Hell's Kitchen (29 page)

“You’re okay,” encouraged the EMS attendant, a young man with a faint blond moustache. Bulky medical equipment and supplies dangled from his belt and filled his pockets. “Breathe it in. Come on, big guy. Keep going.”

The technician wrote on a clipboard then looked into
Pellam’s eyes with a thin flashlight and took his blood pressure.

“Looking good,” the high voice confirmed.

The memory of the horrible fire returned. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Him? ’Fraid so. Didn’t stand a chance. But it’s a blessing, believe me. I’ve had burn cases before. Better for him to’ve gone fast than deal with sepsis and skin grafts.”

He looked over at the body lying on the ground nearby, a sheet draped over it.

The task of giving the bad news about Louis Bailey to Ettie was looming in his mind when a hand descended to Pellam’s shoulder and a figure crouched beside him.

“How you feeling?” the man asked.

Pellam wiped smoke tears from his eyes. His vision was a blur. Finally the face came into focus. In a shocked whisper he said, “You’re here. You’re okay.”

“Me?” Louis Bailey asked.

“That’s not you. I thought it was you.” Pellam nodded toward the body.”

Bailey said. “It was
almost
me. But it’s him—the pyro.”

“The
arsonist?”

The lawyer nodded. “The fire marshal said he was rigging a trap—to get us both, I’d imagine.”

“I turned the light switch on and set it off,” Pellam whispered. He coughed hard for a moment.

“The son of a bitch should’ve unplugged the lamp first,” a voice growled. It was Lomax. He walked up to the two men. “Pyros eventually get careless. Like serial killers. After a while the lust takes over and they stop worrying about details.” He nodded toward the bag. “He had all the
windows in your office closed. There was no ventilation and an open drum of that napalm crap he makes. He passed out from the fumes. Then you got here, Mr. Lucky, and turned on the light. Ka-boom.”

“Who was he?” Pellam asked.

The fire marshal held up a badly scorched wallet in a plastic bag.

“Jonathan Stillipo, Jr. Oh, we heard about him. Goes by the nickname of Sonny. Did juvenile time for torching his mother’s house in upstate New York—of course, it just happened that his mother’s boyfriend was locked in the bedroom upstairs. Fits the classic pyro mold. Momma’s boy, loner in school, sexual conflicts. Did vanity fires in college—you know, sets a fire then puts it out for the heroics. He’s been burning for fun and profit ever since. He was on our list to talk to about the recent fires but he went underground a while ago and we didn’t have any leads. We found this in his back pocket. You can still read some of it.”

Pellam looked at a scorched map of the city. Circles around
X
s marked the sites of the recent fires: the subway on Eighth Avenue, the department store. Two of the
X
s weren’t circled and Pellam assumed those were the targets to be. One was Bailey’s building. And the other was the Javits Center.

“My God,” Bailey whispered. The convention hall was New York’s largest.

Lomax said, “There’s a fashion exhibition scheduled for tomorrow. Twenty-two thousand people would’ve been inside. Would have been the worst arson in world history.”

“Well, he’s dead,” Pellam said. He added, “I guess he won’t be able to testify about who hired him.”

Then he caught the glance that passed between Bailey and the fire marshal.

“What, Louis?” Pellam asked.

Lomax motioned to a uniformed policeman, who walked up and handed him a plastic bag.

“This was in his wallet too.”

The bag contained a sheet of paper. The plastic made a crinkling sound that Pellam found disturbing. It reminded him of the flames he’d just doused. He thought of Sonny’s shaking body. Of the smell.

Pellam took the offered bag and read.

Here’s 2 thousand like we agreed. Try and don’t hurt any body. I’ll leave the door open—the one in the back. I’ll give you the rest, after I get the insurance money.

-Ettie.

Pellam stood uneasily, dropped the oxygen mask onto the sidewalk.

“It’s a forgery,” Pellam said quickly. “It’s all—”

“I’ve already talked to her, Pellam,” Louis Bailey explained. “I’ve been on the phone for ten minutes.”

“With Ettie?”

“She confessed, John,” Bailey said softly.

Pellam couldn’t take his eyes off Sonny’s body. Somehow the sheet—bedclothes of the merely sleeping—made the sight more horrible than the burned flesh itself.

Bailey continued. “She said she never thought anybody’d get hurt. She never wanted anybody to die. I believe her.”

“She
confessed?”
Pellam whispered. He hawked hard and spit. Coughed for a moment, spit again. Struggled to catch his breath. “I want to see her, Louis.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Pellam said, “They threatened her. Or blackmailed her.” He nodded toward Lomax, standing at the curb, talking to his huge assistant. The fire marshal had over
heard Pellam but he said nothing. Why should he? He had his pyro. He had the woman who hired him. Lomax seemed almost embarrassed for Pellam at his desperate words.

Wearily the old lawyer said, “John, there was no coercion.”

“The bank teller? When the money was withdrawn? Let’s find him.”

“The teller identified Ettie’s picture.”

“Did you try the Ella Fitzgerald trick?”

Bailey fell silent.

Pellam asked, “What did you find at City Hall?”

“About the tunnel?” Bailey shrugged. “Nothing. No recorded easements or leases for underground rights beneath Ettie’s building.”

“McKennah must’ve—”

“John, it’s over with.”

A blaring horn sounded across the street. Pellam wondered what it signified. The workers paid no attention. There were hundreds of them still on the job. Even at this hour.

“Let her do her time,” Bailey continued. “She’ll be safe. Medium-security prison. Protective seclusion.”

Which meant: solitary confinement. At least that’s what it meant at the Q—San Quentin—according to the California Department of Corrections. Solitary . . . the hardest time there is. People’s souls die in solitary even if their bodies survive.

“She’ll get out,” Bailey continued, “and it’ll all be over with.”

“Will it?” he asked. “She’s seventy-two. When will she be eligible for parole?”

“Eight years. Probably.”

“Jesus.”

“Pellam,” the lawyer said. “Why don’t you take some time off? Go on a vacation.”

Well, he was certainly going to be doing that—though involuntarily.
West of Eighth
would never be made now.

“Have you told her daughter?”

Bailey cocked his head. “Whose daughter?”

“Ettie’s. . . . Why you looking at me that way?” Pelham asked.

“Ettie hasn’t heard from Elizabeth for years. She has no idea where the girl is.”

“No, she talked to her a few days ago. She’s in Miami.”

“Pellam . . .” Bailey rubbed his palms together slowly. “When Ettie’s mother died in the eighties Elizabeth stole the old woman’s jewelry and all of Ettie’s savings. She vanished, took off with some guy from Brooklyn. They were
headed
for Miami but nobody knows where they ended up. Ettie hasn’t heard from her since.”

“Ettie told me—”

“That Elizabeth owned a bed and breakfast? Or that she was managing a chain of restaurants?”

Pellam watched hard-hatted workers carrying four-by-eight sheets of drywall on their backs walk around to the back of the Tower. The Sheetrock bent up and down like wings. He said to Bailey, “That she was a real estate broker.”

“Oh. Ettie told that one too.”

“It wasn’t true?”

“I thought you knew.
That’s
why her motive—the insurance money—troubled me so much. Ettie came to me last year and wanted to hire a private eye to find
Elizabeth. She thought she was somewhere in the United States but didn’t know where. I told her it could cost fifteen thousand, maybe more, for a search like that. She said she’d get the money. No matter what it took she was going to find her daughter.”

“So Elizabeth isn’t paying your bill?”

“My bill?” Bailey laughed gently. “I’m not charging Ettie for this. Of course not.”

Pellam massaged his stinging eyes. He was remembering the day he met Bailey, in the bar. His uptown branch.

“You sure you want to get involved in this?”

He’d thought the lawyer was simply warning him how dangerous the Kitchen was. But apparently there’d been more to his message; Bailey knew Ettie better than Pellam had guessed.

Pellam wandered to the site of Ettie’s building, looked over it. The land was nearly level. A battered pickup truck pulled to a stop at the curb and two men got out. They walked over to the small pile of rubble and pulled out a chunk of limestone cornice, a lion’s head. They dusted it off and together carted it back to the truck. It was probably on its way to an architectural relics shop downtown, where it’d be priced at a thousand bucks. The men looked over the site, saw nothing else of interest and drove off.

Bailey called, “Let it go, Pellam. Go on home. Let it go.”

*   *   *

The Eighth Avenue subway line offers no service for the time being, due to police action.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Riders are advised . . .

John Pellam considered waiting but like most passengers on the Metropolitan Transit Authority he knew that fate was the essential motorman of his journeys; he decided to walk downtown to a cross street where he could catch an Eastbound bus to his apartment.

He disembarked from the grimy subway car and climbed up the stairs of the station into the city.

West of Eighth Avenue, stores had closed and mesh gates covered windows.

Dusk was long past and the sky was filled with a false sunset—the radiance of city lights from river to river. This fiery canopy would last until dawn.

“Yo, honey how ’bout a date?”

West of Eighth, children had been put to bed. Men had eaten their hot meals and were sitting in their scruffy armchairs, still aching from the hard routine of their jobs at UPS or the Post Office or warehouses or restaurants. Or they were groggy from their hours upon hours in bars, where they’d squandered the day talking endlessly, arguing, laughing, wondering how love and purpose had eluded them so completely throughout their lives. Some of them were in those bars again now, having returned after an evening meal with a silent wife and noisy children.

In tiny apartments women washed plastic dishes and marshaled children and brooded about the cost of food and marveled with painful desire at the physiques and the clothing and the dilemmas of the people in TV shows.

It was a night like a hot stone but here the old buildings weren’t wired for air conditioners. The hum of fans filled most apartment and some not even that.

“I’m sick. I’m tryin’ to get a job. I am, man.”

West of Eighth, clusters of people sat on doorsteps. Dots of cigarettes moved to and from lips. Lights from passing cars reflected amber in quart beer bottles, which rang against the concrete stoops with ever-changing tones as their contents emptied. Conversation was just loud enough to rise above the rush of traffic on the West Side Highway, thousands of cars fleeing the city, even at this late hour.

“Give me a quarter for some food. Got a cigarette. Have a good night anyway. God bless.”

In the windows of tenements lights flickered, the emanations of TV, and often the hue was not blue but the pale gray of black-and-white sets. Many windows were dark. In some there was only glaring light from a bare blub and a motionless head was framed in the window, looking out.

“You want rock, ice, meth, scag, sens, blow, you want you want you want? You want a lotto ticket, you got a quarter you got a dollar you want some pussy? Yo, I got AIDS, I homeless. Excuse me, sir. Gimme your motherfucking wallet . . .”

West of Eighth, young men loped down the street in their gangs. They were invincible. Here they’d live forever. Here bullets would pass through their lean bodies and leave their hearts intact. They glided along the sidewalk, carrying with them their own soundtrack.

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

You open you eyes and whatta you find?

The Man got a message just for you—

Gonna smoke your brothers and your sisters too.

It’s a white man’s world.

It’s a white man’s world . . .

One crew saw another across the street. Boom boxes were turned down. Glances exchanged. Then signs flew back and forth. Palms up, fingers spread. At some point bravado would become dissing. If that happened guns would appear and people would die.

West of Eighth, everyone was armed.

Tonight, though, faces turned away, the volume cranked up again and the crews moved in separate directions, surrounded by a tempest of music.

It’s a white man’s world. It’s a white man’s . . .

Lovers grappled in cars and beside the sunken roadbed of the old New York Central Railroad, near Eleventh Avenue, men dropped to their knees before other men.

It was midnight now. Young dancers hurried home from the topless clubs and peep shows. Broadway actors and actresses too, just as tired. Among the stoop-sitters, cigarettes were stubbed out, good nights were said, beer bottles were left on the sidewalk, soon to be scavenged.

Sirens wailed, glass broke, a voice called out in ornery madness.

Time to be off the streets.

It’s a white man’s world. It’s a white man’s world . . .

West of Eighth, men and women lay in their cheap beds, listening to the song as it floated through the streets outside their window or thudded into their bedrooms from neighboring apartments. The music was everywhere but most didn’t pay it any attention. They lay exhausted and hot, staring at their murky ceilings as they thought: My day begins again in so few hours. Let me get some sleep. Please, just cool me off, and let me get some sleep.