The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  But Willy was the one who commanded Toby Wilder’s attention – at last – though he seemed only mildly curious. She flung the cigarette lighter across the room. He snatched it from the air, and stared at it. And now a closer look, head shaking, not believing his eyes. He held it up to the light of the window, the better to read the faint date scratched in gold. He turned back to her, rising from his table, but Willy was already at the door and passing through it, laughing, laughing. The chase was on.

  Officer Chu was in a quandary. Willy Fallon’s protection might not be his chief concern today, but it was a cop’s job. However, she did not look like a woman in any danger. Every few running steps, she turned back to smile at the long-haired young man who chased her up MacDougal Street. Savvy Village residents hugged brick walls and storefront windows, but a few tourists went down like bowling pins. Arthur Chu followed the pair on the run into Washington Square Park, where they played a fast kids’ game of catch me if you can.

  Grinning like a maniac, Willy ran around the fountain, and her pursuer cut across its wide basin, slogging through the pool and getting drenched by arcs of water from the rim and the bubbling tower at the center. On the other side, he was within grabbing distance of Willy. But now a helpful, though misguided, park visitor tripped the running man to end the chase, and the poor bastard went down on one knee, wincing as bone met concrete. Willy, the clear winner, and Officer Chu were gone before the loser of the race could get to his feet.

  Rolland Mann waited on the sidewalk at the corner of Columbus Avenue and West Eighty-sixth Street, hardly a neighborhood that attracted paparazzi in search of celebrities, not that his own face was all that well known around town. Four southbound buses had passed by since his arrival at this meeting place.

  Willy Fallon was that late.

  Two other people stood beside him, both of them tourists. They gave themselves away by waiting on the sidewalk for their chance to legally walk across the intersection. Their sheep’s eyes were glued to the glowing red sign in the shape of a hand that commanded them not to move.

  The real New Yorkers were standing in the street – screw the traffic light – waiting for the next break in the flow of passing cars. Poised three steps from the sidewalk, the locals liked this competitive edge on timid curbhuggers from out of town. And, in the ongoing war of pedestrian and driver, there were points to be scored if one could terrify the other with a near miss.

  A teenage girl approached the corner, oblivious to her environs, hooked into music by earphones, and she stepped off the curb. She was pretty, else Rolland would not have noticed her. And now the southbound bus was also in his line of sight as it barreled down Columbus Avenue, ramming its way across the lanes of the intersection – as it had done every ten minutes or so during the long wait for Willy Fallon.

  The teenager stepped in time to the music from her earphones and never saw the bus – as she walked into its path. A stunning moment. He knew she was going to die. The bus was bearing down on her. A millisecond more, and she would be smashed like bug soup on a windshield.

  The bus was gigantic, filling out his field of vision. Closer, closer.

  A middle-aged man in greasy coveralls reached out, grabbed the girl’s collar and yanked her back a step. The metal behemoth, brakes screaming, came within inches – inches – of the girl, and it failed to stop for six more yards beyond the point where she really should have died. A stench of burning rubber was in the air. There was time enough for the driver’s quick look in a rearview mirror, a sigh of relief, and then the bus rolled on. Three pedestrians stopped to applaud, as they would for any near-death experience; it was a theater town.

  The show was over, and the audience dispersed. The teenage girl could only stand there, staring at the departing bus, eyes glazing over as shock set in. And now her savior, the man in coveralls, released his handful of her blouse, saying, ‘Jeese, I’m so sorry, kid. What was I thinking?’

  The girl turned to face her rescuer. Huh?

  The hero smacked his head in a mime of Dummy me. ‘If that bus had hit you, you’d be set for life.’ The girl, head shaking, uncomprehending, was still surprised to be there, upright and alive, when the man started across the street, waving goodbye to her, saying, ‘Sorry, kid.’

  The Good Samaritan’s guilt was understandable. A lawsuit involving a city bus would have paid off in millions. But that girl would never have survived a direct hit by tons of rolling steel.

  Though he had been instructed to wait on the corner, Rolland stepped off the curb, moved three more steps into the street, and there he waited for Willy Fallon.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The headmaster doesn’t know whether or not the bums of Potter’s Field are embalmed. I tell him this is important stuff, and I’ve already asked my teacher. She doesn’t know, either, and that’s why she sent me to him. Well, I tell him, the dead wino’s body will turn to soup without embalming. So this is my problem, I say. How can I picture this man in my head, day after day, if I don’t know how fast his body is decomposing?

  The headmaster gets up and leaves his office. Hours later, at the end of the school day, his secretary finds me still sitting in there alone. She tells me to go home. I tell her I don’t think I can get there from here. The secretary calls my mother to come and get me.

  As we walk home, I take Mom’s hand the way I did when I was six.

  —Ernest Nadler

  When Willy Fallon arrived at the designated corner, Rolland Mann appeared to have given up on her. He was standing in the street, waiting for a chance to cross or looking to hail a cab. She called to him from the sidewalk. ‘Hey!’ He glanced at her over one shoulder and then turned back to face the oncoming traffic.

  ‘Where are you going?’ She stepped off the curb to join him in the street. He smiled and placed an avuncular hand on her shoulder. And that set off the first alarm.

  Creepy bastard.

  She shook off his hand, squared her shoulders and faced him down, but his eyes were turned toward the approach of an oncoming bus – not a city bus, but a huge double-decker tour bus. Her first instinct was to step back before it could flatten both of them, and now Mann’s hand was lightly pressed to the small of her back.

  Oh, shit! You prick! No way!

  In the spirit of self-preservation, she reached down to squeeze his testicles, though she had planned to do that anyway. He doubled over in agony. They all did that. And now, with no trouble, only a kick in the pants, she guided the hunched-over man into the bus lane.

  Then a screech, a whack, and he was gone.

  Before Willy Fallon vanished from the scene of the traffic fatality, one of the witnesses heard her mutter, ‘Fucking amateur.’

  However, the tourist’s first language was Danish, and Officer Chu thought the woman might have heard this wrong. Nevertheless, the plainclothes policeman wrote the words down in his notebook. Two uniformed cops collected cameras from the other tour-bus passengers, and a citywide search was under way for the apprehension of a killer socialite.

  So ended Arthur Chu’s surveillance detail and his best shot of advancement in the NYPD. After this fiasco, the department would not trust him to polish the shoes of detectives from Special Crimes Unit.

  He had already given his own witness statement to the local police, and now he repeated it on his cell phone for the benefit of Detective Mallory. With a glance at the bloody smear on the front of the vehicle, he said to her, ‘Oh, yeah. Really dead.’ He explained that the acting police commissioner had made a pass at Miss Fallon. The lady had taken offense and retaliated – New York style – by the balls. Oh, and then, of course . . . by the bus.

  Toby Wilder opened his door, and there she was, the skinny brunette who had tossed him the gold cigarette lighter. Her eyes were too bright, and her skin was flushed. The lady was in a fever when she said, ‘Let me in.’

  Why not?

  He stepped aside, and she walked into his front room, asking, ‘Where do you keep the booze?’
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br />   When he had rinsed out two glasses and returned from the kitchen with the wine, the kind that came with a cap instead of a cork, his visitor had appropriated the couch, arms sprawled across the back cushions, both feet up on the coffee table.

  He handed her one of the glasses. ‘Who the hell are you, and where did you get my lighter?’

  ‘You don’t remember me?’ Her tone was asking, How could he not know who she was?

  Toby shook his head to say he had no idea. He could see that she did not believe him. ‘No, thanks,’ he said, when she offered him pills from the stash in her purse. And this also surprised her.

  He was still feeling a buzz from his last round of oxycodone, neither jonesing for another rush nor stoned. All his heavy doses were for the nighttime hours, and then only pills that guaranteed sleep without dreams. Come morning came the painkillers he favored over every other drug to chase away the sweaty shakes and nausea. Lunch at one o’clock, and then there were more pills to pop. He had his routine. It never varied. Every day was the same day relived – until now.

  She swallowed the wine in one long draught and handed him her empty glass. ‘Get me another one.’

  Why not?

  He brought in the bottle to fill her glass again. When they were seated facing one another, she dropped names into the conversation: the Driscol School, Humphrey, Aggy – each one ending with the lilt of a question to prompt his recall or maybe to catch him in a lie.

  Finally, she came back to his cigarette lighter. He sipped his wine and answered her questions, though she responded to none of his. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you could call it an heirloom.’ He pulled the lighter from his shirt pocket, and looked down at the etching in the metal, so faint now, he could barely read the numbers. ‘My father scratched in this date on the day I was born. Dad loved this lighter.’ It had been left to Jess Wilder by his own father, another drunk who had abandoned his family. ‘He left this with my mother.’

  Dad had been afraid that he might pawn it. He had hocked everything else he owned to pay for booze, but not this lighter. Never this. Toby’s mother had given it to her son when he was old enough to understand the family tradition: Leave your kid a gold cigarette lighter before you run out on him.

  His visitor’s voice seemed far away when she said, ‘I remember when you lost that lighter. The crazy bum in the Ramble, the one who hit you – did he try to take it away from you?’

  ‘No. I was trying to give it back to him.’ Toby slurred his words. Odd. He stared at his glass. ‘So you were there that day.’ And this should have been a more exciting revelation, but he was stoned. Not drunk on wine – he could drink all day and never feel it. His breathing was slow and shallow, then – full stop. For ten seconds of panic, he fought for air. When he could breathe again, his heart was racing at the pace of a heart attack.

  ‘You bitch, you drugged me!’

  The oxycodone bottle lay open on the coffee table. He grabbed it up and emptied the remaining two pills into his hand. How many had gone into his wine? When he reached out for the woman, she sprang up from the couch and danced away, laughing. The dregs of his knocked-over glass were splashed across the carpet like spilt blood.

  The squad room down the hall was a chaos of phones ringing, detectives hollering, chasing down leads on Willy Fallon. But here in the incident room, it was quiet. ‘The news is carrying the story as a traffic accident,’ said Jack Coffey.

  ‘Good,’ said the chief of detectives. ‘Let’s hope our guys collected all the civilian cameras.’ Joe Goddard walked beside the lieutenant, eyeing the latest exhibits on the cork wall. Many of these tourist photos contradicted any possibility of accidental death. Alongside them were the pinned-up phone messages faxed over by Rolland Mann’s secretary.

  ‘This is where it begins.’ Mallory tapped one of the shadow cop’s cell-phone shots taken earlier in the day, when Willy had visited Grace Driscol-Bledsoe. She was pictured here, emerging from the mansion with a bulging purse. ‘Grace claims she can’t stand the sight of Willy Fallon.’

  ‘So I called the lady,’ said Riker. ‘Asked her if they kissed and made up.’ He talked with pins in his mouth as he affixed more pictures to the cork. ‘According to Mrs Driscol-Bledsoe, Willy just stopped by to pay condolences on the death of her beloved pervert son. But we figure Grace sicked her on Rocket Mann.’ The next exhibit was another one of Officer Chu’s pictures. ‘A fast cab ride later, here’s Willy standing in front of Police Plaza with the deputy commissioner. Arty Chu says Rocket Mann ran away when the reporters closed in on them. And here’s Willy with her cell phone out.’

  ‘She made three calls to Rocket Mann’s office.’ Mallory strolled down the wall to stand before the fax from the secretary, Miss Scott. ‘Willy didn’t feel the need to leave her name. Her last message was Call or else.’

  ‘The secretary says the messages rattled him,’ said Riker. ‘Then Willy gets a call on a phone that was reported stolen. Had to be one of Mann’s throwaway cells. So they meet on the Upper West Side.’ The detective tapped the last photograph from Officer Chu. It was a rear view of Rolland Mann and Willy Fallon standing in the street. ‘Here he’s got one hand on her back.’ The next shot was a frontal view taken by a Nebraska tourist, who had mistaken the bland neighborhood as a point of interest worthy of a photograph. ‘In this one, Rocket Mann’s watching the oncoming bus, picking his moment.’ The next shot was the local precinct’s photo of a badly smashed body. ‘But Willy got him first.’

  ‘And she skates on self-defense,’ said Joe Goddard.

  ‘Murder,’ said Mallory. ‘Grace Driscol-Bledsoe set him up for the kill. She aimed Willy like a gun.’

  ‘But you’ll never prove it.’ The chief of D’s was reading Officer Chu’s witness statement forwarded from the Upper West Side precinct. ‘Your surveillance cop thinks Rocket Mann made a pass at Willy. And then the little bitch went psycho. You know that’s the way her lawyer’s gonna play it.’

  ‘Willy did a murder,’ said Riker. ‘And we don’t think it’s her first time out.’

  ‘The West Side cops will handle the bus accident.’ And now that the detective stood corrected, Chief Goddard turned to the lieutenant, suddenly remembering the chain of command for issuing orders. ‘Jack, your guys need to focus. They’re gonna sidestep Mrs Driscol-Bledsoe. All I care about right now are the Ramble murders. You got a nice revenge motive for Toby Wilder. Nail him for the Hunger Artist murders – and we are done.’

  We?

  This did not go over well with Riker. His feet planted solidly in a showdown stance, he faced off against the chief of D’s.

  Lieutenant Coffey failed to catch his detective’s eye. He could only will the man to be careful.

  Mallory moved between her partner and Goddard, saying, ‘Works for me, Chief. Except for sidestepping anybody on our shortlist – and the part about railroading Toby Wilder.’

  The lieutenant stood frozen, waiting for the chief to knock her down the ranks or fire her. It was like watching Mallory take a bullet in slow motion. Jack Coffey had always known this moment would come. Was she crazy? Absolutely. And she was also in the right. He kissed his pension goodbye and stepped forward.

  But his fine adrenaline rush was all for naught.

  Joe Goddard was blind to Mallory. She did not exist for him. He had locked eyes with the man behind her, saying to Riker, ‘It’s your call – your case.’ And then, so calmly, hands in his pockets, the chief of detectives strolled toward the door.

  Jack Coffey had a curious feeling of letdown. Next came suspicion.

  And Mallory shared it. She spoke to her partner as she stared at the chief’s retreating back. ‘What’ve you got on that bastard?’

  It did not occur to Willy Fallon that she might be a fugitive from the law, that any trace of herself had been left behind for the police to find. Dumb cops. And so, with no sense of urgency, she watched Toby Wilder weaving, stumbling around with his overdose eyes, pupils gone to tiny pinpricks on a field of sp
ooky blue irises. He crash-landed in an armchair.

  She leisurely prowled through all his drawers and cabinets, but found no more street drugs, only empty bottles. Toby was definitely an addict, but his drugs were painkillers and sleeping pills, nothing purely recreational, nothing fun. She sat down on the couch once more and glanced at the broken television screen. She tapped the power button. The volume still worked. ‘So this is what you do all day? You listen to TV and get stoned?’

  He was high, flying, but not deaf, and neither was he up to another chase around the furniture. He could only stretch out one accusing hand as he lurched forward in the chair. ‘What were you doing in the Ramble that day?’

  Willy smiled, pleased to see him more docile now, though he was far from dead. Apparently she had misjudged his overdose. Oh, of course. She slapped her forehead. Stupid. Stupid. She had failed to factor in the tolerance level of an addict.

  She took one more slow stroll around the apartment, checking the inventory of lethal things. There were knives in the kitchen. No – too messy. Ah, but out in the hall were steep stairs. A broken neck? Yes, that would do nicely. And many thanks were due to Rolland Mann. She had the hang of murder by accident now. Willy opened the door to the hallway, only a short walk to the staircase. All that remained was the problem of getting Toby Wilder from in here to out there.

  ‘So that dead wino was your father? Well, I guess we’re almost even now.’

  Grace had been so wrong. Rolland Mann could not have been the Hunger Artist. The bus had been a clumsy attempt to kill her, an opportunistic fumble. The Ramble murders of Humphrey and Aggy – that was clearly a different kind of kill. ‘I know it was you.’