The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  The detective was late to pull up a stool at the bar, and he made his apologies to Charles Butler. Coco sat between them on a cushion of two telephone books so she could reach her drink, a pink concoction with three cherries. Riker smiled and flashed his badge at the bartender. ‘Tell me you carded the little girl.’

  ‘The kid’s legal. She’s a performer. Isn’t that right, Coco?’ The bartender had obviously fallen deeply in love with the short piano player. Turning back to Riker, he said, ‘She did a solo between sets.’

  ‘And she got a standing ovation,’ said Charles Butler. ‘But it’s way past her bedtime, and she’s a little tired.’

  Coco smiled like a world-weary trouper. She took a long, noisy sip on her straw and drained her pink drink dry.

  Now the bartender recognized Riker and called him by his name, ‘Lou’s Friend.’ A shot of whiskey and a water back was ordered, and then the detective listened to Coco’s diatribe on the cannibalism of hungry rats, accompanied by a sax-and-strings rendition of ‘Summertime.’ The combo ended its last number, and now he spotted a familiar piano man whose day job was writing orchestra arrangements for classical music and Broadway show tunes. Chick Dolan’s nights belonged to jazz. The man had to be pushing seventy, but he had aged with unnatural grace. He moved toward the bar with glides and slides.

  Damn. So cool.

  And now a flash of the pearly whites. ‘Hey, Riker. How long’s it been, man?’

  ‘A few years.’ In the company of Lou Markowitz, who loved everything from bebop to rhythm and blues, Riker had once been a regular patron of Birdland. Though his first love would always be rock ’n’ roll, over time, he had been forced to admit that jazz rocked, too.

  ‘I’d love to know where this came from.’ Chick Dolan laid a short stack of sheet music on the bar. ‘Your friend here won’t say.’ He nodded in Charles’s direction. ‘So the cops got a sudden interest in jazz?’

  ‘Yeah. Lou’s kid and me. We’re working a case, and that’s part of it.’ He glanced at the musical score transcribed from Toby Wilder’s bedroom walls. ‘What can you tell me?’

  ‘It’s good,’ said Chick, ‘and it’s a real tease. There’s a signature in the sax riffs and piano rolls, but I can’t think who it belongs to. Well, I can see the guy’s face. I just can’t put a name to him.’ Pointing to his head, where the last white hair had fallen out at least five years ago, he said, ‘I think every time I learn something new, something old falls out of my brain.’

  ‘Can you play it?’

  Chick grinned. ‘All I got is a three-man combo. You’d have to bring me – oh, about fifty more musicians.’

  ‘You can’t just noodle the melody?’

  The other man’s expression was clear: No, you idiot. Some translation was obviously required, and fortunately Chick knew Riker’s first language. ‘Mick Jagger had the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band. Suppose those boys had just come out onstage and whistled a few bars for the audience?’

  Riker had to admit that it would not be quite the same experience as the blowout concerts of his younger days.

  ‘Your friend tells me a kid wrote this score fifteen years ago,’ said Chick. ‘The melody is original. If I’ve never heard it, no one has. But then there’s style – something older than the boy’s melody. The riff’s the thing – like fingerprints.’ The man rolled up the score of sheet music. ‘Leave this with me. I’ll get back to you.’ Tomorrow, he explained, there would be a rehearsal for the series of free park concerts. ‘It’s a symphony orchestra, but it’s got lots of switch-hitters, classical and jazz, and a few old-timers like me.’ And one of those musicians would recall the signature in the music.

  Across the street from the Midtown hotel, an officer in blue jeans sat in the back of a cruiser, courtesy of two patrol cops who were taking a late dinner break in a nearby restaurant. Arthur Chu had been told to go home once Willy Fallon returned to her room. Her tenth-floor window was lit, but he would not trust the socialite to stay tucked in.

  If Detective Riker was right about party girls sleeping till noon, it was because they never went to bed this early.

  As a white shield, not yet a detective, Arty knew his perch in Special Crimes was tenuous. Every member of that squad was an elite gold shield. He was only hanging on to his desk moment to moment. With the first screwup, they would send him packing back to his old precinct. And so, tonight, he worked off the clock. He would give up sleep. He would also sacrifice fingers and toes – if they would only let him stay.

  The light went out in the woman’s hotel window, but Arty was not deceived. No way she was going to sleep. He counted off the minutes for her elevator ride down to the lobby. The uniforms, back from dinner, slid into the front seat just as Willy Fallon appeared on the sidewalk, one hand outstretched to fish a passing taxi from the stream of traffic.

  ‘My girl’s on the move,’ said Arthur Chu. ‘Follow that cab!’

  And though surveillance detail was not their job tonight, the patrolmen obliged him, trailing the yellow taxi from a distance of two car lengths, heading uptown, rounding the monument of Columbus Circle, straight up Central Park West and past the Museum of Natural History. A few blocks later, Willy got out of her vehicle, and Officer Chu left his.

  He followed her over a crosswalk and down a side street of brownstones, but hung back as she stopped in front of a large building decorated with gargoyles. The name of the Driscol School was engraved in large letters above the doors.

  Arthur Chu crossed over to the other side of the street and played the role of a bum, descending three steps to a well of concrete sunk below the level of the sidewalk, a place where trash was stored. As he riffled through plastic receptacles and bags, he watched her move toward a tall wrought-iron gate that barred an alley between the school and a building next door. Willy Fallon dipped a hand into her purse and pulled out something he could not see.

  A key? It must be. A moment later, the gate swung open.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Losing them is easy in the Ramble. We know where to hide so no one can find us. Hell, even we can’t find us. We hold our breath, Phoebe and me. They pass us by, and then they double back – double-fisted. Hunting. They call out our names – so angry because they can’t find us, hurt us. Then Humphrey and the girls gang up on another target. From the first scream to the last, we can’t move. We can only listen to what they do to that poor crazy bum. They do it forever, dragging out the pain. The wino screams. Phoebe cries. I’m scared out of my mind – still scared even as I write this line.

  —Ernest Nadler

  Phoebe Bledsoe ran down the alley and across the garden to her cottage. Only time enough to dress, and then she would have to hurry, run all the way if she must. She dare not be late to the gathering at her mother’s mansion.

  The gleam of a garden lantern shone through the crack as she opened her front door, and there on the floor was a note that had been slid under the sill.

  Another threat?

  ‘Don’t turn on the light!’ Dead Ernest stood by the window, looking through a slit in the curtain. ‘Light attracts bugs like Willy.’

  Phoebe’s hand hesitated on the wall switch and then dropped to her side. She made her way across the dark room by touch of chair and couch and table to find the drawer with the flashlight. She clicked it on and trained a yellow beam on the notepaper. Willy Fallon’s handwriting was almost illegible. Phoebe had to labor over every obscenity.

  ‘Murder makes people crazy,’ said Dead Ernest.

  No, none of them had been crazy – only cruel.

  A shadow passed by the curtain of the front window. Then came a knock at the door, and Willy Fallon yelled, ‘I know you’re in there!’ Rapping knuckles escalated to banging fists. ‘Tell your mother she has to talk to me!’

  Willy slammed her body into the door. Screaming and kicking at the wood, she finally got the attention of the night watchman. On the other side of the garden, old Mr Polanski opened the school’s back
door. Armed with his own flashlight, he aimed it at the intruder.

  Willy fled.

  They were driving home from Birdland in Midtown traffic. Riker had always loved the city best by night with the car windows all rolled down. He stared at the windshield, a panorama of neon colors and diamond-bright headlights. A duel of Latin music versus rap blasted from car lanes up ahead, but the detective hardly noticed. He had trouble on his mind.

  The child sleeping in his arms was lightly snoring. He turned to the man behind the wheel, who had just ended the story of a surprise visit from Rolland Mann. ‘When Mallory said she took care of it, did she say how?’

  Charles Butler shook his head. ‘She only told me he wouldn’t be back – ever.’

  ‘Well, I know she didn’t kill him. Word gets out when you shoot the top cop.’ Riker slumped low in the passenger seat. What had she done to that man? Could things get any worse? The tallest buildings were behind them now as the car traveled south through Greenwich Village, a neighborhood built on a more human scale. He looked down at the sleeping child. ‘So when were you planning to tell the kid that her granny’s dead?’

  ‘I thought I’d deal with one trauma at a time,’ said Charles. ‘Perhaps we’ll talk about the death tomorrow.’

  ‘Mallory told her yesterday.’

  Charles’s hands tightened around the wheel, the only sign that he was angry. His voice was calm as he turned east on Houston. ‘Coco took it in stride, didn’t she? No crying, right?’

  ‘Yeah. How’d you know?’

  ‘She always knew Granny was dead. Coco never asked me any questions about her – never talked about going home. She knew she had no one to go back to. That’s why she fastened all her hopes on Mallory. From the moment they met, Coco was angling for a new home and someone to love her.’ They shifted across the lanes of wide Houston in silence, and then, as Charles made the turn down to SoHo, he said, ‘This would be a good time for Mallory to back off – just walk away. There has to be a breach that a real parent can step into. That has to happen very soon.’

  ‘You’re probably right, but Mallory thinks the kid knows more than she’s telling. It’s gonna take us a while to crack the fairy-tale code.’

  ‘I say it ends now. I have the strongest legal claim on Coco. Thanks to Robin Duffy, I’m the recognized guardian in both New York and Illinois. The law says—’

  ‘Mallory is the law.’ The Mercedes pulled up to the curb in front of the saloon that Riker called home. ‘You got no shot. You never did.’

  Charles cut the engine. ‘I’m very close to placing Coco in a permanent home. That’s what she needs right now. She’s in crisis. The child can’t go on this way. But Mallory won’t sign the papers to let her go . . . This is heartless.’

  Riker did not want to end the night like this. ‘Heartless? Yeah, that’s my partner. But you know she’d take a bullet for Coco . . . and maybe she already did. You never asked her how she solved your problem with Rolland Mann. She just told you the kid was safe, and you believed her. Absolute faith, right? I guess it never occurred to you that she could ever go into a fight – and lose everything. Charles, you know – you know she went after that bastard and scared him shitless. That’s her style . . . That’s her romantic side,’ he said to the sorry man who loved Mallory – heart or no heart.

  The salon at the mansion was in full swing when Phoebe Bledsoe arrived with sweat stains under her arms from racing two blocks on this muggy night.

  The caterer’s people, all more formally dressed, carried trays laden with glasses of red wine and white, moving through a babble of voices from every quarter of the wide room. Most of her mother’s guests stood in conspiracies of two and gangs of four or more. Others sat on chairs, divans and sofas positioned in conversational clusters. In this social hierarchy of furniture, there could only be one throne. High above her mother’s favorite chair, the chandelier burned bright with electric candles and a thousand pieces of reflecting crystal. Another chair, a smaller one, had been placed beside her mother’s, allowing only one person at a time to curry favor. It was the most coveted seat in the house, and people made wide circles around it, waiting for a chance at the ear of Grace Driscol-Bledsoe, a maker and breaker of careers and fortunes.

  Phoebe’s late father had called this weekly affair the Night of the Toadies. As a child, she had taken this term to mean a squishiness of character, slimy souls – and a stink. ‘Yes,’ he had said to her then, ‘that’s exactly right.’

  She walked about the room as her mother’s feeble apprentice, accepting kisses from familiar CEOs and politicos, but only handshakes from the up-and-comers. Every fifteen minutes, the drab companion, Hoffman, popped into the room to see that all was well with her employer, and then, after a moment or two, popped out – a clock’s broken cuckoo silently announcing the quarter hour. And finally, finally, at the end of the evening, when the room had been cleared of every toad, and coffee was served for two, Phoebe sat in the petitioner’s chair beside her mother.

  ‘Seriously? That’s what this says?’ Grace Driscol-Bledsoe stared at the note of scrawled lines. ‘Willy’s pushed a few of these through my mail slot, but I never actually tried to read one.’ Nor this one – she crumpled it into a ball and set it on the small table that held her coffee cup.

  ‘Did you really throw Willy out of the house?’

  ‘Hoffman did – with the help of those lovely detectives who interrogated you. I rather hoped they’d shoot her, but they only loaded her into an ambulette.’

  ‘If you’d just talk to Willy, she’d leave me alone.’

  ‘Scary little beast, isn’t she? Well, you could move back into the mansion with me. It’s very safe here, and your old room is always waiting for you.’

  Of course it was. This was an old conversation. It had gone on for years. She was still regarded as her mother’s runaway child. And this was not the first bribe to bring her home – only the most callous one.

  ‘So that’s what it’s going to cost me to get rid of Willy?’ Phoebe stood up, preparing to leave now that she understood her true place – a bit of a shock. She was one of the toads.

  ‘Send him up,’ Mallory said to the doorman at the other end of the intercom. Minutes later, when she heard the soft knock, the detective was ready with a bottle of wine under her arm and two glasses in hand. She opened the door to Rabbi David Kaplan, a slender, middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed beard, a sweet smile and a penchant for poker.

  ‘Kathy.’ He was among that close circle of men who had loved her foster father, and the rabbi was fearless in the use of her first name. He kissed her cheek, already forgiving her for not returning his calls. ‘It’s been a long time – too long.’ He spread his open hands, and slowly shook his head. What was he to do with her? ‘Are you coming to the poker game this week?’

  In lieu of an answer, she handed him the wine bottle, and he read the label of his favorite vintner. Now suspicion would begin. The rabbi would wonder if she could have known that he would drop by tonight unannounced.

  Mallory smiled to say, Oh, yeah.

  After failing with Riker, of course Charles Butler would send another diplomat to plead the case for moving Coco beyond the reach of the police. Also, she had noticed the rabbi standing on the sidewalk below and looking up at her dark street-side windows, awaiting an opportunity to catch her off guard with no excuse for refusing to see him. She had only to flip a light switch in the front room. Then, following a count to ten, the doorman had announced him.

  ‘So,’ she said to the man who lived on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, ‘you just happened to be passing by?’ The detective stepped out into the hall. ‘Let’s go to the roof.’

  They entered the elevator. As the doors closed, Mallory said, ‘I know you called my boss while I was away – quite a few times.’

  ‘Kathy, you were gone so long, months and months.’ He raised his eyebrows in a gentle reprimand. ‘No goodbye, no postcards.’

  Following el
evator etiquette, they both turned their eyes to the lighted numbers for the rising floors.

  ‘So you hounded the lieutenant.’

  ‘Hounded? No.’ The rabbi shrugged. ‘Well, it could’ve been worse. I wanted to file a missing-person report, but Edward stopped me. He said you wouldn’t want that kind of thing on your record. So then I went to Lieutenant Coffey. A nice man, very sympathetic. He told me he’d know if you were in trouble. He said he was always the last to know, but eventually . . . if anything bad should happen . . . he would know.’

  ‘And what about your poker cronies? How many times did they call Jack Coffey?’

  ‘I rat on no one.’ David Kaplan was devoted to his friends, though he would take their money at cards every chance he got. In a penny-ante poker game, that might be a ten-dollar win. What a player. The rabbi, the gentlest man in creation, so loved this little fantasy that he could be ruthless.

  The elevator doors opened onto a narrow stairwell, and they climbed these steps to a well-lit roof with a wooden deck and chairs in clusters around metal tables. The summer wind was warm. Above them, the moon and a poor show of stars could not compete with this view of a million city lights. She sat down with Rabbi Kaplan and poured the wine. ‘So you badgered Lieutenant Coffey every day.’

  ‘A few times. He told me nothing. Well, he did say that no news was good news.’

  ‘I bet you spent a lot of time talking about me on poker nights.’

  ‘Oh, Edward and Robin always talk about you behind your back. They’ve been doing that since you were a little girl. They love you.’ The rabbi sadly shook his head. ‘Those bastards.’ Now he graced her with his most innocent smile, the one he used for killer poker hands. And yet this man probably still wondered how she had managed to fleece him at cards all through her childhood.

  He laid a folded sheaf of papers on the table. ‘More legal work for Coco.’