The Chalk Girl

The front room was bare of any furnishings. ‘I should’ve expected this,’ said the victim’s brother. ‘My parents bought the place fully furnished, but Aggy gives everything away. A lawyer managed her trust-fund allotments so she couldn’t give away all her money, too.’

The space was generous in size, but even so, the word squalor came to mind with the smells of body odor and windows never opened. A stink of garbage led them to the kitchen, where a peanut butter jar stood open and roaches scaled its glass sides. A loaf of bread was moving, breathing with the activity of feasting bugs inside the wrapper. Barry Sutton recoiled and fled to the bedroom, and there a bare mattress lay on the floor. The open closet contained four simple dresses, all exactly like the one in the pathetic pile in the living room. This was a basic Mother Teresa wardrobe – not even a spare pair of shoes.

‘Okay, she’s nuts,’ said Riker. ‘We got that. How long has this been going on?’

‘A couple of years. I call it the brain tumor from heaven. Before the tumor, my sister was just mean. Then she went crazy.’ He turned to Mallory. ‘Crazy is good.’

Her slight nod was an almost imperceptible agreement. ‘What did Aggy do to you?’

‘Aggy the Biter?’ Barry Sutton rolled up one sleeve to show them that he was not concealing any needle marks, only an ugly scar. The wound was healed, but the missing chunk of flesh made an indent in his arm. ‘She did that when I was ten and she was seventeen. That was the year my parents sent her to Europe. The bribe to stay there was plastic surgery and support money. Aggy was butt-ugly and flat-chested when she left. When she came back, she had breasts and a chin – but she’d lost her mind. My parents got a competency hearing so they could make all her medical decisions.’

‘And they decided to keep the brain tumor,’ said Riker.

‘You think that’s cold? I call it self-defense.’ Aggy’s brother rolled down his sleeve and then handed over the keys. ‘Lock up when you leave, okay? Mail me the keys. I don’t want to talk about my sister anymore.’

TWENTY-TWO

The gym teacher lines us up between basketball hoops, wall-to-wall boys and girls in school ties and blazers. It’s class picture day. Everyone takes a turn in the chair in front of a background screen that looks like a curdled sky.

It’s my turn. The man behind the camera is stalled for a minute. He’s staring at my neck. My hair is slicked back with a comb I wet in the drinking fountain, and now half a bite mark shows above my collar. The photographer asks if he can see the whole thing. So I undo my tie and shirt buttons. He’s impressed. He whistles. Now he can see some of my bruises, too, the ones that only show in gym class. And the gym teacher says to him, ‘You can airbrush the picture, right?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ says the photographer, ‘and for a little extra, I can drop by once a week and airbrush the actual kid. Then it won’t matter who’s beating the crap out of him, right?’

So the gym teacher walks away real fast, and I know he’s going to rat this guy out to the headmaster. But the photographer isn’t worried. He winks and says, ‘Well, kid, as Christ on the cross once said of the Romans – fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.’

I laugh. He snaps the picture.

—Ernest Nadler

By the terms of an agreement forged in the mayor’s office, lawyers would be in attendance for the police interview at the Driscol-Bledsoe residence on the Upper West Side. When Hoffman, the drab employee, opened the door to the detectives, she was still carrying her small Gladstone bag on a shoulder strap. The woman ignored Riker when he asked, ‘What’s in the bag? Is your boss shooting up or snorting it?’

Hoffman left them alone in an entry hall larger than the average New Yorker’s apartment. The floor was a circular chessboard of black-and-white marble tiles, and a polished table at its center was decked out with a profusion of flowers. They strolled past the grand staircase, through an archway and into a space of ballroom proportions and a cathedral ceiling that spoke to Mallory, saying, Money lives here.

These environs were familiar in a way. This was a grander version of Charles Butler’s taste – modern art on the walls and antiques on the floor. An education at Barnard allowed her to recognize the style of Frank Stella in a gigantic wall sculpture of curving shapes and primary colors. She was accustomed to artwork on this scale, having viewed it by slides projected on a classroom wall. Mallory could also name Motherwell as the artist of a large work on canvas. And the furniture was an elegant mix of pieces named for the reigns of long-dead kings and queens.

All of this she saw with a cost accountant’s eye.

This was the showroom, the gathering place for cocktail parties, for independent conversations upon a loveseat here and couches over there, and circles of armchairs on the far side. Though visitors clearly came here not to be entertained, but to be cowed by extreme opulence, to stand in awe beneath the largest crystal chandelier that money could buy.

Mallory slowly revolved, finally turning her gaze on Grace Driscol-Bledsoe. The lady of the house was enthroned in a high-back chair by the fireplace – the only chair in that part of the room. She was surrounded by an honor guard of three lawyers, who stood tense and watchful. Their employer tapped one foot, annoyed to be kept waiting.

Well, damn.

As the detectives crossed the wide floor, Mallory deflated the props of the room with a dismissive wave of the hand, saying, ‘All of this belongs to the Driscol Institute, right? The antiques, the art. You don’t even own the house.’

Grace Driscol-Bledsoe barely suppressed a smile of touche and inclined her head to say that this was so.

Approaching the woman, Mallory looked down to see indents on an area rug, impressions left there by chairs recently removed, forcing the detectives to stand in attendance, less like a police interview, more like an audience with royalty. The furniture was telling them to state their business, make it quick and get out.

Mallory held up a bulky envelope. ‘I’ve had a look at your personal finances.’

One of the lawyers stepped forward from the chorus. ‘You’re out of line, Detective.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Riker. ‘Her family trust fund is managed by the Driscol Institute. A charity’s books are public record. Why do we need to explain that to a lawyer?’

‘After taxes,’ said Mallory, ‘you’re barely middle class.’ And now she engaged the socialite in a contest of who would blink first. ‘But then you’ve got the kickback potential that comes with control of a multibillion-dollar charity.’

‘Yeah,’ said Riker. ‘So we’re curious about—’

The attorneys were all talking at once, jockeying for position as the most indignant, the most outraged, until Riker waved his arms and yelled, ‘Hold it! I got an easier question. Okay, guys?’ He turned to the woman in the throne chair. ‘You got any photos of Humphrey? We need a shot of him as a kid.’

‘A picture taken at least fifteen years ago,’ said Mallory.

Grace Driscol-Bledsoe made her first error. Or was it an insult? Perhaps she thought so little of the police that she could not be bothered to feign surprise – to ask why they would need such an old picture of a recent crime victim. ‘Sorry.’ She only smiled at this lost leader of a long-ago murder. ‘I threw away his photographs, but I can show you a portrait of Humphrey and his father.’ She led the detectives and lawyers down a hallway to open the door to a small bathroom off the kitchen. A large, gilt-framed oil painting hung on the narrow wall above the toilet. Her husband, the late John Bledsoe, was posed with one hand on his son’s shoulder, conveying a sense of possession. ‘Humphrey was ten years old when that was painted.’

Mallory pulled out her camera phone to snap a picture.

‘Oh, my dear. I can do better than that.’ The woman disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, and then