Hell's Kitchen (23 page)

He pushed against the door. It was open.

Broken into. He thought fleetingly that he ought to turn tail and use the downstairs neighbor’s phone to call 911. But then his anger grabbed him. He kicked the door in. The empty rooms gaped. His hand went to the switch on the lamp closest to the door.

Oh, shit, he thought, no, don’t! Not the light! But he clicked it on before he could stop himself.

Stupid, he thought.

Pellam pulled the Colt from his waistband, dropping into a crouch.

Hitting the light switch had just announced to the burglar that Pellam had returned. Should’ve left it out.

He remained frozen in the doorway for a long moment, listening for footsteps, for cocking pistols. But he heard nothing.

Making his way slowly through the ransacked apartment, he opened closet doors and looked under the bed. Every conceivable hiding place. The burglar was gone.

He surveyed the damage, walking from room to room. The discount VCR and TV were still there. The Betacam and deck too, sitting out in plain view. Even the most low-tech thieves would have guessed the camera’d be worth a bundle.

And when he saw the camera he understood what had happened. He felt the shock and dismay like the blast of heat from the fire that destroyed Ettie’s building. He dropped to his knees, ripping open the canvas bag where he kept the master videos of
West of Eighth.

No . . .

He rummaged through the bag, hit
Eject
on the Ampex deck attached to the Betacam. And surveyed the damage. Two tapes were gone. The two most recent—the one in the camera and the one containing footage he’d shot last week and the week before.

The tapes . . . Who’d known about them? Well, practically everyone he’d talked to about Ettie’s disappearance or who’d seen him with the camera. Ramirez, the elusive Alex. McKennah. Corcoran. Hell, even Ismail and the boy’s mother, Carol and Louis Bailey knew. For that matter, Lomax and the entire fire marshal’s department. Probably the whole West Side.

The Word on the street. Faster than the Internet.

Who? was one question. But why? was just as interesting. Had Pellam inadvertently taped the pyro himself? Or maybe the man who’d hired him? Or had there been some evidence he’d recorded that had escaped Lomax and the investigators?

He had no answers to these questions and as significant as they were to Ettie’s case there was another implication to the missing tapes. In feature films, all the exposed footage was insured—not for the cost of the celluloid itself but for what it cost to shoot and process, which could run to thousands of dollars a foot. If a daily rough of a feature film is destroyed in a fire the muses may weep but at least the producers recoup their money. Pellam, however, hadn’t been able to afford film completion insurance for
West of Eighth.
He couldn’t recall what was on those twenty or so hours but the interviews might very well have been the heart of his film.

He sat for a moment in a squeaky chair, staring out
the window. Then lazily he punched in 911, spoke to a dispatcher. But the tone of the woman’s voice told him that a crime like this was low on the precinct’s priorities. She asked if he wanted some detectives to come over.

Shouldn’t they be volunteering to do that themselves? Pellam wondered. He said, “That’s okay. Don’t want to trouble anybody.”

The woman missed the irony.

“I mean, they
will,”
she explained.

“Tell you what,” Pellam said, “if he comes back I’ll let you know.”

“You be sure and do that now. You have a good day.”

“I’ll try.”

*   *   *

It was a dusty little office in the fifties, West Side, not far from where he’d sat beside Otis Balm and listened to the hundred-and-three-year-old man tell him about the Hell’s Kitchen of long ago.

“. . . Prohibition was the most fanciest the Kitchen ever got. I seen Owney Madden, the gangster, many times. He was from England. People don’t know that. We’d follow him ’round the streets. You know why? Not for the gangster stuff. We was just hoping he’d say something so we could hear how English people talked. That was stupid of us ’cause he was also called Owney the Killer and a lot of people around him got shot. But we was young then and, don’t you know, it takes twenty, thirty years of getting by in the world for death to start meaning anything to you.”

Pellam sized up the office, prepared his mental script and then pushed into the office. Inside, the bitter smell of paper filled the air. A fat fly buzzed repeatedly into the dusty window, trying to escape from the heat; the air conditioner was a twin of Louis Bailey’s.

“I’m looking for a Flo Epstein,” Pellam asked.

A woman with serpentine cheeks, hair pulled back in a sharp bun, walked up to the counter. “That’s me.” It was impossible to guess her age.

“How you doing?” Pellam asked.

“Fine, thank you.”

John Pellam—wearing his one and only suit, a ten-year-old Armani, a relic from a former life—held out a battered wallet, which contained a special inspector badge, gold colored, sold at arcades on Forty-second Street for novelty purposes only, and let the woman look at it for as long as she liked. Which turned out not to be very long. She gazed at him eagerly and he could see she was a woman who enjoyed playing the part of witness. Celebrity, Pellam knew, is the most addictive of intoxicants.

“That Detective Lomax was here last time. I like him. He’s kind of sober. Wait, I think I mean somber.”

“Fire marshal,” Pellam corrected. “They’re not detectives.”

Though they have full arrest powers and carry bigger guns and beat the crap out of you with rolls of U.S. coins.

“Right, right, right.” Ms. Epstein’s forehead crinkled at the mistake.

“When we interrogate people together,” Pellam said. “I play good cop. He plays bad cop. Well, marshal. Now this is just a follow-up. You identified the suspect, didn’t you?”

“You gotta be more buttoned up than that.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve learned enough so I could be a D.A. myself.” Ms. Epstein recited, “What I told
Marshal
Lomax was, a black woman of approximately seventy years of age came to the premises here and asked for a tenant policy application. I confirmed that the mug shot they showed me was of her. That’s all. I didn’t quote identify any suspects. I’ve been through this a couple times.”

“I can tell.” Pellam nodded. “We sure appreciate intelligent witnesses like you. Now how long was the woman in here?”

“Three minutes.”

“That’s all?”

She shrugged. “It was three minutes. You having sex it’s nothing, you having a baby, it’s an eternity.”

“Depending on the partner and the baby, I’d guess.” Pellam jotted down meaningless scrawls. “She gave you a cash deposit.”

“Right. We sent it all on to the company and they issued the policy.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“No.”

Pellam flipped closed his steno pad. “That’s very helpful. I appreciate your time.” The Polaroid square appeared quickly. “I just want to confirm that this is the woman who came in here.”

“That’s not the mug shot.”

“No. This one was taken in the Women’s Detention Center.”

Ms. Epstein glanced at it and began to speak.

Pellam help up a hand. “Take your time. Be sure.”

She studied the smooth black face, the prison department
shift, the folded hands. The stiff salt and pepper hair. “That’s her.”

“You’re positive.”

“Absolutely.” She hesitated. Then laughed. “I was going to say that I’d swear to it in court. But then I guess that’s exactly what I’m
going
to do, isn’t it?”

“Guess it is,” Pellam confirmed. And kept his face an emotionless mask. The way all good law enforcers learn to do.

*   *   *

That evening—a hot, foggy dusk—found Pellam standing in an alley across from a brownstone, New York
Post
in hand.

He wasn’t paying much attention to the paper. He was thinking: Geraniums?

The nondescript, buff-colored tenement was like a thousand others in the city. The flowers planted in front of it, fiery orange-red, would have fit fine with any other building.

But there?

He’d been standing in the alley for an hour when a door opened and the figure stepped outside, looked up and down the street then started down the stairs. He carried a large shoe box. Pellam tossed the paper aside and began walking as silently as he could along the hot asphalt. He finally caught up with the young man.

Without turning around, Ramirez said, “You been out there for fifty minutes and you got two guns aimed at your back right now. So don’t do nothing, you know, stupid.”

“Thanks for the advice, Hector.”

“What the fuck you doing here, man? You crazy?”

“What’s in the box?”

“It’s a shoe box? What you think’s in it? Shoes.”

Pellam was walking abreast of Ramirez now. He had to move fast to keep up the pace.

“So, what you want?” the young man asked.

“I want to know why you lied to me.”

“I no lie, man. I’m not like no white man. Not like you reporters. Telling white man’s lies.”

Pellam laughed. “What
is
that crap, the
Cubano
Lord’s creed? You’ve gotta recite it to get jumped in your crew?”

“Don’t give me no shit. Been a long day.”

They came to the north-south avenue. Ramirez looked up and down and they turned north. After a minute he said, “I don’t believe you. You too fucking much.”

“What?”

“Hanging out in fronta our kickback, man. Nobody does that. Not even the cops.”

“You plant the geraniums yourself?”

“Fuck you. You carrying?”

“A gun?” Pellam asked. “No.”

“Man, you
are
a crazy fuck. Coming to my kickback without a gun. That how people get blown away. What you mean, I lie to you?”

“Tell me about your aunt, Hector. The one got burned out of the Four-fifty-eight building. She got a new place, I heard.”

Ramirez grinned. “I tell you I look after my family.”

“When did she move?”

“I dunno.”

“
Before
the fire?”

“Around then. I don’t know exactly.”

“You forgot?”

“Yeah, I fucking forgot. Man, I’m busy, why you don’t go have a fucking talk with Corcoran?

“I already did.”

Ramirez lifted an eyebrow, trying not to look too impressed.

Pellam continued, “You also forgot to tell me that she was one of—how many was it?—eight hundred eyewitnesses who saw Joe the Thug kill that guy from Corcoran’s crew.”

“Spear Driscoe and Bobby Frink.”

“So are we all agreed that Corcoran didn’t burn down the building because of your aunt? That’s not a white man’s lie now, is it?”

“Just go away, man. I’m busy.”

“How well you get along with somebody named O’Neil?”

“I don’t know nobody named O’Neil.”

“No? He knows you.”

Ramirez spat out, “What the fuck you talking to him for?” The young man had been playfully irritated a moment ago. Now he was mad.

“Who said I was talking to him?” Pellam touched his ear. “I hear things too. I heard maybe he had some guns. Maybe he was
selling
some guns.”

Ramirez stopped walking, gripped Pellam’s arm. “What you hear?”

Pellam pulled his arm away. “That you rousted him last week. ’Cause he’s selling hardware to Corcoran.”

Ramirez blinked. Then broke into a huge laugh. “Oh, man.”

“True, or not true?

“Both, man.”

“What do you mean?”

“True and not true.” He started walking again. “Look, I gonna explain this but you keep it to yourself. Otherwise I have to kill you.”

“Tell me.”

Ramirez said, “O’Neil, him and me, we do business. He supplies me. Get’s me good stuff. Glocks, MAC-10s, Steyrs.”

“You beat up your own supplier in public?”

“Fuck yes. Was his idea. He’s a mick and I’m a spic. You know how long he’d last, Jimmy finds out he was selling to me? Some of Corcoran’s boys, they were getting suspicious so we do some sparring out in public. O’Neil, he took a fall.” Ramirez looked at Pellam closely. He roared with laughter.

“What’s the joke?”

“I can see it in your face, man. You almost believe me.” The young man added, “I can prove it. Yeah, there was guns in the building. I paid for ’em and O’Neil left ’em there for me to pick up only I didn’t send nobody over there before the place burned. There was Glocks, Brownings and some pretty little Tauruses I had my heart set on, man. Twelve, thirteen of ’em. You talk to one of your reporter friends. See what the crime scene boys found there. If that’s right then you
know
I no burn down nothing.”

Pellam pulled a sheet of paper from his back pocket. “Three Glock, four Tauruses, and six Brownings.”

“Man, you good.”

They passed Forty-second Street, once the Tenderloin of New York and now about as dangerous—and interesting—as a suburban strip mall. Pellam asked, “Where’re we going?”

“I’m doing a business deal. And I don’t want you around.”

“Your crew’s in business?”

“Not a crew, man. It’s a club.”

“What kind of business?”

Ramirez lifted the top of the box, revealing a pair of new basketball shoes.

“I got a truckload of ’em.”

“You buy ’em and then you sell ’em, that right?” Pellam asked skeptically.

“Yeah, I buy things and sell ’em.
That’s
my business.”

“What about the ‘buy’ part? You paid money and took delivery of a shipment of these? Invoice, bill of lading, all that?”

“Yeah, I
bought
’em,” Ramirez shot back. “Same way you fucking reporters pay people for your stories. You do that? You pay somebody to tell you things?”

“No, but—”

“‘No, but.’ Fuck. You take people’s lives, write about ’em, and don’t pay nobody for them.” He mocked, “Oh, man, who’d do something terrible like that?”

A block later they segued around a Korean vegetable stand. Pellam said, “I need a favor.”

“Yeah?”