The Chalk Girl

TWENTY-EIGHT

We’re better trackers now, Phoebe and me. Today we keep Toby in our sights for a long time before losing him in the Ramble. Then we hear the scream, a grown-up’s voice, lots of anger. We can’t tell where the sound comes from. Though we don’t mean to, we run toward it, crashing through bushes and ferns and into a clearing. The place has the stink of an outdoor toilet. And other smells, beer and vomit. A buzz of black flies. A thousand gnats.

And there’s Toby standing on a path up ahead. Next to him is a wild man – hair matted and stringy, clothes dirty, teeth missing – fists waving. Toby holds one hand to a bright red patch of skin on his face, and we know that crazy bum hit him. Then the man slaps something out of Toby’s hand. It falls on the ground. Golden. Shiny. Toby leaves it there, turns his back and walks away. The crazy man lurches into the clearing. Sobbing, he falls to his knees on the grass.

Phoebe picks up the shiny thing, a gold cigarette lighter. And I say, ‘So Toby smokes cigarettes? How cool is that?’ Phoebe says no, it must be a keepsake. Toby never smells of smoke; he smells like soap. Only Phoebe would know his scent. She would taste him if she only could.

And then we hear the laughter from above. We look up to the high ground of a boulder, and there they are, Humphrey, Willy and Aggy. While we followed Toby, they had followed us.

They jump down from the rock. It’s raining monsters.

—Ernest Nadler

Lieutenant Coffey’s destination was only a short walk from the station house, but he had made a detour along the way. After parking his personal car, he stood on the sidewalk, looking up at an apartment window above the SoHo cop bar. He entered the saloon, an alcoholic’s dream come true, only a short stumble up the stairs to Riker’s apartment.

And now Jack Coffey climbed those steps to knock on the detective’s door.

Riker had his six-pack smile in place when he greeted his commanding officer. ‘Hey, Lieutenant.’

Coffey entered the front room, a dumping ground for take-out cartons, crushed beer cans and unwashed glasses that had done double duty as ashtrays. A tower of dirty socks, junk mail and newspapers was precariously stacked on a straight-back chair. The stack moved. He could not look away. Any second now—

Surprise. A walkway had been cleared from the front door to the kitchen, where dirty dishes were stacked up in the sink and along the countertop. But a small table had been swiped clean of debris. Whatever liquid had been spilled on the linoleum, it stuck to the soles of the lieutenant’s shoes and made a tacky sound as he crossed the small room. ‘Well, this is touching. You cleaned up for me.’

Riker, the quintessential host, put a cold beer in the lieutenant’s hand. ‘Pull up a chair.’

Coffey sat down at the table and tipped back his bottle for a long, cold swallow on a warm summer night. ‘Where’s your partner?’

‘Probably following the money.’

‘She ditched you, right?’ The lieutenant could hear the rattle of the air conditioner in the next room, but it was doing little to cool this apartment. He wondered if Riker had ever cleaned the AC filter. Stupid idea. ‘I went back to my place to go over Mallory’s credit-card charges for the time she was gone.’

‘You ran her card trace from your home computer?’

‘Yeah. I couldn’t put her in the department goldfish bowl. But I did it by the book. I guess she backtracked the search with my badge number. It’s not like I was hiding anything. I figured that was her reason for driving me nuts for the past month.’

‘Naw,’ said Riker. ‘That was just payback for all that desk duty.’

‘Maybe – maybe not.’ The lieutenant tipped his chair backwards on two legs and looked up at the ceiling, a haven for spiderwebs and trapped flies.

‘God knows she’s not normal,’ said Riker. ‘But nobody working homicide is all that well-adjusted.’ He held up a cigarette to ask his commanding officer if he minded the smoke – Riker, who deferred to nobody – and this was evidence of a worried man.

‘The chief of D’s called again. He ran his own trace on Mallory’s cards – for the lost time on the road.’

‘Then he’s got nothing,’ said Riker. ‘So the kid likes to drive. So what? Beats the hell out of booze and drugs to forget the last body count. You know her car?’

‘I’ve seen it,’ said Coffey. ‘A Volkswagen convertible.’

‘Naw, it only looks like one. You lift up the hood, roll back the top, and what’ve you got? A damn Porsche with a roll bar.’

‘Disguised as a VW . . . Oh, yeah, that’s normal.’ But that would explain how she had traveled from place to place so fast, wandering aimlessly at breakneck speeds. ‘She was gone for three months, Riker.’

‘I’ve lost more time than that in drunk tanks. Every cop needs a hobby. I drink – she drives.’

Jack Coffey found a clean deli napkin on the floor at his feet, and he used it to draw a crude map of the lower forty-eight states. ‘The charges she racked up are mostly gas stations, food, hotels.’ The lieutenant drew a row of dashes running out of New York. ‘For a few hundred miles, it almost looks like she’s got someplace to go.’ And then the westward line disintegrated into weaves and jogs and doubling-back circles as the lieutenant’s pen traveled across the paper-napkin country. ‘But she’s got no plan, no destination. The kid’s got nothing.’ Paradoxical Mallory, a girl with a full tank of gas – running on empty and covering lots of ground to go nowhere. His pen pressed down on the West Coast. ‘This is where she ran out of land.’ The pen moved along the edge of America, hugging the barrier ocean as it traveled north on the ragged paper coastline and stopped again. ‘Here’s where she decides to come back home.’ The pen described wide spirals – a cartoon of a clockwork spring, months long from coast to coast. ‘Not your typical tourist route. Circling, circling . . . the way people travel when they’re lost.’

‘But she’s fine now,’ said Riker.

The lieutenant waited until the man met his eyes, and then his words were carefully meted out. ‘She was never fine.’

And she never would be. Life could only beat a little kid half to death so many times and still expect her to grow up normal. But Mallory was a highly functional cop, and the best he had ever known, even better than her old man. It was a tribute he could not afford to pay to her face because – she was not fine. At best, he could say she was back in form, smart and edgy and totally—

‘She isn’t nuts,’ said Riker.

Jack Coffey nodded in agreement. ‘Crazy is just a game she plays.’ It was like a new toy she had found out there on the road. ‘And Mallory’s been playing me – playing crazy – in front of a squad of witnesses.’

Hubris. It had never occurred to her that she could fail a psych evaluation. And then she had counted too much on Charles Butler’s rebuttal exam to save her.

‘Every time Chief Goddard calls me,’ said Coffey, ‘it’s like a threat to take her badge. Even if she gets a new evaluation, he can still drag her into a formal hearing anytime he likes. Let’s say the whole squad has to testify to her behavior – like hog-tying a CSI. If just one of those bastards slips up and forgets to lie like crazy – under oath – that’s the end of her.’

Riker could only stare at the napkin. There was no need to remind this man that some of those detectives might not care to risk their own careers – not for her sake.

Jack Coffey finished the beer and pushed back his chair. ‘Much as I’d like to tell Mallory she shot herself in the foot, it could only make things so much worse. You got a picture of that in your head, Riker? Mallory going to war on Joe Goddard?’

The detective nodded. ‘I won’t tell her.’

This time, Jack Coffey believed him. They were done.

The lieutenant gathered up his car keys. ‘I don’t need to know the details. But whatever Goddard wants from you guys – bring it home real fast.’

Riker was across the street from Sardi’s restaurant when he saw the red neon light of Lou Markowitz’s favorite nightclub in the distance. He held a cell phone to his ear and talked as he walked, saying to the shadow cop who followed Willy Fallon, ‘Stay on her till she goes back to her hotel. Then go home, Arty. Tomorrow you can sleep late. Party girls don’t wake up till noon.’ He folded his phone into his pocket and strolled down the sidewalk, mingling with the theater crowd as the shows were letting out, and then he put on some speed to beat these people to a seat in Birdland, a place of low lights, booze and live music.

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.