The Chalk Girl (45 page)

He pulled the throwaway cell from his pocket and called his residence. One ring, two rings – three.
Annie, my Annie, come to the phone
.

Willy Fallon climbed out of the subway near the Greenwich Village movie theater. She turned a corner and walked westward into that patch of New York City where grid logic broke down, where Fourth Street ran north and south of West Tenth. When she was within half a block of Toby Wilder’s apartment building, she saw him step out on the sidewalk.

Lunchtime
.

She knew her quarry was a creature of habit, thanks to a tip paid to a local shopkeeper, a man who bragged that he could set his watch by Toby Wilder. Willy followed her old classmate on a trek across the Village to a Mexican restaurant on Bleecker Street. She saw him pass through the door to reappear at a table by the window. He never noticed her standing there on the sidewalk, watching him. When he did happen to look out on the street, he paid her no more attention than the fire hydrant.

He was still beautiful.

After all these years, it rankled her that he would never know what she had done to him. While she stood by the window, another patron rushed in the door to find a table on the far side of the room
and close to the kitchen. Why would Humphrey’s sister pick the worst seat in the house while better ones went begging?

Phoebe Bledsoe was taller now, but she still lugged around all the baby fat of childhood. And apparently she had not outgrown her crush on the boy by the window. The girl settled into the chair with the worst possible lighting to watch Toby Wilder from a shy distance.

Pathetic
.

Willy entered the café and walked up to the far table to see her favorite expression – naked fear – on Phoebe’s face. Willy sat down, liking this power over the other woman – hardly a woman – a lump of a schoolgirl who would never grow up. ‘What’s that?’

Before Phoebe could close her hand over the gold cigarette lighter, Willy grabbed it, saying, ‘You never smoked. You wouldn’t dare. Neither would I, not if Grace was
my
mother.’

‘Give it back!’ Humphrey’s sister was anxious, reaching for the lighter that was evidently precious to her.

Willy played a schoolyard game of keep-away, holding it high, tossing it from hand to hand, and then she took a closer look at her prize. It was heavy – solid gold. The scratches in the metal appeared to be damage at first glance. At second glance, she remembered where she had seen this lighter before. The surface scratches had been deeper then, and it had been easier to read them as a clear date – the year of her birth – though not the same month and day.

Smiling, Willy cadged a glance at Toby Wilder. It had to be his birth date scratched into the metal. Turning back to Phoebe, she held the gold lighter just out of reach. ‘I know where you got this. You found it in the Ramble. You went
back
for it.’

It was supposed to be found beside the wino’s dead body – this cigarette lighter dropped on the path by Toby Wilder – with his fingerprints on it. Planting the lighter had been Humphrey Bledsoe’s
idea – that moron. He thought the police kept everyone’s fingerprints on file, even those of schoolboys.

‘I
know
who this belongs to.’ Oh, that look of sick fear was priceless – almost orgasmic, and Willy hungered for more. She rose from the table and turned around to face her old classmate on the other side of the room. ‘Hey, Toby!’ He looked in her direction. Behind her, she could hear the scrape of an edged-back chair and then Phoebe’s heavy footsteps running toward the door.

But Willy was the one who commanded Toby Wilder’s attention – at last – though he seemed only mildly curious. She flung the cigarette lighter across the room. He snatched it from the air, and stared at it. And now a closer look, head shaking, not believing his eyes. He held it up to the light of the window, the better to read the faint date scratched in gold. He turned back to her, rising from his table, but Willy was already at the door and passing through it, laughing,
laughing
. The chase was on.

Officer Chu was in a quandary. Willy Fallon’s protection might not be his chief concern today, but it
was
a cop’s job. However, she did not look like a woman in any danger. Every few running steps, she turned back to smile at the long-haired young man who chased her up MacDougal Street. Savvy Village residents hugged brick walls and storefront windows, but a few tourists went down like bowling pins. Arthur Chu followed the pair on the run into Washington Square Park, where they played a fast kids’ game of
catch me if you can
.

Grinning like a maniac, Willy ran around the fountain, and her pursuer cut across its wide basin, slogging through the pool and getting drenched by arcs of water from the rim and the bubbling tower at the center. On the other side, he was within grabbing distance of Willy. But now a helpful, though misguided, park visitor tripped the running man to end the chase, and the poor bastard went down on one knee, wincing as bone met concrete. Willy, the clear
winner, and Officer Chu were gone before the loser of the race could get to his feet.

Rolland Mann waited on the sidewalk at the corner of Columbus Avenue and West Eighty-sixth Street, hardly a neighborhood that attracted paparazzi in search of celebrities, not that his own face was all that well known around town. Four southbound buses had passed by since his arrival at this meeting place.

Willy Fallon was
that
late.

Two other people stood beside him, both of them tourists. They gave themselves away by waiting on the sidewalk for their chance to legally walk across the intersection. Their sheep’s eyes were glued to the glowing red sign in the shape of a hand that commanded them not to move.

The real New Yorkers were standing in the street –
screw
the traffic light – waiting for the next break in the flow of passing cars. Poised three steps from the sidewalk, the locals liked this competitive edge on timid curbhuggers from out of town. And, in the ongoing war of pedestrian and driver, there were points to be scored if one could terrify the other with a near miss.

A teenage girl approached the corner, oblivious to her environs, hooked into music by earphones, and she stepped off the curb. She was pretty, else Rolland would not have noticed her. And now the southbound bus was also in his line of sight as it barreled down Columbus Avenue, ramming its way across the lanes of the intersection – as it had done every ten minutes or so during the long wait for Willy Fallon.

The teenager stepped in time to the music from her earphones and never saw the bus – as she walked into its path. A stunning moment. He
knew
she was going to die. The bus was bearing down on her. A millisecond more, and she would be smashed like bug soup on a windshield.

The bus was gigantic, filling out his field of vision. Closer, closer.

A middle-aged man in greasy coveralls reached out, grabbed the girl’s collar and yanked her back a step. The metal behemoth, brakes screaming, came within inches –
inches
– of the girl, and it failed to stop for six more yards beyond the point where she really should have died. A stench of burning rubber was in the air. There was time enough for the driver’s quick look in a rearview mirror, a sigh of relief, and then the bus rolled on. Three pedestrians stopped to applaud, as they would for any near-death experience; it was a theater town.

The show was over, and the audience dispersed. The teenage girl could only stand there, staring at the departing bus, eyes glazing over as shock set in. And now her savior, the man in coveralls, released his handful of her blouse, saying, ‘Jeese, I’m so sorry, kid. What was I thinking?’

The girl turned to face her rescuer. Huh?

The hero smacked his head in a mime of
Dummy me
. ‘If that bus had hit you, you’d be set for life.’ The girl, head shaking, uncomprehending, was still surprised to be there, upright and
alive
, when the man started across the street, waving goodbye to her, saying, ‘Sorry, kid.’

The Good Samaritan’s guilt was understandable. A lawsuit involving a city bus would have paid off in millions. But that girl would never have survived a direct hit by tons of rolling steel.

Though he had been instructed to wait on the corner, Rolland stepped off the curb, moved three more steps into the street, and there he waited for Willy Fallon.

When Willy Fallon arrived at the designated corner, Rolland Mann appeared to have given up on her. He was standing in the street, waiting for a chance to cross or looking to hail a cab. She called to
him from the sidewalk. ‘Hey!’ He glanced at her over one shoulder and then turned back to face the oncoming traffic.

‘Where are you going?’ She stepped off the curb to join him in the street. He smiled and placed an avuncular hand on her shoulder. And that set off the first alarm.

Creepy bastard
.

She shook off his hand, squared her shoulders and faced him down, but his eyes were turned toward the approach of an oncoming bus – not a city bus, but a huge double-decker tour bus. Her first instinct was to step back before it could flatten both of them, and now Mann’s hand was lightly pressed to the small of her back.

Oh, shit! You prick! No way!

In the spirit of self-preservation, she reached down to squeeze his testicles, though she had planned to do that anyway. He doubled over in agony. They all did that. And now, with no trouble, only a kick in the pants, she guided the hunched-over man into the bus lane.

Then a screech, a whack, and he was gone.

Before Willy Fallon vanished from the scene of the traffic fatality, one of the witnesses heard her mutter, ‘Fucking
amateur
.’

However, the tourist’s first language was Danish, and Officer Chu thought the woman might have heard this wrong. Nevertheless, the plainclothes policeman wrote the words down in his notebook. Two uniformed cops collected cameras from the other tour-bus passengers, and a citywide search was under way for the apprehension of a killer socialite.

So ended Arthur Chu’s surveillance detail and his best shot of advancement in the NYPD. After this fiasco, the department would not trust him to polish the shoes of detectives from Special Crimes Unit.

He had already given his own witness statement to the local police, and now he repeated it on his cell phone for the benefit of Detective Mallory. With a glance at the bloody smear on the front of the vehicle, he said to her, ‘Oh, yeah.
Really
dead.’ He explained that the acting police commissioner had made a pass at Miss Fallon. The lady had taken offense and retaliated – New York style – by the balls. Oh, and then, of course . . . by the bus.

Toby Wilder opened his door, and there she was, the skinny brunette who had tossed him the gold cigarette lighter. Her eyes were too bright, and her skin was flushed. The lady was in a fever when she said, ‘Let me in.’

Why not?

He stepped aside, and she walked into his front room, asking, ‘Where do you keep the booze?’

When he had rinsed out two glasses and returned from the kitchen with the wine, the kind that came with a cap instead of a cork, his visitor had appropriated the couch, arms sprawled across the back cushions, both feet up on the coffee table.

He handed her one of the glasses. ‘Who the hell are you, and where did you get my lighter?’

‘You don’t remember me?’ Her tone was asking, How could he
not
know who she was?

Toby shook his head to say he had no idea. He could see that she did not believe him. ‘No, thanks,’ he said, when she offered him pills from the stash in her purse. And this also surprised her.

He was still feeling a buzz from his last round of oxycodone, neither jonesing for another rush nor stoned. All his heavy doses were for the nighttime hours, and then only pills that guaranteed sleep without dreams. Come morning came the painkillers he favored over every other drug to chase away the sweaty shakes and nausea. Lunch at one o’clock, and then there were more pills to pop.
He had his routine. It never varied. Every day was the same day relived – until now.

She swallowed the wine in one long draught and handed him her empty glass. ‘Get me another one.’

Why not?

He brought in the bottle to fill her glass again. When they were seated facing one another, she dropped names into the conversation: the Driscol School, Humphrey, Aggy – each one ending with the lilt of a question to prompt his recall or maybe to catch him in a lie.