Hell's Kitchen (6 page)

“What
is
relevant?”

“The gears,” he whispered, the theatricality filling his voice like sump water.

Pellam didn’t feel like playing straight man. He remained silent. A car drove past slowly. A BMW convertible. Even inside the bar you could hear the raw bass beat of a popular rap song Pellam had heard several times before on neighborhood radios.

“It’s a white man’s world, now don’t be blind . . .”

The car cruised on.

“The gears,” Bailey continued, teasing his olive. “Here’s what I mean: the first thing you learn about the Kitchen is that anybody can kill you, for any reason. Or for no reason. That’s a given. So what can you do to stay alive? Well, you can make it an inconvenience to kill you. You stay away from alleys when you walk down the street, you don’t make eye contact, you dress down, you stay close to people on street corners, you drop the names of union bosses or cops from Midtown South in bars like this one. . . . You see what I’m saying? You gum up the gears. If it’s too much trouble to kill you, maybe, just maybe they’ll go on to someone else.”

“And Ettie?”

“Everybody—the A.D.A., the cops, the press—they take the path of least resistance. If something clogs up the gears of the case they’ll go fishing for somebody else. Find themselves another jim-dandy suspect. That’s the only thing we can do for Ettie. Gumming gears.”

“Then let’s give them another suspect. Who else’d have a motive? The owner, right? For the insurance.”

“Possibly. I’ll check the deed and find out what the owner’s insurance situation is.”

“Why else would somebody burn a building?”

“Kids do it for kicks. That’s number one in the city. Number two, revenge. So and so is sleeping with somebody’s wife. Squirt a little lighter fluid under his door, presto. Lot of perps set fires to cover up other crimes. Rape murders especially. Burglary. Welfare fraud, like I said. Vanity fires—the mailroom boy sets a fire in the office and then puts it out himself. He’s a hero. . . . Then in the Kitchen we see a lot of landmark torchings—the city gives old buildings this special status ’cause they’re historical. Generally if a landlord owns an old building that doesn’t make money because it’s too expensive to maintain he tears it down and builds a more profitable one. But landmarked buildings can’t be torn down—they’re protected. So what happens? Lord have mercy, there’s a fire. What a coincidence! He’s free to build whatever he wants. If he doesn’t get caught.”

“Was Ettie’s building landmarked?”

“I don’t know. I can find out.”

The way Bailey emphasized the last sentence explained a little bit more about how gears got gummed up. Pellam slipped his wallet out of his back pocket, set it on the bar.

The lawyer’s face broke into a ginny smile. “Oh, yessir, that’s how it works in Hell’s Kitchen. Everybody’s a sellout. Maybe even me.” The smile faded. “Or maybe I just have a high price. That’s ethics around here—when it takes a lot to buy you.”

A police car shot past the window with its lights going
but its siren off. For some reason the silent passage made its mission seem particularly harrowing and urgent.

Then Bailey grew very somber, so suddenly that Pellam guessed the second—or was it third?—Beefeater had kicked in with a stab of melancholy. He touched Pellam’s arm in a fatherly way and you could see reluctant shrewdness through the haze in his eyes. “There’s something I want to say.”

Pellam nodded.

“You’re sure you want to get involved in this? Wait. Before you answer, let me ask you something. You’ve talked to a lot of people around here? For your movie?”

“Ettie mostly. But also a couple dozen others.”

Bailey nodded, examining Pellam’s face up close, scanning it. “Well, people in the Kitchen’re easy to approach. They’ll pass you a quart of malt liquor and never wipe the bottle when you hand it back. They’ll sit on doorsteps with you for hours. Sometimes you can’t shut ’em up.”

“That’s what I’ve found. True.”

“That puts you right at ease, right?”

“Does. Yep.”

“But it’s just talk,” Bailey said. “It doesn’t mean they accept you. Or trust you. And don’t ever think you’ll hear anybody’s real secrets. They won’t tell ’em to somebody like you.”

“And what are
you
telling me?” Pellam asked.

The lawyer’s shrewdness became caution. There was a pause. “I’m telling you it’s dangerous here. Very dangerous. And getting more dangerous. There’ve been a lot of fires lately, more than normal. Gangs . . . shootings.”

The
Times
Metro section was full of shooting stories. Kids smuggling guns into grade school. Innocent people were gunned down in cross fires or by crazed snipers. Pellam had stopped reading the papers his second week in town.

“This is a rough time in the Kitchen.”

As opposed to when? Pellam wondered.

Bailey asked him, “Are you really sure you want to get involved?” As Pellam started to speak the lawyer held up a hand. “Are you sure you want to go where this might take you?”

Pellam answered the question with one of his own. “How much?” He tapped his wallet.

Bailey dipped again back into his alcohol haze. “For everything?” Shrugged. “I’ll have to find a cop to sneak me the arson report, the name of the insurance agent, anything else they have on her. The landlord and deed’re public records but it takes weeks if you don’t, you know—”

“Grease the gears,” Pellam muttered.

“I’d say a thousand.”

Pellam wondered what the real object of the bargaining was: abstract morality or his own gullibility.

“Five hundred.”

Bailey hesitated. “I don’t know if I can do it for that.”

“She’s innocent, Louis,” Pellam said. “That means we have God on our side. Doesn’t that buy us a discount?”

“In Hell’s Kitchen?” Bailey roared with laughter. “This is the neighborhood that God forgot. Give me six and I’ll do the best I can.”

He had the map spread out on the beautiful butcher-block table.

Smoothing the paper under his long, thin fingers. Sonny took pleasure in paper, knew it was the reincarnated skin of trees. He liked the sound of paper when it moved, he liked the feel. He knew that it burned best of anything.

Sonny looked up and surveyed the cavernous loft.

Back to the map. It was of Manhattan and he traced his finger along the colored lines of streets to find the building in which he now sat. With an expensive ballpoint pen he marked an X on that spot. He sipped ginger ale from a wine glass.

He heard a shuffle and a sound like a cat mewing. He glanced to his right—at the witness who’d been flirting with Joe Buck. Poor redheaded Agent Scullery from Ernst & Young; must have been paid a shitload of money at work because this was a very nice loft indeed. He looked her up and down, deciding again that she would look a lot better if she had long hair like his. She lay on her side, feet and hands bound with duct tape. She was gagged too.

Matter-of-factly he said to her, “Your show? On TV? I don’t really believe the FBI does all that stuff. Do you think federal agents give a shit if there are really aliens up there?” He spoke in a soothing voice, though absently. He touched the colorful squares of the map—they reminded him of blocks his mother’d bought him as a child.

Here.

He marked another building.

Here.

Another.

He touched several others and marked them with X’s. It’d be a lot of work. But one thing that Sonny didn’t mind was work. Virtue is its own reward.

Agent Scullery peeked over the gray metallic tape and drummed a loud, panicked dance with her feet.

“Dear, dear, dear.” Folding the map carefully, he replaced it in his back pocket. The pen went in his breast pocket, diligently retracted. He hated ink on his clothing. Then he walked in a circle around Agent Scullery, who kicked and rolled and mewed.

In the kitchen he examined the gas oven and stove. It was a top-of-the-line model but Sonny knew about appliances only from his profession. He used
his
own stove just to heat water for herbal tea. He ate only vegetables and never cooked them; he found the whole idea of heating food abhorrent. He dropped to the immaculate tile floor and pulled open the stove. He had the bimetal gas cutoff valve disabled in five seconds and the gooseneck hose off in ten. The sour scent of the natural gas odorant (the gas itself has no scent) poured into the room. Sweet and bitter and curiously appealing—like tonic water.

He walked to the front door of the loft and flicked the light switch on then off to see which bulb went on—an overhead one not far away. Sonny climbed onto a chair, reaching up, stretching, cracking the bulb with his wrench and sending the sleet of glass down on his hair and shoulders. The ceilings were high and it was quite a stretch. As he’d struggled to reach the bulb he was sure that tall Agent Scullery was laughing at him.

But laughter’s in the eye of the beholder, Sonny thought, glaring at her as he returned to his bag, took out the jar of juice and poured it over her blouse and skirt. She writhed away from him.

He asked, “Who’s laughing now? Hmm?”

Sonny walked throughout the loft, shutting off the lights, and closing all the drapes. He walked to the front door and stepped into the corridor, leaving the door slightly ajar. In the lobby he jotted down the names of six of the residents in the building.

A half hour later he was standing in a phone kiosk a block away, a half-eaten mango in one hand, the phone crooked under his chin, punching in phone numbers.

On his fifth try someone answered. “Hello?”

“Say, is this the Roberts residence?”

“It’s Sally Roberts, yes.”

“Oh, hi, you don’t know me. I’m Alice Gibson’s brother? In your building.”

“Alice, sure. Four-D.”

“That’s right. She’d mentioned you live there and I just got your number from directory assistance. You know, I’m a little concerned about her.”

“Really?” The woman’s voice was concerned too.

“We were talking on the phone a little while ago and she said she was feeling real sick. Food poisoning, she
was thinking. She hung up and I tried to call back and there was no answer. I hate to ask but do you think you could go check on her? I’m worried that she passed out.”

“Of course. You want to give me your number?”

“I’ll just hold on if you don’t mind,” said Sonny the polite sibling. “You’re too kind.”

He leaned his head against the aluminum of the kiosk. It left sweat stains. Why all this sweat? He thought again. But it’s hot out.
Everybody’s
sweating. Not everybody’s hands are shaking though. He pushed that thought away. Think about something else. How ’bout dinner? Okay. What would he have for dinner tonight? he wondered. A ripe tomato. A good Jersey one. They were hard to find. Salt and a little—

This was weird. The sound of the massive explosion reached him through the phone before he heard it live. Then the line went dead as the kiosk shook hard under the wave of the blast. Typical of natural gas explosions there was a blue-white flare and very little smoke as the windows imploded from the inrush of oxygen then immediately exploded outward from the force of the combustion.

Fire draws more than it expands.

Sonny watched for a moment as the flames spread to the top floor of the late Agent Scullery’s apartment. The tarred roof ignited and the smoke turned from white to gray to black.

He wiped his hands on a napkin. Then he opened the map and carefully drew a check through the circle that had marked the loft. He pitched the mango out and started back to his apartment, walking quickly, in the opposite direction from all the spectators, noting their
excitement and wishing they knew they had him to thank.

*   *   *

“How you feeling, Mother?”

“How she feeling?” a voice called across the cold cement floor. “How she doing?”

Ettie Washington lay on the cot, legs tucked up under her. She opened her eyes. Her first thought: the memory that her clothes had been a problem. Always concerned that she looked nice, always ironing her dresses and blouses and skirts. But here, in the Women’s Detention Center in downtown Manhattan, where they let you wear street clothes—minus belts and laces, of course—Ettie Washington had had no clothes.

When they’d brought her from the hospital all she had on was her pale blue robe with dots on it, open up the back. No buttons, just ties. She was dreadfully embarrassed. Finally one of the guards had found her a simple dress, a prison shift. Blue. Washed a million times. She hated it.

“Hey, Mother, you hear me? You feeling okay?”

A large black form hovered over her. A hand stroked her forehead. “She feel hot. Mebbe got a fever.”

“God gonna watch over that woman,” came another voice from the far side of the detention center.

“She be okay. You be okay, Mother.” The large woman, in her forties, shrank down on her knees next to Ettie, who squinted until she could see the woman clearly.

“How’s yo arm?”

“It hurts,” Ettie responded. “I broke it.”

“That quite a cast.” The brown eyes took in John Pellam’s signature.

“What’s your name?” Ettie asked her, struggling to sit up.

“No, no, Mother, you stay lying down. I’m Hatake Imaham, Mother.”

“I’m Ettie Washington.”

“We know.”

Ettie tried again to sit. She felt helpless, weaker than she already was, on her back.

“No, no, no, Mother, you stay there. Don’t get up. They brung you in like a sacka flour. Them white fuckers. Dropped you down.”

There were two dozen cots, bolted to the floor. The mattresses were an inch thick and hard as dirt. She might as well have been lying on the floor.

Ettie had a vague memory of the cops moving her here from the hospital room. She’d been exhausted and doped up. They used a paddy wagon. There was nothing to hold onto and it seemed to her that the driver had taken turns fast—on purpose. Twice she’d fallen off the slick plastic bench and often she banged her broken arm so badly it brought tears to her eyes.

“I’m tired,” she said to Hatake and looked past the huge woman to the other occupants of the cell. The detention center was a single large room, barred and painted beige. Like many Hell’s Kitchen residents Ettie Washington knew something about holding cells. She knew that most of these women would be in here for pissy crimes, who-cares crimes. Shoplifting, prostitution, assault, fraud. (Shoplifting was okay because it helped you feed your family. If you were a prostitute—Ettie hated the term “ho”—it was because you
couldn’t get a job doing decent work for decent pay; besides at least you were
working
and not on the dole. Assault—well, whaling on your husband’s girlfriend? What’s wrong with that? Ettie’d done it herself once or twice. And as for ripping off the welfare system—oh, please. Trees ripe for the picking. . . .)