Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (12 page)

“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.”

“It’s OK. Calm down, Mr. Du Maurier,” I said, patting the little old man’s shoulder as he began to weep. “I just have one more question. This building where you saw the men. What’s the exact address again?”

CHAPTER
33

THE BUILDING ON LENOX
was old and crumbling and had a creepy, vaguely Gothic look to it.

Standing on the sidewalk in front of it with Doyle, I saw that instead of a front door, it had an aluminum riot door with a thick laminated steel padlock. On the hood of the rolling gate, there was a sticker with the name of the Realtor, Luminous Properties, along with a phone number. But even after two calls during which I let it ring a long time, no one picked up.

“What do you want to do now?” Doyle said, giving the steel gate a savage, frustrated kick.

“Let’s use your head to bash a hole through the gate,” I said as I looked up and down the block. “On second thought, let’s take a walk.”

We walked the two blocks back to Du Maurier’s building. My theory was that Naomi had left the man’s apartment and headed straight to the abandoned building. As we walked, I searched for security cameras that might have picked Naomi up. But there was nothing. It was another dead end.

We were heading back to the abandoned building when I suddenly stopped in front of a hardware store. I stared at its plate glass uncertainly. I had an idea. But it was pretty radical even for me.

“What is it?” Doyle said. “Is your Spidey sense tingling?”

Instead of answering him, I went in. Doyle grinned from ear to ear when I came back out of the store two minutes later with a pair of eighteen-inch bolt cutters.

“I think they must have skipped this lesson at the academy,” Doyle said as I knelt down at the front door of the abandoned building.

“Yeah, well,” I said as the teeth of the cutters finally bit through the thick padlock. “Sometimes, Doyle, you just have to improvise.”

It was surprisingly dark inside. I passed the beam of my flashlight over the ruined floors mounded with crumbled plaster and garbage and busted pipes. The heavy smell of burnt wood and rot was almost sweet.

We could hear birds flapping around on the upper floors as we came up a sketchy staircase. There was a loud, hollow rattling sound as Doyle kicked a bottle back down the stairs behind him.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly.

We walked across a dusty third-floor landing through a doorless threshold into a space that had probably been an apartment. A column of sunlight fell through a gaping hole in the structure’s roof.

“This must be the room that Du Maurier saw through the hole in the roof,” Doyle said as he circled the beam of light, staring up at the hole. “It lines up. I can see the windows of his building.”

I looked around at the walls, the floors.

“Anything strike you as strange, Doyle?” I said.

“Just about everything,” the rookie said, shrugging. “This place gives me the damn creeps.”

“The floors, Doyle. Look at them.”

Doyle looked down and then his eyes suddenly brightened.

“You’re right. Downstairs, it’s a landfill, but up here, the floors are clean. Broom-swept, looks like. Someone cleaned up this joint recently. What the hell do you think happened?”

I looked up at the column of light. As I watched, a tiny plane high up in the blue of the sky crossed the hole in the ceiling.

“I think Naomi interviewed Du Maurier and then came here and interrupted somebody cleaning up, and it cost her her life.”

CHAPTER
34

AS I WAS COMING
back out into the bright street from the shadows of the building, I got a call from Mary Catherine. It took me by surprise. She hardly ever called me at work.

“Mike, finally I caught you,” she said quickly.

There was something in her voice. She definitely sounded strange, subdued and yet sort of frantic, which was not like her at all. My adrenaline and blood pressure immediately spiked. What now? I was still as paranoid as hell about everyone’s safety since my brush with the Mexican cartels.

“What is it?” I said quickly. “Is it the kids? Is everyone OK?”

“No, no. They’re fine, Mike. Everyone’s just fine. It’s just…It’s too complicated to explain over the phone. Any chance you could swing by the apartment?”

Come home?
I thought, squinting. She sounded overly polite, like there was someone there with her. We had a visitor or something? I couldn’t for the life of me think who it could be. And why the mystery?

“Actually, I’m kind of in the middle of something, Mary Catherine. Can it wait?” I said.

“No. You need to come home now.”

“Why?” I said.

“You’ll understand when you get here, Mike. Thanks. Bye now,” Mary Catherine said, and hung up.

Five minutes later, I weaved through the crosstown traffic on 145th, racking my brain as to what Mary Catherine’s call could possibly be about. Was it one of the kids? They were in trouble? Had Sister Sheilah, the principal of Holy Name, finally decided to make a house call? I couldn’t figure it out, and not knowing was really driving me crazy.

Speaking of crazy, I was at 123rd and Amsterdam when I caught a nasty snarl of traffic caused by an almost-jackknifed eighteen-wheeler trying to back up in the middle of the avenue.

I drummed my fingers on the wheel, waiting patiently for an authority figure to arrive and resolve the bizarre traffic situation.

For about one point three seconds.

I threw the cruiser into park and got out and threaded my way forward through the maze of honking taxis and work vans. I really,
really
needed to get home to see what was going on.

“Sir!” I yelled as I got to the rumbling semi’s driver-side door. “What are you doing?”

“This move is called backin’ up to make a furniture delivery,” the young, thin, bearded trucker said with a southern accent.

“See, there’s your problem right there,” I said. “This is New York City, sir. Backing up eighteen-wheelers is strictly forbidden. You need to go around the block and try it again.”

“On one of these narrow side streets?” he said in dismay. “Hell, I ain’t got a shoehorn for this rig. Thanks for the advice, but you need to get out of my way and let me work, friend.”

“It’s not advice, friend,” I said, showing him my shield.

There was a cacophony of happy horn honks and applause from the backed-up traffic as the rumbling truck finally pulled away. A big Sikh taxi driver with a handlebar mustache and an orange turban leaned out of his yellow Honda Odyssey and gave me a fist bump as I walked back to my cop car.

I shook my head in wonder as I got rolling again.

I put a cartel head out of business, I get demoted. But I get a truck to move and suddenly I’m Derek Jeter?

Only in New York
, I thought.

CHAPTER
35

ALL THE KIDS WERE
in the living room when I finally burst through the apartment door. Besides Chrissy and Shawna down on their bellies by the coffee table playing Sorry!, everyone was looking shocked and subdued. Which didn’t make sense, especially the subdued part.

“Guys, what is it? What’s wrong?” I said.

“Mary Catherine won’t tell us,” Eddie said somberly.

Juliana took a break from nervously biting a thumbnail to point at the kitchen.

“They’re waiting in there, Dad,” she said.

They?
I thought, rushing down the hall toward the kitchen.

Inside, I found two men sitting at the island as Mary Catherine poured them coffee. One was a handsome blond, blue-eyed guy in his late twenties who kind of looked like a taller, thinner version of the actor Ryan Gosling. The other one, older, balding, middle-aged, and round, wearing silver-framed eyeglasses, reminded me of Karl Rove or maybe Benjamin Franklin.

At first when I saw their dark business suits, I pegged them as cops, feds maybe, and almost passed out because what were the feds doing in my kitchen? But then I noticed how incredibly well tailored their suits were and I freaked out even more because I couldn’t think who the hell they were.

“I’m Bennett. Mike Bennett,” I finally spat out. “What is this? Who are you people? What’s going on here?”

The two guys looked at each other; the younger blond guy blushed a little and looked down, seemingly embarrassed. Besides the actor resemblance, there was something about the guy that seemed vaguely familiar. Then the older gentleman cleared his throat as he stood and offered his hand.

“Mr. Bennett, how do you do? My name is Peter Pendleton,” he said with a cultured southern accent as I halfheartedly shook his hand.

“Sorry for the intrusion,” Pendleton said, smiling affably. He laid a pudgy manicured hand on the blond guy’s shoulder. “Allow me to introduce my client, Robert Bieth.”

“Your client?” I said, dazed.

“Yes, Mr. Bennett. I’m Mr. Bieth’s lawyer,” the southern gentleman said, maintaining his friendly grin. “I know this must be a bit of a surprise, but we came here today to talk to you about your daughter. About Chrissy.”

“What!” I said, on the verge of passing out. “Chrissy? Why? Who are you?”

The lawyer opened his mouth. But before he could get out another word, the young blond guy suddenly stood up. There was emotion in his face now, I noticed. Instead of embarrassment, it seemed like a kind of sadness.

“Chrissy’s my daughter, Mr. Bennett,” he said. “I’m her father. Her real father. I came here to see my daughter.”

CHAPTER
36

HAVING BEEN A COP
in some very crazy situations before, I’m not usually the type to get that fazed by surprises. But, boy, was this one mother of an exception. I suddenly felt dizzy, like all the blood in my body was draining out of my head.

“Chrissy’s father?” I said as I placed both of my hands on the cool granite of the kitchen island to keep myself upright. I stared down at the pattern in the rock, which suddenly seemed like it was moving.

“Yes, I’m her father,” Bieth said, his pale-blue eyes wet now. “You think
you’re
shocked? I just found out myself.”

“That’s enough, Robert,” the lawyer, Pendleton, said quickly. “It’s true, Mr. Bennett. Mr. Bieth just found out that he is Chrissy’s birth father, and he has every right to see her. You can understand that, right? I believe we saw her when we came in. Could you bring her in here, please?”

I finally looked up at the pushy lawyer and his client. Then I gathered myself together and held up a hand.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait one second. You come in here with all these claims and suddenly you want to see my daughter? I don’t think so. I don’t know you folks from a hole in the wall. That’s not going to happen. And who the hell do you people think you are, showing up on my doorstep without even the courtesy of a phone call?

“You know what? Never mind. I’m going to ask you to leave. The both of you. Now.”

The lawyer sighed. Bieth stood there red-faced with his mouth open, looking stunned now and quite confused. Like being told off and thrown out was a brand-new life experience for him.

“Let’s go, Robert,” the lawyer mumbled as he lifted the posh leather briefcase between his feet.

“He’s right, Robert. Listen to your lawyer. He seems really smart,” I said, crossing the kitchen and throwing open the apartment’s back door.

“My apologies for the intrusion,” the slick lawyer drawled as he ushered his client out the door.

Bullshit
, I thought, staring at the back of the probably thousand-dollar-an-hour mouthpiece’s curly gray head. I looked at his fancy briefcase, wondering what was in it. Why did I have the funny feeling that Pendleton had quite the knack for intrusion, for showing up and barging in on people with his honey drawl and his pricy briefcase and Savile Row suit to bowl them over and get them signing on the dotted line before they knew what was going on?

Out on the back landing, Pendleton rang for the freight elevator, then turned and smiled amiably again. Bieth, behind him, already had a phone out, his angry red face aimed down at the screen. He seemed overly sensitive even for today’s often childish young adults. In fact, he looked like an upset overgrown baby with an electronic pacifier.