The Chalk Girl

NINE

On the way home from school, we stop off for a slice of pizza – Phoebe’s treat. She says there’s an upside to what they did to me today. I’ve marked my place in the annals of school history. She says, ‘They’ll never get that bloodstain out.’

—Ernest Nadler

It had been the small joke of a desk sergeant to assign a flaming hypochondriac to the Upper West Side hospital, where a crime victim was under twenty-four-hour guard.

The young, germ-phobic Officer Wycoff sat in a metal chair on the intensive care ward, a large room of pale green walls and medicinal smells. A hub of technology – lights blinking, screens blipping – was manned by doctors in green scrubs and nurses in white, who monitored equipment when they were not hurrying to and fro; and all around them, beds were sectioned off by privacy curtains in pastel colors. The pink curtain behind the police officer’s chair concealed the comatose man from the Ramble.

Officer Wycoff had come prepared with reading material, a thick pile of computer printouts, to pass the time. And now, on the second day of his tour of duty, he was an Internet expert on all things regarding comas and dehydration. He was also vigilant in the extreme; he knew all the websites for hospital horror stories, all the ways that medical personnel could kill the patients, both deliberately and stupidly. No one got past him; not one doctor or nurse was allowed to touch the privacy curtain without first producing identification to back up the names on their hospital badges. And he took notes, by God. He knew all their names and addresses.

After the caregivers passed scrutiny, the policeman personally supervised every treatment, each change of IV bag and the catheter, too. He kept watch on monitors for machines that tracked vital signs of faint heart and failing kidneys. The staff found it unnerving to have medical decisions questioned by a man with a gun. However, to the officer’s credit, he had caught a conflict of medication during one of his many perusals of the coma victim’s chart.

So . . . if this civilian in street clothes, standing before him, thought she had a chance in hell of just waltzing past that curtain to see his patient, she had been cruelly misinformed.

‘What’s your name?’

An easy enough question, but apparently she was stumped.

Detective Mallory opened all the drapes to light up the front room of the apartment owned by Humphrey Bledsoe, alias Uncle Red. ‘That kid can tell me what happened here, but she won’t. And I know she’s not retarded.’

‘Right you are,’ said Charles. ‘Coco is very smart . . . and creative. She doesn’t believe Uncle Red was turned into a tree. But a nice story is so much better than a frightening reality that she cannot deal with. She’s only eight years old.’

Oh, huge mistake. Mallory so disliked having obvious things pointed out to her.

‘You don’t want to get between me and a case! I need—’

‘Mallory, shut up! Just listen.’

And she did shut up, but only because she was surprised to hear these words from him of all people. And so he had bought a moment to compose himself. Charles walked to a window that overlooked the planetarium across the street. He understood the child’s limitations and Mallory’s. ‘When you were her age, I know you went through worse things. But Coco isn’t like you.’ He turned around to see a hint of anger in her eyes. Perhaps Mallory had inferred that this spoke well of the little girl – this lack of likeness to herself. To put her straight, he said, ‘That child doesn’t have your coping skills. I wish she did.’

And now he risked that other crime against Mallory, a repetition of facts already in evidence, but he was past caring what might offend her. ‘Coco was kidnapped, ripped out of the only world she knew. She also witnessed the violence of a man stripped and bound and carried off. Then she dared to go outside in the dark and confront a strange city, where she had nothing and no one. And she followed a sadistic killer into the Ramble – this little girl who has trouble with shoelaces and buttons. She was coming undone, breaking down, shutting down. And then you came along, Mallory. And finally Coco had somebody. That child only lives to please you.’ He waved one hand toward the window and its view of the planetarium. ‘She gave you the damn moon in a box.’ Never mind the small technicality that it was really the sun. ‘What a gift. What an ingrate you are.’

Was Mallory paying attention? No, she was looking down at the floor, finding a pile of discarded clothing miles more interesting.

‘This is where the perp assaulted Humphrey Bledsoe and bagged him,’ she said. ‘I need to know where Coco was hiding when this went down. If she saw the perp, maybe he saw her, too. A sadist could be looking for that kid.’ Mallory smiled, and he wished she would not, for this was hardly a happy smile, not at all friendly. ‘But you’re right to take her away from me, Charles. You’re so right.’ And her sarcasm said he was so wrong. ‘I only wanted to keep that kid alive. What was I thinking? I must be a sociopath.’

This last word was put out there to hang in the air between them like a dare. This was the way she had been characterized in Dr Kane’s psych evaluation for the NYPD. But Charles had been her champion in this matter, and he was her defender to this day, this moment. ‘I would never believe that of you.’ He would not – even if he knew it to be true.

She stepped closer to study his face. Was she waiting for the red bloom in his cheeks that killed all possibility of deception and every chance of winning at cards? Well, she would not see him blush, not today. He was telling the truth. He would stake his own heart on the hope that she might also have one.

Lieutenant Coffey listened as an uptown desk sergeant told him on the telephone, ‘The coma guy’s got a visitor.’ That young woman was being detained by the officer on hospital guard duty. ‘And you got another leak in your case.’

After the lieutenant thanked the man for this brand-new wound to his stomach lining, he ended the call with a slammed-down receiver. Without opening the door of his office, he yelled loud enough to be heard by the entire squad, ‘Who’s got a copy of the Daily!’ He turned to his window on the outer room to see more than a few hands go up; this was not a Wall Street Journal crowd.

Janos rose from his desk with a newspaper in hand. The man was built like a refrigerator that could walk and talk; the five o’clock shadow of his beard appeared at nine every morning; and he had the most brutal face that God ever gave a detective – all of which made him invaluable during interrogations. He entered the private office on cat’s feet and delicately placed his copy of the Daily News on his boss’s desk.

Jack Coffey turned to page nine, as directed by the desk sergeant of the Upper West Side precinct, and there he found a picture of the surviving victim from Central Park, eyes closed and posed in a hospital bed beneath the headline: Do You Know This Man?

‘And none of you guys caught this?’ Coffey looked up at his detective. ‘Does anybody on this squad read anything but the sports pages?’

Janos always politely considered his responses and delivered them softly. ‘I like the movie reviews.’

Though the Times had scooped the big story of the day, there was a reference to Central Park in this newspaper, too. But it was only a passing mention of the place where a dehydrated, naked man had been found. At least the photograph had been buried on the inside pages by an editor who favored rat-eaten little old ladies like Mrs Lanyard over unidentified coma patients.

‘Now our perp knows the guy’s alive,’ said Coffey.

Oh, and the article had thoughtfully provided the name and address of the hospital – so a killer would know where to go if he felt inclined to clean up this sloppy loose end of a living witness.

‘So Coco was hiding behind a door.’ Charles Butler had been restored to his rightful place in the universe. Mallory ruled. She always won.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The kid lied about the door.’

‘I doubt that. Her stories are for entertainment, not deception. Coco has no guile.’ Charles was staring at the raised section of floor on the other side of this spacious room. ‘Hello.’ He walked toward a short flight of steps leading up to that next level. ‘I knew something was off about this place. My parents had friends in this building. That’s a chimney wall. So you have to wonder . . . why would anyone wipe out a fireplace?’ That would be a real-estate sin in Manhattan. He climbed the stairs to stand on the higher floor, and Mallory joined him.

‘Coco was hiding here,’ he said, so confident of what he would find when he lifted the area rug to expose a handle set into the woodwork. ‘And she was behind a door – a door in the floor.’

Mallory leaned down to pull on the handle, lifting a square of wood to look into a dark hole. ‘This is where the bastard kept her.’ She ran one hand over the rough texture on the underside of the trapdoor. ‘He soundproofed it.’

‘It’s a pedophile’s dream house,’ said Charles. There would be no fear of a child’s rescue, not by the accidental discovery of a building handyman letting himself in to fix a broken pipe. ‘You couldn’t do this sort of renovation in any of the smaller rooms. And not over there by the windows. The raised floor would’ve overshot the sills. That’s why he had to take out the fireplace.’

He descended a short ladder into the secret room beneath the floor, where he had to hunch down to look around. ‘No light switch. At Coco’s age, lots of children are afraid of the dark, and fear makes a good control device. So you’ll excuse her if she left this frightening place out of her little narrative about a man who turned himself into a tree.’ By the light from the opening above, he could see stuffed toys and a bed that appeared to be unslept in. Thank you, God. Something crunched beneath his feet as the trapdoor was slowly closing.

‘Give me a minute,’ said Mallory, ‘then open it – just a crack.’

When Charles had finished his countdown, he lifted the square of wood by a few inches, and he was looking through the fringe of the area rug that once again covered this hiding place. The detective had closed the drapes and lit the only lamp. His side of the room was deep in shadow.

Mallory walked to the pile of clothes on the floor and stood in the place of a sadist, her eyes on the trapdoor. ‘Too dark. The perp didn’t see Coco.’

‘She probably didn’t see him, either, at least not in any detail.’ Charles climbed out and walked to the window, carrying a tiny pair of eyeglasses with one broken lens. ‘I found these on the floor – after I stepped on them.’ He pulled back a curtain for a few inches of light, the better to read the small print of the prescription on one stem. ‘If the glasses belong to Coco, she’s nearsighted.’

Through the slit in the drapes, he stared at the planetarium across the street. Poor eyesight explained why the child had mistaken the mock sun for the moon. She had not seen the orbiting planets – nor could she distinguish a green burlap bag from the leaves of trees. He looked down at the spectacles in his hand, regarding them as yet another wound to a little girl. ‘This is why Coco could only tell you about the coveralls and the dolly, nothing about the Hunger Artist’s face.’

‘But we’re the only ones who know that.’

And now the only evidence was gone. The broken eyeglasses had disappeared from his hand and entered the pocket of Mallory’s blazer. The late Louis Markowitz had once described his foster child as a world-class thief, born to steal, and the policeman had said this with some degree of pride, adding, ‘What a kid.’

Mallory perused the shadow side of the room, where the crack of a door in the floor had certainly gone unnoticed. ‘So the perp doesn’t know I have a witness.’

‘Actually . . . you don’t.’ Charles smiled. ‘I do. Custodial guardianship, remember? That’s why your man in Missing Persons called me. The Chicago police found the grandmother’s body an hour ago. Dead of natural causes. Coco has no other family. But she has me.’

He allowed a moment for the import to settle in. And now, with all the leverage he was ever likely to have, he laid down new rules for dealing with his young ward.

Mallory did not like them. Charles did not care.

The commander of Special Crimes Unit stood behind the pink curtain surrounding the coma patient’s bed. In a face-off with Dr Kemper, the hospital administrator, he held up a newspaper open to the page with the crime victim’s photograph. ‘Somebody sold this picture to a reporter.’

Kemper, a thin weasel of a man, took on an attitude of personal offense, one hand pressed to his breast, when he said, ‘It wasn’t one of my people.’

The lieutenant pointed to the patient. ‘This guy’s wearing a hospital gown in the photo – so we can rule out the ambulance crew. They only saw him naked.’

‘I’ll look into it.’

What Jack Coffey hated most about this man was the smooth way he lied with a smile. The lieutenant turned to a nurse, who stood close to the administrator’s side like a lady-in-waiting. ‘Go out in the hall and tell Officer Wycoff to bring in that woman.’

When she had left on this errand, Jack Coffey only glanced at the prince of pricks who aggravated him so much. ‘I don’t need you anymore. Take a hike.’

The hospital administrator’s smile widened as he made his hasty getaway. On the other side of the pulled-back curtain, Officer Wycoff stood beside the visitor he had found so suspicious. The woman was young, still in her twenties, and tall. No wedding ring. Though she had the unlined face and sexless body of a plump child, the quaint word spinster came to mind, perhaps because her mouse-brown hair was pulled back in a schoolmarm’s bun. And the next word he thought of was wallflower. She wore a simple gray dress, the better to blend into a concrete city and disappear. There was only one standout feature, lush eyelashes that looked fake, but he knew they were real. This woman wore no makeup at all.

She twisted to one side, trying to see around him for a peek at the mystery patient. Coffey stepped aside, and she stared at the man on the bed. Her hand tightened around the shoulder strap of her purse as she shook her head. ‘I don’t know him.’

And did he believe that? Well, no.

She was turning round, ready to leave, and quickly. Coffey nodded to the officer, who caught the woman by one arm and restrained her. Eyes wary, she turned back to face the lieutenant. ‘I have to go.’

Jack Coffey consulted Officer Wycoff’s small notebook. ‘You gave your name as Mary Harper?’ He held it up so she could read the open page. ‘And this is your address?’

‘Yes, I live on the Lower East Side.’

‘No, you don’t. That address puts your apartment in the middle of the East River.’ Coffey reached out and slipped the purse strap off her shoulder. ‘So you made a false statement to the police. And now I get to search this bag for weapons before we take you in.’

A nurse came through the curtain as the purse’s contents were dumped out on the bed. ‘Can you do that somewhere else?’

‘Oh, Coma Boy won’t mind.’ The lieutenant looked down at the items spilled across the white bedsheet. No smokes, but there was a cigarette lighter, and he picked it up. Nothing else gleamed like real gold, and it was heavy – solid, not plated. This elegant bauble would not square with the lady’s ugly walking shoes. In this town, rich women wore ankle-breaker stilettos. There were deep scratches on the gold surface. Maybe this lighter was a souvenir of better days. Or maybe not. And now he discovered another lie.

‘Miss Harper, I believe you told Officer Wycoff you weren’t carrying any identification.’ He picked up a snakeskin wallet. It was beautiful. He held it close to his nose, and it even smelled like money; he wanted to marry it. The lady’s driver’s license was displayed in a clear plastic window, and she was not Mary Harper. What a surprise. ‘My detectives just identified our victim here.’ He waved toward the unconscious patient. ‘Phoebe Bledsoe, meet Humphrey Bledsoe.’