Hell's Kitchen Read online

  “Does it hurt much?”

  “I’ll say.” She examined her arm closely. “Don’t I look the mess?” Ettie’s tongue clicked, looking over the imposing bandages.

  “Naw, you’re a cover girl, all things considered.”

  “You’re a mess too, John. I’m so glad you got out. My last thought as I was falling toward the alley was: ‘no, John’s going to die too!’ What a thought that was.”

  “I took the easy way down. The stairs.”

  “What the hell happened?” she muttered.

  “I don’t know. One minute nothing, the next the whole place was gone. Like a matchbox.”

  “I was shopping. I was on my way to my apartment-”

  “I heard you. You must have gotten back just before I got there. I didn’t see you on the street.”

  She continued, “I never saw fire move like that. Was like Aurora’s. That club I told you ’bout? On Forty-ninth Street. Where I sang a time or two. Burned down in forty-seven. March thirteenth. Buncha people died. You remember me telling you that story?”

  Pellam didn’t remember. He supposed the account could be found somewhere in the hours and hours of tapes of Ettie Washington back in his apartment.

  She blew her nose and coughed for a moment. “That smoke. That’s the worst. Did everybody get out?”

  “Nobody was killed,” Pellam answered. “Juan Torres’s in critical condition. He’s upstairs in the kids’ ICU.”

  Ettie’s face went still. Pellam had seen this expression on her face only once before – when she’d talked about her youngest son, who’d been killed in Times Square years before. “Juan?” she whispered. She didn’t speak for a moment. “I thought he was at his grandma’s for a few days. In the Bronx. He was home?”

  She looked heartsick and Pellam was at a loss to comfort her. Ettie’s eyes returned to the blanket she’d been picking at. An ashen tone flooded her face. “How ’bout I sign that cast?” Pellam asked.

  “Why, of course.”

  Pellam took out a marking pen. “Anywhere? How ’bout here?” He signed with a round scrawl.

  In the busy hall outside a placid electronic bell rang four times.

  “I was thinking,” Pellam said, “you want me to call your daughter?”

  “No,” the old woman responded. “I talked to her already. Called her this morning when I was awake. She was worried sick but I said I’m not in the great by-and-by yet. She oughta wait ’bout coming and let’s see what happens with those tests. If they’re gonna cut I’d rather her come then. Maybe hook her up with one of those handsome doctors. Like on ER. ’Lisbeth’d like a rich doctor. She has that side to her. Like I was telling you.”

  A knock sounded on the half-open door. Four men in business suits walked into the room. They were large, somber men and their presence suddenly made the hospital room, even with the other three empty beds, seem very small.

  Pellam glanced at them, knew they were cops. So, arson was suspected. That would explain the speed of the fire.

  Ettie nodded uneasily at the men.

  “Mrs. Washington?” the oldest of the men asked. He was in his mid-forties. Thin shoulders and a belly that could use a little shrinking. He wore jeans and wind-breaker and Pellam noticed a very large revolver on his hip.

  “I’m Fire Marshal Lomax. This is my assistant-” He nodded at a huge young man, bodybuilder. “And these are detectives with the New York City Police Department.”

  One of the cops turned to Pellam and asked him to leave.

  “No, no,” Ettie protested, “he’s my friend. It’s okay.”

  The officer looked at Pellam, the glance repeating the request.

  “It’s okay,” Pellam said to Ettie. “They’ll want to talk to me too. I’ll come back when they’re through.”

  “You’re a friend’a hers?” Lomax asked. “Yeah, we’ll want to talk to you. But you aren’t coming back in here. Give your name and address to the officer there and take off.”

  “I’m sorry?” Pellam smiled, confused.

  “Name and address to him,” Lomax nodded to the assistant. Then he snapped, “Then get the hell out.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The marshal put his large hands on his large hips.

  We can play it this way, we can play it that way. Pellam crossed his arms, spread his feet slightly. “I’m not leaving her.”

  “John, no, it’s okay.”

  Lomax: “This room’s sealed off from visitors. Uh, uh, uh, don’t ask why. It’s none of your business.”

  “I don’t believe my business is any of yours,” Pellam replied. The line came from an unproduced movie he’d written years ago. He’d been dying for a chance to use it.

  “Fuck it,” said one of the detectives. “We don’t have time for this. Get him out.”

  The assistant curled his vice-grip hands around Pellam’s arm and walked him toward the door. The gesture shot a jolt of icy pain through his stiff neck. Pellam pulled away abruptly and when he did this the cop decided that Pellam might like to rest up against the wall for a few minutes. He pinned him there until his arms went numb from the lack of circulation, his boots almost off the floor.

  Pellam shouted at Lomax, “Get this guy off me. What the hell is going on?”

  But the fire marshal was busy.

  He was concentrating hard on the little white card in his hand as he recited the Miranda warning to Ettie, then arrested her for reckless endangerment, assault and arson.

  “Yo, don’t forget attempted murder,” one of the detectives called.

  “Oh, yeah,” Lomax muttered. He glanced at Ettie and added with a shrug, “Well, you heard him.”

  THREE

  Ettie’s building, like most New York tenements built in the nineteenth century, had measured thirty-five by seventy-five feet and been constructed of limestone; the rock used for hers was ruddy, a terra cotta shade.

  Before 1901 there were no codes governing the construction of these six-story residences and many builders had thrown together tenements using rotten lathe and mortar and plaster mixed with sawdust. But those structures, the shoddy ones, had long ago crumbled. Tenements like this one, Ettie Washington had explained to John Pellam’s earnest video camera, had been built by men who cared about their craft. Alcoves for the Virgin and glass hummingbirds hovering above doorways. There was no reason why these buildings couldn’t last for two hundred years.

  No reason, other than gasoline and a match…

  This morning Pellam walked toward what was left of the building.

  There wasn’t much. Just a black stone shell filled with a jumble of scorched mattresses, furniture, paper, appliances. The base of the building was a thick ooze of gray sludge – ash and water. Pellam froze, staring at a hand protruding from one pile of muck. He ran toward it then stopped when he noticed the seam in the vinyl at the wrist. It was a mannequin.

  Practical jokes, Hell’s Kitchen style.

  On a hump of refuse was a huge porcelain bathtub sitting on its claw feet, perfectly level. It was filled with brackish water.

  Pellam continued to circle the place, pushed closer through the crowd of gapers in front of the yellow police tape, like shoppers waiting at the door for a one-day Macy’s sale. Most of them had the edgy eagerness of urban scavengers but the pickings were sparse. There were dozens of mattresses, stained and burned. The skeletons of cheap furniture and appliances, water-logged books. A rabbit-ears antenna – the building wasn’t wired for cable – sat on a glob of plastic, the Samsung logo and a circuit board the only recognizable part of the former TV.

  The stench was horrific.

  Pellam finally spotted the man he’d been looking for. There’d been a costume change; he was now wearing jeans, a windbreaker and fireman’s boots.

  Ducking under the tape, Pellam walked up to the fire marshal, pasting enough authority on his face to get him all the way to the building itself without being stopped by the crime scene techs and firemen milling about.
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  He heard Lomax say to his huge assistant, the man who’d pinned Pellam against the wall in Ettie’s room, “There, the spalling.” He was pointing to chipping in the brick. “That’s a hot spot. Point of origin’s behind that wall. Get a photog to shoot it.”

  The marshal crouched and examined something on the ground. Pellam stopped a few feet away. Lomax looked up. Pellam had showered and changed clothes. The camouflage on his face was gone and it took a moment for the marshal to recognize him.

  “You,” Lomax said.

  Pellam, thinking he’d try the friendly approach, offered, “Hey, how you doing?”

  “Get lost,” the marshal snapped.

  “Just wanted to talk to you for a second.”

  Lomax’s attention returned to the ground.

  At the hospital they’d taken his name and checked with NYPD. Lomax, his detective friends and especially the big assistant seemed to regret that there was no reason to detain Pellam, or even to search him painfully, and so they settled for taking a brief statement and shoving him down the corridor, with the warning that if he wasn’t out of the hospital in five minutes he’d be arrested for obstruction of justice.

  “Just a few questions,” he now asked.

  Lomax, a rumpled man, reminded Pellam of a high school coach who was a lousy athlete. He rose from his crouch, looked Pellam over. Quick eyes, scanning. Not cautious, not belligerent, just trying to figure him out.

  Pellam asked, “I want to know why you arrested her. It doesn’t make any sense. I was there. I know she didn’t set the fire.”

  “This is a crime scene.” Lomax returned to his spalling. His words didn’t exactly sound like a warning but Pellam supposed they were.

  “I just want to ask you-”

  “Get back behind the line.”

  “The line?”

  “The tape.”

  “Will do. Just let me-”

  “Arrest him,” Lomax barked to the assistant, who started to.

  “Not a problem. I’m going.” Pellam lifted his hands and walked back behind the line.

  There he crouched and took the Betacam out of the bag. He aimed it at the back of Lomax’s head. He turned it on. Through the clear viewfinder he saw uniformed cop whisper something to Lomax, who glanced back once then turned away. Behind them, the smoldering hulk of the tenement sat in a huge messy pile. It occurred to Pellam that, even though he was just doing this for Lomax’s benefit, it was grade-A footage.

  The fire marshal ignored Pellam for as long as he could then he turned and walked to him. Pushed the lens aside. “All right. Can the bullshit.”

  Pellam shut the camera off.

  “She didn’t start the fire,” Pellam said.

  “What’re you? A reporter?”

  “Something like that.”

  “She didn’t start it, huh? Who did? Was it you?”

  “I gave my statement to your assistant. Does he have a name, by the way?”

  Lomax ignored this. “Answer my question. If you’re so sure she didn’t start the fire then maybe you did.”

  “No, I didn’t start the fire.” Pellam gave a frustrated sigh.

  “How’d you get out? Of the building?”

  “The fire escape.”

  “But she says she wasn’t in her apartment when it started. Who buzzed you in?”

  “Rhonda Sanchez. In 2D.”

  “You know her?”

  “Met her. She knows I was doing a film about Ettie. So she let me in.”

  Lomax asked quickly, “If Ettie wasn’t there then why’d you go in at all?”

  “We were going to meet at ten. I figured if she was out she’d be back in a few minutes. I’d wait upstairs. Turns out she’d been shopping.”

  “Didn’t that seem kind of strange – an old lady out on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen at ten p.m.?”

  “Ettie keeps her own hours.”

  Lomax was now in a talkative mood. “So you just happened to be beside the fire escape when the fire started. Lucky man.”

  “Sometimes I am,” Pellam said.

  “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  “I gave him my statement.”

  Lomax snapped back, “Which didn’t tell me shit. Give me some details. Be helpful.”

  Pellam thought for a moment, deciding that the more cooperative he was the better it would be for Ettie. He explained about looking into the stairwell, seeing the door blow outward. About the fire and smoke. And sparks. Lots of sparks. Lomax and his pro-wrestler assistant remained impassive and Pellam said, “I’m not much help, I suppose.”

  “If you’re telling the truth you’re tons of help.”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “Tell me, Mr. Lucky, was there more flame or more smoke?”

  “More smoke, I guess.”

  The fire marshal nodded. “What color was the flame?”

  “I don’t know. Fire-colored. Orange.”

  “Any blue?”

  “No.”

  Lomax recorded these facts.

  Exasperated, Pellam asked, “What do you have on her? Evidence? Witnesses?”

  Lomax’s smile pled the Fifth.

  “Look,” Pellam snapped, “she’s a seventy-year-old lady-”

  “Hey, Mr. Lucky, lemme tell you something. Last year, fire marshals investigated ten thousand suspicious fires in the city. More than half were arson and a third of those were set by women.”

  “That doesn’t really seem like admissible evidence. What was your probable cause?”

  Lomax turned to his assistant. “Probable cause. He knows probable cause. Learn that from NYPD Blue? Murder One? Naw, you look like an O.J.-Simpsonwatcher to me. Fuck you and your probable cause. Get the hell out of here.”

  Back behind the police line Pellam continued to take footage and Lomax continued to ignore him.

  He was filming the grimy alley behind the building – memorializing the stack of garbage bags that had saved Ettie’s bacon – when he heard a thin wail, the noise smoke might make if smoke made noise.

  He walked toward the construction site across the street, where a sixty-story high-rise was nearing completion. As he approached, the smoke became words. “One a them. I’ma be one a them.” The woman sat in the shadow of a huge Dumpster beside two eroded stone bulldogs, which had guarded the stairs to Ettie’s building for one hundred and thirty years. She was a black woman with a pretty, pocked face, her white blouse smudged and torn.

  Crouching, Pellam said, “Sibbie. You all right?”

  She continued to stare at the ruined tenement.

  “Sibbie, remember me? It’s John. I took some pictures of you. For my movie. You told me about moving down here from Harlem. You remember me.”

  The woman didn’t seem to. He’d met her on the doorstep one day when he’d come to interview Ettie and she’d apparently heard about him because without any other greeting she’d said she would tell him about her life for twenty dollars. Some documentary filmmakers might balk on the ethical issue of paying subjects but Pellam slipped her the bill and was shooting footage before she’d decided which pocket to put it in. It was a waste of money and time, though; she was making up most of what she told him.

  “You got out okay.”

  Distracted, Sibbie explained that she’d been at home with her children at the time of the fire, just starting a dinner of rice and beans with ketchup. They easily escaped but she and the youngsters had returned, risking the flames to save what they could. “But not the TV. We try but it too heavy. Shit.”

  A mother’d let her children take a risk like that? Pellam shivered at the thought.

  Behind her were a girl of about four, clutching a broken toy, and a boy, nine or ten, with an unsmiling mouth but eyes that seemed irrepressibly cheerful. “Somebody burn us out,” he said, immensely proud. “Man, you believe that?”

  “I ask you a few questions?” Pellam began.

  Sibbie said nothing.

  He started the Betacam, hoping her short-te
rm memory was better than the recollections of her youth.

  “Yo, you with CNN?” the boy asked, staring at the glowing red eye of the Sony.

  “Nup. I’m working on a movie. I took some pictures of your mother last month.”

  “Geddoutahere!” He cloaked his astonished eyes. “A movie. Wesley Snipes, Denzel, yeah! Shit.”

  “You have any idea how the fire started?”

  “Be the crews,” the boy said quickly.

  “Shutcha mouth,” his mother barked, abruptly slipping out of her mournful reverie.

  Crews meant gangs. “Which ones?”

  The woman remained silent, eyes fixed on a key that passing traffic had pressed deep into the asphalt. Beside it was the butt end of a brass pistol cartridge. She looked up at the building. “Lookit that.”

  Pellam said, “It was a nice building.”

  “Ain’t shit now.” Sibbie snapped her fingers with a startling pop. “Oh, I’ma be one a them.”

  Pellam asked, “One of who?”

  “Livin’ on the street. We gonna live on the street. I’ma get sick. I’ma get the Village curse and I gonna die.”

  “No, you’ll be okay. The city’ll take care of you.”

  “The city. Shit.”

  “You see anybody around the basement when the fire started?”

  “Hells, yeah,” the boy said, “What it is. Be the crews. I seen ’em. This nigger keep his eyes open. I-”

  Sibbie viciously slapped her son’s cheek. “He didn’t see nothing! All y’all ain’t worry about it no more!”

  Pellam winced at the slap. The boy noticed his expression but the tacit sympathy didn’t comfort any more than the blow’d seemed to hurt.

  “Sibbie, it’s not safe around here,” Pellam said. “Go to that shelter. The one up the street.”

  “Shelter. Shit. I save me a few things.” Sibbie motioned toward her shopping bag. “Be looking for my mama’s lace. Can’t find it, shit, it gone.” She called out to a cluster of sightseers, “All y’all find any lace ’round here?”

  No one paid her any attention. “Sibbie, you have any money?” Pellam asked.

  “I got fi’ dollar some man give me.”

  Pellam slipped her a twenty. He stepped into the street and flagged down a cab. Pellam held up a twenty. “Take her to the shelter, the one on Fiftieth.”