The Chalk Girl

FORTY

Normally I don’t suck at math. Today my father sees the failing grade on my test paper. He works his butt off for this family, he says, and I only have this one little job – school. How, he asks, can a kid be so smart and screw up this bad? I wanted to say, ‘Well, I’m a little distracted, Dad. I’m waiting for them to kill me.’ But what’s the point? He thinks I lied about the wino’s murder.

‘Be a man,’ he says. I tell him I can’t. I won’t live that long. And he smacks me. This is the first time he’s ever done that. But I don’t cry. I don’t even flinch. I’ve taken worse, and I tell him so. My father just stands there. So surprised. It’s like he’s the one who got hit.

And he’s the one who cries.

—Ernest Nadler

Toby Wilder had been hospitalized for his overdose, and his prognosis was good. The white shield, Arthur Chu, had earned his pay for the day by following Willy Fallon onto her getaway train to arrest her. And then the young cop had dragged his trophy prisoner into the squad room of Special Crimes Unit, where Willy had promptly lawyered up.

Mallory was pronounced fit for duty – only in need of some soap and a change of clothes. This was not the medical opinion of the emergency-room doctor, but Lieutenant Coffey had bought that lie. And it had been Riker’s privilege to see the lady home. Chagrined, he realized that she could have done without his help, his game of blackmail chess with the chief of D’s. As a hero cop, she could fail ten more psych evaluations and still keep her badge.

Riker wondered what a department shrink would make of Mallory’s apartment, where everything was black or white, all sharp corners and hard edges. There were no personal elements, nothing to say that a human being lived here – except for the sound of a shower running in the bathroom. On the glass coffee table, Mallory’s cell played rock-a-bye music to identify her caller, and Riker picked up the phone to have a conversation with Coco.

‘Naw, she’s fine,’ he said to the worried child. ‘You can’t believe what you hear on the news. Mallory can only be killed by a silver bullet.’

There was no sign of media interest in the grand-scale event going on at One Police Plaza, even though a gang of reporters had permanent roosts in the building’s pressroom.

Willy Fallon had been caught on a tourist’s camera while throwing a baby into the path of an oncoming train, and that televised video had upstaged a coup at the Puzzle Palace, where a press secretary was madly spinning today’s demonstration as a silent tribute to Rolland Mann, recently whacked by a bus, thus ensuring that it would be buried on the obituary pages of tomorrow’s newspapers. None of the reporters – with police-issued press credentials – thought to ask why all of the demonstrators were women.

Outside on the plaza, the afternoon sun was hot enough to melt lipstick.

Jack Coffey stood by the red sculpture near the street. The promenade was impassable. He had been summoned here by the chief of detectives. Both men watched the crowd of uniformed officers filling the plaza and much of the courtyard beyond the gatehouse to NYPD Headquarters. There were hundreds of them, tall and short, pretty cops and ugly ones, all packing guns – all of them policewomen. It was stunning and threatening and illegal as hell, but who could be called in to disburse them – the police? Male officers, who worked in the building, stood idly by the entrance, complacent prisoners.

‘This is why you don’t see any broads on patrol,’ said Joe Goddard. ‘They’re all here – except for the seven cops upstairs at Dr Kane’s hearing.’

Lieutenant Coffey had not been invited to the competency hearing, and neither had the chief of D’s. The orchestration of this event had bypassed the Detective Bureau. Failed psych reports had been leaked only to affected patrol cops – every female in uniform ever evaluated by Dr Kane – all seven of them labeled as sociopaths unfit for duty.

‘Go figure,’ said Joe Goddard. ‘A police psychologist who’s afraid of women with guns.’

Not so long ago, Jack Coffey had heard these same words from Riker. He should have listened then. And now? He fancied that he could hear that detective laughing at him. The lieutenant’s eyes traveled over the legion of cops awaiting the reinstatement of sister officers. Inside the building, every high-ranking official had a captive’s view from the upper floors. ‘I bet it’ll be the shortest hearing on record.’

‘You got that right,’ said Goddard. ‘But the hearing’s just a formality. Dr Kane was toast before these women showed up. That twit’s psych reports were shredded hours ago. All of them . . . Detective Mallory’s, too.’ The chief looked up to the high windows. ‘I talked to the computer whiz kids on the top floor. They can’t figure out who leaked those evaluations and organized this demonstration. All these cops think the orders came from their union. They didn’t. But the instructions were routed through a union computer.’

And now Jack Coffey learned that a hacker had used that computer to generate an automated mailing to every precinct. All of these women had received printed invitations to this party. And the sealed envelopes had been handed out this morning – by their own sergeants.

Joe Goddard rocked back on his heels. ‘We only know this was planned by a hacker with world-class skills . . . and she doesn’t leave tracks.’ The chief was not a man to waste words on rhetorical questions, and yet he asked, ‘You got any theories, Jack?’

‘Nope.’ Well, yeah. If he had to guess – at gunpoint – he might think that Mallory had ransacked the department data bank, looking for Charles Butler’s rebuttal evaluation – the one never filed. It had probably taken her all of three minutes to figure out why the chief of D’s was sitting on her failed psych evaluation. She had a natural gift for recognizing extortion potential. Lieutenant Coffey stared at his shoes. He had underestimated her so badly. And now she was gunning for Joe Goddard.

The chief of detectives was still waiting for a better answer – one that would probably come as a three-o’clock-in-the-morning epiphany: Mallory wanted Goddard to know that she had done this. Contrary to what the computer techs believed, there were footprints everywhere. This massive show of force, this overkill, was all Mallory, summoning hundreds of guns into play for one warning shot. Joe Goddard should not mess with her one more time – or there would be war in Copland. But that understanding would come later. Just now the man was tapping his foot – waiting.

‘No idea.’ Jack Coffey folded his arms. ‘Not a clue.’ And then, since they both knew this was a lie, he told the truth. ‘No one’s gonna look at one of my people for this – sure as hell not Mallory. She wouldn’t be caught dead at an all-girl turnout. There’s not one feminist bone in her body.’ She had no need of one. Only a rare and suicidal man might suggest that his detective was of better use barefoot and pregnant.

His point was made. His boss was nodding. And Mallory was going to get clean away with this.

The lieutenant’s thoughts turned back to his pathetic paper-napkin map as evidence of her lost-soul state of mind. Riker had tried to tell him that he was wrong about the road trip, her unauthorized vacation from the job. And the proof? Mallory was getting away with that, too.

Yeah, her partner was definitely laughing his ass off right about now.

In a building across the street from One Police Plaza, the two detectives stood before a fourth-floor window that overlooked the demonstration. Riker had been braced for trouble all the way downtown, and now his partner broke her long, frosty silence.

‘That’ll be the day,’ said Mallory, ‘when I can’t pass a psych evaluation.’

Riker bowed his head, an act of contrition. He should have known better. It should have been obvious that Dr Kane’s finding of sociopathy was bogus – even if that twisted, frightened shrink had accidentally gotten this one thing right.

‘Here they come.’ Mallory handed him her field glasses.

He focused the lenses on the entrance as a small gang of suits, union reps and lawyers, exited the building with seven female officers in dress blues. They all raised their fists in victory. Riker expected cheers, but the demonstrators remained silent and standing at attention. The now unemployed Dr Kane was the next one through the door. He saw the barrier of uniforms, so many of them. The man clutched his breast and paused long enough to lose his mind before he ran back inside. And now Riker got the joke. The female officers broke ranks, standing at ease and then laughing as they peeled away from Dr Kane’s wide-awake nightmare, a mob of mighty women with guns.

And people said Mallory had no sense of humor. Hah.

All that worry for nothing. Riker looked down at his watch. They had a suspect in custody and awaiting interrogation. ‘We gotta get moving.’

Mallory idly jingled the car keys. ‘I know what you did.’ Her head did not turn his way. It swiveled. Like a cannon. And she said, ‘But I don’t know how you did it.’

Riker sensed that this was no prelude to a warm, fuzzy moment. He held up both hands in a don’t-shoot-me posture. ‘I get it, okay? You never needed any help.’ Did this mollify her? Well, no, of course not. He knew why she had dragged him down here, why he had to see her handiwork up close, a damn army in the service of the ultimate control freak.

‘I know what Goddard was using for leverage on us – on me,’ she said. ‘Now tell me what kind of dirt you used on him.’

Tough one.

Extortion or no, a deal was a deal, and he was honor-bound to keep it. If he ratted out the chief of D’s, he would lose her respect. And if he didn’t? Well, the lady carried a gun. And so he said, ‘Shoot me.’

Willy Fallon sat in the interrogation room with her cut-rate attorney, a baby-faced man in a cheap suit. According to Mallory’s background check, he had graduated near the bottom of his law-school class.

Counselor and client had been kept waiting for an hour before the detectives sauntered in. Riker held up a sheet of paper and began to read a list of the state’s grievances.

In response to the first charge of murdering Rolland Mann, Willy shouted, ‘He tried to kill me first!’

Well, that was predictable, and so Riker said his scripted lines, and his delivery was rough. ‘That’s gonna be a hard sell to a jury. This is what they’ll see.’ He showed her a picture on the small screen of a tourist’s cell phone. ‘Here you are squeezing the poor bastard’s balls.’ Now he clicked to his favorite shot. ‘And here you are again, kicking his ass in front of the bus. Don’t tell us you didn’t see that bus coming. It’s a double-decker.’

The attorney chimed in, ‘That’s not murder. At best you’ve got an assault with mitigating circumstances.’

The detectives stared at this man, as if he might be speaking some off-planet language.

‘I’m trying to work with you guys,’ said the lawyer. ‘Okay? Now my client’s a first-time offender.’

‘No,’ said Riker, ‘she’s not. And we got a few more charges. One of her victims was only ten months old. Willy threw the kid on the subway tracks. So, Counselor – what are we calling attempted murder today? You got mitigating circumstances for that one? Did the baby say something rude to Willy?’

After an exchange of whispers with his client, the lawyer smiled. ‘I’m still willing to work with you.’

Riker pulled a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and showed it to his partner. ‘I say he’s gonna tell us the joke about sending her to drug rehab instead of jail.’

Mallory shook her head – no bet. She laid out an evidence bag filled with capsules and pills. And then she said, so politely, almost apologetically, ‘Your client’s stash is evidence for another charge.’

‘Willy drugged a guy,’ said Riker. ‘Not the one she pushed in front of a bus. This was a completely different guy – the one she tried to push in front of a train.’

‘That’s related to the drug charge.’ Mallory’s comment was low-key, as if she had no stake in this game. She was the soul of sanity and clarity – and no hard feelings, by the way. ‘Toby Wilder was given a lethal dose of narcotics.’

Riker grabbed the evidence bag and held it up to the attorney as he squeezed the stash of pills in a fist. ‘Toby says she drugged his wine.’

‘That was only fair!’ yelled Willy, all but confessing before the attorney could lean over and say, ‘Shut the hell up.’

‘I won’t!’ she said. ‘Toby was the one who strung me up in the Ramble. He tried to kill me.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Riker. ‘You couldn’t identify your kidnapper. And that’s backed up by the ER doc who examined you.’

Mallory, in the spirit of being helpful, pushed the doctor’s statement across the table. ‘He said the blow to the back of your head wiped out ten or fifteen minutes of memory. So you couldn’t—’

‘It had to be Toby!’ Willy’s voice was climbing into a high whine. ‘I know it wasn’t that creep Rolland Mann. He was a fucking amateur at killing. He’s dead, isn’t he? So it had to be Toby.’

The detectives looked at each other in mutual understanding of Willy logic: Their suspect had deduced this by process of lethal elimination.

‘So let’s recap,’ said Riker, addressing the only grown-up on the other side of the table. ‘Your client pushes one victim in front of a bus, and then she drugs another one. Tries to push that guy in front of a moving train. And the charge of resisting arrest brings us back to tossing the baby on the tracks. Maybe you saw the baby-tossing video? It’s on every TV channel.’

‘I do watch the news,’ said the lawyer. ‘So I know Detective Mallory here survived being run over by a train. I’m told there’s two feet of clearance between the rail bed and the—’

‘Don’t.’ Riker, with only this one syllable, promised the lawyer that it was worth his life to continue that thought. ‘When you toss a baby on the tracks, you can count on injury from the fall. And then there’s an expectation of sudden death!’ He pounded his fist on the table to punctuate those last two words and then turned his angry face to Willy. ‘The kid’s gonna be okay, but the mother’s suing you for every dime you’ll ever own.’ And now back to the lawyer once more. ‘So I hope you got paid up front, pal. We talked to Willy’s parents. They’re not laying out one dime for legal expenses. Her credit cards are maxed out, but she’s got about five grand in a paper sack. Will that do you?’

This was clearly a surprise to the lawyer. His smile of confidence faltered and failed. It was easy to read his face when he brightened up a little. Hey – five thousand dollars. The man stole a glance at his wristwatch, probably counting the money flying by per minute. ‘I propose a reasonable plea agreement for lesser charges.’

‘What?’ Riker was on his feet and leaning over the table, as though he meant to throttle the lawyer. His partner rested one light hand on his arm, and he settled back into his chair.

Mallory smiled pleasantly, as if the lawyer had said something sane. ‘I think we can work out a deal.’

On the other side of the looking glass, Jack Coffey shook his head in wonder. He had previously supposed that only in hell could Mallory play good cop to Riker’s bad cop.

A visiting VIP, District Attorney Walter Hamlin, was also seated in the front row of the watchers’ room. This distinguished man – in pop-eyed shock – leaned toward the one-way window. He listened to the intercom with rapt attention – while Mallory magnanimously offered to write off the murder of a deputy police commissioner as a traffic accident.

Score one for the smiling chief of detectives, who sat in the chair on Coffey’s right. The problem of Rolland Mann was neatly disposed of, and the department would escape the worst police corruption scandal in twenty years.

In the next room, Riker was throwing up his hands in a show of disgust. And when he quit the interrogation, he slammed the door behind him.

Now Coffey heard his remaining detective agree to throw in the attempted murder of Toby Wilder. ‘We’ll call it a misunderstanding,’ said Mallory. ‘Why not? The guy was stoned. He won’t remember anything.’

Willy’s lawyer nodded and smiled.

The district attorney in the watchers’ room turned to Jack Coffey. ‘Does Detective Mallory know I’m here – listening to this?’

‘Hell, yes,’ Chief Goddard answered for the lieutenant. ‘Walt, you know an ADA would never have the balls to sign off on this deal. That’s why I invited you.’

In the next room, Mallory was making it very clear that Willy would have to plead guilty to the unfortunate baby-tossing incident. ‘But we can knock that down to a misdemeanor.’

The defense lawyer leaned toward the nice detective to ask what she wanted in return.

Mallory proposed a trade of new murders for old. ‘Willy was only a kid when that wino died in the Ramble. I’m also interested in an assault on a boy from her school. If she tells me everything she knows, those old cases go to a judge in Family Court. She’ll get the same sentence as a juvenile offender.’

Riker entered the watchers’ room and stepped up to the glass. ‘Can you believe that lawyer? Willy got him out of the yellow pages. I’m guessing his biggest case was in traffic court. Zero experience in criminal law.’

This was the defense attorney every cop prayed for.

‘Detective,’ said DA Hamlin, calling for Riker’s attention. ‘Even if I put Mallory’s deal in writing, it’ll never stand up in court. Eight million New Yorkers are watching the baby-tossing film on television – right now. There isn’t a judge in town who won’t set aside the deal and hit Miss Fallon with the maximum sentence.’

Riker grinned. ‘Yeah, we’re counting on that.’

DA Hamlin was not done yet. ‘About that wino. If Miss Fallon confesses to a murder done as a juvenile, she’ll still do time in an adult facility – most likely the maximum time allowed by law. Do you think she fully understands this?’

‘No,’ said Riker. ‘But I’m only required to read Willy her rights. She’s a moron, and the lawyer isn’t much smarter. Look at that smile on the guy’s face. He thinks this is a good deal.’

When an hour had passed, the signed plea agreement was put on the table in the interrogation room. Mallory also laid out morgue photographs of the wino’s dead body savaged by three children in the Ramble. ‘I already know most of the details. I can even tell you how many times Agatha Sutton bit the victim. Aggy the Biter – isn’t that what you called her?’

Willy Fallon stared at the pictures. She was frozen, holding her breath – big eyes – as good as a guilty plea.

‘If you lie to me, Willy, just one lie, the deal is off, and I can’t help you anymore. You’ll rot in jail for the rest of your life.’

The lawyer nudged his client, prodding her into a nod.

And so it began, halting at first – and then with gusto.

The watchers in the next room sat in the dark – the only proper way to listen to a scary story. They heard the secondhand screams of a homeless man broken by rocks and torn by little teeth, bleeding and dying on the grass. And then came the long travail of Ernest Nadler. On days following the cruelty of stringing up the little boy by his wrists, his three torturers had returned to climb the hanging tree, to poke him with sticks – and other things – and the pain went on and on. Willy would not shut up. She was reliving all the torture, reveling in it – she crazy loved it.