The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  The man with red spots on his shoulders yelled, ‘I’m a photographer! I got pictures!’ He held out his cell phone to the approaching detectives and pointed to the image on the small screen. ‘See?’ There was only time enough for him to blink before his phone disappeared.

  The civilian was staring down at the empty palm of his hand – while Mallory, the best of thieves, clicked through his pictures, a portrait of Coco among them, and she transmitted them to her own cell. While the man she had robbed was trying to find his voice and a suitable tone of outrage, she said, ‘This is an idiot-proof camera. How could you screw up these shots?’ Oh, and now they were all gone – erased. Well, accidents would happen. She saw a word forming on the man’s lips.

  Before the civilian could call her a bitch, her partner stepped forward to say, ‘Careful, pal.’ Riker held out his hand. ‘Okay, let’s see your press card.’

  ‘He doesn’t have one.’ Mallory turned on the civilian. ‘You’re not a photographer, at least not a pro. And I know you don’t work for the Times.’ He backed up with every step she took toward him. ‘So you’re a reporter wannabe, right?’ She had him up against a tree. ‘Just a lousy stringer with no steady paycheck.’ She smiled and lightly tapped his chest with one long red fingernail. ‘I can change that.’

  His grin was wide. All was forgiven.

  He led them through the trees and across a small clearing, where a painter’s easel lay abandoned on the grass. This might be Tupelo Meadow, but Mallory was uncertain. In her childhood, the Ramble had been a dangerous place, home to every form of lowlife, the detritus of human waste and cast-off needles with the dregs of heroin and blood. In the wake of a real-estate boom on the Upper West Side, the squats of petty criminals had been sold as condos and co-ops, thus pricing junkies out of the neighborhood. These days, on any normal summer day, there should be tourists and local people here, taking in the sun, feeding squirrels and birds. But now, all that remained were their possessions dropped in flight – soda cans and sunglasses, a sandal and a child’s toy. This empty field supported the stringer’s claim of rats swarming here, too – lots of them.

  The aspiring reporter nodded all the while as Mallory explained the rules of journalism: Truth was overrated; information was currency; and he would take whatever she gave him, word for word, and nothing more.

  They entered the woods on the far side of the clearing to stand beneath the tree that had rained blood on his shirt, and the newspaper stringer was promoted to Mallory’s manservant. She inspected his hands to see if they were clean and then allowed him to hold her linen blazer. She jumped for a low bough and hoisted her body upward. Moving higher, limb by limb, she climbed close to the burlap bag. It hung at least twenty feet off the ground, held there by a rope tied off with a slipknot on a lower bough. The remainder of the rope was coiled in the fork of branch and tree. She unraveled it and let it drop to see the loose end form another coil on the ground below.

  Long enough.

  The stench from the bag told her that this second victim was not a fresh kill. The cloth had a hole chewed through it to give her a small ragged window on green-tinged flesh that had been gnawed. There was no blood in the wound. This had to be postmortem damage, though she could see fresh red splatters elsewhere on the skin. The rats must have chewed into some artery where blood still remained in a liquid state.

  The detective called down to the patrolmen, ‘Grab the rope and pull!’ And they did. With one yank from below, the slipknot on the lower branch came undone, and the bag dropped in a short fall of inches until the officers below held a taut line.

  ‘Just hold the bag in place!’ Mallory heard a squeak that was almost mechanical. Almost. She turned her head a bare inch, and now she was looking into shiny rodent eyes. The creature had no sense of fear. Its snout was inches from her face. What long teeth you have. It hissed. And then, balance lost, the rat dropped to the ground to land twitching and squealing at the feet of the two patrolmen, who seemed happy to see it.

  Was it a sick rat, or just a clumsy one?

  Bang!

  A dead rat.

  With better balance than vermin, Mallory dropped from the bough to land with cat’s grace on a lower one, and so she made her way down through the tall tree and then swung from the lowest branch to stand beside the two officers. ‘Don’t bring the bag down till I lose that guy.’ She nodded toward the newspaper stringer, who stood with Riker in the field, madly writing lines in a small notebook. Whatever her partner was feeding the man, she knew it would be nothing useful.

  The second ambulance siren of the day could be heard in the distance as she approached the stringer. One hand with long red fingernails – call them claws – wound around the man’s arm, and she led him farther away from her crime scene. As they walked, she dictated his copy.

  Tomorrow morning, when the Times hit the newsstands, her status as lead detective would be a matter of public record – and not her lieutenant’s call. The mayor tended to believe everything he read in the papers, even when half the lies came from his own office, and it was the police commissioner’s job to kiss that fool’s feet and make this news item come true.

  ‘Nobody else has this story. I can keep it that way till tomorrow morning.’ Mallory took the pen and pad away from the civilian and jotted a brief note to this effect. It was addressed to the city desk editor, a man with debts in the favor bank that were owed to her foster father, and she signed it Lou Markowitz’s daughter. Then she used the stringer’s camera phone to take a photograph for the front page of tomorrow’s edition. In perfect focus, she framed the hanging tree and the uniformed policemen. Click. ‘Okay, you’re good to go.’ She returned his camera phone. ‘Go!’ And he did. He ran.

  Riker was doing damage control in the clearing. He waved off the ambulance crew twenty feet from the tree and then made a call to request transport for a corpse. Turning to the patrolmen, he said, ‘Lower the body. We gotta get it out of the bag and lose that rope before the meat wagon gets here.’

  Mallory nodded her approval. The worst leaks came from the lowest-paid employees of the Medical Examiner’s Office. So now they had one body for the hospital, one for the morgue – two if she counted old Mrs Lanyard – just a typical day in New York City, and there would be no mention of trees or burlap bags and ropes, no red flags that could be sold to the television networks.

  When the bag was lowered to the ground and opened, what flesh remained on a female corpse would not help with identification. The body had been attended to by bugs and rats. And there was no chance of fingerprints; these extremities had been gnawed to the bone. There was silver duct tape on this face, too. It covered the eyes and mouth. And the dead woman had other things in common with the surviving victim: her bondage ropes, both ears sealed with wax, and her nudity.

  Mallory loved money motives best. She looked for them where other detectives would see only evidence of insane cruelty. And so this corpse was a disappointment. The blond hair was high maintenance, but the untreated brown roots were years long. No upscale salon would miss this customer.

  All around them was the bedlam of the emergency room, the babble of foreign languages and screams that needed no translation. Added to this background music were layers of odors: vomit and a whiff of bowel, medicinal smells and the cat-piss aroma of disinfectant from an orderly’s mop and pail.

  When crime-scene investigators arrived at the hospital, the male victim from the first hanging tree was comatose and awaiting a gurney ride to the intensive care unit. The pads of his fingers were quickly blackened with ink and rolled across the white cards that recorded his prints. A technician swabbed a Q-tip inside the man’s open mouth for a DNA sample, and another CSI collected debris from fingernails. Then a man with a camera pulled back the sheet to expose more rat bites and flesh frayed by ropes.

  The ER doctor had been ordered to stand aside – quietly – no more complaining, no whining, no yelling. He could only watch, head shaking in disbelief, and then he gas
ped when Detective Mallory plucked hairs from his patient’s scalp.

  The technicians stopped their work, and every face turned toward a late arrival. An angry bear of a man, the commander of Crime Scene Unit, stood at the foot of the gurney. Heller’s slow-moving brown eyes had missed nothing, not the manhandling of the patient, not the petulant doctor who stood helpless with his back to the wall, nor the detective who had ordered his people to start without him – and obviously against medical advice.

  Mallory backed away from the gurney, making a deliberate show of this submissive gesture. She knew how to pick her fights. Tomorrow, Heller would find out about the ropes and burlap bags stashed in the trunk of her car. She was saving herself for that battle.

  Heller jabbed his thumb toward the doors of the emergency room. His technicians packed their gear and silently filed out. He nodded to the man with the stethoscope, and the doctor resumed his post by the patient’s side. Turning on Mallory, Heller said, ‘That’s one.’ It was their custom to start a fresh count of her trespasses with each new case. He would reach the count of implosion when he discovered that his CSIs had not yet been invited to two crime scenes, but the young detective planned to be long gone by then.

  Mallory handed him the bag of plucked hairs and left before he could order her out. She had what she came for. A close inspection of the roots had satisfied her suspicion of a bad drugstore dye job for a man in his twenties. And judging by the original hair color, the coma patient was most likely Coco’s missing Uncle Red.

  Books were neatly arranged on the shelves, and every scrap of paper knew its place, stacked in shallow boxes marked IN and OUT. It was the office of a very efficient man. The only clutter was on the back wall above his credenza, a cluster of plaques and framed awards that honored Dr Edward Slope. His name also appeared on a roster more elite than the presidency. Over the past hundred years, only seven men had preceded him in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Though, without the clue of his white lab coat, he more closely resembled a military man in his bearing, always at attention, even while seated; his expression was stony, smiles were rare, and his wit was gunpowder dry. As a groundbreaking pathologist, his fame was international. At home, he was best known as a man who ate cops for breakfast.

  Dr Slope raised his eyes from the paperwork on his desk. ‘Hello, Riker.’ And now he acknowledged the second detective to enter his private domain. ‘Kathy.’ He so enjoyed needling her with the forbidden use of her first name.

  ‘Mallory,’ she said, correcting him, as she always did.

  She preferred the chilly formality of her surname, and the doctor’s training in the use of it had begun upon her graduation from the police academy. But she had failed to distance him then – and now. As a charter member of the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game, he had first come to know her as Kathy the child, and she would be Kathy till one of them died.

  ‘That woman’s body just got here,’ he said. ‘What could you possibly want from me?’ A tone of irritation conveyed that their business with him had better be mighty important.

  A little girl stepped out from behind Detective Riker. Her blue eyes were enormous, and her smile was nearly as wide as her face. They had never met, but the doctor felt an instant sense of recognition. Children of this ilk bore a familial resemblance, though they were so rare that never were two of them born into the same family.

  ‘I want you to do the kid first.’ Mallory lightly stroked the child’s hair. ‘Before you do the corpse.’ And she had other demands as well. ‘Keep it off the books. I want bloodwork to see if she needs medication.’

  Riker, the peacemaker, stepped forward. ‘Coco remembers taking a pill every day, but it might’ve been a vitamin. Charles Butler says she’s—’

  ‘One of the Williams people.’ Though it cracked his face to do it, the medical examiner smiled, charmed to his toes. He left his chair to circle the desk and get down on bended knee. He wanted a closer look at the stellate pattern previously studied only on slides. ‘You have stars in your eyes,’ he said to the little girl. ‘That’s very special and beautiful.’ She hugged him around the neck to complete his diagnosis of Williams syndrome, a condition that came with a longing for human contact and sometimes other ailments of the heart. Kidneys and liver might also pose problems. He looked up at the detectives. ‘Her blood tests should be run in a hospital with pediatric—’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ said Mallory. ‘Social Services will take her away. How well do you think she’d do in the system?’

  Dr Slope’s nod conceded the point. Children did not thrive in that bureaucracy, and this little girl would wither faster than most. Mallory passed him a handwritten note, and he read her next demand in clear block letters that might have been printed by a machine: CHECK FOR RAPE.

  And the doctor died a little.

  There was no God.

  The little girl and the chief medical examiner, a man who had cracked open the bodies of many a murdered child, went off in search of privacy for a more delicate violation. When an exam room had been secured and Coco was perched on the edge of a table, she reached out to touch his face – to console him. ‘Rats cry, too,’ she said. ‘Most people don’t know that.’

  FIVE

  As school traditions go, this one is kind of cool. Every year on the first day of spring and very early in the morning, somebody sneaks into the garden and draws the chalk outline of a girl on the flagstones. No one steps on it, and it lasts almost the whole day before the janitor is told to hose it away. My friend Phoebe calls the chalk girl Poor Allison. She jumped off the school’s roof a few years ago. That was before my time. I ask why Poor Allison did it, and Phoebe says, ‘Well, why do any of them do it?’ And I say, ‘What?’

  —Ernest Nadler

  Coco held Riker’s hand as they walked down the quiet hallway of a SoHo apartment house. The child was swaddled in a paper sheet of the type used to drape cadavers. She had been allowed to keep her shoes, but the rest of her clothes were in a plastic bag that swung from the detective’s free hand.

  ‘A friend of mine owns this whole building,’ said Riker.

  ‘Is your friend the man or the lady?’ she asked when they stood before the door of the only residence on the fourth floor. ‘I hear two people in there.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Riker could hear nothing. If anything, this place seemed empty to his ears. Mallory was still at the morgue, but the cleaning lady might have come by after the mayor’s press conference. He wondered how the little girl would react if she was reunited with the bat-swinging, pervert-busting Mrs Ortega.

  The door opened. Coco looked up – and up – at a well-made man in a three-piece suit, who stood six-four in his stocking feet. His tie was undone, and this was Charles Butler’s version of casual dress. Mallory had called ahead, and the tiny visitor was expected, yet he seemed surprised. And this was a trick of the eyes, heavy-lidded and closed by half with small blue irises floating in bulging egg-size whites. Charles went everywhere wrapped in the aspect of a startled frog with a large nose and a foolish smile. The way his face was made, this accident of birth, belied a giant brain and several Ph.D.s, one of them in psychology.

  Coco rushed across the threshold to hug the tall man’s legs in hello, and he knelt down before her, saying, ‘I understand you’ve had a busy day.’

  ‘Full of rats.’ She smiled. ‘Rats go to heaven. Did you know that? And sometimes they come back.’ The child went off down the foyer to inspect the large front room and its collection of antiques and contemporary art.

  Riker loved this apartment. The architecture dated back to an era of tall, arched windows featured in the black-and-white film noir of the forties. He sat down on an ornate sofa reminiscent of other period movies, Jane Austen chick flicks, which he only attended under duress. The centuries-old furnishings should not have worked well with the modern splatter-paint artwork on the opposite wall – but they did.

  There was no sign of the cleaning lady, though the smell of
furniture polish hung in the air. ‘Mrs Ortega told us you diagnosed the kid over the phone.’

  ‘No,’ said Charles. ‘I told her it might be Williams syndrome. That was based on the elfin features and the odd behavior – seeking physical contact from strangers.’ He turned to watch the child enter the adjoining room. ‘And then there’s her shoes.’

  Shoes? Before Riker could say that aloud, he heard the opening bars of Melancholy Baby, note perfect. Coco had discovered the small piano of antebellum days. Charles had bought it for its provenance, he said, a documented tie to legendary riverboat gamblers of the 1800s. The man so loved poker, though he could not play worth a damn. He gave away every hand he held, good or bad, with a blush that would not allow him to bluff, and his tell-all face could not hide a thought.

  The piano played on.

  ‘They’re musical people,’ said Charles. ‘Definitely Williams syndrome. It’s all there – the facial features, that magnetic smile. And have you ever seen eyes quite that bright? There’s a stellate pattern—’

  ‘The stars in her eyes,’ said Riker. ‘Dr Slope loved that.’

  ‘It might take a while to evaluate her. Given the emotional trauma, I’ll have to go slowly.’ Charles, a reformed headhunter, had once been in the business of testing people for placement in projects that required special gifts. And now, semi-retired at the age of forty-one, he only did consulting work for the police when a department shrink could not be trusted, which was most of the time. ‘But I can assure you right now that she’s bright, very high functioning.’

  ‘That’s great.’ The piano recital had ended, and Riker’s voice dropped low, close to a whisper. ‘We couldn’t tell if she was gifted or retarded.’

  The child came running out of the music room to stand before the detective and point an accusing finger. ‘That was so rude.’