The Chalk Girl

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