Hell's Kitchen

TWENTY-TWO

Sparks flew high above his head, cascading off the top of McKennah Tower, an eighth of a mile into the air. He could see a dozen tiny suns of welders’ arcs.

Thinking about Carol Wyandotte, remembering how he’d seen this same astonishing building on his way to her apartment, the night he’d stayed over.

He’d just returned from the Youth Outreach Center, looking for her. But she’d already left for the night. Her assistant said that Carole had been in court all day. One of the kids staying at the YOC there had pulled a knife on an undercover cop during a buy-and-bust operation and Carole had spent six hours with the A.D.A. trying to convince them that he’d just been scared, he hadn’t really intended to murder the officer.

It hadn’t been a good day for her and she’d been pretty upset, the assistant told him. She’d left no message for Pellam at the YOC. And there’d been none on his machine at home.

Pellam was returning to Louis Bailey’s office, to meet the lawyer as planned. He looked down from the crown of the Tower and once again examined the billboard that he’d seen at a dozen times on his way to interview Ettie. An ad for McKennah Tower. He noticed that beneath the slick picture of the building were bulletpoints of features. The 60-story structure would be computer-controlled (a “smart” building), would have a ten-thousand-square-foot public atrium, utomated pneumatic waste removal, custom landscaping, a five-thousand-seat Broadway theater, a gourmet restaurant, boutiques, high-R-value insulation, water-conserving toilets, self-programming elevators…

He was, however, less impressed with this than he was with the facts that weren’t quite so public, the facts Louis Bailey had told him: the labyrinthine deals McKennah had cut with City Hall, P &Z, the Board of Assessment, the Landmark Preservation Commission, the MTA, the Department of Revenue, the unions, the Clinton Community Association, the West Side Democratic Club – the deals in which every inch of the building had been bought, sold or liened in exchange for tax abatements and promises of contracts and public works renovations and sidewalk improvements and employment and oh yes hard cash pressed into very eager hands call them contributions or call them what you will. The actual construction of the monumental edifice was a dull anticlimax to the deal-making that resulted in its building.

Maybe someday he’d do a documentary on a highrise like this.

Skyscraper would be the title.

Buy the companion book.

Pellam turned away from the Tower and walked into Louis Bailey’s building. He was surprised to find the door unlocked and partway open – the rooms inside, he could see, were dark. Pellam squinted and saw Bailey’s form hunched over the desk. The lawyer’s head was resting on a law book and Pellam thought, Hell, passed out drunk. He smelled wine.

And something else. What? Cleanser? Something strong and chemical.

“Hey, Louis,” Pellam called, “rise and shine. How ’bout a little light?”

He flipped up the wall switch.

The explosion was very soft, not much more than the pop of a plastic bag, but the sphere of liquid flame that leapt out of the lamp was huge.

Jesus!

The fiery liquid splashed over the desk and enveloped the lawyer, who jerked back in a hideous, writhing gesture. His face and chest were masses of white flame, and from his throat came an animal’s desperate scream. He fell behind the desk and began to thrash, his heels making loud thuds on the floor as his hands tried manically to beat the flames away.

Looking for a blanket or towel to beat out the flames, Pellam ran into the bedroom. By the time he found an old quilt smoke had completely filled the office, thick vile smoke, burnt-meat smoke.

“Louis!” Pellam flung the blanket over the lawyer but it ignited immediately and just added to the growing mass of fire. Pellam grabbed the phone and hit 911. But the line went dead; the flames had melted the cord. Pellam dropped the set and ran into the hallway, hit the fire alarm on the wall and grabbed the old-fashioned canister extinguisher. He charged back into the office and turned the tank upside down, firing a hissing stream of water at the flames.

As he stood dousing the fire ghastly smoke encircled him, slipped into Pellam’s lungs. He began choking and his vision filled with black pebbles. He kept blasting away with the extinguisher, covering the black mass of Bailey’s quivering body with the gray water.

The desk and a bookcase were still on fire and Pellam turned the extinguisher toward them. The flames were shrinking. But the room continued to grow black with the thick smoke.

Pellam spit the black crud from his mouth, dropped the empty extinguisher and staggered back toward the door to find another one. Outside, a dozen people were fleeing the building. He tried to call out to them but he couldn’t. He felt himself starting to suffocate. He fell to the floor. The air was a little better down here but it was still filled with smoke and the stench of broiling death.

His lungs began to give out. He turned, stumbled toward the door. A fireman appeared.

“In here,” Pellam said. And passed out on the floor.

Pellam sucked hard on the mask, the dizziness from smoke replaced by the dizziness from pure oxygen.

A dozen emergency lights flashed around him. Fire trucks, ambulances, police cars. Piercing white light. And red and blue.

“You’re okay,” encouraged the EMS attendant, a young man with a faint blond moustache. Bulky medical equipment and supplies dangled from his belt and filled his pockets. “Breathe it in. Come on, big guy. Keep going.”

The technician wrote on a clipboard then looked into Pellam’s eyes with a thin flashlight and took his blood pressure.

“Looking good,” the high voice confirmed.

The memory of the horrible fire returned. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Him? ’Fraid so. Didn’t stand a chance. But it’s a blessing, believe me. I’ve had burn cases before. Better for him to’ve gone fast than deal with sepsis and skin grafts.”

He looked over at the body lying on the ground nearby, a sheet draped over it.

The task of giving the bad news about Louis Bailey to Ettie was looming in his mind when a hand descended to Pellam’s shoulder and a figure crouched beside him.

“How you feeling?” the man asked.

Pellam wiped smoke tears from his eyes. His vision was a blur. Finally the face came into focus. In a shocked whisper he said, “You’re here. You’re okay.”

“Me?” Louis Bailey asked.

“That’s not you. I thought it was you.” Pellam nodded toward the body.”

Bailey said. “It was almost me. But it’s him – the pyro.”

“The arsonist?”

The lawyer nodded. “The fire marshal said he was rigging a trap – to get us both, I’d imagine.”

“I turned the light switch on and set it off,” Pellam whispered. He coughed hard for a moment.

“The son of a bitch should’ve unplugged the lamp first,” a voice growled. It was Lomax. He walked up to the two men. “Pyros eventually get careless. Like serial killers. After a while the lust takes over and they stop worrying about details.” He nodded toward the bag. “He had all the windows in your office closed. There was no ventilation and an open drum of that napalm crap he makes. He passed out from the fumes. Then you got here, Mr. Lucky, and turned on the light. Ka-boom.”

“Who was he?” Pellam asked.

The fire marshal held up a badly scorched wallet in a plastic bag.

“Jonathan Stillipo, Jr. Oh, we heard about him. Goes by the nickname of Sonny. Did juvenile time for torching his mother’s house in upstate New York – of course, it just happened that his mother’s boyfriend was locked in the bedroom upstairs. Fits the classic pyro mold. Momma’s boy, loner in school, sexual conflicts. Did vanity fires in college – you know, sets a fire then puts it out for the heroics. He’s been burning for fun and profit ever since. He was on our list to talk to about the recent fires but he went underground a while ago and we didn’t have any leads. We found this in his back pocket. You can still read some of it.”

Pellam looked at a scorched map of the city. Circles around Xs marked the sites of the recent fires: the subway on Eighth Avenue, the department store. Two of the Xs weren’t circled and Pellam assumed those were the targets to be. One was Bailey’s building. And the other was the Javits Center.

“My God,” Bailey whispered. The convention hall was New York’s largest.

Lomax said, “There’s a fashion exhibition scheduled for tomorrow. Twenty-two thousand people would’ve been inside. Would have been the worst arson in world history.”

“Well, he’s dead,” Pellam said. He dded, “I guess he won’t be able to testify about who hired him.”

Then he caught the glance that passed between Bailey and the fire marshal.

“What, Louis?” Pellam asked.

Lomax motioned to a uniformed policeman, who walked up and handed him a plastic bag.

“This was in his wallet too.”

The bag contained a sheet of paper. The plastic made a crinkling sound that Pellam found disturbing. It reminded him of the flames he’d just doused. He thought of Sonny’s shaking body. Of the smell.

Pellam took the offered bag and read.

Here’s 2 thousand like we agreed. Try and don’t hurt any body. I’ll leave the door open – the one in the back. I’ll give you the rest, after I get the insurance money.

– Ettie.