Wisdom of the Bones

by Paul Christopher

  ‘Old lion maybe.’

  Rena gave him a mock slap across his equally hairy stomach. ‘Stop with all this talk about being old.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Something you never ask a lady.’ She smiled back.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘And you can’t find anyone your own age?’

  ‘Who says I want someone my own age?’ She made a little snorting sound. ‘Who says I want anybody at any age?’

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ said Ray, smiling. He reached out and put the tips of his fingers on her bare knee. ‘I’m just surprised anybody wants someone like me at all. Especially an old worn-out me without too much time left on the clock.’

  ‘I’m no virgin, you know that.’

  ‘Really?’ said Ray, grinning. ‘I never would have known.’

  ‘First time is so long ago all I can remember is his first name, Dougie, and the fact that we did it in his parents’ root cellar. Never been able to abide turnips ever since. I guess everyone thought I was racy, or a slut or something, but I always liked it and I never made excuses like I’m so drunk or I’m in love or anything. I used to tell jokes to my friends about how I figured that the secret of eternal youth could be found on the heads of the pricks of young boys. I don’t think so any more.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Pricks as hard as a piece of wood are nice except when that’s all they are and not for too long. It took me a while but I finally figured out I wanted to be with a man who led his prick, not followed it. Few and far between, believe me.’

  ‘Woman as pretty as you are, you’d think you’d have all kinds of dates.’

  ‘Not so many. Lots of men are afraid of pretty women. I spent a lot of Friday nights at home when I was in high school.’

  ‘I would have asked you out,’ Ray said softly.

  She smiled. ‘I’ll bet you would.’ She leaned forward and took his face in her hands and kissed him firmly on the lips. She sat back again. ‘You are some man, Ray Duval.’

  He threw his legs out over the side of the bed.

  ‘Some man who’s running out of time to catch a crazy person.’

  ‘On a Saturday?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Not many people are going to be around. Not with Kennedy. A lot of people are just going to be watching TV.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Inky’ll be opening up, not until noon, though. Early closing.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘You really want to see me again?’

  ‘I want to see you tonight.’

  ‘You want to come to my place? I might be late.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Key’s under the flowerpot to the right of the door.’

  ‘Some cop.’

  Ray stood up, naked beside the bed, looking around on the floor for his clothes. Rena stepped up to him, shrugging off his shirt and letting it fall to the floor around her feet. She wrapped her arms around Ray, the top of her head barely coming to his chin.

  ‘Not a lion,’ she said, squeezing. ‘My great big hairy bear.’

  ‘I didn’t think women liked body hair.’

  ‘Then they don’t know what they’re missing.’

  ‘Why don’t you give me my shirt?’

  She reached down between them, squeezing, then milking his foreskin back and forth until she felt him thickening in her hand.

  ‘Why don’t we go back to bed for a little while.’

  ‘Pretend we’re sleeping in?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Okay.’

  * * *

  Ray drove into downtown again, the streets as dead as Sunday. Rena was right; almost everything was closed and somehow Ray knew it wasn’t because they wanted to be so much as they knew it was expected of them. They would lose a lot of business if they didn’t close out of respect for the fallen man.

  Pop Mercier’s was open, though, with a big Coca-Cola sign over the front door and window, lights on inside the dark, narrow space. Ray parked the car, took out his notebook and wrote out the date on a fresh page: 11/23/63. He locked the car and went up the four steep concrete steps. He opened the door and a bell on a spring tinkled above him. The floors were wood; flypaper hung down from the rafters, the curling varnished traps smelling like summer, still with a few trophies of desiccated bugs hanging overhead. To the right was a huge, curving glass display case full of every candy any child could want, from liquorice bullseyes, to allsorts, to green leaves, twisters, jawbreakers, blackballs and bubble gum. Next to the candy case was a two-doored ice cream freezer with PUR in scrolled letters on one door and ITY in scrolled letters on the other. On the wall behind was a dispenser for sugar cones.

  Off to the right, behind the big candy display case, were shelves loaded down with cigarettes, chewing tobacco, cans of tobacco and a clip rack of Zig-Zag cigarette papers. Opposite there was a big Coca-Cola cooler full of soft drinks in ice water with rack after rack of novelties above. The bottom shelves sold everything from dishwashing soap to toilet paper and mousetraps.

  The ringing of the little bell on the door brought Pop himself out from behind a curtain at the end of the store. For a second before the curtain swung shut again, Ray caught a glimpse of a large, fat woman, knitting in her lap, watching a flickering television with a pair of bent rabbit ears on top.

  ‘Help you, Officer?’ Pop Mercier was immense, over six feet, his huge, almost completely bald head resting on a thick fat neck over broad shoulders and a massive belly cloaked in a spotless apron that fell from his chin to his knees. Pop looked out at the world through thick, black plastic-rimmed glasses that looked a lot like the ones Walter Cronkite had been holding in his hands the night before. He sat down on a tall stool with a worn red corduroy cushion attached to it with fabric tapes.

  ‘You know a man named Danny Coulthart?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘His daughter?’

  ‘Mar’Ellen.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I know just about every kid along here, Officer.’ He opened his mouth and grinned expansively, his entire face taking on the expression of a clown in a circus. He could have been anywhere from fifty to ninety. The man’s hair was white as snow and so were the flecks of beard against his coal-black skin. ‘My job to spoil them rotten and rot their teeth all at the same time.’

  Ray looked beyond the old man to the counter behind him. There were three or four open packages of cigarettes there. ‘You sell cigarettes to the young ones too?’ he asked. ‘Two for a nickel maybe?’

  ‘I sell cigarettes to their parents, two for a nickel, Officer. I don’t sell cigarettes to kids until they old enough to smoke.’

  ‘How old’s that?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Good enough.’

  ‘That’s what I think.’

  ‘Mar’Ellen come in here a lot?’

  ‘Most every day.’

  ‘Her daddy told me she only ever had a dime for milk.’

  ‘Cost you a dime for a pint of milk in here, Officer, in the school it’s just a nickel so she usually had money left over.’

  ‘What did she buy?’

  ‘Whatever she wanted. Changed. Green leaves mostly. Sometimes she’d take a Co’-Cola and drink it standing right here. She’d give me the nickel and when she was finished she’d give me the empty bottle and I’d keep the two-cent return. Smart as a whip.’

  ‘She’s disappeared.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘When did you see her last?’

  ‘Week ago.’

  ‘What day?’

  ‘Monday. Day she went off.’

  ‘She alone?’

  ‘Had one of her little friends with her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One of the Kimberly twins. Tina or Tana, I can’t remember which.’

  ‘They friends?’

  ‘Not really
. The Kimberly girl just came in and asked Mar’Ellen if she could have a penny and Mar’Ellen gave her one. She bought some mint leaves, then scooted out.’

  ‘They didn’t leave together?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long was Mar’Ellen in the store?’

  ‘Couple or three minutes.’

  ‘Talk about anything?’

  ‘Told me about her daddy playing at the Lights Are Blue. Liked to talk about her daddy lots.’

  ‘Proud of him?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘No problems between them?’

  ‘’Bout doing her homework or not but that’s about it.’

  ‘Any ideas yourself?’

  ‘About what happened to her?’

  Mrs Mercier came lumbering out of the back, pushing the curtains aside. She stood beside her husband, put one hand on his shoulder. Her arm was as big around as a prizefighter’s. ‘She went up in smoke, Officer. She turned into nothing overnight and you or nobody else is going to find her.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because you don’t give no never mind ’bout some black kid who wanders off on Ross Street and never gets seen again, that’s why.’

  ‘If I didn’t mind to it, Mrs Mercier, I wouldn’t be here, would I?’

  ‘I’m sure you got your reasons, sir, but they aren’t my reasons and they ain’t the reasons of this community.’

  ‘Now Charlotte, don’t you carry on.’

  ‘Don’t you “now Charlotte” me, you fat old man. You know what I’m saying is true. Blacks in this town is good for porters and elevator operators and warehouse workers and truck farmers and such and if they real smart they might get to go to college so they can get to be doctors who only work on other black people, or maybe to bury them, and now the one man who might have done something to change that gets his head blown off, and guess where that happens, it happens in this town, where they aren’t even shit on your shoes.’

  ‘Charlotte!’

  ‘To hell with that, it’s true.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, Mrs Mercier.’

  ‘Do you know about all the other little pickaninny kids vanished?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Happens all the time. Sometimes they old enough to head up north to Detroit or Chicago, make their way there, maybe a year later you get a postcard or a letter or sometimes a telephone call asking for money but then there’s the little ones. Ten years old, eleven, twelve. Children. Just up and gone and you never see them again or hear from them again. Mar’Ellen’s not the first. Won’t be the last. Now you tell me where they’ve gone, Mr Policeman.’

  ‘How long would you say this has been going on?’

  ‘We come down from Muleshoe in ’thirty-six when my momma died and opened up this store less than a year later. Beginning it was nice an’ peaceful here but even so you always knew it wasn’t safe. Children, little girls especially.’

  ‘Charlotte, you’re making too much of this.’

  ‘Then get the man to check. Get the man to go back through the years and tell me how many of the kids who just wandered off and disappeared were boys, not girls.’ The old woman shook her head. ‘Something bad’s been going on here for a long, long time, Detective, and no one’s ever done anything about it.’

  ‘Reports must have been made.’

  ‘Sure they were. Reports no one paid any attention to.’ She smiled at Ray coldly. ‘How many black men on the Dallas Police force right now, sir?’

  ‘A few.’

  ‘How many detectives?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘How many patrolmen, say, after the war ended?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘There you go. Some black woman comes along, says my baby’s gone, how much attention you think some white cop with little white babies gone is going to pay? No attention at all, that’s how much.’

  Horribly, she was probably right and if his killer was responsible for even a few of those disappearances and was careful not to have their bodies found then it was a whole new ball game. ‘Any of these children you’re telling me about ever found? Any of them appear again?’

  ‘Couple, few. Sometimes they turned out to be running away from something bad at home, or got lost, or drunk too much with a boyfriend. Sometimes dead.’

  ‘Dead? The police must have been involved then.’

  ‘Only dead one I ever heard of was Betty Shoemaker. Found her all wrapped up in a plastic bag in a ditch. She was from around here.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Eight, nine years ago.’

  ‘Where was the ditch?’

  ‘Just outside a little place called Joshua.’

  ‘Johnson County?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Mercier. ‘Never would have heard about it if it wasn’t for my cousin.’

  ‘You remember how old the girl was?’

  ‘Ten.’

  Ray closed his notebook and shoved it back into his pocket.

  ‘You’ve been a help.’

  ‘To who, Mar’Ellen Caddo and her daddy?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Mrs Mercier looked at him, beads of fat sweat rolling into the faint down of sideburn on her cheeks. Her eyes were like cold blue chips of some impossibly hard stone behind her gold-framed glasses. The lines around her lips turned her into old leather. She had the look of someone who’d seen more in her life than she’d ever imagined or wanted to. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ the old woman asked.

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘You look it, though. You look as though you know for sure the person you’re looking for is already dead.’

  ‘I don’t have enough information yet to be sure of that,’ Ray lied. The half-moon scar was enough and he knew it.

  ‘If she’s dead now, none of those questions mean anything.’

  ‘Sometimes the dead can help the living.’

  ‘Help you,’ said the old woman. ‘Help you figure out what you need to figure out and that ain’t got nothing to do with any feelings Mar’Ellen might have had.’

  ‘I’m a homicide detective, Mrs Mercier. It’s what I do.’

  ‘You told Mar’Ellen’s father yet? Told him she’s dead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Keep it that way as long as you can,’ said the old woman, her voice softening.

  ‘It may hurt less if he knows.’

  ‘It may hurt less if he dreams for a little while longer.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘You do that.’

  ‘And I really do thank you for your help. Both of you.’

  ‘If we did help, then do something with it.’

  ‘Charlotte!’

  ‘I’ll try my best, Mrs Mercier. That’s all I can promise.’

  Ray said goodbye and left the store. Standing outside he looked around at the broken, empty street. There was a book bindery across from him, the windows boarded over, a pool hall, a transient hotel, a garage and a box store. What kind of world was this for children, what kind of gauntlet to walk through each and every day coming home from school?

  Or hadn’t he been paying attention when the old woman had warned him? Maybe the killer hadn’t really left the jungle at all – he’d just changed his hunting ground a little. Killing little girls up in the north country would get you noticed, even if the victims were black, but down here would it really make any difference?

  How many little kids could be listed as missing down here without anyone really taking much notice at all? A smart animal only killed what he could eat; maybe the killer only took enough to keep himself satisfied and no more, except now his appetite was getting stronger.

  He climbed into the Chevy, took the Salems off the dashboard and lit one, coughing with the first breath but forcing himself to drag again. He thought about the big march to Washington a few months back and those sit-downs in that Woolworth’s in Atlanta. Sidney Poitier might be a rich black movie actor but that wasn’t going to get him a roo
m at the Adolphus, no way, no how.

  And any chance for that was gone now; that’s what Mrs Mercier was thinking and Danny Coulthart and Amanda Pinkers and Titus Edmonds. All of them. Any chance or hope of justice or redress died the day before in those red and grey trickles he’d seen splashed on the chequerboard tiles in the corridor of Parkland Hospital.

  Foolishness, of course, because no one man was going to change the country, but maybe it would have been a start, something to tack a little more hope on to, like building a ladder. Ray started up the car. More likely a tower of Babel.

  So here he was, sitting downtown on a Saturday, with the president of the United States murdered and more murders of his own than he knew what to do with. He had a pocket full of Polaroid pictures and less than seven days to turn the puzzle into a finished piece.

  So what do you do? he thought. You go back to first principles, that’s what you do. Instead of sitting on your fat spreading ass thinking about your own death you go right back to where it started and look at the puzzle parts and make sure you’ve got them fitted together right. In this case that meant taking another run at Douglas Foster Valentine.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ray Duval was surprised to find Valentine’s shop open; everything else from Neiman Marcus on down was shuttered up tight with signs edged in black on the doors. The bell on Valentine’s door made its tinkling noise, just like the one on Pop Mercier’s door, and Valentine, sitting on one of the big chairs in the small back room, looked a little startled to find a policeman in his store. He got up out of his chair and came into the front room, standing by the counter, close to the cash register.

  ‘Detective Duval, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You received the list I sent over to you?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And now you’d like to talk about it, I presume.’

  ‘Among other things.’

  ‘Still no luck in finding out who killed Price?’

  ‘There’s been another killing.’

  ‘Good Christ,’ said Valentine.

  ‘None of your bunch,’ said Ray.

  ‘My bunch?’

  ‘The antique dealer bunch.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A twelve-year-old girl.’