Wisdom of the Bones

by Paul Christopher

  Wisdom of the Bones

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Wednesday

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Thursday

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Friday

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Saturday

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Sunday

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Monday

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  For all the fallen heroes

  For all the forgotten victims

  ‘It’s awful lonely here.’

  John F. Kennedy at the grave of his son,

  Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, August 1963

  I have a rendezvous with Death

  At some disputed barricade,

  When Spring comes back with rustling shade

  And apple-blossoms fill the air—

  But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

  At midnight in some flaming town,

  And I to my pledged word am true,

  I shall not fail that rendezvous.

  First World War poet Alan Seeger;

  John F. Kennedy’s favourite poem

  Oh to be torn twixt love and duty

  Sposin’ I lose my fair-haired beauty

  I’m not afraid of death, but oh,

  What will I do if you leave me?

  Dimitri Tiomkin, Ned Washington,

  ‘Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling’;

  Lee Harvey Oswald’s favourite song

  Prologue

  Saturday, April 23, 1938

  The Monster sat at the scarred kitchen table in the shack and listened carefully to the night sounds of the dump: skittering animal noises, faint whispering from the screening woods that separated the mounds of garbage from the highway more than a mile away, the muffled crack and thud of ancient detritus giving way and sagging deeper down into the filthy strata of a hundred years or more of the county’s waste.

  He was reasonably sure that he’d hear the sound of a truck or automobile as it clattered down the long dirt road, or see its headlamps as their glowing beams of light swung across the filthy glass of the window in the shack, but he knew it wasn’t likely, especially at night. The dump had been out of service for a decade now, its rotting geography long since picked over for anything of value, the caretaker who’d occupied the shack from dawn to dusk long since dead and gone. The stink kept young lovers from using the dump as a trysting place away from prying eyes and the rats stood guard against wandering hoboes and other jobless migrants fleeing from the cities and the nation’s newly minted Depression. The fuming trash heap was his kingdom and his sanctuary, the shack his fortress and his castle.

  The shack was small, not much larger than a prison cell, the corrugated tin roof sloping up from back to front, a narrow canvas-and-iron cot set up at the lowest point of the slope. There was a chair, the old kitchen table and a wooden McRay residential model icebox for furniture, a stained rag rug on the floor and bins and racks of salvaged objects of one kind or another against one side wall. A large wooden tool chest with his father’s initials on it stood under the table. The only other object of interest was an old twenty-gallon whiskey barrel with a faded name stencilled in white: N.B. Moll Wholesale and Retail dealer in Wines and Liquors, Green Lane, Montgomery County PA. The Monster smiled to himself. A long way from home.

  The Monster stood up and, stooping, shuffled across the floor in a pair of bedroom slippers he’d found one day on his rounds. They were red-and-black silk brocade with rubber soles and heels and looked as though they might have been a work in concert with a smoking jacket and a quilted robe. He reached the barrel and stood looking at it for a moment, letting the fingers of one hand trace around the top hoop and the smooth, dark-grained oak that made up the pickled wood cask. Finally he reached down and pulled up the top. Inside, curled into the bottom in a broken parody of a stillborn infant, lay the body of a small girl, perhaps ten years old. Her head, bent back at an impossible angle, was facing upward, the eyes open, looking up at him imploringly, a trickle of blood dried on her cheek, draining down from the right socket where he’d stuck her with the needle-sharp engraving tool, a number six, which was just right for the job.

  The eyes were drying out a little now, clouding over, and a few small flies were crawling across the swollen lips and thick, purpling tongue. He’d have to begin work soon or it would be too late to salvage what he needed. He thought about the time he’d spent with her before he’d killed her, feeling himself grow stiff and hard with the memory of how it had felt, but he stopped himself from thinking beyond that and dropped the top of the barrel back down, pushing the images crowding his head into some distant part of his mind for the moment, knowing that the memories could be brought forth any time he had need of them in the future.

  He turned away from the barrel, crossed the room to the icebox and pulled up on the shiny steel latch. The inside was wood, heavily varnished, the shelf dividers made of slats of the same wood. He kept milk and cheese and a loaf of bread on the lower shelf, while the middle shelf held a rough pile of his leathery treasures, ready for use. On the top shelf, the coldest part of the icebox, there was a parcel wrapped in newspaper.

  The Monster took down the parcel and took it to the kitchen table, setting it down carefully. He sat down in the chair and slowly peeled away the layers of newsprint to reveal what was underneath. It was the human head of an adult male; the wispy hair, once blond, was tipped with silver and the grey stubble on the cheeks had seemed to grow longer on the man’s cheeks as the flesh on his face desiccated in the cold atmosphere of the refrigerator. The eyes were closed because the Monster had made sure of it by using tiny sutures through the flesh to keep them shut, but the mouth was opening up into a grin that grew wider with the passage of time as the muscles of the jaws began to thin out and shorten, pulling the lips away from the mouthful of small, pearly teeth.

  The Monster stared at the head on the table a foot away from him, lost in the sensations it produced within him: the fear, the loathing and the strange power of it that seemed to flow into him like electrical current, an energy of death with the power to let him be whatever it was that he wanted to be. The power to kill and to live forever by killing.

  As long as he had absolution.

  The Monster crossed himself and closed his eyes, his strong, lithe fingers woven together in an attitude of prayer.

  ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’ And his father forgave him.

  Wednesday

  November 20, 1963

  Chapter One

  Ray Duval parked his Chevy in the underground garage and took the jail elevator up to the third-floor Homicide and Robbery Bureau. The old, slow elevator had shit-brown walls and smelled the way it looked. Normally it was used to transport felons from the cells on the fifth floor down to the basement, where they’d be taken to the County
Jail a few blocks away, but for Ray it was the easiest way to get to Homicide.

  An operator sat at the elevator controls, protected from violent passengers by a steel mesh cage. Ray had never said more to him than good morning or good afternoon or thanks in all the years he’d been a Dallas cop. Riding up he stared at him and saw that he was thin, wore a brown smock, had a club foot and a twisted hand with the fingers all bunched up that he used to prod at the controls. A name tag on his chest said MICKEY.

  ‘How’s it going, Mickey?’

  The man turned and looked at him and gave him a thin smile through the meshwork of the cage. His teeth were brown and he had a scar on his upper lip from a poorly done cleft lip and palate operation. He spoke with a nasal lisp and he knew perfectly well that neither Ray nor anyone else who rode his elevator gave a good goddamn how it was going. ‘Just fuckin’ peachy,’ he said, then turned away again.

  Riding up to the third floor Ray took off his hat and wiped the sweatband with his handkerchief, then put the hat back on. He was hot all the time now, being sick like he was, and any exertion made the sweat come up on him fiercely. It wasn’t good sweat either, not the sweat you got on a hot day when you were working hard and an ice-cold beer would solve your problem. This sweat was like the kind you found on cheese left out too long, a sweat that was talking to you, telling you just what was coming, whispering that it wasn’t too far off now.

  The elevator stopped and thumped a little as Mickey tried to get the floors to meet. Ray stepped off into the small lobby in front of the toilets. He went out the pale green swing doors and turned right, pausing for a second at the water fountain for a long drink. Then he went along a few more feet until he reached the clear glass front door of Homicide–Robbery and pushed it open. Taking the regular elevator would have made the trip three times as long and these days the fewer steps taken the better. He did exactly what his body told him now, which was ironic since he’d ignored it and taken it for granted through two wars and the better part of thirty years as a cop. Now mostly it was telling him he was dying. So was his doctor.

  Ray took off his Knox fedora as he entered the bureau and gave a nod to Francis Ewell, who doubled as receptionist and secretary to Will Fritz, the Homicide captain. Like the entrance to Homicide–Robbery, Fritz’s office had two glass panels, one just past reception, the other looking into the squad room. They were usually covered with Venetian blinds but you never knew when they were going to snap open and you were going to see the captain glaring at you for no good reason except to put the fear of God and Chief Curry into you in equal portions.

  Ray went down the narrow hallway and turned right into the windowless squad room. There were twelve county-issue wooden desks crammed into the room, pairs pushed together in two rows, both rows facing the glass wall in Fritz’s office. The more seniority you had, the farther away from the glass wall you sat. Ray’s desk was as far back as you could get in the right-hand row and closest to the table with the big coffee urn on it, the old Kelvinator standing beside it.

  Most of the other desks that far back were for the night shift but Ray had laid his claim years ago and nobody complained. The desk he butted up against belonged to his one-time partner, Ron Odum. Ron had quit the Dallas PD four months earlier after inheriting his daddy’s oil stocks and his mansion in Vickery Place. Ron was talking about opening a car dealership and given the state of Ray’s ticker Fritz hadn’t seen any point in pairing Ray up again.

  There was a brown plastic radio sitting on top of one of the filing cabinets that ran along the wall behind him. It was a mid-forties Arvin that he’d coveted since rejoining the Dallas PD after the war but there was no way he could walk off with it since everyone in the squad knew he collected and fixed old radios. It was tuned to KRLD and playing the Beach Boys singing ‘Little Deuce Coupe,’ a song he sort of liked but would never admit to. In fact he liked a lot of rock and roll, which he kept his mouth shut about in a room full of guys who thought Perry Como was the cat’s ass.

  Ray checked around the squad room. Most of the desks were empty, which meant the people who usually sat at them were out on the Job. Leavelle and Chuck Dhority were up front closest to Fritz’s glass panel and on the phone, while Joe Perry was leaning back in his chair flipping through a case file, but that was it. Ray picked up a paper clip from the tray he kept at the front of his desk and flipped it towards Perry. The younger detective looked up, scowling, then saw it was Ray and smiled instead.

  ‘Hey, Ray. How you doing?’

  Ray did a fair imitation of the elevator operator’s lisp. ‘Just peachy,’ he said. ‘Who’s catching? I can’t read the board from this angle.’

  The blackboard with the day’s rotation on it was nailed to the wall of the interview room on the right. The truth was, Ray had left his glasses in the car and the blackboard was a blur.

  ‘You are,’ Perry answered. There was a little pause. ‘Want me to take it if a call comes in?’

  ‘Not unless some Olympic sprinter bumped off his mother and I have to chase him around the Cotton Bowl,’ Ray answered. ‘I’m not dead yet.’

  Even without his glasses Ray could see the colour rise in Perry’s cheeks. ‘No, no, I didn’t mean nothing by it, Ray.’ He paused and smiled. ‘Anyway, a sprinter like that, you’d never catch.’

  Ray smiled back. He didn’t feel too much one way or the other about Negroes but he didn’t make fun of them. On the other hand, he’d known from his earliest days on the Job that the Dallas PD was full of Klansmen and John Birchers and always had been. Dallas was a white man’s city and all the black folk around knew enough to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. The same went for a Dallas cop who even vaguely supported the principles of the so-called civil rights movement.

  ‘So what do you think of this Kennedy thing?’ Perry asked, trying to change the subject away from the state of Ray’s health. The Kennedy thing was the presidential visit set for the twenty-second, with a parade and a big reception at the Trade Mart before lunch. Kennedy and the First Lady, as well as LBJ and the governor, would be in Fort Worth doing a day’s glad-handing tomorrow and it was going to be even worse the day after that. Both the FBI and the Secret Service had been sniffing around for the past few days making a nuisance of themselves and looking down their noses at the locals.

  ‘Well,’ said Ray, ‘I surely don’t know. A couple of years back that Mink Coat Mob of so-called ladies spit all over Johnson and his wife in the lobby of the Adolphus and a year ago they did the same thing to Adlai Stevenson and almost flipped over his car.’

  ‘Maybe someone’ll pee on the President.’

  ‘You have a piggy little mind, Perry.’

  ‘Don’t I just.’ The detective grinned.

  ‘Well, at least we don’t have anything to do with it.’ Homicide was just about the only division not involved with the visit and at least that was a blessing.

  The telephone rang. Ray stared at it. Somebody was dead and if he picked up the telephone he’d be the one to take on the case, and that was the irony of it, and the fear. Somebody was dead and he was thinking about if he’d be a cop long enough to solve the murder or even live that long. It was just about the only thing he cared about now – going out clean, they’d say that about him at least. But the telephone was ringing. ‘All yours,’ Perry offered. Ray picked up. At the same time he reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and brought out his red-and-black notebook for November. He turned to a new page and took a ballpoint out of the chipped and cracked Toby mug on his desk and wrote in the new date at the top of the page: 11/20/63. He listened to the voice on the other end of the line for a few moments, jotted down some brief notes with the pen, then hung up the phone.

  ‘So?’ asked Perry.

  ‘Body in a refrigerator out at the dump.’

  ‘That’s fresh,’ said Perry. ‘Like we haven’t seen it a hundred times before.’

  ‘You ever seen one naked as a jaybird, cut up into pieces then put back togeth
er with twists of wire like some kind of puppet?’

  ‘Christ on a crutch.’

  ‘More like Pinocchio.’

  Perry started humming an off-key version of ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’ Ray gave him a raspberry in return, then made his way slowly out of the squad room. Fritz’s big-jowled face looked up briefly from a desk full of paperwork as Ray passed the captain’s open door but Ray avoided meeting the man’s look. Most of his colleagues were overly solicitous about the state of his health but Fritz’s looks had nothing to do with sympathy; he was assessing Ray’s competence and the last thing Ray needed was to be sent down on sick leave, or worse, retired with a short pension. He was dead anyway but without the Job he’d be dead a lot sooner, no matter what all the doctors said. Ray knew exactly what Fritz’s look meant; Ray was due for his official DPD physical next week and he had no chance of passing it. He would be out in a few days, a month if he was real lucky. It was something he could barely let himself think about.

  Ray used the jail elevator again, riding down with a silent Mickey, then walked behind the basement security desk and headed for his car. By the time he reached it he could hear the wheezing rattle in his throat. He sat in the car and waited until he caught his breath, then drove out of the underground lot, up the Commerce Street ramp and out onto the street. He turned south, eventually putting himself on State 75 and headed for the Dallas dump.

  He felt the gurgling wheeze in his throat and upper chest recede and was careful to keep his leg and thigh from leaning against the door. Ten minutes of that and he’d have a gouge shaped like the door handle pitted into the puffy flesh of his leg that would take an hour to come back to normal. Ray twisted open the rectangular vent on his window and angled it so that the wind blew directly onto his face, drying the cold sweat.

  He drove with his right hand, propping his left forearm on the moulded in door rest. He’d bought the Bel Air in ’55, almost ten years ago now, but even then they’d had optional air conditioning and now he was regretting he hadn’t given in to the salesman’s exhortations. He glanced down at the clutter on the dash shelf and spotted a half-empty pack of Salems. Six months ago it would never have occurred to him that he’d wind up smoking menthol cigarettes, but now they were all he could take, and no more than five or six a day now, instead of two packs of Chesterfields, or three if it was a long day or a booze night out with the guys. He switched hands on the wheel and poked the right button for KRLD on the radio. Some guy with a whining voice was telling the world that ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ but Ray really didn’t give a damn, as long as it stopped him thinking about what was wrong with him and what was going to happen.