The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  Riker attacked the remainder of his pancakes, his final meal before the war over misplaced evidence. Chewing and swallowing, he continued his argument for Uncle Red as a blood relation instead of a child snatcher. ‘Dr Slope didn’t find any sign of molestation when he examined Coco.’

  ‘The pervert and the kid were still in the getting-to-know-you stage.’ Mallory sat down to a cup of coffee. ‘I bet Uncle Red didn’t have a clue about the Williams syndrome.’

  ‘But neither did Coco,’ said Charles. ‘She told me she was home-schooled by her grandmother. So the old lady – Coco says she’s a hundred and ninety-one – she evidently realized there was something odd about her granddaughter, but she didn’t have a diagnosis. I’ll tell you how I know that.’

  At this point on any other day, one of the detectives would be bearing down on Charles, all but telling him at gunpoint to cut it short; but Mallory was sipping coffee, and Riker was still in the thrall of pancake rapture.

  ‘Coco’s never heard of the syndrome,’ said Charles. ‘If her grandmother had gotten the right diagnosis, there would’ve been special educational materials in the house. And the child would’ve noticed that. Her reading level is very advanced. She’s read Dickens. Isn’t that marvelous? And Coco tells me there were lots of pamphlets and books about rats. Her grandmother must’ve had a strong interest—’

  ‘Okay.’ Riker’s fork clattered to the plate. His last morsel was eaten, and now he rolled one hand to speed up the lecture. ‘Get to the part where the kid meets up with Uncle Red.’

  And a childish voice said, ‘That was the day I couldn’t wake my granny.’ Coco stood in the doorway. ‘Granny was all stiff and cold.’ The little girl was wearing the button-up pants of Mrs Ortega’s youngest niece. She held them up with both hands. Buttons were a problem.

  Mallory rose from the table to help her with this. ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘I went outside. I wasn’t supposed to, but I was scared . . . Don’t tell.’

  ‘You went outside to get help. That was very smart.’ How easy it was to manipulate a child starved for approval. Any praise would do. ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘I ran down a million stairs before I got outside. And then Uncle Red stopped in his car.’

  ‘Did you recognize him?’

  She paused to think about this. ‘He had red hair like mine. I told him about Granny. He said she couldn’t take care of me anymore, and I was going to live with him.’

  When the pants were securely buttoned, Mallory tucked in the child’s T-shirt. ‘Did he take you back to Granny’s to pack your suitcase?’

  ‘No, I just got into his car, and we drove and drove and drove.’

  Riker, the sorry man who loved children, was slow to set down his coffee cup.

  ‘Tell them how you got your name,’ said Charles.

  ‘Uncle Red said we had to change my name. It had to be something I could remember. He asked me what I liked best in the whole world, and I said flannel pajamas and hot cocoa.’

  Mallory reached out to snatch a twenty-dollar bill from Riker’s hand. ‘And what was your name before that?’

  Coco pursed her lips and then ran out of the kitchen. Moments later, they heard a ragtime riff on the piano in the music room.

  ‘Baby Doll is what her grandmother called her,’ said Charles. ‘I’m sure she has another name, but she won’t say what it is, and I’m not about to interrogate her. So I suggest you stick with Coco. She likes that one.’

  Mallory gathered up the dirty plates from the table. ‘Did you figure out when she was snatched?’

  ‘No more than four days ago.’ Charles nodded toward the kitchen counter and the evidence bag that Riker had left here last night. ‘That was Mrs Ortega’s best guess based on the last time the child’s clothes were clean. I believe it was early morning when Coco went outside to get help for her grandmother.’

  ‘Her dead grandmother,’ said Mallory. ‘Figure one day for the road trip with Uncle Red. It was dark when they got into the city. And he dyed his hair on the road. So he didn’t stalk this kid. It wasn’t a planned snatch.’

  ‘Crime of opportunity,’ said Riker. ‘The pervert saw her walking down the sidewalk . . . all alone.’ He pushed back from the table. ‘So . . . a day’s ride from here, Granny’s rotting away in her apartment. She hasn’t begun to stink yet, not enough for the neighbors to call the cops.’

  ‘And nobody knows this kid is missing,’ said Mallory. ‘That’s a bonus.’

  SEVEN

  On the way to the dining hall, we have to pass through the creepy gallery of alumni portraits, and the eyes of the paintings follow us. I know some of the family names on the plaques below the picture frames. They come down from the robber barons of Wall Street – honored psychos of yesteryear. One of them is Phoebe’s ancestor. He has a cruel mouth that says, ‘Come here, little boy.’

  —Ernest Nadler

  Jack Coffey wadded up his copy of the morning Times and bounced it off the rim of his wastebasket. That grand old lady of New York newspapers was behaving like a tabloid slut. After beating every other rag to the story of a double homicide in Central Park, the Times had won the right to name a killer with the town’s first literary moniker: the Hunger Artist – shades of Kafka.

  Riker slumped against the back wall of the lieutenant’s office. This was the detective’s firing-squad posture. Mallory had not yet clocked in, leaving her partner to explain why the front-page story mentioned information that their boss did not have.

  And the head of Crime Scene Unit had not been privy to these details, either. Heller sat in a chair beside the desk, holding his own mangled copy of the newspaper. ‘I can bring your detectives up on charges – or you can tell me why I don’t have this crime-scene evidence.’ He looked down to consult the small print of the Times. ‘I’m missing a few burlap bags and some ropes. Oh, yeah . . . and a couple of trees.’

  Jack Coffey was inspired now, on his feet and feigning his own bad attitude. ‘Your guys were at both of those scenes yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Heller, ‘eventually. Mallory sent them to the hospital first. Two hours later, she remembers the location of the crime scenes. Then they go to the park, but nobody told them about any trees or—’

  ‘That’s when one of them heard about the bags and the ropes . . . and that bastard leaked the details to the press.’ Coffey looked up at his slouching detective, a cue that it was this man’s turn to jump in.

  Riker stepped forward. ‘I know the park cops didn’t leak anything. They wouldn’t give up shit for a reporter. When I threaten uniforms, they stay threatened.’ He leaned down to tap Heller’s newspaper. ‘Their own sergeant didn’t get those details. But they would’ve answered questions from one of your guys.’

  ‘No way.’ Heller was never rattled. His demeanor was always dead calm. And so the man’s slow rise from the chair was tantamount to a psychotic break. He held up his crumpled newspaper. ‘Nobody in my department did this.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Riker, possibly overplaying his role. ‘It wasn’t the boys with the meat wagon. They only saw the body – nothing else. I suppose you’re gonna blame Mallory for the leak? Give me a break. It’s her case.’ He turned to his boss to see if this last part might be true.

  ‘Damn straight,’ said the lieutenant. ‘So that leaves your team, Heller. And I don’t wanna hear one more threat against my people.’ More magnanimous now, the commander of Special Crimes smiled. ‘Or, if you like, we can have a department hearing – a hanging party. And I’ll have Detective Mallory explain why she didn’t trust your people with evidence.’ He leaned forward, palms flat on his desk, still smiling. ‘Because you know someone’s gonna ask. And you’re wondering about that yourself, aren’t you?’

  The point was won, but not the game.

  Without another word said, the head of CSU managed to convey that this was not over yet. He left the private office and ambled down the aisle between the desks in the squad roo
m, turning heads with the sound of heavy footsteps. When the staircase door had closed behind Heller, the lieutenant retrieved his newspaper from the floor. He sat down to read it – slowly – while Detective Riker hovered, uncertain, somewhere between a clean getaway and a beat down.

  Jack Coffey set the paper to one side, put his feet up on the desk and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘You better hope Heller never calls the desk sergeant at Central Park.’ The lieutenant’s smile was genuine. It gladdened his heart to see the worried look on Riker’s face. ‘Those park cops gossip like crazy. That’s how I know there was a reporter on both of those crime scenes. I hear he was Mallory’s pet.’

  Riker shook his head. ‘That guy was just a stringer, a freelance photographer.’

  ‘And today he’s the newest hire at the Times – a reporter.’ The lieutenant wadded up his newspaper again, and this time his shot hit the wastebasket. He looked up at his detective. ‘Anything else you forgot to mention?’

  Riker appeared to be searching for just the right words, not the truth of course, but something that might work.

  ‘Never mind.’ Coffey waved him toward the door. ‘I don’t wanna know.’

  Detective Riker turned a corner onto a narrow street paved with cobblestones from SoHo’s first incarnation as a factory district. In more recent times, this neighborhood had been the haunt of boys and girls eking out a minimal existence in paint-stained jeans. They had decamped for cheaper quarters when money moved in with the Wall Street kids and the trust-fund babies. But now that crowd’s antiques stores and trendy boutiques were closing doors. New York City was a quick-change artist, and the good old days were always six minutes ago.

  At the middle of the block was the apartment house owned by Charles Butler. Keys in hand, the man stood beside his Mercedes and waved to the detective moseying down the sidewalk.

  ‘Hey,’ said Riker. ‘Going somewhere?’

  ‘I’m driving Robin back to Brooklyn.’ Charles turned around at the sound of his front door opening behind him.

  Coco stepped out on the sidewalk, holding Mallory’s hand. They were followed by gray-haired Robin Duffy, a semi-retired attorney and a player in the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game. Riker truly liked this short, bandy-legged man. Duffy always had a bright smile that gathered up his bulldog jowls and crinkled his eyes to tell everyone how happy he was to be here, wherever that might be.

  When hellos and goodbyes had been said, the old man embraced Mallory, holding her close, as if afraid that he might never see her again. And this was not because she had dropped off the planet for three months of lost time; he always did this.

  As the Mercedes rolled off down the street, Coco announced that Mr Duffy was her lawyer. Riker, long accustomed to hearing this news from felons, gave her a rueful smile and then turned to his partner. ‘Seriously? The kid lawyered up?’

  ‘Robin’s handling her custody issues.’ Mallory led the child down the sidewalk to an unmarked Crown Victoria parked at the curb.

  When Coco had been strapped into a backseat safety belt, Riker climbed in on the passenger side, and he braced himself, though it was unnecessary this morning. His partner’s driving was oddly law-abiding on the trip uptown, perhaps in deference to their young passenger.

  Mallory adjusted the rearview mirror to catch the little girl’s eye. ‘Coco, tell Riker what Granny did for a living.’

  ‘She killed rats!’

  Riker smiled. That would explain a preoccupation with vermin trivia. ‘So Granny was in the pest-control business. Do we know where?’

  Mallory nodded. ‘The company had a real catchy name – Chicago Killers.’

  All the way uptown, Coco entertained them with a monologue on rodents. And so the detectives learned that rats were ticklish, they sneezed and they dreamed.

  The Mercedes traveled south, heading for the Brooklyn Bridge, and Charles’s passenger said, ‘Kathy looks well.’ Robin Duffy was still allowed to call her Kathy, regarding her as the hand-me-down child of his best friend. He had lived across the street from her for all the years that she was growing up with the Markowitzes.

  Robin stared at his friend for a while, finally prompting him. ‘Kathy looks very well.’

  ‘Yes, she does.’ Charles would only commit himself to a comment on mere appearance. He would not invite any speculation on her state of mind or her lost time. And Robin would ask no direct questions. The old lawyer also had a confidence to keep and constraints of professional ethics; he had represented the young detective in the matter of getting her job back.

  On one absence from the NYPD, her destination had been deep in the Southland, and on another trip, she had followed Route 66, but this time was different. It worried Charles, and he was honor bound to worry all alone. Upon her return to New York City, information from Mallory had been couched in bare compass points, though she had agreed that Mount Rushmore was big, and the Mississippi River was indeed mighty. Only one thing was certain: She had been on a very long road trip to nowhere. Whenever he recalled her meandering route, the wide circles and ever-changing directions, he formed a picture of Mallory spiraling, tumbling – falling through America.

  On the other side of the bridge, the car rolled through a Brooklyn neighborhood of single-family houses with driveways and dogs in the yards. And the silence had become awkward.

  ‘I thought Coco was absolutely charming,’ said Robin, in a safe change of topic. ‘She doesn’t have a little girl’s conversations.’

  ‘No, she has what’s called a cocktail-party personality,’ said Charles. ‘That kind of patter is a skill that Williams children develop to form relationships with people.’ The sad irony was in the superficial quality of Coco’s best trick – the very thing that prevented her from forming a meaningful relationship with anyone.

  ‘What will become of her if I can’t locate any family to take her in?’

  ‘Coco will go into foster care,’ said Charles. ‘If she survives that, she’ll grow up, get a job . . . and live alone.’ Did that sound like anyone else they both knew?

  His passenger fell silent again, perhaps considering the commonalities of one broken child and another. Though, unlike Coco, Mallory never sought love or warmth from human contact; she only liked to hunt humans, and all her conversation revolved around death.

  Charles glanced at the dashboard clock. By now the detectives would have found the runaway moon that, according to Coco, had gone to live in a box.

  EIGHT

  The rule is clear. No running in the halls. But no teacher ever reprimands me. I think they all know that I’m running from a beating, a biting or a toilet-bowl drowning, whatever the day will bring.

  —Ernest Nadler

  Summer-school children poured out of yellow buses, their screams and laughter chiming in with the babble of other tourists waiting for the doors to open.

  Coco’s shoulders hunched. Both hands covered her ears, and her eyes shut tight, shutting out the noise and the bustle of the crowd. The two detectives and the little girl retreated to the high ground above the fray. The path sloped upward to a bench in the small park of flowers and trees that surrounded the Museum of Natural History. The trio sat down and faced a gigantic square box of glass and steel that was home to an entire solar system. The majestic structure rose seven stories above the ground floor of the museum’s planetarium.

  ‘I know it looks different in daylight,’ said Mallory. The child beside her had seen this landmark only once, just a fleeting glance on a scary night, and her memory of it was somewhat flawed. ‘Is that what you saw from Uncle Red’s window?’

  The little girl nodded. Upon closer inspection in the morning light, Coco had been crushed to learn that it was not the moon that filled out this immense glass box, but only a pale white replica of the sun. In perfect scale, it dwarfed planets that were made of smaller balls suspended by wires to hang in frozen orbits. And that monster-size sun did not even float; it was securely anchored to the floor.

  Rik
er patted Coco’s hand. ‘What a gyp, huh?’

  Mallory rose from the bench and turned around to face West 81st Street and a lineup of boxes on a grander scale, enormous buildings made of gray stones, brown bricks and, farther down, red ones, some with elaborate façades. This was Money Country, a land of liveried doormen and awnings to shelter the tenants on short walks to the curb and waiting limousines. Hundreds of windows faced the planetarium, and one of those apartments belonged to her comatose crime victim from the Ramble.

  Evidently Charles Butler had not yet returned from Brooklyn to find a note slipped under his door by a SoHo patrolman, a polite request to report for shrink duty uptown. Riker turned to his partner. ‘We should get him a cell phone.’

  Mallory’s mouth dipped down on one side. ‘Yeah, right.’

  Riker envied the technologically retarded psychologist, who had an answering machine – a gift from Mallory – but never turned it on. The man strolled through an average day with no disturbing messages or any urgent summons. As an alien in a television nation, he was never made anxious by manic broadcasters with red alerts and terrorist forecasts, for he preferred to read newspapers, which told him only what had actually happened. Nor was he troubled by the jarring street noise of the hustling millions; it rarely penetrated the rolled-up windows of his Mercedes. And so Charles Butler smoothly navigated the most nerve-jangling town on earth.

  ‘Here they come.’ Mallory pointed toward the patrol car double-parking near the corner of 81st Street and Central Park West. The uniforms stepped out of the vehicle. ‘There’s only three of them.’

  ‘That’s all the West Side could spare,’ said Riker. ‘They’re helping the park precinct comb the trees for more victims.’

  And now the assembled officers were told to conduct a block-long search of sixteen-story buildings to find the apartment of a man with no name. ‘And these pictures won’t help,’ said Mallory, as she handed each of them a photograph of the comatose crime victim. ‘None of the doormen knew who he was. His hair color’s different.’ Starvation and dehydration had also worked changes on Uncle Red. ‘So the neighbors might not recognize him, either.’