Hell's Kitchen

TWENTY-ONE

The shades were down in Bailey’s office.

Maybe to stave off the heat, Pellam guessed. Then he realized that the blackout must’ve been at the request of the nervous man who sat forward on a rickety chair across from the lawyer. He was continually adjusting his position and looking around the room as if a hitman were sighting on his back from across the street.

Pellam paid no attention to the visitor. To the lawyer he said, “I found Alex but the pyro got to him first.”

“The Eagleton fire?” Bailey asked, nodding knowingly.

“Yep.”

“He’s dead?”

Pellam shrugged. “Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he just took off. I don’t know. There were unidentified bodies.”

“Oh, my God,” offered the visitor. He looked like the sort who’d be wringing his hands if they weren’t gripping the seat of the chair so desperately.

Pellam then told the lawyer what Lomax had said about protective custody.

“No!” Bailey whispered. “That’s bad. She won’t last an hour in general population.”

“Goddamn blackmail,” Pellam muttered. “Can you stop him from doing it?”

“I can delay it is all. But they’ll release her. The D.A.’ll agree in an instant if they think it’ll pressure her into giving up the arsonist.” He jotted a note on a piece of sunbleached foolscap and turned his attention to the nervous man who sat before him. He was skinny, middle-aged and wore a clever toupee. His pants had a slight flair. A disco demon from the seventies. The lawyer introduced the men.

Newton Clarke rose slightly and shook Pellam’s hand with a sopping palm, then deflated himself back to his cracked Naugahyde roost. He never held Pellam’s eye for more than a second.

“Newton here has a few interesting things to tell us. Start over, why don’t you? Some wine, Pellam? No? You’re such an abstainer. Okay, Newton, talk to us. Tell us where you work.”

“Pillsbury, Milbank & Hogue.”

“Roger McKennah’s law firm. The one his wife told me about.”

“Right.”

Newton’s job, it seemed, was in the managing attorney’s office.

Bailey explained, “They’re the ones who handle scheduling, make calendar calls and so on, filings. You get the picture. They’re not lawyers. Newton could be, right? With everything you know about the law.” A glance at Pellam. “But he wants an honest profession.”

Clarke smiled uneasily. His eyes flicked to the window as a passerby cast a hurried shadow on the dusty blinds.

Bailey swilled more wine. “Give us your take on Roger McKennah.”

“Well, for one thing, he knows everything that goes on in the Kitchen.”

“Like Santa Claus, is he? Making his list… Don’t you worry, Newton, your mission here’s safe. We’ll give you bushy eyebrows and a fake nose when you leave.”

Clarke forced his shoulders back and sat up straight. He offered a humorless laugh. “Jesus, Louis, his building’s right across the street. We should’ve met someplace safe.”

“Zurich, Grand Cayman?” Bailey asked with uncharacteristic acid. “Now what about McKennah?”

The man told his story. Newton indeed had a clerk’s personality. Organized, precise, detailed. The kind of documentary interviewee, Pellam decided, who seemed perfect but whose testimony he could use only in small doses; for all his accuracy Clarke spoke without a bit of passion or color. We’ll take robust lies over the pale truth any day, Pellam had come to believe.

“Should I-?”

“From the beginning,” Bailey said. “The very beginning.”

“Okay, okay. Well, Mr. McKennah grew up in the Kitchen. He was poor, crude… When he was in his twenties he decided to remake himself. He dumped the girl he was engaged to because she was Jewish.” Clarke glanced at Pellam’s features to see how inappropriate this comment was. Then he continued. “He hired a speech and dress coach to help him improve his image and he started working his way through New York real estate. He bought his first building in Flatbush when he was twenty-three. Then a building in Prospect Park, then Astoria, then a couple in the Heights and the Slope. He was twenty-nine. He had nine buildings.

“Then he hocked all nine and came into Manhattan. One building on Twenty-fourth Street. Nobody was in that part of town then. It was a bum location. The city – the high-class commercial districts – went south to the Empire State Building and it stopped until you got to W ll Street. But he bought this building and what happened but New York Life bought it from him. Fast and with cash. He took that money and bought two more buildings, then three, then six. Then he built one. His first. Then he bought two more. And kept going. Now he’s got sixty or seventy throughout the Northeast.”

Pellam was losing patience. He asked, “Was he ever connected with an arson?”

“That’s my boy,” Bailey said, nodding toward Pellam. “Good movie-maker. Gets right to the proverbial chase scene.”

Clarke responded, “Well…”

But the words deflated as soon as they were spoken and Bailey prompted, “Come on, Newton. Pellam’s a friend.”

“Okay, okay… Well, nobody’s sure. Couldn’t prove anything. But recently there’ve been some accidents. Some union men – one of them went off the thirtieth floor of a building on Lexington. And a building inspector who hadn’t been willing to pocket money got beaned by a stack of two-by-fours. None of this happened on a McKennah job site, of course, but they all were involved with Mr. McKennah one way or another. Suppliers who tried to extort him – their trucks got hijacked. And yeah, a couple of places were fire-bombed – sellers who set ridiculously high prices. People who wouldn’t deal. That was Mr. McKennah’s complaint. He doesn’t mind negotiations. He doesn’t even mind getting bested. But he hates it when people won’t even sit down with him. That’s the most important thing for Mr. McKennah. You don’t have to play fair but you have to play.”

Pellam recalled the steely eyes of the brunette at the developer’s party. Tough adversary, playing the game. “How’d you find out all of this?”

“Pellam’s right to be suspicious, Newton.” Bailey turned to him. “But we don’t have to worry. Newton’s sources are impeccable.” More wine sloshed. “And so’s his motive for helping us out here, isn’t it? Pristine.”

Pellam explained what Jolie had told him and asked, “Exactly how desperate is he?”

“His casinos have failed big. He’s step away from bankruptcy. And I mean complete bankruptcy. Apocalyptic bankruptcy.”

“Now we come to the crux of it, right, Newton?”

The toupee was adjusted to quell an itching scalp. “Mr. McKennah needs the Tower.” He nodded toward the shaded window, on the other side of which the highrise soared into the sky. “It’s his last chance,” added the flatlined voice.

McKennah, Clarke explained, had several tenants lined up for the Tower when it was completed but there was only one lease he really cared about. RAS Advertising and Public Relations was consolidating all of its many operations in one location – fifteen floors in the Tower under a ten-year lease, with generous cost-of-living increases annually. RAS would be paying annual rent of more than $24 million.

The ad agency employees, however, were upset about their move from midtown and were concerned that commuting through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen would be dangerous. RAS would sign the lease only if McKennah, at his own expense, built a four-block-long tunnel connecting the building with the Long Island Railroad commuter line in Penn Station, which also had a subway stop.

The deal was signed and, like a piranha, McKennah’s company began devouring underground rights to build the tunnel. The company negotiated easements to every building on the planned route of the tunnel – except one. A small plot of land on Thirty-seventh Street, directly behind the lot on which Ettie’s building had sat.

“Odd coincidence,” Bailey explained wryly. “The land was bought by someone just three days before McKennah’s company approached the old owner.”

“So, somebody had inside information that McKennah needed it. Who?”

“Jimmy Corcoran,” Bailey said. “How ’bout that?”

“Corcoran?” Pellam remembered Jacko Drugh’s telling him that Jimmy and his brother were planning some kind of big deal. And he recalled too what Jolie had said – the late-night meetings.

Corcoran doing a deal with Roger McKennah… Now, that was a bizarre thought.

Bailey continued. “And Jimmy’s basically extorting McKennah. ’Cause without that parcel, no tunnel. No tunnel, no lease and hello bankruptcy court.”

“Here’s what the deal is,” Clarke said, finally displaying some animation. “Corcoran owns the land Mr. McKennah needs, right? Well, he’s agreeing to lease it to Mr. McKennah. Only Corcoran insisted on taking a cut of the profits, not a flat fee. He gets one percent of the revenues generated by the property. That’s brilliant for Corcoran because it looks like McKennah Tower’s going to be making close to a hundred twenty million in annual rents.”

“That psychotic punk is going to wind up with one point two million a year,” Bailey said.

Clarke continued. “Mr. McKennah’s never given anybody a percent of the action before. That’s how desperate he is.”

Pellam considered this. He said, “Ettie’s building – the one that burned – was right in between the Tower and Corcoran’s property.”

“Right,” Bailey confirmed.

“So McKennah needs it to finish the tunnel. It’s the last piece.”

“So it seems,” the lawyer said.

“What about this?” Pellam mused. “He cuts a deal with the owner – the St. Augustus foundation – so they let him build the tunnel. Only McKennah finds out he can’t dig under the building. Maybe it’s too old, maybe it’s not stressed right. So he hires the pyro to burn the place down and make it look like Ettie did it. McKennah gets his tunnel and the Foundation can put up a new building.”

Clarke shrugged. “All I can say is what I said before. I’ve never seen him this desperate.”

Pellam asked, “What exactly happens if the Tower fails?”

“A dozen banks’ll call Mr. McKennah’s loans. They’re personally guaranteed,” Clarke whispered, as if disclosing a social disease. “He’ll go bankrupt. He owes a billion five more than he’s got.”

“Hate it when that happens,” Pellam said.

Bailey asked Clarke, “You find anything at the office about granting underground rights to the property that burned?”

“Nothing, no. But McKennah always plays things close to his chest. The partners’re always complaining that he never keeps them informed.”

Bailey grimaced. “Never easy, is it? Well, all right, Newton, back you go to the salt mines.”

Clarke hesitated then, eyes on the dusty, scuffed floor.

“What?” Pellam asked him.

But when he spoke it was to Bailey. He said, “He hurts people, Mr. McKennah does. He screams at them and he fires them when they don’t do exactly what he wants even if it turns out later he was wrong. He has temper tantrums. He gets even with people.” Finally the eyes swung toward Pellam momentarily. “Just… be careful. He’s a very vindictive man. A bully.”

Cloaked as a warning, the man’s words meant something else. They meant: Forget the name Newton Clarke.

He stood and left hurriedly, his disco boots making virtually no noise on the linoleum.

“So, we’ve got a motive,” Pellam said.

“Greed. The Old Faithful of motives. One of the best.” Bailey refilled his glass. He lifted the shade, looked out at the construction site.

Pellam said, “We’ve got to find out if McKennah has the underground rights to the land below Ettie’s building. The head of the Foundation could tell you. Father… whatever his name is. Did he ever call you back?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Let’s try him again.”

But Bailey was shaking his head. “I don’t think we should trust him. But I can find out.”

“Cleg?” Pellam asked. The skinny horseman, armed with his liquor bottles.

“No,” Bailey said, reflecting. “I’ll do this one myself. We should meet back here at, say, eight?”

“Sure.”

Bailey looked up and found Pellam’s eyes on him. “Thought I treated him a little harshly? Newton?”

Pellam shrugged. “I’ve finally nailed down your secret. How you clog up gears, Louis.”

“Have you now?”

“You cultivate debts.”

The lawyer sipped wine and chuckled, nodding. “I learned a long time ago about the power of debt. What’s the one thing that makes a man powerful, a president, a king, a corporate executive? That people owe him – their lives, their jobs, their freedom. That’s the secret. A man who knows how to milk debt is the man who can keep power the longest of anyone.”

The dull ice cubes clinked on the surface of the lemon-colored wine.

“And what does Clarke owe you?”

“Newton? Oh, in crass terms, about thirty-thousand dollars. He used to be a broker. He came to me with a real estate investment partnership idea a few years ago and I plunked down a chunk of my life savings. I found out later it was all phoney. The U.S. Attorney and the SEC caught him and I lost the money.”

“And this is how he’s paying you off?”

“As far as I’m concerned, information is negotiable tender. Tough luck that none of his other creditors feel that way.”

“How long till he pays you off?”

Bailey laughed. “Oh, he probably has. Ages ago. But he doesn’t believe it, of course. And he never will. That’s the marvelous thing about debts. Even after you repay them, they never really go away.”

No one paid any attention to the young worker as he wheeled the 55-gallon drum of cleaning fluid up the ramp to the apartment building. It was seven-thirty, dusk, but Thirty-sixth Street was lit up like a carnival, workers scurrying to get McKennah Tower ready for the topping-off ceremony.

Wearing white overalls, Sonny rested the dolly carrying the drum on the floor and in front of the door. He glanced at the tarnished sign, Louis Bailey, Esq. He listened and heard nothing. Then he knocked several times and when there was no answer he easily picked the lock – a talent that he didn’t possess when he entered Juvenile Detention but that he had with him when he left – and then wheeled the drum inside.

Sonny was a worried man now. The Eagleton fire had galvanized the police and fire department. He’d never seen so many cops and marshals on the West Side. They were practically stopping cars on the street and frisking drivers. They were getting close and he had to stop them. A rough drawing of him had made the dinnertime news.

Shaking hands, sweaty face.

And tears. He was so frustrated and frightened that once or twice on the way over here, wheeling the drum up Ninth Avenue from his apartment, he’d found himself crying.

Walking into the office and parking the drum beside the lawyer’s desk. The young man then sat down in the swivel chair. Fake leather, he thought disdainfully. Agent Scullery – a bit shorter and a lot deader than she’d been when she looked down at him like a squirrel – had had much better taste in interior designs. Still, the office pleased him. There was plenty of paper. He’d never burned a lawyer’s office and he thought that it would go up very fast because there was sooo much paper.

Sonny pulled a few books off the shelf, flipped them open. Looked down at the gray blocks of type. He had no idea what these particular words meant. Sonny used to read books all the time (though he preferred his mother’s reading to him). But that was years ago and he realized now that they no longer interested him. He wondered why that was. He couldn’t remember when he’d last read a book. Years ago. What was it?

The book drooped in his hand…

Yes, he remembered. It was a true story. About the Ringling Brothers circus fire in Hartford in 1944. More than a hundred and fifty people were killed when the big top burned in a matter of minutes. The bandleader played Stars and Stripes Forever – the traditional circus disaster march – to warn all the performers and workers of the blaze but they hadn’t been able to save that many people. Sonny remembered particularly the story of Little Miss 1565, who died in the crush of the audience trying to escape. She was clearly recognizable but no one ever claimed the body.

Why, Sonny thought when he finished the book, didn’t he feel the least bit bad about the girl?

He stopped brooding and returned to his task.

On the desk he noticed Pellam’s name and phone number written on a piece of yellow paper. The Midnight Cowboy Joe Buck faggot Antichrist… Sonny’s hands began to shake again – the sweat was already peppering his forehead – and he felt the urge to cry once more.

Stop it stop it stopit stopstopstop itttttt!

He had to pause for a moment until he calmed. Get to work. Keep busy. He unscrewed the lightbulb from the old lawyer’s desk lamp and carefully opened his knapsack, taking out one of his special light bulbs, heavy and fat with the slick, milky juice. He rested it carefully on the desk and then turned to the oil drum and took his wrench from his overall pocket. He began to work the lid off.