The Chalk Girl

‘We’ll give you a receipt.’ Mallory turned in a half circle, waving one hand to encompass the stunning display of notes that covered the walls. ‘Now what about this?’

‘It’s been there forever. The kid did that when he got out of Juvie – oh, maybe ten years ago.’

With a nod from Mallory, the man left the room. A small woman with a giant camera entered next, and Riker instructed her to record every square foot of the musical walls. And now both detectives turned to their expert on the subject of gifted people.

‘It’s jazz,’ said Charles. ‘You can see that much in the tall chords.’ He reached out to touch a single stack of vertical notes. ‘Chords taller than triads . . . Not helpful?’

No, apparently not. Riker only shrugged, and Mallory, of course, was annoyed.

‘That’s a G-thirteen, an extended chord,’ said Charles. ‘Extended intervals are another clue.’

Riker smiled. ‘I bet you can’t hum a few bars.’

‘Not really. There is an underlying melody, but this is a complex orchestration.’

‘Like the old big-band sound?’

‘Bigger – a full symphony orchestra.’ Charles pointed to different areas as he rattled off instruments. ‘Woodwinds, brass and strings. And there – percussion section. Here, a full complement of saxophones. Did you find any sheet music – more notations like these?’

‘Nothing like that,’ said Mallory. ‘No music at all. The guy doesn’t even have a stereo. He probably hocked it for drugs.’

‘And the only radio is busted,’ said Riker. ‘Looks like it hit a wall on a bad day.’

It was difficult for Charles to believe that the boy only had one song in him. ‘If I transcribe it to music paper, I can get an expert opinion on the derivative influence. Jazz is not my forte.’

‘Actually,’ said Riker, ‘we’re just wondering how nuts this kid might be.’

‘Oh . . . Well, I’d hardly call this evidence of insanity.’ Charles pointed to areas here and there where notes had been whited out and written over. Pentimento, the artist’s change of heart, went to the bones of the melody, and these changes were carefully drawn – done last. ‘The boy began with a rush in the physical act of the initial notation. You can see the hurried hand in the lean of flags and time signatures. Periods are almost dashes – as if he couldn’t wait to set it all down. For the most part, it has the seamless quality of a single continuous act. And yet . . . I’d say he’d been working on this for a very long time. Before he ever went to these walls, he had already integrated dozens of instruments and the change of octaves to make them blend. Most people don’t realize that you can’t use the same notes for different instruments, even when—’

He turned to his audience of two bored detectives. ‘Sorry.’ Back to the wall. ‘This boy could hear his orchestration as a full-blown work of art before he made the first stroke. Now the absence of music in this apartment – not even a radio to play a song – that’s very telling. It’s like, years ago, the boy let all his music out in one frantic act. And then . . . silence.’

‘He’s a junkie,’ said Mallory. ‘His habit probably started in Spofford. The cop who put him there said Toby was beaten by other inmates, and he wouldn’t defend himself. So he was kept away from the general population.’

‘That happened off and on,’ said Riker, ‘starting when he was thirteen.’

‘A child in solitary confinement? That’s obscene.’ But now everything was clear to Charles, here on these walls in a stream of music, and he saw the final note as a kind of death. The best of the boy had bled out.

Spacey was his state of mind, and Toby Wilder floated through his days in the lighter gravity of Mars. Silent days. Airless. Sounds of the city were filtered through the cotton wadding of his brain on painkillers, and a waitress from his homeworld had to ask him twice – ‘Same old thing?’

‘Yeah.’ Hungry or not, he always ordered a cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato, a perfect food group, so his mother had said.

He recalled the first time Mom had led him to this place. That was the day following his release. During his confinement, she had sold their uptown condo and moved down here, closer to her place of work. That was the reason given then. Later he had discovered the truth. Mom had sold the condo to buy him an annuity that would take care of him after she was gone. She had taught him to negotiate the maze of West Village streets that so confused the tourists. And for that one year they had together, he had sat across this table from her every day, only seventeen years old when they had talked about his future – as if all his possibilities had not died in juvenile detention, where he had lost two teeth, his virginity and self-respect.

But he had gained a tolerance for pain and worse things. At thirteen he had cried for his mother; at fourteen he had learned to cadge drugs from doctors for the beatings he took, and when enough of his bones were broken, he had won a private room in solitary. And each visitors’ day, he had taken his mother’s hand and told her it was not so bad.

Today, he felt only a mild druggy buzz, and his mother was dead. All he had left of her was this old habit of lunchtime, his only reason to carry a watch. Without the ritual cheeseburger, his day would have no bones.

Phoebe watched Toby Wilder finish his burger.

Dead Ernest stared at her hands as she unconsciously rubbed the gold cigarette lighter. ‘If you keep doing that,’ he said, ‘you’ll rub off the date. I can hardly read it anymore. It just looks like scratches.’

She put the golden talisman back in her purse.

When Toby left the cafe, Phoebe went home to do penance – to read comic books aloud for the dead boy, who could never take his hands out of his pockets.

Comics had been the passion of the real Ernie Nadler, the living child. They had been his religion and his philosophy. One day, after school let out, Ernie had taken her into his father’s den and opened a bookcase like a door to show her a walk-in safe. There were more comics in there than she had ever seen in her life, stacks of them, walls of them. This was his father’s collection. Some issues dated back to the 1930s, and these had belonged to Ernie’s grandfather.

That was the day Ernie had shared his best-loved memories: bedtime story hours of his kindergarten days, when his father had turned the pages of these collector items and read aloud to his only child.

‘Comic-book heroes are in the family genes,’ Ernie had said to her then.

And so, of course, she understood why he had to die.

TWENTY-SIX

Spider Girl is mutating. This morning in algebra, Willy Fallon shows me her new manicure, fingernails filed to sharp points, and she flexes them close to my eyes. I guess those claws are supposed to make her more like an animal – maybe a cat? Well, that would take social climbing for an insect like Willy. But I get the message, and when class is over, I run.

—Ernest Nadler

As Charles put his key in the lock, Coco hugged their patrolman escort in farewell and gave a hello hug to the officer who guarded the front door.

Once inside the apartment, Charles laid down the envelope that contained pictures of Toby Wilder’s walls. He opened a paper bag to show the child his recent purchase from a stationery store, a tablet with pages of blank lines where notes would go. ‘Music paper.’

An hour later, they sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Between them was a bowl of popcorn and the score for a jazz symphony. He had no difficulty working out the order of the police photographs; music followed logical progressions, and he quickly transcribed pictured notes to paper. The child was still laboring over the first photo that he had discarded. He could see that her interest in drawing had waned. Charles waved one hand to get her attention, and she waved back, slow to smile, tired now.

‘Coco, if you take a nap, you can stay up late. We’re going out tonight.’ He did not want to call on Mrs Ortega to mind the child this evening. The woman would take nothing from him in payment for anything connected to this little girl. ‘Do you like jazz?’