"There was a name," said the heavy man with the knee brace.
Everybody turned. The man looked like he wished he had not spoken, but he had, and now he seemed to decide that he might as well finish. He was in his late sixties, with a red face and a Cleveland Browns cap, and he leaned on his racket like a cane.
"Rolf, come on," he said. "There was a name. I saw it. I said, Rolf, the kid's got it, let's take two and three, and you said the kid always has it and you were sick of it. You said that." He turned to Ferrol. "I'm Laszlo Ruhland. I'm a retired mail carrier. I've played here since my knees worked. There was a name, officer. In yellow."
Cheever's face went very still. "Laszlo."
"I'm not going to lie to a cop, Rolf. I'm sixty-eight years old. I'm not starting now."
The younger man with the earpiece took it out of his ear and put it in his pocket, the way you take off a hat in church. The third man finally stopped stretching his calf.
Ferrol let the silence go on a beat longer than was comfortable, and then he said, in the same flat road voice he had used on Ruel, except that now Ruel could hear that the flatness was a tool, not a temperament, a thing he picked up and put down: "Mr. Cheever. You called dispatch at 7:51 and you told them a young man was refusing to leave a court you'd reserved, that he'd been hanging around a closed building, and that he was getting aggressive. I've got a board that says he reserved it. I've got a witness from your own group who says you wiped his name. I've got a kid who sat on a step once in August. And I didn't see one aggressive thing from him in the fifteen minutes I've been here. I saw him put his hands on his knees."
"I felt threatened."
"By a sixteen-year-old with his hands on his knees."
"He questioned me in a tone—"
"Yeah," Ferrol said. "People do that. It's not a crime. If it were, I'd have arrested my ex-wife a thousand times." The heavy man, Laszlo, snorted. Ferrol did not smile. "Here's what's going to happen. Court 4 is Mr. Abara's at eight. It's 8:22. He's lost twenty-two minutes. Your group can have Court 4 at nine, if you write one name for one hour, and Courts 2 and 3 are open right now. I'm going to clear this call as unfounded. I'm going to write in my report exactly what you told dispatch and exactly what I found when I got here. That report is a public record. You're on the parks advisory committee, right?"
Cheever said nothing.