Wisdom of the Bones

by Paul Christopher

  ‘And you think it’s the same killer?’

  ‘They were killed in exactly the same way, detail for detail.’

  ‘I don’t see the connection.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Ray, ‘which is why I’m here talking to you.’

  ‘Doesn’t seem right somehow.’

  ‘That someone else has been murdered?’

  ‘No, I mean, with this Kennedy thing.’

  ‘They’re both just as dead.’

  ‘It’s hard to concentrate on anything else, that’s all I’m saying, Detective. The president of the United States is assassinated and it affects just about everyone on the planet. A lot of people are worried about a war.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Ray. ‘If Khrushchev was going to start lobbing H-bombs our way, he missed his chance.’

  ‘I suppose so… still.’

  ‘Your store’s open for business; you can’t be grieving that deeply.’

  ‘My store is open because I’m not a hypocrite like most of the other people in this hick town. One day they’re taking out ads in the Times Herald calling the poor bastard a traitor and the next day they’re sobbing and crying and beating their breasts because they got exactly what they wanted. I don’t know why anyone’s surprised. Big D isn’t Big D Democratic. Give it enough time and every cracker lunatic winds up getting off the Greyhound on Lamar.’

  ‘You sound pretty hot under the collar.’

  ‘Excuse me for having an opinion.’

  ‘You’re not a local boy, are you?’

  ‘Dallas?’

  ‘Texas.’

  ‘No. Atlanta.’

  Ray pulled out his notebook and flipped back a few pages. He nodded to himself. ‘I believe Mr Price was born in Atlanta as well.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You knew each other there?’

  ‘We grew up together there. Went to the same high school.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  ‘We had shared interests.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Art, for one.’

  ‘Young boys?’

  ‘Just each other.’

  ‘You were lovers then?’

  ‘For a time. Long enough to know that we liked it better with each other than we liked it with girls.’

  ‘Anybody know?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘J. P.’s father had a lot of money back then. He went to Harvard.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Emory.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Neither has anybody else,’ said Valentine with a laugh. ‘It’s about twenty minutes outside Atlanta in the Druid Hills. I had a full scholarship. Class of ’forty-one.’

  ‘And then right into the army?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Rank?’

  ‘Captain. You got your bachelor’s, you were a captain, you had your master’s, you were a major.’

  ‘Price?’

  ‘Master’s in art history. He was a major. Came out a colonel, just like the chicken fellow.’

  ‘You were both in the same outfit?’

  ‘I applied. Jennings had the pull, like I said.’

  ‘So you spent time together in Europe?’

  ‘We met up from time to time. We were all over the place. He had a lot of things going on as well.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t think I want to speak ill of the dead.’

  ‘Little late for that.’

  ‘One of the things he did was catalogue artefacts for repatriation.’

  ‘Try that again.’

  ‘The Nazis had whole platoons of SS going around and confiscating art. We confiscated it back. The OSS had a looting team as well so we worked together. There were four or five big “collection centres” behind the front lines. The paintings, jewellery – everything was taken to these collection centres and catalogued. J. P. was in charge of one of them. Wiesbaden.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So if it wasn’t catalogued it didn’t exist. If it didn’t exist, nobody went looking for it.’

  ‘You’re telling me he stole things?’

  ‘I wasn’t in a position to know. I was just a lowly captain running around trying to save things from looters and making sure things that had already been saved weren’t destroyed or “liberated.”’

  ‘Liberated by who?’

  ‘You name it. The Russians had a whole division that did nothing but swipe things and send them back to Russia. Our own people did it, so did the French, the Poles, the Brits. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie.’

  ‘Big operation?’

  ‘Big enough. Some of the stuff you could just slip into your pocket and then stuff into your duffel bag. It wasn’t like customs was going to go through your underwear when you got off the Queen Mary.’

  ‘Bigger stuff?’

  ‘Shipped by air. Usually as something else or with forged clearances.’

  ‘You’re making it sound pretty organised.’

  ‘It was. That’s what J. P. was all about. Organisation.’

  ‘So what was his part in it?’

  ‘You saw his place?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘His old man had money but not that much money.’

  ‘So he smuggled things into the country after the war.’

  ‘Too smart for that. Never got his hands dirty. He just helped other people. Made a lot of friends with the big-time types, the ones who were going back to the States to become museum curators.’

  ‘How did it work?’

  ‘Lots of corrupt art dealers at the end of the war, name any country, but France was big, so was Italy. J. P. would get things sent to his pals, who’d sit on them for a while, and then “discover” it with a cute story and a forged provenance. A legit dealer or museum would acquire it and everyone was happy except the original owners and most of them were dead anyway.’

  ‘He did this by himself?’

  ‘He had help. He bribed people.’

  ‘Any particular help? You, for instance?’

  Valentine looked pained. ‘Detective, a man walks in here with cow shit on his shoes and puts down a nice little leather-bound diary I open up and discover is one of Galileo’s lost journals, I’m going to offer him ten dollars and send him on his way, then turn around and sell it at Sotheby’s for ten thousand dollars, but that doesn’t make me a thief.’

  ‘Just a cheat.’

  ‘Are you trying to get me angry, Detective, maybe because if I was angry I might say something useful?’

  ‘Crossed my mind.’

  ‘Sure I cheat. It’s the nature of the business. Picker cheats the person selling, junkman cheats the picker, dealer cheats the junkman, dealer cheats the final buyer, buyer cheats on his income tax, calls it a business expense.’

  ‘Okay, there’s always a bigger fish in the sea but who was helping Price?’

  ‘He had a clerk. Another local boy.’

  Ray took out his notebook and pencil. ‘Who?’

  ‘Schwager. Dick Schwager. He was about twenty-two or twenty-three then. My sense is they were fucking each other at the time.’

  ‘Any idea where he is now?’

  ‘I can tell you exactly. He lives with his sister in a little town called Blackstone, about forty miles north of here off Highway 75.’

  ‘How do you know his whereabouts?’

  ‘He came back from the war pretty well set up. Presumably by J. P. He opened his own little antique store in his home town. Keeps an apartment here as well for his romantic liaisons. I occasionally buy from him, so do a few other dealers. He keeps his eyes out.’

  ‘Call him,’ said Ray. ‘I think we should pay him a visit.’

  ‘We?’ asked Valentine, looking vaguely horrified at the suggestion.

  ‘I need someone to ask the right questions.’

  ‘I thought I was a suspect.’

  ‘You may be,’ said Ray. ‘That doesn’t
mean you can’t cooperate with your friendly Dallas Police, does it?’

  ‘I’ll have to close the shop.’

  ‘You won’t be selling anything for the next few days unless it’s got a picture of JFK or Jackie on it.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right.’ He pursed his lips for a moment. ‘What kind of automobile do you drive, Detective?’

  ‘A ’fifty-seven Chevy.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Nothing. I don’t suppose you’d mind going in mine.’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘A 1964 T-Bird.’

  ‘Business must be good.’

  ‘Good enough.’

  * * *

  ‘I’m still not entirely sure what you’re hoping to accomplish,’ said Valentine, sitting behind the wheel. The interior was white leather to match the outside but with black trim. Everything was sparkling. Ray let himself sink back in the bucket seat on the passenger side of the console, enjoying the sensation of being a passenger instead of a driver. The car was smooth as glass on the road and the interior was almost perfectly soundproofed. Outside the sky was the colour of pewter, the overcast low and oppressive.

  ‘There’s some kind of kids’ puppet show with a car like this in it,’ said Ray. He reached out and ran his hand across the sharply defined dashboard. ‘I saw it one Saturday morning, last month. Fireball XL-5 I think it was called.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ said Valentine, glancing over at Ray and giving him a strange look.

  ‘Sorry, I get distracted sometimes these days. I’m not quite myself.’

  Ray went into the pocket of his jacket, flipped through the Polaroids and handed the one of Mar’Ellen Caddo across to him. Valentine glanced at the picture and almost drove off the road. Luckily there was virtually no traffic, north or south.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ He threw the picture back into Ray’s lap.

  ‘Just thought I’d get your reaction.’

  ‘But how can Jennings—’

  ‘During the spring and summer of 1938 there were nine little girls raped and murdered in several counties upstate. Each one of them was dismembered and then wired together like a puppet, like your friend and your one-time lover, Jennings Price. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, Mr Valentine, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the solution to all of this is somewhere in the past. Your past maybe, or Mr Price’s past. This man Dick Schwager is from the past. That could make him important.’

  ‘What about that list of dealers and clients I sent over to you?’

  ‘If nothing pans out here I’ll have to try it. But you don’t chop a man into pieces and rape little girls because someone owes you money or vice versa. It’s important I jump a few squares on the board here.’

  ‘You on some kind of schedule, Detective?’

  ‘You might say that.’

  They drove on in silence. Finally Valentine spoke, keeping his eyes glued to the road ahead. ‘In 1938 I was twenty years old and living in Atlanta, Mr Duval. J. P. would have been twenty-one. At Harvard. You’ve got to know we had nothing to do with those killings.’

  ‘Already figured that out,’ said Ray, smiling quietly. ‘But your friend was murdered, and he was murdered in the same way as those little girls, so there is something he has in common with the killer. Perhaps you as well.’

  ‘I can’t see how that’s possible.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Ray answered. ‘But that’s what being a detective is all about. Making connections. Seeing links when other people don’t.’

  ‘What about lovers?’

  Ray turned to Valentine, staring hard. ‘Someone on that list was Price’s lover?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘You might.’

  ‘Jennings didn’t have lovers, he had sex. With a lot of people.’

  ‘Yourself included.’

  ‘Half the gay guys in Dallas included and a few from Fort Worth besides.’

  ‘You think one of them might have killed him?’

  ‘You’re the detective, not me,’ said Valentine. ‘And whatever you think, Mr Duval, homosexuals aren’t particularly homicidal by nature. The only thing they are by nature is homosexual.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Ray.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you would.’

  Ray tried to think it through; his intuition told him that any lover, Valentine included, almost certainly had nothing to do with murders committed twenty-five years ago – which in turn probably meant they weren’t involved in the disappearance and death of Mar’Ellen Caddo.

  * * *

  Blackstone, Texas, stood within a hundred yards of the Grayson/Fanin County line about sixty miles north of Dallas. The town was named after a Boston entrepreneur, Henry G. Blackstone, who purchased a tract of land directly in the path of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad. With a combination of rail access and excellent farmland, Blackstone soon attracted plenty of settlers and businesses to the area. Henry Blackstone got rich and headed back to Boston, leaving nothing behind but his name. While cotton was king, Blackstone flourished, both as a place to grow it and a place to ship it, but as the years rolled by Blackstone languished, its businesses closing and moving to larger centres nearby.

  Reaching the small city of McKinney, they turned onto Texas 69 and continued north, eventually reaching Blackstone a little more than an hour after leaving Dallas. Valentine guided the T-Bird down an empty Main Street, every single business closed except for the Mobil station, then turned up a numbered farm road on the eastern edge of town. They drove north again, leaving the town behind them, then turned a second time, stopping in front of a yellow clapboard farmhouse directly across the country road from a walled cemetery. There was a gate with a wooden sign on it that said Willow Hills Cemetery. There were no hills that Ray could see but there were plenty of willows, a number of them around the yellow farmhouse.

  To the right of the farmhouse and connected to it by a makeshift addition was something that had either once been a small barn or a large garage. It was painted a deep red colour and like the cemetery it also had a sign: RICHARD M. SCHWAGER ANTIQUES.

  ‘Could just as easily say “Junk,”’ Valentine commented, getting out of the car. Ray followed him, noticing for the first time that behind the house there was an extensive greenhouse and beyond that a small apple orchard. With the slamming of the car doors a retriever came bounding out of the open door of the large garage and raced towards Ray and Valentine, tail wagging, tangle foot, its tongue lolling out of its mouth in a ridiculous grin. A harsh voice brought it up short and a woman the size of a small tank appeared, dressed in a blossoming parachute-style dress with short sleeves barely able to contain the immense biceps within. She had her hair up in pink curlers and the curlers covered by a lime-green kerchief. She had a cigarette lodged directly in the centre of her small, heavily lipsticked mouth.

  ‘It’s you,’ said the woman, staring at Valentine, talking around the cigarette.

  ‘Yes, it is, Mrs Schwager.’

  ‘Nice car,’ she said, looking beyond him.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ asked the fat woman. She peered closely at Ray. ‘He looks sick.’

  ‘He’s a police detective. From Dallas.’

  ‘Zat right?’ She let out a coughing laugh and delicately removed the cigarette from her mouth before she spat down on a patch of brown, burnt-out grass. ‘Come to interview me about killing the President?’ She shook her head. ‘Dumb sumbitch, you ask me. Teeth were just too good to be true.’

  ‘We came to talk to Dick.’

  ‘Dick’s dying, why don’t you leave him be?’ Ray’s eyebrows went up.

  ‘I’m aware of Richard’s condition, Mrs Schwager, and I promise you I won’t upset your brother more than necessary.’

  ‘This about those papers people are saying he stoled?’

  Ray broke in. ‘It’s about a murder, Mrs Sc
hwager.’

  The immense woman stared at Ray. She put the cigarette back into her mouth and drew on it heavily, then swallowed the smoke, eating it the way he used to do himself. She let the smoke trickle slowly out through her nostrils. ‘My brother never killed anyone but a few Germans during the war.’

  ‘He’s not a suspect, Mrs Schwager. I just want to ask him a few questions.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Jennings Price.’

  ‘That young gay fella?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘He’s in the greenhouse with his stupid roses,’ she said. She slammed a meaty hand onto a meatier thigh. ‘Come on, Delilah.’ She turned and the dog followed her back to the garage. Ray watched them go.

  ‘The dog’s male.’

  ‘She’s like that.’

  ‘If his name is Schwager and her name is Schwager, and they’re brother and sister, how come she calls herself Mrs?’ Ray asked.

  ‘I suppose no one would marry her so she married herself.’

  ‘It sounds like she doesn’t know her brother is a homosexual.’

  ‘Some people can make themselves believe just about anything, Detective.’

  Ray thought about Delilah, with nuts the size of swinging tennis balls. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  They came around the back of the house and Ray saw that the greenhouse ran the full width of the building and sixty or seventy feet back towards the orchard. A light rain was beginning to spit down from the gunmetal sky, tinkling on the glass panes in the greenhouse roof and making a harsher banging sound against the areas on the side walls that had been replaced with heavy plastic.

  Valentine pulled open a lightweight door and Ray followed him into a small room walled with chipboard that was set out with shelves full of terracotta pots of all sizes, small gardening implements on pegboard racks and bags of potting soil stacked up on the floor. A second door led into the greenhouse proper but even in the little potting shed Ray could feel the damp, cloying heat and taste the overpowering smell of tea roses in his nostrils, almost worse than anything he’d experienced in the autopsy room at Parkland.

  They went into the greenhouse and Ray was suddenly faced with a sea of roses in orderly ranks, wave after wave of colour heading towards the rear of the wood-and-glass enclosure. There were Coventry Cathedrals, Granadas, City of Leeds, Liverpool Echo and Grace Abounding. Tiffanys, Honor, Tequila and Don Juan, First Love and Madame Butterfly. Thousands of them in every shade of red, pink, yellow, white and even a tawny gold. In the middle of it all, a brightly polished brass spritzer in his hand, was Dick Schwager.