The Chalk Girl

for. A close inspection of the roots had satisfied her suspicion of a bad drugstore dye job for a man in his twenties. And judging by the original hair color, the coma patient was most likely Coco’s missing Uncle Red.

Books were neatly arranged on the shelves, and every scrap of paper knew its place, stacked in shallow boxes marked IN and OUT. It was the office of a very efficient man. The only clutter was on the back wall above his credenza, a cluster of plaques and framed awards that honored Dr Edward Slope. His name also appeared on a roster more elite than the presidency. Over the past hundred years, only seven men had preceded him in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Though, without the clue of his white lab coat, he more closely resembled a military man in his bearing, always at attention, even while seated; his expression was stony, smiles were rare, and his wit was gunpowder dry. As a groundbreaking pathologist, his fame was international. At home, he was best known as a man who ate cops for breakfast.

Dr Slope raised his eyes from the paperwork on his desk. ‘Hello, Riker.’ And now he acknowledged the second detective to enter his private domain. ‘Kathy.’ He so enjoyed needling her with the forbidden use of her first name.

‘Mallory,’ she said, correcting him, as she always did.

She preferred the chilly formality of her surname, and the doctor’s training in the use of it had begun upon her graduation from the police academy. But she had failed to distance him then – and now. As a charter member of the Louis Markowitz Floating Poker Game, he had first come to know her as Kathy the child, and she would be Kathy till one of them died.

‘That woman’s body just got here,’ he said. ‘What could you possibly want from me?’ A tone of irritation conveyed that their business with him had better be mighty important.

A little girl stepped out from behind Detective Riker. Her blue eyes were enormous, and her smile was nearly as wide as her face. They had never met, but the doctor felt an instant sense of recognition. Children of this ilk bore a familial resemblance, though they were so rare that never were two of them born into the same family.

‘I want you to do the kid first.’ Mallory lightly stroked the child’s hair. ‘Before you do the corpse.’ And she had other demands as well. ‘Keep it off the books. I want bloodwork to see if she needs medication.’

Riker, the peacemaker, stepped forward. ‘Coco remembers taking a pill every day, but it might’ve been a vitamin. Charles Butler says she’s—’

‘One of the Williams people.’ Though it cracked his face to do it, the medical examiner smiled, charmed to his toes. He left his chair to circle the desk and get down on bended knee. He wanted a closer look at the stellate pattern previously studied only on slides. ‘You have stars in your eyes,’ he said to the little girl. ‘That’s very special and beautiful.’ She hugged him around the neck to complete his diagnosis of Williams syndrome, a condition that came with a longing for human contact and sometimes other ailments of the heart. Kidneys and liver might also pose problems. He looked up at the detectives. ‘Her blood tests should be run in a hospital with pediatric—’

‘We can’t do that,’ said Mallory. ‘Social Services will take her away. How well do you think she’d do in the system?’

Dr Slope’s nod conceded the point. Children did not thrive in that bureaucracy, and this little girl would wither faster than most. Mallory passed him a handwritten note, and he read her next demand in clear block letters that might have been printed by a machine: CHECK FOR RAPE.

And the doctor died a little.

There was no God.

The little girl and the chief medical examiner, a man who had cracked open the bodies of many a murdered child, went off in search of privacy for a more delicate violation. When an exam room had been secured and Coco was perched on the edge of a table, she reached out to touch his face – to console him. ‘Rats cry, too,’ she said. ‘Most people don’t know that.’

FIVE

As school traditions go, this one is kind of cool. Every year on the first day of spring and very early in the morning, somebody sneaks into the garden and draws the chalk outline of a girl on the flagstones. No one steps on it, and it lasts almost the whole day before the janitor is told to hose it away. My friend Phoebe calls the chalk girl Poor Allison. She jumped off the school’s roof a few years ago. That was before my time. I ask why Poor Allison did it, and Phoebe says, ‘Well, why do any of them do it?’ And I say, ‘What?’

—Ernest Nadler

Coco held Riker’s hand as they walked down the quiet hallway of a SoHo apartment house. The child was swaddled in a paper sheet of the type used to drape cadavers. She had been allowed to keep her shoes, but the rest of her clothes were in a plastic bag that swung from the detective’s free hand.

‘A friend of mine owns this whole building,’ said Riker.

‘Is your friend the man or the lady?’ she asked when they stood before the door of the only residence on the fourth floor. ‘I hear two people in there.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Riker could hear nothing. If anything, this place seemed empty to his ears. Mallory was still at the morgue, but the cleaning lady might have come by after the mayor’s press conference. He wondered how the little girl would react if she was reunited with the bat-swinging, pervert-busting Mrs Ortega.

The door opened. Coco looked up – and up – at a well-made man in a three-piece suit, who stood six-four in his stocking feet. His tie was undone, and this was Charles Butler’s version of casual dress. Mallory had called ahead, and the tiny visitor was expected, yet he seemed surprised. And this was a trick of the eyes, heavy-lidded and closed by half with small blue irises floating in bulging egg-size whites. Charles went everywhere wrapped in the aspect of a startled frog with a large nose and a foolish smile. The way his face was made, this accident of birth, belied a giant brain and several Ph.D.s, one of them in psychology.

Coco rushed across the threshold to hug the tall man’s legs in hello, and he knelt down before her, saying, ‘I understand you’ve had a busy day.’

‘Full of rats.’ She smiled. ‘Rats go to heaven. Did you know that? And sometimes they come back.’ The child went off down the foyer to inspect the large front room and its collection of antiques and contemporary art.

Riker loved this apartment. The architecture dated back to an era of tall, arched windows featured in the black-and-white film noir of the forties. He sat down on an ornate sofa reminiscent of other period movies, Jane Austen chick flicks, which he only attended under duress. The centuries-old furnishings should not have worked well with the modern splatter-paint artwork on the opposite wall – but they did.

There was no sign of the cleaning lady, though the smell of furniture polish hung in the air. ‘Mrs Ortega told us you diagnosed the kid over the phone.’

‘No,’ said Charles. ‘I told her it might be Williams syndrome. That was based on the elfin features and the odd behavior – seeking physical contact from strangers.’ He turned to watch the child enter the adjoining room. ‘And then there’s her shoes.’

Shoes? Before Riker could say that aloud, he heard the opening bars of Melancholy Baby, note perfect. Coco had discovered the small piano of antebellum days. Charles had bought it for its provenance, he said, a documented tie to legendary riverboat gamblers of the 1800s. The man so loved poker, though he could not play worth a damn. He gave away every hand he held, good or bad, with a blush that would not allow him to bluff, and his tell-all face could not hide a thought.

The piano played on.

‘They’re musical people,’ said Charles. ‘Definitely Williams syndrome. It’s all there – the facial features, that magnetic smile. And have you ever seen eyes quite that bright? There’s a stellate pattern—’

‘The stars in her eyes,’ said Riker. ‘Dr Slope loved that.’

‘It might take a while to evaluate her. Given the emotional trauma, I’ll have to go slowly.’ Charles, a reformed headhunter, had once been in the business of testing people for placement in projects that required special gifts. And now, semi-retired at the age of forty-one, he only did consulting work for the police when a department shrink could not be trusted, which was most of the time. ‘But I can assure you right now that she’s bright, very high functioning.’

‘That’s great.’ The piano recital had ended, and Riker’s voice dropped low, close to a whisper. ‘We couldn’t