The Chalk Girl (54 page)

Only the doctor would not back down. And that had been predictable. Edward Slope was known to be reckless and daring with nickels and dimes.

The bet was raised again as Riker pushed all his chips to the center of the table. ‘I can guess why Mallory’s pissed off at you, Doc. You had to jerk her around on those autopsies.’ The detective stared at his cards, head shaking. ‘Naw, that’s not it. Sniper shots across dead bodies – that’s just business as usual with you two. Maybe I missed something?’ He smiled at the doctor. ‘What did you
do
to her?’

Edward Slope was all in to the last nickel chip when the cards were called. He laid down a pair of tens – and lost everything. Riker turned up his hole card to show the man three of a kind. And now the detective finally understood what Lou had meant when the old man once said that he had to cheat to lose to these guys.

The doctor’s cache was gone, and he could buy no more chips. This was the most sacred rule of the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game, and no man would break it. So now Dr Slope must sit out the rest of an evening that had just begun.

‘Doc?’ Riker gathered up the deck and shuffled it. ‘How about a side bet? Fast game of high card.’ He tapped the admission form for Toby Wilder. ‘This against everything I got.’

Slope, who saw himself as a reincarnated riverboat gambler – yeah,
right
– would not be able to resist a play like that one. He looked to his friends, and there were nods all around the table. The other players had no problem with this loophole in the old rule.

Riker cut the deck and palmed a queen so that he could play a lowly three of hearts, though he had been told he could draw a worse card and still win. When Slope cut the deck, the detective could see, by the tell of flickered eyes, that the doctor’s card was way higher.

‘You win,’ said Edward Slope to the detective who had surely lost. The doctor covered his unshown card with the rest of the deck and shuffled twice. After signing the junkie’s admission form, he crumpled up the voucher. ‘No charge to the city. I have rules. The boy’s on scholarship.’

Charles Butler leaned toward his friend. ‘Edward, I could write a check to cover the—’

‘No, you
couldn’t
.’ The doctor, a gentleman who paid his own debts – whether he owed them or not – handed the admission form to Riker.

The detective had what he came for, and now he took his leave.

Well played
.

Charles Butler could only speculate on Edward’s reason for throwing the game of high card. The good doctor fancied that he was born with a poker face that gave away no tells, but Charles could tell. What had his friend done to Mallory to account for such a guilty present? He might wager that even Riker would have no idea.

Ah, but just now, Charles was feeling his own remorse in matters of fireflies and shoelaces. On the following evening, he would go to Mallory’s apartment with flowers in hand, his tokens of regret, and she would not be at home to him. But one night, the tenth or a
twelfth night, she would open the door, and they would begin again as strangers, for he would not presume to know her.

He stood by the window, watching Riker slouch down the Brooklyn sidewalk, no doubt heading for a subway station. In this modern world, what the detective had done tonight might be called quaint and courtly. The man had avenged fair lady and won her a prize, and he had done this in a way that Mallory never could have managed. For one thing, the event was bloodless. And
shame
was not a word in her lexicon, nor a weapon in her arsenal.

Riker came to the end of the rabbi’s tree-lined block and turned a corner. He bowed down to the open window of his partner’s personal car. ‘It worked – play for play.’ Climbing into the passenger seat, he handed over his winnings, the admission form for Toby Wilder’s drug program. ‘So
now
will you tell me? Why did Dr Slope have to win – so he could lose?’

Mallory lowered the silver convertible’s ragtop and turned up the radio, killing the idea of more conversation as they rolled through the neighborhood of lighted windows and green lawns.

He had run a game on the doctor with absolute faith in Mallory’s script, but he had no clue why it had to end with Edward Slope’s own beau geste. The detective was forced to reach into his store of old Gary Cooper movie titles to find those foreign words for the handsome gesture that would not abide any thanks. Though the idea of blackmail worked much better. Did Mallory have something on the doctor? No. It was too hard to imagine the chief medical examiner making a single misstep. Maybe the man
did
owe her a favor.

There was no point in asking; she would never say. He only turned his head in her direction, and the volume of the radio was jacked up higher.

Blasting tunes of rock ’n’ roll, they sailed across the Brooklyn
Bridge decked out in strings of light running all the way to Manhattan. A beautiful night. Wasted on him. His thoughts were still on the game of high card. Blackmail or payback – why not call in her own damn chips? Had she sent in a proxy to save the doctor’s face? No. Their whole game, Slope’s and Mallory’s, was one protracted round of dodging knives and bullets; any show of civility would cost her points. So what was tonight all about? Only one thing was certain: The junkie’s welfare was incidental. Mallory cared nothing about Toby Wilder now that her case was wrapped. She placed all his kind just below the level of a bug’s kneecaps.

He would never figure this one out. It would cost him a night’s sleep, and it would drive him crazy for a
long
time. Of course, that was no concern to Mallory. She was still angry with him for not sharing his dirty leverage on the chief of D’s. That crime of holding out on her would never be forgiven.

But there
would
be payback.

Riker grinned, and then he laughed. The woman behind the wheel was good at poker – better than him – but driving him nuts, that was Mallory’s get-even game tonight.

After showing her badge at the gate, Mallory drove into the parking lot of a large Victorian country house that Edward Slope had converted into a rehab clinic. This place allowed the doctor to derail young addicts on their journey to an overdose and his dissection table. Rarely did any patients leave until their drug programs were finished. The surrounding pine trees hid a formidable security fence.

Her passenger, Toby Wilder, was skin-crawling edgy and more awake than he wanted to be – thanks to a hospital stomach pump. Given the chance, he would dig up his dead parents and sell the corpses for a couple of pills to end his withdrawal hell.

Well,
tough
.

Mallory stepped out of her car and opened the trunk to remove a suitcase she had packed for him. ‘I put the rest of your stuff in storage. The apartment’s gone.’ He might have forgotten that part. The junkie had been barely conscious when she had him sign his name to surrender the lease. ‘You’ve got no place to go back to.’

Toby climbed out of the passenger seat, nodding his understanding that she had cut his legs out from under him. He took the bag from her hand and carried it as he followed her up the steps – entirely too compliant. She knew he planned to run as soon as her car rolled out the gate, but that escape fantasy would end the first time he was dragged back from the electrified fence, a crude form of shock therapy.

Together, they crossed the verandah to enter the clinic. Its large reception room would pass for an upscale hotel lobby if not for the nurse behind the front desk. Mallory handed this man an admission form and filled out paperwork to complete the drug addict’s transfer from a city hospital.

Two orderlies appeared on either side of Toby Wilder. Before the new patient was led away, Mallory placed a small parcel into his hands. ‘You’ll need this.’

When she was outside in the parking lot once more, she sat behind the wheel of her car, going nowhere, only staring at the windshield, impervious to a starry night. She had a lot riding on the junkie’s survival. Dr Slope’s program had high success rates, but it was not a sure thing. What of Toby’s chances? He was so wasted in his body and his mind. She saw only desolation for him in the days ahead.

But tonight there would be music.

Toby carried Detective Mallory’s gift into his room at the rehab clinic, and he laid himself down on the bed. After adjusting the earphones of the CD player, he powered it up to get at the music
inside. The orchestration of notes from the walls back home came alive in the opening bars to the overture, welling up in a giant wave of sound, and then subsiding and sliding into his jazz symphony. In the background, a piano played out the story, and up-front drums beat with the rhythm of a banging heart.

Early in this musical score – in the springtime of his father’s life – when life was still good for Jess Wilder, when the man was sane and young and beautiful, the saxophone was a charismatic dazzle of rippling melody and riffs, attracting a crowd of coronets and strings, trombones and other voices.

The boy on the bed bobbed his head, keeping time, keeping up with the daddy sax.

More than a year had passed. Another summer was drawing to a close, and Coco was chasing lightning bugs in the far-off state of Illinois.

Following an anonymous tip, an assistant district attorney with a yellow bowtie was found to have a pattern of selling generous plea bargains to fund his futile election-year races. Cedrick Carlyle had recently left his office in handcuffs, and a messy loose end was tied up.

Mallory was a tidy detective.

Willy Fallon had lost an eye during a fight in the prison laundry, almost poetic in a biblical way – that forfeit eyeball in balance with the mutilation of a little boy.

In Mallory’s own twisted take on scripture, vengeance was hers, and she was not quite done. The young detective sat in the drawing room of the Upper West Side mansion, holding pen to paper, and
she signed as a witness to the transaction between Grace Driscol-Bledsoe and Toby Wilder’s attorney, a blind man who had seen the light and learned to do as he was told.

By the terms of a probate agreement, restitution had come due following a sanity hearing held this afternoon. As promised, Mallory had not attended. She had done nothing to block the early release of Phoebe Bledsoe, a somewhat misguided murderess, now pronounced cured.

Yeah,
right
.

‘What a waste of money,’ said the former doyenne of New York charities. ‘That boy will die of a drug overdose before he turns thirty.’

‘Maybe,’ said Mallory, who had no faith in happy endings, but she believed in getting even. Humphrey’s millions now belonged to Toby Wilder, and the deal was done.

Almost done.

The lawyer left. The detective stayed.

Now that her daughter had been ransomed, Grace Driscol-Bledsoe waited for Mallory to leave – and she
waited
. And then, as a pointed invitation to
get out
, she said, ‘Our business is concluded.’

‘Not quite.’ The detective held in her hands a small book encased in a plastic bag and a tin box the size of a brick. She seemed to be weighing them, one against the other.

‘Hard feelings, my dear?’ Oh, it must be irksome to stand this close to a killer – one that the law could not touch. But must the detective stand so close? Grace stared at the box and the book. The younger woman handled them carefully – like treasures – or bombs. ‘You should be gone before my daughter—’

‘When Phoebe gets out, she’ll come straight to you.’

Grace tilted her head to one side. What now? Small talk was out of character for this unwanted guest. ‘You know damn well my
supervision was a condition of her release.’ And Phoebe had nowhere else to go. Her little cottage had been rented out from under her during the yearlong absence in an asylum for the rich and criminally crazy. The rental income had been sorely needed in the wake of Mallory laying waste to a fortune.

The detective looked around the drawing room. ‘Where’s Hoffman? Oh, right, you can’t afford a full-time nurse anymore.’

‘No . . . I can’t.’ Life had been a bit harsh since the tax men had come to the door, citing cash expenditures beyond her means, seeking their share of that unreported income, and then confiscating the monthly rents on the cottage that was once her daughter’s home.

‘But you don’t need hired help . . . now that Phoebe’s going to live here.’

‘And I have you to thank for that.’ This was said with acrimony. There was
much
to thank Mallory for, but now there were no funds to hire some unspeakable act that would properly show her gratitude. Grace also lacked the influence to have the detective fired. The only remaining power card had been played as the single threat of scandal on a grand scale: If she stood trial for any crime, a great many politicians would keep her company in prison.

Grace’s eyes were drawn back to the detective’s belongings. A tiny clasp was now visible on the book. Could this be another one of Ernest Nadler’s diaries? And what was in the tin box?

‘What a comfort,’ said Mallory, ‘a loving child to look after you in your golden years.’