Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

There was some risk to the arsonist that the police or a fire marshal might find the applications. But in a city bureaucracy as unwieldy as New York’s, arson investigators would probably be content with checking only the ownership of record, foregoing deeper scrutiny. Especially if they had a suspect in custody.

McKennah nodded to Pavone, who snatched up the phone and spoke in cryptic terms of art to an underling. He jotted some notes. In three minutes he hung up. “Got it. No P &Z but a White Plains construction company applied for a building permit for 458 West Thirty-sixth Street – the site of the fire – two days ago. Morrone Brothers on Route 22.”

McKennah nodded, seemed to recognize the name.

Pavone continued, “They’re going to put up a seven-story parking garage on the lot that burned and the two lots next to it.”

“Parking,” Pellam whispered. All this death and horror for a parking lot?

“So John Doe sets up the St. Augustus Foundation, buys the two vacant lots, torches the property on the third and builds his garage.”

“I want John Doe,” Pellam said. “How do we find him?”

“Who’d do Morrone’s steel work?” the developer asked Pavone.

“Bronx Superstructures, Giannelli…”

“No, no,” McKennah barked, “in Westchester ! In Connecticut. Let’s think tighter here, Elm. Come on. Whoever it is’s got to keep some distance from the city.”

“You’re right, okay, okay. Probably it’d be Bedford Building and Foundation.”

“No.” McKennah shook his head vehemently. “They’re doing the Metro North job. They don’t have the capacity to do that and a garage. Come on! Think!”

“Then how about Hudson Steel? Yonkers.”

“Yes!” McKennah snapped his fingers and picked up the phone, dialing from memory. A few seconds later he muttered into the receiver, “Roger McKennah here. Is he in?” In the time it took to drop another phone call like a red-hot drill bit the contractor was on the line.

“Hi, Tony… Yeah, yeah.” McKennah’s rolling eyes suggested how eagerly the man’s tail was wagging. “Okay, okay, friend, I’m in kind of a hurry. Here’s what it is. Don’t fuck with me, okay? You gimme answers and you’ll do our new dock in Greenwich. No bidding, no nothing… Yeah, pick yourself up off the floor… Yeah, lucky you. Now, I hear Morrone’s the general on a garage in the city. West Thirty-sixth. St. Augustus Foundation’s the owner. What d’you mean it’s supposed to be hush-hush? There’re no fucking secrets from me, Tony. You’re subbing the steel, right?… You meet anybody from St. Augustus?.. Well, check it out. And call me. And I mean in three minutes. And Tony, did I tell you, I’m budgeting one point three million for the dock job.”

McKennah hung up. “He’ll call back. So, that’s my part of the deal. Now it’s your turn. Who’s the fucking spy who’s leaking my secrets?”

Pellam said, “When I was over at the Tower a little while ago, taking that tour of your office?”

“Tour,” the developer said wryly.

Pellam continued. “I noticed one of the secretaries in the rental office. Kay Haggerty? I saw her nameplate.”

The flash in McKennah’s eyes explained that voluptuous Miss Haggerty was more than a secretary.

“Kay?” McKennah asked. “What about her? She’s a nice kid.”

“She may be. But she’s also your leak.”

“Impossible. She’s a hard worker. And I’ve…” He groped for a euphemism. “I trust her completely. Why d’you think she’d be spying on me?”

“Because she’s Jimmy Corcoran’s girlfriend. I saw her last week in the 488 Bar and Grill. She was sitting on his lap.”

The location scout turned filmmaker paced high in the midtown sky, looking out Roger McKennah’s perfectly clean windows.

His Nokona boots silently pressed their narrow silhouettes into the lush blue carpet. It seemed to him that here, seventy stories above the streets, the air was rarified. He felt breathless but he supposed that wasn’t altitude or corporate power but just the residue of smoke in his lungs from the fire at Bailey’s.

Flanked by a billionaire and his ruthless associate, Pellam paced. Minutes passed like days then finally the telephone chirped.

The developer dramatically snagged the phone from its cradle the way he probably always did when others were present. He listened, then put his palm over the mouthpiece and looked at Pellam.

“Got ’em.”

He jotted a note and hung up. Showed it to Pellam. “This name mean anything to you?”

Pellam stared at the paper for a long moment. “I’m afraid it does,” he said.

“Yo, look, man. Her, she the bitch work at that place fo’ kids.”

“Man, don’t be talking ’bout her that way. She okay. My brother, he all fucked up and he stay there a month. Was a cluckhead. Got hisself off rock, you know what I’m saying?”

“This nigger say she a bitch. All y’all think that be a okay place but all kinda shit go on there. Why you dissing me?”

“I ain’t dissing you. I just saying she ain’t no bitch. Got a minda her own. And look out for people is what I’m saying.”

Carol Wyandotte sat on the pungent creosote-soaked pilings overlooking the murky Hudson and listened to the young men lope past on their way south. Where were they headed? It was impossible to tell. To jobs as forklift operators? To direct an independent film like John Singleton or young Spike Lee. To pull on throwaways, take a box cutter and mug a tourist in Times Square.

When she heard the exchange she thought, as she’d said recently to John Pellam, Oh, he doesn’t mean “bitch” that way.

But apparently he did.

Anyway, who was she to say anything? Carol had been wrong before about the people whose lives she’d wedged her way into.

She sat on this pier under a torrid sun and looked at the ships cruising up and down the Hudson. Tugs, few pleasure boats, a yacht. A ubiquitous Circle Line cruise ship, painted in the colors of the Italian flag, moved slowly past. The tourists on board were still excited and eager for scenery; but then their voyage had just begun. How enthusiastic would they be, hot and hungry, in three hours?

One thing was different about Carol Wyandotte today. She had pulled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, revealing rather pudgy arms. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d appeared bare-armed in public. Already a slight blush of sunburn covered her skin. She looked down and turned her right arm over, gazing at the terrible mass of scars. She rubbed her hand absently over this ruined part of her body then buried her eyes in the crook of her arm and let the tears soak the skin.

The car door slammed some distance away and by the time she counted, obsessively, to fifty she heard footsteps rustling through the grass. They hesitated then continued. When she reached seventy-eight in her count she heard the voice. It was, of course, John Pellam’s. “Mind if I join you?”

“The property was willed to a charity years ago,” Carol told him, hugging her knees to her chest.

“And then got transferred to the Outreach Center. I was working in the main office then and saw those three lots on the books of the charity – the ones at 454, 456 and 458 Thirty-sixth. Then I noticed McKennah’s surveying team working in the block where the Tower is now. I asked around and heard a rumor he was going to build. That neighborhood was a nightmare then. But I knew what was coming. I knew the value of those three lots’d skyrocket in a couple of years. Of course, none of the board of the charity would dare even set foot in the Kitchen; they had no clue what was going on. So I went to them and said we had to dump them fast because there’d been some reporters doing stories about teenage hookers and pushers and homeless squatting in the buildings.”