Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

“Don’t tell me,” Doyle said. “It’s time we have a talk with Mr. The Third.”

CHAPTER 32

AS DOYLE AND I went to Du Maurier’s address, I sent Brooklyn and Noah and Lopez on a scavenger hunt to see if they could find the sometimes sidewalk artist at one of his usual hangouts on the street.

Doyle and I had just parked in front of Du Maurier’s building on Lenox when my phone rang. It was Brooklyn Kale.

“We got him,” she said.

“Where?”

“Rucker Park.”

“Stay there. We’re on our way.”

We headed north. She didn’t have to tell me the address. Rucker Park, at 155th and Frederick Douglass, is probably the most famous public basketball court in the city. Started in the ’50s to give city kids something to do in the summer, the league and tournaments associated with the park had been a stepping-stone for such legends as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Dr J.

There was quite a crowd when we pulled up, had to be a few hundred people in the aluminum stands. There was also an MC and even boom cameras and lights as two brightly uniformed three-on-three teams went at it. As I pulled behind Brooklyn’s double-parked cruiser, the crowd exploded in laughter and Bronx cheers as some lumbering six-five fifteen-year-old blew a slam dunk.

I sat in the back of the cruiser and shook Du Maurier’s hand. Du Maurier was a slim, neat, diminutive light-skinned black man in a dusty, threadbare tuxedo. His strange getup struck me as a cross between a magician and Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. He nervously clutched a folding easel to his chest with both hands like it was an instrument he was about to play.

“You wanted to talk to me about something?” the seventy-something man said, rocking back and forth as he stared out at the crowd. He didn’t give me any eye contact. I wondered if he was maybe autistic.

“If you could be quick about it, please, Officer. That’s MTV filming in there. I don’t see these kinds of crowds that often.”

“That can wait, Mr. Du Maurier. I need your attention. I also need you to be perfectly honest with me. Did an officer speak to you yesterday? A female officer?”

“Yes, she did. A young woman with reddish-blond hair,” the street artist said, rocking even harder now as he began to bite a thumbnail.

“Detective Chist, no, Chast was her name,” he said, flicking a quick look in my direction. “I told her about what I saw a few nights ago, those men in the abandoned building by the subway.”

“Where did she speak to you?”

“At my apartment. Twenty-three forty-one Lenox Avenue, five J.”

“There’s a problem, Mr. Du Maurier. Officer Chast was found dead this morning. She was murdered.”

The old man stopped rocking momentarily as his eyes went huge.

“Murdered?” he said. “What? How? By who?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” I said. “Now, specifically tell me what you talked about.”

Du Maurier grabbed at his hair as he stared intensely at the cruiser’s floor mat.

“Just how I saw the men sitting around the grill, about the tied-up girl. I gave her the license plate number I took down.”

“Do you still have the license plate number?”

He stared at me almost fearfully.

“No. I gave her the paper I had written it on. Holy moly.”

He was

really tugging at his hair now. I wondered if he was going to rip some out.

“You don’t think I had anything to do with her death, do you? Please, I wouldn’t hurt anyone. Ask anyone. I can’t believe I’m caught up in this. I was just trying to be a good citizen, a good citizen.”