Wisdom of the Bones

by Paul Christopher

  ‘How do you make it happen?’

  ‘Get in touch with the Veterans Administration, I guess.’

  ‘Can you pick your own spot?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There was a lot of ‘shushing’ going on so Ray and Rena went back to his room. There were four beds in the small ward at the end of a long green corridor, three of them occupied. There was Jacko Munro, who’d been gassed at Passchendaele in 1917 and who’d been in and out of veterans hospitals for the better part of forty-five years, his condition deteriorating with each passing decade; Nick Childs, legless and blind and plagued by diabetic ulcers, not to mention being in his seventies and well into dementia; and there was Ray, the youngest of the three. The fourth bed, the one directly beside Ray, was empty.

  Both Jacko and Nick were sleeping when they got back to the room. Ray parked his three-legged IV pole and eased himself into bed, letting Rena fluff up his pillows and then steal a third from the bed beside him so he could breathe better. She sat on the bed and reached out, just touching Ray’s outstretched fingers, the rest of the hand now properly covered in a long-wristed cast.

  ‘I don’t like this talk about funerals and graves,’ said Rena. Her voice was thin and Ray knew she was close to tears.

  ‘I don’t like it much either,’ Ray answered. ‘But if it’s going to be done it’s going to be done right. The first thing is we’ve got to get married as soon as possible.’

  Rena’s eyes went wide. ‘What?!’

  Ray wiggled his fingers. ‘I’m still a cop. They would have bounced me on Friday but it’s too late now. I got this in the line of duty. It’s my shooting hand, my writing hand. I’ll get full disability. It’s fifty percent more on my pension. Brings me up almost to full salary.’

  ‘What does that have to do with us getting married?’

  ‘When I die, you get the money, every month, regular as clockwork.’

  ‘You want me to marry you for your money?’

  ‘No, I just want you to have it. The house too. Everything.’

  ‘But I don’t want anything, Ray. I just want you.’

  ‘You’ve got me for as long as I’m here but I’d like you to still have a bit of me after I’m gone. Just tell me you’ll think about it.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’ She stood up and leaned over the bed. ‘I’ve got to go to work now. I’ll be back after I get off. The nurse said she’d let me in after regular hours.’ She gave him a long sweet kiss and he brought up his good hand and let it slide lightly down the front of her blouse. She leaned into the caress and deepened the kiss for a moment. Then she stood back, her eyes a little wet, smiled and gave him a little wave. ‘Love ya,’ she said, surprising him, and then she turned and left, making her way between the beds almost before he could answer.

  ‘Love you too.’ Surprising himself even more.

  He spent an hour composing and then dictating a handwritten last will and testament to one of the nurses and the rest of the afternoon finding a pair of doctors willing to witness his signature. One was a major who specialised in cancer and the other was a full-bird colonel who was a surgeon and who seemed to think that being a witness along with a major was beneath him, and worse still, witnessing it on behalf of a sergeant.

  They brought dinner around at five, just as it was getting dark outside, but Ray found he wasn’t hungry at all. The tiredness he’d felt the day before was threatening to overwhelm him and the only thing keeping his eyes open was the sound of Jacko’s ghastly breathing and the clicking, whirring sound of the oesophageal tube in his throat and the strange, almost coherent mumblings coming from Nick Childs’s bed, a whispered muttering rant that never seemed to stop. He knew that he had to stay awake, though, because Rena would be coming and he had to tell her about the will.

  He closed his eyes, resting them for a moment, listening to his favourite radio, the Philco 90B that looked like the polished wooden arch of a cathedral. The volume was turned down very low and he could just barely hear it, that old Irving Berlin tune he’d liked so much and for so long, ‘Putting on the Ritz’; a circus tune, part funny with its up-and-down calliope rhythm but something rich and dark and sinister behind it like the Hall of Mirrors or the Freak Show. Half Man, Half Lizard, see Chameleon Boy!

  The radio was still playing and he found himself in the painting from Rose Cottage, seeing details he’d never noticed before, the turn of a leaf on the bush to the left, the underside faint pink, the texture of the sandy road leading down to the launching place, summer hot between his toes and somehow comforting. In the distance, close to the heavily wooded point, there was the small cottage that he knew was theirs and then he knew the truth, felt the thwarts of the old flatboat in one hand and the rod in the other. He was the one in the boat, the one going fishing with Daddy and as if to prove it the old Evinrude burst into life and behind him, without even looking, he felt the thump and rock of the boat as his father stepped over the transom and sat down, the throttle in his hand.

  Twisting the throttle to give it more gas his daddy turned the boat up the lake and away from the launching place, leaving a V-shaped foaming wake behind them, taking them away to the places he’d never fished before, the bright sun from the clear blue sky skittering over the broken water, turning their passage into a trail of shattered glass and diamonds until finally they were almost invisible against the horizon. With a final twinkle of light and faint laughter, Ray Duval reached the dark point at the painting’s end and rounded it, disappearing at last. Forever.

  Epilogue

  Detective Sergeant Ray Duval of the Dallas Police Department Homicide Division died sometime on the evening of Monday, November 25, 1963, three days after the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and one day following the assassination of Kennedy’s reputed killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. The time of Detective Duval’s death is approximate since his passing was not discovered until a visit later that evening by his friend, Rena Michelle Abson. According to his wishes Detective Duval’s remains were transported to Washington, D.C. and he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, plot 224A, Section 3, which stands on the small knoll just inside the gates to the cemetery. Miss Abson was the only person who attended the funeral.

  William Cooper, also known as William Gerritson, was buried in a pauper’s grave on Wednesday, November 27, 1963, in Fort Worth’s Rose Hill Cemetery three plots east of the grave belonging to one William Bobo, an itinerant and indigent cowboy. The actual occupant of the grave was Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Ray won his bet with Jimmy Leavelle. The story of his discovery of William Gerritson’s atrocities and the rescue of one of his victims never made the papers at all. Leavelle anonymously donated the five dollars to the local Dallas chapter of the beleaguered NAACP.

  A week after his visit by Ray Duval, Richard Schwager went up to his sister’s place in Blackstone, sat down among his roses and, with a glass of perfectly brewed iced tea as a chaser, took a massive and lethal dose of morphine. He was dead before he’d fully swallowed the first sip.

  R. T. Odum, once Ray Duval’s partner, was killed in a hunting accident in East Texas on November 30, 1963, under mysterious circumstances. Although some interest was shown in Mr Odum by the Warren Commission when Mr Odum’s house was searched it was found to be completely empty of all furniture and documents.

  A year after Ray Duval’s death the first of a series of heart medications was introduced that would have extended the detective’s life. By the mid-1990s such drugs were commonplace and millions of Americans enjoyed near normal lives while living with congestive heart failure.

  Joseph Civello, purportedly the mafia boss in Dallas and the man who met with Jack Ruby, R. T. Odum and others at Jack Ruby’s apartment, died of an apparent heart attack while awaiting trial on federal narcotics charges in 1969.

  Jack Ruby died of cancer on January 3, 1967, sure that the cancer had been ‘given to him’ by various people in authority who wished to keep him silent.

  Afte
r a protracted legal battle with Ray Duval’s father and brother, Rena Michelle Abson, with the help of the two military officers who witnessed Ray’s holographic will, eventually inherited Ray’s entire estate. While going through clothes to be given to charity, Rena discovered the sabot bullet Ray had picked up off the floor of Parkland Hospital in one of his tweed jackets. Not having any idea of its possible significance, she threw the bullet into the trash.

  Claudius Duval, Ray’s brother, never became governor of Texas and divorced his wife, Cynthia, after she had a very public affair with a local state senator. Claudius Duval died in an alcohol-related accident in 1974. Ray’s father drowned three years later while fishing on Lake Arrowhead, a few miles from the town of Henrietta, Texas.

  Each year between 1964 and 1994, the year of Rena Abson’s death from acute ovarian cancer, she came to Washington in November and placed a single yellow rose on Ray Duval’s grave in Arlington. From 1973 onward, Rena sometimes noticed that a red rose had been placed on Ray’s grave as well and often wondered who the mysterious visitor was. She never found out and never really tried to, although she had her suspicions and respected the other person’s privacy.

  On the fortieth anniversary of the President’s death, November 22, 2003, an attractive middle-aged black woman, Dr Zinnia Brant Heilman, a practising paediatrician and also junior senator from Tripp County, South Dakota, went to the JFK memorial and grave in Arlington Cemetery. She placed a bouquet of yellow roses and one of red close to the grave along with the hundreds of others already there, reserving one flower from each bouquet. She walked back down through the winding paths in the blustery air and then climbed up the knoll as she had so many times before.

  She reached the stone, weathered now, the inscription and the dates steadily wearing down, knowing that he wouldn’t care. She lay down the yellow rose first.

  ‘From Rena.’

  And then the red.

  ‘From me. Zinnie. For my love, for my children, for my work.’ She stopped then, unable to keep back the tears, thinking of all the hours and the days and the years he’d given her. ‘For my life,’ she whispered, smiling as the cold wind shook the last leaves from the trees around her, scattering them down on the grave and then skittering them away across the sloping winter grass, almost as though they were alive.

  Acknowledgements

  During the writing of Wisdom of the Bones, the author consulted hundreds of documents and books. He would especially like to acknowledge the definitive information provided by the Dallas Police Department; the Dallas Archives; Treasure Hunt: A New York Times Reporter Tracks the Quedlinburg Horde by William H. Honan; Regicide: The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy by Gregory Douglas; The Day Kennedy Was Shot by Jim Bishop; The Search for Lee Harvey Oswald: A Comprehensive Photographic Record by Robert J. Groden; Death of a President by William Manchester and With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J. D. Tippit by Dale K. Myers. And last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my editor, Doug Grad, for helping me get the cars right, among other things.

  Author’s Note

  All of the information stated as fact within Wisdom of the Bones is true. There were a number of child mutilation murders in several northern Texas counties in 1938 and one of the victims’ fathers was lynched for the murder of his own daughter. The murders and the mutilations took place as they are described within the novel and to this date they remain unsolved. The homicide files relating to the black children killed are limited to basic information about the victims and the details of the crimes. There is virtually no information relating to any real investigation of the crimes by the various county authorities involved. The names of the victims and their families have been changed out of respect for their surviving relatives.

  Details included surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are accurate and the majority of named characters, such as Captain William Fritz, head of the Dallas Police Department Homicide–Robbery Division, and Dr Earl Rose, Chief Medical Examiner for Dallas County, are real people. Details concerning the arrest and interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder of both President Kennedy and officer J. D. Tippit are also accurate.

  Immediately prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, Jack Ruby, owner of the Carousel Nightclub on Commerce Street in Dallas, really did meet with the organised crime figures mentioned in the book and really did attend a late-night news conference at Dallas Police Headquarters on the night of the assassination.

  Only a few minutes prior to the killing of the President there really was a man who apparently threw an epileptic fit on the sidewalk in front of the Texas School Book Depository building on Dealey Plaza, thus removing one of the strategically placed ambulances on the motorcade route. After arriving at Parkland Hospital the mysterious epileptic disappeared and was never identified or found.

  Thirty seconds prior to the arrival of Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement parking garage of Dallas Police Headquarters someone really did tap out the letter F in Morse code on his automobile horn, generally accepted to be a warning to Jack Ruby that Oswald was on his way down to the garage. Following Ruby’s killing of Oswald an unidentified police detective wearing a white Stetson bent down and administered CPR to Oswald, although it is assumed that any police officer would know that CPR administered to a gunshot victim with a sucking chest wound such as Oswald’s was actually exacerbating the situation and almost certainly hastening Oswald’s death.

  Although Ray Duval is a fictitious character, congestive heart failure, the disease that killed him, is very real and as of the writing of this book affects almost thirty-five million Americans, most of them over the age of forty. In 1963 there was almost no therapy in existence for the disease other than the limited-use diuretics described in the book and its diagnosis was inevitably a death sentence.

  Descriptions of racism and the Ku Klux Klan within the Dallas Police Department are accurate for the period involved. In November of 1963 there were no black police officers of any kind on the DPD, although the population of Dallas at that time was approximately 34 per cent black. There were also no women police officers at the time.

  In 1963 there were 232 homicides in Dallas, 584 reported rapes and 27 kidnappings. Between January and December of that year there were 428 missing persons reports filed. Of that number 64 were black and of those 31 were children under the age of twelve, 26 girls and 5 boys. Three of the boys were found but nineteen of the little girls simply vanished.

  Of the 232 murders in Dallas during 1963, seven took place between November 20 and November 25, not including the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald or Officer J. D. Tippit. Of those seven murders three were described as domestic, one was a rape–murder. The remaining three were ‘simple’ homicides. Only one of the four non-domestic murders that occurred during the time frame covered in Wisdom of the Bones was ever solved. In light of this Ray Duval’s rescue of little Zinnia Brant can only be described as fantasy.

  Like all young countries, America embraces its history almost as much as it embraces change. Much in Dallas has been transformed since that day in 1963. The big Hertz sign no longer graces the roof of the Texas Book Depository and the sixth floor of that building, the floor from which Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly fired his deadly fusillade, is now a museum, almost certainly the only museum in the world dedicated to a split second in time. The Carousel Club is long gone, just like Jack Ruby, although the Texas Theatre where Oswald was captured is still there and still showing second run movies. The old warehouses and the cemetery where Ray Duval fought his last battle have completely vanished and are now an open space called Pioneer Park, a place where office workers eat their lunches and where children play.

  Paul Christopher

  New York/Dublin/Nassau

  First published in the USA in 2003 by Onyx, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by

&
nbsp; Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  57 Shepherds Lane

  Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © Paul Christopher, 2003

  The moral right of Paul Christopher to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788636254

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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