Excerpted from Book 1 in the John Pilate Mystery Series. Book 2: Pilate's Key is available now free on Wattpad.
PROLOGUE
November 26, 1963
Dr. Brady Bernard tied his bowtie as he gazed in the mirror of his small deco tiled bathroom. A breeze blew in over his shoulder from the window above the bathtub—a window he’d always kept open “just a crack” after a faulty gas heater in the bathroom nearly asphyxiated him and his wife a few months prior. Unlike the shattered nuptial union that had also nearly succeeded in suffocating him over time, the good doctor had at least managed to repair the heater.
He slipped the burgundy tie ends together just as he had thousands of times before. A jaunty bow formed around his neck, and his sagging skin fell around it. Bernard adjusted the wire-framed glasses on his ruddy face, slipped his suspenders over his shoulders, and ran a comb through his thinning, pomaded hair.
He glanced quickly at the headlines of the two-day-old newspaper crumpled on the floor beside the toilet:
KENNEDY SLAIN ON DALLAS STREET.
Bernard heaved a disgusted sigh. Like so many others, he liked President Kennedy. The assassination had a surprisingly strong effect on him, though not for the typical reasons anyone might suspect. The stairs creaked and groaned under his 260-pound frame. From the landing, through his leaded-glass window on his front door, he saw gentle snowflakes falling. Bernard slipped into his jacket, followed by his overcoat. He dimmed the lamp on the end table, opened the front door, and stepped one foot outside, but then stopped abruptly. “Oh yes!” he said. He turned quickly on the ball of his foot and marched across the living room to a seven-drawer oak desk. For the first time in months, he took notice of the framed motto he’d hung over his desk several years ago:
An Indian scalps his enemy…a white man skins his friend.
Dr. Bernard sighed at the bitter truth, removed a key from his pocket, and used it to open the center door, pulling it about an inch out of its resting place. Grunting as he folded his heavy body over, he reached to the bottom left-hand drawer and opened it. From that drawer, he scooped up something heavy, then stood upright and closed it gently with his cap-toed shoe. He locked the center drawer again and walked into the snowy campus world at his teachers’ college near the banks of the Missouri River.
***
Dottie Mostek sat, ramrod straight, at her desk, her eyes rimmed with red from shedding so many tears on behalf of the deceased President Kennedy, whose funeral had taken place just the day before. Her dark hair, which she’d styled in proper Jackie form for the past three years, was as disheveled as her emotional state, a careless mess. She just could not force herself to care about styling her hair; in the grand scheme of things, it seemed so trivial.
She touched her hand to her chin and glanced at a newspaper that offered grainy grayscale photos taken at the funeral. Bobby looked so devastated, and John-John’s salute was heartbreaking.
Out of respect for the fallen Commander in Chief, classes had been canceled, and the school had been closed to students for the week, but today administrative staff were expected back to work. Dottie was relieved there would be no students. I can sure use the peace and quiet, she thought with a defeated sigh, glancing in her compact mirror at the destroyed mop on her head.
Earlier, Dr. Walker Keillor had quietly slipped in. At the sight of her stricken expression, he consoled, “It’s a sad day for us all, Dottie. Try to get a hold of yourself.”
She nodded at the other chief executive in her life, the president of Cross College, and sat up straighter in her chair. Next, she dutifully attempted to type a memo as President Keillor disappeared behind his office door. She admired Dr. Keillor, a reserved and thoughtful man who had been in education most of his sixty-two years.
Downstairs, Dean Gareth Kennedy had been spending the last few moments reminiscing with his secretary, Grace Hamilton, about the time he’d met JFK himself on a train right after the war. He regaled her with the tale of borrowing a newspaper from the rail-thin, nearly-crippled Navy hero. “He said ‘showr’ in that Boston accent of his and handed it to me,” Kennedy said. “I introduced myself, and that was when he told me he was Jack Kennedy. That’s why I remember meeting him. We had a laugh about being related or something like that.” He paused a moment, tapping his finger on the Kansas City newspaper that lay open on his desk, plastered with photos of the slain president’s memorial service. “I, uh…” His voice trailed off.
Grace looked at the steno pad in her hands.
Kennedy shook his head, wiped his glasses, and told Grace to tell the two typewriter salesmen in his outer office that he would be with them in a few minutes.
She closed his door quietly and returned to her desk.
***
Walter Mackey, of the Westside Typewriter and Office Company, waited patiently in Dr. Kennedy’s outer office, seated in a worn wooden chair. Next to him sat Thomas Guthrie, his new trainee. Mackey was entering his twentieth year in the sales game, and this week he was tasked with showing the freshly-discharged-from-the-Army kid, Guthrie, the ropes. On the way over from the city, he’d filled Guthrie in on the sad story of Cross Township, telling the wide-eye rookie how Cross had once rested close to the banks of the Missouri River—until the Great Flood of 1943 rerouted the mighty Missouri and quashed Cross’s ambitions of economic glory. Now it was a small, anemic college town a mile from the river and two miles off the beaten track of State Highway 9. “But they’ve still got a college there, and colleges need office equipment, one way or another,” he’d explained to Guthrie.
“Dr. Kennedy will see you in a few minutes, gentlemen.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Mackey said.
Guthrie smiled back at her as well. A little too big, Mackey thought.
“If you’re in a hurry, you might want to go upstairs to the commerce office to handle the past billing,” Grace said. “Then you could come back about the new typewriter order.”
“Aw, that’s okay. We can wait,” Mackey said.
Guthrie nodded assent, sliding his beaten-up leather satchel on the floor beside his chair.
Grace sat down. “He has an appointment with one of our professors at 8:15, but it shouldn’t take long,” she said.
The men nodded; they knew the drill.
A few awkward minutes passed after the campus bell rang 8:15 a.m.
Mackey looked at his watch, then at Grace. “Terrible what happened in Dallas,” the salesman said, trying to make conversation.
Guthrie nodded in silent agreement, his face grim.
“Yes,” Grace said. She was the picture of efficiency, and any grief she had for President Kennedy—or nearly any emotion at all—was reserved for her husband and dog to see.
Mackey was not one to be ignored, however, which served him well in the sales business. “Just awful. I’m glad they got that bastard Oswald,” Mackey said.
Grace jumped a bit at “bastard.”
“Oh sorry, ma’am. Pardon my French, but this whole thing’s just so upsettin’.”
Grace stood and offered a simple, “Yes.” She looked back at her boss’s door. “Perhaps Dr. Kennedy can see you since Dr. Bernard seems to be running late today,” she offered, wanting to get them out of her lobby so they’d stop distracting her from her work. She knocked quietly at his door and slipped in.
Mackey and Guthrie stood up and took a step toward Kennedy’s door.
The double-doors rattled as a tall, portly man in a snow-speckled overcoat barreled into the outer office. He eyed the two men for a second and said, “I’m first. I have an appointment.”
Grace returned from Kennedy’s office. “Oh, Dr. Bernard,” she said, not looking him in the eye. “Dr. Kennedy is ready to see you and has been expecting you. Please go on in.”
Bernard nodded and walked past Grace and the salesmen. He quietly closed Dr. Kennedy’s door behind him.
Mackey whistled. “Boy, that’s a friendly fella, huh?” he said.
Grace looked at her desktop as if to make it clear she wasn’t there to make excuses or explanations for anyone. “Dr. Bernard has been…well…” She cleared her throat and leaned forward toward the men
In turn, the salesmen leaned forward in the creaky old chairs, eager to hear some rare gossip from the usually Sphinx-like Grace.
She had just opened her ruby-red lips to speak when the air in the room crackled with an explosive series of five sounds.
Mackey froze.
Grace jumped.
Guthrie launched from his chair. “Was that…gunshots?” he said.
Dr. Kennedy’s office door opened, and Bernard calmly strode into the outer office, closing the door behind him with his left hand, holding a distinctive German Luger pistol that was partially obscured under his coat with the right. A sickening sulfurous smell followed him.
Guthrie started toward the professor, but Bernard raised the gun at the veteran. In the next instant, his left hand instinctively jolted toward his eyeglasses, which had faint red specks on the lenses.
Everyone froze for a bizarre two seconds of silence before Bernard walked past them into the hallway.
Grace rushed to Kennedy’s door and saw him splayed like a marionette with clipped strings on the floor beside his desk. His head rested at an odd angle of contortion against a radiator on the wall. He had a small, almost bloodless hole above his right eye. In contrast, a jagged crevasse where his nose was supposed to be bled like an open floodgate down his face, crimson staining the white, starched collar of his shirt. His right hand was also bloody and mangled; the bullet had obviously torn through it when he tried to cover his face in self-defense. Droplets of blood covered the photo of President Kennedy on the newspaper lying across his desk.
“He’s been shot!” Grace choked out, stating the obvious.
Mackey burst into the room, saw Kennedy, and threw up on his own shoes.
“I knew they was gunshots,” Guthrie said, whistling and patting his pockets for a pack of cigarettes.
***
Dottie heard what sounded liked a series of thumping sounds from downstairs, but she thought little of it. She continued typing her memo until Dr. Bernard, who had calmly slipped into the room and up to her desk, interrupted her. She noted that he was wearing his overcoat and was wiping his eyeglass lenses with a monogrammed handkerchief. “Oh, Dr. Bernard, you startled me.”
Bernard didn’t look at her; he simply continued to clean his glasses. “He in?”
“Um, yes he is. You can go on in if you’d like,” she said, keenly aware of Keillor’s open-door policy with faculty, even faculty whose contracts had been terminated effective the end of semester.
Bernard grunted, put his glasses back on, and stepped toward Keillor’s office. Then, he suddenly stopped. Without turning around, he spoke in monotone, “They shoot presidents these days.” Then he jammed his right hand into his pocket and went in.
Dottie shivered at the emotionless announcement and looked back to her typewriter. She glanced up a second later and noticed that Bernard had not closed the door as he normally would. She craned her neck to peer into President Keillor’s office. In a split second, she convinced herself that her overwrought emotions stemming from the JFK assassination had rendered her eyes unreliable. Surely Dr. Bernard is not pointing a pistol at the head of Cross College President Walker Keillor. I must be…seeing things.
The chain reaction of cartridge ignition rocketed the bullet from the barrel into Keillor’s right eye socket.
Dottie screamed hysterically at the grim reality as Bernard took his leave, walking silently past her desk and out the door.
***
Bernard trudged across the snowy oval in front of the Administration building. The Luger was warm and felt nice in his pocket, a reprieve against the chilly air. The campus seemed airless and deserted to him. The carillon bells played a Christmas carol just as he reached his own front door. He shed his overcoat, draped it over the banister, then carefully removed the Luger from his pocket and walked to the desk.
He unlocked the center drawer just as he had earlier, then opened the bottom left-hand drawer, from which he retrieved a box of cartridges. He dropped the spent shells from the Luger’s magazine into a wicker wastebasket beside the desk. He paused for a moment, looking at the weapon he’d personally taken from the stiff, dead hands of a German officer in a crumbling Berlin tenement. That officer’s face had been left with a hole in it, too, not unlike Dean Kennedy’s.
He methodically loaded the pistol, then set it on the desk and removed a piece of paper from the center drawer. It was his last letter, already typed:
Mr. Benton,
Please take charge. Use Nathaniel’s Funeral Home of Goss City. Services should run about $600. Cremate and scatter ashes from the bridge over the Missouri, at night, under the cover of darkness. Let only one person know what you have done.
I require no funeral services or other fanciful memorials. No relatives need be notified of my demise other than my wife, wherever that harpy now resides.
Stay in my house at night or get someone until things quiet down. Somebody might try to cause trouble.
You will be paid for your faithful service in these matters.
Take care of my office and bring everything down to the house.
He signed it with his fountain pen, blotted it, and placed it before him on the desk. He reread it carefully, then wrote a postscript under his signature:
P.S. Wally tried to fire the wrong person.
Bernard rose from the chair, walked across the drab hooked rug, and placed the letter in its center. He capped his fountain pen and placed it on top of the letter. He removed his eyeglasses and put them in the breast pocket of his jacket breast pocket. As absently as he had tied his bowtie that morning, he placed the warm, acrid barrel of the German gun in his mouth and squeezed the trigger without a second thought.
***
November 29, 1963
Grif Nathaniel tapped the ashes from his cigarette into the open cardboard cylinder on the desk in front of him. The cigarette ash was finer and darker than the mortal remains of Dr. Brady Bernard, which had the appearance of fireplace ash mixed with chips of rock. The chips were not rocks at all, of course, but the remnants of the departed Bernard’s bones. “All men are cremated equal,” he said aloud, smiling and remembering the joy the distasteful but clever pun had brought to his father, Martin.
He leaned back in his chair, swinging his feet on the desk of the funeral home, with a pre-assassination issue of Life magazine resting on his knees. He had known the late Dr. Bernard from his psychology class. He remembered the man as a boring lecturer who would intentionally drop pencils so he could sneak peeks up the front row of coed skirts. Grif always thought it was funny that the strangest prof on campus taught psych. The old bird’s wife had left him a few months prior, and word around campus was that Bernard’s boss, Dean Kennedy, had the okay from President Keillor to fire him.
Grif leaned forward, exhaling smoke and stubbing the cigarette out in a small pan spirited from the embalming table. Life flopped to the morgue floor as he reached for the town’s twice-weekly newspaper, the Cross Courier. He scanned the paper. Accounts of the Cross College president’s murder had even bumped the United States President’s murder off the front page—at least locally. President Keillor and Dean Kennedy were dead on the scene, and Bernard had been found dead in his living room, killed by his own hand with the same Kraut gun. He’d left a peculiar suicide note, along with the fountain pen he used to sign his name that last time.
The newspaper did not reveal the contents of the note, but Grif knew. Sheriff Scovill had told Martin Nathaniel that the letter left strict instructions for cremation and how to dispose of Bernard’s effects. Scovill also intimated that there was a bizarre postscript, but he would say nothing further about it.
Grif had asked his high school buddy, Morgan Scovill, a member of the “social club” known as the Cross Cavaliers, what he knew, but Morgan was as stubborn and tight-lipped as his father, the sheriff. “Come on, Morg! We’re Cavaliers. We have no secrets between us, right?” Grif had coaxed, trying to revive the camaraderie of the gang from high school.
Morgan Scovill had simply shaken his head and said, “Oh, but we do have secrets, Grif…and be glad we do.”
“Crazy sum’bitch,” was all Sheriff Scovill had allowed Grif beyond the press accounts. After his firsthand observation of Bernard’s handiwork on the heads of Keillor and Kennedy, Grif had to agree. Even with Martin’s artistry with mortician’s wax and makeup, closed caskets were the order of the day for both funerals.
In his twenty-two years growing up in the family business, Griffin Nathaniel had seen his share of dead bodies—none worse than those mangled by combines or car wrecks. However, in his opinion, there was something far more gruesome about a bullet hole in the face and a blown-out skull.
“Griffin?” Martin Nathaniel called to his son from the stairs. “Son, you down there?”
“Yes, Dad,” Grif said, waving at the smoke in the air.
Martin descended the stairs, looking paler than usual. Admittedly, the man could have walked right out of Central Casting to play the part of a mortuary director even on his best day, but on this day, he looked flushed, perhaps even ill. His thin fingers nervously smoothed his black frock. “Where’s Dr. Bernard?” he said in the way they always referred to the deceased, regardless of whether they were on an exam table or in a jar.
“Right here,” Grif said, glancing down at the open cylinder before him.
“Oh good.”
“Dad, you okay?” Grif said, unused to seeing his father’s studied reserve shaken and bothered b by the man’s profuse and uncharacteristic perspiration.
“Yeah. Just came down the stairs a little too fast, I suppose,” he said, his face morphing into the mask of disengaged kindness that he usually saved for the customers. “Do me a favor, son. Uh, I need you to go to the bank and deposit this check from the Harrisons. I have a feeling we shouldn’t hold on to it for too long.”
Grif thought it an unusual request, as the Harrisons had been a local farm family in the area since the days before Moses, and they’d always paid their bills. “Uh, sure, Dad,” Grif said, pulling his jacket on and carefully nudging the Life magazine under the desk with his foot. He took the check from his father’s bony hand.
“Thank ya, son. I’ll uh…well, I’m gonna seal up Dr. Bernard.”
“His wife gonna claim him anytime soon?” Grif asked, halfway up the stairs.
“No,” Martin said without turning away from the open cylinder. “Nope, I don’t think so. We’ll hang on to him a while in case she changes her mind. Now please be on your way.”
Grif hurried up the stairs to find his overcoat for the chilly trip to the bank.
Martin’s hand shakily fished into his frock coat. From a buttoned interior pocket, he retrieved a small brown ledger, held together with a fat rubber band. He fingered the rubber band a moment and looked at the crematory oven on the other side of the room. It had been fired up early yesterday for Dr. Bernard and was still quite warm. Martin took a step toward the crematory until he was stopped by Grif’s shout from upstairs.
“Dad! The mayor’s here and wants to see you. He says it’s urgent.”
Martin started, and the shaking in his hands worsened. The ledger suddenly seemed as hot as a coal from the oven. He hurriedly dropped it in the cylinder of Brady Bernard’s ashes, sending a plume of dusty remains into the air. He then sealed the package with packing tape. “I’ll be right up,” his voice quavered.
The cylinder of ashes was still warm to the touch as he carried them to a small closet in the basement. He felt in the dark for the light chain and pulled it. Martin slid Dr. Brady Bernard’s ashes onto the shelf next to rolls of toilet paper and some dusty plastic flowers. He pulled the chain again to turn out the naked light bulb and closed the door. As he climbed the stairs to the parlor, the unmistakable voice of Mayor Ollie Olafson greeted him.
“Marty, we need to talk.”
***
Copyright 2009, 2012 Caroline Street Press. All rights reserved.
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