Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

The weary technician said, “Sorry, mister. I didn’t treat anyone like that. But we got eight BBRs.”

Pellam shook his head.

The tech explained. “ ‘Burned beyond recognition.’ ”

Walking through the numb crowds, Pellam asked about the boy. Somebody thought he might have seen the young man climb down the fire escape but he couldn’t be sure. Somebody else, a tourist, asked him to take his picture in front of the building and held out his Nikon. Pellam stared in silent disbelief and walked on.

Closer to the building he stepped away from the crowd and nearly ran into Fire Marshal Lomax. The marshal glanced at Pellam and didn’t say a word. His eyes returned to four bodies lying on the ground, arms and legs drawn up in the pugilistic pose. They were loosely covered with sheets. His radio crackled and he spoke into his Handi-Talkie. “Battalion commander has advised fire is knocked down as of eighteen hundred hours.”

“Say again, Marshal Two-five-eight.”

Lomax repeated the message then added, “Appears to be suspicious origin. Get the crime scene buses down here.”

“That’s a roger, Marshal Two-five-eight.”

He put the radio back in his belt. A rumpled man in general, he was now a mess. Shirt soot-stained, drenched in sweat, slacks torn. There was a gash on his forehead. He pulled on latex gloves, bent down and tossed the sheet off one of the victims, searched the horrible corpse; Pellam had to look away. Without glancing up, Lomax said in a calm voice, “Let me tell you a story, Mr. Lucky.”

“I-”

“Few years ago I was working in the Bronx. There was this club on Southern Boulevard, social club. You know what a social club is, right? Just a place for people to hang out. Drink, dance. The name of the place was Happy Land. One night there was maybe a hundred people inside, having a good time. It was a Honduran neighborhood. They were good people. Working people. No drugs, no guns. Just people… having a good time.”

Pellam said nothing. His eyes dipped to the macabre spectacle of the corpse. He tried to look away but couldn’t.

“There was this guy,” Lomax said in his eerie, dead voice, “who’d been going out with the coat-check girl and she’d dumped him. He got drunk and went out and bought a buck’s worth of gas, came back and just poured it in the lobby, lit it and went home. Just like that: set a fire and went home. I don’t know, maybe to watch TV. Maybe have some dinner. I don’t know.”

“I hope he got caught and went to jail,” Pellam said.

“Oh, yeah, he did. But that’s not my point. What I’m saying is there were eighty-seven people killed in that fire. The biggest arson murder in U.S. history. And I was on the ID team. See, it was a problem – because they were dancing.”

“Dancing?”

“Right. Most of the women didn’t have purses on them and the men’d left their jackets, with their wallets, hanging on the chairs. So we didn’t know who was who. What we did was we laid all the bodies out and then we’re thinking, Jesus, we can’t have eighty-seven families walk up and down the street and look at this. So we took Polaroids of them. A couple shots of each body. And put it in this notebook for the families to look at. I was the one who handed the book to every mother or father or brother or sister whose kids were at Happy Land that night. I’m never going to forget that.”

He covered up the body and looked up. “One guy did all that. One guy with a fucking dollar’s worth of gasoline. I just wanted to tell you I’m putting a call to the D.A. to move Ettie Washington out of protective isolation.”

Pellam began to speak. But Lomax, fatigue in every move, stood and walked to the second body. He said, “She killed a kid. Every prisoner in Detention knows that by now. I give her a day or two. At best.”

He crouched down and pulled the sheet off.

The shades were down in Bailey’s office.

Maybe to stave off the heat, Pellam guessed. Then he realized that the blackout must’ve been at the request of the nervous man who sat forward on a rickety chair across from the lawyer. He was continually adjusting his position and looking around the room as if a hitman were sighting on his back from across the street.

Pellam paid no attention to the visitor. To the lawyer he said, “I found Alex but the pyro got to him first.”

“The Eagleton fire?” Bailey asked, nodding knowingly.

“Yep.”

“He’s dead?”

Pellam shrugged. “Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he just took off. I don’t know. There were unidentified bodies.”

“Oh, my God,” offered the visitor. He looked like the sort who’d be wringing his hands if they weren’t gripping the seat of the chair so desperately.

Pellam then told the lawyer what Lomax had said about protective custody.

“No!” Bailey whispered. “That’s bad. She won’t last an hour in general population.”

“Goddamn blackmail,” Pellam muttered. “Can you stop him from doing it?”

“I can delay it is all. But they’ll release her. The D.A.’ll agree in an instant if they think it’ll pressure her into giving up the arsonist.” He jotted a note on a piece of sunbleached foolscap and turned his attention to the nervous man who sat before him. He was skinny, middle-aged and wore a clever toupee. His pants had a slight flair. A disco demon from the seventies. The lawyer introduced the men.

Newton Clarke rose slightly and shook Pellam’s hand with a sopping palm, then deflated himself back to his cracked Naugahyde roost. He never held Pellam’s eye for more than a second.

“Newton here has a few interesting things to tell us. Start over, why don’t you? Some wine, Pellam? No? You’re such an abstainer. Okay, Newton, talk to us. Tell us where you work.”

“Pillsbury, Milbank & Hogue.”

“Roger McKennah’s law firm. The one his wife told me about.”

“Right.”

Newton’s job, it seemed, was in the managing attorney’s office.

Bailey explained, “They’re the ones who handle scheduling, make calendar calls and so on, filings. You get the picture. They’re not lawyers. Newton could be, right? With everything you know about the law.” A glance at Pellam. “But he wants an honest profession.”

Clarke smiled uneasily. His eyes flicked to the window as a passerby cast a hurried shadow on the dusty blinds.

Bailey swilled more wine. “Give us your take on Roger McKennah.”

“Well, for one thing, he knows everything that goes on in the Kitchen.”

“Like Santa Claus, is he? Making his list… Don’t you worry, Newton, your mission here’s safe. We’ll give you bushy eyebrows and a fake nose when you leave.”

Clarke forced his shoulders back and sat up straight. He offered a humorless laugh. “Jesus, Louis, his building’s right across the street. We should’ve met someplace safe.”

“Zurich, Grand Cayman?” Bailey asked with uncharacteristic acid. “Now what about McKennah?”

The man told his story. Newton indeed had a clerk’s personality. Organized, precise, detailed. The kind of documentary interviewee, Pellam decided, who seemed perfect but whose testimony he could use only in small doses; for all his accuracy Clarke spoke without a bit of passion or color. We’ll take robust lies over the pale truth any day, Pellam had come to believe.

“Should I-?”

“From the beginning,” Bailey said. “The very beginning.”

“Okay, okay. Well, Mr. McKennah grew up in the Kitchen. He was poor, crude… When he was in his twenties he decided to remake himself. He dumped the girl he was engaged to because she was Jewish.” Clarke glanced at Pellam’s features to see how inappropriate this comment was. Then he continued. “He hired a speech and dress coach to help him improve his image and he started working his way through New York real estate. He bought his first building in Flatbush when he was twenty-three. Then a building in Prospect Park, then Astoria, then a couple in the Heights and the Slope. He was twenty-nine. He had nine buildings.