Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

Pellam tested the shower but the water was ice cold. Pass on that. He dressed and stepped out into a gassy, clear morning, scalding hot. Took a cab to his place on Twelfth Street. He climbed the steps of his apartment, watching two energetic youngsters, names razor-cut in their hair, streak past on skateboards.

He decided he wanted a bath and a cup of very hot, black coffee. Just sit in the tub and forget arson, pyros, Latino thugs, Irish gangsters, and lovers with enigmatic attitudes.

Climbing the dim stairs slowly. Thinking of the bath, thinking of soapy water. The mantra worked. He found he could forget it all – he could wipe all of Hell’s Kitchen out of his mind. Well, almost all. Everything except for Ettie Washington.

He was thinking of all the flights of stairs Ettie had climbed over the years. She’d never lived in an elevator building, always walk-ups. She climbed stairs for seven decades. Carrying her baby sister Elizabeth. Helping Grandma Ledbetter up and down dim stairwells. Lugging food for her men until one left her and the other died drunk in the Hudson’s sooty waters, then for her babies and children until they were taken from her or fled the city, and then for herself.

“… That’s a word for us here in the Kitchen. ‘Anonymous.’ Lord. ‘Ignored’ is more like it. Nobody pays attention to us anymore. You got that Al Sharpton fellow. Now he’ll go to Bensonhurst, he’ll go to Crown Heights and raise some hell and people hear ’bout it. But nobody ever comes to the Kitchen. Even with all the Irish here the St. Paddy’s Day Parade doesn’t even come over this way. That’s fine with me. I like it nice and private. Keep the world out. What’s the world ever done for me? Answer me that.”

Ettie Washington had told the glossy eye of Pellam’s Betacam that she dreamed of other cities. She dreamed of owning stylish hats and gold necklaces and silk dresses. She dreamed of being a cabaret singer. The rich wife of Billy Doyle, a highfalutin landlord.

But Ettie recognized these hopes as illusions only – to be examined from time to time with pleasure or sorrow or disdain then tucked away. She didn’t expect her life to change. She was content here in the Kitchen, where most people cut their dreams to fit their lives. And it seemed so unfair that the woman should have to lose even this minuscule corner she’d been backed into.

Breathing deeply, he arrived at his own fourth-floor apartment.

A bath. Yessir. When you live in a camper most of your life, baths take on a great importance. Bubble baths particularly, though that was a secret he kept to himself.

A bath and coffee.

Heaven.

Pellam dug the keys out of his black jeans and walked to the door. His eyes narrowed. He looked at the lock. It was twisted, sideways.

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.