Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

“And?”

“She said it was.”

“Well.” Bailey examined the picture. Squinted. Picked it up and laughed. “Say, this is very good. How’d you do it?”

“Morphing. Computer graphics at my post-production lab.”

The photo was the Polaroid that Pellam had taken of Ettie at WDC, body, hair, hands, dress. The face, however, was that of Ella Fitzgerald. Pellam had had the two images assembled by computer and then had taken a Polaroid of the result.

“Encouraging,” the lawyer said. Though Pellam thought he wasn’t as encouraged as he ought to be.

Pellam pulled open the door of the tiny refrigerator. Jugs of wine. No water, no soft drinks, no juice. He looked up. “What’s eating you, Louis?”

“That poker game I told you about? With the fire marshal?”

“It didn’t happen?”

“Oh, it did.”

Pellam took the slip of paper Bailey offered with an unsteady hand.

Dear Louis;

I did what we talked about and got a game together with Stan, Sobie, Fred and the Mouse, remember him? Been years. I lost you sixty bucks but Stan let me take a bottle of Dewar’s, almost full, so I’ll drop it off sometime after its not so almost full any more.

Here’s what I found and I think you might not like it. Lomax found a passbook Washington didn’t tell any one about. Grand total inside of over Ten Thousand. And guess what. She took out 2 Gs the day before the fire. Also they say your a prick because you didn’t list the $ on her financial disclosure statement for the bail motion. But mostly they’re happy cause it gooses they’re case.

Joey

Ten thousand?

Pellam was stunned. Where on earth had Ettie got that much money? She’d never mentioned any savings to him. When Bailey’d asked what she could contribute to the bail bondsman she said maybe eight, nine hundred, tops. He remembered the other day too. She’d said she couldn’t have bought the insurance policy from Flo Epstein’s agency because she didn’t have the money.

He looked out the window, watching the bulldozer demolishing what was left of Ettie’s building. A worker with a sledgehammer was pounding a star-point chisel into a scorched stone bulldog to break it apart.

He heard Ettie’s voice:

“… I’m trying and recall how many buildings were on this block. I’m not sure. They were all tenements like this one. But they’re mostly gone now. This one was built by an immigrant in 1876. Heinrik Deuter. German man. You know those bulldogs out front? The ones on either side of the steps. He had a stone carver come and carve those because he had a bulldog when he was a boy in Germany. I met his great-grandson a few years back. People say it’s sad they pull down these old places to build new ones. Well, I say so what? A hundred years ago they tore down other buildings to build these , right? Things come and things go. Just like people in your life. And that’s just the way it works.”

Pellam said nothing for a long while. He picked up a large skeleton key from Bailey’s desk, studied the brass intently then replaced it. “How’d the police find out about the account?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did the teller identify her as the woman who took out the money?”

“I have a call in to somebody in the department to find that out. They’ve frozen the account.”

“This is bad, isn’t it?”

“Yep. It sure is.”

The phone rang. It was an old-fashioned bell, the sound jarring. Bailey picked it up.

Pellam watched a car cruise slowly past. Again he heard the thump of bass notes from that hip-hop song. It must have been number one on the rap chart. “… the Man got a message just for you, gonna smoke your brothers and your sisters too .”

It faded. When he looked back he saw that Louis Bailey was holding the phone absently. He tried to replace it. Needed to do it twice to seat the receiver in its cradle. “My God,” he whispered. “My God.”

“What, Louis? Is it Ettie?”

“There was a fire on the Upper West side a half hour ago.” He took a deep breath. “The insurance agency. Two employees were killed. Flo Epstein was one of them. It was him, Pellam. Somebody recognized him. It was that young man from the gas station. He used that napalm of his. He burned them both to death. Jesus Lord…”

Pellam exhaled, stunned at the news. He was thinking: The pyro had followed him there, to the agency. He’d been to Pellam’s apartment earlier and broken in, stolen the tapes. Then he’d followed him uptown. That’s probably why he hadn’t killed Pellam in his apartment. He was using him to find witnesses.

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

And if you’re burning to death…

Bailey said, “She’d signed an affidavit about identifying Ettie. That’s admissible. What she told you about the ginned-up picture isn’t. It’s hearsay.”

Pellam looked out Bailey’s window at a square of earth near where Ettie’s building used to stand, illuminated by sunlight shining ruddy and immaculate through a clear sky. It occurred to Pellam now that because the building was gone, sunlight would shine on places that hadn’t been lit for more than a hundred years. This recaptured brilliance seemed to Pellam to alter both the present and the past, as if the ghosts of thousands of Hell’s Kitchen residents long gone to bullets and disease and hard lives were once again at risk.

“You want to plead her, don’t you?” Pellam asked the lawyer.

He nodded.

Pellam said, “You’ve wanted to all along, haven’t you?”

Bailey steepled his fingers, his pale wrists jutting from dirty white cuffs. “A plea bargain is considered a win here in the Kitchen.”

“What about the innocent ones?”

“This doesn’t have a damn thing in the world to do with guilt or innocence. It’s like Social Security or selling your blood for booze or food money. Pleading in exchange for a reduced sentence – it’s just something that makes life a little easier in the Kitchen.”

“If I hadn’t been involved,” Pellam said, “you would’ve gone ahead, right? And plead her?”

“A half hour after they arrested her,” Bailey responded.

Pellam nodded. He said nothing as he walked outside and started down the sidewalk. The backhoe lifted a shovelful of rubble from the wreckage of Ettie’s building – chunks of the hand-carved bulldog mostly – and dropped it unceremoniously into the Dumpster at the curb.

“Things come and things go. And that’s just the way it works.”

There was nothing to do but ask. Straight out.

Pellam watched Ettie walk stiffly into the visitor’s room at the Woman’s Detention Center. Her dim smile faded and she asked, “What is it, John?” Her eyes narrowed at the streak on his face. “What happened…” But her voice faded as she studied his expression.

“The police found the bank account.”

“The…?”

“The one in Harlem. The savings account with ten thousand in it.”

The old woman shook her head vehemently and touched her temple with her good hand, the ring finger of which had been broken long ago and had set badly. Her face shone with contrition for maybe a second. Then she spat out, “I didn’t tell anybody about my savings. How the fuck’d they find it?” She was drawn and secretive now.

“You didn’t tell anyone. You didn’t tell the court or your bail bondsman. You didn’t tell Louis. That doesn’t look good.”

“There’s no reason for the world to know everything about a woman,” she snapped. “Her man takes her things away, her children take things away, everybody takes and takes and takes! How’d they find out?”