Hell's Kitchen (26 page)

*   *   *

There was nothing to do but ask. Straight out.

Pellam watched Ettie walk stiffly into the visitor’s room at the Woman’s Detention Center. Her dim
smile faded and she asked, “What is it, John?” Her eyes narrowed at the streak on his face. “What happened . . .” But her voice faded as she studied his expression.

“The police found the bank account.”

“The . . . ?”

“The one in Harlem. The savings account with ten thousand in it.”

The old woman shook her head vehemently and touched her temple with her good hand, the ring finger of which had been broken long ago and had set badly. Her face shone with contrition for maybe a second. Then she spat out, “I didn’t tell
anybody
about my savings. How the fuck’d they find it?” She was drawn and secretive now.

“You didn’t tell anyone. You didn’t tell the court or your bail bondsman. You didn’t tell Louis. That doesn’t look good.”

“There’s no reason for the world to know everything about a woman,” she snapped. “Her man takes her things away, her children take things away, everybody takes and takes and takes! How’d they find out?”

“I don’t know.”

Bitterly she asked, “Well, so what I’ve got some money?”

“Ettie . . .”

“It’s
my
damn business, not theirs.”

“They say that you—or somebody—made a withdrawal just a day before the fire.”

“What? I didn’t take anything out.” Her eyes were wide with alarm and anger.

“Two thousand.”

She rose and limped in a frantic circle as if she
were about to charge into the streets in search of the stolen cash. “Somebody robbed me? My money! Somebody told ’em ’bout my money! Some Judas did that.”

The speech seemed too prepared, as if she’d planned an excuse if the money was found. More conspiracies, Pellam thought wearily. Under Ettie’s shrunken frown Pellam turned away and gazed out the window. He wondered if she was accusing him. Was
he
the Judas? He asked finally, “Where’s the passbook?”

“In my apartment. It got burnt up, I guess. How can somebody take my money just like that? What am I going to do?”

“The police froze the account.”

“What?” Ettie cried.

“Nobody can take any more money out.”

“I can’t get my money?” she whispered. “I need that. I need every penny of my money.”

Why? Pellam wondered. What for?

He asked, “You didn’t use that money for bail. Don’t look that way, Ettie. I’m just telling you what they’re saying. That it’s suspicious.”

“They think I paid it to the firebug man?” She gave a sour laugh.

“Reckon they do,” Pellam said after a moment.

“And you think that too.”

“No. I don’t.”

Ettie walked to the window. “Somebody betrayed me. Somebody betrayed me good.” The words were bitter and she couldn’t hold Pellam’s eye when she said this. Again Ettie remained still as stone. Then her head rose inches, just enough for her to gaze at the dimly lit windowsill. “Leave me alone now, please. I’d as soon
not see anybody. No, don’t say anything, John. Please, just leave.”

*   *   *

When the got him this time, they frisked him carefully.

Oh, man, not now. I don’t need this now.

Pellam had just walked into his apartment building lobby in the East Village, lost in his doubts about Ettie and her secret money, when six hands grabbed him from behind and slammed him against the wall.

Last time, with Ramirez, the Irishmen had been content to slug him once and forgo a search for wild west pistols. Now, they turned his pockets inside out and, satisfied that he was unarmed, spun him around.

Little Jacko Drugh was accompanied by a tall man vaguely resembling Jimmy Corcoran and a third one, a redhead. The lobby wasn’t that big a space but it offered plenty of room for three guys to beat the crap out of him.

The look in Drugh’s eye told him this wasn’t his idea and Pellam had some sympathy for the young man.

Let’s see. What scene would this be? Toward the end of Act Two in your standard Hollywood action/adventure script. The good gunfighter gets blindsided by the cattle baron’s boys. The heroic reporter gets nailed by the oil company security guards. The commando gets set up and kidnapped by the enemy.

Score one for the bad guys—setting up the hero for his triumphant return. And audiences love it when their boy goes down hard.

“I’d invite you up,” Pellam said, wincing at the vice grips on his arms, “but I don’t really want to.”

The taller of the thugs—probably Corcoran’s
brother—drew back a fist but Drugh shook his head. Said to Pellam, “Jimmy heard what happened last night. Seany McCray taking it on himself to wax Ramirez. Heard you were playing second for the spic. . . . Anyway, like you maya heard, Jimmy don’t want no excitement, too much attention in the Kitchen right now. So he ain’t going to kill you and Ramirez, like he probably ought. But youse took out one of our boys so we gotta come and do something about it. There’s gotta be some, you know, payback.”

“Wait, why me?” Pellam asked. “What about Ramirez?”

“Well, what it is is Jimmy don’t want to start nothing, no crew wars, so he figured everybody’d be happier we play Mike Tyson on you.”

“Not everybody,” Pellam muttered.
“I’m
not real crazy about the idea.

“Yeah, well, that’s how it goes, doesn’t it? Jacko don’t make the rules.”

And I just paid five C-notes to this guy. Damn.

“Look, you want me to apologize, I will. I’m sorry.”

Redhead said, “Sorry don’t count for shit.” He stepped forward. Pellam turned to face him but Drugh held up an arm to stop his fellow gangster.

“Hold up. He’s Jacko’s. Isn’t he now?” Five-foot-two Drugh turned to face Pellam.

Who relaxed considerably. He understood now. That’s why Jacko’d volunteered. It’d be like O’Neil and Ramirez. A sham. Drugh’d pull punches, Pellam’d take a fall and it’d all be over with in three minutes. He knew how to fake-fight—from his stuntman days. Pellam shook free of the other two Irishmen and stepped forward. “Okay, you want some, you got it.” He lifted his arms, making fists.

Drugh’s first swing nearly knocked him out. The bony fist slammed viciously into Pellam’s jaw. He blinked and flew back, his head slamming into the brass mailboxes. Drugh followed up with a left to the gut. Pellam went down on his knees, retching.

“Goddamn—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Drugh muttered. He joined his hands together and brought them down hard on Pellam’s neck. In two seconds Pellam was flat on the filthy tiles.

Drugh’s coup de grace was a work-booted foot slamming into his kidney and gut. Jesus . . .

“You don’t got no gun now, you asshole,” Drugh recited, as if he’d been working on the line all day. He was a far worse actor than Pellam had suspected. “You’ve fucked with the wrong people.”

Pellam rose to his knees, swung at Drugh, missing completely and took three hard blows to the belly.

The little man whispered in Pellam’s ear: “How’m I doing?”

Pellam couldn’t speak. He was close to vomiting.

Drugh whispered: “Hit me back. It’s looking too fake.”

Pellam crawled away from him, struggled to his feet. He spun around and swung hard. He connected, a weak glancing blow to the man’s cheek.

Drugh blinked in surprise and screamed, “You fucking prick!” Redhead and the other one held Pellam while Drugh rained blows into his belly and face. Pellam simply gave up, he held his hands over his face and dropped to the floor again.

“Not so hot shit now,” the redhead said. He was laughing.

“Way to go, Jacko.”

Then Drugh had his gun in his hand and he pressed the muzzle against Pellam’s face. Pellam, thinking how he’d never really trusted the trigger cogs in guns. They could be notoriously edgy. The little bantam leaned closer, whispered, “See, you get me that part in a movie, I can do my own fighting and everything. I don’t need no stuntmen. An’ I got my own gun too.”

Pellam groaned.

“Shoot him in the foot or knee or something, Jacko.”

“Yeah. Fuck up his hand. Boom, boom.”

Drugh seemed to be debating “Naw, he’s had enough. These fucking queers from Hollywood, they can’t take shit.”

Drugh leaned forward once again, whispered, “What it is, that kid Alex you wanted to know about? He’s staying at the Eagleton Hotel on Ninth Avenue. Room 434.”

Pellam mumbled something that Drugh took to be, ‘’Thank you,” though the phrase shared only one word with that expression of gratitude.

Drugh gave him a friendly kick in the ribs as a farewell and then vanished with the others. “Hey, Tommy,” he said to Redhead, “you remember that scene in that movie I was telling you about? . . . What the fuck movie you think I mean? . . .”

The door swung shut. Pellam spit the loose tooth from his mouth. It rattled around on the tile floor for what seemed like minutes before it finally spun to silence.

It was just as a horde of bleary French tourists was checking into the tawdry hotel on the West Side that the elevator returned as summoned to the ground floor. And then it opened its doors.

“Mon dieu!”

The flaming liquid inside the car melted through its plastic container and spilled like a fiery tidal wave into the lobby.

“Jesus!” somebody screamed.

“Oh, shit . . .”

The flames appeared almost magically as the liquid ran along the floor and ignited the carpet, the chairs, the gold-flecked wallpaper, the fake rubber trees, the tables.

Alarms begin detonating with harsh baritone ringing—old-fashioned bells that make one think immediately of lifesaving systems vastly outdated. Screams filled the tattered halls. People began to flee.

More frightening than the flames was the smoke, which filled the hotel instantly as if it were pumped in under high pressure. The electricity simply stopped
and, amid the palpable smoke, nighttime filled the lobby and corridors. Even the ruby exit signs grew invisible.

And sounding above all of the screams and ringing and alarms was a frantic pedal tone—the howl of fire.

The Eagleton Hotel was about to die.

The flames consumed the cheap carpet and turned it from green to black in seconds. The flames boiled plastic as easily as it puckered skin. The fire ran up the walls, melting plaster like butter. The flames spit out smoke thick as muddy water and suffocated a half-dozen foreign guests trapped in an alcove without an exit.

The flames kissed and the flames killed.

“Merde! Mon dieu! Allez, allez! Giselle, où es tu?”

In the downstairs banquet room, where three white jacketed busboys cowered, there was a sudden flash-over—the whole space grew so hot it ignited like one huge match head.

Upstairs a young man, fully clothed, leapt into a brimming bathtub, thinking cleverly that this would protect him. Sickened rescue workers would find what was left of his body, two hours from now, in water still heated to a slow boil.

One woman in a frenzy of panic flung open the door of her room and with the in-rush of oxygen an explosion engulfed her. The last scream she uttered wasn’t a human sound at all but a burst of flame popping from her mouth.

One man fled from a searing wall of flames and hurtled through a fifth-floor window. He cartwheeled elegantly in silence to the roof of a yellow taxi below. The glass in the cab’s six windows turned instantly opaque as if coated with winter frost.

Another man stepped onto a fire escape so heated by flames that the metal rods of the stairs melted through his running shoes in seconds. He climbed, screaming, on burnt, bloody feet to the roof.

In rooms on the higher floors some of the guests believed they were safe from the fire itself; they noticed only a faint haze of smoke around them. They calmly read the in-case-of-emergency cards and, as those reassuring words instructed, soaked washclothes and held them over their faces. Then they sat down calmly on the floor to wait for help and died peacefully in the sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In the lobby, there was another flash-over. A sofa exploded in orange fire. So did the body of a tourist, lying on the carpet. He contracted into the pugilistic attitude—knees drawn up, fists clenched and arms bent at the elbows. In front of him a Pepsi machine melted and exploding soda cans shot through the lobby, the contents turning to steam before the aluminum hit the floor.

Sonny caught glimpses of these vignettes because he’d placed the jug of burning juice in the elevator on the sixth floor and then leisurely made his way down the fire escape. Lingering, watching. He told himself to flee, to be more cautious. But naturally he couldn’t help himself. His hands were no longer shaking, he wasn’t sweating.

The NYFD trucks began to roll up. Sonny slipped into an alley across the street and continued to watch, observing with pleasure that it was an “all-hands” blaze. This was quite a feather in his cap. There were ladders, engines and trucks from a number of companies. My God, it was a whole-battalion fire! He hadn’t set one of those for months. He listened to his Radio Shack scanner and learned that it was a ten-forty-five, Code 1.

Fatalities already.

But he knew that.

The apparatus kept arriving. Dozens of Seagrave and Mack fire trucks and engines and ladders. Some red, some Day-Glo yellow-green. Intersection horns blaring harshly. Ambulances. Police cars, marked and unmarked. Men and women in heat-proof gear, with air tanks and masks, hurried into the conflagration. More ambulances. More police. Lights and noise, cascades of water. Steam everywhere, like ghosts of the dead. Cars parked illegally were hacked open to make paths for the hoses.

Crowds filled the streets, looters sized up the risk.

The hotel became a storm of orange flame, towering up to the eighth-floor penthouse.

When the flames were largely under control the EMS medics started bringing out the bodies. Some were cyanotic—bluish-tinted due to lack of oxygen. Some were red as lobsters from the flames and heat. Some were charcoal colored and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the human beings they had once been.

More windows burst outward. Slivers of black glass rained to the street as rooster tails of water rose from the huge nozzles and converged on the weakening flames, turning to scalding steam.