Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

The woman tossed a handful of corn chips at the feet of one baby who had just started sobbing. Pellam shot the scene.

With robust approval McKennah said, “Stone-cold Pulitzer! Go, go, go!”

Twenty minutes later they were outside, deeply breathing fresher air. Pellam asked, “So, what the hell’s going on?”

He pointed at the building. “I’m trying to wipe those out of New York, places like that. They’re a disgrace… Excuse me, do I see some cynicism? Wondering why Roger McKennah wants to do a good deed? Oh, I’m no Mother Teresa. But that kind of crap doesn’t help anybody. It’s in my interest to have good, cheap day care centers in this neighborhood.”

“Day care?”

“And clean parks and pools. I want parents who can feel safe dropping their kids off and then coming to work in my office buildings. I want teenagers to play basketball on nice courts and swim in clean pools so they don’t mug my tenants at night. Self-interest? Sure. Say what you want, I don’t care. I read Ayn Rand in college and never got over her.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“Because I checked you out. You’re doing a documentary on the neighborhood. And you were going to trash me like everybody else does.”

“That’s what you think?”

“I’m tabloid-magnet and I’m fucking sick of it. I want to make sure you tell the whole story. Nobody has an inkling what I’m doing for the neighborhood.”

“Which is what?”

“How ’bout the public park I’m renovating at my personal fucking expense on Forty-fifth Street. And the pool repairs for the Department of Parks and Recreation that I guarantee’ll be finished by the time the schools’re out next year. And the new day care center on Thirty-sixth and the-”

“Wait – on Thirty-sixth and Tenth? On the corner?”

Louis Bailey’s building.

The supposed harem for McKennah’s mistresses.

“Yeah, that’s the place. I’m turning three floors there into the best day care center in the country. The parents show they’re gainfully employed or looking for work and their kids stay for five bucks a day, everything included. Food, games, Montessori tutors, books…”

“And I suppose it was just a coincidence that the building next door burned down? It didn’t have anything to do with the Tower?”

McKennah’s temper flared again. “Listen, you may be a hotshot in Tinseltown but that’s slander! I’ll sue your goddamn ass! I have never in my life torched a building. You can check every one of my projects going back to day one. I’ll go through the list building by building with you.”

“What about the tunnel? You didn’t torch the building to put it in?”

McKennah frowned. “You know about the tunnel?”

“And I know about your deal with Jimmy Corcoran.”

The developer blinked in surprise. Then said, “Well, you sure as hell don’t know too much about it. The tunnel doesn’t go under the lot that burned. There’s a Con Ed substation under there. It jogs west. Under the day care center building – which I happen to own.”

Oh. Bailey’s building.

“Sure, I leased subsurface rights from Corcoran. But I could care less about the other property. If you know so damn much about deeds and public records why the hell didn’t you just look up the owner and go spy on him ?”

Pellam explained about the St. Augustus Foundation. “It’s fake. I thought you were the ultimate owner. That’s what I was looking for in your office. Some connection.”

McKennah was no longer angry. He nodded, musing, “Using a not-for-profit to hide ownership. That’s damn clever. There’s no chance for pass-through profits so the Attorney General wouldn’t pay much attention to it.” He said this with admiration and seemed to file the idea away for future use.

“The board members of the Foundation are fake. But the lawyer I’m working with said it’d take weeks to trace who really runs the place.”

McKennah’s laugh was loud. “Find yourself a new lawyer.”

“You can do better?”

“Hell, yes. I could do it in a couple hours. But why should I? What’s in it for me?”

That’s the most important thing for Mr. McKennah. You don’t have to play fair but you have to play.

“Let’s do some horse-trading,” Pellam said coyly.

“Keep talking.”

“You’ve got leaks in your company, right?”

“I don’t know, do I?”

“Well, I knew all about your Jimmy Corcoran deal, didn’t I?”

McKennah said nothing for a moment, as he scrutinized Pellam. “You can give me a name?”

“You deliver,” Pellam said, “I’ll deliver.”

They rose in silence to the velvet heaven of high-rise New York.

On the seventy-first floor of McKennah’s flagship building on the Upper East Side the developer led him through a maze of offices and deposited him with a bushy-haired, well-dressed, nervous man. Elmore Pavone nodded an uneasy greeting, realizing he was about to receive yet another burden upon his sloping shoulders. But it was a burden being placed there by Roger McKennah himself and would therefore remain firmly affixed until he had solved whatever problem it represented.

The developer explained to Pavone about the arson and the St. Augustus Foundation. The adjutant too seemed impressed with this illicit use of nonprofit corporations.

Pellam said, “I think it’s Corcoran who’s behind the Foundation.”

McKennah and Pavone got a big laugh out of this.

The developer said, “This’s way, way outa Corcoran’s league. He’s a putz. The phrase ‘small-time’ was invented for him.”

Pellam cocked his eyebrow. “Yeah? I heard he negotiated you under the table.”

“Oh, did you?”

“On the tunnel deal. Taking a cut of the action when he granted you the easement.”

McKennah blinked in astonishment. “How the hell do you know all this stuff?”

Word on the street.

Pellam said, “Is it true or not?”

The developer smiled. “Yeah, Corcoran gets a cut of the profits. But the way the contracts reads is that he gets one percent of the profit quote deriving from his property. That means he gets a piece of the action from any money I make from the tunnel, not the tower. The deal with the city is that I’m leasing the tunnel to the Transit Authority for a token rental – ten bucks a year. So Jimmy Corcoran’s share is ten cents a year.”

The developer added, “I’ll always be one step ahead of punks like Jimmy Corcoran. I was in an Irish gang in the Kitchen too, you know. The difference is, I graduated.”

“Not a great guy to have as an enemy,” Pellam pointed out. “Corcoran.”

McKennah laughed again. “You hear about the Gophers?”

Pellam nodded. The Hell’s Kitchen gang that so fascinated Ettie’s grandfather.

“You know who finally broke their back?”

“Enlighten me,” Pellam said.

“Not the cops. Not the city. Lord knows the feds didn’t do shit. It was business that broke ’ em up. The New York Central Railroad. They hired Pinkerton and in six months the gang was history. If Corcoran hassles me, I’ll tell you, that little shit is going down hard.”

Pellam said, “Well, if it’s not him then who’s behind the Foundation?”

Pavone and McKennah conferred. Assuming the motive for torching the building was that it was landmarked, Pavone mused, the only reason you would clear a landmarked building was to put up something new. “To build something new, you’d have to file applications for construction permits and P &Z variances and an environmental impact statement.”

McKennah nodded and explained to Pellam that builders often had to wait months before getting construction permits for major projects in the city. Planning and zoning variances, which necessitated public hearings and EPA and utility waivers were sometimes required too. These applications would have to be filed as soon as possible – to minimize the time the owner had to hold property that produced no income and yet on which steep taxes were levied.