Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

“So,” the producer said coyly, “research, huh, John?”

“Research.”

Silence while the signals of ambition bounced off a satellite somewhere in cold space and shot back down to earth. “I’ve been hearing things, John.”

“What? That Oakland’s losing and the Cardinals’re winning?”

“Somebody in some post-pro house out here was telling somebody I know you’ve booked editing time.”

“That’s a lot of somebodies,” Pellam observed.

“And that’s not the only thing I’ve heard.”

“Isn’t it?”

“A couple studios’ve tried to get you to scout for them but the word is you’re out of the scouting business.”

Somebody told somebody about something.

The Word in Hollywood was as quick as the Word on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen.

“Naw, naw, I’m just on vacation.”

“Oh. Sure. Got it. And you need a good editor to clean up that footage you took of Mickey and Goofy when you were at Epcot. Sure.”

“Something like that.”

“Come on, John. I always had faith in you.”

A safe way of saying that whatever had gone down, however bad it looked for Pellam (and it’d looked pretty bad at one time), Lefkowitz hadn’t abandoned him. Which was, with some creative recasting, slightly true.

“It’s always warmed my heart knowing that.”

“So? You’re trying to get something on, aren’t you?”

“It’s a little thing, Lefty. A small project. You wouldn’t be interested. All I need at this point is domestic distribution.”

“You got financing ? And I didn’t hear about it?” He whispered this.

“It’s a very small project.”

“Your Palm D’or and your L.A. Film Critics award were for small projects too, you’ll recall.”

“Distribution, I was saying.”

Producers love distribution-only deals because if the film bombs they don’t lose millions. It’s a percentage arrangement. The execs don’t get the Academy awards and they don’t get as rich but they don’t get as poor either and hence don’t get fired as soon.

“My ears’re turned your way, Pellam. Talk to me.”

“I’m in a meeting now-”

“Yeah, with who?”

“A lawyer. Can’t really go into it.” Pellam winked at Bailey.

“Wall Street? Which firm?”

“Hush, hush,” Pellam whispered.

“What’s going on, John? This could be big. A new Pellam feature.”

If Lefkowitz found out he was slavering over a documentary he’d hang up the phone in an instant and the Pellam he had always been behind one hundred per cent would cease to exist. Distribution for the art-house circuit meant selling the film to a total of about one hundred screens around the country, like the Film Forum in New York and the Biograph in Chicago. Feature films went to thousands of multiplexes.

Pellam, deciding he didn’t feel guilty, said, “You get me in to see McKennah and I’ll have my lawyer here give you a call.” There was a pause that screenwriters call a beat. “I may have to burn some bridges but I’d do it. For you.”

“Love you, Johnny. I mean that. Sincerely. Oh, about McKennah, you know he’s an unchained shit, don’t you?”

“I just want to crash his party, Lefty. I don’t want to sleep with him.”

“You have that lawyer call me.”

They hung up.

“Was that,” Bailey asked, “a Hollywood person?”

“To the core.”

“Do you really want me to call him?”

“I wouldn’t do that to you, Louis. But I do have a legal question.”

Bailey tipped the jug of wine into his cup once more.

Pellam asked, “What’s the sentence for carrying an unlicensed pistol in New York City?”

There were probably some questions that gave the lawyer pause and some that surprised him. This wasn’t in either of those categories. He answered as if Pellam had asked him about the weather. “Not good here. It’s technically a mandatory sentence but the judge has some discretion. Unless of course you’re a felon. Then it’s a year mandatory. Riker’s Island. And the sentence comes with several large boyfriends, whether you want them or not. You’re not talking about yourself, are you?”

“I’m just asking theoretically.”

The lawyer’s eyes narrowed. “Is there something about you I should know?”

“No. There’s nothing you should know.”

Bailey nodded to the window. “What do you need a gun for anyway? Look outside, young man. You see tumbleweeds? You see cowpokes? Indians? This isn’t the streets of Laredo.”

“I don’t think that’s a lock, Louis.”

From somewhere in his apartment building Pellam heard that song again, strident and loud. It must’ve been number one on the rap charts.

“… now don’t be blind… Open your eyes and whatta you find?”

A large stack of videocassettes sat at his feet, representing several months’ worth of taping. They weren’t edited yet or even organized beyond subject and date written in his sloppy handwriting on first-aid tape stuck to each cassette. He found one and slipped it into a cheap VCR that rested precariously on a cheaper TV.

Through the wall came the steady bass thud of the song.

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

The screen of the cheap Motorola flickered reluctantly to life, showing this:

Ettie Wilkes Washington sat comfortably in front of the camera. She’d wanted to be filmed in her favorite rocker, an oak relic her husband Eddie Doyle had bought for her. But even the slight rocking motion had been a distraction and he’d moved her to a straight-backed chair. (As a young assistant Pellam had worked on Jaws and remembered Spielberg telling the director of photography to bolt the camera to the deck of Robert Shaw’s boat during the location shots. The seasoned DP wisely suggested that they better shoot handheld – or else risk sending sea-sick audiences racing for restrooms around the country.)

So Pellam had moved her to an overstuffed armchair. He’d wanted her in front of a window, with the construction work going on outside. You could also see, in the frame, another antique – an old rolltop desk, filled with papers and letters. On the wall behind it hung a dozen pictures of family.

“You asking ’bout Billy Doyle, my husband? I’ll tell you, he was a funny man. Nobody like him I ever met. I’ll tell you what he looked like first of all. He was handsome, yessir. Tall and, well, you know, very white. We’d walk down the street together. He always made me take his arm. Didn’t matter whether we were uptown near San Juan Hill, where the blacks were mostly, and they didn’t like mixed couples, or in Hell’s Kitchen, where it was white. The Irish and Italian boys there didn’t like mixed couples either. We got glares from everybody. But he always had me on his arm. Day or night.

“And he’d always go to clubs with me when I sang. He’d sit at a table with a whisky in front of him – the man loved his whisky – sit there, th’only white man in the whole place and he kept getting looks. But after a while nobody’d pay any attention to him. I’d look down from the stage and there he’d be, eating chitlins and talking with a couple, three men, smiling up at me, knocking them on the shoulders and saying I was his gal. Then I’d look down and see him arguing. I knew he was talking ’bout Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith.

“But the thing about him was he never found himself. And that was hard for a man. Hardest thing there is, a man who doesn’t come into his own. Sometimes he doesn’t really have to find it. Sometimes he just ends up someplace and digs his heels in and some years go by and that’s who he is and he’s all right with that. But Billy was always looking. What he wanted most was land. To own something. That’s the funny thing – it’s why we never really had a home, because he wasted all his time on these schemes to get a building, get some land. He wanted it bad and that was why he served that time in jail.”