Wisdom of the Bones Read online

  ‘Well, this guy had three.’ He pushed them around on his desk with a pencil.

  ‘No inscriptions?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Maybe he was gay,’ said Perry. ‘Don’t gay guys wear a lot of jewellery?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ray answered. He pushed the rings around on his desk some more and felt a surge of desire for a cigarette. He’d forgotten the Salems on the dashboard of his car and he knew he’d only be able to take a few puffs before his lungs seized up on him and he started gasping. He pushed the feeling down.

  ‘There’s gotta be gays in Dallas,’ Perry offered.

  ‘Maybe I’ll start with the watch instead. Omegas aren’t cheap, especially solid-gold ones. Somebody should remember an engraved inscription like that.’ Perry picked up the watch. He flipped it over and read the inscription. ‘Tempus Fugit sed Amatus est Infinitus.’ He shook his head. ‘“Fuck the weather, she said, the mattress is infinite?”

  ‘I think it means “Time flies but love is infinite.”’

  Ray heard the sound of a door opening and looked up in time to see Fritz leaving his office with another man. The other man was wearing a dark suit, dark shoes and had close-cropped hair. He had Fed written all over him. They left the bureau and through the big glass window in the door Ray saw them heading for the main elevators.

  ‘Who’s the Fed?’

  ‘Secret Service. Probably another meeting with Curry.’ Jesse Curry was the owl-eyed and chubby-cheeked chief of police. Like Fritz, Curry had come up through the ranks. Unlike the captain, Curry had kept on going, calling in favours and playing politics, which was never Fritz’s style.

  ‘Taking Kennedy’s visit pretty seriously.’

  ‘Put it this way,’ said Perry. ‘He’s a long way off his home ground. Better safe than sorry.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true.’ Ray pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and dragged out the Dallas Yellow Pages. He turned to the jewellery section and started making calls. By two in the afternoon he’d given a pass to Perry’s invitation to lunch, gone to the can six times and had a fix on the biggest Omega dealer in Dallas, one of two who carried the Constellation model in solid gold. Once more he headed out into the gloomy day, his legs itching like fury after sitting at his desk for the last two and a half hours. He stopped at the water fountain and tossed down half a dozen aspirin to see if he could make the itch go away but he doubted it. A few nights before it had been so bad he’d gone to the fridge and packed all the frozen food he could find around his legs to see if he could numb the itch but all it had done was change the itch to a burn.

  Edelson’s, the Omega dealer, was on Main Street between Akard and Field just down from the old Praetorian Building. It was in the middle of a fashionable row of smaller stores selling everything from furs to expensive women’s shoes. Edelson’s itself was quite small, less than twenty feet across and perhaps sixty feet deep. The front window was black with a small square of clear glass showing off a diamond necklace on a flared felt neck stand, spotlit from above in a small beige niche.

  Ray went into the store. A woman in her sixties or seventies was having a whispered discussion with a man in an expensive black suit and a second salesman, younger but dressed the same way as his colleague, was replacing a tray of wristwatches in a glass, waist-high counter. He looked up as Ray approached, taking in the slow walk, the rumpled off-the-rack blue suit and the stained, fawn-coloured fedora Ray hadn’t taken to be reblocked since he’d picked it up ten years ago. He went back to arranging the tray of watches in the case.

  Ray reached the man and stopped, placing his hands flat on the top of the counter. The salesman looked annoyed. He turned and took a cloth and a spray bottle and began spritzing the counter around Ray’s large hands. The air filled with the smell of vinegar.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ said the man.

  Ray lifted his hands. The man spritzed and wiped. Ray put his hands down just as they’d been before.

  ‘Sir,’ said the younger man sternly, ‘we like to keep our fingerprints off the counter if you don’t mind.’

  ‘It’s not sir,’ Ray answered. ‘It’s Detective Sergeant.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ The kid looked suitably impressed at the title but he was still giving Ray a dirty look for the way he dressed. Ray reached into his pocket and took out all the jewellery, including the watch.

  ‘Recognise anything?’

  ‘The wristwatch is an Omega Constellation.’

  ‘The rings?’

  ‘I don’t recognise any of them.’

  ‘Flip the watch over.’

  The young man did as he was told. Ray could see that his hands were shaking a little bit. Hiding something? Or just scared of cops in old hats who didn’t take any shit from pretty boys in sharp suits? ‘The engraving is in Latin.’

  ‘You go to private school or something?’

  ‘No, but I recognise it as Latin.’

  ‘Can you tell who did the engraving? Was it your store?’

  ‘Edelson’s does engraving, yes.’

  ‘Did you engrave the watch?’

  ‘It’s very difficult to say.’

  ‘You keep a record of selling watches like this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And engraving them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it shouldn’t be too difficult to put the two of them together now, should it?’

  ‘I’ll have to ask my superior.’ The young man cleared his throat. ‘Mr Edelson is with a client at the moment.’ He nodded towards the front of the store. Ray turned and looked over his shoulder. Mr Edelson was clearly the older man talking to the older woman in the mink coat.

  ‘You want me to get him or do you want to do it yourself?’

  The kid looked terrified at the prospect of Ray barging in on the conversation with Madam Mink and his boss. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Ray. The young man followed the counter around to where Mr Edelson was standing, waited a few seconds for a lull in the conversation and then put his two cents in. Both Edelson and the old lady stared at Ray. He smiled back at them. Mr Edelson went back to his conversation with the old woman and the kid trotted back to where Ray was standing.

  ‘Mr Edelson says if you’ll wait until he finishes with Mrs Saylor he’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Ray.

  He scooped up the jewellery and the watch, turned away from the young man and walked back the length of the store. He stopped beside Mrs Saylor in the mink coat. Mr Edelson looked up and turned his lips into a puckered little pout of disdain. Ray didn’t wait for the man to speak. He took one of the Polaroids of the dead body out of his pocket and placed it on the counter where Mrs Saylor couldn’t miss it. The old lady jerked back as though someone had pulled a chain embedded in the back of her neck.

  ‘My God!’ she said.

  Edelson looked down at the photograph and blanched.

  ‘It looks a bit like a pig trussed up to have its bristles boiled off but it’s not. It’s a man and he’s dead and he was wearing an Omega Constellation which he most likely bought here. I’d like you to answer a few questions about it. Now.’ He turned to Mrs Saylor. ‘If you don’t mind, that is, ma’am.’ He tipped his hat to the old woman and she fled from the store.

  ‘Was that absolutely necessary?’ asked Edelson, making his little pouty face again.

  ‘Apparently,’ said Ray. ‘Your boy back there didn’t recognise the engraving on the back of the watch. I thought maybe you might.’

  Edelson turned the watch over and read the inscription. He nodded. ‘Yes, this is our work.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Mr Vanetti, our engraver, has a particular way with swirls.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know who JP is or PF?’

  ‘The names of our clients are confidential.’

  ‘No state secrets in a watch, pal.�
�

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  Ray dropped the good-old-boy drawl. ‘Nevertheless, if you don’t tell me who JP is, it’s obstruction of justice and it gets you put in jail, you pretentious little prick.’ Ray smiled. ‘Your memory suitably jogged now?’

  ‘Jennings Price,’ said Edelson.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He deals in fine editions and manuscripts. He dealt mostly in metaphysics as well as some Texana.’

  ‘Texana?’

  ‘Books and documents about Texas. Autographs of well-known Texans. It’s become quite a lucrative trade, I hear. There are at least a dozen dealers in Dallas and even more in Houston.’

  ‘You seem to know quite a bit about it.’

  ‘People who deal in luxury items generally associate with people in like positions.’

  ‘Does that mean you knew Jennings Price?’

  ‘Yes. But not well.’ Edelson paused. ‘Was that Mr Price in the photograph?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I assumed it, since you have his wristwatch.’

  ‘And his rings. Three of them. Did the Price you knew wear a lot of rings?’

  Edelson nodded. ‘He tended to be a tad ostentatious with his jewellery.’

  ‘A tad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have an address for him?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s listed in the telephone directory.’

  ‘Save me some time,’ said Ray.

  Edelson nodded curtly and walked back the length of the store. He went through a curtain as black as his suit. Ray looked down through the counter. There were hundreds of rings on display, mostly diamond and sapphire, all of them looking old-fashioned. A discreet card referred to them as ‘estate jewellery.’ Stripped off bodies before they were slipped into their coffins or sold to ward off failing fortunes. Every one of them had probably meant something once upon a time and now none of them meant anything. Someone else’s bad dream or tragedy. Edelson returned with a card in his hand. He gave it to Ray.

  JENNINGS PRICE & CO.

  Fine Editions, Manuscripts & Autographs

  Metaphysics, Exotica & Texana

  93 Stone Place

  Dallas, Texas

  Telephone SH8-1555

  The top line with Price’s name on it was almost unreadable. Stone Place, Ray knew, was a narrow street in the middle of downtown about a block and a half to the east. He’d used it as a shortcut once or twice not so long ago when he walked most places he needed to go downtown and remembered it as lined with high-class stores cheek by jowl in narrow four- and five-storey buildings from the last century.

  ‘May I be of any further assistance?’ Edelson asked.

  ‘Tell me what you know about Price.’

  ‘As I said, I didn’t know him very well.’

  ‘How well?’

  ‘As business associates.’

  ‘A jeweller and a book dealer.’

  ‘Sometimes information would come to me that Mr Price found useful and vice versa.’

  ‘You read much?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You sound like the type of man who reads a fair bit.’

  ‘When I can.’

  ‘Dickens?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘A Christmas Carol, Scrooge, all that?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘That the kind of information you passed back and forth?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

  ‘There’s a scene in the book where a bunch of servants and the undertaker are selling off Scrooge’s stuff to a fence. Bartering. Is that the kind of information you shared?’ Ray tapped the glass countertop. ‘Estate sales. Books, jewellery.’

  ‘I resent the analogy.’

  ‘Sure you do, but that was the nature of the relationship, wasn’t it? You’d tell him about books from estates you were pawing through and he’d do the same for you. Right?’

  ‘If you wish.’

  ‘Make any enemies that way?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Ours is a somewhat closed community. There is no need for the kind of acrimony you are suggesting.’

  ‘So nobody’d kill him for one of his old books.’

  ‘I seriously doubt it.’

  ‘So what would they kill him for, Mr Edelson? Sex, revenge, politics, what?’

  ‘As I said, I didn’t know him very well.’

  ‘Member of any of the same clubs, associations?’

  ‘The chamber of commerce, Rotary.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  Edelson paused. Ray waited.

  ‘We were both members of the Dallas Gourmet Association.’

  ‘Gourmet as in food?’

  ‘Yes. We would invite famous chefs to cook for us.’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘Usually once a month.’

  ‘You’d go for a meal, have a few drinks and then go home?’

  ‘They were largely social occasions. Sometimes we had guest speakers.’

  ‘About food?’

  ‘No. Usually about their own professions, interesting anecdotes, travel tales, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Was Price a long-time member?’

  ‘One of the founders actually.’

  ‘Any enemies there?’

  ‘None that I can think of.’

  ‘Well, he obviously had at least one enemy who really, really didn’t like him, Mr Edelson, so why don’t you think on that fact and I’ll get back to y’all later.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Thanks for your cooperation.’ Ray tipped his hat and left the store. Something behind the man’s eyes said there was more but Ray knew better than to pull on a weed too hard in case you broke it off before you got to the root. He had dandelions in his front yard like that. He’d let Edelson off the hook for a while and then come back at him.

  Ray had parked the car in front of a hydrant a hundred yards away, the sun visor down to show off the DPD emblem and keep away traffic cops. He was a little tired by the time he climbed behind the wheel but the aspirins seemed to have put the itch down to a dull roar. He could feel his feet swelling hard inside his foam-lined Roblees but even that didn’t seem to be bothering him too much today.

  He put the key in the ignition but he didn’t start the car. Instead he just sat there, leaning back against the vinyl seat, staring at the roof liner and seeing nothing, listening to the unsteady beat of his heart. He found himself thinking about the hospital and how strange it had been, lying in a bed in a ward at Parkland, one tube in his arm pushing in the diuretic and another tube up his Johnson draining out an endless stream of piss as his legs and feet and belly went back to normal.

  The guys from the bureau had somehow found an old Dahlberg pillow radio with a detachable speaker you stuck under your pillow so you didn’t disturb the people around you. Instead of listening to the sounds of the people dying all around him he’d listened to classical music that came in perfectly on the white, sausage-shaped Dahlberg. Sometimes he knew that he was hallucinating because the soft-voiced host on the broadcasts was speaking directly to him, but it didn’t matter because it lifted him up and took him away from where he really was and that was all that mattered.

  The radio turned the hospital into a dream that remained dreamlike even when he was well enough to be up and around, dragging his intravenous pole around the ward and then around the entire wing of the hospital, always knowing that any time he wanted he could go back to the bed and lie down and listen to his pillow and the sounds of Mozart and Chopin and a hundred others he’d never heard of but learned to love.

  When they finally let him out of Parkland after two weeks of bringing him back to life he plugged in the Dahlberg at home but he could never find the classical station that had come in so well over the airwaves while he was in the hospital. Sometimes he wondered if he’d hallucinated all of it and the music had never been there at all.

  The wh
ole city was like that for him now, a dream so vivid it had more reality than his waking, breathing day. Always he was apart from it by the slightest of degrees, a captive in time, often a blurred split second ahead, at other times decades gone by. Sometimes he’d be swept away on a deep, almost religious wave of sadness that never seemed to have a source but usually presented him with some tiny fragment from the past he hadn’t thought about in years, the images clear enough to be frightening and wrenching enough to make him catch his breath in his throat and bring tears to his eyes.

  It was exactly 6:39 a.m. on Omaha Charlie. They’d gone up a crevice in the cliff by using their daggers while behind them anyone stupid enough or cowardly enough was getting picked off by enfilading fire from a forward bunker high above them to their left. Ray knew it was exactly 6:39 because he’d seen the mud-spattered face of Lieutenant Norman D. Belcher’s Gruen and that’s what it said. Belcher got to the top of the cliff first, with Ray a few seconds behind. When he came over the cliff, there was Belcher’s Gruen, still on Belcher’s wrist, but it was just his hand and there was nothing left of the rest of his body except some bloody rags and entrails. Ray just lay there in the mud above Omaha Charlie and watched the second hand of the Gruen ticking off seconds that didn’t mean a damn thing any more, because there was no Lieutenant Norman Belcher any more, there was just good old Pfc. Ray Duval and the Gruen. He ’d taken the Gruen off the wrist and put it on his own, not to steal it, but somehow feeling that as long as he wore it a little bit of Lieutenant Belcher was still ticking away, like a pulse. Like a heartbeat.

  Sitting in the car, staring out the windshield, Ray could feel the hot sting in his eyes. He’d worn the Gruen for the rest of the war and then he’d come home and taken it off and put it in a drawer, where it ran down and stopped, surrounded by cufflinks and tie tacks and a few loose buttons. And that was the memory that could bring tears to his eyes: not the death of Lieutenant Belcher but letting the Gruen stop without even noticing it, letting Belcher come to his final end in a dusty drawer.

  ‘Ah, screw it,’ he said. He wiped his eyes quickly. His legs hurt but walking a block or so there and the same back wouldn’t kill him and he needed the cooling air and the smell of rain and at least the illusion that he was alive and all was well. He decided to go for broke and reached out for the pack of Salems on the dash. He lit one with his old Rangers Zippo, the same one he’d had going up that cliff on Omaha Charlie.