You see, I’m sufficiently confident of my plan’s success to mail this letter even before its subject has come to pass.
My daughter’s murder will be attended by many members of the press, of course. That damned book of hers seems quite the rage. So mine won’t be the only cameras running when my man puts those bullets in her. One to the heart and one to the head, as the saying goes.
All of this is rich with irony, of course.
I have only been able to strike at that girl because of her damned memoir that has made historical record of that which I’ve tried for so many years to keep secret—my siring of the unclean little bitch.
Given the damage she’s done my reputation with her book, and, soon (more rich irony here), with the film based on that book, one might think I’d gain more satisfaction from finally putting her in the ground.
But her nearing assassination brings me little consolation. The fact that Sexton and Lassiter, particularly, are both already dead and so not here to witness my ultimate success makes it all a bit hollow.
By the time you read this, there will be only you and I left, Hanrahan. And I hear you are all but dead yourself. What’s the line from your countryman? “An old man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick…”
Your time seems quite past.
Still, I have the mild satisfaction of knowing you know I lived on and waited for my moment and now have at last succeeded in taking her from the world.
That’s some scant consolation.
Lest you think this letter some kind of hoax, I’ve provided the enclosed photograph of myself. I sense I’ve weathered the years better than you.
—Werner Höttl
P.S. I’d have preferred to send this as a filmed testimony, but I’ve no sense you have the equipment or facility to screen such a “document.” So we have to make do with mere words.
I looked at the accompanying photograph: it was Höttl, no question. He was white-haired now; his face lined. He seemed very bronzed. The ugly scar showed differently in his deeply tanned face. The old man in the picture stood ramrod straight and was still quite slender. In the photo, he was glazed with a thin sheen of sweat. The foliage in the background looked lush, tropical, like some goddamn jungle.
Biting my lip, I checked the envelope again. The thing had originated from somewhere in Brazil. It wasn’t much of a start for a search, but maybe if I could find some native investigator for hire there, some shamus who’d understand the way mail moved in that country?
“I’ve done everything possible to trace the letter to its source,” Jimmy said. He was still the ace cop, ever the man who’d already anticipated, and, often as not, executed my strategies in advance of my having even stated or possibly even thought of them.
“It’s likely to have come from somewhere in central Brazil, but that’s all that envelope can tell us. And we can’t farm out this job of finding him, Hector.”
He gripped my arm; his eyes besieged me. Jimmy said, “I’ve never asked you for a deep favor, not once, but I’m doing that now. Look at you, Hector—you could pass for your late fifties. You can do what I can’t. You can go where I can’t go anymore. I know you can’t do this, but I’m begging you to do this anyway, Hector. For the love of God, do what I can’t do for myself. Go there and kill Höttl! Avenge our Marie. Avenge Duff. Please, Hector, I’m begging you. I can’t die knowing that monster is still in this world.”
54
To my shame, I’d left Jimmy with no firm commitment about chasing after Höttl. He was right—he’d never asked much of me, yet over the years he had come running to the four-corners of this sorry world for me when I’d asked favors of him.
But this request?
And I’d only succeeded in drawing the woman who was now my wife back into my life with an honest promise of no more bloody intrigue; no more mayhem. I’d meant to keep that promise to my own real end.
I stopped by the cemetery to pay my respects at Marie’s lonely grave. The place was quiet and the sun had burned off the morning’s rain. A mourning dove cooed from the branches of an old elm that shadowed Marie’s plot.
The marker bore the name by which the world had come to know Marie as a writer.
I checked my watch. My first flight of three that would carry me back to Hawaii was scheduled to depart in three hours. It was a thirty-minute drive to the airport. I had the time to tarry.
But I found myself distracted.
A young man with blond hair was hanging around a grave three rows away. His hair was longish, like all the young guys seemed to wear it now. He saw me looking, nodded, then squatted down and pressed his hand to the sod, eyes closed in apparent prayer.
It was some nice theatre.
We were the only two living souls in sight in the crowded bone yard.
I moseyed over his way, fishing my old Zippo from my pocket. Stepping up behind him, I said, “Who’d you lose, son?”
Boy was a lousy liar. The headstone said old “Sebastian May” had died in 1940. No way this young guy was more than twenty-four, tops. Yet the kid said, “My father.”
Lad should have picked a fresher marker or been more deft at dissembling.
Bringing my Colt from Hawaii to Ohio was more logistical trouble than I’d wanted to tackle, and getting the Peacemaker out of the house around my wife would have invited even more resistance on her part about my leaving. And, hell, I hadn’t anticipated actually needing the damned thing like I did now.
But my hands were big and still steady. I jammed two fingers into the boy’s kidney and flicked the lid on my Zippo to simulate a gun’s cock.
“That’s a lie, sonny,” I said. “Check those dates on the tombstone. You should have said grandfather. Keep those hands out and pressed to that sod, son. Stay down there, boy. Now, don’t get screwy or stupid. I’m pulling your wallet from your back pocket to check your I.D. Move any at all, and I will shoot you through, kid.”
The boy’s legs began to tremble; my gun ruse seemed to be working. That was good. As Jimmy said, I’d kept myself reasonably fit, but at seventy-one, me wrestling some young buck was not apt to have a good outcome for me.
“Sounds a real dull duty, watching that grave,” I said. “How long are they paying you to stare at that plot?”
The kid blustered, “You’re nuts! I’m not spying on that woman’s grave.”
“No? Then how’d you know it’s a woman buried yonder there?”
I flipped open the kid’s wallet. I squinted at his license. Putting on my spectacles would mean taking my pretend gun from his back. “So, you’re one Vincent Stoats. Now, a last time, who’s paying you to watch that woman’s grave, Vince?”
“I don’t know what—”
“What I’m talking about, yeah, yeah,” I said, cutting him off. “I can supply every lame denial you’re going to trot out before you finally get some sense and tell me what I want to know. Now, before we have to go through those tired motions, before you have to sacrifice teeth and maybe take a bullet to the knee, just cut to the chase, boy. I’m striving to do this civil-like.”
He was still hesitating.
I tossed his wallet on the ground. “Look how quiet it is out here, Vince. How lonely. If I shoot you like this, with the gun up tight against you, it’s gonna hurt my wrist, but it’s also going to suppress the sound of the shot. Nobody will hear.”
Keeping my fingers jabbed into his back, I began to pat him down. Kid had no weapons, but he had a pocket bulging with change. I said, “I’m assuming there’s a pay phone somewhere around here so you can call in and report.”
In the pocket with the change, I’d found a slip of paper with a phone number scrawled across it. I held the paper up where he could see it. “You’re to call into this guy, right? Report in anyone lurking around the girl’s grave?”
The kid tried to brazen it out, to stay silent on me.
I said, “Vincent, you’re no hard case, so just stop this silly shit. When I call the number on this
paper to tell your boss how you screwed up out here today, who’s gonna pick up on the other end?”
The first crack in his veneer: “You’re crazy, old man.”
Kid was so green I truly was loathe to start-in beating on him. I decided to give it one more shot. “Sonny, you’re just dense as a brick, aren’t you? We have this place to ourselves, and it’s a damn graveyard. Look over there. See that dirt pile? That pile implies an adjacent hole, Vincent. And look, someone left a shovel in that mound of dirt from that new-dug grave.”
Vince said, “So what, man? It is a graveyard. So what?” There was a new quaver in Vincent’s voice. They couldn’t be paying the young dude too much to run surveillance on a grave on the off chance someone other than Jimmy or a journalist might happen by to gawk.
I figured this kid’s courage threshold, the point at which risk exceeded paltry compensation, had been reached. He only needed a little nudge across that line, now.
“It is a graveyard, yes, Vincent,” I said. I jabbed him hard in the back again. “If you don’t affably start gushing helpful information, here’s what’s going to happen to you, son. I’ll escort you over to that hole in the ground, then I’ll put a bullet in your heart and topple you into that open grave. Then I’ll ladle in just enough dirt to cover you up. See kid, nobody’s going re-measure that hole now that it’s been dug. They aren’t going to notice it’s only five-feet deep when they drop the other dearly deceased’s vault in there over top your corpse. It’s the perfect place to dispose of a body, Vincent. Requires hardly any effort on my part and they will never, ever find you, sonny.”
That did it. The words came in a torrent. “He’s some private investigator named Jeffrey Carey. I don’t know who he’s working for. I was to watch the grave, like you said. Call in if anyone came by.”
I could guess who was paying the private peeper’s bill. I said, “Good, Vince. You just might yet walk out of this graveyard, today. Lead me to that payphone you’re supposed to call from, sonny.”
He did that.
I caught a break: along the way, we encountered no mourners or caretakers to mess up my quiet menacing of Vince.
When we reached the phone booth, I made the boy stand inside, facing the phone, while I checked the Yellow Pages. There really was a local private eye named Jeffrey Carey. His office number matched the one on the slip of paper I’d found in Vince’s pocket. I tore out the yellow page with the ad. I slipped that in my pocket and then I gave Vince back the scrap of paper with the phone number. I said, “Dig yourself some of that change out or your pocket and dial that number, kid.”
Vince said, “You want me to call him?”
“Yep. You call him and tell him just what you would if I didn’t know you were spying on me, sonny. Tell him what you’re paid to say. You tell this bastard you saw a man standing over the grave. Keep the description sketchy. You only saw my back. Say I’m still here, and it looks I might hang around for a while.”
Vince handled it all very convincingly. When he finished, I jerked the chromed receiver cord from the box; tossed it on the ground. “Now, gimme your car keys, Vince.”
Kid sounded freshly panicked. “You’re not stealing my car?”
“Just taking your keys, kid.” I pointed at the distant gates of the cemetery entrance. It was about three-hundred yards away. “I’ll leave your keys there at the end of the driveway. But if I was you, I’d jog down there, fetch ’em, and keep on going out of this bone yard. I’d come back later for my car. Maybe in a week. You see, Vince, distances in this town are short, so I don’t figure you have time to get your keys, get back here and drive out before your private-eye boss arrives. Lousy liar that you are, Carey’s going to figure out you helped me finesse him away from his office and then he’s going to be very angry at you, kiddo. Worse news? The people he’s working for are even meaner.”
***
The office door lock picked easily enough.
The private eye’s place looked like something a dumbass who’d seen too many film noirs thought embodied a P.I.’s office. There was a battered desk (with office bottle in a lower drawer), a crooked coat rack, and two guest chairs. Two battleship-gray four-drawer filing cabinets held down one corner (idiot left the keys in the cabinet locks, but it turned out I didn’t need ’em, anyway).
The office’s window overlooked an alley and the place was scented with the rising bouquet of the garbage dumpsters below. Très swanky.
Jeffrey Carey seemed to have three active cases. He’d carelessly left the files atop his desk. Two dossiers were tied to tawdry divorce jobs. The other consisted of a batch of documents regarding Marie and her gravesite. That file contained some telegrams, some correspondence… Wire transfer records and preserved envelopes mailed from someplace called Mato Grosso, Brazil.
There was probably enough time to read the scant information in the file and make my own notes.
But I didn’t care so much about leaving footprints, so to speak. I decided to take the file and read it on the plane.
That was the ticket, I’d decided. I’d let Jeffrey Carey carry word back to his Brazilian client something hinky had happened here in Ohio.
Höttl still considered Hector Lassiter dead, so there was no threat to me or mine in that sense.
Höttl knew Jimmy was housebound.
I was, for the moment, the perfect mystery man.
And, hell, as such, maybe I’d even cost Höttl some sleep.
55
It was raining in Oahu—the daily misty downpour.
My wife said, “You’re not a young hell-raiser anymore, Héctor. You’re over seventy and you’re seriously talking about going to a jungle.”
She took my face in her hands. “I’ve been reading about this place. Héctor, there are many people who believe this Mato Grosso is the actual gate to Hades. This idea of you going there alone, to kill this man, it’s loco, Héctor. They say this is a lawless, savage place. Much of it is still unexplored.”
Alicia was right. It was one of the last frontiers. The rumored location of El Dorado and a place, as my wife said, that some believed was a portal to the literal Hell.
“But I have something like an address,” I said. “This man, Höttl, he believes Hector Lassiter is dead. Beau Devlin is nobody to this man, nor to anybody in Brazil. Just as Jimmy, Marie and I never saw Höttl coming after his bogus death in 1957, the bastard will never see me coming his way until it’s too late.”
“You promised me there’d be no more of this, Héctor,” she said. “You swore we were just going to have our quiet, normal life. Until now, you’ve largely honored that promise. If you break it now…?”
I combed my fingers through her glistening black hair. “This is the one thing in this world that can compel me to break that promise, and just this single time. I owe Jimmy a thousand times over. He’s saved my life many times. He’s my last true friend from the old days. Darling, I thought I’d saved this child. I thought I’d killed Höttl all those years ago. I never imagined this was a possibility. But he tricked us somehow. Höttl is still alive, and he had Duff tortured and killed. He had Marie murdered. Now I have a chance to kill him back for certain, up close and personal. I won’t be fooled again. I can’t let him cost me or Jimmy anymore.”
“It sounds you’ve already made up your mind,” Alicia said. “Isn’t that so, Héctor?”
“I don’t feel like I really have a choice.” I awaited her verdict. My beautiful quiet life with the family I never thought I’d have now hung in the balance. I pushed a bit harder. “What if it was one of our children Höttl killed? If Jimmy was capable of doing this himself, I wouldn’t contemplate this.” I searched her dark eyes. “I’m the only one who can do this.”
She was quiet a long time, just looking at me. Alicia said, “Perhaps. Perhaps there is no choice in this.” She understood revenge better than most. She understood me better than anyone alive, God help her.
Alicia kissed me hard. “This must be the only time
. This must be the last time. And you must come back to me, safe.”
“I’ll return just as fast as I can.” I hugged her to me. “Please believe me, my love. I truly don’t relish any of this that is to come. But it has to be done. Höttl has to die, and he has to know who it is who’s killing him. He has to know what he’s paying for.”
***
Jimmy picked up after the third ring. He was a little breathy sounding as he said hello.
Not knowing if the line was fully secure on his end, I’d opted for a payphone to make my call. I said, “Jimmy, it’s me. I’m going. I swear I’ll do my best to put that devil back down in the pit forever.”
A heavy sigh on his end, then Jimmy said, “Thank you. I wish there were more words to tell you how much I value what you’re doing here.”
“Hell, we don’t need ’em, brother. We never have.”
Jimmy said, “Then please, just make it hurt terribly for that son of a bitch.”
I smiled so he’d hear it in my voice. “Rest assured, old friend, that’s my goal.”
56
I flew from Honolulu to São Paulo. The in-flight movie was Double Indemnity, prissy Ray Chandler’s spin on earthy Jimmy Cain’s carnal potboiler. Strange bedfellows, indeed. It was regarded as one of the great film noirs. The script and dialogue crackled, but that casting distracted me, and how.
Fred McMurray and the Sapphic Barbara Stanwyck?
I kept thinking, My Three Sons meets The Big Valley.
So I turned my attention to Hem’s posthumous Islands in the Stream. I’d had a chance to participate in shaping the unfinished manuscript for publication, but demurred. I was curious to see what Hem’s dotty widow had ultimately made of the book. Flashes of the brilliant Hem lurked in there, but the novel still really didn’t cohere. It was going to hurt Hem’s long game. That bitch.
Eventually, I turned back to the notes various investigators had gathered for me regarding the career of this Brazilian filmmaker Siron Cícero, cinematic auteur.
Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 28
