Wisdom of the Bones

by Paul Christopher

  According to Valentine, Richard Schwager was in his mid-forties but he looked at least twenty years older than that. He was wearing expensive-looking grey trousers, a red-and-blue-striped silk shirt and what appeared to be a blond shoulder-length woman’s wig. His eyes were sunken behind heavy tortoiseshell plastic glasses and Ray could see every bone in the man’s face. His skin had a faintly blue cast and on his hands Ray could see the man’s veins, like thick, pale worms. The man’s nails were a little too long and shiny and his lips looked as though he’d used a touch of lipstick but it wasn’t enough to cover up the fact that some terrible disease was eating him alive.

  ‘Cancer,’ said Schwager, reading Ray’s mind. ‘Leukaemia.’ Almost as though he was proud of it. He smiled and Ray could see that the man’s small teeth were stained and in very bad shape. ‘I suppose you’re here to talk to me about J. P.’ He gave Valentine a short, bitter look as though the antiquarian book dealer had betrayed some kind of trust. He turned to Ray. ‘And you would be?’

  ‘Ray Duval. I’m the detective investigating Mr Price’s murder.’

  ‘Dear me, investigating the death of an ageing gay man like J. P. I’d have thought you’d have your hands full with poor Mr Kennedy’s passing.’ The strange man made a small giggling sound and spritzed a large bush loaded with pale, creamy blossoms. Overhead, real raindrops hammered on the glass and the plastic.

  ‘The only thing that gives me any pleasure now,’ he said, sighing melodramatically like some Southern belle and smiling at Ray again. ‘And it’s lovely and warm in here. Come along.’

  He turned on his heel and walked down the long aisle to an open area about halfway down the greenhouse. A small area had been cleared and set out with white wrought-iron furniture: two chairs, a love seat and a round, glass-topped table. On the table there was a large pitcher of iced tea and several glasses set on a silver-edged tray. Ray wondered how the man had known they were coming and once again, eerily, it seemed as though Schwager read his mind.

  ‘You never know when guests are going to drop in. It’s only polite to have refreshments ready.’

  ‘They come for the roses?’ asked Valentine, sitting down in one of the chairs.

  Schwager let out a little squeaking laugh as he carefully lowered himself onto the love seat. ‘Well, they certainly aren’t coming for me any more, dear.’ He waved a hand at the tray on the table. ‘Help yourself and pour me a glass while you’re at it, won’t you?’

  Valentine did the honours, pouring three glasses of iced tea. It was perfectly brewed, not too sweet, tart with a little lemon. It was all Ray could do to stop himself from draining the glass and asking for a refill. Amanda Pinkers had a rival.

  ‘It’s very neat and tidy, isn’t it?’ asked Schwager. For a moment Ray thought he was talking about the greenhouse but then he realised Schwager was still thinking about the Kennedy assassination. ‘The man is killed, his assailant runs, is captured and the story’s ended, all in a few minutes. I always thought murders were messy things that took ages to solve, like in mystery stories. Or like poor old Jennings.’ Schwager made his little giggling noise again and took a small sip of his iced tea. He lifted his legs up onto the love seat and crossed them at the ankles. Ray noticed he was wearing pale grey leather slippers that matched his trousers perfectly.

  ‘Murders usually are messy,’ said Ray, taking a careful sip from his own glass.

  ‘I seriously doubt there was only one assassin,’ said Schwager. ‘They’re talking about seeing someone firing from that little knoll by the railway tracks.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard that,’ said Ray, only faintly interested.

  ‘Oh yes, it’s been on television.’

  ‘I don’t watch television. Not very much.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ Schwager said. ‘Certainly not the news programmes. I’ve problems enough of my own.’ He paused. ‘I do like the Gary Moore Show and sometimes I watch Have Gun, Will Travel.’ Schwager touched the open collar of his shirt as though he’d suddenly been chilled. ‘Wire Paladin, San Francisco.’

  Ray kept looking at the man over the rim of his glass. He was like something out of a sick fairy tale – literally – and he wondered how a man like that could survive in a town like Blackstone, or anywhere else for that matter.

  ‘Did you know I was an art teacher for simply ages?’ he said, staring back at Ray through the tortoiseshell glasses. ‘In Taos, New Mexico, after I got out of West Texas State.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘West Texas State?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-eight. I spent a year or so teaching in high school but it was just too tempting. Taos was different. You could let your hair down.’ He reached up and patted his wig carefully, as though he was afraid it might tip off. ‘So to speak.’ He giggled.

  ‘Did you know Mr Price?’

  ‘No. You might say we didn’t travel in the same circles back then.’

  ‘But you were a clerk for him in the army,’ put in Valentine. Ray was grateful for the push; he didn’t need Schwager’s life history.

  The wigged man gave a small mock salute, his hand shaking slightly. ‘I wasn’t really a clerk, more like his assistant. And I didn’t start out that way.’

  ‘How did you start out?’

  ‘I enlisted. As a private. In the army. I had a friend at the time who thought he’d do better in the navy.’

  ‘But you were a college graduate,’ said Ray. ‘You could have been an officer.’

  ‘I knew that. I was accepted as an officer candidate. I went to the artillery school at Fort Sills and trained as an FO.’

  Ray looked curiously at the husk of a man across from him. Being a Forward Observer was one of the most dangerous jobs in the army, involving sneaking up to the battlefront to observe enemy positions and direct fire for the big guns using a radio. FOs had just about the shortest life expectancy for combat soldiers; either they died from their own friendly fire when it fell short or they were picked off by enemy snipers.

  ‘Not a pleasant occupation.’

  ‘Cannon fodder,’ said a nodding Schwager, his wig bobbing.

  ‘Who were you with?’

  ‘Eighty-seventh Armored Field Artillery Battalion.’

  ‘Big unit, small?’

  ‘Small for what it was expected to do. Five hundred men, sixteen officers. We had a few tanks but mostly they were priests. Eighteen of them.’

  ‘Priests?’ asked Valentine.

  ‘Howitzers, 105 millimetre, mounted on tank chassis,’ Schwager explained, warming to the subject. ‘We could level a small city in three or four minutes.’

  ‘Where did you meet up with Price and Mr Valentine here?’

  ‘I met J. P. at a place called Quedlinburg in the Harz Mountains. I didn’t run into Douglas until Wiesbaden.’

  ‘What happened when you met Price?’

  ‘We both recognised each other as gay, that was the first thing.’

  ‘How?’ It was something Ray had wondered about from time to time.

  ‘Just looks, a feeling. Something you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘You became lovers?’

  ‘Not immediately. This was March of ’forty-five, you’ve got to remember. The war in Europe was almost over and everyone knew it. J. P. had more pressing matters at hand.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Quedlinburg was like Ali Baba’s cave, almost literally. A fairy-tale town with half-timbered houses and a castle, cobbled streets. Never a shot fired in anger; it was the centre of the German floral industry; they did a roaring business in funerals and parades right up until the end of the war.’

  ‘Ali Baba’s cave,’ said Ray, getting Schwager back on track.

  ‘Oh yes. Well, it was also Heinrich Himmler’s favourite spot. It was the place where German kings and queens were historically crowned so it was full of treasure, especially the religious kind. Jewelled Gospels, reliquaries. Apparently Himmler liked to have all sorts of secre
t SS rituals there. When the war started everything was moved to a bank vault and later on to something they called a Champignonzuchterei. A mushroom-growing cave.’

  ‘Ali Baba’s cave.’

  ‘Which is where J. P. found it.’

  ‘And removed it?’

  ‘That’s right. I was the one who found the place originally and when he showed up with his Monuments and Fine Arts team it was like an omen. I told him about what I’d found. Supposedly he logged it into one of his ledgers, packed the stuff up and me with it.’

  ‘The treasures were never registered?’

  ‘No,’ said Valentine. ‘That’s how the game worked. Art objects would come into the collection centre and anything Price wanted he simply left off the books. Most of it was books and documents.’

  ‘Why?’

  Valentine answered. ‘It was his area of expertise and books and documents were easy to smuggle. Jewelled crosses, Leonardo paintings and bags of gold bullion attract attention. Old books and papers don’t.’

  ‘That’s how it began,’ said Schwager. ‘And then he got into the forgeries.’

  ‘Why forgeries?’

  ‘Cheap to produce,’ Valentine answered.

  ‘If you find yourself in possession of one drawing by Hans Holbein, why not make yourself another five or six and sell them as originals?’ Schwager shrugged. ‘I had enough art training to be a reasonably good copyist and we had all sorts of processes for ageing paper and leather bindings. Smoking, coffee marking, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Coffee marking?’

  ‘It worked best with the instant coffee powder they gave you in your rations. You dampened the paper then took a teaspoon of coffee powder and threw it up in the air. Where it landed it made beautiful ‘foxing’ marks – old iron deposits. Smoking darkened the paper. The longer you smoked it over green wood the “older” the paper got.’

  ‘And you actually made money doing this?’

  ‘Lots,’ said Schwager. ‘J. P., Douglas over there, me and Koop.’

  ‘Koop? What did he do?’

  Valentine nodded. ‘I remember him. Another local boy. J. P. liked to keep it in the family, so to speak. He apprenticed to his father as a bookbinder or a papermaker or something. He could fix bindings, fake them, age paper, anything to do with books or documents and he could do it. When Jennings met him he was a picker.’

  ‘Picker?’

  ‘J. P. had a “friend,” so to speak, who owned an antiquarian bookstore. Koop sometimes brought him books he’d found and sometimes Jennings’s “friend” gave Koop books to fix.’

  ‘I thought Price was from Atlanta?’

  ‘He was. He spent the summers here. An uncle or what have you. That’s how he got started. If you know what I mean.’ Schwager leered.

  Ray contemplated the unsavoury image for a moment then brought his thoughts back to his investigation. ‘So what happened after the war?’

  ‘I mustered out first,’ said Valentine. Lived in New York for several years. By the time I got back here J. P. was already in business.’

  ‘Forging?’

  ‘Not at first,’ said Schwager.

  ‘You were working for him?’

  ‘With him is how I like to think of it.’

  ‘A business arrangement?’

  ‘Yes.’ Schwager giggled again. ‘The bloom had gone off the romantic rose.’ He reached behind him and let his skeletal fingers caress a drooping yellow bloom at his shoulder. ‘We spent almost a decade simply working our way through the material we’d spirited away from the Wiesbaden collection centre. It wasn’t like there was any lack of shady dealers to sell it to. J. P. used the money to expand his own legitimate business.’ Schwager allowed himself a small smile. ‘I spent my ill-gotten gains on other things.’

  ‘The forgeries,’ Ray prompted.

  ‘Just the last few years or so. J. P. was getting into debt. He decided to do for Texana what he’d done for the Third Reich.’

  ‘He used pickers to walk into county archives and just walk out with historic documents, then forged other things,’ said Valentine.

  ‘He had a Crockett letter on vellum supposedly from the Alamo. We must have made and sold fifty copies of the same letter.’

  ‘This is with Koop’s help?’

  Schwager shook his head. ‘No, no. Koop disappeared somewhere into Germany. Berlin, ’forty-six or ’forty-seven. Nasty place then.’ He laughed. ‘Probably had his throat slit by some table-girl’s pimp on the Kudamm.’

  ‘You sound like you know something about it.’

  ‘I dabbled,’ said Schwager. ‘Sugar lickers and wild boys.’

  ‘Sugar lickers?’

  ‘You figure it out.’ Schwager giggled again and made his mouth into a small O and stuck his tongue out, waggling it back and forth. Ray turned away for a moment, feeling his face flush.

  ‘This Koop wasn’t a homosexual then?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Any sense that he could be violent? Anything strange about him?’

  Schwager thought for a moment. ‘He used to disappear for days at a time. He’d get this tense look in his eye and he’d go all quiet and then he’d disappear. People were getting killed all the time, whores, pimps, black-market types. He could have been doing anything and you’d never have heard about it. Lots of places to hide bodies too.’

  ‘Were you involved in any of the forging after the war?’ Ray asked, turning to Valentine.

  ‘I didn’t have to be. I had a little money put aside, I’d put together good contacts in New York and elsewhere. Jennings was always a risk-taker. I had a better sense of self- preservation, I suppose. The police would have caught up with him eventually.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Schwager, poking gently at his wig. ‘When people in the business started telling tales out of school I knew it was time for us to part company. I mean, he was selling things to the governor for pity sake! It was getting a little too warm in the kitchen.’

  ‘What about lovers?’ said Ray, just to see what the response would be. There was a quick look that passed between Schwager and Valentine and some kind of quick acknowledgement of something but Ray decided not to pursue it.

  Schwager let out a long braying laugh that eventually turned into a painful-sounding cough. He gathered himself together, took a long drink from his iced tea and let out a sigh. ‘You’re a riot, Detective, a regular riot.’

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘J. P. was born to be a slut, Detective. He used people, then tossed them out like that.’

  ‘I think the word Richard is looking for is promiscuous,’ said Valentine. ‘But he’s right. In terms of being an actual lover, no one took Jennings seriously.’ It was essentially the same answer he’d been given by Valentine before. Another look telegraphed from Schwager across the table. Once again Ray decided to let it lie, at least for the moment.

  ‘What about business enemies?’ Ray asked. It was a long shot and an unlikely solution but it was a necessary question.

  ‘Every dealer in town,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Every dealer in Texas,’ said Schwager, laughing.

  ‘But not enough to kill him?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ offered Valentine. ‘He was a cheat, a liar and a thief and everyone knew it.’

  ‘But they still did business with him?’

  ‘Great stock,’ said Schwager. ‘J. P. always had the best and paid the least for it. If you had a client who wanted something specific that you didn’t have, you’d go to J. P. He’d stiff you but you’d get the item.’

  ‘When I was there I saw something that was clearly stolen. A robbery in New York.’

  ‘The Marlene Dietrich cigarette case?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ray, surprised.

  ‘It’s a come along,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘It’s like crows,’ said Schwager. ‘They go after anything shiny. The Dietrich case is just to get you interested. You never
actually get to buy the case because eventually you’d find out that it was on some police force’s hot sheet but in the meantime it would establish the dealer’s bona fides, and also his ability to bend the law, sell you something with a wink and a nod.’

  ‘A con.’

  ‘Crudely put but accurate.’

  ‘Did Price have any connections with the mob?’ asked Ray, thinking about Ruby again.

  ‘Possibly.’ Another look passed between Valentine and Schwager.

  ‘Either one of you know Jack Ruby?’

  ‘The name is familiar,’ said Valentine. But his eyes shifted.

  Schwager was a better liar but not by much. ‘Not to me.’ He shook his head.

  Ray could smell the lie even through the reek of the roses all around him. He sighed. It was beginning to sound as though Jennings Price had lots of people with potential motive but none of it seemed to fit the murders of the little girls.

  ‘A cat,’ said Schwager, draining the last of his iced tea. ‘That’s what Jennings was.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Curiosity and all that. It’s probably what killed him. Always had to know everything, have his finger in every pie, his nose in everyone else’s business. A cat.’

  ‘I guess he ran out of lives,’ said Valentine.

  ‘Guess so,’ Schwager said. He stood and picked up a pair of shears from the shelf behind him. He studied the roses immediately in front of him and chose a large, pale pink blossom on a long stem. He handed it across to Ray. ‘I think this is appropriate. It’s a Ruhm von Steinforth, a cross between a German Frau Karl Druschki and an American General MacArthur.’ He smiled, showing his bad teeth again. ‘You can dry it out and throw it on the coffin at my funeral.’

  * * *

  Zinnia Brant lay on the filthy bed, too tired and too frightened to cry any more. Too terrified to make a sound beyond the ragged whisper of her breathing. The room was windowless and dark and she had no idea how much time had passed; only that she was very hungry and ashamed. He had touched her everywhere, even tried to put his finger inside her, but it had hurt and she had screamed. He’d smeared something slippery on her the next time and lain on top of her, almost smothering her, pushing his thing between her legs, hard as a piece of root and bigger than any she’d seen on the boys she knew but that hadn’t worked either and he’d given up. But he was only beginning and somehow she knew that. She knew as well that if he ever really did it that it would split her in half like a piece of fruit and she’d die, right here in this horrible place, and maybe she’d go to heaven and maybe she wouldn’t, but either way she didn’t want to go, not right away, no matter what her mother and old Grammy said about Jesus and God and flaming chariots of retribution like the reverend talked about every Sunday. For now she was alive, even though she’d peed and pooped herself and that was shameful too, but for the time being it seemed to be keeping the Monster away from her.