The Chalk Girl km-10

by Carol O'Connell

  Rolland Mann smiled, as if in agreement with a voice he could not possibly hear. ‘There were five children in the Ramble when the incident happened.’ He held up five fingers in case she could not grasp such a high number. Adding insult, he counted them off, folding his long fingers one by one. ‘Ernie’s dead, Humphrey – Aggy. And Willy Fallon nearly died.’

  All that remained was the worm-white thumb – herself.

  ‘It’s simple math, Phoebe.’ He turned his back on her and walked down the flagstone path, saying, ‘Call me if you change your mind about protection.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  My guidance counselor tells me that school days are the best times of my life, and I should relish every second. When she tells me this, I want to scream, ‘You silly old fuck! It’s hell every day, five days a week! It’s war!’

  —Ernest Nadler

  By all appearances, Charles Butler had recovered from Mallory’s funeral scam to expose a little girl to a lineup of murder suspects. He was smiling broadly, happy to see the two detectives at his door, and he ushered them into his apartment.

  This extended babysitting detail would be wearing on anyone. Maybe Charles was starved for adult company. That was Riker’s thought as he bent down to receive a hug from Coco. ‘Hey, kid. Can you play something for us? Know any good rock groups?’

  She clapped her hands together, eyes lit brightly, big grin. ‘Echo and the Bunnymen!’

  Charles smiled. ‘Sounds charming.’

  ‘Excellent choice,’ said Riker, ‘post-punk rock.’

  And Charles stopped smiling, somewhat less charmed.

  Coco took Mallory’s hand and led her into the adjoining room. Moments later, the two men in the parlor were listening to a piano duet.

  Riker slapped his worried host on the back. ‘It’ll be okay. As long as you can hear the music, you know Mallory isn’t beating the kid.’ And now the detective recognized the opening bars to an old song from a garage band that almost made it. ‘Oh, this is vintage. It’s called “Crazytown Breakdown” – a hit single back in the early nineties.’

  The man who loved classical music had a baffled look about him. Charles Butler’s golden oldies predated rock music by centuries.

  In the next room, two voices rose in song, high, pure notes running up and down the scale of the melody. When they came to the refrain, they both banged out the music and belted out the lyrics. Great fun – so said the child’s giggles accompanied by a softer ripple of piano keys.

  Charles was entranced. ‘I’ve never heard Mallory sing.’

  Riker had, but only once and long ago. That was the day of her little rock ’n’ roll rebellion at Special Crimes. A child-size Kathy Mallory had been suspended for some playground transgression before her school day had ended, and Lou Markowitz was on midget duty until his wife could arrive to pick up their foster child. He sat at his desk, facing Kathy’s chair. Her legs were shorter then, and her sneakers dangled above the floor. Maybe the kid was only bored when she began the staring contest with Lou, but then she had escalated with lyrics, putting their little war of nerves to music. The child had sung the old man this same refrain – Crazy is a place I know. I come and go. I come and go – over and over, all the while fixing him with her weird green eyes. And, with his best poker face, Lou had, one by one, snapped six lead pencils in two before saying, ‘You win.’

  Today this old song had the same unnerving effect on Charles Butler – and not by accident. What had this poor man done to Mallory?

  On the next note of ‘—cra-a-a-zy—’ Riker described the invisible dead boy who spoke to Phoebe Bledsoe. ‘Her mother blames it on a child psychiatrist.’ The detective consulted his notebook for a name. ‘Dr Martin Fyfe. This guy had Phoebe personalize her anxiety.’ He squinted at his shorthand, isolated words standing for sentences and whole paragraphs. Most of his notes had been written on the fly while being shown to the door. ‘Well, that backfired. The kid was supposed to confront her problem – talk to it – but she only listened.’ He looked up. ‘Is this nuts, or what? So then the shrink tells the mother that Phoebe’s delusional, and the kid needs years on the couch.’ He closed his notebook. ‘The mother fired the shrink.’

  ‘A good maternal instinct.’ Charles looked into the music room to watch the piano players during a lull in the song. ‘Dr Fyfe was a fraud – not actually a psychiatrist.’ Assured that Mallory was not browbeating Coco, he turned back to Riker. ‘Fyfe did have a Ph.D. in psychology. Unfortunately for his patients, his education was the next best thing to a correspondence course in cartooning. But you don’t need any credentials for psychodrama, and that’s what you described.’

  Charles rose from his chair, and Riker followed him down the hall and into the library, where every wall was thick with books, and shelves soared to a high ceiling. The music of the piano was thin and tinny here. Coco’s guardian had one ear cocked toward the open door, monitoring the piano duet, as he walked toward shelves filled with magazines. Their wooden holders were labeled by dates and titles of Psychiatric this and Psychology that.

  ‘So Phoebe Bledsoe started her therapy about fifteen years ago?’

  ‘Give or take.’ Riker watched him pull out holders for the nineties.

  ‘Fyfe would’ve been in a rush to publish a case like hers. I can almost guarantee that Phoebe Bledsoe made it into print. There won’t be a real name mentioned, but he wouldn’t change the patient’s gender or her age. This might take me a while.’

  ‘Hey, you’ve got a photographic memory.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve only read one of that idiot’s papers.’

  Riker glanced down at his wristwatch. ‘Me and Mallory got plans to ambush an assistant DA. We gotta corner the weasel before five.’ The detective stared at the stack of professional journals still piling up on the table. ‘This is gonna take all day, huh?’

  ‘Not that long.’ Charles picked up a large stack as if it weighed only ounces, and he carried it down the hall to the front room, unwilling to leave Coco and Mallory unchaperoned. He set the journals on the coffee table and sat down in line of sight with the piano.

  Riker’s load was lighter by half, but he felt the strain of seldom-used muscle when he placed his stack beside the taller one.

  The psychologist’s eyes scanned the printed word as fast as he could turn the pages, faster than anything passing for speed-reading. His face had the deep red flush of embarrassment, and that was understandable. This man was shy about any evidence of freakishness – his giant brain and even his tall stature. He always seemed apologetic when looking down at someone of average height. Being closely observed while reading at the speed of light – that must be humiliating.

  Gallant Riker turned away to watch the singing piano players, and his feet tapped to the beat. Without turning his head, he said, ‘So you know this Dr Fyfe pretty well.’

  ‘No, only by name and a bad reputation.’ Charles held up one of the publications. ‘Years ago, this journal sent one of Fyfe’s papers for peer review. It was a case study on an eight-year-old boy. The idiot fed a child unwarranted drugs. Then the reviewer – a real psychiatrist – looked into his background and discovered that Fyfe wasn’t licensed to prescribe an aspirin. The article was evidence of illegal traffic in drugs – he bought them on the street. But it was a charge of child endangerment that got him suspended the first time.’

  ‘The first time? How many—?’

  ‘Three suspensions.’

  ‘What does it take to get your license pulled?’

  ‘You’d have to kill someone on the ethics committee. That would get their attention. As a provision of reinstatement, Fyfe wasn’t allowed to work with children anymore. But that would’ve been too late for Phoebe Bledsoe. Would you like a tutorial on psychodrama?’

  Riker rolled his eyes.

  Charles smiled. ‘It’ll only take a minute. It’s that simplistic.’ He pointed to the empty armchair beside Riker’s. ‘Imagine, if you will, that the source of your anxiety si
ts there. Now you speak to it. You pour out your heart, all your angst and fear. It’s a game anyone can play. There’s a drama school on the Lower East Side that uses it for a class exercise.’ Charles picked up another journal and resumed his page turning, stopping suddenly. ‘Here we go.’ He slowed down to read at a speed close to that of a human being.

  And Riker listened to the music from the other room, the never-ending song of crazy. What was Mallory playing at?

  When Charles was done with the article, he closed the journal. ‘The child mentioned here was eleven years old. Her therapy began a month after the death of a classmate.’

  ‘That’s our girl,’ said Riker.

  Charles turned his eyes to the music room, distracted by the song begun again. ‘Fyfe’s patient was suffering from nightmares and a fear of being left alone for any length of time. She was unresponsive to a standard talking cure. So Fyfe introduced her to psychodrama, and he helped it along with twice-weekly doses of a psychotropic drug. Now that’ll really mess up a child’s brain. Then, as if the little girl didn’t have enough problems, she became delusional. Did I mention that Fyfe is an idiot? He could’ve confused delusion with a coping mechanism or a rich fantasy life.’

  ‘You mean the invisible playmate?’

  Charles nodded as one finger ran along a line on the open page. ‘Here, Fyfe says her delusion took the form of the dead classmate, but the girl wouldn’t say any more than that. No feedback at all. She only listened to an empty chair.’

  ‘The mother says Phoebe’s listening to her inner critic.’

  ‘That’s pop-psychology, but there might be a kernel of truth . . . if this little girl felt some responsibility for the boy’s death. That also fits with her silence during therapy sessions. Children are geniuses at keeping the secrets that eat them alive.’

  ‘You think she’s nuts? Could Phoebe have killed the invisible kid?’

  If that had not come out quite right, the psychologist was too polite to say.

  ‘No idea.’ Charles laid the journal down. ‘If this is a portrait of Phoebe . . . if the behavior is ongoing, I can only confirm that Dr Fyfe sent her to live in a private hell, locked up with a dead child – and she’s still there.’

  In the next room, the song of crazy ended.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Phoebe’s brother isn’t in school today. She says he can’t come back till Mr Carlyle fixes his last mess. Girl trouble, she says. Humphrey’s got a thing for little girls.

  And all this time, I thought her brother wanted to be a girl. But who is Mr Carlyle? Maybe he’s Humphrey’s therapist?

  ‘No, he’s only a toady,’ says Phoebe. One night a week, her house is full of toads, her mother’s pets.

  You can’t make this stuff up.

  —Ernest Nadler

  One day, years ago, while Mallory was being fitted for a cashmere blazer, Riker had wandered into the tailor shop – and the tailor had asked him to leave, concerned, and perhaps rightly so, that stains on the policeman’s crummy suit might be infectious to Mallory’s fine new threads.

  Her partner was not a stylish man.

  But she knew Riker held strong opinions on bowties – like this bright yellow one around the scrawny neck of Cedrick Carlyle, one of many assistant district attorneys, and perhaps the one with the smallest office. Prior to the last renovation, this cramped space might have been a storage room with a copy machine where the desk was now. The little man behind that desk was the joke candidate of election years, best remembered for his trademark yellow bowtie. In Riker’s fashion philosophy, bows should be reserved to the pigtails of little girls or the collars of tiny dogs hatched from peanut shells.

  ADA Carlyle was pouting, eyes fixed on the keyboard of his laptop computer. He had yet to acknowledge that there were two detectives in this room that was too small for one visitor. So Riker, perhaps realizing that he had been way too polite, rephrased their inquiry on the old Ramble case of fifteen years ago. ‘We’re here about the railroad job you did on Toby Wilder.’

  The lawyer stopped typing for a moment, puzzled, maybe undecided as to whether he should bark or roll over. But then the little man continued his two-finger keystrokes.

  This was not the response Mallory had hoped for. She wanted his watery gray eyes to spin around in their sockets.

  Carlyle never looked up from the laptop screen when he said, ‘You’ll have to come back later.’ He waved one hand toward the door, as if they might have some trouble finding their way out of this closet. ‘Next time, make an appointment.’ In the hierarchy of the justice system, an assistant district attorney should trump a cop.

  But not today.

  ‘This is a homicide investigation.’ Mallory leaned over the desk and slammed down the lid of his laptop. ‘We outrank everybody today.’ There was only one extra chair, and it was piled with papers. She swept them to the floor and sat down.

  Following suit with the swipe of one hand, Riker cleared a seat for himself on one corner of the desk, sending books and pens crashing to the floor – just a touch of violence to set the proper tone. ‘We don’t like the way Toby Wilder’s case was handled.’

  This got the little man’s rapt attention. Mallory liked that. She liked it a lot. There was no protest, no righteous indignation. Carlyle had probably lived his whole life avoiding confrontation – until now. She leaned forward to lie to him. ‘Rolland Mann said the bogus confession was your idea.’

  The prosecutor wiped his palms on his sleeves. A sweaty act of guilt? And now he whined, ‘You can’t blame me. The kid’s own lawyer pled him out on the wino murder.’

  The detectives exchanged glances. The wino murder? What wino?

  ‘I could’ve taken the kid to trial,’ said Carlyle, ‘and I would’ve won a conviction – no problem.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Riker, playing it casual, as if the wino’s murder was not news to him. ‘You’ve never won a trial.’

  ‘Your cases never get that far,’ said Mallory. ‘You plead everybody out. That’s your specialty, right?’

  The lawyer assumed a prosecutorial smile, the one they all used for talking down to stupid cops. ‘In a plea bargain, the criminals get less jail time, but the taxpayers save the cost of a trial. Everybody’s happy.’

  ‘Easier to keep the details quiet, huh?’ Riker leaned forward.

  The smaller man leaned back.

  ‘Right,’ said Mallory. ‘That’s why you sent Toby to Family Court. Sealed records. So . . . was it your idea to substitute victims – trading the Nadler kid for a dead wino? How bad did you need to bury a felony assault on a little boy?’

  The little man had found his spine, and he straightened up in his chair. ‘You’re right about one thing, Detective – those records are sealed. You know I can’t discuss the case with you. I can tell you it was a clean plea bargain. Toby Wilder got off light.’

  ‘Because he confessed to killing a wino instead of torturing a little kid?’

  ‘Pleading out to a lesser charge is done all the time,’ said Carlyle, as if the murder of a drunken bum might be on the scale of petty crime. ‘I always get good results.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Riker laid a copy of a child’s death certificate on the desk. ‘You conspired to bury a murder. That’s a felony.’

  Carlyle looked down at this solid piece of evidence, and his back curved into a slump.

  Oh . . . crushed again?

  Mallory opened her notebook and pretended to consult the pages. ‘Fifteen years ago – the first time you ran for district attorney – you outspent your opponent two dollars to one . . . and you still lost.’ She looked up to catch the man’s wince. ‘How did somebody like you raise that kind of money?’

  Riker unfolded a sheet of financials, the fruit of Mallory’s love for money motives. ‘You got a lot of street-name cash donations to your election fund.’

  ‘Most people use credit cards or checks,’ said Mallory, liking the effect of Carlyle’s head swiveling back and forth f
rom cop to cop. She left her chair, walked around to the back of the lawyer’s desk and bent down close to his ear. ‘That kind of cash spike on one deposit slip sends up red flags.’

  Riker leaned into the little man’s personal space. ‘Even cash leaves tracks, pal. Suppose we backtrack donation names to payroll lists – and the people who own those companies? Now suppose just one of them got a sweet deal on a plea bargain.’ He smiled. It was unnecessary to finish this line of thought for the lawyer.

  Mallory placed one hand on Carlyle’s shoulder – just to make him jump. ‘Who told you to nail Toby Wilder for the wino’s murder?’

  The ADA was stalled, weighing his options, but neither detective had expected an answer to that one. The statute of limitations would not save him from a charge of conspiracy in a homicide case. Murder never went away.

  And now, on cue, Riker made an easier demand. ‘Get us a warrant to search Toby Wilder’s apartment.’

  Carlyle bowed his head. ‘I need probable cause for that.’

  ‘Find one,’ said Riker. ‘If a judge gives you any grief, call the acting police commissioner. You and him go way back, right? Rolland Mann was the detective on the old murder case – and I don’t mean the wino.’

  Mallory slapped her hand down on the death certificate. ‘He means this little boy!’ She swiveled the lawyer’s chair from side to side. She was not done playing with him. ‘The warrant should also give us access to common areas in his building – and the basement, too. We’re looking for tools from a murder kit. You railroaded Toby fifteen years ago – so it shouldn’t be hard to screw him over for a few more killings in the Ramble.’

  The building superintendent had only glanced at the warrant. He was sullen and slow to find the right key among the many attached to his belt loop. Finally the door was opened, and the detectives entered Toby Wilder’s dark front room.