The Chalk Girl (32 page)

‘Oh, no. I’ve seen the way you talk to children. That old interrogation tape of Toby Wilder? That was brutal.’

Mann was looking past him and, with more urgency now, renewed his efforts to gain entry. ‘Let me in!’

Charles turned his head to see Coco standing behind him and clearly disturbed by the angry voice from the hall. Her hands were spinning, and her body was weaving from side to side.

Rolland Mann put all his weight against the door and yelled, ‘Don’t make me call that cop back up here!’

And now, as if the smaller man weighed no more than a
bothersome fly, Charles easily pushed him into the hall by simply closing the door. Rolland Mann beat on the wood, and the pounding grew louder as each of three dead-bolt locks was secured.

Coco put her hands to her ears and ran down the hall.

Charles caught up to her in the guest room. She sat on the bed, tailor-fashion – rocking, rocking, as her little world tilted, all at sea. She held the one-button cell phone in both hands and held on tight, as if it were her lifeboat. And it was.

He gently took it from her hands. ‘Good idea. Let’s call Mallory, shall we?’

‘I’ve never heard of Ernest Nadler,’ said the lawyer. ‘Toby was charged in the death of an unidentified wino.’

Riker stepped closer to the blind man’s desk. ‘Where was Toby’s father while this was going on?’

‘Long gone,’ said Anthony Queen. ‘Mr Wilder abandoned his family when Toby was ten. I only know that much because I had the man declared legally dead. Susan wanted to sell her condo, and the absent husband was a cloud on the title.’

‘Let’s get back to that bogus waiver,’ said Mallory, ‘the one that signed away the mother’s parental rights. Did you even bother to challenge it?’

‘Of
course
I did. And the judge was ready to hit the prosecutor with his gavel. Toby was a minor, a child. So I insisted that his confession be tossed. But
then
the court-appointed lawyer showed up. He was hired by the Driscol School. Very pricey legal talent – way out of
my
league. I can’t disclose the con versation in chambers, but when court resumed, Toby pled guilty to a charge of manslaughter. The plea-bargain arrange ment killed the boy’s right of appeal, but his mother and I filed a complaint against Detective Mann. Two angry blind people. I always wondered if they were laughing at us, those policemen at Internal Affairs. I imagine they
made a paper airplane out of Susan’s statement. It took me four years to get Toby out on early release. His mother was dying. I bought them a year to say goodbye.’

Behind him, Riker heard Mallory’s cell phone ring. A moment later, he turned around, and she was gone.

Rolland Mann’s secretary did not look up from the screen of her computer. Miss Scott wore a secretive, joyful little smile, and he assumed that she had found another job. No doubt he would find her letter of resignation on his desk. But that was not the surprise that awaited him when he opened the door to his private office.

A detective was seated at his desk – leaning back in
his
chair – just begging to be fired for gross insubordination. ‘Mallory, are you
insane
?’

‘Oh, yeah. Ask anybody.’ She lifted a newspaper from the desk blotter to expose a weapon lying there, and it was not a police-issue semi-automatic. It was a revolver – a big one.

Rolland observed the traditional body language for dealing with a whack-job cop: the missed beat of the heart, the tension of every muscle, the gaping dry mouth.

The detective’s face was a mask, and neither was there any expression in her voice when she said, ‘Charles Butler tells me you have an interest in a little girl . . . He called it an unhealthy interest.’ She picked up the revolver and studied its muzzle.
Now
she showed emotion – she
loved
the gun.

He felt a cold wetness spreading on his crotch. Rolling down his legs. The smell of piss was in the air.

Point taken
.

Mallory holstered her weapon and left the office.

Lieutenant Coffey’s destination was only a short walk from the station house, but he had made a detour along the way. After parking his personal car, he stood on the sidewalk, looking up at an apartment window above the SoHo cop bar. He entered the saloon, an alcoholic’s dream come true, only a short stumble up the stairs to Riker’s apartment.

And now Jack Coffey climbed those steps to knock on the detective’s door.

Riker had his six-pack smile in place when he greeted his commanding officer. ‘Hey, Lieutenant.’

Coffey entered the front room, a dumping ground for take-out cartons, crushed beer cans and unwashed glasses that had done double duty as ashtrays. A tower of dirty socks, junk mail and newspapers was precariously stacked on a straight-back chair. The stack moved. He could not look away. Any second now—

Surprise
. A walkway had been cleared from the front door to the kitchen, where dirty dishes were stacked up in the sink and along the countertop. But a small table had been swiped clean of debris. Whatever liquid had been spilled on the linoleum, it stuck to the soles of the lieutenant’s shoes and made a tacky sound as he crossed the small room. ‘Well, this is touching. You cleaned up for me.’

Riker, the quintessential host, put a cold beer in the lieutenant’s hand. ‘Pull up a chair.’

Coffey sat down at the table and tipped back his bottle for a long, cold swallow on a warm summer night. ‘Where’s your partner?’

‘Probably following the money.’

‘She ditched you, right?’ The lieutenant could hear the rattle of the air conditioner in the next room, but it was doing little to cool this apartment. He wondered if Riker had ever cleaned the AC filter.
Stupid idea
. ‘I went back to my place to go over Mallory’s credit-card charges for the time she was gone.’

‘You ran her card trace from your home computer?’

‘Yeah. I couldn’t put her in the department goldfish bowl. But I did it by the book. I guess she backtracked the search with my badge number. It’s not like I was hiding anything. I figured that was her reason for driving me nuts for the past month.’

‘Naw,’ said Riker. ‘That was just payback for all that desk duty.’

‘Maybe – maybe not.’ The lieutenant tipped his chair backwards on two legs and looked up at the ceiling, a haven for spiderwebs and trapped flies.

‘God knows she’s not normal,’ said Riker. ‘But nobody working homicide is all that well-adjusted.’ He held up a cigarette to ask his commanding officer if he minded the smoke –
Riker
, who deferred to nobody – and this was evidence of a worried man.

‘The chief of D’s called again. He ran his own trace on Mallory’s cards – for the lost time on the road.’

‘Then he’s got nothing,’ said Riker. ‘So the kid likes to drive. So what? Beats the hell out of booze and drugs to forget the last body count. You know her car?’

‘I’ve seen it,’ said Coffey. ‘A Volkswagen convertible.’

‘Naw, it only looks like one. You lift up the hood, roll back the top, and what’ve you got? A damn Porsche with a roll bar.’

‘Disguised as a VW . . . Oh, yeah, that’s normal.’ But that would explain how she had traveled from place to place so fast, wandering aimlessly at breakneck speeds. ‘She was gone for three months, Riker.’

‘I’ve lost more time than that in drunk tanks. Every cop needs a hobby. I drink – she drives.’

Jack Coffey found a clean deli napkin on the floor at his feet, and he used it to draw a crude map of the lower forty-eight states. ‘The charges she racked up are mostly gas stations, food, hotels.’ The lieutenant drew a row of dashes running out of New York. ‘For a few hundred miles, it almost looks like she’s got someplace to go.’ And then the westward line disintegrated into weaves and jogs and doubling-back circles as the lieutenant’s pen traveled across the paper-napkin country. ‘But she’s got no plan, no destination. The kid’s got nothing.’ Paradoxical Mallory, a girl with a full tank of gas – running on empty and covering lots of ground to go nowhere. His pen pressed down on the West Coast. ‘This is where she ran out of land.’ The pen moved along the edge of America, hugging the barrier ocean as it traveled north on the ragged paper coastline and stopped again. ‘Here’s where she decides to come back home.’ The pen described wide spirals – a cartoon of a clockwork spring, months long from coast to coast. ‘Not your typical tourist route. Circling, circling . . . the way people travel when they’re lost.’

‘But she’s fine now,’ said Riker.

The lieutenant waited until the man met his eyes, and then his words were carefully meted out. ‘She was never fine.’

And she never would be. Life could only beat a little kid half to death so many times and still expect her to grow up normal. But Mallory
was
a highly functional cop, and the best he had ever known, even better than her old man. It was a tribute he could not afford to pay to her face because – she was
not
fine. At best, he could say she was back in form, smart and edgy and totally—

‘She isn’t nuts,’ said Riker.

Jack Coffey nodded in agreement. ‘Crazy is just a game she plays.’ It was like a new toy she had found out there on the road. ‘And Mallory’s been playing
me
– playing crazy – in front of a squad of witnesses.’

Hubris
. It had never occurred to her that she could fail a psych evaluation. And then she had counted too much on Charles Butler’s rebuttal exam to save her.

‘Every time Chief Goddard calls me,’ said Coffey, ‘it’s like a threat to take her badge. Even if she gets a new evaluation, he can still drag her into a formal hearing anytime he likes. Let’s say the whole squad has to testify to her behavior – like hog-tying a CSI. If just one of those bastards slips up and forgets to lie like crazy – under
oath
– that’s the end of her.’

Riker could only stare at the napkin. There was no need to remind this man that some of those detectives might not care to risk their own careers – not for her sake.

Jack Coffey finished the beer and pushed back his chair. ‘Much as I’d like to tell Mallory she shot herself in the foot, it could only make things so much worse. You got a picture of that in your head, Riker? Mallory going to war on Joe Goddard?’

The detective nodded. ‘I won’t tell her.’

This time, Jack Coffey believed him. They were done.

The lieutenant gathered up his car keys. ‘I don’t need to know the details. But whatever Goddard wants from you guys – bring it home real fast.’

Riker was across the street from Sardi’s restaurant when he saw the red neon light of Lou Markowitz’s favorite nightclub in the distance. He held a cell phone to his ear and talked as he walked, saying to the shadow cop who followed Willy Fallon, ‘Stay on her till she goes back to her hotel. Then go home, Arty. Tomorrow you can sleep late. Party girls don’t wake up till noon.’ He folded his phone into his pocket and strolled down the sidewalk, mingling with the theater crowd as the shows were letting out, and then he put on some speed to beat these people to a seat in Birdland, a place of low lights, booze and live music.

The detective was late to pull up a stool at the bar, and he made his apologies to Charles Butler. Coco sat between them on a cushion of two telephone books so she could reach her drink, a pink concoction with three cherries. Riker smiled and flashed his badge at the bartender. ‘Tell me you carded the little girl.’

‘The kid’s legal. She’s a performer. Isn’t that right, Coco?’ The bartender had obviously fallen deeply in love with the short piano player. Turning back to Riker, he said, ‘She did a solo between sets.’

‘And she got a standing ovation,’ said Charles Butler. ‘But it’s way past her bedtime, and she’s a little tired.’