The Chalk Girl

TWENTY-FOUR

Phoebe’s brother isn’t in school today. She says he can’t come back till Mr Carlyle fixes his last mess. Girl trouble, she says. Humphrey’s got a thing for little girls.

And all this time, I thought her brother wanted to be a girl. But who is Mr Carlyle? Maybe he’s Humphrey’s therapist?

‘No, he’s only a toady,’ says Phoebe. One night a week, her house is full of toads, her mother’s pets.

You can’t make this stuff up.

—Ernest Nadler

One day, years ago, while Mallory was being fitted for a cashmere blazer, Riker had wandered into the tailor shop – and the tailor had asked him to leave, concerned, and perhaps rightly so, that stains on the policeman’s crummy suit might be infectious to Mallory’s fine new threads.

Her partner was not a stylish man.

But she knew Riker held strong opinions on bowties – like this bright yellow one around the scrawny neck of Cedrick Carlyle, one of many assistant district attorneys, and perhaps the one with the smallest office. Prior to the last renovation, this cramped space might have been a storage room with a copy machine where the desk was now. The little man behind that desk was the joke candidate of election years, best remembered for his trademark yellow bowtie. In Riker’s fashion philosophy, bows should be reserved to the pigtails of little girls or the collars of tiny dogs hatched from peanut shells.

ADA Carlyle was pouting, eyes fixed on the keyboard of his laptop computer. He had yet to acknowledge that there were two detectives in this room that was too small for one visitor. So Riker, perhaps realizing that he had been way too polite, rephrased their inquiry on the old Ramble case of fifteen years ago. ‘We’re here about the railroad job you did on Toby Wilder.’

The lawyer stopped typing for a moment, puzzled, maybe undecided as to whether he should bark or roll over. But then the little man continued his two-finger keystrokes.

This was not the response Mallory had hoped for. She wanted his watery gray eyes to spin around in their sockets.

Carlyle never looked up from the laptop screen when he said, ‘You’ll have to come back later.’ He waved one hand toward the door, as if they might have some trouble finding their way out of this closet. ‘Next time, make an appointment.’ In the hierarchy of the justice system, an assistant district attorney should trump a cop.

But not today.

‘This is a homicide investigation.’ Mallory leaned over the desk and slammed down the lid of his laptop. ‘We outrank everybody today.’ There was only one extra chair, and it was piled with papers. She swept them to the floor and sat down.

Following suit with the swipe of one hand, Riker cleared a seat for himself on one corner of the desk, sending books and pens crashing to the floor – just a touch of violence to set the proper tone. ‘We don’t like the way Toby Wilder’s case was handled.’

This got the little man’s rapt attention. Mallory liked that. She liked it a lot. There was no protest, no righteous indignation. Carlyle had probably lived his whole life avoiding confrontation – until now. She leaned forward to lie to him. ‘Rolland Mann said the bogus confession was your idea.’

The prosecutor wiped his palms on his sleeves. A sweaty act of guilt? And now he whined, ‘You can’t blame me. The kid’s own lawyer pled him out on the wino murder.’

The detectives exchanged glances. The wino murder? What wino?

‘I could’ve taken the kid to trial,’ said Carlyle, ‘and I would’ve won a conviction – no problem.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Riker, playing it casual, as if the wino’s murder was not news to him. ‘You’ve never won a trial.’

‘Your cases never get that far,’ said Mallory. ‘You plead everybody out. That’s your specialty, right?’

The lawyer assumed a prosecutorial smile, the one they all used for talking down to stupid cops. ‘In a plea bargain, the criminals get less jail time, but the taxpayers save the cost of a trial. Everybody’s happy.’

‘Easier to keep the details quiet, huh?’ Riker leaned forward.

The smaller man leaned back.

‘Right,’ said Mallory. ‘That’s why you sent Toby to Family Court. Sealed records. So . . . was it your idea to substitute victims – trading the Nadler kid for a dead wino? How bad did you need to bury a felony assault on a little boy?’

The little man had found his spine, and he straightened up in his chair. ‘You’re right about one thing, Detective – those records are sealed. You know I can’t discuss the case with you. I can tell you it was a clean plea bargain. Toby Wilder got off light.’

‘Because he confessed to killing a wino instead of torturing a little kid?’

‘Pleading out to a lesser charge is done all the time,’ said Carlyle, as if the murder of a drunken bum might be on the scale of petty crime. ‘I always get good results.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Riker laid a copy of a child’s death certificate on the desk. ‘You conspired to bury a murder. That’s a felony.’

Carlyle looked down at this solid piece of evidence, and his back curved into a slump.

Oh . . . crushed again?

Mallory opened her notebook and pretended to consult the pages. ‘Fifteen years ago – the first time you ran for district attorney – you outspent your opponent two dollars to one . . . and you still lost.’ She looked up to catch the man’s wince. ‘How did somebody like you raise that kind of money?’

Riker unfolded a sheet of financials, the fruit of Mallory’s love for money motives. ‘You got a lot of street-name cash donations to your election fund.’

‘Most people use credit cards or checks,’ said Mallory, liking the effect of Carlyle’s head swiveling back and forth from cop to cop. She left her chair, walked around to the back of the lawyer’s desk and bent down close to his ear. ‘That kind of cash spike on one deposit slip sends up red flags.’

Riker leaned into the little man’s personal space. ‘Even cash leaves tracks, pal. Suppose we backtrack donation names to payroll lists – and the people who own those companies? Now suppose just one of them got a sweet deal on a plea bargain.’ He smiled. It was unnecessary to finish this line of thought for the lawyer.

Mallory placed one hand on Carlyle’s shoulder – just to make him jump. ‘Who told you to nail Toby Wilder for the wino’s murder?’

The ADA was stalled, weighing his options, but neither detective had expected an answer to that one. The statute of limitations would not save him from a charge of conspiracy in a homicide case. Murder never went away.

And now, on cue, Riker made an easier demand. ‘Get us a warrant to search Toby Wilder’s apartment.’

Carlyle bowed his head. ‘I need probable cause for that.’

‘Find one,’ said Riker. ‘If a judge gives you any grief, call the acting police commissioner. You and him go way back, right? Rolland Mann was the detective on the old murder case – and I don’t mean the wino.’

Mallory slapped her hand down on the death certificate. ‘He means this little boy!’ She swiveled the lawyer’s chair from side to side. She was not done playing with him. ‘The warrant should also give us access to common areas in his building – and the basement, too. We’re looking for tools from a murder kit. You railroaded Toby fifteen years ago – so it shouldn’t be hard to screw him over for a few more killings in the Ramble.’

The building superintendent had only glanced at the warrant. He was sullen and slow to find the right key among the many attached to his belt loop. Finally the door was opened, and the detectives entered Toby Wilder’s dark front room.

Riker so loved owning the soul of an assistant DA; it guaranteed that warrants would be plentiful from now on, and the lack of probable cause would never present a problem.

He opened the curtains to windowpanes that had not been cleaned in a decade. The diffused sunlight of an air shaft illuminated a couch and chair with threadbare, grimy arms and burn holes in the upholstery. The screen of an early-model television was smashed. Maybe their boy had a temper. Yes, he did. There was an empty wine bottle visible on the other side of the set’s broken glass.

This place had the smell of a loser, a whiff of morning-after vomit in the air.

In Mallory’s book of scores and records, Riker ranked high as an extreme slob, and so he looked around Toby Wilder’s apartment with a competitor’s eye. Discarded clothes strewn on the floor – check; take-out cartons with days-old, crusted food – check. Dead flies on the windowsill – just like home. But now, upon closer inspection, he realized that he and the boy had something else in common: too many empty beer cans and bottles to pass for a social drinker.

And there was another nasty habit, one they did not share, though the detective could not readily say what Toby was sniffing, popping or smoking. Drug use was evidenced only in the turned-out pockets of pants and jeans, and by recent swipes in the dust on the floor in front of the couch, signs of the morning hunt for dropped grains of cocaine or stray pills to take away the raw ugliness of a brand-new sunny day. Upon awakening, Riker might look around for a bottle that was not quite empty. But this boy had scraped the floor for something, anything, to jump-start his heart. And in the far corner, Mallory was bending down to retrieve two empty pharmacy bottles.

‘These aren’t cheap on the street.’ She handed them to Riker, and he read the labels, variations on the theme of oxycodone – more addictive than heroin, and neither one had been prescribed for Toby Wilder.

‘He favors painkillers,’ said Rolland Mann from the open doorway, and the detectives turned on him in unison. ‘Vicodin, Oxycontin. He also needs sleeping pills. That’s why we got you a warrant for suspicion of drug possession.’

‘You knew the kid was an addict,’ said Riker. ‘So, all this time, you kept tabs on him.’

‘I admit to an ongoing interest in the boy.’ Rolland Mann walked into the room, turned his back on them and addressed the faded wallpaper. ‘This place is rent-controlled. Toby inherited the lease from his mother. She sold her condo and moved in here when her kid was sent to Spofford.’

Spofford. Before the children’s jail was closed down, that was the name New York parents invoked when they told their wayward offspring that they were going straight to hell. Toby’s drug habit was hardly surprising – given where he had been caged.

The detectives walked down the short hallway, passing the kitchen and its stink. Mallory opened a door to a room of chintz curtains and an unmade bed. And this had to be the dead mother’s room. A pair of lavender slippers were neatly paired on a scatter rug, still waiting for her to step into them. And a book lay on the quilt, pages down, perhaps open to the last passage read by the lady before she died. A thick layer of dust lay on every surface, undisturbed for years. Preserved as a shrine? Yeah.

The junkie had loved his mother.

Riker opened the next door. Jesus Christ. He stepped inside for a closer look. Not wallpaper. ‘Hey, you gotta see this!’

Rolland Mann and Mallory followed him inside the second bedroom, bare as a monk’s cell, with only a small chest of drawers and a narrow bed. The floor was swept clean. Toby had carved out a niche of order surrounded by the chaos of four walls covered with music: lines of scales, time signatures and thousands of notes filled in all the space from ceiling to floor. Riker’s instrument was guitar, and he could read sheet music, but here he was out of his depth. ‘These are some seriously scary chords.’

Mallory pulled the narrow bed away from one wall, and the music was there, too. And behind the dresser – more music.

Only Rolland Mann showed no surprise. ‘The kid was on a fast track for Juilliard, but he could’ve had his pick of full scholarships anywhere in the country.’ The acting commissioner consulted the screen on his ringing cell phone. ‘Colleges were courting Toby when he was only thirteen years old. Some kind of musical genius.’

Rolland Mann could have used the ground-level entrance for high-ranking politicians and other criminals visiting the Supreme Court on Centre Street. Instead, he elected to climb the many steps to this grand Grecian temple. Once inside, he passed through a checkpoint with the jostling crowd of ordinary people. None of them took any notice of him, and his rise to the rank of acting police commissioner was too recent for his face to make any impression on officers manning the metal detector. They simply waved him on, and he was free to enter a rotunda ringed by tall pillars. The vast space was brightly lit by a great iron chandelier and by sunlight from the center of the dome. The art and architecture were scaled for giants, and every living thing therein was reduced to bug size – so many bugs – lawyers and uniformed officers, jurists and jurors. It was a place where a rising star could be seen with a loser without arousing suspicion.

He saw the loser’s yellow bowtie bobbing in a throng of jurors being herded toward elevators.

Though that little man had campaigned in every election for two decades, no voter could remember his name, but if the silly tie was mentioned, people would say, ‘Oh, yeah, that guy.’ A political consultant, the late John Bledsoe, had recommended the bright yellow bow for its recognition factor. And Cedrick Carlyle – fool that he was – had no idea that his adviser’s more common name was Satirical Bastard.

As the assistant district attorney hurried toward him, Rolland Mann did not return the wave. He was distracted by other concerns. He wondered if his wife would manage the courage to leave him today. He was hardly listening as he strolled across the rotunda.

Cedrick Carlyle pranced at his side, whining, ‘I might need to produce witness statements for the wino murder. Please tell me you kept copies.’

‘From juvenile records? Sealed records?’ Rolland Mann’s eyes were fixed on some distant point above the smaller man’s head. ‘Why do you need copies? You can’t even discuss those witnesses with Mallory and Riker – not without losing your job and your license to practice law.’

ADA Carlyle clenched his teeth, his hands and no doubt his buttocks, too. What to do? What to do? ‘Right after they left, Willy Fallon called me. She asked how much those detectives know about the old Ernest Nadler case.’

‘New case. There never was an old case for the Nadler boy. That was your idea, wasn’t it? Something you cooked up with Toby Wilder’s attorney?’ Well, that shut his mouth. And now they were done. The acting police commissioner walked away with a plan of catching a cab to take him home.

Would his apartment be empty, or would Annie still be there? This had been guesswork every day since the Hunger Artist’s murders had come to light.