Wisdom of the Bones Page 13

  Ray took a breath and let it out slowly. He’d always been a morbid bastard, which was probably a good thing considering his job and his present condition, but as his ex-partner, Ron Odum, had once pointed out, death was a state of being, not a state of mind. He heard the sound of gravel crunching on the driveway outside and his eyes flickered automatically to his old tweed jacket hanging over the chair, the shoulder rig and the Browning rolled together on the seat. Then he settled back against the pillows. It was too far to get to and whoever was out there probably wasn’t someone intent on blowing his brains out. He waited and a few seconds later Cynthia stepped through the open door, wrapped up in a dark blue silk robe with huge orchids on it. As she stepped inside the cottage she instinctively pulled the knot on the thin belt a little tighter at her waist. Outside he could hear a quick gust of wind creaking through the old hawthorns. A car drove fast down the Old Lake Road, or maybe it was a truck, because there was a lot of gearing down and rattling as it hit the curve just past the cottage.

  ‘Aren’t you a sight?’ She smiled.

  ‘I could cover up if I’m causing offence.’

  ‘No, don’t do that. I like boxer shorts.’

  He looked down at himself. They were plain, light blue. ‘Nothing special. Just Fruit of the Loom. Cotton.’

  She sat down on the edge of the bed. She put her thumb and forefinger around the hem of one leg. Her touch made his skin quiver. ‘I thought they might be silk.’

  ‘I’m not the type to wear silk boxers.’

  ‘No. Always the practical one.’

  ‘Audie sleeping?’

  She curled her lip. ‘Passed out.’

  ‘The Old Man?’

  ‘Went to bed hours ago.’ She looked at the tiny gold watch on her wrist. ‘It’s late. Past one.’

  ‘I’m surprised you’re still up. You should be asleep yourself.’

  ‘Speak for yourself. You being sick and all and here you are up and working. Can’t be good for you.’

  ‘Difference is I don’t much care any more,’ Ray said. ‘And I like to work. Makes me feel like I’m doing something.’

  ‘All I’ve ever been is a wife.’ She paused. ‘Or a girlfriend. I never even got to be a mother.’

  ‘You or Audie?’

  ‘Neither one of us, though he never got checked. Just… it didn’t work out. Wouldn’t have been good for the job.’ There was an awkward pause.

  She moved her hand so that it lay flat in the centre of Ray’s boxers. She started to move her hand back and forth in small motions, then grabbed him through the fabric, milking his foreskin back and forth the way she had years ago. ‘You don’t have to do this, Cyn. You shouldn’t do it.’

  ‘I want to.’ He started to thicken, which was a surprise, because the last thing on his mind these days was sex; death had a way of dampening his urges, not to mention the effect of his failing heart.

  ‘What about Audie?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t owe him anything.’

  ‘He said you played around.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t want me or he doesn’t need me or maybe he just doesn’t care either way.’ She pulled at his shorts and his half erection slithered out.

  ‘Then get a divorce. It should be easy enough.’

  ‘Real easy.’ She leaned over and took him into her mouth briefly, something she’d never done back when they were together. She brought up her head and it made a wet little popping noise. ‘Trouble is, it would be bad for his career.’

  ‘What do you care about his career?’

  ‘If he’s going to be a senator, then I’m going to be the fucking senator’s wife. If he’s going to be the governor, even better.’ Another shock, he’d never heard her say fuck before and he began to understand that he’d never really known her at all. She started sucking at him again but he reached down and pulled her away.

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘I want you to come. I want to do it for you.’ She paused and he thought he saw tears forming in the corners of her eyes but he didn’t believe her for a minute. ‘I wanted to because you’re…’

  ‘Sick? Dying?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sighed because he was a professional when it came to knowing a lie from the truth, even when the lie was halfway plausible like this one. ‘No, Cyn, you want to do it for yourself. You want to screw your husband’s brother again so you can betray him just like you betrayed me.’ He pushed her away. She sat back and Ray pulled up his boxers and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

  ‘I never betrayed anyone. You were gone and he was there. I didn’t know if you were coming back from the war.’

  ‘You could have waited to find out.’

  ‘I had a life to live.’

  ‘You married my brother for the money you knew he was going to get. You married him for the power you thought he might have. I was a cop and I was always going to be a cop and you didn’t like the idea of being a cop’s wife. You would have dropped me even without the war.’

  She raised her hand to slap him but he caught her wrist. ‘You go on now, Cyn,’ he said softly. ‘You go on and leave now.’ He let go of her arm. She stood up and gave him a long look. ‘I hope it works out for you and Audie. I hope he takes you as far as you wanted to go.’

  She made a little face and looked down at the still-visible evidence of her ministrations. ‘That’s all you are, all of you. Pale white cocks. Fat worms. You think that’s all women want.’ She turned away and as she did so Ray could see that the tears were flowing freely now but they were from anger, not compassion. She reached the door and he stopped her. ‘Cyn?’

  She turned around. ‘What? Changed your mind?’

  ‘You tell Audie what you did here or lie to him about it and he won’t believe you, understand?’

  ‘I could make him believe me. I could make him think I screwed you all night long.’

  ‘You know something, Cyn, I don’t think he’d really give a good goddamn one way or the other. You’d just wind up making things harder on yourself.’

  ‘Fuck you, Ray Duval.’ She went out, slamming the door hard. Ray stood up and went to the desk, picked up the gun and rig and looped it over the back of the chair. He sat down and riffled through the files again until he got to the slim folder given over to the Lucille Edmonds investigation, what little of it there was.

  He opened the folder and read through it again and saw what he’d missed the first time. Lucille was taken walking home from school. After a war or two and twenty-five years, Finney, Moran and Durkin might be dead and gone but what about Lucille’s friends? They would have been walking home from school just like her and some of them, at least, would almost certainly still be around. He picked up the phone, dialled 0 for operator and asked for Haynesville information. Haynesville didn’t have its own exchange but Electra did and the operator there gave him what he wanted: the number for the black elementary school in the area as well as a number for its principal, Mrs Amanda Pinkers. He jotted down the numbers in his pad and went outside to take a last breath of air before trying to sleep. Outside the crickets were chirping as though it was summer and overhead there wasn’t a cloud to be seen. It was a beautiful night and strangely warm for so late in the year.

  Standing there, smelling the pine and the hawthorn and the air still sweet with a hint of rain in it, he suddenly knew exactly where he belonged in the world and what it had all come to in the end. A few weeks before he’d been watching the Disney show on a Sunday, which might have been an omen if he believed in omens, and there’d been a part about time-lapse photography. He’d watched plants grow like magic and buildings rise in seconds from basement to topping off. He’d been entranced by it all, especially the time-altered opening of a blood-red rose from nothing but a dew-sprinkled bud at first light to a brilliant full-blown flower by midday. To most it would just be a camera trick but for Ray it had been a haunting epiphany of what time’s essence
really was and standing in the doorway of the cottage, Rose Cottage, he understood that whatever length of borrowed time remained to him, his purpose was to reach back through the years and solve the savage killings of Lucille Edmonds and all the rest, which in turn would give him whoever had killed Jennings Price in the here and now. A small thing in the universe perhaps but something to hang on to as he drifted to the grave: I did this one thing, if nothing else, and there need be nothing more to ease me to my death.

  Friday

  November, 22, 1963

  Chapter Eleven

  Ray was up at six, shaved and showered by six thirty. He thought about taking his water pill then decided against it; the last thing he needed was to be pissing like a racehorse all day and missing a dose wasn’t really going to make that much of a difference in the long run. He laughed, nicking himself with the razor; he didn’t really have a long run according to the doctors.

  He put on his shoulder rig, slipped into his jacket, scooped up the old file folders and headed out the door. He had a quick, lucidly erotic memory of Cynthia and pushed it away, ashamed enough for both of them. He climbed into the Chevy, wound up the dashboard clock as usual, setting the time from his wristwatch, then threw the files in the back seat and drove away.

  Reaching the end of the Old Lake Road he turned onto Highway 79 and headed north. He could still see the image of the blossoming rose in his mind and for the first time in weeks he felt interest and energy flowing through him. It was like that old spiritual he used to hear sometimes when he was a boy, ‘May the Circle Be Unbroken.’ He began humming it under his breath as he drove, slipping onto 287, heading north-west towards Iowa Park and then to Haynesville, where it all began.

  At ten past eight he reached Electra and swung off the highway onto old State 25, a strip of two-lane blacktop that had been patched so often there was barely any of the original road left. The land was mostly scrub brush and small farms, half of them looking deserted. He reached Haynesville a few minutes later, barely recognisable as a town except for an old general store, a Gulf station and a liquor joint. There were half a dozen other buildings in varying states of repair clustered around the crossroads at the intersection of State 25 and County 240. A weathered sign said the population was sixty, which looked about right. He parked the Chevy and went up the worn, parched steps to the porch of the general store. The day had turned bright and strangely hot for November. Kennedy would have near perfect weather for his parade.

  There was a big red Coca-Cola cooler beside the screen door and Ray paused, pushed open the top and pulled a bottle out of the water-ice inside. He used the opener on the front of the cooler then went into the store through the screen door. The place was small, two aisles and a counter, with wood plank floors that had lost their varnish half a century ago. A tall thin man in his late fifties or early sixties wearing bib overalls was leaning on the inner side of the counter. He had a hand-rolled cigarette burning in his mouth and a copy of the Wichita Falls Times Record News in his hands. Kennedy’s visit was all over the front page, just like it was on every other newspaper in Texas. Ray dug a nickel and a penny out of his pocket and put them on the counter in front of the man. He ignored the coins. Ray dug his wallet out of his back pocket and pulled out a dollar.

  ‘Package of King Sanos.’

  The man in the bib overalls didn’t look up from his paper. ‘You see them up there?’

  Ray looked over the man’s shoulder at the rack of cigarettes against the wall. There were no King Sanos. ‘Can’t see them.’

  ‘’S because they eren’t there.’

  ‘Newports then.’

  ‘Eren’t there neither,’ said the man. He pushed his newspaper off to one side, picked up the nickel and the penny and slipped them into the front pocket of the bib overalls. ‘You gonna rob me or something or you really want cigarettes?’

  ‘Do I look like I’m going to rob y’all?’

  ‘Look like you’ve got a gun under your jacket, one of them fancy holsters like you see on that Naked City story on television. Man comes into a store, asks for cigarettes eren’t there and has a gun might be thinking about robbing. Wouldn’t be a smart thing to do though.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Been robbed before. Didn’t like it.’

  ‘Understandable.’

  ‘You look old enough for the war. You in it?’

  ‘Europe. Rangers. Korea.’

  ‘Then you know what a trench gun is.’

  Ray nodded. ‘Sure do. Military shotgun. Winchester. Army used it in both World Wars. Korea as well.’

  ‘Cut down the stock and bolt it under the counter, stops you getting robbed too. Put a big hole in the side o’ the counter I’d have to fix but put a big hole in y’all too. Right about where you keep your ladypoker from where I’m standing.’

  ‘I’m a police officer.’

  ‘Not a Texas Ranger. Not County Sheriff neither. I’d know.’

  ‘Dallas PD.’

  ‘What do you want here?’

  ‘You live here long?’

  ‘Never left except for the war. Born, growed, got old, all in the one place.’

  ‘Ever hear of a little girl named Lucille Edmonds?’

  The man stared at Ray as though he’d seen a ghost. ‘Shee-it!’ he whispered. ‘Not heard that name since I was a little-bitty boy.’

  ‘So you knew her?’

  ‘She wasn’t no playmate of mine. But she shopped in this store when my daddy owned it and so did her daddy too. What was his name?’

  ‘Titus.’

  ‘Right. I remember now.’

  ‘They lynched him.’

  The man in the bib overalls nodded. ‘That’s right, that’s right,’ he said. ‘Like to ripped his head right off his shoulders.’

  ‘You saw it?’

  ‘Yeah, I saw it,’ he said gravely.

  ‘You know a woman named Amanda Pinkers?’

  ‘Sign out there says population sixty. More like fifty-two or three. I know them all.’

  ‘Know where she lives?’

  ‘Sure. Mile north ’til you get to the turning. Go right on East Lalk ’til you cross China Creek. She’s got the house beside the school.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Ray drained off his Coca-Cola, then put the bottle on the counter. He turned and left the store.

  ‘You got two cents on that bottle comin’,’ the man in the bib overalls called out.

  ‘Keep it,’ Ray answered without turning back.

  He drove up Highway 25, turning away from the blacktop as it headed west, following a gravel road east. With the window open for a breeze he could smell the sharp tang of the Red River less than a mile or so away, the border between Texas and Oklahoma. He crossed a plain concrete bridge with a little sign before it that said CHINA CREEK and he was there, a plain white house with a groomed lawn that went down to the creek and a larger building beside it with a row of small windows on one paint-peeling wall. The building had a tiny belfry like a church and Ray could see an old rusty bell inside it.

  He pulled onto a rutted drive beside the house and got out of the car. The smell of the creek was thick and dark as peat, overwhelming the more distant tooth of the river. There was a porch facing the road, with an old-fashioned glider on one side and a screen door on the other. He tapped on the frame of the door and a few moments later he heard the sounds of shuffling footsteps. A small, bent woman appeared at the door, skin black and wrinkled, eyes blinking behind wireframe glasses and hair shining white, bound back with a rubber band in a little knot at the back. She had to be at least eighty or eighty-five. Her dress was long and printed with small blue flowers. She looked a little startled to see a white man on her porch and a little afraid. He hoped a little corn pone and some manners would make her less so.

  Ray took off his hat. ‘Morning, Mrs Pinkers. My name’s Ray Duval. I’m a detective from down in Dallas.’

  ‘Duval?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Relati
on to Claudius Duval, the county prosecutor?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. He’s my brother.’

  ‘What do you want with an old black lady this time of the morning?’

  ‘Wanted to ask you some questions if I could.’

  ‘I do something wrong?’ She smiled thinly. ‘Rob a bank? Murder someone? Memory’s not what it was.’

  ‘No, ma’am. This is about something that happened a long time ago.’

  ‘Lucille Edmonds?’ said the little old lady without a hitch or pause to take a breath. ‘Or Titus, her father?’

  ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘I’m old. You get old, you either get stupid or you get wise. Nothing else happened in Haynesville since they paved Highway 25 and Henry Haynes built the General Store. Luci Edmonds was murdered and so was her father.’

  ‘He was lynched.’

  ‘That’s murder in my book.’ She paused. ‘How ’bout yours?’

  ‘Murder in my book too.’

  ‘Why you coming around after so long? Twenty-five years now.’

  ‘I think there may be a connection to a case I’m working on.’

  ‘That the only reason?’

  ‘At first. Then I saw how badly Lucille’s case had been investigated and I thought it deserved another look.’

  ‘Well, good for you, son.’ She pointed to the glider. ‘You sit down and I’ll get us some iced tea. You like it with lemon and sugar?’

  ‘Sure, that’d be fine.’

  ‘Sweet or sour?’

  ‘Little on the sour side.’ He paused. ‘What about the school?’

  ‘Gave the children a day off. They’ll be coming in at noon to watch Mr Kennedy’s procession on the television. Chance for them to see a white man who has a care for the black race doesn’t come too often. Him and the Reverend Mr King, except they don’t seem to give him as many parades.’