The Chalk Girl (12 page)

‘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. ‘Hel
lo
.’ 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.’

Lieutenant Coffey sat down on the dark side of the one-way glass for a peepshow view of the lighted interrogation room. In other cop shops, covert watchers made do with bare rooms and maybe a folding chair or two. This one was decked out like a tiny movie theater with raised rows of cushioned seats to accommodate the backsides of visiting VIPs.

The lieutenant was the only watcher in the dark room, and Phoebe Bledsoe was the sole occupant of the lighted one. Above the woman’s head, long fluorescent tubes leached the color out of her face, and her feet tapped the floor while she chewed her lower
lip. She chewed her fingernails, too; they were bitten to the quick after an hour of sitting there alone.

The door opened. Two detectives entered the interrogation room and sat down.

Showtime
.

While amiable Riker made the introductions, his partner placed her hands flat on the table, the red arrows of ten long fingernails pointing at Miss Bledsoe. And then Mallory leaned in to stare at the woman up close. Such a hungry look. So intense. Some said she could do this for an hour without blinking, but that was only the cophouse mythology of Mallory the Machine.

Jack Coffey smiled. His detectives were running an interesting twist on the old game of good cop and bad cop.

Sane cop. Crazy cop.

The lieutenant had no trouble reading Phoebe Bledsoe’s mind as she stared at Mallory:
What fascinating green eyes. Are they real?

The woman quickly looked away. Every New Yorker was taught in the womb to never make eye contact with the lunatic. She turned to the
sane
detective. ‘Am I under arrest?’

‘No,’ said Riker. ‘We just need some information.’ He scanned a sheet of paper and then flashed her a friendly smile. ‘I see you’re a nurse at the Driscol School. So you’re on summer vacation?’

Miss Bledsoe leaned forward. ‘Lieutenant Coffey said he’d charge me for making a false statement to the police officer. And obstruction – that was another charge.’

‘Don’t worry about that.’ Riker dismissed this idea with a wave of one hand. ‘We’re not here to give you a hard time.’ He turned to his partner. ‘Are we?’

Mallory continued to stare at Phoebe Bledsoe as if the woman might be lunch. She licked her lips.

On the other side of the glass, Jack Coffey’s smile was wry.
Nice try
. He had no doubts about why his detective was playing crazy
cop today; she knew he was watching her, wondering:
How crazy are you?

Riker pulled a photograph from a manila envelope. ‘We found another homicide victim in the Ramble. She was bagged and strung up – just like your brother. But we didn’t get to her in time. She’s dead. We figure there’s gotta be a connection to Humphrey. If you could just take a look at the picture? Tell us if you recognize this woman.’ He laid down the photo of a naked female with a rat-chewed nose and cheeks, tape covering the eyes and mouth, and only bare bones for fingertips. The picture had no ID potential – only shock value.

Phoebe Bledsoe rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. ‘I’ve got no idea who that is.’

‘That’s what you said about your brother in the hospital.’ Riker raised his hands as if to say,
But hey, no hard feelings
. ‘And then you gave a phony name to the—’

‘My mother told me not to call attention to myself.’

‘Your mother sent you to the hospital?’

‘The picture in the paper wasn’t very good. She couldn’t be sure it was my brother. Humphrey was only sixteen years old the last time we saw him. He had chubby cheeks then – and his hair was red, not black. The man in that bed—’ Her eyes lowered. Her hands clenched.

Jack Coffey could finish that thought for her: Humphrey Bledsoe’s grainy newspaper portrait was black and white. His sunken eyes and cheeks had lost their definition to a bright flashbulb. The better photo on a new driver’s license bore even less resemblance to the coma patient, who was clearly not himself today.

‘I wanna tell my lieutenant that you cooperated,’ said Riker. ‘Then we can make those charges go away.’ Once again, he held out the photograph of the female corpse. ‘I know this body’s in real bad shape, but the woman was around the same age as your brother.
He was twenty-eight, right? If you could give us a list of his friends—’

‘I don’t know his friends.’ She looked down at her chewed fingernails and then hid them in her lap beneath the table. ‘I
told
you – I haven’t seen Humphrey in years.’

Riker reached into the envelope and pulled out a clear plastic bag containing a blond strand of hair with long, dark roots. ‘This might help. Take a look at the dead woman’s hair . . . Miss Bledsoe? Could you please open your eyes?’