Hell's Kitchen Page 8

  With a booted foot the young Latino was kicking in the shattered front door of Ettie’s building. He shouldered his way inside, filthying his T-shirt on the charred wood. Pellam heard breaking glass and loud crashes. The man returned a minute later with a rectangle of metal. He tossed it to Pellam, who caught the heavy frame. It was the building directory. With a long finger the Cubano Lord tapped a name. C. Ramirez. “She my aunt. Okay? She live there with two niños. My mother’s sister! Okay? You figure it out? I’m not gonna burn down no building my family living in.

  “And you wanna know something else? That lady, my aunt Carmella, she see one of Jimmy Corcoran’s micks drop the hammer on some guy last month and she testify against him. He up in Attica now and Jimmy, he no so happy about what she say. How you like that story, my friend? You like the truth now? The truth about a white mick? Now, get outta here. Get outta the Kitchen.”

  “Who’s that? Corcoran? Jimmy Corcoran?”

  The man wiped the sweat off his forehead. “You go back to you news station, you go back and tell them the Cubano Lords, they no do this kind of shit!”

  “I’m not a reporter.”

  “So now you no have to talk to me. You know la verdad.”

  Pellam asked, “Your name’s Ramirez? What’s your first name?”

  The man paused and held a muscular finger to his lips, silencing him, then pointed it at Pellam’s face. “You tell them.” His eyes sank down to Pellam’s boots then rose again as if he were memorizing him. Then he walked slowly out of the shadow of the ruined building into the crisp hot sunlight.

  But Jimmy Corcoran was a ghost.

  No one had heard of him, no one knew any Corcorans.

  Pellam had wandered around the neighborhood, stopping in Puerto Rican bodegas, Korean vegetable stands, Italian pork stores. Nobody knew Corcoran but everybody had a funny lilt in their voices when they said they didn’t – their denials seemed desperate.

  He tried a bodega. “He hangs out around here someplace,” Pellam encouraged.

  The ancient Mexican clerk, with an immensely wrinkled face, stared at his fly-blown tray of lardy pastry, smoked his cigarette and nodded silently. He offered nothing.

  Pellam bought a coconut drink and stepped outside. He mbled up to a cluster of T-shirted men lounging around a Y-stand sprinkler hookup and asked them. Two of them quickly said they’d never heard of Jimmy Corcoran. The other three forgot whatever English they knew.

  He decided to try further west, closer to the river. He was walking past the parochial school on Eleventh when he heard, “Yo.”

  “Yo yourself,” Pellam said.

  The boy stood in a tall, battered Dumpster and looked down, hands on scrawny hips. He wore baggy jeans and, despite the heat, a red, green and yellow windbreaker. Pellam thought the mosaic haircut was pretty well done. The razor notch mimicked the grin that was etched deep into his dark face.

  “Whassup?”

  “Tell you what… Come on down here.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to talk to you. Don’t jump, climb around the back. No-”

  He jumped. The boy landed on the ground, unhurt. “You don’t ’member me.”

  “Sure I do. Your mother’s Sibbie.”

  “Straight up! You be CNN. The man with the camera.”

  On the playground behind him four baseball diamonds stood empty. Two basketball courts too. The gates were chained. Easily a hundred cans of paint had been sacrificed to decorate the yard.

  “Where’s your mother and sister?”

  “Be at the shelter.”

  “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “Ain’t no school, be summer.”

  Pellam had forgotten. Despite heat or snow, cities are virtually seasonless. He had trouble imagining what summer vacation in Hell’s Kitchen might be like. Pellam’s Augusts had been filled with sneaking into movies and trading comics and occasional softball games. He remembered many summer mornings bicycling like a demon, zipping over smooth concrete marked by the slick paths of confused snails and slugs.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ismail. Yo, what’s yours?”

  “I’m John Pellam.”

  “Yo, homes, I ain’t like John. Slob nigger I know called John. He ain’t down to do nothing, you know what I’m saying? I’ma call you Pellam.”

  Wasn’t Mr. an option?

  “How’s the shelter?”

  His smile faded. “This nigger don’t like the peoples there. Slanging all the time. Cluckheads all over the place.”

  Drugs, the boy was saying. A cluckhead was a crack addict. Pellam had worked on several films in South Central L.A. He knew some gangspeak.

  “It’s only for a little while,” Pellam said. But the reassurance sounded leaden; he had no idea how the boy took it.

  Ismail’s eyes suddenly flashed happily. “Yo, you like basketball? I like Patrick Ewing. He the best, you know what I’m saying? I like Michael Jordan too. Yo, ever see the Bulls play?”

  “I live in L.A.”

  “Lakers! Yeah! Magic, he be fine. I like Mr. B. The Barkley. He the man to have at yo’ back ina fight.” He sparred against an unseen adversary. “Yo, yo, you like basketball, cuz?”

  Pellam had been to a few Lakers games though he gave that up when he found that a good percentage of the spectators were in the Industry and bought season passes just to see or be seen. As Jack Nicholson does, so shall you do. “Not really,” he confessed.

  “And Shaq too. Man be ten feet tall. I wanna be that nigger.”

  Ismail danced around on the sidewalk and performed a mini slam dunk.

  Pellam glanced at the boy’s tattered high-tops and dropped to his knees to retie a dangling lace. This made the boy uncomfortable; he stepped back and clumsily tied it himself. Pellam rose slowly. “You started to tell me something the other day. About the gangs burning down your building. Your mother hit you when you started to tell me something. I won’t say anything to her.”

  He looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten the slap.

  “I heard Corcoran’s gang might’ve had something to do with it. You know ’bout his crew?”

  “How you know Corcoran?”

  “I don’t. I’m trying to find him.”

  “Man, that fucked-up, you doin’ that. His set, they some bad O.G.s.”

  Original gangstas. Senior members of the crew, who’d earned the status by killing someone.

  The young face grew agitated. “Nigger, spic – anybody – dis him, don’t matter who, Corcoran wax him. He see peoples he don’t like, bang, they ass be gone, you know what I’m saying?” Ismail closed his eyes and leaned his head against the fence, looking at the school. “Why you axing me all this shit?”

  Pellam asked, “Where’s his kickback? Corcoran’s?”

  Impressed that Pellam talked the talk, Ismail said, “I ain’t know were they hang, man.” He kept his eye on Pellam and did a few layup shots. “Yo. You got a daddy?”

  Pellam laughed. “A father? Sure.”

  The grin was gone. “I don’t got one.”

  Pellam reflected that a large percentage of black households were missing an adult male. Then felt ashamed this news bite was his immediate reaction to the boy’s comment.

  The boy continued, matter of factly, “Got hisself shot.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry, Ismail.”

  “There these cluckheads outside on the street, okay? Selling rock. My daddy go out and they just smoke him right there. I seen ’em do it. He didn’t do nothing. They just smoke him.”

  Pellam exhaled in shock, shook his head. “They find who did it?”

  “Who, the jakes?”

  “Jakes?”

  “You know, jakes. Joey. The man. The Man. The poeleece?” Ismail laughed with a frighteningly adult sound. “Jakes do shit, you know what I’m saying? My daddy gone. And my mama, she sleep a lot. She do copious shit. Where she be, the shelter I’m saying, there shit all over the place if you got the green. Rock mostly. She
do lotsa rock. Men come by eyeballing her all the time. I don’t think I go back there. Where yo’ crib, Pellam?”

  A Winnebago, currently stored. A two-bedroom bungalow in L.A., currently sublet. A four-flight walk-up under short-term lease.

  “I don’t really have one,” he told the boy.

  “Check it out, you just like me! Damn!”

  Pellam laughed at this then decided the parallels were unsettlingly accurate.

  John Pellam, single, former independent film director and itinerant location scout, sometimes missed family life. But then he’d laugh and try to picture himself attending a suburban grade school PTA parent-teacher night.

  “Where’re you going to go?” he asked the boy.

  “Dunno, cuz. Maybe get my own crew together. Ain’t no nigger crews ’round here. Get a kickback on Thirty-sixth. I’ma call it the Trey Six Ghosts. How that sound? ‘I from the Trey Sixes.’ Shit, that’ll fuck ’ em up. Fuck up their minds good.”

  Pellam asked, “You have lunch?”

  “No. And I ain’t have breakfast neither,” Ismail said proudly. “You sit at the shelter, men come up and they, you know, be dissing you and touching you. They ax you come into the back with them. You know what I’m saying?”

  Pellam shook his head, gripped the strap of the camera bag. “Come on, I’m hungry. I saw this place up the street. Cuban. Let’s eat, you want to?”

  “Rice and beans. Yeah! An’ a Red Stripe!!”

  “No beer,” Pellam said.

  The boy grabbed the bag from Pellam’s hand and slung it over his shoulder. He listed against what was probably half of his own weight.

  “I’ll get that,” Pellam said. “It’s heavy.”

  “Shit. Don’t weigh nothing.”

  “Yo, over there.”

  “There?”

  “No, more back. Yeah. Yo. Back is what I’m saying. Back!”

  Ismail was pointing out to Pellam where he thought the fire had started. “I smell smoke then see all these flames, cuz. Right here. An’ a big pop. Yeah.”

  “Pop.”

  “And I run inside th’apartment and I go, ‘Yo, all y’all gotta get out! There this fire!’ And my mama, she start to scream.”

  “You see anybody by the window before the fire?”

  “This old lady is all. She live upstairs, on the top floor.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “I dunno. People hanging. I dunno.”

  Pellam looked at what was left of the back door. It was metal and had two large locks on it. Would’ve been a tough job to break through. He leaned down and peered through the window. He’d wondered if the pyro could have thrown the bomb through the bars. But they were too close together for anything but a beer bottle; the wine jug never would have fit. Somebody would have to’ve let him in.

  “The back door was locked, right?”

  “Yeah, they try an’ keep it locked. But, shit, there a lotta traffic, you know what I’m saying? In that back place there, see it, Pellam? This fag doing business, you know? Givin’ head and all. He a cluckhead too.”

  A male prostitute… “So people’d come through the back door? His customers?”

  “Yeah, we’d sit outside, some of us, what it is, and these guys’d come out the back door and we’d say, ‘Fag, fag…’ And they’d run away. Shit, that was fun!”

  “You seen that guy around lately?”

  “Naw, cuz. He gone.”

  Pellam picked up the building directory, lying where he’d let it fall after Ramirez had tossed it to him the other day. “You know this Ramirez?”

  “Shit, Hector Ramirez? His crew be the Cubano Lords. They bad motherfuckers too but they don’t give this nigger no shit. Not like Corcoran. He’s sprung, cuz, Corcoran is. Man be a hatter. But Ramirez, see, he’d wax you but only if he had to.”

  Even this ten-year-old was better patched in to the Word on the street than Pellam. He glanced at the name E. Washington on the directory and tossed it to the ground.

  A police car cruised slowly past the building and paused. The officer in the driver’s seat was looking his way. He gestured Pellam out of the police tape.

  “Ismail-”

  The boy was gone.

  “Ismail?”

  The squad car drove on.

  He searched for several minutes but Ismail had vanished. A brittle sound of falling brick and hollow metal filled the night. A soft grunt followed.

  “Ismail?” Pellam stepped into the alley behind the building and saw boy, about eighteen, blond, in faded blue jeans and a dirty white shirt. He crouched beside a pile of trash. He was digging something out, occasionally dislodging a small avalanche, leaping back like a spooked raccoon then digging again. He had fine, baby hair, self-cut, ear length. The obligatory Generation X goatee was anemic and untrimmed.

  He glanced at Pellam, squinted then returned to his task.

  “Gotta get some stuff, man. Some stuff.”

  “You lived here?”

  The boy said gravely, “In the back.” He nodded toward where the rear basement apartment had been. “Me and Ray, he was like my manager.”

  Me and Ray, he was like his pimp.

  This was the one Ismail was talking about. The male prostitute. He seemed so young for a life on the street. Pellam asked, “Where’s Ray now?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Can I ask you some questions about the fire?”

  With a grunt of exertion he pulled what he’d been looking for from beneath the pile and wiped at the cover of the book. Kurt Cobain – the Final Year. He gazed at it lovingly for a moment then he looked up. “That’s what I was going to talk to you about, man. The fire. You Pellam, right?” He flipped through the book.

  Pellam blinked in surprise.

  “So, here’s the deal. I can tell you who started the fire and who hired them. If you’re, like, interested.”

  TEN

  “How’d you know about me?”

  “Just did.” The boy caressed the glossy cover of the book with a filthy hand.

  “How?” Pellam persisted, as curious as he was suspicious.

  “You know. Like, you hear things.”

  “Tell me what you know. I’m not a cop.”

  His laugh said he already knew this about him.

  The Word. On the street.

  The boy’s attention returned to his book, like a child’s Golden Book, just a photo laminated on a cardboard cover. The type was large and the words sparse. The photos were terrible.

  Pellam prompted, “So who set the fire? Who hired him?”

  In a very young face, the very old eyes narrowed. Then the boy broke out into a laugh.

  Gear-greasing is expensive work.

  Pellam mentally totaled his two savings accounts and an anemic IRA, penalty for early withdrawal, and some remaining advance money from WGBH. The figure eighty-five hundred floated into his mind. There was a little equity left in the house on Beverly Glen. The battered Winnebago had to be worth something. But that was it. Pellam’s lifestyle was often liquid but his resources largely were not.

  The boy wiped his nose. “A hundred thousand.”

  He thought a grunge-stud like this would have more modest aspirations. Pellam didn’t even bother to negotiate. He asked, “How’d you find out about the fire?”

  “The guy who did it, I sorta know him. He’s hatter. Crazy dude, you know. He gets off burning things.”

  The pyro Bailey had told him about – the one A.D.A. Lois Koepel, whom Pellam already detested, was so eager to track down.

  “He told you who hired him?”

  “Like, not exactly but you can figure it out. From what he told me.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You, like, don’t need to know it.”

  You, like, know mine.

  “I could give you one,” the boy continued. “But so what? It wouldn’t be real.”

  “Well, I don’t have a hundred thousand bucks. Nowhere near.”

  “Bullshit. You
’re, like, this famous director or something. You’re from Hollywood. Of course you got money.”

  In front of them the police cruiser eased down the street again. Pellam thought about tackling the skinny kid and calling the cops over.

  But all it took was one look into Pellam’s eyes.

  “Oh, nice try, you asshole,” the boy shouted. Clutching the precious book under his arm, he burst down the alley.

  Pellam waved futilely at the police car. The two cops inside didn’t see him. Or they ignored the gestures. Then he was racing through the alley, boots pounding grittily on the cobblestones, after the kid. They streaked through two vacant lots behind Ettie’s building and emerged onto Ninth Avenue. Pellam saw the boy turn right, north, and keep sprinting.

  When the kid got to Thirty-ninth Street Pellam lost him. He paused, hands on hips, gasping. He examined the parking lots, the approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel, the rococo tenements, bodegas and a sawdust-strewn butcher shop. Pellam tried a deli but no one in there had seen him. When he stepped out into the street Pellam noticed, half block away, door swinging open. The boy sprinted out, lugging a knapsack, and vanished in a mass of people. Pellam didn’t even bother to pursue. In the crowded streets the boy simply turned invisible.

  The doorway the kid had come out of was a storefront, windows painted over, black. He remembered seeing it earlier. The Youth Outreach Center. Inside he saw dingy fluorescent-lit room sparsely furnished with mismatched desks and chairs. Two women stood talking in the center of the room, arms crossed, somber.

  Pellam entered just as the thinner of the two women lifted her arms helplessly and pushed through a doorway that led to the back of the facility.

  The other woman’s pale, round face was glossy with faint makeup, barely hiding a spray of freckles. She wore her red hair shoulder-length. He guessed she was in her mid-thirties. She wore an old sweatshirt and a pair of old jeans, which didn’t disguise her voluptuous figure. The long-sleeved top, maroon, bore the Harvard crest. Veritas.