The Chalk Girl

TWENTY-FIVE

We follow Toby Wilder inside the Ramble now. It was Phoebe’s dare. But we never get far before we lose sight of him. We get lost in there sometimes, and when that happens, we run, hearts a banging, screaming up and down the paths, looking for a way out. Everyone we see might be a crazed killer, or at least more dangerous than what trolls the halls at Driscol. Phoebe says this is good training. This is Monster School.

—Ernest Nadler

The ambulette was not Wilhelmina Fallon’s idea of luxury transport, and the driver was getting surly. She ordered him to pull over in front of what might be Toby Wilder’s apartment house, a redbrick building on a shady Greenwich Village street. This phonebook listing for Susan Wilder was the only lead she had not exhausted, but no one ever answered the phone.

The driver opened the vehicle’s rear door to engage the hydraulic platform for his wheelchair passenger. ‘Don’t bother,’ said Willy. She abandoned the chair and every pretense of a handicap. Stepping out on the sidewalk, she donned her sunglasses and reached into her purse for the brown sack of money. Her tip was lavish. The man’s eyes lit up at the sight of so much cash. And now he had surely forgotten how badly she had abused him and berated him for talking to those two cops.

‘Wait for me.’ Willy turned toward the apartment building. Behind her, wheels burned rubber as they peeled away from the curb, and she thought she heard the driver laughing as he sped off down the street.

Prick.

The vacated parking space was quickly filled by a police car. Willy retreated to the other side of the street, forgetting for a moment that the pills in her purse were legal prescription drugs from the hospital. She turned back to see a uniformed officer open the vehicle’s rear door. A man unfolded from the backseat, and, as he left the car, he was preceded by his large nose. A tall man, a rich man – nice suit. Nice body, too. A small red-haired girl scrambled out behind him. Strange pair – a giant with the eyes of a frog and a kid with a cartoon smile.

Willy foraged in her handbag and pulled out her cell phone. Playing the tourist, she snapped their picture. The police car rolled away, and she drifted back toward Toby’s apartment house, stopping in the middle of the street.

A great hulking thug in a bad suit emerged from the building to greet the other two freaks. This one had a menacing face even as he smiled and bowed down to delicately shake the child’s tiny hand. He was everybody’s idea of a mob hit man, not a typical babysitter even by New York standards – and yet the girl was left in his company as the tall frogman entered the building alone. Willy stepped onto the curb and heard the little girl call her new minder by name, Detective Janos.

Another damn cop.

Forgoing her plan to go inside the apartment house, she looked up to catch sight of uniformed officers framed in a third-floor window. What was going on up there? Was Toby Wilder under arrest? And why would a little girl—

Oh, no.

Willy had attracted the attention of the detective on the side walk. She looked down at the small screen on her phone to observe more discreetly. The mystery child tugged on the man’s sleeve, and when his eyes turned down to hers, she informed him that a rat could be flushed down a toilet three times before it drowned. ‘Four times is the charm.’

Lowering her dark glasses, Willy stepped onto the sidewalk, bowed down to a child’s eye level and said, ‘I like rats.’

And now the thuggish cop was rabidly suspicious, perhaps because rats were the enemy of every sane New Yorker. Behind the child’s back, he held up his badge and mouthed the words, Move on.

Willy crossed the street and sat down on the stoop of a facing building. In a duel of sorts, she took another picture with her camera phone, and Detective Janos shot her with his.

Satisfied that Janos and Coco were getting on well, Charles Butler climbed the steps to the third-floor apartment, where he was admitted by a policeman in uniform. Once inside, he could see the two detectives standing in a room at the end of a short hallway.

‘Hey, Charles.’ Riker beckoned him to join them.

The psychologist walked in on an argument in progress.

Mallory stared down a badly dressed man, whose jangle of keys gave him away as the building superintendent, and he was angry when he said to her, ‘Your guys took the winch off my car. My car. Toby doesn’t drive. I need that winch to tow a trailer of furniture out to Jersey. That’s my sideline, short hauls. When do I get it back?’

While Charles gaped at the music notations on every inch of wall space, a police officer entered the room, holding up a cordless drill. ‘We found it in the basement.’

And the angry super shouted, ‘That’s my personal property! I need that drill!’

‘We’ll give you a receipt.’ Mallory turned in a half circle, waving one hand to encompass the stunning display of notes that covered the walls. ‘Now what about this?’

‘It’s been there forever. The kid did that when he got out of Juvie – oh, maybe ten years ago.’

With a nod from Mallory, the man left the room. A small woman with a giant camera entered next, and Riker instructed her to record every square foot of the musical walls. And now both detectives turned to their expert on the subject of gifted people.

‘It’s jazz,’ said Charles. ‘You can see that much in the tall chords.’ He reached out to touch a single stack of vertical notes. ‘Chords taller than triads . . . Not helpful?’

No, apparently not. Riker only shrugged, and Mallory, of course, was annoyed.

‘That’s a G-thirteen, an extended chord,’ said Charles. ‘Extended intervals are another clue.’

Riker smiled. ‘I bet you can’t hum a few bars.’

‘Not really. There is an underlying melody, but this is a complex orchestration.’

‘Like the old big-band sound?’

‘Bigger – a full symphony orchestra.’ Charles pointed to different areas as he rattled off instruments. ‘Woodwinds, brass and strings. And there – percussion section. Here, a full complement of saxophones. Did you find any sheet music – more notations like these?’

‘Nothing like that,’ said Mallory. ‘No music at all. The guy doesn’t even have a stereo. He probably hocked it for drugs.’

‘And the only radio is busted,’ said Riker. ‘Looks like it hit a wall on a bad day.’

It was difficult for Charles to believe that the boy only had one song in him. ‘If I transcribe it to music paper, I can get an expert opinion on the derivative influence. Jazz is not my forte.’

‘Actually,’ said Riker, ‘we’re just wondering how nuts this kid might be.’

‘Oh . . . Well, I’d hardly call this evidence of insanity.’ Charles pointed to areas here and there where notes had been whited out and written over. Pentimento, the artist’s change of heart, went to the bones of the melody, and these changes were carefully drawn – done last. ‘The boy began with a rush in the physical act of the initial notation. You can see the hurried hand in the lean of flags and time signatures. Periods are almost dashes – as if he couldn’t wait to set it all down. For the most part, it has the seamless quality of a single continuous act. And yet . . . I’d say he’d been working on this for a very long time. Before he ever went to these walls, he had already integrated dozens of instruments and the change of octaves to make them blend. Most people don’t realize that you can’t use the same notes for different instruments, even when—’

He turned to his audience of two bored detectives. ‘Sorry.’ Back to the wall. ‘This boy could hear his orchestration as a full-blown work of art before he made the first stroke. Now the absence of music in this apartment – not even a radio to play a song – that’s very telling. It’s like, years ago, the boy let all his music out in one frantic act. And then . . . silence.’

‘He’s a junkie,’ said Mallory. ‘His habit probably started in Spofford. The cop who put him there said Toby was beaten by other inmates, and he wouldn’t defend himself. So he was kept away from the general population.’

‘That happened off and on,’ said Riker, ‘starting when he was thirteen.’

‘A child in solitary confinement? That’s obscene.’ But now everything was clear to Charles, here on these walls in a stream of music, and he saw the final note as a kind of death. The best of the boy had bled out.

Spacey was his state of mind, and Toby Wilder floated through his days in the lighter gravity of Mars. Silent days. Airless. Sounds of the city were filtered through the cotton wadding of his brain on painkillers, and a waitress from his homeworld had to ask him twice – ‘Same old thing?’

‘Yeah.’ Hungry or not, he always ordered a cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato, a perfect food group, so his mother had said.

He recalled the first time Mom had led him to this place. That was the day following his release. During his confinement, she had sold their uptown condo and moved down here, closer to her place of work. That was the reason given then. Later he had discovered the truth. Mom had sold the condo to buy him an annuity that would take care of him after she was gone. She had taught him to negotiate the maze of West Village streets that so confused the tourists. And for that one year they had together, he had sat across this table from her every day, only seventeen years old when they had talked about his future – as if all his possibilities had not died in juvenile detention, where he had lost two teeth, his virginity and self-respect.

But he had gained a tolerance for pain and worse things. At thirteen he had cried for his mother; at fourteen he had learned to cadge drugs from doctors for the beatings he took, and when enough of his bones were broken, he had won a private room in solitary. And each visitors’ day, he had taken his mother’s hand and told her it was not so bad.

Today, he felt only a mild druggy buzz, and his mother was dead. All he had left of her was this old habit of lunchtime, his only reason to carry a watch. Without the ritual cheeseburger, his day would have no bones.

Phoebe watched Toby Wilder finish his burger.

Dead Ernest stared at her hands as she unconsciously rubbed the gold cigarette lighter. ‘If you keep doing that,’ he said, ‘you’ll rub off the date. I can hardly read it anymore. It just looks like scratches.’

She put the golden talisman back in her purse.

When Toby left the café, Phoebe went home to do penance – to read comic books aloud for the dead boy, who could never take his hands out of his pockets.

Comics had been the passion of the real Ernie Nadler, the living child. They had been his religion and his philosophy. One day, after school let out, Ernie had taken her into his father’s den and opened a bookcase like a door to show her a walk-in safe. There were more comics in there than she had ever seen in her life, stacks of them, walls of them. This was his father’s collection. Some issues dated back to the 1930s, and these had belonged to Ernie’s grandfather.

That was the day Ernie had shared his best-loved memories: bedtime story hours of his kindergarten days, when his father had turned the pages of these collector items and read aloud to his only child.

‘Comic-book heroes are in the family genes,’ Ernie had said to her then.

And so, of course, she understood why he had to die.