The Chalk Girl

THIRTY-ONE

I know the headmaster believes me. He goes a little pale while I tell my story in his office. I sit there between my parents. My mother seems embarrassed by murder, and I’m sure my father is disappointed in me for ratting out the wino’s killers. The smirking detective stands by the window, hardly listening.

The headmaster knows I’m telling the truth, but he was once a teacher, one of the deaf-and-blind people. I guess that’s why he tries not to hear me, shaking his head, shaking out my words. And when I’m gone, he’ll probably forget that he ever saw me while I was alive.

—Ernest Nadler

‘Hey, man, you’re early.’ Chick Dolan smiled and waved the detective into his Chelsea loft.

‘Nice digs.’ Riker had no idea that writing musical arrangements paid so well. The price of New York living space was measured in light, and the street side was almost solid glass. No interior walls – only furnishings to define the spaces for sleeping and lounging, shooting a game of pool – and work. Riker admired the grand piano. He was about to ask what came of Toby Wilder’s musical score for a jazz symphony.

‘This is it.’ Chick handed him a CD. ‘Nothing fancy, not like a studio cut. Just a crummy pocket recording from the rehearsal session. But that’s your music, and now I know who those riffs belong to. I should’ve remembered the other night in Birdland. I’m gettin’ old. Listen here.’ He played a ripple of piano keys. ‘This kid – well, he wouldn’t be a kid anymore, maybe in his fifties now. I didn’t know him well, and I sure didn’t know him long – just his style. He was a studio musician when he wasn’t playing clubs. He’s got credit lines on at least ten of those albums.’ Chick pointed to the large freestanding bookcase behind them.

Riker whistled. There were enough CDs, vintage cassettes and old vinyl records to open a small music library.

‘You won’t find any written scores for the best of them,’ said Chick. ‘This guy couldn’t even read sheet music. He was all tunes in freefall, improvisations on a theme. Finest kind. So his style comes shining through every time. Jess left the scene twenty years ago. Back in the day, he played the sax better than any man on the planet. Now, on piano, I’d have to say he was merely fucking marvelous.’

Riker hefted the CD in his hand. ‘So he’s in the wind.’

‘On the run? I wish. No, Jess was still young when he flamed out, and then he drank himself away. Last I heard, he was panhandling on the street, but that was ages ago. Sorry, man. You got this dead-end look in your eye.’

Charles Butler opened the door of his apartment to greet his second guest of the day, the detective who did not hold a grudge against him.

When Riker entered the front room, Mallory flashed a look of irritation. Always late. Her partner held up a CD as a peace offering. ‘Chick Dolan’s buddies recorded the music, and it’s not a total loss.’ He smiled, possibly waiting for some sign of interest from her. Giving up on this idea, he handed Charles the sheet music transcribed from Toby Wilder’s walls. ‘Chick underlined all the signature passages. And he gave me a—’

‘You’re interrupting,’ said Coco.

‘Sorry, kid.’ Riker gave the disk to Charles and then joined his partner on the couch, where he patiently listened as Coco explained how a cat-size rat could fit through a hole the size of a quarter.

Charles opened the doors of an eighteenth-century armoire that hid a twenty-first-century stereo, a stack of state-of-the-art components, and one of them would even play his collection of archaic vinyl records. This was the only electronic gift from Mallory that he actually liked and used. She had wired his entire apartment to surround him in sound so that he could walk around inside of sonatas and symphonies. He slipped in Riker’s CD, but hesitated on the play button until Coco had concluded her lecture on the compression factor of rat bones.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Riker. ‘I made a stop at the Hall of Records.’ He leaned across Coco to hand his partner a sheet of paper. ‘That’s a birth certificate for Toby. The kid’s father was Jess Wilder, a great sax player.’ He turned to Charles. ‘Chick says the style is pure Jess, but the guy couldn’t read or write sheet music. And he only played other people’s tunes.’

Charles pressed the play button. ‘Then this score belongs to Toby.’ He riffled the pages of sheet music to see all the highlighted passages. ‘But the father’s influence is everywhere.’ Literally. He saw it everywhere on all the pages.

And now he could hear it as well – all around him.

A rippling passage from a saxophone began the overture, and other instruments dropped in notes with a perfect balance of sound from speakers on every wall, drums to the right of him, strings to the left. Piano keys, soft as shadows, followed the saxophone through the music that wound throughout the room.

‘I don’t care how gifted the father was.’ Charles paused for a wilding of notes, an auditory landscape of windblown strings and horns. ‘A man who can’t write sheet music can’t do an orchestration for fifty instruments. This is the son’s creation.’

Charles lost his train of thought, as did they all. And they heard out the rest of the work, waiting for a crescendo. The tension was exquisite – any moment – soon, soon. Every chin was lifted, waiting to catch the high notes when they crashed to earth. But then the music wandered off, tapering down to the sax playing solo notes that ended mid-sentence, and a piano finished the saxophone’s song.

This departure from the logical progression of music was akin to defying gravity. ‘Beautiful – and original.’

Charles riffled a drawer to find the police photographs of music writ on walls, and he laid them out on the coffee table in front of the detectives, pointing to places in every picture where notes had been whited out and written over. ‘Toby altered the very structure of the bones – his underlying melody. You can actually see the creative process at work.’

Ah, but now he could also see that Mallory wanted the short version. After years of training him, she had only to raise one spread hand, a signal for him to cut to the best part – something useful.

‘It’s not derivative work,’ said Charles. ‘It’s a virtual fusion of father and son. I think Jess Wilder was still in Toby’s life when the boy was locked up in Spofford.’

‘If the father is the saxophone,’ said Coco, ‘he’s dead.’ In unison, every pair of eyes turned to the little girl, and she picked up on this as a cue to perform. ‘It’s a story.’ She pointed to the stereo. ‘Play the last part again.’

Mallory walked to the stereo and cued up the last few cuts of the disk. Now the symphony played once more, and Coco stood center stage in the middle of the room. Her eyes closed, and she lifted her face, hands cupped as if to catch rain. Charles fancied that he could actually see music washing over her.

‘You hear it?’ Coco opened her eyes. ‘There’s something wrong with the saxophone.’

‘That’s a stylistic effect,’ said Charles.

The child shook her head in both denial and a warning. ‘No, the saxophone is sick.’

Now Charles realized this was not a conversation. He had interrupted her performance. ‘Sorry.’ He sat down on the couch beside the other two members of the child’s audience.

‘This is a story about the saxophone.’ The symphony was nearing its end, and Coco pointed at thin air, here and there, as if she could see the notes winging by. ‘This is the place where the saxophone dies.’ And then they were down to the last instrument, a velvet piano solo. ‘And this is loneliness. The piano loved the saxophone, and now it’s crying.’

‘Flowers,’ said Mallory. ‘Toby’s flowers.’

‘What?’ Charles turned to see the back of the detective as she slipped into the foyer, heading for the door. Coco ran to hug Mallory goodbye, delaying the escape but not by long. And Riker followed close behind his partner.

The detectives sat at their facing desks, sifting through the recent fruits of search warrants for ADA Carlyle’s home and office. They were looking for flowers.

Riker found the original booking sheet for Toby Wilder, age thirteen. ‘Here’s a note under tattoos and identifying marks. ‘Left arm. Numerals.’ Everything after that is crossed out.’ He stared at the scribbled-over line. ‘What do you bet that’s when the booking cop figured out that the kid drew it with a pen? Say Toby’s got a pen but no paper, so he writes stuff on his arm. We all do that.’

‘I don’t,’ said Mallory.

Riker studied the crossed-out numerals mistaken for a child’s tattoo. Some of the printed figures were still partially visible. ‘Hey, this ends with letters.’ He handed her the booking sheet. ‘Can you make ’em out?’

She held the paper up to the bare bulb of her desk lamp. ‘Looks like an old toe-tag number. I can’t work out the whole date, but the letters – that’s a designation for Potter’s Field.’

‘Where they would’ve buried the wino,’ said Riker. ‘So Toby paid a visit to the morgue. And he got up close and personal with the wino’s corpse – close enough to read a toe tag.’

Mallory flipped through pages of Carlyle’s confiscated files. ‘If the kid saw the wino’s body, he never made a formal ID. The morgue would’ve sent the form to the ADA on that case, and it’s not here.’

‘Okay,’ said Riker, ‘but the kid was at the morgue. That’s the only way he could’ve seen a toe-tag number. It’s too long to memorize – so Toby writes it on his arm when nobody’s looking.’ He said this on the possibility that his partner might be listening to him. ‘That could only happen before Toby was questioned on the Nadler kid’s assault. He was in custody after—’

‘It all comes down to the flowers.’ Mallory stared at a document from the files. ‘And here they are again. Toby brought flowers into the Ramble. The way it’s written up here, he laid them down in the place where they found the dead wino. If this is true, it looks like Toby witnessed that murder. That’s how he knew where to lay his flowers.’

‘Or Toby did the killing,’ said Riker. ‘And maybe he strung up the Nadler kid, too. Did you believe Carlyle when he said Ernest Nadler was a witness to the wino’s murder?’

‘Who knows? If there ever was a witness statement, you know it got shredded fifteen years ago.’

‘Yeah.’ Elbows planted on his desk, Riker rested his head in his hands. ‘And we still got nothing solid on Rocket Mann. Chief Goddard’s gonna shit a brick if that bastard comes up clean. We’re screwed.’

‘Maybe not.’ Mallory turned her laptop around to show him a screen from the NYPD archives. ‘Ernest Nadler was strung up for at least three days . . . but there’s no report on file with Missing Persons – or any other department.’ She smiled. ‘The kid doesn’t come home from school one day. After a few hours, his parents get worried. Dinnertime comes and goes. Then it gets dark outside. There’s no record that they ever called the police. But most parents really like their kids. And that’s how I know they ran all the way to the nearest police station – on the Upper West Side.’

‘Rocket Mann’s old precinct when he was a detective. Bastard – he probably shined off the paperwork.’

‘But the parents keep coming at him,’ said Mallory. ‘Days go by. Maybe Mann sends out the uniforms to knock on some doors in the neighborhood. The Nadlers are half crazy. Eventually, just to shut them up, Detective Mann does a little work, checks out the kid’s hangouts and his friends. Then somebody put him on to the Ramble.’

‘Okay, that explains why he was on the spot when Ernie was found hanging in a tree.’ Riker lifted one hand in a gesture of So?

‘Now back up,’ said Mallory. ‘What if there’s a reason why Mann wound up with the parents of a missing kid? Maybe it wasn’t just luck of the draw when the Nadlers walked into the station house. What if the parents already knew Detective Mann?’

‘Before their kid went missing? You figure Mann was the cop who took down Ernie’s statement on the wino murder?’

‘I know he was.’ Mallory pointed to highlighted text on her screen. The old entry named Rolland Mann as the detective assigned to the murder of a nameless derelict. ‘If Ernie came forward, he would’ve given his witness statement to the cop who owned that case. The parents would’ve been there with their son . . . and that was the first time they met Rocket Mann.’

‘Then later, when their kid goes missing, the Nadlers ask for help from the only cop they know.’

Rolland Mann’s wife sat up in the dark. She rose from their bed and left the room. Lately, Annie seemed to have an internal clock for the scary hours when she was afraid to sleep – afraid of him. When morning came, he would find her lying on the couch, where she felt safe – safer. This pattern had begun with the first morning paper to carry a new piece of a very old puzzle. Perhaps Annie already knew what he had done.

But fifteen years had passed, and she was still alive. What more proof of love did Annie require?

No sleep tonight.

Rolland reached out to the nightstand, picked up his cell phone and turned it on to check his messages. Ten of them were from ADA Carlyle. And a new one was ringing through. He held the phone to his ear. ‘Yes? . . . What witness statement? . . . You moron. They scammed you. How much did you tell them?’ He glanced at the lighted dial of the alarm clock. Right about now, the detectives of Special Crimes Unit would be pulling records for the final phone call of a terrified ADA reaching out to him – in the scary hour.

Phoebe Bledsoe lay in her bed – listening – eyes moving from window to window.

Click, click. What was that? Bedcovers fell away as she sat bolt upright. Was someone trying the lock on the door? No. She recognized the hum of the refrigerator’s automatic ice-cube maker. More cubes clicked into their plastic container. Phoebe lay back on the pillow. So – only imagining things – she was too good at that. And still she could not lose the fear that someone was out there.

And in here, Dead Ernest was with her, a little corpse lying beside her in the dark.

‘I counted on you,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d come for me . . . I waited. I held on, because of you.’ Dead Ernest moved closer to whisper in her ear. ‘You were a witness, too. And now Willy’s out there somewhere.’ He nodded toward the window. ‘I hear footsteps. She’s coming for you. Now you know how it feels.’

The greatest flaw in her homemade wraith was the lack of a heart. This little doppelgänger only bore a physical resemblance to her old friend. Even the way it smiled lacked Ernie’s personality. But what of the real boy, the living child – what if he had counted on her to come for him – to save him?

She had never been allowed to visit Ernie during his monthlong coma. Humphrey had told her why: ‘Mom and Dad don’t want you to know his hands were hacked off.’ Taking this for no more than routine torture by her brother, she had not believed it then. Not then. But, because she was an invisible child, ignored by everyone, she had found her way into Ernie’s hospital room.

To this day, she would not allow Dead Ernest to pull his phantom hands from his pockets – to discover what had been done to him during the long sleep.

There was a rap, tap, tap on a windowpane. In a small, still rational compartment of her brain, she knew this was only a tree branch knocking around in the wind. She rose from her bed and hesitated before parting the curtain, only intending to peek through a slit.

She sucked in her breath and lost her balance, falling to the floor and dragging down the curtain with its rod. Willy Fallon’s face was pressed up against the glass, fleshy features smeared in monstrous distortions.

Phoebe screamed.

Willy laughed.