The Chalk Girl (30 page)

He recalled the first time Mom had led him to this place. That was the day following his release. During his confinement, she had sold their uptown condo and moved down here, closer to her place of work. That was the reason given then. Later he had discovered the truth. Mom had sold the condo to buy him an annuity that would take care of him after she was gone. She had taught him to negotiate the maze of West Village streets that so confused the tourists. And for that one year they had together, he had sat across this table from her every day, only seventeen years old when they had talked about his future – as if all his possibilities had not died in juvenile detention, where he had lost two teeth, his virginity and self-respect.

But he had gained a tolerance for pain and worse things. At thirteen he had cried for his mother; at fourteen he had learned to cadge drugs from doctors for the beatings he took, and when enough of his bones were broken, he had won a private room in solitary. And each visitors’ day, he had taken his mother’s hand and told her it was not so bad.

Today, he felt only a mild druggy buzz, and his mother was dead. All he had left of her was this old habit of lunchtime, his only
reason to carry a watch. Without the ritual cheeseburger, his day would have no bones.

Phoebe watched Toby Wilder finish his burger.

Dead Ernest stared at her hands as she unconsciously rubbed the gold cigarette lighter. ‘If you keep doing that,’ he said, ‘you’ll rub off the date. I can hardly read it anymore. It just looks like scratches.’

She put the golden talisman back in her purse.

When Toby left the café, Phoebe went home to do penance – to read comic books aloud for the dead boy, who could never take his hands out of his pockets.

Comics had been the passion of the real Ernie Nadler, the living child. They had been his religion and his philosophy. One day, after school let out, Ernie had taken her into his father’s den and opened a bookcase like a door to show her a walk-in safe. There were more comics in there than she had ever seen in her life, stacks of them,
walls
of them. This was his father’s collection. Some issues dated back to the 1930s, and these had belonged to Ernie’s grandfather.

That was the day Ernie had shared his best-loved memories: bedtime story hours of his kindergarten days, when his father had turned the pages of these collector items and read aloud to his only child.

‘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.

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 Western 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?’