‘Like someone who can play Mozart on the piano two-handed but can’t wipe his own ass, right?’
‘Something like that but Cooper was certainly not so… extreme. He seemed perfectly capable of dealing with his own bodily functions, for example.’
‘So you guys didn’t mind him?’
‘He did his job and he did it very well. Much of the time he kept himself to himself but he was always personable and friendly.’
‘Schwager said he disappeared in Berlin.’
‘That’s right. Both our group and the Art Looting Investigation Unit were there simultaneously. That was late July of 1945, shortly after the end of hostilities. The Russians were stealing everything they could get their hands on; we tried to save what we could. That’s when Cooper had his unfortunate accident.’
‘Accident?’
‘He had talked to someone who told him that they knew where there was a cache of rare books from the State Library, including a Schrifft Bible from the fourteenth century and a copy of Cavalieri’s Portraits of the Roman Pontiffs.’
‘Valuable?’
‘Worth millions, even then. Virtually priceless.’
‘So he went off to fetch them and never came back?’
‘No. He went off to fetch them and was murdered.’
‘He’s dead?’
‘Without a doubt,’ said van Plaut. ‘He was found by the local MPs the following day in the ruins of the Nollendorfplatz Theater in the Schöneberg District. Someone had covered Mr Cooper’s body with debris and set fire to it. The body was badly burned but he was easy enough to identify apparently.’
Ray saw his entire theory spinning down the toilet bowl. William Cooper might well have been killing little children in the thirties but he wasn’t killing them now or knocking off Jennings Price either. He thanked van Plaut for his help then let the art historian get back to his Dutch Masters.
He still wasn’t willing to let go of the theory entirely; too many of the pieces fit. He decided to get dressed and go down to headquarters. Somebody would be in the County Sheriff’s Offices up in Lubbock and Decatur and maybe one of them had information about William Cooper that would point the way to a living killer instead of a dead one.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ray dressed in trousers and a white shirt, threw on his shoulder rig and shrugged into his tweed jacket. He pushed his swollen feet painfully into his old loafers then went back to the kitchen, where he picked up Schwager’s address book and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. Before leaving the house he switched on the TV for a minute. Every station was showing the same thing: the President’s flag-draped coffin heading down Pennsylvania Avenue to lie in state under the Capitol Dome and shots from inside and outside headquarters as they waited for Oswald to be transferred over to County Jail. Ray switched off the TV and left the house. If he was lucky he’d arrive after all the fuss was over.
He spent the ten-minute drive thinking about William Cooper and his friends, especially Jennings Price. Why had Price been carrying an envelope from the Army Records Center? With Cooper dead, whose records would he have been searching and why? The only thing Ray could come up with was that perhaps Price knew who Cooper was going to meet that night and somehow managed to get hold of the supposedly priceless books, the Bible and the book of papal portraits. Maybe Price had been lurking in the ruins of the Nollendorfplatz Theater that night and perhaps he had seen Cooper’s murder.
Jump ahead eighteen years to the present and suddenly Price runs into Cooper’s murderer and starts to blackmail him or is simply killed for recognising the man. A new dealer in town or perhaps a new client. But if that was the case why would Price’s killer be running around kidnapping little girls like Zinnia Brant? It was the continuing bugbear about the case – making the past line up with the present.
When he got to headquarters the Commerce Street ramp was blocked by an armoured car, presumably to carry Oswald, or more likely to act as a very visible decoy as well as completely block off that entrance to the basement. There were two uniforms walking back and forth in front of the heavy-jawed vehicle and a scattering of reporters. Ray kept on going, turned left on South Pearl, then turned left again on Main Street. Halfway down the block he turned down the Main Street ramp entrance to headquarters, waving at the pair of uniforms and flashing his badge.
He slowed at the stop sign painted on the floor at the base of the ramp and honked his horn a couple of times to get the crush of reporters to move out of the way so he could park. As he turned left into the basement level of the garage he waved again, this time at a detective friend from Robbery Division, Rio Pierce, who was piloting a black unmarked car out of the lot and up the ramp.
Ray parked the Bel Air and sat behind the wheel for a moment. He realised he’d picked just about the worst possible time to arrive at headquarters. There appeared to be at least fifty uniforms and more than twenty Stetson-wearing detectives in a human corridor that led from the jail office door to the foot of the ramp. Behind the cops there were a dozen film and TV cameras with their lights as well as another thirty or forty reporters and technicians. It was a zoo and it meant that the jail elevator was going to be tied up. That in turn meant he’d have to use the basement stairs to get up to the first floor and the main elevator bunk or sit and wait it out. He decided to wait it out and rolled down his window.
He glanced at the clock on the dash in the dim light and wondered how long he’d have to wait. It was 11:20. He’d managed to find a parking spot between a DPD paddy wagon and a cherry-top Ford Custom cruiser, which gave him a perfect view of the scuttling mass of humanity focused on the door leading out from the jail office. He leaned back in his seat to enjoy the show and at the same moment he was startled to hear a car horn echoing from somewhere behind him. It wasn’t the sound so much as the methodical sound of it: short, short, long, short. There was no mistaking it – dot, dot, dash, dot. Morse code for the letter F. The only people he knew who even used Morse code any more were him and R. T. to announce their arrival at one another’s homes, something they’d been doing for years. He turned around in his seat and peered out through the rear windshield, almost expecting to see Odum’s banana-yellow Corvette but it wasn’t there.
Ray turned again as an expectant rumble of voices came from the reporters. He looked out the windshield and saw that the lights from the cameras were all focused on a group of figures coming out the door that led back to the jail office and the elevator. One of them was Fritz, his craggy, jowled face serious and his Stetson pulled low. Behind him, and towering above the homicide captain, was Leavelle, also wearing a Stetson, handcuffed to a much shorter man who Ray vaguely recognised as Lee Harvey Oswald. It was hard to believe that a skinny little pissant like him could have killed the president of the United States and then pumped a street cop like Tippit full of bullets. He looked more like a janitor in a high school or give him a few more years and he’s ‘Peachy,’ driving an elevator in some government building.
Somebody in the crowd yelled out ‘There he is!’ and all hell broke loose as the pack of reporters and camera people surged forward, bathing the whole area around the jail office door with blinding light. Suddenly, out of nowhere, hidden by the glare of lights, a short dark figure in a fedora pushed through the throng of press men, his arm extended. From the first movement of his locked forearm Ray knew who he was and what he was going to do.
‘Jack,’ he said softly, staring in horror. ‘Jack Ruby, you son of a bitch, you’re going to kill him.’
Ray had his hand on the door handle but it was far too late. There was a single hard familiar popping sound. A .38 Police Special. Oswald grabbed his guts, dragging Leavelle’s shackled hand towards his belly and staining the detective’s jacket sleeve bloody red. A dark green car, probably the one they were really going to use to transport Oswald, hit the mobster in the back of the legs and thumped him down on the floor of the garage before he could get off another shot.
A split second after t
hat Lou Graves from Homicide and Billy Combest from Vice dropped down on Ruby, Graves pulling the handgun away from Ruby and turning it away out of his reach. People were yelling loudly and milling around but Ray could clearly see Leavelle down on his knees beside Oswald, still handcuffed to him. His hat was tipped back on his head and the detective was looking around wildly, trying to make himself heard over the roar of the crowd all around him.
‘An ambulance! Let’s get an ambulance here!’
The car that was supposed to take Oswald to County went rocketing up the Main Street ramp and away and Ray watched as Ruby was hustled back through the jail office door with half a dozen detectives in tow, a phalanx of uniformed cops stopping the news and TV people from following. For the first time it occurred to Ray that he had actually witnessed a homicide in his life and a moment later he realised that it was almost certainly the first murder ever broadcast on network television.
For some strange reason he felt tears welling up in his eyes at the simple awfulness of what he’d just seen and the things preceding it. It was as though the killing of the President was just the first ripple in the pool and this was the next, both inevitably leading to a new world where this kind of violence was the rule and not the exception any more – an America that would be changed forever.
A pale green O’Neal’s ambulance backed down the Main Street ramp, siren wailing and bubble light twirling. Two men got out, opened the tailgate of the slightly remodelled Ford wagon and pulled out a collapsible stretcher. The crowd of reporters and cops parted before them and a moment later they came back out of the crowd with Oswald on a stretcher, one hand dangling and dragging on the ground. The two men loaded the stretcher into the back of the wagon, climbed into the front seat, then went tearing back up the ramp, siren screaming, followed by a tattered line of cops and reporters.
Within five minutes of the shooting the basement was almost completely empty. No one was making any effort to block off any area as a potential crime scene. It was as though nothing had happened at all. The body had been removed, the perpetrator taken to jail, the evidence of his crime so overwhelming that nothing else needed to be done. Ray knew the shot was fatal from the instant he heard the gun firing. A .38 fired point-blank into Oswald’s mid-chest from that angle would have ripped through every major organ in the man’s body, including heart and lungs. Oswald might not be officially dead, but he soon would be, and if Ray knew Chief Curry and Captain Fritz, that would be the end of any real investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Dallas would do its time in purgatory silently but it would also do its time with a suspect apprehended in minutes and the suspect’s executioner in less time than that. Curry and Fritz would assume they might endure a lot of ribbing about letting a prisoner get shot while he was handcuffed to one cop and surrounded by a hundred more but maybe that wasn’t so bad compared to being the focus of a trial that might go on for months, if not years.
Staring out into the empty, now-silent garage where murder had just been done, Ray knew that Curry and the captain would be wrong in their assessment of what lay ahead. Ruby’s single shot had turned Oswald from a suspected killer into a myth and myths, as Ray Duval well knew, had a tendency to last forever. A million questions would be asked by a million people and would remain unanswered. Years would pass, decades perhaps, and the mystery would endure.
Ray smiled thinly, thinking about the myth of his own life, the myth of sitting with his non-existent grandchildren, telling them the story of how he’d actually been there and seen the blood on Jackie’s suit, seen the President’s blood and brains leaking into his makeshift plastic shroud, seen Jack Ruby lunge forward into the TV lights and history, putting a single shot into Lee Harvey Oswald and starting a never-ending story with an infinite number of good guys and bad guys, beginnings, middles and endless endings.
Ray finally climbed out of the Bel Air, locked it and walked out of the lot and up onto the ramp. He crossed the spot where Oswald had been shot and took a quick look, noting that there was no blood on the floor, probably meaning that there had been no exit wound. Ray stopped where he was and thought for a moment. Unless it had hit bone, Oswald’s spine maybe, a .38 fired from that range should have gone right through him. Ray reached into his jacket and took out the bullet he’d picked up off the floor at Parkland on the day of the assassination. Definitely a rifle round but smaller than he’d originally thought and unjacketed. What if Ruby had been using the same kind of ammunition, a ‘sabot,’ as it was called, where a smaller calibre, unjacketed bullet was fitted into a larger casing; such a bullet was lighter, would travel faster and would do a great deal more damage as it tumbled through the meat of the intended target.
He put the Parkland bullet back into his pocket, went through the entrance to the jail office and rode the elevator up to Homicide. This time he took his chances and bullied his way through the crowd of reporters, nodded to the two uniforms standing guard at the door and then stepped into Homicide–Robbery for the first time in days. There was no sign of either Ruby or Curry but Leavelle, his long horse face still looking shocked and horrified by what had just happened, was tagging some evidence at his desk, including Ruby’s gun. As Ray had assumed it was a .38 Police Special, in this case a Colt Cobra Hammerless. Leavelle was handling the weapon carelessly, not paying any attention where he put his fingers.
‘Karl been over it yet, Jimmy?’ Karl Knight was the head of the DPD fingerprint section.
Leavelle answered with a sour look on his face. ‘Naw and I got a suspicion he ain’t never going to go over it. Who needs fingerprints when you got ten or twelve million witnesses on TV?’
‘I didn’t see Carl Day or any of his people down in the basement either. Shouldn’t there be some kind of crime scene perimeter or something?’
Jimmy Leavelle’s tone was bitter. ‘Well, it’s funny, you know, Ray. We get the President killed and there’s about a thousand cops running around with their big goddamn shoes messing everything up, and today there’s a guy shot right there on TV with my goddamn hand cuffed to him and there’s no crime scene there either, because we just know what we’re doing so well that we don’t need people to pick up bullet casings or mark things up right, or maybe even interview a few people about where they were when the gun went off, or who that fool was who jumped in and started giving the poor bastard artificial respiration after he’s been shot in the belly and the chest and probably has both his lungs shot through.’
‘Missed that,’ Ray paused. ‘Where’s Ruby now?’
‘Up on five in his underwear. What do they expect, he’s got a machine gun shoved down the back of his fat-ass pants?’
‘Can I see the gun?’
‘Sure.’ Leavelle looped the tag through the trigger guard of the handgun and gave it to Ray. He popped open the cylinder and emptied it into his hand. There were five live rounds that looked like standard Remington-Peters 158-grain loads. The empty shell casing was a Remington-Peters .38 as well but the neck of the brass had been crimped as though to take a different bullet. Ray reloaded the gun and was in the process of handing it back to Leavelle when Fritz came out of his office, smacking the door against the wall behind him, the Venetian blinds clattering.
‘Just what the fuck do y’all think you’re doing, Duval?’
‘Looking at Jack Ruby’s gun.’
‘This your case, Duval?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well then what the fuck are you handling evidence for?’
‘Ruby’s part of my case.’
‘No, Jack Ruby is fucking well not part of your case, Detective. In fact as far as you’re concerned you don’t have a fucking case, you understand me.’
‘No, sir. I don’t understand you because I do have a case.’
‘Bunch of little black girls killed way back when that nobody gives two shits in the wringer about and I’ve got the fucking crime of the century on my hands. You know that, Detective Duval, they’re calling this the crime of the ce
ntury in the newspapers. Used to be the Lindbergh baby back in New Jersey but now it’s the fucking crime of the century, Duval, and I don’t care about your little kids, and I don’t care about some dead guy chopped up in a refrigerator. What I do care about is the fact that Lee goddamn-his-fucking-eyes Harvey Oswald is probably dying up to Parkland right this minute and all I got to show for it is some strip club owner who thinks he’s fucking Al Capone or something and I got the world thinking this good ol’ boy is personally responsible for arranging Dallas as the best place in the world to kill the president of these United States, so I don’t need any crap from you, Detective Duval, and in the middle of all this I most certainly do not like being given personal shit by Mayor Earle Cabell about why one of my detectives was going around slandering one of his school supervisors. Now do you understand me, Detective?’
‘Yes, sir, I suppose I do.’
‘No more cases. You’re on medical leave. You’re going to go to your check-up next week and you’re going to be given a meritorious discharge from the Dallas Police Department with a recommendation for a full disability pension and a bonus for early retirement. How does that sound, Ray?’
‘Just peachy, sir.’
Fritz’s eyes went to little slits behind his black glasses and his heavy lips flattened out. ‘You backtalkin’ me, Detective Duval?’
‘No, sir,’ said Ray. ‘You want me to, I’ll come right out and say it.’
‘Suit yourself.’
‘You got Lee Harvey Oswald bleeding to death at Parkland and I’ve got one of your kids who might just still be alive. If I can find her in time I might just be able to stop some crazy bastard from tearing her little body apart and ripping off pieces of her skin before he wires her head back onto her shoulders, which part we don’t know is if he fucks her in the mouth before he cuts her head off or after, so you can just go fuck yourself, Captain.’
Wisdom of the Bones Page 28