Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

Outside he bought a newspaper then flagged down a cab.

The clattering vehicle wove right and left through traffic, as if the cabbie were avoiding hot pursuit, and Pellam tightly gripped the handhold as he tried to read about the fire. The story was dwindling in news value and today’s paper reported only that Ettie’d been arrested and confirmed what he’d known – that the only serious injury was Juan Torres. Pellam remembered the boy clearly. He’d interviewed his mother and recalled the energetic twelve-year-old, standing in his apartment, by the window, left-hooking a package of Huggies like a punching bag and saying to Pellam insistently, “My daddy, he know Jose Canseco. No, no, no. Really. He does!”

The boy’s condition was still critical.

A picture of Ettie, being led by a woman cop out of Manhattan Hospital, accompanied the article. Her hair was a mess. Light flares sparked off the chrome cuffs on her wrists, just below the cast that Pellam had signed.

Etta Washington, formerly Doyle, neé Wilkes, was seventy-two years old. Born in Hell’s Kitchen she’d never lived anywhere else. The 458 W. Thirty-sixth Street building had been her home for the past five years. She’d resided for the prior forty in a similar tenement up the street, now demolished. All her other residences had been in the Kitchen, within five square blocks of one another.

Ettie had ventured out of New York state only three times for brief trips, two of them funerals of kin in North Carolina. Ettie had been a star student in her first two years of high school but dropped out to work and try to become a cabaret singer. She’s performed for some years, always opening for better-known talent. Mostly in Harlem or the Bronx, though occasionally she’d land a job on Swing Street – Fifty-Second. Pellam had heard some old wire recordings transcribed onto tape and was impressed with her low voice. For years she’d worked odd jobs, supporting herself and sometimes lovers, while resisting the inevitable proposals of marriage that a beautiful woman living alone in Hell’s Kitchen was flooded with. She finally married, late and incongruously: her husband was an Irishman named Billy Doyle.

A handsome, restless man, Doyle left her years ago, after only three years of marriage.

“He was just doing what a man does, my Billy. They got that runaway spirit. May be their nature but it’s hard to forgive ’em for it. Wonder if you’ve got it too, John.”

Sitting beside the camera as he’d recorded this, Pellam had nodded encouragingly and reminded himself to edit out her last sentence and her accompanying chuckle.

Her second husband was Harold Washington, who drowned, drunk, in the Hudson River.

“No love lost there. But he was dependable with the money and never cheated and never raised his voice to me. Sometimes I miss him. If I remember to think about him.”

Ettie’s youngest son, Frank, had been caught in a cross fire and killed by a man wearing a purple top hat in a drunken shoot-out in Times Square. Her daughter, Elizabeth, of whom Ettie was immensely proud, was a real estate saleswoman in Miami. In a year or two, Ettie would be moving to Florida to live near her. Her oldest son, James – a handsome mulatto – was the only child she had by Doyle. He too caught the wanderlust flu and disappeared out west – California, Ettie assumed. She hadn’t heard from him in twelve years.

The elderly woman had been, in her youth, sultry and beautiful if somewhat imperious (as evidenced by a hundred photos, all presently burned to gray ash) and was now handsome woman with youthful, dark skin. She debated often about dying her salt-and-pepper hair back to its original black. Ettie talked like a quick, mid-Atlantic Southerner, drank bad wine and cooked delicious tripe with bacon and onions. And she could unreel stories about her own past and about her mother and grandmother like a natural actress, as if God gave her that gift to make up for others denied.

And what would happen to her now?

With a jolt the cab burst across Eighth Avenue, the Maginot Line bordering Hell’s Kitchen.

Pellam glanced out the window as they passed storefront, in whose window the word Bakery was painted over, replaced by: Youth Outreach Center – Clinton Branch .

Clinton.

This was a raw spot with longtime residents. The neighborhood to them was “Hell’s Kitchen” and would never be anything but. “Clinton” was what the city officials and public relations and real estate people called the ’hood. As if a name change could convince the public this part of town wasn’t a morass of tenements and gangs and smokey bodegas and hookers and pebbles of crack vials littering sidewalks but was the New Frontier for corporate headquarters and yuppie lofts.

Remembering Ettie’s voice: “ You hear the story how this place got its name? The one they tell is a policeman down here, a long time ago, he says to another cop, ‘This place is hell.’ And the other one goes, ‘Hell’s mild compared to here. This’s hell’s kitchen.’ That’s the story, but that’s not how it happened. No sir. Where the name came from was it’s called after this place in London. What else in New York? Even the name of the neighborhood’s stolen from someplace else .”

“Look I am saying,” the cabbie broke into Pellam’s thoughts. “Same fucking thing fucking yesterday. And for weeks.”

He was gesturing furiously at a traffic jam ahead of them. It seemed to be caused by the construction work going on across from the site of the fire – that high-rise nearing completion. Cement trucks pulled in and out through a chain-link gate, holding up traffic.

“That building. I am wanting them to go fuck themselves. It has ruins fucking neighborhood. All of it.” He slapped the dashboard hard, nearly knocking over his royal orb air freshener.

Pellam paid and climbed out of the cab, leaving the driver to his muttered curses. He walked toward the Hudson River.

He passed dark, woody storefronts – Vinnie’s Fruits and Vegetables, Managro’s Deli, Cuzin’s Meats and Provisions, whose front window was filled with whole dressed animals. Booths of clothing and wooden stands filled with piles of spices and herbs packed the side-walks. A store selling African goods advertised a sale on ukpor and ogbono. “ Buy now !” it urged.

Pellam passed Ninth Avenue and continued on to Tenth. He passed the shell of Ettie’s building, floating in a surreal grove of faint smoke, and continued on toward a scabby six-story, red-brick building on the corner.

He paused in front of the handwritten sign in the grimy window of a ground floor apartment.

Louis Bailey, Esq. Attorney at Law/Abogado. Criminal, Civil, Wills, Divorces, Personal Injuries. Motorcycle Accidents. Real Estate. Notary Public. Copies Made. Send Your Fax.

Two window panes were missing. Yellow newspaper had replaced one. The other was blocked by a faded box of Post Toasties. Pellam stared at the decrepit building then checked to make sure he had the name right. He did.

Send your fax…

He pushed inside.

There was no waiting room, just a single large room of an apartment converted into an office. The place was jam-packed with papers, briefs, books, some bulky, antiquated office equipment – a dusty, feeble computer and a fax machine. A hundred law books, some of which were still sealed in their original, yellowing cellophane wrappers.

A sign proclaimed NOTARY PUBLIC .

The lawyer stood at his copier, feeding pages of legal documents through the wobbly machine. Hot sun came through the filthy windows; the room must have been a hundred degrees.

“You Bailey?”

His sweaty face turned. Nodded.

“I’m John Pellam.”