The Chalk Girl km-10 Page 9

  ‘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.’

  TEN

  They only mess with Phoebe when she’s with me, and they don’t hurt her much. Sometimes she gets bounced off a locker in the hall. A little violence in passing. It seems almost accidental.

  I don’t think they even see her.

  Phoebe doesn’t appreciate her superpower of invisibility.

  Maybe that’s because Toby Wilder can’t see her, either. Toby is entirely too cool to know that either one of us exists.

  —Ernest Nadler

  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?’

  Mallory curled her fingers into a fist and banged the table with the force of a hammer.

  Phoebe Bledsoe’s eyes were wide open now as she edged her chair back a few inches. Prompted into a more helpful frame of mind, she studied the hair sample. ‘I still don’t know who she is.’

  Mallory hit the table again, beating out the rhythm of a drummer – or a shooter – bang, bang, bang, staring all the while at her suspect. Under the table, the Bledsoe woman’s fingers intertwined in a death-grip prayer.

  Well, insanity made everybody nervous. It was an interesting moment for the watcher in the darkened room. His detective, the one recently voted the most unstable, was pretending to be unstable.

  Riker leaned toward Phoebe Bledsoe. His was the reassuring face of reason. ‘You really need to cooperate. My partner here wants to charge you as an accessory to kidnapping.’

  ‘I kidnapped Humphrey? That’s crazy!’ The woman paused to steal a glance at Mallory, probably worried that she had offended the insane detective with the slur word crazy.

  ‘No,’ said Riker, ‘not your brother. I mean that little kid he snatched.’

  Her mouth opened to mime the words, Oh, no. The shock was real. She shook her head. ‘I want a lawyer!’

  Riker slumped low in his chair. ‘Like I said, Miss Bledsoe, you’re only here for questioning. If we have to charge you with a crime, then you get a lawyer.’ While he packed up his envelope, preparing to leave, the suspect was rising from the table.

  Mallory’s hand flashed out to close around the woman’s wrist, and she said, ‘Sit down.’ Her words had no rising or falling notes, no human qualities. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

  ‘I think I know what my partner is trying to say here.’ Riker stood up. ‘She wants to spend some quality time with you.’

  The frightened woman turned her head to stare at an empty chair on her own side of the table, as if intently listening to someone who was not there. Miss Bledsoe smiled, taking some comfort from her invisible companion. And Lieutenant Coffey had to work on a relative scale of insanity for the occupants of the other room.

  Oh, please, not another nut who hears voices.

  Schizophrenics were next to useless in court.

  Riker sat down at the table. Slowly. No sudden movements. ‘So . . . Phoebe, who’s your friend?’ He casually gestured toward the empty space that commanded all of her attention.

  Crazy was a game of musical chairs, for now the woman stared at Riker as if he might be crazy.

  A stretch limousine was a common sight at the Driscol School, though not in the summer months of vacation. In the backseat of this one, an attorney cautioned his client. ‘Miss Bledsoe, if anyone shows you another badge, just hand the bastard my card.’ It was the second business card he had given her in the past half hour. Perhaps this young man sensed that Phoebe had already forgotten his name. In another few minutes, she would not recall any distinction to set him apart from the law firm’s other errand boys, all Yalies and Harvard graduates.

  The rear door was opened by a chauffeur. She stepped out onto the pavement in front of the school, and the car rolled away. Phoebe looked up at the large building that dated back to an era when stone filigree was in fashion – and gargoyles. Two such monsters sat above the lintel, set to spring on anyone entering by the massive front door. The less grandiose neighbors, all brownstones, were also unchanged since the 1800s. The Landmark Society was rabid in the matter of external renovations, and with only the flaw of fluorescent street lamps replacing gaslight, they had managed to stop time on this Upper West Side street.

  The school’s founder had been a man with a penchant for carving his family name in stone all around the town. This mad quest to keep the Driscols in the public eye had been defeated elsewhere by urban planners who had torn his monuments down. But here on the façade of this building, the name remained in letters etched so deep that centuries of wind and rain could not obliterate them.

  A narrow space between the Driscol School and the building next door was closed off by a tall wrought-iron gate. Phoebe fished through her purse for the key and unlocked it. On the other side of the iron bars, she made her way down an alley that opened onto a generous back garden. Chairs and tables were set in conversational groupings, and there were small benches here and there for the solitary teacher or student when classes were in session. Lush green ivy covered the rear wall, and flowers of many colors filled the wide wells of ancient trees.

  A flagstone path led to a tiny cottage that had been a carriage house in the horse-and-buggy days. An anomaly in a city of skyscrapers, it sat on an adjoining plot of land not entailed to the school. Before the age of soaring real-estate prices, this had been a way station for family members who had depleted their trust funds or fallen into some other disgrace.

  It was a hiding place.

  Phoebe occupied the cottage with the grudging consent of her mother, the last of the Driscol line. By terms of the family trust fund, Phoebe did not count because she carried her father’s name. She was merely a Bledsoe, declared so on her birth certificate.

  A small boy walked beside her on the path. He was fair of hair and spindle-legged. For the entire eleven years of his life, he had been called Ernie. In later years, Phoebe had renamed him Dead Ernest, a pale joke, a poor play on words; being dead earnest had gotten him killed. In this incarnation that walked beside her, the child was much thinner. His T-shirt and jeans were dirty, and there were dead leaves in his hair. He had lost one shoe and a sock – and his life.

  The little boy’s feet made no sound on the flagstones. She had never mastered footsteps for her old classmate – never tried – for no one knew better than she that he was not there. And so the policeman’s remark – ‘Who’s your friend?’ – had been somewhat unnerving.

  ‘I thought they’d never let us go home,’ said Dead Ernest. He never said anything to elicit a response from her. They held no two-way conversations. Only crazy people spoke to the dead.

  The boy who was not there had sprung from sessions with a child psychiatrist after the – incident. Dr Fyfe, a believer in confrontational therapy, had said to her then, ‘Imagine the anxiety that troubles you. Picture it as a person. Talk to it, yell if you like, but get it all out.’ One snag – Phoebe had never been a confrontational child. And so she had constructed a facsimile of angst – Dead Ernest – but never railed against him. She had only listened to him, hour upon hour. After a succession of silent sessions, the young listener’s therapy had been terminated.

  Dead Ernest lived on.

  Phoebe opened the cottage door to a large room with a high ceiling and a sleeping alcove. Apart from the kitchenette, every bit of wall space was lined with books. These volumes had been accumulated by generations of Driscols in hiding. They were all works of fiction – escape hatches.

  She removed her gray dress – Dead Ernest called it her cloth of invisibility – and draped it over the back of a chair. The armoire’s door was opened to a lineup of cotton frocks in bright colors and bold prints.

  ‘You’re running late,’ said the dead boy with one shoe.

  Quite right. She had only twenty minutes to get downtown to the café on Bleecker Street. Phoebe undid her bun, and brown tresses fell in waves to her shoulders. After donning her dress and slipping on sandals, she ran a comb through her hair. Next came the perfume and a bright swatch of lipstick. Done.

  She walked out the door, down the alley and into the street to flag down a taxi. Dead Ernest’s legs were shorter; he ran to keep up and followed her into the backseat of the yellow car. And now they were off on a wild ride with a cabbie from the school of Oh-was-that-a-red-light? The first blown traffic signal was followed by the driver’s diatribe on the thieving city of N
ew York. ‘They speed up the yellow lights. Maybe you noticed, lady? If you’re walking, you can start across an intersection on the green, watch it go from yellow to red, and die before you get to the other side. I love this town.’ After three court stories about the tickets he had beaten, the car stopped on the corner of Bleecker Street and MacDougal.

  ‘You made it,’ said Dead Ernest.

  With minutes to spare.

  Phoebe Bledsoe was always the first to arrive at the Mexican restaurant. Over the years, she had known this place as a coffeehouse and café under different ownership, décor and menus. Only the location was unchanged – and the time of her rendezvous. She sat down at a table far from the sunshine of the front window. The old gold cigarette lighter was pulled from her purse, and she rubbed it between her fingers. As if by magic, the door opened, and a young man with long, dark hair walked in. He had always been slender, and now he was thin but still handsome – and probably stoned. It was hard to tell. He moved with an animal grace so deep, so innate, that he could not stumble or falter or fall even by an accident of overdose. He took his customary seat on the other side of the room. It must be one o’clock. He was never late.

  ‘He’s two years older than you,’ said Dead Ernest, as if this still mattered outside the society of children. ‘You never had a chance.’

  True, Toby Wilder had been beyond her then, as he was now. Yet this was the high point of every day, having lunch with Toby at separate tables. She put away the gold cigarette lighter. One day, she should return it to him, though she was loathe to part with this memento – and he might remember that he had dropped it in the Ramble all those years ago.

  ‘He looks like a sleepwalker,’ said the dead boy.

  She stared at the real and solid young man. Were Toby Wilder’s eyes less blue, less bright? No, but they lacked focus. When he looked out the window, he was blind to the jumpy foot traffic of tourists jamming the sidewalk – blind even to the waitress who handed him a menu – deaf to the girl when she asked what he wanted for lunch. And there was one other difference between Toby the child and his grown-up self: He had found a way to be still. His feet did not tap, and there was no tabletop drumming of the fingertips.