Hell's Kitchen (7 page)

Ettie had a taste for some wine. Wanted some badly. She’d snuck a hundred dollars into her cast but it didn’t look like anybody here was connected enough to get her a bottle. Why, these’re just girls, here, most of ’em babies.

Hatake Imaham stroked Ettie’s head once more.

“You lie right there, Mother. You be still and don’t you worry ’bout nothing. I’ma look out for you. I’ma get you what you need.”

Hatake was a huge woman with cornrows and dangling, beaded African hair—exactly the way Elizabeth had worn it the day she left New York City. Ettie noticed that the holes in Hatake’s ear lobes were huge and she wondered about the size of the earrings that had stretched the skin so much. She wondered if Elizabeth wore jewelry like that. Probably. The girl had an ostentatious side to her.

“I’ve gotta make a phone call,” Ettie said.

“They let you but not now.” The woman touched her good arm, squeezed it gently.

“Some son of a bitch took away my pills,” Ettie complained. “One of the guards. I need ’em back.”

Hatake laughed. “Honey, them pills, they ain’t even in this building no more. They sold an’ gone. Mebbe we see what we can find, us girls. Something help you. Bet it hurts like the devil’s own dick.”

Ettie almost said that she had some money and could
pay. But she knew instinctively to keep the money secret for the time being. She said, “Thank you.”

“You lie back. Get some rest. We look out for you.”

Ettie closed her eyes and thought of Elizabeth. Then she thought of her husband Billy Doyle and she thought of, finally, John Pellam. But he was in her thoughts for no more than five seconds before she fell asleep.

“Well?”

Hatake Imaham returned to the cluster of women on the far end of the cell.

“That bitch, she the one done it. She guilty as death.” Hatake didn’t claim to be a real mambo but it was well known in the Kitchen that she did possess an extra sense. And while she hadn’t had much success laying on hands to cure illness everyone knew that she could touch someone and find out their deepest secrets. She could tell that the hot vibrations radiating off Ettie Washington’s brow were feelings of guilt.

“Shit,” one woman spat out. “She burn that boy up, she burn up that little boy.”

“The boy?” another asked in an incredulous whisper. “She set that fire in the
basement,
girl—didn’t you read that? On Thirty-sixth Street. She coulda killed the whole everybody in that building.”

“That bitch call herself a mother,” a skinny woman with deep-set eyes growled. “Fuck that bitch. I say—”

“Shhhh,” Hatake waved a hand.

“Do her now! Do the bitch now.”

Hatake’s face tightened into a glare. “Quiet! Damballah! We gonna do this th’way I say. You hear me, girl? I ain’t kill her. Damballah don’t ask more than what she done.”

“Okay, sister,” the girl said, her voice hushed and frightened. “Okay. That’s cool. Whatcha saying we do?”

“Shhhhh,” Hatake hissed again and glanced out the bars, where a lethargic guard lounged out of earshot. “Who gonna see the man today?”

A couple of the girls lifted their arms. The prostitutes. Criminal Term batched those arraignments and disposed of them early, Hatake knew. It was like the city wanted them back on the street with a minimum of lost time. Hatake looked at the oldest one. “You Dannette, right?”

The woman nodded, her pocked face remained peaceful.

“I’ma ask you do something for me. How ’bout that, girl?”

“Whatchu want me to do?”

“You talk to yo man when you get into the courtroom.”

“Yeah, yeah, sister.”

“Tell him we make it worth his while. After you get out, I wan’ you to come back.”

Dannette frowned. “You want . . . You want what?”

“Listen to me. I want you to get back in here. Tomorrow.”

Dannette had never stopped nodding but she didn’t understand this. Hatake continued, “I want you to get something, bring it in here to me. You know how, right? You know where you hide it? In the back hole, not the front. In a Baggie.”

“Sure.” Dannette nodded as if she hid things there every day.

She looked around at the other women. Whatever she was being asked to do was being seconded by everybody.

“I’ll pay you for this, for coming back again.”

“You get me rock?” the girl asked eagerly.

Hatake scowled. It was well-known that she hated drugs, dealers and users. “You a cluckhead, girl?”

The pocked face went still. “You get me rock?”

“I give you money,” the huge woman spat out. “You buy whatever you want with it, girl. Fuck up your life, you want. That your business.”

Dannette said, “What it is you want me to bring you back?”

“Shhh,” whispered Hatake Imaham. A guard was wandering past the door.

“Hell of a visiting room.”

“Oh, John, am I in the soup?”

Pellam told Ettie, “Not exactly. But you’re walking around the edge of the bowl, looks like.”

“It’s good to see you.” They sat across from each other in the fluorescent-lit room. A roach meandered slowly up the wall, past the corpses of his kin crushed to dry specks. Beneath a sign that read
NO PHYSICAL CONTACT
John Pellam took the bandaged hand of Ettie Washington. The squat uniformed matron nearby looked coldly at this disregard of regulations but didn’t say anything. Pellam said. “Louis Bailey’s going to get you out on bail.”

Ettie looked bad. She seemed too calm, considering everything that had happened to her. He knew she had a temper. He’d seen it when she talked about her husband—Billy Doyle’s leaving her. And about the time she was fired from her last job. After years working for a jobber in the Fashion District she’d been let go without a single day’s severance. He expected to see her fury at whoever had set the blaze, at the police, at the jailors.
He found only resignation. That was a lot more troubling to him than anger.

She picked at a worn spot on her shift. “The guards’re all saying it’ll go easier if I tell ’em I did it and tell ’em who I hired. I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Pellam debated for a moment then decided to ask. “Tell me about the insurance policy.”

“Hell, I didn’t buy any insurance, John. They think I’m a stupid old lady, doing something like that?” She pressed the palm of her good hand against her stiff gray-and-black hair as if fighting off a migraine. “Where I’m gonna get money to buy insurance?” She winced in pain, continued. “I can barely pay my bills, as is. I can’t even do
that
half the time. Where’m I gonna get money to buy insurance?”

“You’ve never been in any insurance agencies in the last month?”

“No. I swear.” Her face was drawn up, as she eyed the guard suspiciously.

“Ettie, I’ve got to ask you these questions. Somebody recognized you taking out the policy.”

“That’s
their
problem,” she said, tight-lipped. “It wasn’t me.”

“Somebody else saw you at the back door of the building that night. Just before the fire.”

“I go in the back door usually. A lot of times I do that—if I’ve been to the A&P. It’s a shortcut. Saves me some steps.”

“Do all the tenants have keys to the back?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so.”

“You locked it behind you?”

“It locks by itself. I think I heard it close.”

Ettie was often digressive. One thought brought up ten others. One question could lead via a colorful stream of consciousness to a different time and place. Pellam noted that today, though, her responses were succinct, cautious.

The guard had tolerated Pellam’s hand upon Ettie’s arm long enough. “No contact,” she snapped. Pellam sat back. The guard’s nose was pierced three times with gold studs and each ear sprouted ten or twelve small rings. Her belligerence suggested that she was waiting for someone to ridicule the jewelry.

“Louis Bailey,” Pellam asked Ettie. “You think he’s a good lawyer?”

“Oh, he’s good. He’s done stuff for me before. I hired him six, eight months ago, for this social security problem I had. He did an okay job. . . . That guard over there keeps looking at us with an evil eye, John. She’s too jaunty for my taste. Sticking pins in her nose.”

Pellam laughed. “This witness told me she saw some men in the alley just before the fire. Did you see them when you got home from the store?”

“Sure.”

“Who was it?”

“Nobody I recognized. Some boys from the neighborhood. They’re always there. You know, it’s an
alley.
Where kids always hang out. Did fifty years ago. Do now. Some things never change.”

Pellam remembered what Sibbie’s son had told her—what earned him the slap in the face. He asked Ettie, “Were they from the gangs?”

“Could be. I don’t know much about them. They leave us alone pretty much. . . . And maybe there were some of those workers too. From that big building
they’re putting up across the street. You know, with those telescopes they have. For surveying. Yeah, I’m sure I saw some of them in the alley. I remember ’cause they wear those plastic helmets. Some of them were those men who came around with the petition we signed.”

Pellam remembered Ettie telling him about the high-rise, how the locals had greeted the huge project with such excitement. Roger McKennah, as famous as Donald Trump, was building a glitzy skyscraper in Hell’s Kitchen! His company had sent representatives out into the ’hood, asking residents in the blocks around the high-rise to sign waivers so that the building could go five stories higher than the zoning laws allowed. In exchange for their approval of the variance he pledged that the building would feature new grocery stores and a Spanish restaurant and a twenty-four-hour laundry. Ettie had signed, along with most of the other residents.

And then they’d found that the grocery store was part of a gourmet chain that charged $2.39 for a can of black beans, the laundry charged three dollars to wash a blouse, and as for the restaurant, it had a dress code and the limos parked out in front created a terrible traffic jam.

Pellam now made a mental note about the workers, wondered why they were surveying in the alley
across
the street. He wondered too why they’d been working at ten o’clock at night.

“I think we should call your daughter,” Pellam said.

“I already did,” Ettie said and looked at her cast in surprise—as if it had just materialized on her arm. “I had a long talk with her this morning. She’s sending
money to Louis for his bill. She wanted to come tomorrow but I was thinking I’ll need her more ’round the trial.”

“I’m voting that there won’t even be a trial.”

The bejeweled guard examined her watch. “Okay. Come on, Washington.”

“I just got here,” Pellam said coolly.

“An’ now you just be leavin’.”

“A few minutes,” he said.

“Time’s up. Move it! And you, Washington,
hustle.
”

Pellam lowered his eyes to the guard’s. “She’s got a sprained ankle. You want to tell me how the hell’s she supposed to hustle?”

“Don’t want lip from you, mister. Less go.”

The door swung open, revealing the dim hallway, in which a sign was partially visible.
PRISONERS SHALL NO

“Ettie,” Pellam said, grinning. “You owe me something. Don’t forget.”

“What’s that?”

“The end of the story about Billy Doyle.”

Pellam watched the woman tuck away her despair beneath a smile. “You’ll like that story, John. That’ll be a good one in your film.” To the matron she said, “I’m coming, I’m coming. Give an old lady a break.”

Inside Bailey’s office a gaunt man hunched over the desk, listening to instructions the lawyer was firing at him over a paper cup filled with jug Chablis.

Bailey saw Pellam enter and nodded him over. “This is Cleg.”

The thin man shook Pellam’s hand as if they were good friends. Cleg wore a green polyester jacket and black slacks. A steel penny gleamed in his left loafer and he smelled of Brylcreem.

The lawyer was looking through an impacted Rolodex. “Let me see. . . .”

Cleg said to Pellam, “You play the horses.”

It wasn’t a question.

“No,” Pellam admitted.

The slim man was dismayed. “Well. I got a lock for you, you interested.”

“What’s a lock?”

“Bet,” Cleg responded.

“A bet?”

“That you can’t lose.”

“Thanks anyway.”

He stared at Pellam for a moment then nodded as if he suddenly understood everything there was to know about him. He searched his pockets until he found a pack of cigarettes.

“Here we go,” Bailey said. He jotted a name on a yellow Post-it that had been reused several times. He took two bottles of liquor from his desk, slipped them into large interoffice envelopes along with smaller packages that contained, presumably, Pellam’s former cash.

He handed Cleg one envelope. “This’s for the Recorder of Deeds, the clerk. He’s the fat man on the third floor. Sneely. Then this one goes to Landmark Preservation. Pretty Ms. Grunwald with the cat. A receptionist. She gets the Irish Cream. As you probably guessed.”

Greasing gears.

Or maybe clogging them.

The man nestled the bottles among his sporting papers and left the office. Pellam saw him pause outside to light a cigarette then continue toward the subway.

Bailey said, “The A.D.A., Ms. Koepel, asked for a postponement of Ettie’s arraignment. I agreed.”

Pellam shook his head. “But she’ll have to stay in jail longer.”

“True. But I think it’s worth it to keep the bitch happy.” His head dropped toward the chipped mug he held. “Koepel’s a madwoman. But then there’s a lot of pressure to catch the firebug. Things’re getting worse. Did you hear?”

“Hear what?” Pellam asked.

“There was another fire this morning.”

“Another one?”

“A loft. It wasn’t too far from here, matter of fact. Destroyed two floors. Three dead. Looked like it was a gas explosion but they found traces of our boy’s special brew—gas, fuel oil and soap. And one of the victims was bound and gagged.” Bailey shoved a limp
Post
toward Pellam. He glanced at the picture of a burnt-out building.