Wisdom of the Bones

by Paul Christopher

  Careful not to drag any of the smoke into his lungs until he was ready, he pushed open the driver’s-side door of the Chevy, climbing out by swinging his legs out first and boosting the rest of his body out by levering forward with his arms. He slammed the door, locked it and slipped in between his and another car to reach the sidewalk.

  He leaned against the passenger-side fender of the Chevy to catch his breath and took a short drag on the stale Salem, feeling the menthol bite hard into his throat but holding back the cough that came automatically. To hell with all of it. Today he would smoke a few cigarettes and do his job as well as he could and enjoy one of his numbered days no matter what it gave him and where it took him. When the day was done he’d go home and pour himself two inches of Maker’s Mark in a big glass with two cubes of ice, settle into his big chair and maybe watch The Beverly Hillbillies for a while.

  Ray pushed himself off the fender, flipped away the half-smoked cigarette and headed slowly down the sidewalk back down Main Street to Stone Place.

  Chapter Three

  Stone Place was pretty much as Ray remembered: high-class stores occupying the main and sometimes the second floor of four-storey stone and brick buildings. They had been rich people’s city homes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Number 93 was almost in the middle of the long block between Elm and Main. It was four steps up to the tall, black-painted front door and a discreet brass plaque riveted to the wall beside it said only:

  JENNINGS PRICE & CO.

  ANTIQUARIA

  Ray turned the big brass knob and pushed open the heavy door. He found himself in a short, marble-floored vestibule that had a real elephant’s-foot umbrella stand with a pair of walking sticks in it. Beyond the vestibule was a large room with a high, patterned tin ceiling and narrow-plank pegged cherry floors. The walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookcases except for niches containing display cases every ten feet or so. Down the sides of the room there were more bookcases, head high, and dead centre in a long line there was a trio of display cases with glass tops. All the display cases and bookcases had been stained to match the floors. At the end of the row of display cases there was a huge, ornate mahogany Chippendale Revival desk from the 1920s with tapering legs and claw-and-ball feet. A man in his early thirties, fair hair fading away in a widow’s peak, sat behind the desk in a grey, high-backed upholstered chair, circling things in a catalogue of some kind. He barely looked up when Ray came through the door, then went back to his work.

  Ray decided to hold off revealing himself for the moment. Instead he started browsing the stock, beginning with the bookcases in the alcoves on either side of the vestibule. The books were all old and were arranged in alphabetical order by author: E. B. Fleming, Early History of Hopkins County Texas; Henry Stuart Foote, Texas and the Texans, two volumes; Grant Foreman, Indian Removal; W. A. Ganoe, A History of the United States Army; Pat Garrett, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. Ray pulled that one down and opened it to the flyleaf. It was listed as ‘fine – $150.’ It was a paperback, published in Santa Fe in 1882. About twenty to thirty per cent of the books had something to do with Texas and most of them were histories of some kind.

  He slowly made his way along the line of large display cases in the centre of the room. There were some books, a few objects and a lot of documents of one kind and another, each one identified by a small card: Texas Declaration of Independence, 1836; William Barret Travis’ ‘Victory or Death’ Letter from the Alamo; a collection of Texas currency and half a dozen Davy Crockett letters as well as a copy of Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Wild Sports of the West and Life in the Backwoods.

  Ray went and stood in front of the reproduction Chippendale desk and waited for the man with the widow’s peak to notice him. It was like Edelson all over again. The fair-haired man paid no attention to him at all. He continued to circle things in the catalogue. From where Ray was standing he could now see that it was a listing of books. Widow’s Peak was circling possibles for his master’s perusal, no doubt. Except the master was on a slab at Parkland Hospital by now with Dr Earl Rose cutting him open for a look inside. Ray smiled at that, wondering how Earl would deal with a man in as many pieces as Jennings. His legs had started to itch again and the Salem had made the inside of his mouth dry, another side effect of the diuretic pills. In a few minutes he was going to need a toilet too.

  Ray rapped a knuckle on the desk, just outside the red leather insert that covered most of the top. He was in the perfect frame of mind to question the little snot behind the desk.

  ‘Yes?’ said Widow’s Peak.

  Ray decided to keep it simple for the moment, see how the snot reacted when the other shoe dropped. ‘The boss in?’

  ‘Mr Price, you mean?’

  ‘Is he the boss?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is he usually in around this time?’

  ‘Not on Wednesdays.’

  ‘His day off?’

  ‘You might say that.’

  Interesting, thought Ray. Whoever killed him would have an extra day before he was missed.

  ‘Perhaps I can help you?’ said Widow’s Peak. The look on his face said he doubted it very much.

  ‘I need a bathroom.’

  ‘We don’t have public toilet facilities.’

  ‘I’m not the public,’ said Ray. He reached into his back pocket and took out his buzzer. He flipped open the leather case and showed Widow’s Peak. ‘By the way, what’s your name?’

  ‘Errol Timmins.’

  ‘How about it, Errol? You have a bathroom hidden away somewhere?’

  Errol hesitated then nodded. He half turned in his chair. ‘At the back. The last set of shelves against the back wall is faux.’

  ‘Faux?’

  ‘The books are trompe l’oeil.’

  ‘You lost me.’

  Errol sighed. ‘They’re painted on.’

  ‘It’s a door,’ said Ray.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why didn’t y’all just say so?’ He smiled down at Errol. ‘What else you got hidden behind the faux door and the trompe l’oeil books?’

  ‘The stairs and the freight elevator.’

  ‘Which go where?’

  ‘To the upper floors. Storage on the second floor. Mr Price’s private apartments on the third and fourth.’

  ‘Elevator need a key?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mr Price’s apartment, though, you need a key to get into that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You got it?’

  ‘As a matter of fact I do.’

  ‘Thought you might. Let’s go.’ Ray made a sweeping gesture with his hands.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask what this is all about,’ said Errol.

  ‘Don’t be afraid to ask,’ said Ray. ‘It’s about the fact that I have to take a leak real bad and it’s about the other fact that someone hacked your boss into little pieces and then stuck him in a fridge and took him out to the dump.’

  Errol went pale and his hands reached out to grab the edge of the desk. He swallowed hard. Ray noticed the man’s fingernails looked as though they’d been polished. He’d never seen a man with a manicure before.

  ‘The key.’

  ‘Don’t you…’ Errol’s voice turned into cotton wadding. He swallowed and tried again. ‘Don’t you need a warrant?’

  ‘He’s a victim, not a suspect. You don’t need a warrant to look over a crime scene.’

  ‘Crime scene?’

  ‘Could be.’ Ray shrugged. ‘He might have been butchered upstairs for all I know. Blood splashed everywhere, maybe some guts and brains and who knows what all.’ He felt his kidneys cramp hard. ‘But first I really do have to use the bathroom, Errol, so why don’t you show me the way and then we’ll go on up to Mr Price’s apartment, how’s that?’

  Ray took his leak and then he and Errol went up an ancient, creaking slat-front Otis to the
third floor. Errol pushed up the gate when they thumped to a halt. In front of them was a small foyer wallpapered in gold fleurs-de-lys against a powder-blue background. Dead ahead was a cherry-stained door. Errol made no move to leave the elevator.

  ‘Maybe I should stay here.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Errol. I’ll be needing a tour guide, after all.’

  ‘I know very little about Mr Price’s private affairs.’ Already getting as far away from Price as he could. Nothing like distancing yourself from the dead.

  ‘Who said anything about his affairs? I just want to look around his apartment.’ Ray smiled. ‘You have been up here before, haven’t you?’

  ‘Once or twice.’

  ‘Or more?’

  ‘I can’t remember exactly.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Ray. He put his hand in the middle of Errol’s back and gave him a little shove. Errol stumbled out of the elevator.

  ‘You never gave me the key,’ said Ray.

  Errol reached into his pocket, pulled out a ring of keys and held them out to Ray. ‘You do it,’ said Ray.

  Errol looked terrified and sweat was beading up along the edge of his widow’s peak. ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘I don’t give a shit. Open the goddamned door.’

  Errol fumbled with the ring, found the right key and opened the door. He stood aside so Ray could go first. Ray put his hand on Errol’s back again and nudged him through the doorway. ‘Just in case the killer’s still in there with a machete or something – he’ll hack you up first.’

  Ray followed Errol into the apartment. It was full of furniture, all of it old. The door led into a short hall stuffed with half a dozen varieties of small table, the walls above them crammed with gold-leaf Middle European icons and as many Victorian miniatures, landscapes and portraits, arranged in no particular way or order. The walls were the same pale blue as the wallpaper in the foyer off the elevator.

  Halfway down the hall there was a doorway leading into a modern kitchen complete with fridge, stove, a small freezer unit and Dutch-tiled counters. The floor was done in alternating black and white linoleum tiles. A door on the other side of the hall led into a sparely furnished office with a pair of telephones – one red, one white – and a lot of ledgers. There was an adding machine on one side of the metal desk and a new-looking IBM Executive Electric typewriter in the same powder blue as everything else in the place.

  ‘He like blue a lot?’ asked Ray as they headed down the hall.

  ‘It’s his favourite colour,’ said Errol.

  ‘Better than red.’ Ray smiled.

  They stepped into the dining room. It was dominated by a wide Regency mahogany extending table with two double gate legs. Ray counted all the legs and came up with a total of fourteen. There was enough room to seat twenty in comfortable Hepplewhite mahogany reproductions with silk-upholstered seats in a thin alternating blue and white stripe that matched the wallpaper.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Ray.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The table’s an original but the chairs are fakes.’

  ‘Reproductions.’

  ‘If something’s not real it’s a fake.’

  ‘You know something about antiques, then?’

  ‘I grew up with them all around me.’ That and oil wells, Ray thought.

  The rugs on the cherry floors were all authentic. Dagestan prayer rugs, Shirvan kilims and Kubas in every colour of the rainbow, with blues predominating, of course, including a pale blue Chajli that must have cost Price a fortune.

  ‘He have money or was he born with it?’

  ‘His parents were quite wealthy.’

  ‘Oil?’

  ‘Cotton, I believe. Mr Price was born in Atlanta.’

  ‘Now isn’t that interesting.’ Ray nodded, even though it wasn’t very interesting at all. ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Forty-two,’ said Errol.

  ‘Not married, I take it?’

  ‘No,’ Errol answered stiffly.

  Ray pulled open a pair of pocket doors and they stepped into the living room.

  It was full of furniture, most of it antique, none of it matching, but all of it somehow fitting together as though it belonged. There was a huge corduroy modern sectional that took up one wall and half of the next, a marble coffee table on spindly metal legs, occasional tables, end tables, side tables, Windsor chairs, side arm chairs, club chairs and wing chairs, the giant sectional balanced by a massive Steinway grand kitty-corner to it. The rugs were like the ones in the dining room, only larger. Every horizontal surface was covered with something – lamps, clocks, vases, a pair of Gouda ceramic decanters, a Wedgewood bowl, a Derby vase with penguins on it, busts on pedestals. There were paintings that looked as though they were by Old Masters but weren’t quite, lots of other paintings, mostly landscapes, framed in heavy gilt and a pair of authentic-looking Remingtons – Indian Trapper and White Trapper – and an N. C. Wyeth called The Silent Fisherman. There was also a tall glass display case filled with firearms. Ray recognised a Winchester 73, a Frontier Colt, a Spencer carbine in an original saddle holster and a Smith & Wesson .44. Looking closely at that one, Ray saw that the butt had been inscribed: Texas Jack Cottonwood, Spring 1872.

  ‘Bedroom must be a treat,’ said Ray.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Errol answered but his face was flushed with embarrassment.

  ‘Your boss was a collector.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All sorts of things.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Big piano over there. Mr Price play anything? Dixie maybe?’

  ‘I never heard him play.’

  ‘A lot of this stuff looks expensive, the Remingtons and the Wyeth in particular.’ Errol seemed surprised that Ray had the slightest idea of what he was looking at and who the artists were. ‘Some of it might even be worth killing for, you think?’ Of course in Little Mexico on the edge of the business district you could get somebody killed for a double sawbuck but Price hadn’t died a twenty-dollar death.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Errol answered.

  ‘Anything missing?’

  Errol looked around, his eyes doing a machine-gun inventory that said a lot about how often he’d been in the room.

  ‘There doesn’t appear to be.’

  ‘Any recent pictures of Mr Price around?’

  ‘I think I could find one.’

  ‘Why don’t you just do that,’ said Ray. He eased down on the sectional couch. ‘I’ll just wait for you here if you don’t mind.’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘And while you’re at it, you better get me any legal papers of his you know about – wills, insurance policies, that kind of thing – and the name of his lawyer.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Mr Price have any close relatives living nearby?’

  ‘No, sir, none that I know of.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Umm,’ said Ray from the depths of the sectional. ‘Means y’all are going to have to come down to Parkland and identify the body for me.’

  ‘I’d rather not if you don’t mind.’ Errol looked as though he was going to be sick.

  ‘I don’t mind but someone’s got to do it. That’s the law. He does look pretty bad, I must say, all puffed up like that. Understandable you wouldn’t want to see him that way.’ Ray shrugged. ‘But like I said, it’s the law.’

  ‘Couldn’t you find someone else?’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down for a minute,’ said Ray, patting the sofa cushion beside him. ‘You’re looking a bit on the pale side.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Errol. He sat down, closing his eyes for a moment. His tongue came out and licked his thin, too-red lips.

  ‘Enemies,’ said Ray.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We were talking about them before.’

  ‘No, we weren’t,’ Errol said, frowning as he opened his eyes. There was a gold cigarette case on the marble coffee table in front of them and a silv
er table lighter to go with it. The engraved initials on the lighter were TMD, not PF like the watch. There were no initials on the cigarette case.

  ‘You want to smoke, go right ahead,’ Ray offered. Errol almost lunged for the case. He opened it and Ray saw a photograph inset in the top. ‘Looks like Marlene Dietrich,’ he said.

  ‘It is,’ Errol answered, picking up the lighter and flicking it on. He lit the cigarette. Errol handed Ray the case. It was full of Chesterfields, his old brand. The picture really was of Marlene Dietrich and signed.

  ‘How’d he get it?’ asked Ray, snapping the case shut and putting it back on the coffee table.

  ‘Private sale.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It never came on the open market. A friend of Mr Price offered it to him.’

  ‘How’d the friend get it?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Ray nodded. Four or five years back he remembered reading about Dietrich’s apartment in New York being burgled. The case was probably part of the haul.

  ‘Your boss do a lot of that?’

  ‘What?’ asked Errol, puffing on the cigarette, holding it between his second and third fingers rather than the first and second.

  ‘Receive stolen goods.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Sure you do. Miss Dietrich doesn’t go around selling her cigarette cases ’cause she can’t pay the rent. The case was stolen.’

  ‘Surely you’re not suggesting Mr Price is a thief?’

  ‘It would be a burglar, and no. It’s like I said, he knowingly received the box as stolen goods. Not that it matters, since he’s dead, but it is interesting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it means he wasn’t above that kind of thing. It means he was willing to bend the law. Farther you bend it, more likely you are to get hit with it on the rebound. Enemies?’

  ‘He didn’t have any that I know of.’

  ‘Lovers?’

  ‘I wasn’t privy to his love life.’