The Chalk Girl (34 page)

‘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 elevator 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.’

‘From Robin Duffy?’

Now why was that a hard question?

The first document was a court order for Coco’s travel to the state of Illinois. It was subject to the qualification of adoptive parents. Buried in the fine print of legalese was the second condition: the child’s release from material-witness protection. The next sheet was the companion form that required Mallory’s signature to bind the deal. Robin Duffy had already given her copies of this paperwork, but those had been left undated pending the wrap of her case. She turned back to the court order. It bore today’s date. And it was already signed by a judge. ‘This wasn’t Robin Duffy’s idea.’

That was only a guess, but a good one.

David Kaplan widened his sweet smile, inadvertently confirming that this was Charles Butler’s plot. The man picked up his wineglass for another taste – a stall. And now, in classic rabbi evasion, he said, ‘I know you want what’s best for the child. You want her to have every good thing that Louis and Helen gave to you.’

In the cold tone of a machine that could talk, she said, ‘How well you know me.’

The rabbi’s smile faltered, perhaps with a suspicion that he knew her not at all.

She laid the papers on the table. ‘I have to wonder why you thought this was a good idea. It
isn’t
– not if you want me to keep that kid alive.’

Only moments ago, everything had been clear to this man, but when he looked down at the document once more, he regarded it with some confusion.

Good
. It was Mallory’s turn to smile. She was certain that Robin
Duffy had not obtained the signature on this court order, though the old lawyer knew the signing judge quite well – and so did the rabbi. Judge Cartland was sometimes a guest player in the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game. The detective lifted her glass and drank deeply. ‘Charles sent you. You forgot to mention that.’ She tapped the document’s signature line. ‘When did the judge sign this – like an
hour
ago?’

Maybe right after Charles Butler got home from Birdland?

David Kaplan raised both hands to say,
You got me
. ‘That little girl is in very deep trouble, trauma layered over trauma. Charles has a list of likely parents in Illinois. And he’s lined her up with a therapist in Chicago, a very good doctor. This poor fragile child needs a—’

‘That kid’s not going anywhere. She’s a material witness in a murder investigation.’

‘Charles says she’s not good witness material. When I spoke to the—’

‘You
told
that to the judge?’ She read her answer in his face, his quizzical eyes with no trace of denial, only wondering what he had done wrong. ‘You
did
!’ Mallory slammed one hand down on the table. ‘Behind my
back
!’

Had she ever yelled at him before? No, never. They stared at each other with equal surprise.

Angry still, she said, ‘You trust Charles Butler’s judgment more than mine.’ She leaned toward him. ‘In a
homicide
investigation?’

How upside down was that? How would it square with this man’s flawless rabbinical logic? It would not. He simply had no faith in her. There was no other way to spin this night.

‘Rabbi, it was a mistake to mess with my case.’ She crushed the court order into a ball. ‘So you chose up sides.’ Not
her
side. ‘And then you gave that judge a reason to screw with me.’ She rolled the paper ball between her hands, making it smaller, harder. With the
flick of a finger, she sent it spinning across the table, and it came to rest by his wineglass. ‘Keep it . . . Something to remember me by.’

The rabbi’s eyes were sad, for this was a death of sorts, an end to things. She had stabbed him with words, and the win was clearly hers.

Or not.

‘Kathy, when you only
figuratively
cut out someone’s heart – that won’t necessarily get rid of your problem . . . I will
always
love you.’ David Kaplan leaned back in his chair and emptied his glass. ‘I’ll always be here for you.’ The rabbi rose from the table and kissed her cheek in farewell. ‘But I’m guessing you won’t be sitting in on the poker game this week.’ He shrugged and smiled. ‘Well, maybe next week.’

When he had left her alone on the roof, she smashed her wineglass into the brick parapet. Unconditional love could be infuriating.

The den in Mallory’s condo had one wall lined in cork. She had stolen it from Lou Markowitz’s office after the old man’s death. As far as Riker knew, it was her only theft of sentiment.

To accommodate her electronics, the temperature of this back room was always on the chilly side, but it was ice cold by the looks of it – decorated with metal furnishings, wires and cables, steel shelves of manuals and gadgets. Even the damn carpet was gunmetal gray.

And baby had a brand-new toy.

The four computer monitors on workstations no longer had pride of place. They had been upstaged by a gigantic flat screen, and Riker gawked at it. A television set this size was every guy’s wet dream on Super Bowl Sunday. But he did not salivate; it was just another computer. No need of a keyboard or mouse – she only pointed to the picture of a file holder and pages tumbled out in
animation. With two fingers, she caught them in midair and juggled them into positions across the wide field of electric blue. It was not bad enough that his partner’s only stable relationships were with machines – now she had found one that responded to her touch, one that could feel her body heat, and this vaguely creeped him out – possibly because he was drunk.

Riker had moved on to the good stuff, Mallory’s single-malt whiskey, as he watched glowing boxes of text enlarge their type for the benefit of his middle-aged eyes. Standing up as straight as the liquor would allow, he gave his best impression of actually listening to her lecture on a tired old theme: How to Buy a Politician.

Elected officials loved to see their names plastered on charities, so said Mallory. But all the worthy causes listed on her screen were funded by the Driscol Institute, and the Institute was funded by moguls in search of political whores to bed down with. ‘Good works get votes.’

When she turned around to see if he was paying attention, Riker recited what came to all New Yorkers with their mothers’ milk. ‘The politicians wow the voters and then screw ’em over after the election.’ He said this in the tone of
Yeah, yeah, what else is new?

She rewarded him by refilling his glass. How many times had she done that? He had lost count of his shots tonight.

Mallory capped the bottle. ‘The mayor doesn’t run this town. Grace Driscol-Bledsoe does.’ She faced her giant screen and pointed to one of her lists. ‘These council members were bought with small stuff, their names on scholarship funds and after-school programs.’ Her pointing finger moved to the next column of more impressive charities. ‘The Driscol Institute funded a civic center with the mayor’s name engraved in stone. That bought him votes in a district that hated his guts. Coincidentally, that’s when he dropped his opposition to a building site for a high-rise on the West Side. The land was owned by a real-estate broker, one of the major donors to
Grace’s family charity – and he made a fifteen-million-dollar profit overnight. I figure Grace’s cut was ten percent.’

And now Riker
was
paying attention. ‘Why didn’t the feds pick up on that? I thought they were tracking this stuff.’

‘They are. Corporations have to declare every donation to charity, but that has no effect on a money-laundering racket like this one. There’s nothing on paper that ties a charity donor to a politician. The trustees of the Driscol Institute are the middlemen.’

‘The money cleaners – and Grace is their leader.’ Riker looked down to see Mallory topping off his glass – a small bonus for staying awake. And so, just to prove that he was somewhat sober, he asked, ‘How does Grace collect her cut? Wouldn’t that show up in an audit?’

‘No. She gets paid by the donors.’ With a touch of the screen, Mallory opened another folder. ‘And here they are.’ This was an old client list for the late John Bledsoe’s consulting firm. ‘Grace used to channel the payoffs into her husband’s company. It looked good on paper – like legitimate earnings for a lobbyist. And the taxes got paid. No red flags for the IRS.’

‘So all that money her husband left to Humphrey – that really belonged to Grace? Well, that explains why the portrait of hubby and the kid was hung over a toilet.’ And now he could clearly see a pissed-off Grace Driscol-Bledsoe out in the woods, stringing up bodies, one of them her own son. ‘But can the lady climb a tree?’ He raised his glass for a deep swallow. ‘For a hundred million bucks, I say she can. That broad’s in better shape than I am.’

His partner smiled – she was smiling at his empty glass. And then she turned back to the screen. ‘After the husband sold his company, Grace had no holding pen for the next batch of money-laundering fees, and her personal finances had to jibe with legal earnings.’ Mallory touched another folder, and a slew of facsimile checks spilled out across the blue screen, all of them made out to the
woman’s personal companion. ‘Here’s the weak spot, a stupid mistake. Hoffman is underpaid. I’m guessing Grace gives out weekly cash bonuses.’

‘I bet she does a lot of things with cash,’ said Riker. ‘She’d never trust another partner to launder her own money – not after what her husband did to her.’