Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

“No, he didn’t.”

“Let’s try him again.”

But Bailey was shaking his head. “I don’t think we should trust him. But I can find out.”

“Cleg?” Pellam asked. The skinny horseman, armed with his liquor bottles.

“No,” Bailey said, reflecting. “I’ll do this one myself. We should meet back here at, say, eight?”

“Sure.”

Bailey looked up and found Pellam’s eyes on him. “Thought I treated him a little harshly? Newton?”

Pellam shrugged. “I’ve finally nailed down your secret. How you clog up gears, Louis.”

“Have you now?”

“You cultivate debts.”

The lawyer sipped wine and chuckled, nodding. “I learned a long time ago about the power of debt. What’s the one thing that makes a man powerful, a president, a king, a corporate executive? That people owe him – their lives, their jobs, their freedom. That’s the secret. A man who knows how to milk debt is the man who can keep power the longest of anyone.”

The dull ice cubes clinked on the surface of the lemon-colored wine.

“And what does Clarke owe you?”

“Newton? Oh, in crass terms, about thirty-thousand dollars. He used to be a broker. He came to me with a real estate investment partnership idea a few years ago and I plunked down a chunk of my life savings. I found out later it was all phoney. The U.S. Attorney and the SEC caught him and I lost the money.”

“And this is how he’s paying you off?”

“As far as I’m concerned, information is negotiable tender. Tough luck that none of his other creditors feel that way.”

“How long till he pays you off?”

Bailey laughed. “Oh, he probably has. Ages ago. But he doesn’t believe it, of course. And he never will. That’s the marvelous thing about debts. Even after you repay them, they never really go away.”

No one paid any attention to the young worker as he wheeled the 55-gallon drum of cleaning fluid up the ramp to the apartment building. It was seven-thirty, dusk, but Thirty-sixth Street was lit up like a carnival, workers scurrying to get McKennah Tower ready for the topping-off ceremony.

Wearing white overalls, Sonny rested the dolly carrying the drum on the floor and in front of the door. He glanced at the tarnished sign, Louis Bailey, Esq . He listened and heard nothing. Then he knocked several times and when there was no answer he easily picked the lock – a talent that he didn’t possess when he entered Juvenile Detention but that he had with him when he left – and then wheeled the drum inside.

Sonny was a worried man now. The Eagleton fire had galvanized the police and fire department. He’d never seen so many cops and marshals on the West Side. They were practically stopping cars on the street and frisking drivers. They were getting close and he had to stop them. A rough drawing of him had made the dinnertime news.

Shaking hands, sweaty face.

And tears. He was so frustrated and frightened that once or twice on the way over here, wheeling the drum up Ninth Avenue from his apartment, he’d found himself crying.

Walking into the office and parking the drum beside the lawyer’s desk. The young man then sat down in the swivel chair. Fake leather, he thought disdainfully. Agent Scullery – a bit shorter and a lot deader than she’d been when she looked down at him like a squirrel – had had much better taste in interior designs. Still, the office pleased him. There was plenty of paper. He’d never burned a lawyer’s office and he thought that it would go up very fast because there was sooo much paper.

Sonny pulled a few books off the shelf, flipped them open. Looked down at the gray blocks of type. He had no idea what these particular words meant. Sonny used to read books all the time (though he preferred his mother’s reading to him). But that was years ago and he realized now that they no longer interested him. He wondered why that was. He couldn’t remember when he’d last read a book. Years ago. What was it?

The book drooped in his hand…

Yes, he remembered. It was a true story. About the Ringling Brothers circus fire in Hartford in 1944. More than a hundred and fifty people were killed when the big top burned in a matter of minutes. The bandleader played Stars and Stripes Forever – the traditional circus disaster march – to warn all the performers and workers of the blaze but they hadn’t been able to save that many people. Sonny remembered particularly the story of Little Miss 1565, who died in the crush of the audience trying to escape. She was clearly recognizable but no one ever claimed the body.

Why, Sonny thought when he finished the book, didn’t he feel the least bit bad about the girl?

He stopped brooding and returned to his task.

On the desk he noticed Pellam’s name and phone number written on a piece of yellow paper. The Midnight Cowboy Joe Buck faggot Antichrist… Sonny’s hands began to shake again – the sweat was already peppering his forehead – and he felt the urge to cry once more.

Stop it stop it stopit stopstopstop itttttt!

He had to pause for a moment until he calmed. Get to work. Keep busy. He unscrewed the lightbulb from the old lawyer’s desk lamp and carefully opened his knapsack, taking out one of his special light bulbs, heavy and fat with the slick, milky juice. He rested it carefully on the desk and then turned to the oil drum and took his wrench from his overall pocket. He began to work the lid off.

Sparks flew high above his head, cascading off the top of McKennah Tower, an eighth of a mile into the air. He could see a dozen tiny suns of welders’ arcs.

Thinking about Carol Wyandotte, remembering how he’d seen this same astonishing building on his way to her apartment, the night he’d stayed over.

He’d just returned from the Youth Outreach Center, looking for her. But she’d already left for the night. Her assistant said that Carole had been in court all day. One of the kids staying at the YOC there had pulled a knife on an undercover cop during a buy-and-bust operation and Carole had spent six hours with the A.D.A. trying to convince them that he’d just been scared, he hadn’t really intended to murder the officer.

It hadn’t been a good day for her and she’d been pretty upset, the assistant told him. She’d left no message for Pellam at the YOC. And there’d been none on his machine at home.

Pellam was returning to Louis Bailey’s office, to meet the lawyer as planned. He looked down from the crown of the Tower and once again examined the billboard that he’d seen at a dozen times on his way to interview Ettie. An ad for McKennah Tower. He noticed that beneath the slick picture of the building were bulletpoints of features. The 60-story structure would be computer-controlled (a “smart” building), would have a ten-thousand-square-foot public atrium, utomated pneumatic waste removal, custom landscaping, a five-thousand-seat Broadway theater, a gourmet restaurant, boutiques, high-R-value insulation, water-conserving toilets, self-programming elevators…

He was, however, less impressed with this than he was with the facts that weren’t quite so public, the facts Louis Bailey had told him: the labyrinthine deals McKennah had cut with City Hall, P &Z, the Board of Assessment, the Landmark Preservation Commission, the MTA, the Department of Revenue, the unions, the Clinton Community Association, the West Side Democratic Club – the deals in which every inch of the building had been bought, sold or liened in exchange for tax abatements and promises of contracts and public works renovations and sidewalk improvements and employment and oh yes hard cash pressed into very eager hands call them contributions or call them what you will. The actual construction of the monumental edifice was a dull anticlimax to the deal-making that resulted in its building.