The Great Pretender: A Hector Lassiter novel Read online

  THE GREAT

  PRETENDER

  A Hector Lassiter novel

  Craig McDonald

  First published in the English language worldwide in 2014 by Betimes Books

  www.betimesbooks.com

  Copyright © 2014, Craig McDonald

  Craig McDonald has asserted his right under the Universal Copyright Convention to be identified as the author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, sold, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, print, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and the copyright owner.

  ISBN 978-0-9929674-2-0

  The Great Pretender is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by JT Lindroos

  Praise

  “With each of his Hector Lassiter novels, Craig McDonald has stretched his canvas wider and unfurled tales of increasingly greater resonance.” —Megan Abbott

  “Reading a Hector Lassiter novel is like having a great uncle pull you aside, pour you a tumbler of rye, and tell you a story about how the 20th century 'really' went down.” —Duane Swierczynski

  “What critics might call eclectic, and Eastern folks quirky, we Southerners call cussedness -- and it's the cornerstone of the American genius. As in: "There's a right way, a wrong way, and my way." You want to see how that looks on the page, pick up any of Craig McDonald's novels. He's built him a nice little shack out there way off all the reg'lar roads, and he's brewing some fine, heady stuff. Leave your money under the rock and come back in an hour.” —James Sallis

  “Craig McDonald is wily, talented and - rarest of the rare - a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either.” —Laura Lippman

  “James Ellroy + Kerouac + Coen brothers + Tarantino = Craig McDonald.” — Amazon.fr

  ALSO BY CRAIG MCDONALD

  The Hector Lassiter Series

  One True Sentence

  Forever’s Just Pretend

  Toros & Torsos

  Roll the Credits

  The Running Kind

  Head Games

  Print the Legend

  Three Chords & The Truth

  Write from Wrong (The Hector Lassiter Short Stories)

  Standalones

  El Gavilan

  The Chris Lyon Series

  Parts Unknown

  Carnival Noir

  Cabal

  Angels of Darkness

  The Daughters of Others

  Watch Her Disappear

  Nonfiction

  Art in the Blood

  Rogue Males

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  OVERTURE

  BOOK ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  BOOK THREE

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  INTRODUCTION

  If any label best describes the Hector Lassiter series, it’s probably “Historical Thrillers.” These books combine myth and history. The Lassiter novels spin around secret histories and unexplored or underexplored aspects of real events. They’re set in real places, and use not just history to drive their plots, but also incorporate real people.

  As a career journalist, I’m often frustrated by the impossibility to nail down people or events definitively. Read five biographies of the same man, say, of Ernest Hemingway, and you’ll close each book feeling like you’ve read about five different people. So, I’ve concluded, defining fact as it relates to history is as elusive a goal as stroking smoke or tapping a bullet in flight.

  History, it’s been said, is a lie agreed to. But maybe in fiction we can find if not fact, something bordering on truth. With that possibility in mind, I explore what I can make of accepted history through the eyes of one man. The “hero” of this series, your guide through these books, is Hector Mason Lassiter, a shades-of-grey guy who is a charmer, a rogue, a bit of a rake, and, himself, a crime novelist.

  Some others in the novels say he bears a passing resemblance to the actor William Holden. Hector smokes and drinks and eats red meat. He favors sports jackets, open collar shirts, and Chevrolets. He lives his life on a large canvas. He’s wily, but often impulsive; he’s honorable, but mercurial.

  He often doesn’t understand his own drives. That is to say, he’s a man. He’s a man’s man and a lady’s man. He’s a romantic, but mostly very unlucky in love. Yet his life’s largely shaped by the women passing through it.

  Hec was born in Galveston, Texas on January 1, 1900. In other words, he came in with the 20th Century, and it’s my objective his arc of novels span that century — essentially, through each successive novel, giving us a kind of under-history or secret-history of the 20th Century.

  Tall and wise beyond his years, as a boy Hector lied about his age, enlisted in the military, and accompanied Black Jack Pershing in his hunt down into Mexico to chase the Mexican Revolutionary Pancho Villa who attacked and murdered many American civilians in the town of Columbus, New Mexico. Villa’s was the first and only successful assault on the United States homeland prior to the events of September 11, 2001.

  Much of that part of Hector’s life figures into Head Games, the first published Hector Lassiter novel and a finalist for the Edgar and Anthony awards, along with a few similar honors. That novel is set mostly in 1957. Its sequel, Toros & Torsos, opens in 1935. Subsequent books about Hector similarly hopscotched back-and-forth through the decades upon original publication.

  The Betimes Books release of the Hector Lassiter series will try for something different, presenting the books in roughly chronological order—at least in terms of where each story starts as the novel opens. The series now opens with One True Sentence, the fourth novel in original publication sequence, but the first novel chronologically.

  Set in 1924 Paris, that novel is now followed by its intended sequel, Forever’s Just Pretend, enjoying its first-ever publication and completing a larger story revealing how Hector became the guy we come to know across the rest of the series: “The man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives”; friend to Hemingway, Orson Welles and other 20th-Century luminaries.

  The rest of the repackaged series unfolds in similar fashion, a mix of the old and new titles.

  The Lassiter novels were written back-to-back, and the series mostly shaped and in place before the second novel
was officially published. It’s very unusual in that sense—a series of discrete novels that are tightly linked and which taken together stand as a single, larger story.

  Welcome to the world of Hector Lassiter.

  Craig McDonald

  This novel is for Scott Montgomery

  “Almost any story

  is almost certainly

  some kind of lie.”

  —Orson Welles

  OVERTURE

  Breathless, the chubby-faced boy spied on his grandmother through the closet’s cracked door.

  The boy watched the old woman chanting, preparing to sacrifice a pigeon to The Dark Prince who lived on the far side of the dusty looking glass. Chirping, beating its wings, the terrified bird struggled in the old woman’s grip.

  George’s grandmother Mary had increasingly given herself over to conflicting and even sinister obsessions. The little grand dame seemed to regard herself as part Christian Scientist and part wizard. She styled her latter, darker interests after the diabolical teachings of Aleister Crowley and Madame Blavatsky.

  His grandmother also had this small, insanely detailed miniature golf course on the third floor of her rambling home, occupying what was once an upstairs ballroom but most lately partially converted into her idiosyncratic and slap-dash vision of a black magic shrine.

  Still muttering in some unintelligible, guttural language, she knelt before a rustic wooden altar and stained glass-window. She deftly wrung the pigeon’s neck and placed the bird’s twitching body on the altar adorned with a golden pentagram.

  The old woman crossed the pigeon’s corpse with a bronze dagger, her incantations veering into faltering Latin. Young George Orson Welles began to whisper, over and over, “You’ll burn in hell for this, you old witch. You’ll surely burn in hell, you monster!”

  BOOK ONE

  PANIC BROADCAST

  Thursday, October 27, 1938

  “I have a great love and respect

  for religion, great love and respect

  for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism,

  people who do not choose.”

  —Orson Welles

  CHAPTER 1

  THE STRANGER

  “Perception is reality, that’s how the saying goes, isn’t it, Hec?”

  Hector Lassiter, novelist, screenwriter, and for the moment, literary executor, looked down at all the chilly pedestrians scurrying through the autumn wind tearing along Fifth Avenue. The fierce wind made eyes water and noses run down there. Up here the wind cut to bone. He called above its roar, “That’s indeed what some say, Mathis.” Hector lit a cigarette with his windproof Zippo, engraved with the legend, “One True Sentence.” He slipped the lighter into the pocket of his overcoat.

  Standing on the eighty-sixth floor of the world’s tallest and most famous building, Hector pulled on his right glove and took another hit from the coffin nail as he stared up at the dirigible mooring mast—a pointless novelty—looming higher above them.

  Hector wasn’t crazy about heights and the view up made his legs tremble. Taking a deep, icy breadth, he looked back down the side of the Empire State and said, “Suppose as clichés go, that one is true enough. Least so far as it runs. Take those people down there. They only look like ants, you know.”

  They were supposed to be having this meeting over coffee in a cozy place downstairs. But Hector had talked his companion into coming up here in the wicked wind where only fools, would-be suicides or stubborn tourists would venture on a blustery, late autumn day. Hector had his reasons.

  Peter Mathis, rising New York publisher, smiled and said, “Sure. Anyway, this is a remarkable turn to say the least. Imagine, the popular and mysterious mystery writer, Connor Templeton, and the cult crime author, Bud Grant, being one-in-the-same. But, no, that’s not enough! Both of those male writers were actually the pen name for a raven-haired stunner named Brinke Devlin! My publicity people are going to go berserk in the best sense with this, Hec. It transcends the merely remarkable. And it’s surely money in the bank. Having seen some snapshots of Brinke, this wife of yours who wrote like a tough, lusty he-man and yet looked like a far prettier, bustier Louise Brooks? All I can say is, this will be huge.”

  “Money isn’t the point, not for me,” Hector said. “And certainly not for her. Publication, long-term, hell, permanent publication, is the aim. This is about her legacy. This is about Brinke’s long game. Literary immortality is the objective.”

  “Well, of course,” Mathis said. “That’s one of the things you pay me for, isn’t it?”

  Hector nodded. “Just making sure we’re clear on my primary goal in signing with you to at last publish all of her books under Brinke’s real name.” It was a Hail Mary gambit on Hector’s part. His first wife’s literary oeuvre under both her pen names had lately gone out of print. Hector simply couldn’t stomach that. Brinke could never slip into literary obscurity, not so long as Hector lived.

  The two men shook gloved hands. Mathis said, “To my last comment, I’m in danger of being late for a meeting about some of Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous works. We’re in negotiations about trying to do something more significant with O Lost. I still can’t believe he’s dead. And gone so young. Did you ever meet Tom?”

  The North Carolina novelist and Ernest Hemingway’s bête noire had died last month. Tom’s was a sudden and bad death, like Brinke’s, only of natural causes.

  Hector let go of the man’s hand. “Crossed paths two or three times, I suppose. Seemed a nice enough fella in the moment. A decent, if undisciplined, fiction writer. He drove Hem to distraction, I know. Anyway, thirty-seven is far too young to be dead, regardless of what you did or how well you maybe did it.”

  “Indeed. Well, at least Tom didn’t have to suffer too long. There’s real comfort in that, yes?”

  “Sure there is.”

  They said their goodbyes. Hector watched the publisher go, then checked his watch. His next appointment was characteristically late. He turned up the collar of his overcoat and thrust his hands deeper into its pockets, looking out across the city but also watching the other lone man standing a bit off to Hector’s left, the author’s presumed stalker—his reason for dragging the publisher and the actor yet to come up here in the roaring, cold wind.

  But there’d be time for that later, if indeed the man was really following the writer. For now, for better or worse, Hector’s head was elsewhere. Dead at thirty-seven? Jesus Christ, didn’t that resonate? Come January, Hector would be thirty-nine. Brinke would have been, what? Forty-three, forty-four? Something like that. Hector damned himself for not being certain. Either way, his first and truest love had never seen 1926.

  That voice—it rose above the roar of the wind. “Hector, old man! Don’t you look well?” It was l’enfant terrible himself, George Orson Welles, twenty-three, red-cheeked and already the toast of the Great White Way and the radio airwaves. Orson, still tragically baby-faced, was sporting the sparse shadow of a beard he was growing for a stage role.

  Hector had first met the dramatic prodigy in Ireland, when Orson was indeed a boy actor. Back then, Orson regarded Hector as a kind of worldlier older brother. Eventually, after a brief return to the States, the two had shared an idyll across Spain, followed the bullfighting circuit together. That fraternal dynamic defined their friendship in its early going.

  Now, despite their age difference—one of fifteen years, give or take—they comported themselves more or less as peers. Hector supposed that owed chiefly to his young friend’s precocious but universally acknowledged—if untamed—genius.

  As he had the last time they’d met, Orson looked to be firing on pure adrenaline, caffeine and nervous energy. Maybe something else, too: Hector was betting on Benzedrine or perhaps amphetamines to kick-start the boy-giant’s metabolism. Even as a kid, Orson was fighting his waistline. Eyes already tearing-up, Orson cast his watery gaze down at the sidewalk far below. “The call of the void, yes? Did you hear about Dorothy Hale, old man?” Orson’s voic
e was already growing breathy, the cold wind aggravating his asthma.

  Hector shook his head. “What’s a Dorothy Hale?”

  “What was, you mean. Or who was she, rather.” Orson smiled sadly. “Socialite and struggling actress. Pretty, but lacking talent. She threw a big farewell party for herself in her penthouse in the Hampshire House on Central Park South. Then she hurled herself off her terrace. It was only a few days ago. It was in all the papers. Suicide, though some say murder. Would they really dig for a bullet after a fall like that some have wondered. Anyway, I’m surprised you haven’t heard.”

  “Been on the road mostly these past few days,” Hector said. “Haven’t been keeping up with the news. Just grown more than tired of all the war drums, you know?”

  “Understood, and anyway we haven’t much time, old friend,” Orson said. “We need to take our meal and then for you to tell me what was so pressing for us to have to meet—delighted though I am for any excuse to spend time with you. Then I need to get to my place with all haste. You can sit in tonight, if you’d like to, and listen to the probably vexing wax disc coming my way later. I’d frankly love it if you did. I’d be very grateful for your reaction. They’re rehearsing and recording our next Mercury production tonight. It’s a corker, at least in theory. My spin on H.G.—that other Wells, though he spelled his last name the wrong way—and The War of the Worlds. We’re giving it the new broom treatment. Projecting it all through the prism of our modern mass media. Basically, in the early going anyway, it will play as a developing radio news story. We have a fake orchestra, fake news breaks. Hell, even a fake F.D.R., more or less.”

  “Can hardly wait,” Hector said. “But about us meeting now, I’m confused. You telegraphed me for this meeting, don’t you remember?”

  “I did no such thing, old man. You sent for me.” Orson frowned. “Urgent was a word used at least three times in various forms in your telegram, you’ll recall.”