Hell's Kitchen (12 page)

“The shelter in the school? It’s one of the better ones,” Carol said. “They’ll probably get them into an SRO in a month or so. Single room occupancy—a residence hotel. At least if they’re lucky.”

“So, you know the neighborhood pretty well?” he asked.

“Cut my social work teeth here.”

“You’d know the good stuff then. The stuff that we
touristas
never find out.”

“Try me.” Carol glanced at the tooling on Pellam’s battered black Nokona cowboy boots.

“The gangs,” he said.

“The crews? Sure, I
know
about them. But I don’t deal much with them. See, if a kid’s in a set he’s gonna get all the support he needs. Believe it or not, they’re better adjusted than the lone wolves.”

“Yo,” Ismail called to Carol. “I going back to L.A. with my homie there,” he said, pointing at Pellam.

“I don’t recall that being on the agenda, young man.” He raised his eyebrows to Carol.

“No, no, it’s cool, cuz. I come with you. Hook up with a Blood or Crip crew. I get myself jumped in with them. Be cool. You know what I’m saying.” He vanished down the alley.

“Give me a lesson,” Pellam said. “Gangs 101 in Hell’s Kitchen.”

Carol’s glasses had reappeared. He wanted to tell her she looked better without them. He knew better than that.

“Gangs, huh? Where do I start? All the way back to the Gophers?” Carol smiled coyly. Then she laughed in surprise when Pellam said, “I heard One-Lung Curran’s outa business now.”

“You know more than you’re letting on.”

Pellam remembered an interview with Ettie Washington.

“. . . Battle Row, Thirty-ninth Street, the turn of the century. Grandma Ledbetter told me what a dreadful place it was. That’s where One-Lung Curran and his gang, the Gophers, hung out—in Mallet Murphy’s tavern. Grandma’d go to dig in bins for scraps of gabardine, or maybe look for knuckle bones and she had to be careful ’cause the gang was always shooting it out with the police. That’s where it got the name. They had real battles. Sometimes it was the Gophers that won, believe it or not, and the cops wouldn’t come back for weeks, until things’d settled down.”

He now said to Carol, “How ’bout the gangs now?”

She thought for a moment. “The Westies used to be
the
gang here and there’re still some around but the Justice Department and the cops broke their back a few years ago. Jimmy Corcoran’s gang’s pretty much replaced them—they’re the dregs of the old Irish. The
Cubano
Lords’re the biggest now. Mostly Cuban but some Puerto Rican and Dominican. No black gangs to speak of. They’re in Harlem and Brooklyn. The
Jamaicans and Koreans are in Queens. The tongs in Chinatown. The Russians in Brighton Beach.”

The director within Pellam stirred momentarily at the thought of a story about the gangs. Then he thought, Been done. Two words that are pure strychnine in Tinseltown.

Carol stretched and her breast brushed Pellam’s shoulder. Accidentally or otherwise.

It had been a remarkable evening, that night eight months ago. The snow hitting the side of the camper, the wind rocking it, the blonde assistant director gripping Pellam’s earlobe between very sharp teeth.

Eight months is an incredibly long time. It’s three quarters of a year. Practically gestation.

“Where’s Corcoran’s kickback?” he asked.

“His headquarters?” Carol asked, shaking her head. “Those boys’re a step away from caves. They hang out in an old bar north of here.”

“Which one?”

Carol shrugged. “I don’t know exactly.”

She was lying.

He glanced at her pale eyes. He was letting her know she’d been nabbed.

She continued, unapologetically. “Look, you gotta understand about Corcoran . . . it’s not like the gangs on TV. He’s psycho. One of his boys killed this guy’d tried to extort them. Jimmy and some of his buddies cut up the body with a hacksaw. Then they sunk the parts in Spuyten Duyvil. But Jimmy kept one of the hands as a souvenir and tossed it into a toll basket on the Jersey pike.
That’s
the kind of crew you’re dealing with here.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“You think he’ll just grin and tell you his life story on camera?”

Pellam shrugged, nonchalant—though an image of hacksaws had neatly replaced the image of making love in a snow-swept Winnebago.

Carol shook her head. “Pellam, the Kitchen isn’t Bed-Sty. It isn’t the South Bronx or East New York. . . . There, everybody
knows
it’s dangerous. You just stay away. Or you know you’re going to get dissed and you can see trouble coming. Here, it’s all turned ’round. You got yuppie lofts, you got nice restaurants, you got murderers, whores, corporate execs, psychos, priests, gay hookers, actors . . . You’re walking past a little garden at noon in front of a tenement, thinking, Hey, those’re pretty flowers, and the next thing you know you’re on the ground and there’s a bullet in your leg or an ice pick in your back. Or maybe you’re singing Irish songs in a bar and the guy next to you, somebody walks up and shoots his brains out. You never know who did it and you never know why.”

“Oh, hell,” Pellam said, “I
know
that Jimmy Corcoran spits poison and walks through walls. That’s not news.”

Carol laughed and lowered her head to Pellam’s arm. He felt another sizzle from the contact, hot enough to melt January snow. She said, “Okay, sorry about the preachin’. It’s in my job description. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You want Jimmy, I’ll give you Jimmy. The Four Eighty-eight. It’s a bar on the corner of Tenth and Forty-fifth. You can probably find him there three or four days a week. But if you go, go during the day. And—” She laid a firm grip upon Pellam’s arm. “—I’d recommend you take a friend.”

“Yo!” Ismail jumped onto the stairs next to them. “I be his friend.”

“I’m sure that’ll have Corcoran quaking in his shoes.”

“Fuck, yeah!”

Ismail ran off to find more earth-moving equipment. Carol kept her eyes on Pellam for a long moment. Pellam looked away first and Carol stood up. “Back to the salt mines,” she said. Laughing, taking the glasses off.

As they walked back to the Youth Outreach Center she said, “You know, you’re not the first creative sort I’ve run across. One of our Youth Outreach graduates was an author.”

“Really?”

“Wrote a best-seller—about a murderer. The bad news is it was an autobiography. Call me sometime, Pellam. Here’s my card.”

*   *   *

Dannette Johnson was standing on Tenth Avenue.

This was a broad street. The buildings lining it were low and it seemed even wider because of that. The sun, sinking over New Jersey, was still very bright and hot. She stood in one of the few shaded places for blocks around, under the awning of an abandoned late night club, a relic from the eighties.

She thought: Nosir, not that one. Examining drivers who slowed and looked at her in a particular way.

Nope. Not that asshole.

Nope, not him neither.

She stood in the shade not because of the heat—she was wearing no more than eight ounces of clothing on her extravagant body—but because teenage acne had dimpled her face and she believed she was ugly.

Another car drove past, slowed almost to stopping.
Like most of them here it had New Jersey plates; this was an approach to the Lincoln Tunnel, a main route for commuters who lived in the Garden State.

It was also a very easy place for a girl to make five, six hundred a night.

But not from this fellow, not today. She looked away and he drove on.

Dannette had been working the street for eight years, since she’d turned nineteen. To her, the profession was absolutely no different from any other job. Most of the johns were decent guys, who had a job they didn’t really care for, bosses who didn’t particularly like them, wives or girlfriends who’d stopped giving them head after the first baby.

She provided a necessary service. Like the stenographer her mother had dreamt she’d be.

A red Iroc-Z turned onto Tenth and cruised slowly toward her, the exhaust bubbling sexily. Behind the wheel was a pudgy Italian boy in an expensive, monogrammed white shirt. His moustache was trimmed carefully and he wore a gold Rolex on his left wrist. He looked like a salesman at one of the car dealerships on the West Side. “Wanna fuck?”

She smiled, leaned forward, said in a sexy voice, “Kiss my black ass. Git outa here.”

As Dannette retreated to the shade again the car vanished.

A few minutes later a Toyota cruised by. Inside was a thin white man wearing a baseball cap. He looked around nervously. “Hi,” he said. “How you doing today? Hot, isn’t it? Sure is hot.”

She looked around and then walked to the car, her high heels tapping on the concrete with loud pops.

“Yeah, hot.”

“I go home this way from work,” he said. “I’ve seen you out here.”

“Yeah? Where you work?”

“A place. Up the street.”

“Yeah, what kinda place?” she asked.

“Office. It’s boring. I seen you a couple times. Here, I mean. On the street.” He nervously cleared his throat.

This boy was
too
much.

“Yeah, I hang here some,” she said.

“You’re a pretty lady.”

She smiled again, wondering, as she did a hundred times a day, if a plastic surgeon could smooth out her cheeks.

“So,” he said.

Dannette eyed him again. Echoed, “So.” After a moment she added, “Well, honey, you innerested in a date?”

“Maybe. You sure got nice boobs. You don’t mind I tell you that, do you?”

“Everbody like mah tits, sugar.”

“So whatta you do?” The boy wiped his face. He was sweating. He started to take his cap off but changed his mind.

“What I do?” she asked, frowning.

“Like if we were to have a date, you and me, what’d we do to have fun?”

“Oh, I tell you. I do everthing. I suck and I fuck and you can put it up my ass, you want. S’okay with me. You gonna be wearing a rubber anyways. And I got me some K-Y.”

“Wow.” He seemed embarrassed but she definitely had his attention. “I like it, you talking that way. Dirty talk.”

“Then I’ll talk t’you that way on our date.”

“Man, you are one hot woman.”

“Shit, honey, that ain’t news,” Dannette said, straight-faced.

“What’s your name?”

“Dannette. What’s yours?”

“Joe.” There was a warehouse across the street. Joe Septimo’s Hauling and Storage, painting in letters twenty feet high. Half the guys who stopped here were named “Joe.”

“Well, Joe, how’s that date sounding?” she leaned forward, letting him get a good look at the tits he seemed to like and letting him see they were real and that she wasn’t a transvestite.

“Sounding pretty good.”

He whispered something she couldn’t hear. She leaned forward on the car, her hands inside now. He looked at her nine rings.

“What’s that you said, honey?”

“I said, how much we talking? For our date, I mean?”

“Fo’ a nice boy like you? What it is is I go down on you for fifty. You can fuck my pussy for a hundred. You can fuck my ass for two. And we can do it right in your backseat. There this alley I know ’bout. Now, whatchu—” She gasped in shock as the boy’s eyes hardened and he reached into his pocket, grabbing the handcuffs in one hand and her wrists in the other. He was skinny but surprisingly strong.

“What’re you doing?” she screamed.

With a click the cuffs ratcheted onto her narrow wrists.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’m doing, Dannette. I’m arresting you for soliticiting sexual services in violation
of the New York State Penal code. I want you to stand over there, with that lady who’s coming up right behind you.” The boy pulled her purse off her shoulder.

“What?” Dannette turned around, eyes wide.

The policewoman appeared behind the car and walked up to Dannette, led her to the shaded part of the sidewalk.

“Oh, shit,” she said, astonishment in her voice. “You don’t mean you a cop.”

“Fooled you pretty good. I do that.”

“Oh, shit, man. I don’t believe it. I just got outa detention! Shit. I coulda swore you was just another asshole from Jersey.”

Pleased with this review of his performance, the vice officer nodded to the policewoman, said, “Get her in the wagon. Take ’em downtown.”

The stocky woman cop gripped Dannette by the arm and led her around the corner where a Dodge Caravan waited—an unmarked paddy wagon—and helped her up inside the vehicle, where two other prostitutes sat, bored and sweating.

“Man, they on a fucking fishin’ trip,” Dannette blurted. “Don’t they got nothin’ better to do w’their time. I mean, shit. Don’t you got nothing better to do?”

“We’ll get you downtown in ten, fifteen minutes,” the woman said. “I’ll tell ’em to turn on the air conditioning when we start moving. You, what’s so funny?”

But Dannette was laughing too hard to answer.

*   *   *

More sweat. And look how these poor hands shake.

Ah, momma, can this really be the end?

Sonny walked through the construction site across
from the burned-out building on Thirty-sixth Street, which, he’d decided, was rapidly becoming one of his favorite jobs of his whole career. A trophy job. Despite Pellam, the faggot Joe Buck midnight cowboy hee-haw. Or maybe
because
of him.

To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again. . . .

Sonny paused, looking for Pellam. No sign of him. He kept hearing the music in his head, thinking of his mother, dead five years now. Thinking of her walking around the house, listening to Dylan on that thing, that
turntable.
All those records she had! LPs. Funny things, scratchy and jumpy and when you burned them they melted into weird shapes. His mother played Dylan, Dylan, Dylan all night long, month after month after month.

For a moment now he actually heard the music, thought his mother was back. He spun around. No, she wasn’t there. He saw only workers, yellow hard hats, stacks of Sheetrock.

Tanks of diesel oil and gasoline and propane. Nice . . .

He continued east until he came to a grating over the subway tunnel at Eighth Avenue. He crouched behind a series of small Dumpsters, wiped the sweat from his face with his trembling hands.