Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

Pellam slipped his notebook into his pocket and said, “Will you do something for me?”

“Anything, John.”

“Tell me the end of the Billy Doyle story.”

“Which story? About his doing time?”

“That one, yeah.”

“Okay. My poor Billy. Here’s what happened. I told you all along that his goal in life was to own land. For a man with wanderlust he couldn’t go past a lot or a building with a for-sale sign on it without looking it over and calling up the owner and asking questions about it.”

Ettie’s eyes glowed. This was where she belonged, Pellam thought, weighing memories and using them to spin her stories. He knew the seductive lure of storytelling too; he was after all a film director. Except that her stories were true and she expected nothing in return for them. No critical acclaim. No percentage of gross.

“You remember I told you about my brother, Ben. He was about Billy’s age, a year or two younger. Ben came to Billy and said he had this idea how to get some money for a down payment for some land, only he needed a partner to help him. Well, it wasn’t an idea at all. It was just a scam. Ben knew some people at a union headquarters and he did some fake contracts and got them slipped in when the bosses weren’t there. Ben listened too much to Grandpa Ledbetter’s stories about the Gophers and the gangs. He wanted to be in one real bad – even though there weren’t any black gangs in the Kitchen, then or now. But he was real proud of this scam of his.

“But Ben didn’t tell my Billy about the scam part. He thought they were just real contracts for hauling and stuff, they were taking a broker’s fee on. He lived on the edge, Billy did, but he wasn’t stupid. There might’ve been people he’d scam but the union wasn’t one of them. Then Lemmy Collins, the longshoremen’s vice-president, found out there was money missing. He thought Ben’d done it. He knew Billy was tight with Ben but he knew an Irishman wouldn’t steal from his own but a black man’d steal from Irish without thinking twice. So Lemmy came to see my brother with two other men from the union and a baseball bat.

“Just as they were about to beat him to death they got a call from union headquarters. The police had called. It seemed that my Billy’d confessed to the whole thing. It was all his idea. Since the police were involved then Lemmy couldn’t kill Ben even thought he wanted to. The union got the money back and Billy did a year in jail. See, he knew being Irish and white he could get away with his life. If Ben had gone down he would’ve died. If not in the Kitchen then in Sing Sing.”

“He took a rap for somebody,” Pellam said.

“For my own brother,” Ettie said.

Pellam added softly, “He did that for you, you know.”

“I know he did.” Ettie was wistful. “But I think that year changed him. I got my brother saved but I think I might’ve lost my husband because of it. It was a year after he got out that I came home one night and found the note.”

“Excuse me, sir,” the guard said pleasantly. “I’m afraid time’s up.”

Pellam nodded to the guard. “Just one more thing. Hey, Mrs. Washington, look up.”

There was a snap and the soft buzz of a small motor.

She blinked at the flash as Pellam took the Polaroid.

“What’re you doing there, John? You don’t want to remember me this way. Lemme fix my hair, at least.”

“It’s not for me, Ettie. And don’t you worry. Your hair looks just fine.”

Lefty came through.

Pellam was in his bitchen, boots off, listening to messages, as he sat on the plywood sheet turning the bathtub into a table. There was one hang-up, then another. Finally Alan Lefkowitz’s mile-a-minute voice was telling him about a party Roger McKennah had planned and that Pellam had only to drop Lefty’s name and he’d be admitted into the “inner sanctum of New York business,” a line the producer actually recited without noticeable irony. Pellam, however, rolled his eyes as he listened to it, kicking his foot against the wall to scare off a wise-ass pigeon that alighted on his window sill.

The lengthy message continued with relevant details, including the orders to dress for the event.

An hour later, Pellam, suitably “dressed” (new black jeans and polished Nokona cowboy boots) strolled out into the suffocating heat and took a subway to the Citicorp building. From there he walked to an address on Fifth Avenue and ducked into the revolving door. Once inside nobody knew that he, unlike most of the other guests, hadn’t arrived via Bentley, Rolls-Royce, or – for the impoverished – the stately yacht of a Lincoln Continental.

“Look, it’s another one.”

The woman spoke breathlessly and the crowd on the top floor of the triplex murmured less in horror than appreciation.

“Oh, man. Look at that. You can see the flames.”

“Where?”

“There. See?”

“Ronnie, go see if someone’s got a camera. Joan, look!”

Pellam eased closer to the window, six hundred feet above the sidewalk on which Cartier, Tiffany and Henri Bendel hawked their wares. He gazed west. Another fire, he noticed with disgust. A building somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen, north of Louis Bailey’s block. Occasionally you’d see a lick of flame shooting through a massive cloud of smoke. Rising a thousand feet into the milky sky, it blossomed like the mushroom of an atomic bomb.

“Oh, God,” a woman whispered. “It’s the hospital! Manhattan Hospital.”

Where he and Ettie had been treated, he realized. Where Juan Torres had died.

“You think it’s him? Where is that camera? I want to get a snap. You know who I mean? That crazy man I read about in the Times this morning?”

“Is that the fifth one he’s set? Or the sixth?”

The flames had grown and were now clearly visible.

No cameras materialized and after five minutes the fire became just another part of the scenery. Alone or in groups of two or three the guests turned back to the party.

Pellam continued to watch for a few moments. The silent ballet of the flames, the cloud of gray smoke rising high above Manhattan.

“Hey, how you doing?” The man’s voice was close by, riddled with Long Island lockjaw. “You’re dressed like an artiste. Are you an artiste?”

Pellam turned, found himself standing in front of a drunk, beefy young man in a tuxedo.

“Nope.”

“Ah. Quite a place, isn’t it?” He gestured his groggy head around the two-story living room in the Fifth Avenue penthouse triplex. “Roger’s little abode in the sky.”

“Not too shabby.”

At that moment Pellam caught sight of his quarry across the room. Roger McKennah. Then the real estate developer was lost in the crowd again.

“You know the story?” Pellam’s new friend began laughing drunkenly. Sipped more of his martini.

“The story?” Pellam responded.

The young man nodded enthusiastically but said nothing more.

Pellam prompted, “The one about the priest, the rabbi and the nun?”

The man frowned, shook his head then continued drunkenly and began explaining how the triplex here was latticed with rabbit warrens of rooms McKennah described as dens and parlors and music rooms and entertainment spaces .

“Uh-huh,” Pellam said uncertainly, looking over the crowd for McKennah once more.

“They’re really just bedrooms, see?” the young man told Pellam, spilling vodka on his patent leather shoes. “But there’re fifteen of them and the thing is, Roger McKennah doesn’t have a single friend – I mean, forget fifteen – who’d be willing to endure him long enough to stay overnight.”

The young man shivered with laughter and drank some more of the alcohol that the butt of his mean joke was providing. A blonde in a low-cut red dress cruised past. She caught the eyes of both Pellam and the young man and suddenly the young man vanished as if he were the tail and she, the dog.