The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  ‘Comic-book heroes are in the family genes,’ Ernie had said to her then.

  And so, of course, she understood why he had to die.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Spider Girl is mutating. This morning in algebra, Willy Fallon shows me her new manicure, fingernails filed to sharp points, and she flexes them close to my eyes. I guess those claws are supposed to make her more like an animal – maybe a cat? Well, that would take social climbing for an insect like Willy. But I get the message, and when class is over, I run.

  —Ernest Nadler

  As Charles put his key in the lock, Coco hugged their patrolman escort in farewell and gave a hello hug to the officer who guarded the front door.

  Once inside the apartment, Charles laid down the envelope that contained pictures of Toby Wilder’s walls. He opened a paper bag to show the child his recent purchase from a stationery store, a tablet with pages of blank lines where notes would go. ‘Music paper.’

  An hour later, they sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Between them was a bowl of popcorn and the score for a jazz symphony. He had no difficulty working out the order of the police photographs; music followed logical progressions, and he quickly transcribed pictured notes to paper. The child was still laboring over the first photo that he had discarded. He could see that her interest in drawing had waned. Charles waved one hand to get her attention, and she waved back, slow to smile, tired now.

  ‘Coco, if you take a nap, you can stay up late. We’re going out tonight.’ He did not want to call on Mrs Ortega to mind the child this evening. The woman would take nothing from him in payment for anything connected to this little girl. ‘Do you like jazz?’

  She nodded and bowed her head to the task of drawing music – so serious. Her attention span for this exercise was longer than he had expected, and he now realized that this was because it was a project for Mallory. Perhaps there was an upside to that relationship. The child delivered monologues to most people, but she held actual conversations with the detective she loved.

  Charles stared at Coco’s odd attempts at copying: flags without notes and notes without stems, numbers and symbols arranged in a mystifying order, some touching the lines for the musical scale only by accident – a completely alien pictorial language. Once more, the two lonely people waved to each other from different planets while seated at the same kitchen table.

  Only one thing was painfully clear. She had a little dream. It would never come true.

  Coco laid down her pencil and stared at the door, listening, waiting – for Mallory.

  ‘Willy Fallon was casing Toby’s place.’ Detective Janos laid down a fax record of wireless calls. ‘She went through all the Wilders in the phonebook to find him.’

  Lieutenant Coffey stared at the screen of his desktop computer, clicking on the images of the socialite downloaded from Janos’s cell phone. ‘What happened to the guard on her hospital room? Where the hell was he?’

  ‘I talked to his sergeant,’ said Janos. ‘Willy declined police protection. So he pulled off the guard.’

  ‘And when did that idiot plan to tell us our crime victim was running loose on the streets?’ Jack Coffey held up one hand to say never mind, and he turned to the wide window on his squad room.

  Seated at a desk by the staircase door was Arthur Chu, a plainclothes cop in the white-shield limbo between a uniform’s silver badge and a detective’s gold. During Mallory’s absence, Chu had been borrowed from another precinct. He had done well on surveillance assignments – very well. And Coffey had neglected to return the young man to the squad that owned him.

  ‘Put Arty Chu on shadow detail. Tell the kid he stays on Willy’s tail until we wrap this case. Where’s our girl now? Do we know?’

  ‘I found her.’ Janos held up the data for a triangulation of pings off cell-phone towers. ‘Looks like Willy’s heading back to the hospital.’

  The effect of her last pain pill had worn off. Sore and tired, Willy Fallon looked forward to lying down in her hospital bed and ordering more painkillers to ease the lingering aches of muscle and tendon. On the way to her room, she passed a clock in the corridor. She was right on time for her next massage from the physical therapist. Oh, and she wanted her special button, the one used to run the nursing staff ragged.

  She opened the door to find an orderly stripping sheets from her bed. Well, this was better maid service than her hotel provided. Another staffer, the nurse called Hey You, was standing at the bedside table, scooping pill bottles into a box.

  ‘Hey! I might need that stuff!’

  ‘Not anymore,’ said the nurse. ‘You’ve been discharged, Miss Fallon.’

  ‘No way. I didn’t check out. I just had some personal business to take care of.’ There had been people to stalk and people to threaten – a very busy day. But now she wanted her damn bed and her meds and the service of her handmaids. And that massage – oh, how she needed that. ‘So now I’m back. Get my doctor in here. Tell him I need more meds. Move!’

  Something had changed while she was away. This nurse no longer had the look of a beaten dog. The woman actually seemed cheerful, and Willy planned to fix that. ‘Are you listening to me?’

  The nurse placed the last bottle in her collection box. ‘Your bill’s been paid. You’ve been discharged. We need the bed.’

  ‘My parents paid the bill?’

  ‘Their lawyer did.’

  ‘But they called, right? They asked for me?’ Did that sound too needy?

  The nurse hated her, but the woman dropped her smile, and her eyes conveyed something approaching pity.

  ‘Did my parents leave me a message?’

  The response to this question was so terribly important, and the nurse must have intuited this. Her voice softened when she said, ‘Well . . . reporters have been calling all day.’ The woman was taking no satisfaction here, only leaving Willy to draw the obvious conclusion: Mummy and Daddy had not called. And they never would. They were done with her.

  Willy sank down on the bare mattress, sore, tired and hungry. Her hotel only offered a bed, nothing more. Who would take care of her now? Subdued, she opened her purse to pull out her magic paper bag, and she held up a wad of cash as an offering. ‘Let me stay?’

  ‘We need the bed.’

  They loved her. They adored her.

  Cameras, cameras everywhere, flashes and strobe lights.

  A reborn Willy Fallon, jazzed on four lines of cocaine, stood before a stretch limousine parked outside her hotel. She lowered her sunglasses to accommodate the paparazzi and followed their camera directions of ‘Hey, Willy, give us a smile,’ and ‘Willy, baby, turn this way.’ Reporters in this mix were holding out microphones and asking not where she had been all this time or how long had she been back in town, but did she know the Hunger Artist’s victim, Humphrey Bledsoe? And what about the other one? ‘Miss Fallon, who was the third victim in the Ramble?’

  Willy ignored the questions. She had a better story, and when she had told it, she ducked inside the limo and handed the driver Detective Mallory’s card. ‘That’s the address.’ When the car was under way, she turned to look out the rear window. Good. The reporters were in pursuit.

  ‘No, there’s no truth to it! . . . Yeah, that’s right. She lied!’

  Jack Coffey hung up on the fact-checker for a network news show, the third one to call and ask him to name the detective who had attacked Willy Fallon on her sickbed. Oh, God. Why did this have to happen now? If the chief of D’s did not take Mallory’s badge today, the mayor would – not for the bogus assault charge, but for the bad press.

  The lieutenant stood by the street-side window and looked up to the sky, where God might be, and he splayed his hands to ask, ‘So what did Mallory do to you?’

  Down below, reporters were gathering on the sidewalk outside the station house. Damn lynch mob. He opened the blinds for the window on the squad room. With a wave, he signaled Detective Gonzales to bring in the visitor earlier announced as Bitch of the Wes
tern World. Miss Fallon had been kept waiting, steaming and complaining for the past half hour.

  Before the woman could open her mouth, the lieutenant said, ‘I’m sorry, the matter is out of my hands. It’s a civil case now – or it will be if you give those reporters the detective’s name. Her personal attorney will be handling the lawsuit against you.’

  ‘What do you—’

  ‘I’ll get you her lawyer’s name and number.’ The lieutenant flipped through his Rolodex. ‘Robin Duffy? Yeah, that’s it.’ He looked up at Detective Gonzales. ‘You know – the guy who sued the feds a while back – and beat the crap out of ’em.’

  Willy Fallon smiled, so unimpressed with this fairy tale. ‘I came here to file charges against Detective Mallory.’

  ‘Police brutality,’ said Coffey. ‘That’s what the reporters tell me. Those charges have to be filed with Internal Affairs. But that can wait till you make bail. Detective Gonzales will handle your booking.’

  Gonzales had taken most of her abuse, and now the man wore a wide grin as he handed his boss a copy of Riker’s assault report, typed up minutes ago and backdated.

  ‘Your attorney should read this,’ said Coffey, ‘before you’re arraigned on the criminal charge.’ He leaned back in his chair, feigning nonchalance. ‘I hear you had Detective Mallory’s partner by the balls – so to speak.’ He pretended to read the report. ‘Oh. Literally. You had the poor guy by the balls. That makes you a sex offender. Detective Riker was willing to let it slide because of what you’d been through. But now I guess we’ll have to jail your ass, lady.’

  ‘Suppose I call off the reporters?’

  ‘I could live with that – if you tell them you made a mistake. Let’s say you were swacked on pain medication, maybe hallucinating.’ Jack Coffey pushed a yellow pad across his desk. ‘And put it in writing.’

  She did. And when she had left his office, he turned to the street window and looked down at the foot traffic on the sidewalk below. It took him a while to locate Officer Chu among the locals. The young shadow cop was that good at blending in. The lieutenant kept watch until Willy Fallon left the building – and Chu followed her down the street.

  The assistant district attorney with the yellow bowtie had no secretary of his own, no gatekeeper to turn away stoned socialites. But Cedrick Carlyle had no fear. Mr and Mrs Fallon, the power couple of Fallon Industries, had retired from public life to hide behind the walls of the family compound in Connecticut, a safe haven where their daughter was persona non grata.

  Willy Fallon leaned over his desk, clicking through pictures on her cell phone to show him shots of a man who was giant size in proportion to a redheaded child. ‘Who is this guy?’

  ‘That’s Charles Butler, a psychologist. Sometimes we use him as an expert witness.’ ADA Carlyle looked up to see her eyes, manic and angry. Crazy bitch. ‘You don’t want to fool with him, Miss Fallon. Dr Butler comes from old money – bluer blood than yours – and some of his best friends carry guns.’

  But who was the child on the small screen? Butler had no offspring.

  In the next shot on Willy’s cell-phone screen, the little girl held hands with a menacing brute. Janos? Yes, that was the name of this detective from Special Crimes Unit. And then Carlyle noticed the large decorative numbers on a building’s front door. He shook his head. No! This was the address on the search warrant. Bimbo socialites could be dangerously stupid. What the hell had she been doing at Toby Wilder’s place? Now he was afraid. He snatched the phone from her hand for a better look at the picture. Who was this child? Why would a detective watch over her? And then the answer came to him. Oh, Christ. Another little girl with red hair.

  Willy broke into his reverie, yelling, ‘Hey!’ And when she had his attention, she banged on the desk. ‘You told the cops about us, didn’t you?’

  ‘I never did.’

  ‘Make it all go away! That’s what you do, isn’t it?’

  While his visitor ranted on, he transferred the child’s pictures from her phone to his own.

  The two detectives watched from their parked car on Hogan Place as Willy Fallon left the massive gray building that housed the District Attorney’s Office and an army of more than five hundred lawyers.

  Riker answered a ringtone, listened a moment and then said to his partner, ‘It’s Janos. He says Carlyle just called Rocket Mann.’

  ‘There’s our guy.’ Mallory pointed to the officer in blue jeans and shades.

  Arthur Chu was the perfect surveillance cop for a multi-ethnic town. He had his mother’s curly brown hair, his father’s Asian eyes and a Bronx accent. With only a few accessories, a cap or sunglasses to wear or discard, he could blend in anywhere, and his baby face was a bonus. No one would ever peg him for a cop. At twenty-six, Mallory’s age, Chu looked years younger, more like a high-school kid.

  In the rearview mirror, Riker watched the shadow cop follow Willy down the sidewalk and disappear around a corner. Since Mallory’s return to town four weeks ago, she had never taken any notice of this youngster. And now that she was aware of him, Riker could only hope that the boy would not screw up.

  ‘Is Chu any good?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Riker. ‘Arty worked one of my cases while you were gone. I don’t think the kid slept for three days. He’s real eager to please.’ Oh, poor choice of words. In Malloryspeak, that translated as a weakness.

  Her cell phone rang, and Riker held up a ten-dollar bill. ‘I bet that’s him now.’

  ‘No bet.’ Mallory showed him Chu’s name on her cell screen, and then, with a click, she was connected to the young cop and demanding to know, ‘What happened?’ She turned to Riker, shaking her head to tell him that nothing had happened – and she was not happy. Her voice was testy when she spoke to the cop on the phone. ‘You don’t have to call in your position every six seconds.’

  Riker took the cell phone from her hand, and his tone was friendly when he said to Officer Chu, ‘Arty? If Willy kills somebody, you can call that in. Otherwise – just take notes.’

  Rolland Mann stepped off the elevator and walked down the hall to his apartment. His workday was far from over, but he had to know – would Annie still be there? Every phone call had gone to the answering machine. And though it was not uncommon for his wife to let the calls ring through, his anxiety had been ratcheting up all day. He opened his front door and found her huddled on the floor beside a packed suitcase, weeping again – frightened again.

  Kneeling down beside his wife, he said to her, so gently, ‘It’s okay, Annie. I’m not mad.’

  Annie was slow to gain her legs, and then she was unsteady. He picked her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom, where he laid her down and covered her with a quilt. After a search of the nightstand drawer, he selected a bottle from her stash of pharmaceuticals. When she had taken the dose he gave her and chased it with water, he sat down on the bed, watching over her until the sleeping pill did its work. Her eyes closed.

  He needed her – and feared her. Did she know how much power she had over him?

  Rolland fetched her suitcase from the front room and unpacked it. While folding her clothes into dresser drawers, he whispered, so as not to wake her, ‘Better luck next time, Annie.’

  Turning on his cell phone, he checked the calls that had gone to voice mail. One message from ADA Carlyle was brief – ‘Call me.’ But more was said by the whining tone of the recorded voice and by the companion photographs that appeared on Rolland’s screen. The first one was a snapshot of a little girl standing outside of Toby Wilder’s apartment building with Charles Butler, a police consultant. In the next shot, she was holding the hand of Detective Janos from Special Crimes.

  Unusual child – and familiar. He could place her now. On the day of the funeral, while he stood in line with the other mourners, this little girl had walked past him, hand in hand with Detective Mallory.

  Was she one of Humphrey Bledsoe’s victims? That freak always had a penchant for very young redheads. Another
thought occurred to him as he pocketed his phone and collected his keys and ran for the front door.

  The child was a witness.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  While I’m getting dressed for school, my father walks into my room. He sees the bites and bruises all over my body. My mother would’ve screamed. Dad only gives me a slow nod. I think he’s commending me for not ratting out the kids who beat me senseless every day. And then he leaves without a word. No help. I’m on my own. I can take a beating without tears, but my father – who never raised a hand to me – he makes me cry.

  —Ernest Nadler

  The visitor had not been announced, and the police officer who guarded the door was gone.

  ‘He’ll be back in a few minutes, Dr Butler.’ Rolland Mann held out a business card that identified him as a deputy police commissioner. ‘Mind if I come in?’

  In fact, Charles did mind. ‘I hear Commissioner Beale is in the hospital. How’s he doing?’

  ‘He’s back in surgery.’ The acting commissioner, a person of merely average height, craned his neck to look up at the tall psychologist. ‘There was a complication.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it.’ Charles was doubly sorry, lacking a good impression of this man next in line for Beale’s job. He had been repulsed by the filmed interrogation of the schoolboy Toby Wilder. And now he was also put off by the visitor’s furtive movements and darting glances into the apartment. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’ve come to see our star witness.’ By the flicker of eyes and a pursed mouth, Rolland Mann gave himself away. He was clearly fishing, testing waters.

  Charles knew he could not lie to this man – or anyone else for that matter. By telltale blush, he had been genetically programmed to be truthful. However, by another accident of birth, he could play the fool without even trying. He smiled, realizing that this somewhat goofy expression always made him the clown in the room. Tilting his head to one side, he was the very portrait of a clueless simpleton. And it was unnecessary to add, Witness? What witness?