wet?”

  “Again, a moot point, Lassiter. It’s over now. Guess nobody wins, eh?” Agent X paused, then added, “If I were in your position, I’d probably have done the same thing to him. Though perhaps not so destructively. My God, the carnage.”

  “So you’re not going to come after me or mine? I mean, if we had done something here?”

  “What would we gain, Lassiter? Your former wife is dead. Höttl is dead… along with twenty-three pieces of human debris. And, frankly, you’re a public figure with far-reaching media connections. I was browsing over your file when you called. No, you’re a writer—I should choose my words more carefully. I’ve been wading through your file. It’s a massive goddamned dossier. But suffice it to say, I’m convinced pursuing charges against you in this matter would be a treacherous undertaking.” His voice hardened. “But if you ever do something like that again? The insurance claims from the broken windows alone are shaping up to be staggering.”

  At least I didn’t have to worry about being a fugitive. Still, I couldn’t resist a dig. “How many other Nazis is Uncle Sam protecting? Whatever happened to Klaus Barbie, for instance? How about Josef Mengele? You boys maybe set that twisted cocksucker up in some backwater with a bottomless stock of twins to tinker on?”

  “This conversation is over, Mr. Lassiter. Again, I’m sorry for your loss. Again, keep your damned nose clean.”

  I said, “This isn’t over yet. Not even close.”

  “Hell it isn’t,” Agent X said. “It is over. Over and done. Put it behind you, Mr. Lassiter.”

  ***

  Jimmy and I sat out on the balcony of our hotel room, staring out at the lights of Chihuahua, half drunk on mezcal.

  Sipping my booze and studying the moon, I said, “It’s not really over you know.”

  Jimmy turned his head; arched his eyebrows.

  “It’s not over in the purest sense, I’m afraid, Jimmy. The Germans who killed Duff are still out there. They know who Marie is and they were prepared to kill her for Höttl. They probably know about you and about Ohio, because Höttl knew. If they want revenge for what happened to their chief?”

  That sparked Jimmy to fury; I was the convenient target for his wrath. He snarled, “So what? What are you fucking saying, Hector? That Marie has to stay in hiding? That she gets some other name? That she has to move to some other place even though this cocksucker’s already in hell? Fucking Christ!”

  Figured about then, we were both flashing on memories of Duff on that bloody bed.

  Seething, Jimmy stared at the moon for a long time.

  I said softly, “Yeah, Jim. I guess I am saying all that.”

  Jimmy hung his head. “Goddamn it!” He sighed. “But you’re likely too right, of course.” He looked close to tears. His hands trembled with impotent frustration. “I’ll break that lousy news to Marie in the morning. I can’t do it now and not like this.” Jimmy flung his glass over the balcony. It crashed on pavement and a dog barked.

  I poured myself some more Dos Gusanos. I said carefully, “They know where you live, too.”

  Now I got this withering death stare from Jimmy, all cop’s eyes and barely contained fury. “Are you going to hide, too, Hector?”

  “Nah. I’m solo lobo again, and in the best of times, I’m a moving target. And after what they did to Duff, I’m going to be hunting these bloodsuckers.”

  “When do you undertake that quest, Hector?”

  I fired up a Pall Mall. All gravel, I said, “First, I have to bury Duff.”

  I poured myself another drink; trying to get drunk enough to make me forget the nightmares I knew I’d have tonight and for many nights to come. My poor lost Duff.

  But I’d been hard at the bottle that year, and could hold my liquor too well. So the booze, this time, offered no respite.

  When sleep finally came, it brought some of the worst nightmares of my sorry life.

  BOOK FOUR

  The Garden of Suffering:

  July 1971

  “A land without men

  for men without land.”

  — Emilio Medici

  Excerpted from Publishers Weekly

  (Starred review of Demon’s Daughter: A Survivor’s Memoir,

  by Marie O’Rourke—aka Sara Tennant)

  “The past is never dead,” declares Sara Tennant in her startling tell-all, Demon’s Daughter: A Survivor’s Memoir.

  Tennant, a novelist and screenwriter of some repute, reveals she was actually born Myriam Dreyfus, in Lyon, France.

  In 1942, Myriam’s parents were tortured and murdered by her biological father—a Nazi filmmaker, propagandist and sadist named Werner Höttl. Höttl was right-hand man to Klaus Barbie, the so-called “Butcher of Lyon.”

  Obsessed with obliterating any trace of evidence he’d fathered a Jewish child, Höttl embarked on a decades-long campaign to murder Myriam.

  As detailed in Tennant’s gripping account, she was rescued from her Anne Frank-like-hiding-place in Lyon by charismatic, larger-than-life novelist and screenwriter Hector Lassiter (L
assiter died under mysterious circumstances in 1967).

  Lassiter, renowned as “the man who lived what he wrote and wrote what he lived,” was aided by the charming, equally larger-than-life Irish-born detective whose family would adopt and raise Myriam as their own. Along for the ride was a beautiful OSS operative named Duff Sexton whom would later marry Lassiter.

  From the opening, breathless description of Lassiter’s characteristically violent and swashbuckling rescue of the child from a band of Nazi searchers in occupied France, to post-war Hollywood for a final showdown with a disguised and vengeful Höttl, the memoir is a white-knuckle and deeply-felt tale of courage and wily fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds…”

  Headline from Variety:

  United Artists’ options Demon’s Daughter: A Survivor’s Memoir

  Sidebar headline from Variety:

  William Holden in discussions to play famous crime writer in Demon’s Daughter

  53

  It was raining hard on the coast of Oahu. Lightning forked over the chopping waves and thunder rattled the windows in their cases. Honey-voiced schmaltz on the hi-fi: Roger Whittaker’s “The Last Farewell.”

  I stood looking out the sliding glass door, sipping coffee, watching the water and thinking about my next novel. Duff had long ago theorized I’d have to one day choose between being “the man who writes what he lives” or “the man who lives what he writes.” In the late 1960s, I’d chosen to live my life very differently. I’d also chosen to write very different kinds of novels. Yet I still wasn’t sure it all broke in half as evenly as Duff had seemed to think.

  From deeper inside the house, I heard our phone ring. I heard my wife talking in her softly accented Spanish. But something creeped into her tone that chilled me. She put down the phone; she was coming for me.

  “Héctor, it’s your friend, the Irish policeman.” Alicia looked very sad. “Something very bad has happened. I’m so sorry.”

  Jesus Christ. I hoped it wasn’t another heart attack. Jimmy’s ticker was all but shot now.

  Since 1967, since I’d “retired” the wearisome, outsized persona of “Hector Lassiter” from the world with my own staged “murder-suicide,” Jimmy and I pretty much only connected by phone. The last time was when he suffered his second heart attack, a call that Marie had made him make over his own objections, he’d said, because he didn’t want “to worry or depress me” with his failing health.

  I scooped up the phone, said, “Jimmy?”

  His voice was cracking, “I need you to come to Ohio, Hector. I need your help, now. Marie is dead, Hector. Höttl murdered her.”

  “Marie? Dead? What?” None of this made any sense. I said, “Höttl? We killed Höttl in fifty-seven, Jimmy. Are you—”

  “No, Hector. We didn’t kill him. Höttl is still alive. The bloody bastard murdered our Marie yesterday! Goddamn it, Höttl had her killed!”

  ***

  My son Joaquin fetched the newspaper for me.

  I found a wire account buried on page 14. Marie, now “Sara,” a name I’d never grown accustomed to using for her, had been signing copies of her memoir at a bookstore in Illinois.

  According to reports, a stocky man wrapped in an out-of-season black overcoat approached the signing desk and passed a copy of her memoir to Marie for personalization.

  As she set to that task, the man whipped off his overcoat. He was dressed in khaki pants and shirt and sporting a Nazi armband. He pointed a vintage Mauser at Marie and shouted, “Father sends his regards!”

  He then shot Marie twice in the face.

  As he successfully fled the scene—all those bookworms were no threat to his escape—the shooter was seen being followed by a second man who was carrying a motion picture camera. They bolted in a white Plymouth.

  I sat in my chair, desolate, the newspaper crumpled in my lap.

  My wife took the paper from me, knelt and hugged me to her as I sobbed into her bare shoulder.

  ***

  It’s a hell of a long way from Hawaii to northeastern Ohio, so I had too much time on planes to think about it all. Time to browse over articles on Marie’s recent memoir and additional accounts of her murder a clipping agency hastily assembled for me.

  After Duff’s death, for several months I’d chased those two phantom Nazis who’d killed her. I’d hunted them with no success. In 1958, I’d gotten caught up in other matters, and early- to middle-1959 found me tangled up in different old business that had also clouded my life across the decades.

  By July of 1959, having never found a trace of the Nazi bastards, I’d reluctantly set aside my search for Duff’s killers and tried to close the door on all that. Revenge, I tried to convince myself then, was a hobby for the young and the passionately intent.

  By then, Marie had adopted another name, moved out to Los Angeles, and, with a little help from myself and my screenwriter/poet/songwriter friend Eskin “Bud” Fiske, she’d established herself as head writer for a long-running CBS TV series.

  In late 1967, tired of being me, I’d pulled my own disappearing act—I’d plotted and written myself right out of the public eye.

  I’d not known Marie was contemplating a memoir. If I had, I’d certainly have strongly counseled her against it. That fact was probably why she kept me in the dark about her damned book. Doing that probably cost her some real money. Judging from the estimates in the trades regarding her likely advance, with my publishing connections, I could certainly have gotten Marie better than the book deal she’d signed.

  But there was no advance and no movie-option money in the world that could offset what telling her true story had cost Marie.

  There was not enough to make up for what it might yet cost Jimmy.

  ***

  Hanrahan’s house was located in a quiet neighborhood shadowed by big old trees. I parked my rental Impala in the driveway. There was a black wreath on the front door.

  I buzzed and an elderly black woman in a nurse’s uniform opened the door. “You must be Beau Devlin,” she said. “I’m Rose. I’ve heard so many stories about you. I expected you to be a good bit older, Beau.”

  “I’m seventy-one,” I said. “Just been living cleaner… Lately.”

  She smiled with her eyes. “Wish you’d taught your friend to do the same, Beau. I check on him mornings. See him through to lunch. Martha comes by in the evenings. His church women are filling in the gaps for the next few days.” Rose shook her head. “That man surely should have married.”

  “His job always got in the way of that,” I said. “Where is he?”

  “On the back porch. He just sits there all day. Poor man.”

  Rose led me through the neutrally decorated house and out onto a slab patio that had been screened in. Rain pattered down on the aluminum roof. Jimmy was sitting in a chair. An oxygen tank in a rolling cart sat at the ready near his elbow. On a low table, there was a copy of my novel, Bordertown, and a bottle of Jameson. A single upended glass sat next to the bottle.

  Even seeing him from behind, I could tell Jimmy was carrying a few more pounds. His hair was now white. He was sipping his own stingy pour of whiskey and staring off through the trees.

  That familiar tenor: “Boyo, pull up a chair and pour yourself a drink.”

  I did that. He reached over and shook my hand. Still a killer grip despite it all. “Thank you so much for coming all this way,” Jimmy said. “I can only imagine the trouble this caused you with your wife. I’m sure Alicia hates you risking coming out here. Risking exposure. And she probably already suspects why I asked you here.”

  “Alicia knows you are my good friend,” I said cagily. “My last good friend from the early days. It’s just thee and me now, Jimmy. Last men standing.” I sipped my Irish whiskey, staring at the trees now, too. It was hard to see Jimmy looking so old, so frail. I said, “You should have called me earlier, buddy. I’d have been here for the funeral, you know that.”

  “There really wasn’t a funeral,” Jimmy said voice crack
ing again. “I couldn’t even be there. My blood-pressure was in the danger zone. Sawbones feared any exertion or emotional stress beyond what I’m coping with—their mealy-mouthed words, not mine—might trigger another attack. They say the next one could be the one that at worst will kill me, and at best might make me an invalid.” Jimmy shook his head. “As if there’s a feckin’ difference.”

  He sighed. The rain began to beat down harder on the aluminum roof. “So there was no funeral, per se. With Finn and Sean already gone, Marie and I were the last, anyway. I knew given how she died, the place would be thick with reporters. Those maggot journalists would turn any service for Marie into a circus.”

  Eyeing that idle air tank, I resisted the urge to have a smoke. I’d been cutting down for years, lately rationing myself to stingy two-a-days. But stressed like this, I felt the old craving for a smoke more strongly than I had for a long, long time. For single malt, too. Irish whiskey would have to do.

  I said, “I had a clipping service send me everything they could find on—” I faltered, finished with, “—on what happened to Marie. The shooter got away, of course, but I know witnesses say he spoke with a German accent. Given what Marie’s memoir centered on, it’s reasonable to assume some neo-Nazi sort might snap and go after—”

  “No!” Jimmy swiveled to face me, his blue eyes watery but wrathful. “Höttl did this, no mistake on that! Höttl hired that man to kill her!” He passed me an envelope. “His letter. As you’ll see, like everyone else in this gullible-ass world, he fell for your so-called death in 1967. Just like you and I fell for Höttl’s so-called death ten years before.”

  Skeptical, I turned over the envelope, raised the flap and slid out the letter inside. I slipped on my despised spectacles and read:

  My dear Hanrahan,

  I wish I could better savor what I’ve taken from you.

  As I write this, your “niece” is still alive, of course.

  Timing is everything and I want this letter to strike you hard, as close as possible to the news I’ve had that cursed girl killed.