Hell's Kitchen

SIXTEEN

“Hey, mister, you got yourself a famous lawyer working for you. He sued the Port Authority and won. You ever hear of anybody suing the city and winning?”

The man sitting at Louis Bailey’s desk rose the instant Pellam entered the room. It was the green-jacket handicapper from yesterday. The man with a lock.

“Cleg, please,” Bailey said, self-effacing.

“And tell him about the time you sued Rockefeller.”

“Cleg.”

The skinny guy seemed to have forgiven Pellam for not taking his tip about the horses. He said, “Rockefeller stole this guy’s invention and Louis took him to court. He caved too. Louis scared the bejeebers out of him. Hey, sir, you look like a cowboy. Anybody ever tell you that? You ever ride broncos? What is that exactly, bronco? I just know about the O.J. one. The white truck, I mean.”

“It’s an untamed horse,” Pellam said.

“Well, how ’bout that,” Cleg said, astonished – a handicapper who’d just discovered a different kind of horse. He took more gear-greasing envelopes from Bailey and left the office.

“He’s quite a fellow” was all that Pellam could offer.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Bailey said ambiguously. Then he opened that morning’s paper. Slapped it. “Look at this.” The front page story was about a fire at a gas station in the Village. “That’s our boy.”

“The pyro?” Pellam asked.

“They’re pretty sure. Almost got him but he got away. Seriously injured two cops and three pedestrians. Almost a million dollars in damage.”

Pellam examined the picture of the devastation.

Bailey swallowed a mouthful of wine. “This is turning into a nightmare. There’s a public uproar. The Police Department and the Attorney General are under incredible pressure to get this guy. They think that he’s gone nuts. Like Ettie switched him on and he won’t shut off now. It’s become a citywide crusade to stop him.”

Pellam bent wearily over the paper. There was a sidebar that included a map of Hell’s Kitchen. Tiny drawings of flames marked the spots of the fires. They were in a pattern, it seemed – a semicircular shape north of Ettie’s building.

Bailey found a slip of paper, handed it to Pellam. “That’s the insurance agency where Ettie got the policy. The woman who sold it is a Florence Epstein.”

“What’d she say?”

Bailey looked at Pellam with a significance that escaped him completely.

“I’m sorry?” Pellam tried.

“I can’t talk to her. I’m Ettie’s attorney of record.”

“Oh, I get it. But I can.”

Bailey sighed. “Well, yes, but…”

“But what?”

“You know, sometimes… well, with that black outfit of yours, you look a little intimidating. And you don’t smile a lot.”

“I’ll be charm itself,” Pellam said. “As long as she’s not lying.”

“If there’s any hint of intimidation…”

“Do I look like the sort who intimidates?”

Bailey was suddenly very uncomfortable and he changed the subject. “Here. I went to the library.” He set some clippings down in front of Pellam.

“You went yourself? You didn’t bribe some librarian to bring them to you?”

“Ha.” Bailey was too busy wrestling the seal off a new wine bottle to smile. “Some back-grounders about Roger McKennah.”

Pellam shuffled through the clippings.

Business Week offered:

The best part of the prior decade for McKennah was the late eighties – when the market cindered, the boom went bust and careers ‘Chappaquidicked’ (a popular McKennahism) throughout Wall Street. Yet that was when he had shone the brightest.

New York magazine:

… Roger McKennah, the self-confessed megalomaniac, marched into third-world sections of the New York metro area and strewed them with affordable (and profitable) housing projects. He is also credited with revitalizing real estate investment trusts and with prying a good portion of midtown out of foreign hands and returning it to local developers. Notable for his wit as well as his lifestyle and business acumen, it was McKennah who coined the term “vulturing” – spotting deals going bad and grabbing them out from under receivers and trustees.

From baroquely metaphorical People:

Anyone – a Trump, a Zeckendorf, a Helmsley – could ride the crest of prosperity. But only a genius like Roger McKennah dared answer the call of ‘surf’s up’ when the only place to hang ten was in the tunnel of the wave.

Pellam put the articles aside.

“Makes him greedy and smart but hardly an arsonist,” Bailey commented.

“Then I better tell you about my date last night.”

“The party at his place?”

“The caviar was a bit too warm. But I had champagne with his wife.”

Bailey was delighted. Fraternizing with the enemy was probably an important technique for gear-cloggers. “And?”

“She wants to sink him like the Titanic.”

Pellam told the lawyer about McKennah’s clandestine meetings and the calls to and from the law firm.

“Pillsbury, Millbank?” Bailey asked.

“I’m pretty sure that’s what she said.

Bailey pulled a huge volume of Martindale Hubbell Lawyers Directory off his shelf and flipped it open. He found a listing of the firm. He read carefully, nodding. “I think I can get to somebody there.”

Can get.

Pellam was reaching for his wallet.

“Not this time. I’ve got another idea. Oh, and I’ve got more good news. Something I forgot to tell you. A friend of mine has a friend who plays cards with a senior fire marshal. There’s a poker game tonight and my buddy’s going to get his buddy to lose big and pour a bottle of Macallan scotch very freely. We’ll get some inside dope on the case.”

“How old?”

“How old what?” Bailey asked.

“Is the Macallan?”

“I don’t know. Twelve years probably. Maybe older.”

“I’m thinking, Louis,” Pellam said. “Maybe I’ll do a documentary about you. I’ll call it Greasing Gears. Say, did you really sue Rockefeller?”

“Oh, well, yes, I did,” Bailey gazed modestly down at his desk. Then he shrugged. “But it wasn’t one of the Rockefellers.”

The footsteps were close behind him and moving in closer.

Pellam spun around, his hand slipping into the small of his back, where the Colt rested, heavy and hot, against his spine.

He looked down.

“Yo, cuz. Where you been?” Ismail was grinning, hands on his scrawny hips. Sweating furious but still in his beloved African National Congress windbreaker.

“Around, and you?”

“Yo, you got a gun. You carryin’!”

“No I’m not.”

“Yo. You be! You was reaching for yo’ piece. Lemme see it, Pellam. Whatchu got? You got a Glock, you got a Brownin’? A trey five-seven? Man, I want a Desert Eagle. Blow yo’ ass to kingdom come. Fucker be fifty caliber.”

“I was reaching for my wallet. I figured you were a mugger.”

“I ain’t jack you, cuz.” Ismail looked genuinely hurt.

“Where’ve you been?” Pellam asked him.

“Flaggin’ and saggin’. You know.”

Pellam laughed. “Your jeans aren’t hanging down to your knees, my man. And I’ll give you ten bucks you flash me some real crew signs.”

But the boy knew them and gestured broadly. Pellam had no idea what the signs meant but they looked authentic. In an L.A. crew Ismail’d be considered a perfect T.G., tiny gangster. He slipped him the ten dollars, hoping it would go for food.

“Thanks, cuz.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Dunno. She gone. My sister too.”

“Gone? What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Gone. Ain’t ’round the shelter no more.”

“Where’re you hanging?”

“Don’t got no place. Hey, whatchu looking, Pellam. You giving me the eye like that.”

“Come on. There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

“Yeah? Who?”

“This woman.”

“She a fox?”

“I think so. I don’t know how you’ll feel.”

“Why you wanna introduce me to yo’ bitch, Pellam?”

“Watch the language.”

“No way.”

“Ismail.”

“No motherfuckin’ way,” he grumbled.

Pellam clamped his hand down hard on the boy’s arm and dragged him into the Youth Outreach Center.

“Ismail, stop the swearing.”

“Yo, cuz, I know what that bitch want. Man, she try to run a drag on me…”

“What’s his name?” Carol Wyandotte asked, unfazed by the little ball of angry child in front of her.

“Ismail.”

“Hello, Ismail. I’m Carol. I run this place.”

“Yo, you a slob bitch and I ain’t staying here-”

“That’s it, young man,” Pellam barked.

He responded, surly, “You keep that white bitch way from me.”

Pellam thought he’d try the soft approach. He said calmly, “Ismail, look, some people don’t think that’s a very nice word to use.”

“Okay, okay.” The boy looked contrite. “I ain’t say ‘white’ no more.”

“Very funny.”

“Oh, he doesn’t mean ‘bitch’ that way,” Carol said matter-of-factly, rocking back and studying him. “It’s just verbal window dressing.”

“Don’t be telling me what I mean, bitch.”

Pellam snapped, “You want to be my friend or not? Watch your mouth.”

The boy crossed his arms and dropped sullenly onto the windowsill.

“His mother and sister’ve vanished,” Pellam told her.

“Vanished?”

“From the shelter,” Pellam explained.

“Ismail, what happened?”

“Dunno. I come back and they gone. Dunno where.”

The boy had spotted a stack of comic books in the corner. He began flipping through an old issue of X-Men.

“Anything you can do for him?” Pellam asked.

Carol shrugged. “We could call SSC, Special Services for Children. They’ll place him in an emergency home in twenty-four hours. He’ll run away in twenty-five. I think we should keep him here for a few days, see if his mother shows up… Ismail?”

The boy looked up.

“You have a grandmother?”

“Hey, you don’ know shit. The whole everbody got a grandmother.”

“I mean, who you know.”

He shrugged.

“Where’s yours live?”

“Dunno.”

“Either of them? How about aunts? Anybody else?”

“Dunno.”

It hit Pellam hard that the boy didn’t know ny of his relatives. But Carol calmly said, “You like those books? We’ve got a lot of them.”

He snorted, said defiantly, “Shit. I could ’jack myself a thousand motherfuckin’ comics, I wanted to.”

Pellam walked over to the boy, crouched down. “You and me, we’re friends, right?”

“I guess. I dunno.”

“Will you stay here for a while? And not make any waves.”

Carol said to him, “We’ll help you find your mother.”

“I don’t want her. She a cluckhead bitch. Doing rock all the time. She put the rush on all these guys, make some money. Motherfuckers, you know what I’m saying?”

Pellam offered, “Just stay for a little while. For me?”

He put down the book. “Okay, fo’ you, Pellam, I do that.” He eyed Carol. “But listen up, bitch-”

“Ismail!” Pellam shouted. “Once more, and I’m cutting you loose.”

The boy blinked in surprise at this outburst. He nodded uncertainly.

Carol said to the boy, “We’d like you to stay. There are some kids you can hang with. Go on in the back. Ask for Miss Sanchez. She’ll find you a bed in the boy’s dormitory.”

He looked at Pellam. “I come see you?”

“It’s not a prison,” Carol told him. “You come and go as you like.”

Ignoring Carol, he said to Pellam, “We hang in the ’hood together, cuz?”

“I’d like that.”

Ismail’s dark, contracted eyes appraised the dim office. “Okay,” he muttered, “but nobody better be dissing me, you know what I’m saying?”

“Nobody’ll dis you here,” Carol said.

He looked at Pellam with eerily adult eyes and said, “Later, cuz.”

“Later.”

He disappeared into the back, pushing through the door like a wild west gunfighter.

Carol laughed. “So what’re you doing out on these mean streets? Aside from playing social worker.” She glanced down at her Harvard sweatshirt, brushed some dust off with her pudgy fingers. The gesture made her seem both strong and vulnerable at the same time.

“Just walking around. Looking for camera angles. Looking for people to talk to. You hear anything from Alex?”

“Nothing, sorry. He hasn’t been back, nobody’s seen him. I asked around.”

Neither of them said anything for a minute. A teenage girl, very pregnant, walked through the lobby, cradling a stuffed Barney dinosaur toy in her arms.

Carol poked her glasses up on her nose and exchanged a few words with the girl. When she was gone, Pellam asked the social worker, “You interested in another cup of politically incorrect coffee?”

A brief hesitation. Pellam thought she was pleasantly surprised. But it might have been something else.

“Well, sure.”

“If you’re busy…”

“No. Just let me change. Give me two minutes? I was schlepping boxes around all day,” she added pologetically, shaking dust off her sleeves again.

“No problem.”

She vanished into the backroom. A young Latino woman appeared, nodded to Pellam and took over desk duty.

Carol appeared a few moments later; a loose green blouse had replaced her sweatshirt and black stretch pants, the jeans. She wore short black boots, instead of the Nikes. The woman at the desk glanced at the outfit with surprise and muttered a indiscernible response when Carol said she’d be back later.

Outside she asked, “You mind if we stop by my apartment? It’s only four blocks. I forgot to feed Homer this morning.”

“Cat, boa constrictor or boyfriend?”

“Siamese. I named him Homer Simpson. No, not the one you’re thinking of.”

“I was thinking of the character in Day of the Locust,” Pellam responded.

“Well,” Carol said, surprised. “You know it?”

Pellam nodded.

“I had my cat first. Then they came up with that cartoon show on TV and I wished I’d called him something else.”

Pellam felt one those little bursts in the gut when you find someone who’s moved by the same obscure work of art as you are. Pellam had seen Day of the Locust twelve times and could see it another twelve. So, Carol was a kindred soul. “Donald Sutherland’s role. Great film. Waldo Salt wrote the script.”

“Oh,” Carol said, “It was a movie? I just read the book.”

Pellam had never gotten around to the book. Well, they were distant kindred. But that was all right too.

They turned south, the rush-hour traffic jammed the street, the yellow cabs interspersed between the battered trucks and cars. Horns honked constantly. The heat had unleashed tempers like geysers and occasionally one driver turned on another with rageful gestures. No one seemed to have the energy, though, for any physical damage.

Despite the prickly heat the sky was clear, and crisp shadows stretched across the street before them. Two blocks away McKennah Tower caught the last of the light and glowed like oiled ebony. The sparks fell from the welders’ flames as if the sunlight was being sheared off by the slabs of black glass.

“Did you ever find Corcoran?” she asked.

“We had a chin-wag, like my mother used to say.”

“And you lived to tell about it.”

“He’s a sensitive person deep down. He’s just misunderstood.”

Carol laughed.

“I don’t think he did it,” Pellam said. “The arson.”

“You really think that old woman’s innocent?”

“I do.”

“Unfortunately, one thing I’ve learned is that innocence isn’t always a defense. Not in the Kitchen.”

“So I’m finding.”

They continued slowly along bustling Ninth Avenue, dodging the hoards of workers from the main post office and discount stores and fashion district warehouses and greasy-spoon restaurants. In L.A. the streets were impassable at rush hour; here, it was the sidewalks.

“He seemed smart, Ismail,” Carol said after a moment. “Had spirit. It’s a crying shame it’s too late for him.”

“Too late?” Pellam laughed. “He’s only ten.”

“Way, way, way too late.”

“Isn’t there a program or something you can get him into.”

Carol apparently thought he was kidding and burst out laughing. “A program? Nope, Pellam. No program, no nothin’.” They stopped in front of a store selling exotic gypsy dresses. Carol, in her fat-hiding clothes, looked wistfully at the outfits on the anorexic mannequins. They walked on. “His father’s dead or gone, right?”

“Dead.”

“His mother? He called her a cluckhead. That means she’s a crack addict. No other relatives. You showed some interest. That’s why he attached himself to you. But you can’t give him what he needs. Nobody can. Not now. Impossible. He’s making gang contacts now. He’ll be jumped in in three years. Five years from now he’ll be a street dealer. In ten he’ll be in Attica.”

Pellam was angered by her cynicism. “I don’t think it’s that bleak.”

“I know how you feel. You wanted to let him stay with you, right?”

He nodded.

“I used to be optimistic too. But you can’t take ’em all in. Don’t even try. It’ll only drive you crazy. Save the ones you can save – the three-, four-year-olds. Write off the rest. It’s sad but there’s nothing you can do about it. Forces beyond our control. Race’ll be the death of this city.”

“I don’t know,” Pellam said. “Making this film, I see a lot of anger. But not angry blacks or whites. Angry people. People who can’t pay their bills or get good jobs. That’s why they’re mad.”

Carol shook her head emphatically. “No, you’re wrong. The Irish, Italian, Poles, West Indians, Latinos… they were all despised minorities too at one time. But there’s one insurmountable difference – it may have been in steerage but their ancestors booked passage to the New World. They didn’t come on slave ships.”

Pellam wasn’t convinced. But he let it go. This was her world, not his.

I be his friend…

He was surprised at how bad he felt about the boy.

“I hear so much rhetoric,” Carol continued angrily. “ ‘Ghettocentric.’ ‘Fragmented family units.’ What incredible bullshit you hear. We don’t need buzzwords. We need somebody to get the fuck into these neighborhoods and be with the kids. And that means getting to them in the nursery. By the time they’re Ismail’s age, they’re set in concrete.”

She looked at him and her eyes, which had grown icy, softened. “Sorry, sorry… You poor guy. Another lecture. The thing is, you’re an outsider. You’re entitled to a certain amount of optimism.”

“Bet you’ve got a little left, though. To stay here, I mean. Do what you’re doing.”

“I really don’t think I’m doing very much.”

“Oh, that’s not what your neighbors say.”

“What?” Carol laughed.

Pellam tried to remember. The name came to him. “Jose Garcia-Alvarez?”

Carol shook her head.

“I taped him for my film. Just last week. He spends every afternoon in Clinton Park. Shares his Wonder bread with a thousand pigeons. He said something about you.”

“That I’m a fiesty bitch probably.”

“That he’s forever grateful. You saved his son.”

“Me?”

He told the story. Carol had found the sixteen-year-old boy, strung out and unconscious, in a tenement that was just about to be torn down to make way for McKennah Tower. If she hadn’t called the police and medics the teenager might’ve been crushed to death by the bulldozers.

“Oh, him? Sure, I remember that. I wouldn’t exactly call it heroic.” She seemed embarrassed. Yet part of her was pleased, he could see. She suddenly grabbed Pellam’s arm to stop at a shoe store. It was an upscale place, doing no business whatsoever. Joan and David Shoes, Kenneth Cole. A single pair probably cost a week’s paycheck for most of people walking past. The owner was praying for gentrification and couldn’t hold out much longer.

“In my next life,” Carol said, though whether she was talking about being able to afford the svelte rhinestone-studded black heels she looked at or fit into a dress that would go with them, Pellam couldn’t guess.

Halfway down the street Carol asked, “You married?”

“Divorced.”

“Kids?”

“Nope.”

“Going with anybody?” she asked.

“Haven’t been for a while.”

Eight months to be precise.

If you could call a lusty night in a snowbound Winnebago “going with.”

“You?” He didn’t know if he should ask. Didn’t know if he wanted to.

“Divorced too.”

They dodged around a hawker in front of a discount cosmetics store. “Yo, bee-utiful lady, we make you mo’ bee-utiful than you already be.”

Carol laughed, blushing, and continued quickly past him.

A block farther she nodded at a shabby tenement, similar to Pellam’s.

“Home sweet home,” she said.

Carol gave a quarter to a panhandler she greeted as Ernie. They stopped at the deli, exchanged a few words with the counterman and walked to the back of the store. She held up a can of coffee and a six pack of beer. “Which one,” she mouthed.

He pointed to the beer and he could see that that was her choice too.

Not too distant kindred souls…

Her apartment was next door, a decrepit walk-up with beige and brown paint slapped over dozens of generations of other layers. They walked up the stairs. He smelled old wood, hot wallpaper, grease and garlic. Another firetrap, Pellam thought in passing.

On the landing she abruptly halted, stopping him on the step below. A pause. She was debating. Then she turned. Their faces were at the same height. She kissed him hard. His hands slid down her shoulders into the small of her back and he felt the ignition inside him. Pulled her even closer.

“Turiam pog,” she whispered, kissing him hard.

He laughed and cocked an eyebrow.

“Gaelic. Guess what it means.”

“I better not.”

“ ‘Kiss me,’ ” she said.

“Okay.” And did. “Now, what does it mean?”

“No, no.” She laughed. “That is what it means.” She giggled like a girl and stepped to the door closest to the stairs. They kissed again. She dug for her keys.

Pellam found himself looking at her. And as she bent forward, glassesless, squinting her bad eyes to open the lock, he saw an image of a Carol Wyandotte very different from the stony, hustling Times Square social worker. He saw the sad pearls, the sweatshirts, an elastic-shot cotton bra, the fat at her throat that Fiber-Trim would never melt away. Whose nights were filled with the tube, in a room peppered with Atlantic Monthlys and Diet Pepsi empties, dresser filled with more cotton socks than black pantyhose. The Archway cookies packages she’d automatically tucked out of sight when guests walked into the kitchen, a fat person’s instinct.

Don’t do this for pity, Pellam thought to himself.

And in the end he didn’t. Not at all.

Eight months is, after all, eight months.

He kissed her hard and, when the last deadbolt clicked, he pushed the door eagerly open with his booted foot.