Hell's Kitchen (33 page)

When she heard the exchange she thought, as she’d
said recently to John Pellam, Oh, he doesn’t mean “bitch” that way.

But apparently he did.

Anyway, who was she to say anything? Carol had been wrong before about the people whose lives she’d wedged her way into.

She sat on this pier under a torrid sun and looked at the ships cruising up and down the Hudson. Tugs, a few pleasure boats, a yacht. A ubiquitous Circle Line cruise ship, painted in the colors of the Italian flag, moved slowly past. The tourists on board were still excited and eager for scenery; but then their voyage had just begun. How enthusiastic would they be, hot and hungry, in three hours?

One thing was different about Carol Wyandotte today. She had pulled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, revealing rather pudgy arms. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d appeared bare-armed in public. Already a slight blush of sunburn covered her skin. She looked down and turned her right arm over, gazing at the terrible mass of scars. She rubbed her hand absently over this ruined part of her body then buried her eyes in the crook of her arm and let the tears soak the skin.

The car door slammed some distance away and by the time she counted, obsessively, to fifty she heard footsteps rustling through the grass. They hesitated then continued. When she reached seventy-eight in her count she heard the voice. It was, of course, John Pellam’s. “Mind if I join you?”

*   *   *

“The property was willed to a charity years ago,” Carol told him, hugging her knees to her chest.

“And then got transferred to the Outreach Center. I was working in the main office then and saw those three lots on the books of the charity—the ones at 454, 456 and 458 Thirty-sixth. Then I noticed McKennah’s surveying team working in the block where the Tower is now. I asked around and heard a rumor he was going to build. That neighborhood was a nightmare then. But I knew what was coming. I knew the value of those three lots’d skyrocket in a couple of years. Of course, none of the board of the charity would dare even set foot in the Kitchen; they had no clue what was going on. So I went to them and said we had to dump them fast because there’d been some reporters doing stories about teenage hookers and pushers and homeless squatting in the buildings.”

“And they believed you?”

“Oh, you bet. All I had to say was that if the media got hold of the fact that the YOC owned them, the publicity’d be devastating. They were horrified at the thought of bad press. They all are—rabbis, priests, philanthropists, CEOs, doesn’t matter. They’re all cowards. So the board dumped the lots at a sacrifice.” She laughed. “The broker called it a ‘fire sale’ price.”

“You bought them yourself?”

She nodded. “With drug money my ex and I’d stashed away. I set up the phoney St. Augustus Foundation. Learned how to do that when I was a legal secretary in Boston. I also knew I couldn’t tear down the building because it was landmarked. So I just held it. Then I met Sonny.”

“How?”

“He stayed at the YOC for a couple years after his time in Juvenile Detention for burning down his mother’s house and killing his mother’s boyfriend.”

“And,” Pellam continued, “you also knew Ettie.”

“Sure,” the woman confessed. “I was her landlord. I had copies of her rent checks and of her handwriting. I sent this black woman who looked sort of like her to get the insurance application. Paid her a few hundred dollars. I used my master key to get into Ettie’s apartment while she was out shopping. I found her passbook.”

Pellam looked over the flat, grassy land around them. “And you took the money out of her account?”

“The same woman who got the insurance application made the withdrawals. And the note they found on Sonny’s body? About Ettie? He was just supposed to plant it at one of the fires so the police would find it. I forged that too.”

“But why? You can’t take any money out of the foundation.”

She laughed. “Ah, Pellam. You’re so Hollywood. You think every crook has to steal ten million bucks worth of gold, or a hundred million in bonds. Like in a Bruce Willis movie. Life’s more modest than that. No, with the garage, the Foundation’d make a good profit and I’d hire myself as executive director. I could make seventy, eighty thousand a year without the Attorney General batting an eye. Add some petty cash, an expense account, and there’d still be enough money left to actually give some away to the poor folks in Hell’s Kitchen.”

She offered a grim smile. “Not contrite enough for you, am I?” The wolf eyes were like pale ice. “Pellam, you know the only times I’ve cried, I mean,
really
cried, in the past year? Five minutes ago, thinking about you. And the morning after we spent the night together. After I stole those tapes from your apartment I took the subway to work. I sat in the car and cried and cried. I
was almost hysterical. I thought what kind of life I might’ve had with somebody like you. But it was too late then.”

A car drove past and they heard a powerful bass beat from the radio’s speakers.
That
song again.
It’s a white man’s world
. . . . Slowly the beat faded.

Pellam stared at the woman’s horribly scarred arms. He found himself saying, “But you didn’t cry for Ettie, did you?”

“Oh, that’s the point, Pellam,” Carol said bitterly. “Cry for Ettie Washington? All she could ever be is a
victim.
God gave her that role. Hell, half the people in this city are victims and the other half are perpetrators. That’s never going to change, Pellam. Never, never, never. Haven’t you caught on yet? It doesn’t
matter
what happens to Ettie. If she didn’t go to jail for this she’d go to jail for something else. Or she’d get evicted and move into the shelter. Or onto the street.”

She wiped her eyes. “That boy who’s following you around, Ismail? The one you think you can save? The one you think you have this
connection
with? The minute he realizes you’re no good to him alive, he’d knife you in the back, steal your wallet and have the money spent by the time you died. . . . Oh, you look so placid, staring at the grass there. But you’re pretty horrified to hear me say things like that, aren’t you? Well, I’m not a monster. I’m realistic. I see what’s around me. Nothing’s going to change. I thought it might, once. But, no. The only answer’s to get out. Get as far away with money or with miles as you can.”

“The tapes you stole? Why’d you give them back to me?”

“I thought by confessing to the smaller crime you
wouldn’t suspect me of the bigger one.” She moved her hand within a millimeter of Pellam’s. Didn’t touch him. “I didn’t want anybody to die. But it happened that way. It
always
happens that way, at least in places like Hell’s Kitchen it does. Can’t you just let it go?”

Pellam said nothing, moved his hand and touched the point of his Nokona, lifted off a dry, curled leaf.

“Please,” she said.

Pellam was silent.

She said, “I’ve never had a home. All I’ve had are the wrong men and the wrong women.” Her whisper was desperate. When she saw Pellam rise Carol too stood. “No, don’t go! Please!”

Then she glanced toward the highway, where the three police cars were parked. She smiled faintly, almost relieved, it seemed—as if she’d finally received bad news long anticipated.

“I had to,” Pellam said. He nodded at the cars.

Carol slowly turned back to him. “You know poetry? Yeats?”

“Some, I guess.”

“‘Easter 1916’?”

Pellam shook his head.

She said, “There’s a line in it. ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.’ It’s my theme song.” Carol laughed hollowly.

The Circle-Line was long out of sight, hooking past Battery Park.

Carol suddenly tensed and swayed closer, as if about to embrace and kiss him.

For an instant compassion stirred in John Pellam and it occurred to him that perhaps the harms Carol had endured were just as deep and numerous as those she
had inflicted. But then he saw Ettie Washington, betrayed by Billy Doyle, and by so many others just like Carol Wyandotte. He stepped coldly away.

A horn brayed over the water, resonating from the Moran tug that pushed a barge as long as a football field through the roiling current. Pellam glanced at the sunlight shattered on the waves. The horn blared again. The pilot was signaling to a fellow sailor steaming upriver.

Carol whispered something Pellam didn’t hear—a single word, it seemed—and her pale eyes turned to the skyline, remaining on this vista as she stepped backward so placidly that she tumbled into the gray-green water and was swept deep into the barge’s undertow before he could take a single step toward her.

The story was big.

The suicide of the youth center director who’d hired the mad pyromaniac . . . This was the classic stuff of the New York
Post
and Geraldo.

The Live at Five broadcast showed the Coast Guard cutters and the tiny blue police boats searching New York Harbor for Carol Wyandotte’s body. The Associated Press got the most dramatic shot, which featured Ellis and Liberty Islands in the background as they lifted the woman’s body from the water. Pellam saw the picture in the New York
Times.
Her eyes were closed. He remembered how pale they were, as pale as her skin after all those hours in the cold water.

Wolf eyes . . .

The charges against Ettie were dropped. That part of the story was almost nonnews, except for a bite that brought the tabloids into play: Roger McKennah owned a piece of property right next to the building she’d lived in, the one that had burned. Everybody was eager to developer-bash, of course, but even the most zealous scoop-hog couldn’t find any tie linking him and the
arson. One network even ran a glowing story about McKennah’s installing a high-tech day care facility in the neighborhood (the news account featuring a lurid videotape of an illegal day care center on Twelfth Avenue—dramatic footage that McKennah himself had somehow procured).

The bulk of the reporting devoted itself to the gala topping-off ceremony at McKennah Tower on Saturday. Good news: although former President Bush, Michael Jackson and Leonardo DiCaprio would be unable to attend, Ed Koch, David Dinkins, Rudolph Guiliani, Madonna, Geena Davis, Barbara Walters and David Letterman had RSVP’d in the affirmative.

At four-forty-five on Friday afternoon John Pellam pushed open one of the tall brass doors of the Criminal Courts Building and helped Ettie Washington outside then down the few stairs to the wide sidewalk.

They stood on Centre Street under a clear sky, the late afternoon unusually cool for August. It was the end of the civil servants’ day and hundreds of government workers passed before them on their way home.

“You doing okay?” he asked the gaunt woman.

“Fine, John, just fine.” Though she still limped and occasionally winced at the pain from her broken arm when she adjusted her makeshift sling. Pellam noticed that his signature was still the only one on her cast.

The woman had been released from the lockup without ceremony. She seemed even more frail than the last time Pellam had seen her. The guards were somewhat less antagonistic than on previous visits though Pellam put that down to lethargy, not contrition.

“Hey, wait a minute,” the voice called from down the sidewalk.

They turned to see the rumpled man in windbreaker and jeans. He was trotting toward them. “Pellam. Mrs. Washington.”

“Lomax,” Pellam said, his face an angry mask. Of all the batterings he’d taken in the last few days—bullet streaking across the cheek, the fire, the Irish Mafia—it was the fire marshal’s skinny friend, the man with the roll of quarters, who’d inflicted the most painful damage.

Lomax paused. He’d stopped Pellam and Ettie as he’d planned but now that he had their attention he wasn’t sure what to do. Finally he extended his hand to Ettie. She took it cautiously He debated about doing the same with Pellam but sensed, correctly, that the gesture would be rejected.

“I don’t guess anybody came by to apologize,” Lomax said.

“The President and the First Lady just left,” Pellam said.

“I thought Lois Koepel’d send flowers,” the fire marshal tried.

“Maybe FTD was closed.”

Ettie didn’t participate in the uneasy banter.

“We made a mistake,” he said. “I’m sorry for that. And I’m sorry you lost your home.”

Ettie thanked him, still wary—as she probably had always been around cops and always would be. They talked for a few minutes about how shocking it was that a youth director had been behind the arson.

“Was a time when nobody would’ve cared what happened in the Kitchen,” Lomax said. “Life’s changing. Slowly. But it’s changing.”

Ettie said nothing but Pellam knew what her
response would be. He remembered, almost verbatim, one of her quotes.

“. . . That fancy building, that tower across the street, it’s a nice one. But whoever’s putting it up, I hope for his sake he doesn’t expect too much. Nothing lasts in the Kitchen, don’t you know? Nothing changes but nothing lasts either.”

Lomax handed her a card, saying if there was ever anything he could do. . . . Some help finding a new place. Public assistance.

But Louis Bailey had already found Ettie a new apartment. She told Lomax this.

“And I don’t really need anything—” she began. But Pellam shook his head and touched her shoulder. Meaning: Let’s not be too hasty here. Bailey was perhaps a bad lawyer but Pellam was confident he could toy with the city’s gears well enough to negotiate a generous settlement.

Then Lomax was gone and Pellam and Ettie stepped to the curb. Several taxis, seeing a black woman and anticipating a Harlem- or Bronx-bound fare, sped past them.

This infuriated Pellam though Ettie took it in stride. She winced in pain and Pellam suggested, “Let’s sit for a minute.” He gestured toward a dark green bench.

“You know what this part of town used to be, John?”

“No idea.”

“Five Points.”

“Don’t think I’ve ever heard of that.”

“When the Gophers were ruling Hell’s Kitchen this
neighborhood was just as dangerous. Maybe worse. Grandpa Ledbetter told me. Did I ever tell you about his gangster scrapbook? He kept all kinds of clippings in it.”