Wisdom of the Bones Read online

  Chapter Eight

  By the time he got back to the squad room it was almost four in the afternoon. Dhority and Roberts had two black men in the interview room accused of knocking over a Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse on Inwood Lane, and Leavelle and Cecil Stringer had a man named Drucker in the interview supply room handcuffed to a pipe and waiting to be taken upstairs to the cells on five for beating his wife to death with a Louisville Slugger and trying to cover up by putting her out with the regular trash.

  True to his word, Valentine had sent over a list of clients, sealed in an envelope that Rodney, the desk sergeant, had put in a manila circulating memo envelope. Ray undid the string, stripped open the smaller envelope with a straightened paper clip and sat back in his squeaky old chair to read it. It was broken down into dealers and collectors and neither list was very long:

  DEALERS

  Eric Dunbar & Associates

  Paul Connaught Gallery

  Rose Waring Antiquities

  Arthur Allenby Archives

  COLLECTORS

  J. P. Carran

  Howard Moresby Case

  W. H. Harrison

  Alexandra J. Holt

  William Parr

  Paul Putrelle

  Clifford R. Parker

  Sen. E. Edward Stanton

  Ray didn’t recognise any of the dealers, and he hadn’t really expected to, but some of the collectors’ names were familiar. J. P. Carran was a big-time oil lawyer with a penchant for beating his wives and mistresses, then paying them off; Alexandra Holt gave charity balls and raised money for good causes; Paul Futrelle was the Dallas Supervisor of Schools and Stanton was a redneck state senator who’d bigoted his way into the capitol in Austin on the coat-tails of the local Klan. Ray couldn’t identify the others on the list but presumably they were among the rich and powerful as well.

  He jotted down the names in his notebook along with a badly drawn doodle of Pinocchio and another doodle of an old-fashioned icebox like the one Jackie Gleason had in his apartment on The Honeymooners. He wrote down the words time and care because that’s what he’d seen. Whoever killed Jennings Price had taken a great deal of both and that just didn’t fit in with any idea about murder he knew.

  He wrote out the name Peter Pan, underlining it twice and drawing an arrow back up to his crude drawing of Pinocchio. He seriously doubted Walt Disney had come out from California to kill Price but, hell, you never really knew where a murder was going to take you. Pinocchio was obvious, given the state of the man’s body, but what did Peter Pan have to do with anything except the image of a ticking clock in his chest earlier that afternoon and the fact that the picture had been the last thing he’d seen with Lorraine? He lifted his pencil and was about to scribble out the Peter Pan notation when his phone rang at him. He picked it up and hit the blinking button on the line panel.

  ‘Duval.’

  ‘It’s your brother.’

  ‘Audie?’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fair to middling.’

  ‘That’s no answer, Ray.’

  ‘You sound like the Old Man, except he’d call me Horatio and he’d call you Claudius. And it’s the only answer I’m willing to give because it’s the only one you deserve.’

  ‘Why do you always have to be such a prick about things, Ray?’

  ‘Lack of a formal education, I suppose. You went to Harvard Law and screwed girls, I went to France and got shot at. Now I’m dying from some kind of heart thing that probably runs in the family.’

  ‘You could have gone to any university you wanted. Not like money was lacking.’

  ‘The Old Man wanted you to become a lawyer and then he wanted you to become county prosecutor and now he wants you to run for governor and maybe after that take a run at the White House. Dreams of glory. So far you’re halfway up the ladder. Wichita County prosecutor. The Old Man didn’t have any dreams of glory for me.’

  ‘We going to go into one of these “Daddy didn’t love me” routines?’

  ‘Daddy loved me all right. Every once in a while he’d remember he had two sons and he’d say – ‘What chew up to these days, Ho-Ra-Ti-O.’ And I’d tell him and he’d say something like, ‘Now don’t that just beat all!’’

  ‘I really don’t need to listen to this asswipe, Ray.’

  ‘I got the Congressional Medal of Honor from FDR’s own hands and that’s what the Old Man said. ‘Now don’t that just beat all.’ I got out of the VA with enough screws in my legs to open a hardware store and I come home and you two are playing backgammon on the sun porch and I give him the picture they took of me and the president in the Rose Garden at the White House. I thought he might want to frame it or something. Hang it up somewhere where he’d point it out to his friends but he just looked at it and then he looked at me and then he told me it was a good thing I’d come home because I looked too skinny in the picture and what I needed was fattening up. Then he gave me back the picture. He gave it back to me, Audie.’ Ray tried to control the flood of thoughts coming into his head, feeling his heartbeat begin to accelerate, every once in a while one of the beats like someone thumping his chest with a fist.

  ‘You always took the Old Man too personally.’

  He tried to speak calmly, staying in control. ‘Damn right I took it personally, Audie, since that’s how it was meant, or actually, impersonal’s probably a better description of me and Daddy.’

  ‘It’s his birthday today. His seventy-fifth.’

  ‘Now don’t that just beat all!’

  ‘He wants to see you, Ray. We’re having a party and he wants to see you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he’s afraid he won’t ever see you again. He’s afraid you’re going to die and that he’s going to outlive you and it’s making him sick to his heart.’

  ‘Not as sick as mine.’

  ‘Put away the jokes, Ray. It’s not the time.’

  ‘Who’s joking?’

  There was a long silence. Then Ray heard a sigh that made him see his brother’s drawn face and hound-dog eyes. ‘Why do we always fight this way, Ray?’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘No, Ray, I surely do not.’

  Ray sighed and wished he could still smoke properly. ‘Because we don’t know each other, Audie. We’ve got nothing in common except the past and nothing in the past is worth remembering. We’re brothers by blood but we don’t think the same or hope the same or anything else the same. You want to be governor. I want to solve the murder I’m working on. You like things complicated, that’s why you’re a politician. I like things simple, so I guess that’s why I’m a cop.’

  Another long silence and then Ray’s brother spoke again. ‘I checked. There’s a Southern Aviation flight at seven. I’ll meet it if you want.’

  Ray looked at his watch. Ten past four. Just like his brother to forget how much he hated flying. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive and he could probably beat that if he tried. Cyn would be there, of course, which might make it worthwhile, or it might make it so hard he’d stop breathing. ‘I’ll drive up, Audie,’ he said and gently hung up the phone without saying anything more. He spent ten minutes just sitting there, waiting for calm to come in a room full of crimes and criminals. Eventually it did. He took out the Gem Junior razor he kept in his desk drawer along with a jar of Burma- Shave and a toothbrush he kept there for late nights or early mornings on the job.

  Normally he would have signed out with the captain but Fritz was off at another Secret Service meeting with Chief Curry and had taken his secretary with him, so Ray checked himself out on the chalkboard screwed to the back wall of the jail elevator without any information about when he’d be back. Not that Fritz would care; his head was full of cotton wool with all the Kennedy visit hoopdeedoo and concern for Ray’s whereabouts would probably revolve around whether he was dead or not.

  The detective retrieved his car, drove west almost to Fort Worth and put himself into the heavy evening traffic on U.S. 81. By
the time he reached the little farm town of Rhome the traffic was thinning out and it was dark enough for him to pull the knob for the lights, creating a comforting tunnel of light as he headed for home. He finally gave in, pushed in the lighter and fired up one of the Salems, taking small drags every once in a while, like sipping wine, but mostly letting it just hang in his mouth, letting a little smoke trickle back into his nose, pushed by the stream of air from the half-open vent window. After all, it was a celebration, wasn’t it? The Old Man was seventy-five years old.

  Ray stared down the double cones of light, a faint moon shining on the patchwork of endless fields and low hills in the distance that never seemed to come any closer. He’d always liked driving at night and sight was just about the only thing unaffected by what was killing him. He kept his foot heavy on the gas, keeping the big needle on the fan-shaped speedometer at a steady seventy-five to keep up with the Old Man.

  Most people, he knew, thought about what was going to happen in the future, about things they were going to do, or places they’d go, women they’d sleep with, children they’d have, or millions they’d make before they reached a certain age. Not long ago he’d felt the same way, putting most things out of his mind except the Job and his radio hobby – not happy but maybe content, which was probably the best you could expect at that age after two wars and an ex-wife like Lorraine.

  Now he lived on memories, flipping through them like a deck of cards with girlie pictures on them, pausing once in a while to examine one in particular, then moving on, moving back and forth, trying to find the scheme of it all, but inevitably failing, because it wasn’t just days and nights and people, it was fragments, small pieces of vision, snippets of sound, faint aromas, good and bad that triggered his mind.

  ‘Rolling up a Persian carpet,’ he said out loud around the dangling cigarette. Because that’s what it was. Rolling up his life like a carpet. Setting himself aside in some basement storage room. Years ago, decades ago, he’d read an article about Persian carpets in a National Geographic magazine at the Edwards Public Library on West Gilbert Street in Henrietta. How many stitches in a nine-by-twelve carpet? How many memories in a dying man’s head? Both were created by little children, except the little Persian boys and Turks went blind and all he was doing was feeling sorry for himself because he was dying and going home.

  It wasn’t really home, of course, any more than boarding school had been. Sometimes he thought to himself that he’d never had one. In Burkburnett after the oil came in and the Old Man sold off his ranch in leases the place got too rowdy, so the Old Man moved them all down to Henrietta and bought one of the old mansions that had been abandoned during the Indian Wars. He’d always thought it strange that there were so many mansions there, but they’d been built by men who’d gotten fat selling horses and cattle to the army at Fort Sill just up the way, or shipped them out from the big railhead to Fort Worth and the slaughterhouses.

  Ray’d hated everything about the place and hated it still.

  Small-town Texas at its worst, women putting on airs and graces while they spent their free time fucking each other’s husbands while their sons and daughters fucked each other under the bleachers at Tex Rickard Stadium during football games and sometimes during the annual Clay County Pioneer Reunion and Rodeo. Rickard had been born and raised in Henrietta but he’d escaped and gone on to be the first boxing promoter to put a fight together with a million-dollar purse. He’d even named his own hockey team after himself up in New York, Tex’s Rangers. He’d been one of the lucky ones; most people born in Henrietta died there as well.

  The sex was always fumbling and desperate, a substitute for getting out of town that often ended with the couple staying for the rest of their lives for that brief unprotected fit of passion while the Henrietta Hurricanes battled with every other high school in Clay County. It was one of the few useful pieces of advice his father had given him: ‘Once your tallywhacker’s out there’s no stopping him, so bind the sumbitch up like Holy Moses in his swaddling clothes before you poke her. Remember, son, you marry the woman, you marry the family, and there’s no families in this town I want sitting down at my Thanksgiving table for turkey and sweets.’

  The admonition had two sides to it, of course: the Old Man didn’t want him bringing any big-bellied white trash home to share his turkey and the wealth of his oil leases. He also didn’t want his son Horatio to live any kind of life where the city limits of Henrietta or even Clay County were his only universe. Phillipus Lee Duval knew perfectly well he was a short-mouthed farmer from the dry-as-dust northern boondocks of the state with no whit of a chance to be something other than rich, but he thought he could start a dynasty like the Roosevelts or the Rockefellers and fully intended to have both his sons college graduates, preferably from somewhere in the Yankee north that blowtorched off the edge of their good ol’ boy accents.

  Ray baulked at all of it. Without a by-your-leave on his eighteenth birthday he’d left a note for his old man telling him his intentions and then took the Greyhound into Dallas and joined the cops. For the first few years he tried to keep something going with the Old Man, visiting now and again, but pretty soon he realised that his father was pinning all his hopes on Audie and Audie was responding in the approved manner.

  From then on Ray was never more than a sidebar to his brother’s life. Even when he came home wounded from the war with the highest military decoration in the land, it was Audie’s first murder trial that stole the conversation around the dinner table that night. Even that far back there had been talk of the Old Man’s political ambitions for his son, ways and means of pushing his career from county prosecutor to a position on the bench or a state senator’s slot before he made the hop, skip and one-two jump to governor to congressman to senator and finally to the White House. The Old Man had the money and the connections to make much of it come true but Ray had never liked the look on his younger brother’s face as his daddy spun tales of his son’s future, listening like a little boy while the Old Man spun fairy tales. They were P. Lee Duval’s dreams and Audie was shrugging them on like someone else’s coat while the Old Man stood behind him pulling in the fabric and adjusting the sleeves to make the dreams fit.

  Ray took his left hand off the wheel and tipped the butt of the Salem out the vent window, flecks of the long ash blowing back onto his jacket. He felt a thousand years old and tired down to his bones and not for the first time he found himself almost welcoming the thought of death, letting it come over him like a cool green blanket, taking him down to a dark world without thought or dreams or anything else, the world not changing one little bit because he was gone, not feeling his absence, not caring for his passing in any way at all. Oddly he was beginning to find the thought almost comforting. A soul moving through time, there for a moment, then gone in the wink of an eye.

  At Bowie, roughly halfway home, Ray turned off the main highway and into the town. Once upon a time Bowie was known best for the fried chicken sandwiches you could buy there when the Dallas to Wichita Falls train pulled in but the poultry industry was almost shut down now, replaced by big natural gas storage tanks scattered across the landscape like giant golf balls, while the spaces in between were filled in by dreary-looking, small manufacturing companies.

  He pulled the Chevy up to the pumps at a Texaco station on the outskirts of town and went into the Dine-A-Mite next door. He put down a quarter for the new Life magazine and then sat down at the counter. He ordered coffee and pie and a second coffee to take with him. As he ate and drank he flipped through the Life issue. Some Broadway unknown named Elizabeth Ashley was on the cover and the inside wasn’t much better. Two editorials, one about the Bobby Baker scandal in Congress, the other about a new military government in Vietnam. He read a brief article about a sheriff in California killed by a boy out in the desert that didn’t amount to much except a couple of dead people shot for no reason and the rest of the magazine was full of things he wasn’t much interested in, particularly the begin
ning of a series on the First World War.

  He drank his coffee and ate his pie. Bobby Baker lining his own pockets as secretary to the Senate majority leader was just good ol’ boy politics and nothing new but the paragraph about Vietnam was a telling thing, an omen that most people probably just overlooked because pronouncing names like Ngo Dinh Diem and Duong Van Minh was too hard. After fighting in two of them Ray could smell war coming like the tang of electricity you got in your nose when a storm was on the way. Nobody saw Pearl Harbor, nobody saw Korea and nobody was seeing this. He closed the magazine and finished his pie. The only good thing was he wouldn’t be around to see it.

  He picked up his Dixie of coffee, left it black and added three sugars to give him some extra energy. He paid for the two coffees and the pie, went back to the Texaco and paid for his gas. He set out again, dropping the glove compartment door and jamming the Dixie into the opening. Ray settled back in his seat and drove through town, most of which was shut down for the night even though it was only just past six.

  He turned off at Mission Street and headed along Old State 59 for less than a mile, thinking about Audie and how he’d missed joining up, first for the Second World War because he was still in law school at Harvard and had a deferment and then for Korea, because by then his eyes were bad enough to get him a 4F. It also didn’t hurt that by then he was living back in Texas and the Old Man was serving on his local Selective Service Board. Ray had enlisted both times, which either made him a fool or an idiot or perhaps both.

  Sometimes, even back then, he had wondered if he hadn’t been born to be a warrior plain and simple and that the Job was just a poor excuse. As a child he’d had a recurring nightmare about running through the fog and the skeleton trees of Belleau Wood, firing an empty horse pistol at ghostly German soldiers, weeping because there was no end to the forest or the fog or the Germans and he knew that inevitably he was going to tire and fall and die.