The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  Edward Slope, wielding a knife, presided over platters with all the makings for triple-decker sandwiches, and Robin Duffy exchanged Charles Butler’s money for poker chips. White chips were a nickel, and red cost a dime. But the blue ones were twenty-five cents – high stakes.

  The foster child of the game’s founder was rarely in attendance anymore. It was the rabbi’s theory that Kathy Mallory had lost patience with rules that allowed deuces wild when the moon was full. Jacks, of course, were always wild when it rained, and treys whenever it snowed. The rabbi would concede that a hundred such rules were perhaps too many. Or maybe Kathy had simply grown tired of winning so easily. Nevertheless, he set out the -traditional chair for her, though he knew she would certainly not come tonight.

  Maybe next week.

  David Kaplan was a patient man, and he had great faith in the power of enduring love to drive her to the screaming edge of crazy and wear her down. Eventually. But not tonight.

  And so it was a great surprise to hear his doorbell ring.

  Detective Riker followed the rabbi into the den, and he smiled to see familiar faces. All the men on Mallory’s hit list were seated in club chairs around the poker table. ‘Lou always said I had a standing invitation. You guys got a problem with that?’

  ‘Not at all.’ Dr Slope used his cigar to point the detective to the empty chair. ‘You were always welcome, but Lou told us you hated the game.’

  ‘He meant I’d hate this game.’ And now that Riker had set the tone for his visit, he pulled up a chair, lit up a cigarette and accepted a cold beer from his host. ‘I hear you guys play like old ladies.’ He popped the bottle cap. ‘I heard that from Mallory. I think she was twelve years old at the time.’ The detective laid two papers down in front of the chief medical examiner. ‘Could you sign these?’

  The top sheet was the standard form to admit a junkie to the doctor’s private rehab clinic for treatment. Edward Slope scanned the second sheet, a voucher, the city’s promise to pay. ‘No way this is legal. Willy Fallon pleaded out. Why would Toby Wilder be—’

  ‘Maybe it’s not strictly legal,’ said Riker, ‘but it’s fair. That kid lost four years of his life – and more.’

  Slope pushed the papers to one side, unsigned. ‘Then Mr Wilder can sue the city. And good luck to him.’

  The detective shrugged as he dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table. Robin Duffy exchanged it for chips that would have totaled a thousand dollars in a game for grown-ups. But long ago the stakes were fixed within the limits of a child’s allowance money. Lou Markowitz had devised this ritual poker night around his Kathy, a cold little alien spawn who would have gone friendless without these players, these very decent men.

  Riker had come here to slaughter them.

  He had not expected Slope to sign off on a city voucher. The chief medical examiner was legendary for scrupulous honesty. ‘Okay, screw the voucher. What about all those charity beds?’

  ‘Every bed has a long waiting list,’ said Edward Slope.

  No sale.

  As guest of honor, Riker was offered the deck. He dealt out cards with the skill and speed of a born hustler, and that got their attention. So it came as no surprise to the other players when he announced, ‘Tonight we play cutthroat. The name of the game is five-card stud.’ Mallory’s favorite. Back in her puppy days, she had walked in on a game in the station-house lunchroom, and not Lou’s kinder, gentler brand of poker. That day, Riker, with an eye for raw talent, had staked the child to a seat at the table with men who carried real cash and guns. Now he reiterated little Kathy’s rule. ‘No stupid wild cards.’

  No mercy.

  The first bets were made on the two cards dealt to each of them, one faceup and the hole card facedown. Nickel chips clicked into a pile at the center of the table. When the doctor’s turn came round, he raised them all by a dime. What a shark. The detective finished off the deal with three more cards to every player, and they all wanted in, perhaps forgetting that weather conditions and moon cycles no longer improved their chances.

  Riker liked his hand, and he was standing pat. ‘Cards? Anybody?’ He dealt them to takers with discards all around the clockwise circle. The last one he dealt to the doctor, and he leaned toward the man, lowering his voice to say, ‘Just so you know – Mallory’s the one who wants to keep Toby Wilder alive. But she won’t ask you for help. I guess she figures you don’t owe her any favors.’

  For a moment, it seemed as though even Dr Slope’s cigar smoke was frozen.

  No one despised junkies more than Mallory did. The doctor must find it curious that she would want one for a pet. Riker had also wondered about that. He could not always follow the plays of his partner’s old game with Slope, one that had begun in her childhood – scorched-earth warfare.

  With the next raise of the bet, Robin Duffy folded his cards to bow out of this round, and he did it with a smile. ‘Is Kathy coming tonight?’

  ‘No,’ said Riker, ‘she’s pissed off at you guys. I’m just keeping her seat warm till she gets over it.’

  The retired lawyer was stunned. ‘Why would Kathy be mad at us?’

  ‘Well, maybe not you.’ Who could be mad at Duffy? Riker turned to Charles Butler. ‘But you did your best to sabotage her case.’ And when the man could make no sense of this, the detective gave him a hint. ‘Coco? Mallory’s material witness?’ With a nod to the rabbi, he said, ‘And I hear you did your part. Talking to a judge behind her back? That was—’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this.’ David Kaplan had a wounded look as he pressed one hand to his breast, his heart. ‘Kathy ratted on me?’ And when the man smiled and raised the bet, that was Riker’s clue that the rabbi would run the best bluff in the game. But that was not saying much – not in this crew.

  ‘David’s not to blame,’ said Charles Butler. ‘It was all my doing. That child has special needs. She—’

  ‘The kid needed protection, and she got it – from Mallory.’ This dropped bomb was a reminder that his partner had risked her badge to keep Rolland Mann away from Coco. And now for the kill shot, Riker reached out and flicked Charles’s cards with one finger. ‘You got nothin’.’

  A deep blush confirmed this, and the psychologist laid down his cards, saying, ‘I’m out.’

  Two players down – two to go.

  Riker looked at his own cards and grinned like a winner, the same grin he wore when aiming his gun, a fair warning for hardened felons to give up or else. And the rabbi folded.

  Only the doctor would not back down. And that had been predictable. Edward Slope was known to be reckless and daring with nickels and dimes.

  The bet was raised again as Riker pushed all his chips to the center of the table. ‘I can guess why Mallory’s pissed off at you, Doc. You had to jerk her around on those autopsies.’ The detective stared at his cards, head shaking. ‘Naw, that’s not it. Sniper shots across dead bodies – that’s just business as usual with you two. Maybe I missed something?’ He smiled at the doctor. ‘What did you do to her?’

  Edward Slope was all in to the last nickel chip when the cards were called. He laid down a pair of tens – and lost everything. Riker turned up his hole card to show the man three of a kind. And now the detective finally understood what Lou had meant when the old man once said that he had to cheat to lose to these guys.

  The doctor’s cache was gone, and he could buy no more chips. This was the most sacred rule of the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game, and no man would break it. So now Dr Slope must sit out the rest of an evening that had just begun.

  ‘Doc?’ Riker gathered up the deck and shuffled it. ‘How about a side bet? Fast game of high card.’ He tapped the admission form for Toby Wilder. ‘This against everything I got.’

  Slope, who saw himself as a reincarnated riverboat gambler – yeah, right – would not be able to resist a play like that one. He looked to his friends, and there were nods all around the table. The other players had no problem with this loophole in the o
ld rule.

  Riker cut the deck and palmed a queen so that he could play a lowly three of hearts, though he had been told he could draw a worse card and still win. When Slope cut the deck, the detective could see, by the tell of flickered eyes, that the doctor’s card was way higher.

  ‘You win,’ said Edward Slope to the detective who had surely lost. The doctor covered his unshown card with the rest of the deck and shuffled twice. After signing the junkie’s admission form, he crumpled up the voucher. ‘No charge to the city. I have rules. The boy’s on scholarship.’

  Charles Butler leaned toward his friend. ‘Edward, I could write a check to cover the—’

  ‘No, you couldn’t.’ The doctor, a gentleman who paid his own debts – whether he owed them or not – handed the admission form to Riker.

  The detective had what he came for, and now he took his leave.

  Well played.

  Charles Butler could only speculate on Edward’s reason for throwing the game of high card. The good doctor fancied that he was born with a poker face that gave away no tells, but Charles could tell. What had his friend done to Mallory to account for such a guilty present? He might wager that even Riker would have no idea.

  Ah, but just now, Charles was feeling his own remorse in matters of fireflies and shoelaces. On the following evening, he would go to Mallory’s apartment with flowers in hand, his tokens of regret, and she would not be at home to him. But one night, the tenth or a twelfth night, she would open the door, and they would begin again as strangers, for he would not presume to know her.

  He stood by the window, watching Riker slouch down the Brooklyn sidewalk, no doubt heading for a subway station. In this modern world, what the detective had done tonight might be called quaint and courtly. The man had avenged fair lady and won her a prize, and he had done this in a way that Mallory never could have managed. For one thing, the event was bloodless. And shame was not a word in her lexicon, nor a weapon in her arsenal.

  Riker came to the end of the rabbi’s tree-lined block and turned a corner. He bowed down to the open window of his partner’s personal car. ‘It worked – play for play.’ Climbing into the passenger seat, he handed over his winnings, the admission form for Toby Wilder’s drug program. ‘So now will you tell me? Why did Dr Slope have to win – so he could lose?’

  Mallory lowered the silver convertible’s ragtop and turned up the radio, killing the idea of more conversation as they rolled through the neighborhood of lighted windows and green lawns.

  He had run a game on the doctor with absolute faith in Mallory’s script, but he had no clue why it had to end with Edward Slope’s own beau geste. The detective was forced to reach into his store of old Gary Cooper movie titles to find those foreign words for the handsome gesture that would not abide any thanks. Though the idea of blackmail worked much better. Did Mallory have something on the doctor? No. It was too hard to imagine the chief medical examiner making a single misstep. Maybe the man did owe her a favor.

  There was no point in asking; she would never say. He only turned his head in her direction, and the volume of the radio was jacked up higher.

  Blasting tunes of rock ’n’ roll, they sailed across the Brooklyn Bridge decked out in strings of light running all the way to Manhattan. A beautiful night. Wasted on him. His thoughts were still on the game of high card. Blackmail or payback – why not call in her own damn chips? Had she sent in a proxy to save the doctor’s face? No. Their whole game, Slope’s and Mallory’s, was one protracted round of dodging knives and bullets; any show of civility would cost her points. So what was tonight all about? Only one thing was certain: The junkie’s welfare was incidental. Mallory cared nothing about Toby Wilder now that her case was wrapped. She placed all his kind just below the level of a bug’s kneecaps.

  He would never figure this one out. It would cost him a night’s sleep, and it would drive him crazy for a long time. Of course, that was no concern to Mallory. She was still angry with him for not sharing his dirty leverage on the chief of D’s. That crime of holding out on her would never be forgiven.

  But there would be payback.

  Riker grinned, and then he laughed. The woman behind the wheel was good at poker – better than him – but driving him nuts, that was Mallory’s get-even game tonight.

  After showing her badge at the gate, Mallory drove into the parking lot of a large Victorian country house that Edward Slope had converted into a rehab clinic. This place allowed the doctor to derail young addicts on their journey to an overdose and his dissection table. Rarely did any patients leave until their drug programs were finished. The surrounding pine trees hid a formidable security fence.

  Her passenger, Toby Wilder, was skin-crawling edgy and more awake than he wanted to be – thanks to a hospital stomach pump. Given the chance, he would dig up his dead parents and sell the corpses for a couple of pills to end his withdrawal hell.

  Well, tough.

  Mallory stepped out of her car and opened the trunk to remove a suitcase she had packed for him. ‘I put the rest of your stuff in storage. The apartment’s gone.’ He might have forgotten that part. The junkie had been barely conscious when she had him sign his name to surrender the lease. ‘You’ve got no place to go back to.’

  Toby climbed out of the passenger seat, nodding his understanding that she had cut his legs out from under him. He took the bag from her hand and carried it as he followed her up the steps – entirely too compliant. She knew he planned to run as soon as her car rolled out the gate, but that escape fantasy would end the first time he was dragged back from the electrified fence, a crude form of shock therapy.

  Together, they crossed the verandah to enter the clinic. Its large reception room would pass for an upscale hotel lobby if not for the nurse behind the front desk. Mallory handed this man an admission form and filled out paperwork to complete the drug addict’s transfer from a city hospital.

  Two orderlies appeared on either side of Toby Wilder. Before the new patient was led away, Mallory placed a small parcel into his hands. ‘You’ll need this.’

  When she was outside in the parking lot once more, she sat behind the wheel of her car, going nowhere, only staring at the windshield, impervious to a starry night. She had a lot riding on the junkie’s survival. Dr Slope’s program had high success rates, but it was not a sure thing. What of Toby’s chances? He was so wasted in his body and his mind. She saw only desolation for him in the days ahead.

  But tonight there would be music.

  Toby carried Detective Mallory’s gift into his room at the rehab clinic, and he laid himself down on the bed. After adjusting the earphones of the CD player, he powered it up to get at the music inside. The orchestration of notes from the walls back home came alive in the opening bars to the overture, welling up in a giant wave of sound, and then subsiding and sliding into his jazz symphony. In the background, a piano played out the story, and up-front drums beat with the rhythm of a banging heart.

  Early in this musical score – in the springtime of his father’s life – when life was still good for Jess Wilder, when the man was sane and young and beautiful, the saxophone was a charismatic dazzle of rippling melody and riffs, attracting a crowd of coronets and strings, trombones and other voices.

  The boy on the bed bobbed his head, keeping time, keeping up with the daddy sax.

  FORTY-SIX

  These are my superpowers. I run like a rabbit. I shiver like a whippet. I can scream like a little girl. And I remain the dead wino’s witness.

  —Ernest Nadler

  More than a year had passed. Another summer was drawing to a close, and Coco was chasing lightning bugs in the far-off state of Illinois.

  Following an anonymous tip, an assistant district attorney with a yellow bowtie was found to have a pattern of selling generous plea bargains to fund his futile election-year races. Cedrick Carlyle had recently left his office in handcuffs, and a messy loose end was tied up.

  Mallory was a tidy detective.


  Willy Fallon had lost an eye during a fight in the prison laundry, almost poetic in a biblical way – that forfeit eyeball in balance with the mutilation of a little boy.

  In Mallory’s own twisted take on scripture, vengeance was hers, and she was not quite done. The young detective sat in the drawing room of the Upper West Side mansion, holding pen to paper, and she signed as a witness to the transaction between Grace Driscol-Bledsoe and Toby Wilder’s attorney, a blind man who had seen the light and learned to do as he was told.

  By the terms of a probate agreement, restitution had come due following a sanity hearing held this afternoon. As promised, Mallory had not attended. She had done nothing to block the early release of Phoebe Bledsoe, a somewhat misguided murderess, now pronounced cured.

  Yeah, right.

  ‘What a waste of money,’ said the former doyenne of New York charities. ‘That boy will die of a drug overdose before he turns thirty.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Mallory, who had no faith in happy endings, but she believed in getting even. Humphrey’s millions now belonged to Toby Wilder, and the deal was done.

  Almost done.

  The lawyer left. The detective stayed.

  Now that her daughter had been ransomed, Grace Driscol-Bledsoe waited for Mallory to leave – and she waited. And then, as a pointed invitation to get out, she said, ‘Our business is concluded.’

  ‘Not quite.’ The detective held in her hands a small book encased in a plastic bag and a tin box the size of a brick. She seemed to be weighing them, one against the other.

  ‘Hard feelings, my dear?’ Oh, it must be irksome to stand this close to a killer – one that the law could not touch. But must the detective stand so close? Grace stared at the box and the book. The younger woman handled them carefully – like treasures – or bombs. ‘You should be gone before my daughter—’