Hell's Kitchen Page 14

  “Ettie, what happened? Why’re you up here?”

  “Isolation,” she whispered. “They were going to kill me.”

  “Who?”

  “Some girls. In the cell downstairs. They heard about the Torres boy dying. They fooled me pretty good. I thought they were my friends but they were planning all along to kill me. Louis got some court order or another to move me. The guards came just as those girls were about to burn me. They sprayed stuff on me and were gonna burn my face, John. The stuff, it hurt my skin.”

  “How’re you feeling now?”

  She didn’t answer. She said, “Oh, I never thought that boy’d die. That gave me a turn. Oh, the poor thing. He was such a sweet little one. If he’d been at his grandmother’s like he was supposed to be he’d still be live… I prayed for him. I did! And you know me – I don’t waste any time on religion.”

  Pellam put his hand on Ettie’s good arm. He thought about saying, ‘He wasn’t in any pain,’ or ‘He went quickly,’ but of course he had no idea how much pain the boy had experienced or how quickly he’d died.

  Finally she glanced at his unsmiling face. “I saw you in court. When you heard ’bout that time I got myself arrested… You want to know about that, I’ll bet.”

  “What happened?”

  “Remember the time Priscilla Cabot and me were working at that factory? The clothing place?”

  “They fired you. A few years ago.”

  “It was a desperate time for me, John. My sister’d been sick. And I didn’t have any money at all. I was beside myself. Anyway, this man Priscilla and I worked with, we all got laid off together and he had this idea to scare the company so they’d pay us money. We figured we were owed it, you know. Hell, I went along with ’em. Shouldn’t’ve. Didn’t really want to. But the long and short of it was they called up the owner and said his trucks were going to get wrecked if he didn’t pay us. We weren’t really going to do anything. At least, I wasn’t. And I didn’t know they threatened to burn them. I didn’t call; they did, Priscilla and this man.

  “Anyway, the boss, he agreed but he called the police and we all got arrested and the other two said it was my idea. Well, the police didn’t believe I was the ringleader but I did get arrested and I spent some time in jail. I’m not proud of it. I’m pretty ashamed… I’m sorry, John. I didn’t tell you the truth ’bout that. I should’ve.”

  “There’s no reason for you to tell me everything about yourself.”

  “No, John. We were friends too. I shouldn’ta lied. Shoulda told Louis too. Didn’t help in court any.”

  Near them someone laughed hysterically, the sound rising higher and higher until it became a faint scream. Then silence.

  “You’ve got your secrets; I do too,” Pellam said. “I’ve kept some things from you.”

  She looked at him closely. City life gives you a quick eye. “What is it, John?”

  He was debating.

  “Something you want to tell me, isn’t there?” she asked.

  Finally he said, “Manslaughter.”

  “What?”

  “I did time for manslaughter.”

  Her eyes grew still. It was a story that he had no interest to tell, no desire to relive. But he thought it was important to share it with her. And tell it he did – the story about the star of Pellam’s last feature film – the one never completed (the four canisters of film were sitting at the moment in his attic back in California). Central Standard Time. Tommy Bernstein, lovable, crazy, out of control. Only six setups left to shoot, four second-unit stunt gags. A week. Only a week. “Just give me a little, John. Just to get me through wrap.”

  But Pellam hadn’t given him a little. Pellam had given him lot and the man had stayed up in his cokeinduced frenzy for two days straight. Railing, laughing, drinking, puking. He died of a heart attack on the set. And the City of Angels’ District Attorney chose to go after Pellam in a big way for supplying the cocaine that caused it. He was the guilty party, the D.A. claimed, and the jury agreed, bestowing on Pellam conviction and some time in San Quentin.

  “I am sorry, John.” She laughed. “Isn’t that a stitch? You, me and Billy Doyle. We’re all three of us jailbirds.” She squinted again. “You know who you remind me of? My son James.”

  Pellam had seen pictures of the young man. Ettie’s oldest son, her only child by Doyle. Photographed in his early twenties, he was light-skinned – Doyle had been very pale – and handsome. Lean. James had dropped out of school several years ago and gone out west to make money. The last word from him was a card saying the young man was going to work in the “environmental field.”

  That had been over a decade ago.

  The guard glanced at her watch and Pellam whispered, “We don’t have much time. I’ve got to ask you a few questions. Now, that insurance policy they claim you bought had your checking account number on it and your signature on it. How’d somebody get them?”

  “My checking account? Well, I don’t know. Nobody’s got my account number that I know ’bout.”

  “Have you lost any checks lately?”

  “No.”

  “Who do you write checks to?”

  “I don’t know… I pay my bills like everybody. Mama put that in me. Never let ’em get the edge on you, she always said. Pay on time. If you’ve got the money.”

  “You written any checks to somebody you wouldn’t ordinarily?”

  “No, not that I can think. Oh, wait. I had to pay some money to the government few months ago. They gave me too much social security by mistake. One check had three hundred more’n I ought to get. I knew about it but I kept it anyway. They found out and wanted it back. That’s what I hired Louis for. He handled it for me. All I had to pay was half what they wanted. I gave him check and he sent it to ’em with this form. See, the government, maybe they’re out to get me, John. Maybe the social security people and the police’re working together.”

  This manic talk of conspiracies unsettled him. But Pellam cut her some slack. Under the circumstances she was entitled to be a little paranoid.

  “How ’bout samples of your handwriting? How could somebody get them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you written any letters lately to somebody you don’t normally write?”

  “Letters? I can’t think of any. I write to Elizabeth and send cards sometimes to my sister’s daughter in Fresno. Send ’em few dollars on their birthdays. That’s about it.”

  “Anybody broken into your apartment?”

  “No. I always lock my windows and door. I’m good about that. In the Kitchen you got to be careful. That’s the first thing you learn.” She played with her cast, traced Pellam’s signature. The answers made sense but they weren’t compelling. To a jury they might be true, might be fishy. As with so much else about Hell’s Kitchen he wasn’t sure what to believe.

  Pellam slipped his notebook into his pocket and said, “Will you do something for me?”

  “Anything, John.”

  “Tell me the end of the Billy Doyle story.”

  “Which story? About his doing time?”

  “That one, yeah.”

  “Okay. My poor Billy. Here’s what happened. I told you all along that his goal in life was to own land. For a man with wanderlust he couldn’t go past a lot or a building with a for-sale sign on it without looking it over and calling up the owner and asking questions about it.”

  Ettie’s eyes glowed. This was where she belonged, Pellam thought, weighing memories and using them to spin her stories. He knew the seductive lure of storytelling too; he was after all a film director. Except that her stories were true and she expected nothing in return for them. No critical acclaim. No percentage of gross.

  “You remember I told you about my brother, Ben. He was about Billy’s age, a year or two younger. Ben came to Billy and said he had this idea how to get some money for a down payment for some land, only he needed a partner to help him. Well, it wasn’t an idea at all. It was just a scam. B
en knew some people at a union headquarters and he did some fake contracts and got them slipped in when the bosses weren’t there. Ben listened too much to Grandpa Ledbetter’s stories about the Gophers and the gangs. He wanted to be in one real bad – even though there weren’t any black gangs in the Kitchen, then or now. But he was real proud of this scam of his.

  “But Ben didn’t tell my Billy about the scam part. He thought they were just real contracts for hauling and stuff, they were taking a broker’s fee on. He lived on the edge, Billy did, but he wasn’t stupid. There might’ve been people he’d scam but the union wasn’t one of them. Then Lemmy Collins, the longshoremen’s vice-president, found out there was money missing. He thought Ben’d done it. He knew Billy was tight with Ben but he knew an Irishman wouldn’t steal from his own but a black man’d steal from Irish without thinking twice. So Lemmy came to see my brother with two other men from the union and a baseball bat.

  “Just as they were about to beat him to death they got a call from union headquarters. The police had called. It seemed that my Billy’d confessed to the whole thing. It was all his idea. Since the police were involved then Lemmy couldn’t kill Ben even thought he wanted to. The union got the money back and Billy did a year in jail. See, he knew being Irish and white he could get away with his life. If Ben had gone down he would’ve died. If not in the Kitchen then in Sing Sing.”

  “He took a rap for somebody,” Pellam said.

  “For my own brother,” Ettie said.

  Pellam added softly, “He did that for you, you know.”

  “I know he did.” Ettie was wistful. “But I think that year changed him. I got my brother saved but I think I might’ve lost my husband because of it. It was a year after he got out that I came home one night and found the note.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” the guard said pleasantly. “I’m afraid time’s up.”

  Pellam nodded to the guard. “Just one more thing. Hey, Mrs. Washington, look up.”

  There was a snap and the soft buzz of a small motor.

  She blinked at the flash as Pellam took the Polaroid.

  “What’re you doing there, John? You don’t want to remember me this way. Lemme fix my hair, at least.”

  “It’s not for me, Ettie. And don’t you worry. Your hair looks just fine.”

  FIFTEEN

  Lefty came through.

  Pellam was in his bitchen, boots off, listening to messages, as he sat on the plywood sheet turning the bathtub into a table. There was one hang-up, then another. Finally Alan Lefkowitz’s mile-a-minute voice was telling him about a party Roger McKennah had planned and that Pellam had only to drop Lefty’s name and he’d be admitted into the “inner sanctum of New York business,” a line the producer actually recited without noticeable irony. Pellam, however, rolled his eyes as he listened to it, kicking his foot against the wall to scare off a wise-ass pigeon that alighted on his window sill.

  The lengthy message continued with relevant details, including the orders to dress for the event.

  An hour later, Pellam, suitably “dressed” (new black jeans and polished Nokona cowboy boots) strolled out into the suffocating heat and took a subway to the Citicorp building. From there he walked to an address on Fifth Avenue and ducked into the revolving door. Once inside nobody knew that he, unlike most of the other guests, hadn’t arrived via Bentley, Rolls-Royce, or – for the impoverished – the stately yacht of a Lincoln Continental.

  “Look, it’s another one.”

  The woman spoke breathlessly and the crowd on the top floor of the triplex murmured less in horror than appreciation.

  “Oh, man. Look at that. You can see the flames.”

  “Where?”

  “There. See?”

  “Ronnie, go see if someone’s got a camera. Joan, look!”

  Pellam eased closer to the window, six hundred feet above the sidewalk on which Cartier, Tiffany and Henri Bendel hawked their wares. He gazed west. Another fire, he noticed with disgust. A building somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen, north of Louis Bailey’s block. Occasionally you’d see a lick of flame shooting through a massive cloud of smoke. Rising a thousand feet into the milky sky, it blossomed like the mushroom of an atomic bomb.

  “Oh, God,” a woman whispered. “It’s the hospital! Manhattan Hospital.”

  Where he and Ettie had been treated, he realized. Where Juan Torres had died.

  “You think it’s him? Where is that camera? I want to get a snap. You know who I mean? That crazy man I read about in the Times this morning?”

  “Is that the fifth one he’s set? Or the sixth?”

  The flames had grown and were now clearly visible.

  No cameras materialized and after five minutes the fire became just another part of the scenery. Alone or in groups of two or three the guests turned back to the party.

  Pellam continued to watch for a few moments. The silent ballet of the flames, the cloud of gray smoke rising high above Manhattan.

  “Hey, how you doing?” The man’s voice was close by, riddled with Long Island lockjaw. “You’re dressed like an artiste. Are you an artiste?”

  Pellam turned, found himself standing in front of a drunk, beefy young man in a tuxedo.

  “Nope.”

  “Ah. Quite a place, isn’t it?” He gestured his groggy head around the two-story living room in the Fifth Avenue penthouse triplex. “Roger’s little abode in the sky.”

  “Not too shabby.”

  At that moment Pellam caught sight of his quarry across the room. Roger McKennah. Then the real estate developer was lost in the crowd again.

  “You know the story?” Pellam’s new friend began laughing drunkenly. Sipped more of his martini.

  “The story?” Pellam responded.

  The young man nodded enthusiastically but said nothing more.

  Pellam prompted, “The one about the priest, the rabbi and the nun?”

  The man frowned, shook his head then continued drunkenly and began explaining how the triplex here was latticed with rabbit warrens of rooms McKennah described as dens and parlors and music rooms and entertainment spaces.

  “Uh-huh,” Pellam said uncertainly, looking over the crowd for McKennah once more.

  “They’re really just bedrooms, see?” the young man told Pellam, spilling vodka on his patent leather shoes. “But there’re fifteen of them and the thing is, Roger McKennah doesn’t have a single friend – I mean, forget fifteen – who’d be willing to endure him long enough to stay overnight.”

  The young man shivered with laughter and drank some more of the alcohol that the butt of his mean joke was providing. A blonde in a low-cut red dress cruised past. She caught the eyes of both Pellam and the young man and suddenly the young man vanished as if he were the tail and she, the dog.

  Pellam gazed out the window again, at the huge plume of smoke.

  In the hour he’d been here he’d learned a few things about McKennah, much of it like the sniping he’d just heard, none of it particularly helpful. The developer was forty-four. Stocky but fit. His face was a younger, puffier Robert Redford’s. His net worth was rumored to be two billion. Pellam had observed that the developer had a kaleidoscope of expressions; McKennah’s visage flipped from boyish to greedy to demonic to pure ice in a fraction of a second.

  In fact the most telling thing that Pellam had learned was that no one really knew much about Roger McKennah at all. His only conclusion was that the developer had some inexpressible quality that drove guests like these – attractive or powerful or obsessed with the attractive or powerful – to pray for invitations to his parties, where they would drink his liquor and think of clever ways to insult him behind his back.

  He eased closer to McKennah, who had moved on and was cruising slowly through the crowded room.

  A young couple double-teamed the developer by the beluga table.

  “Nice, Roger,” the husband said, looking around. “Very nice. Know what this room reminds me of? That place in Cap d’Antibes. On the Point? L�
��Hermitage. That’s where Beth and I always stay.”

  “You know it?” the woman, presumably Beth, asked McKennah. “It’s so wonderful.”

  The developer demurred with a faint pout. “ ’Fraid I don’t,” he said, to their delight. Then he added, “When I’m over there I usually stay with the prince in Monaco. It’s just easier. You know.”

  “I hear you,” the husband said, hearing nothing really. The couple pasted glazed smiles on their faces, evidence of how snugly their hearts had been nailed by the chubby Roger McKennah.

  The substantial crowd milled and hovered over the tables filled with caviar like black snowdrifts and sushi like white jewels, while a tuxedoed pianist played Fats Waller.

  “But he didn’t go to Choate,” Pellam overheard someone whisper. “Read it carefully. He gives them money, he lectures there, but he didn’t go there. He went to some parochial school on the West Side. In his old neighborhood.”

  “Hell’s Kitchen?” Pellam asked, breaking into the circle.

  “That’s it, yes,” responded the woman, whose face-lift was remarkably good.

  So, McKennah was a Kitchen pup himself. It must’ve taken years to polish off the rough edges.

  Then suddenly Pellam himself became the prey. The crowd had momentarily parted like the Red Sea and McKennah was staring directly at him, fifty feet away. A memory came back to Pellam – the limousine in front of Ettie’s building. It had probably been McKennah’s.

  But the developer gave no greeting. And as the crowd swept back together McKennah turned and stepped into a cluster of guests and turned his attention on them like klieg lights on a movie set. Then the developer was moving again, on stage, always questioning, poking, probing.

  Ambition’s a bitch, ain’t it?

  He was about to follow when, from behind him, a woman’s voice said in a very Northeastern accent, “Howdy, partner.”

  Pellam turned to see an attractive blonde woman in her forties, holding a champagne flute. Her eyes were faded, but not from drinking, merely from exhaustion. With a sequined shoe she tapped Pellam’s boot, explaining the greeting.