The Chalk Girl

me. The kid’s own lawyer pled him out on the wino murder.’

The detectives exchanged glances. The wino murder? What wino?

‘I could’ve taken the kid to trial,’ said Carlyle, ‘and I would’ve won a conviction – no problem.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Riker, playing it casual, as if the wino’s murder was not news to him. ‘You’ve never won a trial.’

‘Your cases never get that far,’ said Mallory. ‘You plead everybody out. That’s your specialty, right?’

The lawyer assumed a prosecutorial smile, the one they all used for talking down to stupid cops. ‘In a plea bargain, the criminals get less jail time, but the taxpayers save the cost of a trial. Everybody’s happy.’

‘Easier to keep the details quiet, huh?’ Riker leaned forward.

The smaller man leaned back.

‘Right,’ said Mallory. ‘That’s why you sent Toby to Family Court. Sealed records. So . . . was it your idea to substitute victims – trading the Nadler kid for a dead wino? How bad did you need to bury a felony assault on a little boy?’

The little man had found his spine, and he straightened up in his chair. ‘You’re right about one thing, Detective – those records are sealed. You know I can’t discuss the case with you. I can tell you it was a clean plea bargain. Toby Wilder got off light.’

‘Because he confessed to killing a wino instead of torturing a little kid?’

‘Pleading out to a lesser charge is done all the time,’ said Carlyle, as if the murder of a drunken bum might be on the scale of petty crime. ‘I always get good results.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Riker laid a copy of a child’s death certificate on the desk. ‘You conspired to bury a murder. That’s a felony.’

Carlyle looked down at this solid piece of evidence, and his back curved into a slump.

Oh . . . crushed again?

Mallory opened her notebook and pretended to consult the pages. ‘Fifteen years ago – the first time you ran for district attorney – you outspent your opponent two dollars to one . . . and you still lost.’ She looked up to catch the man’s wince. ‘How did somebody like you raise that kind of money?’

Riker unfolded a sheet of financials, the fruit of Mallory’s love for money motives. ‘You got a lot of street- name cash donations to your election fund.’

‘Most people use credit cards or checks,’ said Mallory, liking the effect of Carlyle’s head swiveling back and forth from cop to cop. She left her chair, walked around to the back of the lawyer’s desk and bent down close to his ear. ‘That kind of cash spike on one deposit slip sends up red flags.’

Riker leaned into the little man’s personal space. ‘Even cash leaves tracks, pal. Suppose we backtrack donation names to payroll lists – and the people who own those companies? Now suppose just one of them got a sweet deal on a plea bargain.’ He smiled. It was unnecessary to finish this line of thought for the lawyer.

Mallory placed one hand on Carlyle’s shoulder – just to make him jump. ‘Who told you to nail Toby Wilder for the wino’s murder?’

The ADA was stalled, weighing his options, but neither detective had expected an answer to that one. The statute of limitations would not save him from a charge of conspiracy in a homicide case. Murder never went away.

And now, on cue, Riker made an easier demand. ‘Get us a warrant to search Toby Wilder’s apartment.’

Carlyle bowed his head. ‘I need probable cause for that.’

‘Find one,’ said Riker. ‘If a judge gives you any grief, call the acting police commissioner. You and him go way back, right? Rolland Mann was the detective on the old murder case – and I don’t mean the wino.’

Mallory slapped her hand down on the death certificate. ‘He means this little boy!’ She swiveled the lawyer’s chair from side to side. She was not done playing with him. ‘The warrant should also give us access to common areas in his building – and the basement, too. We’re looking for tools from a murder kit. You railroaded Toby fifteen years ago – so it shouldn’t be hard to screw him over for a few more killings in the Ramble.’

The building superintendent had only glanced at the warrant. He was sullen and slow to find the right key among the many attached to his belt loop. Finally the door was opened, and the detectives entered Toby Wilder’s dark front room.

Riker so loved owning the soul of an assistant DA; it guaranteed that warrants would be plentiful from now on, and the lack of probable cause would never present a problem.

He opened the curtains to windowpanes that had not been cleaned in a decade. The diffused sunlight of an air shaft illuminated a couch and chair with threadbare, grimy arms and burn holes in the upholstery. The screen of an early-model television was smashed. Maybe their boy had a temper. Yes, he did. There was an empty wine bottle visible on the other side of the set’s broken glass.

This place had the smell of a loser, a whiff of morning-after vomit in the air.

In Mallory’s book of scores and records, Riker ranked high as an extreme slob, and so he looked around Toby Wilder’s apartment with a competitor’s eye. Discarded clothes strewn on the floor – check; take-out cartons with days-old, crusted food – check. Dead flies on the windowsill – just like home. But now, upon closer inspection, he realized that he and the boy had something else in common: too many empty beer cans and bottles to pass for a social drinker.

And there was another nasty habit, one they did not share, though the detective could not readily say what Toby was sniffing, popping or smoking. Drug use was evidenced only in the turned-out pockets of pants and jeans, and by recent swipes in the dust on the floor in front of the couch, signs of the morning hunt for dropped grains of cocaine or stray pills to take away the raw ugliness of a brand-new sunny day. Upon awakening, Riker might look around for a bottle that was not quite empty. But this boy had scraped the floor for something, anything, to jump-start his heart. And in the far corner, Mallory was bending down to retrieve two empty pharmacy bottles.

‘These aren’t cheap on the street.’ She handed them to Riker, and he read the labels, variations on the theme of oxycodone – more addictive than heroin, and neither one had been prescribed for Toby Wilder.

‘He favors painkillers,’ said Rolland Mann from the open doorway, and the detectives turned on him in unison. ‘Vicodin, Oxycontin. He also needs sleeping pills. That’s why we got you a warrant for suspicion of drug possession.’

‘You knew the kid was an addict,’ said Riker. ‘So, all this time, you kept tabs on him.’

‘I admit to an ongoing interest in the boy.’ Rolland Mann walked into the room, turned his back on them and addressed the faded wallpaper. ‘This place is rent-controlled. Toby inherited the lease from his mother. She sold her condo and moved in here when her kid was sent to Spofford.’

Spofford. Before the children’s jail was closed down, that was the name New York parents invoked when they told their wayward offspring that they were going straight to hell. Toby’s drug habit was hardly surprising – given where he had been caged.

The detectives walked down the short hallway, passing the kitchen and its stink. Mallory opened a door to a room of chintz curtains and an unmade bed. And this had to be the dead mother’s room. A pair of lavender slippers were neatly paired on a scatter rug, still waiting for her to step into them. And a book lay on the quilt, pages down, perhaps open to the last passage read by the lady before she died. A thick layer of dust lay on every surface, undisturbed for years. Preserved as a shrine? Yeah.

The junkie had loved his mother.

Riker opened the next door. Jesus Christ. He stepped inside for a closer look. Not wallpaper. ‘Hey, you gotta see this!’

Rolland Mann and Mallory followed him inside the second bedroom, bare as a monk’s cell, with only a small chest of drawers and a narrow bed. The floor was swept clean. Toby had carved out a niche of order surrounded by the chaos of four walls covered with music: lines of scales, time signatures and thousands of notes filled in all the space from ceiling to floor. Riker’s instrument was guitar, and he could read sheet music, but here he was out of his depth. ‘These are some seriously scary chords.’

Mallory pulled the narrow bed away from one wall, and the music was there, too. And behind the dresser – more music.