Hell's Kitchen

ELEVEN

Hatake Imaham was holding court in the Women’s Detention Center.

“Now listen here,” she told the young women gathered around her. “Don’t buy that crap. High John Conqueror root? Black-bat oil, lodestones, Bichon’s two-hearts drawing candle? That be bullshit, all that crap people be trying to sell you. Just to take yo’ money. Y’oughta know better.”

Ettie Washington, across the cell, listened with half her attention. She hurt more today than she had right after the fire. Her arm throbbed, sending waves of pain into her jaw. Her ankle too. And her headache was blinding. She’d tried again to get some painkillers and the guards had merely stared at her the way they sometimes stared at the mice scurrying around on the floors here.

“But I know it work,” one skinny woman said. “One time mah man was cheatin’ and what it was-”

“Listen to me. If you got the sight you don’t need them oils and candles and roots. If you ain’t got the sight then there’s nothing gonna do it. You come to make a sacrifice at my honfour, you leave a few pennies for Damballah. That’s all you gotta do. But mosta the mambos and houngnans in New York’re just out fo’ money.” Her voice lifted, “What about you, Mrs. Washington? You believe in Damballah?”

“In?-”

“The serpent god? Santeria, hoodoo?”

“Not really, no, I don’t,” Ettie said. She didn’t feel like explaining that Grandma Ledbetter, bless her heart, had squeezed every shred of religion out of Ettie by her fierce lectures that mixed Catholicism and fiery Baptist dogma. Which, come to think of it, didn’t seem to Ettie very different from the crazy stuff Hatake was talking about. Incense and holy water instead of High John Conqueror root.

Hatake tugged at her naked, punctured earlobe and continued to expound on the silliness of man-fetching spells and law stay-away oil. What was in your heart was what was important, Hatake said. Ettie’s mind wandered and she thought again about John Pellam. Wondered when he’d come to visit her again. If he’d come. That man ought to be a hundred miles away by now. What the hell was he helping her for? She thought with horror how he’d almost been trapped by the fire. Thought about little Juan Torres too. She said a nonbeliever’s prayer for the boy.

Then a noise from the front of the cell. The clank of metal on metal. Some of the women shouted hello to a new prisoner.

“Yo, girl. Weren’t out but one day? You got yo’ ass busted that quick?”

“Shit, Dannette, yo’ bad luck. I staying away from you, girl.”

Ettie watched the young woman with the pocked face and the beautiful figure walk uncertainly into the large cell. She was one of the prostitutes who’d been released just yesterday. Back so soon? Ettie smiled at her but the woman didn’t respond.

Dannette walked up to the circle of women sitting around Hatake Imaham, who nodded to the woman. “Hey, girl. Good to see you.”

Which sounded a little odd. Sort of like Hatake had been expecting her.

And the woman continued her lecture on hoodoo, talking now about Damballah, the highest in the voodoo order. Ettie knew this because her sister had dabbled in that craziness some years ago. Then the huge woman’s voice faded and the women began talking among themselves, very quietly. One or two of them glanced at Ettie but they didn’t include her in the conversation. That was all right. She was thankful for the quiet and for a few minutes’ peace. She had many things to think about and, as the good Lord, or Damballah, she laughed to herself, knew, there were few enough moments of peace in here.

One of those feelings. Somebody watching him.

Pellam stood on the curb in front of Ettie’s building, wasting his time asking amnesia-struck construction workers if they’d been in the alley when the fire started or if they knew who had.

He turned suddenly. Yep, there it was. About fifty feet away a glistening black stretch limo was parked in the construction site, under the large billboard on which an artist had rendered a dramatic painting of the finished building. Pellam had seen a number of billboards like this one on the West Side; whoever painted them managed to make the high-rises look as appealing, and as completely phoney, as the drawings of women modeling lingerie in the Saks and Lord & Taylor newspaper ads.

Pellam focused on the limo. The windows were tinted but he could see that someone in the backseat – a man, it seemed – was gazing at him.

Pellam suddenly lifted the camera to his shoulder and aimed at the limo. There was a pause and then some motion in the backseat. The driver punched the accelerator and the long vehicle bounded out of the drive. It vanished in traffic toward the fish-gray strip of the Hudson River.

He stepped off the curb, still aiming the camera, and so he never saw the second car, the one that nearly broadsided him.

When he heard the brakes he spun around and stumbled back over the curb out of the way, falling. He lost some skin on his elbows rescuing the Betacam – which was worth more than he was at the moment.

A man was all over him in an instant, huge man. Vice-grip hands grabbed Pellam’s arms, jerking him to his feet, lifting the camera away. Not even time to blurt a protest before he was flung into the backseat of the sedan. At first he thought Jimmy Corcoran had found out he was looking for his crew and sent some boys to find him.

Hacksaws… The image just wouldn’t leave him alone.

But he realized these men weren’t gangies. They were in their thirties and forties. And they wore suits. Then he remembered where he’d seen the one who grabbed him, the one with the smooth, baby skin and muscles upon muscles. And so wasn’t surprised to see who was in the front passenger seat.

“Officer Lomax,” Pellam said.

The huge assistant climbed into the front seat and started to drive.

“I’m not an officer,” Lomax said.

“No?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then what do I call you? Inspector? Fire marshal? Kidnapper?”

“Ha. Maybe I should call you Mr. Funny. Instead of Mr. Lucky. Ain’t he a kick?” Lomax asked his assistant. The wrestler didn’t respond.

Neither did the the man beside Pellam, a scrawny cop or marshal, tiny as a rooster. He didn’t seem even to notice Pellam and just stared at the scenery as they drove past.

“How you doing?” Lomax asked. Around the man’s neck was a badge on a chain. It was gold and had a mean-looking eagle perched on top of a crest.

“So-so.”

To his assistant the marshal said, “Take him where we just were.” Then added: “Only where nobody can see us.”

“The alley?”

“Yeah, the alley’d be good.”

This seemed rehearsed. But Pellam wasn’t going to play the intimidation game. He rolled his eyes. Three cops – or whatever fire marshals were – weren’t going to shoot him in an alley.

“We want to know one thing,” Lomax said, looking out the window at a recently burned store. “Only one thing. Where can we find that shit the old lady hired? That’s it. Just that. Tell us and you won’t believe the kind of deal we’ll cut for her.”

“She didn’t hire anybody. She didn’t torch the building. Every minute you spend thinking she did is another minute the real perp is free.”

This was another line from one of his movies. It sounded better on paper than it did when spoken aloud. But that may have been the circumstances.

Lomax said nothing for a few minutes. Then he asked, “You wanta know difference between women and men? Women break down easy. A man’ll hard-ass you for days. But you stand in front of a woman and scream and they start crying, they say, yeah, yeah, I did it, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me. I didn’t mean to or I didn’t know anybody’d get hurt or my boyfriend made me do it. But they break down.”

“I’ll share that with Gloria Steinem next time I see her.”

“More of the humor. Glad you can laugh at times like this. But you maybe better listen to what I’m saying. I intend to break that woman one way or another. I don’t care how I do it. Tommy, am I saying this?”

The marshal’s huge assistant recited, “I don’t hear you saying anything.”

Beside Pellam, the skinny cop, the silent one, examined some kids opening a hydrant. He didn’t seem to hear anything either.

Lomax said, “I am gonna stop this fucking psycho and you’re in a position to make it easier on Washington and save a lot of innocent people in the process. You can talk to her, you can – Ah, ah, ah, don’t say a word, Mr. Lucky. Tell him what happened this morning, Tony.”

“Fire on the Eighth Avenue Subway.”

Lomax was looking at Pellam again. “How many injured, Tony?”

The assistant recited, “Sixteen.”

“How bad?”

“Real bad, boss. Four critical. One’s not expected to live.”

Lomax looked at the sidewalk, said to the driver, “Go the back way. I don’t wanna be seen.”

They were all very grim, these men – two of them outweighing Pellam by fifty pounds at least. And it was starting to occur to Pellam that while they might not shoot him they could beat the crap out of him. They’d probably even enjoy it. And break the forty-thousand-dollar camera that wasn’t his.

“You know what we call an easy case? One with witnesses and solid evidence?” Lomax asked.

“A grounder,” offered Tony.

Lomax continued, leaning close to Pellam, “You know what we call a case we can’t figure out?”

“A balk?” Pellam tried.

“We call it a mystery, Mr. Lucky. Well, that’s what we got here. A big fucking mystery. We know the lady hired this guy but we can’t find any fucking leads. And I just don’t know what to do about it. So I don’t have any choice. All I can think of is to start hitting that old lady hard. Am I saying this, Tony?”

“You’re not saying anything.”

“And if that doesn’t work, Mr. Lucky, then I’m going to start hitting you hard.”

“Me.”

“You. You were at the building around the time of the fire – like you were supposed to be an alibi for the old lady. Now you’re walking around, talking to witnesses, with that big dick of a camera you got. You’re a man’s been around cops, I can smell that. I think you’ve seen more of ’em than you’d like, you ask me. So before I start whaling on her and on you, I want a straight answer: What’s your interest in all this?”

“Simple. You arrested the wrong person. Getting that to register in your mind – that’s my interest.”

“By destroying evidence? Intimidating witnesses? Fucking up the investigation?”

Pellam glanced at the man beside him. A nebbishy guy. The sort you’d cast for an accountant or, if he had to be a cop, one from Internal Affairs.

Pellam said, “Let me ask you a few questions.” The marshal grimaced but Pellam continued. “Why’d Ettie burn down a whole building if she’s just got a policy on her apartment?”

“Because she hired a fucking psycho who couldn’t control himself.”

“Well, why’d she need to hire somebody at all. Why couldn’t she fake a grease fire?”

“Too suspicious.”

“But it was suspicious anyway.”

“Less suspicious than just burning her place. Besides, she didn’t know about the insurance fraud database.”

“She lost everything in the fire.”

“What everything? A thousand bucks worth of old furniture and crap?”

Pellam said, “And her fingerprints? What about them? You think she’s going to hire somebody then give the pyro a bottle with her fingerprints on them? And isn’t it kind of funny that the parts of the bottle with her prints on them don’t get melted into bubble gum?”

“What should I ask this fellow now, Tony?” Lomax asked his belabored assistant, who thought for a moment before answering. Then said, “I’d wonder how he knew we got her prints on the bottle.”

“Well?” Lomax raised an eyebrow.

“Lucky guess,” Pellam responded. “True to my name.”

“Turn here,” Lomax said to the driver. The car skidded around a curve. And stopped. “Tony,” the marshal gave the cue.

The assistant turned and Pellam suddenly found an very large pistol resting on his temple.

“Jesus…”

“I got more trivia for you, Pellam. Us fire marshals aren’t cops. We don’t have to worry about P.D. regs. We can carry whatever kind of weapons we want. What kind of gun is that you’re holding, Tony?”

“This is a.38 Magnum. I load it with Plus P rounds.”

“So you can fuck around with innocent people more efficiently?” Pellam asked. “Is that the idea?

The cop holding the gun drew it back. Pellam laughed again, shaking his head. He knew he wasn’t going to get hit. Physical evidence of a beating was the last thing these boys wanted. Tony looked at Lomax, who shrugged.

The gun disappeared into the big man’s pocket. He and Lomax climbed out of the front seat, looked away.

Pellam was thinking, Called their bluff, when the skinny man slammed his bony fist, wrapped around roll of quarters or nickels, into Pellam’s head just a behind the ear. An explosion of pain shot through him.

“Man… Christ.”

Another blow. Pellam’s face bounced off the window. Outside Lomax and Tony were examining a pile of trash in the alley, nodding.

Before he could lift his hands the skinny man delivered another fierce blow. There was a burst of yellow light and more astonishing pain. It occurred to him that the bruise and the welt would be virtually impossible to see through his hair.

So much for evidence.

The man dropped the roll of coins into his pocket and sat back. Pellam wiped pain tears from his eyes and turned to the man. Before he could say anything – or haul off and break the man’s jaw – the door opened and Lomax and Tony pulled him out, dropped him in the alley.

Pellam touched his scalp. No blood. “I’m not going to forget that, Lomax.”

“Forget what?”

Tony dragged Pellam up the deserted alley.

No witnesses was all Pellam could think.

Lomax escorted them halfway for about thirty feet. Motioned to Tony, who pinned Pellam to the wall, just like he’d done in Ettie’s hospital room the other day.

Pellam flinched. Lomax shoved his hands into his pocket. He said in a low voice, “I’ve been a supervising fire marshal for ten years. I’ve seen lot of pyros before but I’ve never seen anybody like this guy. This is your ground-zero asshole. He’s out of control and it’s gonna get worse before we get him. Now, are you going to help us?”

“She didn’t hire him.”

“Okay. If that’s the way you want it.”

Pellam balled his fists. He wasn’t going down without a fight. They’d arrest him for assault probably but they were going to arrest him anyway, it looked like. Go for Tony first, try to break his nose.

Then Lomax nodded to Tony, who released Pellam. The big guy walked back to the car, where the skinny man with the coins was reading the Post.

Lomax turned to Pellam, who shifted his weight, ready to start slugging it out.

But the marshal only gestured toward an unmarked gray door. “Go through there and up to the third floor. Room three-thirteen. Got it?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“In there.” He nodded toward the door. “Room three-thirteen. Just do it. Now, get out of my sight. You make me sick.”

Stepping into the elevator and pressing the disk of oily plastic that said 3.

The building was a hospital, the same one where he’d been treated and where Ettie Washington had been arrested.

Pellam followed the corridors and found the small room that Lomax had directed him to.

Pausing in the doorway, he didn’t pay any attention to the couple who stood inside. He didn’t notice the fancy medical equipment. He didn’t acknowledge the white-uniformed nurse, who looked at him briefly. No, all John Pellam saw was the pile of bandages that was a twelve-year-old boy. Young Juan Torres, the most serious injury in the fire at 458 W. Thirty-sixth Street.

The son of the man who knew Jose Canseco.

Pellam looked around the room, trying to figure out why Lomax had sent him here. He couldn’t figure it out.

In Pellam’s heart was a balanced pity – equal parts for the child and for Ettie Washington. (But, he wondered, were these sorrows exclusive? He debated for a difficult moment. If Ettie Washington was guilty, then yes they were.)

Forget it, he told himself. She’s innocent. I know she is.

Wondering again why Lomax had directed him here.

“La iglesia,” the woman said evenly. “El cura.”

Another nurse walked brusquely into the room, jostling Pellam, and continued on without apology. She offered the mother a small white cup. Maybe the woman was sick too. At first Pellam supposed she’d been hurt in the fire. But he remembered helping her out the doorway herself, behind the fireman who carried her son. She’d been fine then though now her hands trembled and the two tiny yellow pills spilled from the wax cup and tapped on the floor. He realized that something about this room differed from the others he’d just walked past.

What is it?

Something odd was going on here.

Yes, that’s it…

The monitor above the bed was silent. The tubes had been disconnected from the boy’s arm. The chart had been removed from a hook welded to the bedframe.

Cura. Pellam had a Southern Californian’s grasp of Spanish. He remembered that the word meant priest.

The child had died.

This was what Lomax wanted him to see.

The boy’s mother ignored the dropped pills and leaned against her companion. He turned his head, covered with tight short-shorn curls and looked at Pellam.

“My daddy, he knows Jose Canseco. No, no, no. Really. He does!”

The nurse again walked past Pellam, this time uttering a soft “Excuse me.”

Then the room was silent or almost so. The only sound was white noise, an indistinct hiss, like the soundtrack on the tape of Otis Balm in his death pose or the tape of Ettie’s empty armchair after she rose to answer the door in the last scenes he shot of her. Pellam remained frozen in the center of the room, unable to offers words of condolence, unable to observe or to analyze.

It was some moments later that he finally realized the other implications of this silent event – that the charge against Ettie Washington would now be murder.