Wisdom of the Bones

by Paul Christopher

  It had happened so quickly. She’d gone to the 7-Eleven and she’d done just what her mother told her to do, buying a loaf of bread and a German’s bar for her treat, hardly spending any time at all looking at the comic books. Her favourite was Magnus, Robot Fighter, 4000A.D. but she didn’t have twelve cents to buy it for herself, even though it looked pretty good this month, what with Leeja being trapped in some kind of submarine with her feet stuck in something that looked like nose boog, while Magnus came to her rescue wearing fins, a shark bigger than he was sneaking in behind. Leeja was blonde and Magnus was white as well but it wasn’t the kind of thing Zinnie thought about too much, since the whole world was white.

  She’d taken another bite of chocolate bar, put the comic book back in the rack and picked up her bag with the loaf of Mrs Baird’s in it. She stepped out into the cool darkness, the boom and rumble of the traffic on the expressway echoing down from above. Directly in front of her there were half a dozen teenagers, all white, lounging on the hoods of a couple of old jalopies, smoking cigarettes and talking loudly to each other. Her mother had told her about something she called ‘discretion was the better part of valour,’ and that meant when she saw a bunch of white people, grown or kids, she was supposed to keep a smile on her face and put wings on her shoes, and that meant she was supposed to keep out of their way and if she got into any trouble she was supposed to run like hell.

  Instead of going down the parking area to the sidewalk Zinnie walked along in front of the store, then down between a white van and the wall of the building next door. She took another bite of the German’s bar and out of the corner of her eye she had a split second of horrible realisation when she noticed that the side door of the van was open and that she was in big trouble.

  It all happened so fast. A hand reached out and grabbed her by the hair and then she was off her feet and inside the van. He let go of her and like the big stupid she was she swung the bag of bread as though that was going to hurt anyone and then there was a big square of something sticky over her eyes and mouth and one hand around her throat, choking the screams in her throat, stillborn. More tape around her ankles, her hands dragged behind her back and bound with more tape and then she was pushed down onto the floor of the van, falling onto something prickly and soft. Burlap bags or a rough blanket of some kind. A few seconds later she heard the van start up, the rumble of the engine vibrating through the floor and then the crash and clatter of gears as the Monster put it into reverse and backed up out of the 7-Eleven parking lot.

  They didn’t go very far, no more than a hundred yards or so, and then the nightmare started up again. The engine died and then the Monster was on her again. He ripped off her clothes, broke her glasses clawing at her like an animal, and when his fingers hooked under her underpants she knew that her mother had been right about everything and she whipped her head back and forth, chewing at the tape across her mouth, the screams of unbridled dread and terror drowned out by the thundering noises coming from directly above her.

  She knew this place. The dark hole of nothing right under the expressway. Even in daylight it was no place to be and Zinnie felt her bladder open and drain into the blanket under her naked skin. For the first time in the brief passage of her life Zinnia Brant understood that death wasn’t some vague thing that only happened when you were very old and that it turned on a simple twist of fate, like heads or tails on a spinning dime, even for little girls.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ray stood at one of the urinals in the third-floor men’s room completing another of his seemingly interminable drainings when John McDonald, the ex-Vice cop, came lumbering into the room and stepped up to the urinals next to Ray. He unzipped and let out a small groan of satisfaction as his bladder began to empty.

  ‘Too much fucking coffee,’ he said.

  ‘Amen.’

  ‘Still a zoo out there. I met a reporter from Frankfurt for Christ’s sake! Germany if you can believe it.’

  ‘How come you’re here at all?’ Ray asked. ‘This isn’t your shift, is it?’

  ‘Naw,’ said McDonald. ‘But I wouldn’t miss this shit for the world. Kind of thing you tell your grandchildren about.’ He turned his head to Ray. ‘You got grandkids, Ray?’

  ‘Don’t even have kids.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Two boys and a girl and six little ones between them. Makes life worth living. Anyway, like I said, I wouldn’t miss any of this.’

  ‘They still questioning this Oswald character?’

  ‘Off and on. He comes up and down from the cells like a yo-yo. Still no lawyer.’

  ‘He hasn’t asked for one?’

  McDonald laughed. ‘Oh, he’s asked all right. Curry and Fritz just don’t seem to be hearing him too good.’ McDonald shook himself a couple of times, tucked himself back into his trousers and zipped up. He went over to the chipped enamel sink in one corner of the room and gave his hands a cursory wash. ‘’Member I mentioned Jack Ruby to you?’

  ‘Sure,’ Ray said, still standing at the urinal.

  ‘He was here last night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Midnight look-see. Sort of a press conference. You shoulda been here.’

  ‘I saw Ruby at Parkland.’

  ‘That right?’ McDonald hauled down a relatively fresh section of roller towel. ‘Anyway, Jack’s there with all these foreign correspondent types, making like he’s some kind of reporter, and the D.A. makes some comment that Oswald’s a commie, that he was on some kind of Cuba Committee, but Wade gets the name wrong and Jack actually corrected him, gave him the right name.’ McDonald snorted, grabbed a piece of paper towel off a roll balanced on the back of the sink and blew his nose loudly. ‘It was the funniest damn thing you ever saw, Ray. All these reporters and it’s Jack fucking Ruby giving them the goods and embarrassing the hell out of the D.A.’

  ‘Funny,’ said Ray.

  McDonald gave a little wave. ‘Well, back to it.’ He turned and left the bathroom, leaving Ray still at the urinal. He finally finished the chore, picked up the fat folding file from Juvenile and went down the hall, cutting his way through the press of photographers and reporters who seemed permanently camped outside Homicide–Robbery. None of them paid him the slightest attention. At the end of the hall the press room door was wide open and someone had dragged in a couple more tables. There were at least a dozen more reporters, photographers and cameramen crammed into the room, all of them talking either to each other or on the few phones in the room. Turning, Ray stepped into the relative calm of the Juvenile office.

  He dropped the big magenta expanding file of missing persons back into the wire basket he’d taken it from the day before. Millie Toombs gave him a nasty look from behind her desk. ‘I said you could look at it, not take it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Ray apologised. ‘I didn’t think you’d miss it.’

  ‘Bad joke, Detective Duval. My ass would have been in some sling if that file had disappeared.’

  ‘Such language.’ Ray smiled. Up on the filing cabinets the radio was still on but turned down now so that it was barely audible. The only thing worse than the President being killed would be a nuclear war and you wouldn’t need the radio to find out about that. Today it was nothing but background noise.

  Millie looked up from an open file on her desk. ‘Just got another one.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Little black girl run off.’ She glanced down at the report on the desk. ‘Like you were looking for.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Name, Zinnia Brant, like the flower. Twelve years old. Address on Virgil Street.’

  ‘Deep Ellum?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Her momma sent her out to the 7-Eleven store to get some bread for the next day’s breakfast. She never came back.’

  Ray nodded. He could remember when the 7-Elevens used to be called Tote’m stores because you had to tote the
stuff home in bags. ‘How late she go out?’

  ‘Just before nine.’

  ‘Already dark. Where’s the store in relation to the home?’

  ‘Three blocks. The 7-Eleven’s right there by the expressway.’

  ‘Not a nice neighbourhood.’

  ‘Depends on your colour, Detective.’

  ‘Safe for her?’

  ‘Shoulda been.’

  ‘Who called it in?’

  ‘The mother. Eileen Brant. Leaned pretty hard on the Mrs part. And she brought it in. Picture as well.’ Millie unclipped a photograph from the report. It looked like it had been taken at a fifty-cent photo booth like the kind they had at the bus station. The girl was plain, her hair done in braids, wearing black plastic eyeglasses, her skin fairly light. ‘Anybody check it out?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘Nobody went and talked to the 7-Eleven staff?’

  ‘All I got is the incident report. She disappeared last night, nobody’s seen her since.’ Ray could see a couple of dicks, Stetsons on their desks at the back of the long room, doing nothing but smoking and talking.

  Ray took out his notebook. ‘Give me whatever numbers you’ve got.’

  Millie did as she was asked, then she sat back in her creaking old chair, the full weight of her broad beam tilting the chair back to a dangerous angle. ‘Now how come a homicide detective is suddenly interested in little black girls running off, which is something nobody in this department really pays much attention to.’

  ‘That’s why,’ said Ray.

  ‘I’m just a dumb old receptionist,’ said Millie. ‘Why don’t you explain that to me?’

  ‘A smart man who wants to get away with murder kills people nobody cares about. Nobody on the DPD or in the press cares about little black girls from Deep Ellum.’

  ‘That is a fact.’

  ‘But it’s still murder. Homicide is colour blind.’

  Millie snorted loudly. ‘Tell that to your Captain Fritz; bet your white ass he’s got a few bed sheets in the family tree or, better yet, you go and look it up in your files. How many black murders got solved in Big D last year.’

  ‘You be careful how loud you say that kind of thing, Millie, and who to.’

  ‘That a threat, Ray Duval?’

  ‘No, Millie Toombs, that’s just good sense.’ Ray could see that her eyes were wet as she looked up at him and he knew she was thinking about Kennedy being killed and thinking that with a native son like Lyndon Baines Johnson in the big chair there wasn’t going to be much chance for civil rights until at least the end of that man’s term.

  ‘I’m sorry, Millie.’

  ‘No need to be sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m used to things the way they are; just going to have to get used to it again.’ She took a little breath.

  ‘You make me a mimeograph of the report?’ asked Ray.

  ‘Called a photocopy machine, Ray. We’ve had one for a couple of years now.’

  ‘I’m a bit behind on things like that, Mill.’

  Millie took the report, disappeared into one of the small rooms at the back of the office and came back a few moments later with a copy of the report. Ray folded it in half lengthwise and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket. ‘Thanks, Millie.’

  ‘You go find her, Ray. Find her quick.’

  ‘Do my best.’ He gave her a smile but it faded away as soon as he left Juvenile and stepped back into the hall. If this little girl had been taken by the same man who took Mar’Ellen Caddo he had two or three days at the most before the child was finally murdered.

  It was dark by the time he pulled the Chevy up the Commerce Street ramp and darker still by the time he wound his way across the bands of railway track and into the depths of the Deep Ellum district. Ignoring the girl’s home address he drove directly to the 7-Eleven store, tucked up beside the expressway on an unmarked street that formed a narrow, almost invisible underpass. There was garbage strewn everywhere and when Ray stepped out of the car he could smell the exhaust from the cars up above him and hear the sounds of tyres singing on the pavement.

  He stood beside his car for a moment, listening and tasting the air. He had one of those maudlin images that had been haunting his thoughts ever since the doctors had given him his death sentence. All the people in his hearing, everyone in this city alive today, in the whole country, would be dead and buried in seventy or eighty years, even the little kids like John-John Kennedy and his sister. All of them would be dust and none of it would mean anything, because by then they’d all be replaced. Life went on so amazingly easily when you died, even if you were the president of the United States.

  He went up the narrow paved area to the front door of the scrappy-looking store. There was a stringy-looking white man behind the main counter wearing a short green smock and a white and green fatigue-style cap on his head. His pocket said 7–11 and his name tag said DWAYNE, and below that, MANAGER. Dwayne had an Adam’s apple like a ping-pong ball, pale skin and reddish hair. He looked as though he was about thirty-five but his skin was broken out in acne sores like that of a teenager.

  The store had five narrow aisles loaded down with packaged food, a few necessities like toilet paper and frozen food in a freezer along the back. There was a soft drink cooler just beyond the counter. Tucked in behind the cooler was a photo booth with the word AMAZING on the side and a slot for quarters. Probably where Zinnia Brant had her picture taken.

  Ray went to the soda pop cooler and took out a bottle of Big Red. He popped the cap on the cooler opener and took a sip. It tasted like nothing else in the world, a bit of lemon, a lot of fizz and the sweet sick sense that you were drinking ice-cold liquid bubblegum. He took it over to where Dwayne was looking through a copy of Handguns magazine. There was a picture of an automatic on the cover and a Police Special but the big illustration was a close-up of some cowboy type quick drawing a Colt single-action Army in presentation brass and steel that would probably blow up in your hand if you ever really tried to fire it.

  ‘Like guns, Dwayne?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’ Dwayne asked, looking up briefly.

  Ray took another sip of the Big Red then put the bottle down on the counter. He reached into his back pocket, took out his ID wallet and showed Dwayne his badge. ‘I do.’

  ‘Sure. I like guns. I keep one under the counter.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘’Course.’ Dwayne put the magazine face up on the counter and reached down. He came up with a shiny Colt Trooper, bored as a .357 Magnum. He laid it on the counter beside the magazine.

  ‘Big gun.’

  ‘Big enough.’

  ‘Ever use it?’

  ‘Flashed it a couple of times, kids trying to take a five-finger discount. They don’t do it again.’

  ‘Keep it loaded, Dwayne?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be much use empty.’

  ‘Got a permit?’

  ‘’Course.’

  ‘Company get it for you?’

  ‘Naw. They say you get stuck up, just hand over the cash.’

  ‘Smart.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  ‘Anybody ever try to hold you up?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘How long you worked here?’

  ‘Four months.’

  ‘Know this girl?’ He took out the picture of Zinnia. ‘She’s got braids, she’s twelve years old. She came in here last night around nine. Maybe bought a loaf of bread. You were here last night?’

  ‘Till eleven, just like the name says.’

  ‘Remember her?’

  ‘I’d be lying if I said I did, Officer. I sell a little bit of everything to a little bit of everybody, if you know what I mean. People going to work, people coming home and everything in between. Don’t remember any of them. Go crazy if I tried. Colour blind too.’

  ‘Okay, you don’t remember her. What do you remember, say, between eight and when you closed up?’

  ‘Eight to nine it was pretty busy, mostly cigarettes
and pop.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘Yeah, but older, with cars, you know? High school boys.’

  ‘No problems?’

  ‘Noise, swearing. Talking about Kennedy, what they’d been doing, who’d been in school, who’d been watching and such. More excited than anything. Lot of bullshit going on.’

  ‘What kind of bullshit?’

  ‘One of them said he’d been right there, saw the whole thing, but no one believed him when he said it was a black guy looking out the window with the gun.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Apparently so.’ Dwayne let out a hog laugh that seemed too big for him. ‘Funny thing is, the other boys called him Amos Lee.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Lee. Don’t you get it? Lee like in Lee Harvey Oswald.’

  ‘I see. That the only thing a little bit odd?’

  ‘The Corvan.’

  ‘Corvan?’

  ‘It’s a Corvair van. White. Parked out front for better part of half an hour. Empty. It was getting me a little pissed. Only people supposed to park out front are customers.’