Hell's Kitchen Read online

  Pellam had a fast memory of the Cubano Lord. Verdad, he recalled.

  Primero con la verdad.

  She glanced up at him with some curiosity as he stepped inside. She glanced at his camera bag. He introduced himself and the woman said, “I’m Carol Wyandotte. The director here. Can I help you?” She adjusted a pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses, break in the frame fixed with white adhesive tape – shoving the loose glasses back up her nose. Pellam thought she was pretty the way a peasant or farm girl would be. Absurdly, she wore a choker of pearls.

  “A kid left here a minute ago. Blond, grungy.”

  “Alex? We were just talking about him. He ran inside, grabbed his backpack and left. We were wondering what was going on.”

  “I was talking to him down the street. He just ran off.”

  “Talking to him?”

  Pellam didn’t want to say that the boy knew about the arson. For the youngster’s sake. The Word on the Street traveled far too fast. He remembered the gun in Ramirez’s hand and how the whole world seemed terrified of Jimmy Corcoran.

  “You can,” Carol said dryly, “tell me the truth.” Shoved her glasses onto her nose.

  Pellam cocked an eyebrow.

  “Happens all the time. One of our kids cops a wallet or something. Then somebody comes in, blushing, and says, ‘I think one of your boys “found” my wallet.’ ”

  Pellam decided she was a smart, rich girl turned social worker. Which was probably a very tough category of person to deal with.

  “Well, he might be a great thief but he didn’t steal anything from me. I’m making a film and-”

  “A reporter?” Carol’s face went ice cold – much angrier than if he’d accused Alex of “finding” his wallet. He thought: her eyes are remarkable. Pale, pale blue. Almost blending into the surrounding white.

  “Not exactly.” He explained that West of Eighth was an oral history.

  “I don’t like reporters.” A bit of brogue slipped into Carol’s voice and he had a clue to the feistiness inside her – a grit that the director of a place like this undoubtedly needed. A temper too. “All those damn stories on preteen addicts and gang rapes and child prostitutes. Makes it hard as hell to get money when the boards of foundations turn on Live at Five and see that the little girl you’re trying to rehabilitate is an illiterate hooker with HIV. But, of course, it’s exactly kids like that who’re the ones you need to rehabilitate.”

  “Hey, ma’am,” Pellam held up his hand. “I’m just a lowly oral historian here.”

  The hardness in Carol’s round face melted. “Sorry, sorry. My friends say I can’t pass a soapbox without climbing on top. You were saying, about Alex? You were interviewing him?”

  “I’ve been talking to people in the building that burned down. He lived there.”

  “Off and on,” Carol corrected. “With his chicken hawk.”

  Me and Ray.

  She continued, “You know Juan Torres?”

  Pellam nodded. “He’s in critical condition.”

  The son of the man who met Jose Canseco.

  Carol shook her head. “It just kills me to see something like that happen to the good ones. It’s such a damn waste.”

  “You don’t have any idea where Alex took off to?”

  “Ran in, ran out. Don’t have a clue.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “He claimed he was from Wisconsin somewhere. Probably is… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Pellam.”

  “First?”

  “John Pellam. Go by the last usually.”

  “You don’t like John?”

  “Let’s say I don’t lead a very Biblical life. Any chance he’ll come back?”

  “Impossible to say. The working boys – you know what I mean by ‘working’ – only stay here when they’re sick or between hawks. If he’s scared about something he’ll go to ground and it could be six months before we see him again. If ever. You live in the city?”

  “I’m from the Coast. I’m renting in the East Village.”

  “The Village? Shit, Hell’s Kitchen sleaze beats their sleaze hands down. So, give me your number. And if our wandering waif comes home I’ll let you know.”

  Pellam wished he hadn’t thought of her as a peasant. He couldn’t dislodge the thought. Peasants were earthy, peasants were lusty. Especially red-haired peasants with freckles. He found himself calculating that the last time he’d slept with a woman they’d wakened in the middle of the night to the sound of winds pelting the side of his Winnebago with wet snow. Today the temperature had reached 99.

  He pushed those thoughts aside though they didn’t go as far away as he wanted them to.

  There was a dense pause. Pellam asked impulsively, “Listen, you want to get some coffee?”

  She reached for her nose, to adjust the glasses, then changed her mind and took them off. She gave an embarrassed laugh and readjusted the glasses again. Then she gave a tug at the hem of her sweatshirt. Pellam had seen the gesture before and sensed that a handful of insecurities – probably about her weight and clothes – was flooding into her thoughts.

  Something in him warned against saying, “You look fine,” and he chose something more innocuous. “Gotta warn you, though. I don’t do espresso.”

  She brushed her hair into place with thick fingers. Laughed.

  He continued, “None of that Starbucks, Yuppie, French-roast crap. It’s American or nothing.”

  “Isn’t it Colombian?”

  “Well, Latin American.”

  Carol joked, “You probably like it in unrecyclable Styrofoam too.”

  “I’d spray it out of an aerosol can if they made it that way.”

  “There’s a place up the street,” she said. “A little deli I go to.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Carol called, “Be back in fifteen.”

  A response in Spanish, which Pellam couldn’t make out, came from the back room.

  He opened the door for her. She brushed against him on the way out. Had she done so on purpose?

  Eight months, Pellam found himself thinking. Then told himself to stop.

  They sat on the curb near Ettie’s building. At their feet were two blue coffee cartons depicting dancing Greeks. Carol wiped her forehead with the souvenir Cambridge cotton and asked, “Who’s he?” Pellam turned and looked where Carol was pointing.

  Ismail and his tricolor windbreaker had mysteriously returned. He now played in the cab of the bulldozer that had been leveling the lot beside Ettie’s building. “Yo, my man, careful up there,” Pellam called. He explained to Carol about Ismail, his mother and sister.

  “The shelter in the school? It’s one of the better ones,” Carol said. “They’ll probably get them into an SRO in a month or so. Single room occupancy – a residence hotel. At least if they’re lucky.”

  “So, you know the neighborhood pretty well?” he asked.

  “Cut my social work teeth here.”

  “You’d know the good stuff then. The stuff that we touristas never find out.”

  “Try me.” Carol glanced at the tooling on Pellam’s battered black Nokona cowboy boots.

  “The gangs,” he said.

  “The crews? Sure, I know about them. But I don’t deal much with them. See, if a kid’s in a set he’s gonna get all the support he needs. Believe it or not, they’re better adjusted than the lone wolves.”

  “Yo,” Ismail called to Carol. “I going back to L.A. with my homie there,” he said, pointing at Pellam.

  “I don’t recall that being on the agenda, young man.” He raised his eyebrows to Carol.

  “No, no, it’s cool, cuz. I come with you. Hook up with a Blood or Crip crew. I get myself jumped in with them. Be cool. You know what I’m saying.” He vanished down the alley.

  “Give me lesson,” Pellam said. “Gangs 101 in Hell’s Kitchen.”

  Carol’s glasses had reappeared. He wanted to tell her she looked better without them. He knew better t
han that.

  “Gangs, huh? Where do I start? All the way back to the Gophers?” Carol smiled coyly. Then she laughed in surprise when Pellam said, “I heard One-Lung Curran’s outa business now.”

  “You know more than you’re letting on.”

  Pellam remembered an interview with Ettie Washington.

  “… Battle Row, Thirty-ninth Street, the turn of the century. Grandma Ledbetter told me what a dreadful place it was. That’s where One-Lung Curran and his gang, the Gophers, hung out – in Mallet Murphy’s tavern. Grandma’d go to dig in bins for scraps of gabardine, or maybe look for knuckle bones and she had to be careful ’cause the gang was always shooting it out with the police. That’s where it got the name. They had real battles. Sometimes it was the Gophers that won, believe it or not, and the cops wouldn’t come back for weeks, until things’d settled down.”

  He now said to Carol, “How ’bout the gangs now?”

  She thought for a moment. “The Westies used to be the gang here and there’re still some around but the Justice Department and the cops broke their back a few years ago. Jimmy Corcoran’s gang’s pretty much replaced them – they’re the dregs of the old Irish. The Cubano Lords’re the biggest now. Mostly Cuban but some Puerto Rican and Dominican. No black gangs to speak of. They’re in Harlem and Brooklyn. The Jamaicans and Koreans are in Queens. The tongs in Chinatown. The Russians in Brighton Beach.”

  The director within Pellam stirred momentarily at the thought of a story about the gangs. Then he thought, Been done. Two words that are pure strychnine in Tinseltown.

  Carol stretched and her breast brushed Pellam’s shoulder. Accidentally or otherwise.

  It had been a remarkable evening, that night eight months ago. The snow hitting the side of the camper, the wind rocking it, the blonde assistant director gripping Pellam’s earlobe between very sharp teeth.

  Eight months is an incredibly long time. It’s three quarters of a year. Practically gestation.

  “Where’s Corcoran’s kickback?” he asked.

  “His headquarters?” Carol asked, shaking her head. “Those boys’re a step away from caves. They hang out in an old bar north of here.”

  “Which one?”

  Carol shrugged. “I don’t know exactly.”

  She was lying.

  He glanced at her pale eyes. He was letting her know she’d been nabbed.

  She continued, unapologetically. “Look, you gotta understand about Corcoran… it’s not like the gangs on TV. He’s psycho. One of his boys killed this guy’d tried to extort them. Jimmy and some of his buddies cut up the body with a hacksaw. Then they sunk the parts in Spuyten Duyvil. But Jimmy kept one of the hands as a souvenir and tossed it into a toll basket on the Jersey pike. That’s the kind of crew you’re dealing with here.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “You think he’ll just grin and tell you his life story on camera?”

  Pellam shrugged, nonchalant – though an image of hacksaws had neatly replaced the image of making love in a snow-swept Winnebago.

  Carol shook her head. “Pellam, the Kitchen isn’t Bed-Sty. It isn’t the South Bronx or East New York… There, everybody knows it’s dangerous. You just stay away. Or you know you’re going to get dissed and you can see trouble coming. Here, it’s all turned ’round. You got yuppie lofts, you got nice restaurants, you got murderers, whores, corporate execs, psychos, priests, gay hookers, actors… You’re walking past a little garden at noon in front of a tenement, thinking, Hey, those’re pretty flowers, and the next thing you know you’re on the ground and there’s a bullet in your leg or an ice pick in your back. Or maybe you’re singing Irish songs in a bar and the guy next to you, somebody walks up and shoots his brains out. You never know who did it and you never know why.”

  “Oh, hell,” Pellam said, “I know that Jimmy Corcoran spits poison and walks through walls. That’s not news.”

  Carol laughed and lowered her head to Pellam’s arm. He felt another sizzle from the contact, hot enough to melt January snow. She said, “Okay, sorry about the preachin’. It’s in my job description. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You want Jimmy, I’ll give you Jimmy. The Four Eighty-eight. It’s a bar on the corner of Tenth and Forty-fifth. You can probably find him there three or four days a week. But if you go, go during the day. And-” She laid a firm grip upon Pellam’s arm. “ – I’d recommend you take a friend.”

  “Yo!” Ismail jumped onto the stairs next to them. “I be his friend.”

  “I’m sure that’ll have Corcoran quaking in his shoes.”

  “Fuck, yeah!”

  Ismail ran off to find more earth-moving equipment. Carol kept her eyes on Pellam for a long moment. Pellam looked away first and Carol stood up. “Back to the salt mines,” she said. Laughing, taking the glasses off.

  As they walked back to the Youth Outreach Center she said, “You know, you’re not the first creative sort I’ve run across. One of our Youth Outreach graduates was an author.”

  “Really?”

  “Wrote a best-seller – about a murderer. The bad news is it was an autobiography. Call me sometime, Pellam. Here’s my card.”

  Dannette Johnson was standing on Tenth Avenue.

  This was a broad street. The buildings lining it were low and it seemed even wider because of that. The sun, sinking over New Jersey, was still very bright and hot. She stood in one of the few shaded places for blocks around, under the awning of an abandoned late night club, a relic from the eighties.

  She thought: Nosir, not that one. Examining drivers who slowed and looked at her in a particular way.

  Nope. Not that asshole.

  Nope, not him neither.

  She stood in the shade not because of the heat – she was wearing no more than eight ounces of clothing on her extravagant body – but because teenage acne had dimpled her face and she believed she was ugly.

  Another car drove past, slowed almost to stopping. Like most of them here it had New Jersey plates; this was an approach to the Lincoln Tunnel, main route for commuters who lived in the Garden State.

  It was also a very easy place for a girl to make five, six hundred a night.

  But not from this fellow, not today. She looked away and he drove on.

  Dannette had been working the street for eight years, since she’d turned nineteen. To her, the profession was absolutely no different from any other job. Most of the johns were decent guys, who had a job they didn’t really care for, bosses who didn’t particularly like them, wives or girlfriends who’d stopped giving them head after the first baby.

  She provided a necessary service. Like the stenographer her mother had dreamt she’d be.

  A red Iroc-Z turned onto Tenth and cruised slowly toward her, the exhaust bubbling sexily. Behind the wheel was a pudgy Italian boy in an expensive, monogrammed white shirt. His moustache was trimmed carefully and he wore a gold Rolex on his left wrist. He looked like a salesman at one of the car dealerships on the West Side. “Wanna fuck?”

  She smiled, leaned forward, said in a sexy voice, “Kiss my black ass. Git outa here.”

  As Dannette retreated to the shade again the car vanished.

  A few minutes later a Toyota cruised by. Inside was a thin white man wearing a baseball cap. He looked around nervously. “Hi,” he said. “How you doing today? Hot, isn’t it? Sure is hot.”

  She looked around and then walked to the car, her high heels tapping on the concrete with loud pops.

  “Yeah, hot.”

  “I go home this way from work,” he said. “I’ve seen you out here.”

  “Yeah? Where you work?”

  “A place. Up the street.”

  “Yeah, what kinda place?” she asked.

  “Office. It’s boring. I seen you a couple times. Here, I mean. On the street.” He nervously cleared his throat.

  This boy was too much.

  “Yeah, I hang here some,” she said.

  “You’re a pretty lady.”

  She smile
d again, wondering, as she did a hundred times a day, if a plastic surgeon could smooth out her cheeks.

  “So,” he said.

  Dannette eyed him again. Echoed, “So.” After a moment she added, “Well, honey, you innerested in a date?”

  “Maybe. You sure got nice boobs. You don’t mind I tell you that, do you?”

  “Everbody like mah tits, sugar.”

  “So whatta you do?” The boy wiped his face. He was sweating. He started to take his cap off but changed his mind.

  “What I do?” she asked, frowning.

  “Like if we were to have a date, you and me, what’d we do to have fun?”

  “Oh, I tell you. I do everthing. I suck and I fuck and you can put it up my ass, you want. S’okay with me. You gonna be wearing a rubber anyways. And I got me some K-Y.”

  “Wow.” He seemed embarrassed but she definitely had his attention. “I like it, you talking that way. Dirty talk.”

  “Then I’ll talk t’you that way on our date.”

  “Man, you are one hot woman.”

  “Shit, honey, that ain’t news,” Dannette said, straight-faced.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Dannette. What’s yours?”

  “Joe.” There was a warehouse across the street. Joe Septimo’s Hauling and Storage, painting in letters twenty feet high. Half the guys who stopped here were named “Joe.”

  “Well, Joe, how’s that date sounding?” she leaned forward, letting him get a good look at the tits he seemed to like and letting him see they were real and that she wasn’t a transvestite.

  “Sounding pretty good.”

  He whispered something she couldn’t hear. She leaned forward on the car, her hands inside now. He looked at her nine rings.

  “What’s that you said, honey?”

  “I said, how much we talking? For our date, I mean?”

  “Fo’ a nice boy like you? What it is is I go down on you for fifty. You can fuck my pussy for a hundred. You can fuck my ass for two. And we can do it right in your backseat. There this alley I know ’bout. Now, whatchu-” She gasped in shock as the boy’s eyes hardened and he reached into his pocket, grabbing the handcuffs in one hand and her wrists in the other. He was skinny but surprisingly strong.