Hell's Kitchen

TWENTY-SIX

They drove in silence for eight blocks.

The limo pulled up in front of a dilapidated old building somewhere in the Forties on the far West Side. The paint was scaling. It looked like dirty, white confetti. The wood trim was rotten and piled up against a side door were a dozen trash bags.

McKennah gestured toward it. “Artie.”

The bodyguard opened the limo door, took Pellam’s arm firmly, led him toward the side entrance. He shoved open a door and pushed Pellam forward. They waited as McKennah entered.

Down long, dark corridor. The developer went first. Pellam followed, trailed by Artie, who carried the camera as if it were a machine gun.

Pellam looked around, squinting, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He slipped his hand into his sleeve to grip the handle of the letter opener he’d copped from McKennah’s office. It felt flimsy but Pellam knew from prison what kind of damage even the most delicate of weapons could do.

The corridor was lit by only one low-watt bare bulb. He coughed at the smell of mold and urine. A blur of motion at their feet. McKennah whispered, “Jesus,” as the huge rat passed indifferently in front of them. Pellam ignored it. He gripped the letter opener again. Felt the point against his arm. Waited for reassurance. He felt none.

Then, the noise.

Pellam slowed at the sound of the faint high-pitched wail. It seemed to be a woman’s scream. From TV? No. It was a live, human voice. Pellam felt the hairs on his neck stir.

“Keep going,” McKennah ordered and they continued to the end of the corridor. Then stopped.

The chill keening grew louder and louder.

He shoved the horrible noise out of his thoughts and concentrated on what he was about to do. His legs tensed. This was the moment. His right hand slipped to his left sleeve.

McKennah nodded to Artie once more.

The wailing rose in volume. Two people, maybe three, were howling in pain. The bodyguard pushed Pellam forward roughly. He set his teeth together and stepped forward, pulling the letter opener from his sleeve.

Artie pushed the door open, stepped inside.

He’d slash first at Artie – aiming for his eyes. Then try for the gun. He’d -

Pellam stopped just over the threshold, frozen, gripping the letter opener.

What is this?

He glanced back at the developer and his thug. McKennah impatiently motioned him forward. And, following the tacit order, Pellam began to walk forward – but he did so very carefully; it was hard to maneuver through the sea of babies. Across the room was a pale, obese woman in a stained blue tank top and tan shorts, who sat rocking the loudest of the screamers – the infant they’d heard from the hall. Trying to feed the baby a Frito, the woman stared at them in angry shock. “Who the fuck’re you?”

McKennah nodded toward Pellam then said to his bodyguard. “Okay, give it to him.”

The man handed Pellam his Betacam.

“Do it,” McKennah urged. Pellam shook his head, not understanding.

Half of the babies were in cardboard boxes and the rest wandered or crawled about, playing with broken toys or blocks. On the floor sat plastic bottles of orange diet soda and Coke, some had tipped over and spilled. Two of the children struggled to open one, like young animals trying to crack open a coconut. Ammonia from dirty diapers wafted through the room.

“Who the fuck are you?” the woman repeated, shouting. “You want me to call the cops?”

Roger McKennah said petulantly, “Sure, why don’t you?” To Pellam he said with irritation, “So go ahead. What’re you waiting for?”

He asked, “Go ahead what?”

“Well, what do you think? Play Charles Kuralt. Start filming!” The developer’s temper was starting to fray.

“Fuck you!” the fat woman shouted. “You get out of here.”

One of the babies crawled rapidly over the filthy floor and began playing with Pellam’s boot. He picked up the infant and dusted off his blackened hands and knees, set him on a blanket. “Why don’t you take better care of these kids?”

“Fuck you too.”

Okay. We’ll do it your way. Pellam lifted the Betacam. Started the deck running. “Say, ma’am, you mind repeating that?”

“I’m calling the cops.” But the woman remained seated, ignoring the intruders, and lost herself in an episode of The Young and the Restless on the small TV.

Pellam panned slowly around the room, having no idea what he would ever do with these shots; the squirming infants, the junk food and the raised middle finger of a fat woman hardly made the stuff of oral history.

Looking through the eyepiece, he asked McKennah, “You want to tell me what we’re doing?”

“This’s an unlicensed day care center. Most of the people in the Kitchen can’t afford a licensed one so they drop their kids off at pigsties like this. It’s a disgrace but there’s nothing parents can do if they want to work.”

The woman tossed a handful of corn chips at the feet of one baby who had just started sobbing. Pellam shot the scene.

With robust approval McKennah said, “Stone-cold Pulitzer! Go, go, go!”

Twenty minutes later they were outside, deeply breathing fresher air. Pellam asked, “So, what the hell’s going on?”

He pointed at the building. “I’m trying to wipe those out of New York, places like that. They’re a disgrace… Excuse me, do I see some cynicism? Wondering why Roger McKennah wants to do a good deed? Oh, I’m no Mother Teresa. But that kind of crap doesn’t help anybody. It’s in my interest to have good, cheap day care centers in this neighborhood.”

“Day care?”

“And clean parks and pools. I want parents who can feel safe dropping their kids off and then coming to work in my office buildings. I want teenagers to play basketball on nice courts and swim in clean pools so they don’t mug my tenants at night. Self-interest? Sure. Say what you want, I don’t care. I read Ayn Rand in college and never got over her.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“Because I checked you out. You’re doing a documentary on the neighborhood. And you were going to trash me like everybody else does.”

“That’s what you think?”

“I’m tabloid-magnet and I’m fucking sick of it. I want to make sure you tell the whole story. Nobody has an inkling what I’m doing for the neighborhood.”

“Which is what?”

“How ’bout the public park I’m renovating at my personal fucking expense on Forty-fifth Street. And the pool repairs for the Department of Parks and Recreation that I guarantee’ll be finished by the time the schools’re out next year. And the new day care center on Thirty-sixth and the-”

“Wait – on Thirty-sixth and Tenth? On the corner?”

Louis Bailey’s building.

The supposed harem for McKennah’s mistresses.

“Yeah, that’s the place. I’m turning three floors there into the best day care center in the country. The parents show they’re gainfully employed or looking for work and their kids stay for five bucks a day, everything included. Food, games, Montessori tutors, books…”

“And I suppose it was just a coincidence that the building next door burned down? It didn’t have anything to do with the Tower?”

McKennah’s temper flared again. “Listen, you may be a hotshot in Tinseltown but that’s slander! I’ll sue your goddamn ass! I have never in my life torched a building. You can check every one of my projects going back to day one. I’ll go through the list building by building with you.”

“What about the tunnel? You didn’t torch the building to put it in?”

McKennah frowned. “You know about the tunnel?”

“And I know about your deal with Jimmy Corcoran.”

The developer blinked in surprise. Then said, “Well, you sure as hell don’t know too much about it. The tunnel doesn’t go under the lot that burned. There’s a Con Ed substation under there. It jogs west. Under the day care center building – which I happen to own.”

Oh. Bailey’s building.

“Sure, I leased subsurface rights from Corcoran. But I could care less about the other property. If you know so damn much about deeds and public records why the hell didn’t you just look up the owner and go spy on him?”

Pellam explained about the St. Augustus Foundation. “It’s fake. I thought you were the ultimate owner. That’s what I was looking for in your office. Some connection.”

McKennah was no longer angry. He nodded, musing, “Using a not-for-profit to hide ownership. That’s damn clever. There’s no chance for pass-through profits so the Attorney General wouldn’t pay much attention to it.” He said this with admiration and seemed to file the idea away for future use.

“The board members of the Foundation are fake. But the lawyer I’m working with said it’d take weeks to trace who really runs the place.”

McKennah’s laugh was loud. “Find yourself a new lawyer.”

“You can do better?”

“Hell, yes. I could do it in a couple hours. But why should I? What’s in it for me?”

That’s the most important thing for Mr. McKennah. You don’t have to play fair but you have to play.

“Let’s do some horse-trading,” Pellam said coyly.

“Keep talking.”

“You’ve got leaks in your company, right?”

“I don’t know, do I?”

“Well, I knew all about your Jimmy Corcoran deal, didn’t I?”

McKennah said nothing for a moment, as he scrutinized Pellam. “You can give me a name?”

“You deliver,” Pellam said, “I’ll deliver.”

They rose in silence to the velvet heaven of high-rise New York.

On the seventy-first floor of McKennah’s flagship building on the Upper East Side the developer led him through a maze of offices and deposited him with a bushy-haired, well-dressed, nervous man. Elmore Pavone nodded an uneasy greeting, realizing he was about to receive yet another burden upon his sloping shoulders. But it was a burden being placed there by Roger McKennah himself and would therefore remain firmly affixed until he had solved whatever problem it represented.

The developer explained to Pavone about the arson and the St. Augustus Foundation. The adjutant too seemed impressed with this illicit use of nonprofit corporations.

Pellam said, “I think it’s Corcoran who’s behind the Foundation.”

McKennah and Pavone got a big laugh out of this.

The developer said, “This’s way, way outa Corcoran’s league. He’s a putz. The phrase ‘small-time’ was invented for him.”

Pellam cocked his eyebrow. “Yeah? I heard he negotiated you under the table.”

“Oh, did you?”

“On the tunnel deal. Taking a cut of the action when he granted you the easement.”

McKennah blinked in astonishment. “How the hell do you know all this stuff?”

Word on the street.

Pellam said, “Is it true or not?”

The developer smiled. “Yeah, Corcoran gets a cut of the profits. But the way the contracts reads is that he gets one percent of the profit quote deriving from his property. That means he gets a piece of the action from any money I make from the tunnel, not the tower. The deal with the city is that I’m leasing the tunnel to the Transit Authority for a token rental – ten bucks a year. So Jimmy Corcoran’s share is ten cents a year.”

The developer added, “I’ll always be one step ahead of punks like Jimmy Corcoran. I was in an Irish gang in the Kitchen too, you know. The difference is, I graduated.”

“Not a great guy to have as an enemy,” Pellam pointed out. “Corcoran.”

McKennah laughed again. “You hear about the Gophers?”

Pellam nodded. The Hell’s Kitchen gang that so fascinated Ettie’s grandfather.

“You know who finally broke their back?”

“Enlighten me,” Pellam said.

“Not the cops. Not the city. Lord knows the feds didn’t do shit. It was business that broke ’ em up. The New York Central Railroad. They hired Pinkerton and in six months the gang was history. If Corcoran hassles me, I’ll tell you, that little shit is going down hard.”

Pellam said, “Well, if it’s not him then who’s behind the Foundation?”

Pavone and McKennah conferred. Assuming the motive for torching the building was that it was landmarked, Pavone mused, the only reason you would clear a landmarked building was to put up something new. “To build something new, you’d have to file applications for construction permits and P &Z variances and an environmental impact statement.”

McKennah nodded and explained to Pellam that builders often had to wait months before getting construction permits for major projects in the city. Planning and zoning variances, which necessitated public hearings and EPA and utility waivers were sometimes required too. These applications would have to be filed as soon as possible – to minimize the time the owner had to hold property that produced no income and yet on which steep taxes were levied.

There was some risk to the arsonist that the police or a fire marshal might find the applications. But in a city bureaucracy as unwieldy as New York’s, arson investigators would probably be content with checking only the ownership of record, foregoing deeper scrutiny. Especially if they had a suspect in custody.

McKennah nodded to Pavone, who snatched up the phone and spoke in cryptic terms of art to an underling. He jotted some notes. In three minutes he hung up. “Got it. No P &Z but a White Plains construction company applied for a building permit for 458 West Thirty-sixth Street – the site of the fire – two days ago. Morrone Brothers on Route 22.”

McKennah nodded, seemed to recognize the name.

Pavone continued, “They’re going to put up a seven-story parking garage on the lot that burned and the two lots next to it.”

“Parking,” Pellam whispered. All this death and horror for a parking lot?

“So John Doe sets up the St. Augustus Foundation, buys the two vacant lots, torches the property on the third and builds his garage.”

“I want John Doe,” Pellam said. “How do we find him?”

“Who’d do Morrone’s steel work?” the developer asked Pavone.

“Bronx Superstructures, Giannelli…”

“No, no,” McKennah barked, “in Westchester! In Connecticut. Let’s think tighter here, Elm. Come on. Whoever it is’s got to keep some distance from the city.”

“You’re right, okay, okay. Probably it’d be Bedford Building and Foundation.”

“No.” McKennah shook his head vehemently. “They’re doing the Metro North job. They don’t have the capacity to do that and a garage. Come on! Think!”

“Then how about Hudson Steel? Yonkers.”

“Yes!” McKennah snapped his fingers and picked up the phone, dialing from memory. A few seconds later he muttered into the receiver, “Roger McKennah here. Is he in?” In the time it took to drop another phone call like a red-hot drill bit the contractor was on the line.

“Hi, Tony… Yeah, yeah.” McKennah’s rolling eyes suggested how eagerly the man’s tail was wagging. “Okay, okay, friend, I’m in kind of a hurry. Here’s what it is. Don’t fuck with me, okay? You gimme answers and you’ll do our new dock in Greenwich. No bidding, no nothing… Yeah, pick yourself up off the floor… Yeah, lucky you. Now, I hear Morrone’s the general on a garage in the city. West Thirty-sixth. St. Augustus Foundation’s the owner. What d’you mean it’s supposed to be hush-hush? There’re no fucking secrets from me, Tony. You’re subbing the steel, right?… You meet anybody from St. Augustus?.. Well, check it out. And call me. And I mean in three minutes. And Tony, did I tell you, I’m budgeting one point three million for the dock job.”

McKennah hung up. “He’ll call back. So, that’s my part of the deal. Now it’s your turn. Who’s the fucking spy who’s leaking my secrets?”

Pellam said, “When I was over at the Tower a little while ago, taking that tour of your office?”

“Tour,” the developer said wryly.

Pellam continued. “I noticed one of the secretaries in the rental office. Kay Haggerty? I saw her nameplate.”

The flash in McKennah’s eyes explained that voluptuous Miss Haggerty was more than a secretary.

“Kay?” McKennah asked. “What about her? She’s a nice kid.”

“She may be. But she’s also your leak.”

“Impossible. She’s a hard worker. And I’ve…” He groped for a euphemism. “I trust her completely. Why d’you think she’d be spying on me?”

“Because she’s Jimmy Corcoran’s girlfriend. I saw her last week in the 488 Bar and Grill. She was sitting on his lap.”

The location scout turned filmmaker paced high in the midtown sky, looking out Roger McKennah’s perfectly clean windows.

His Nokona boots silently pressed their narrow silhouettes into the lush blue carpet. It seemed to him that here, seventy stories above the streets, the air was rarified. He felt breathless but he supposed that wasn’t altitude or corporate power but just the residue of smoke in his lungs from the fire at Bailey’s.

Flanked by a billionaire and his ruthless associate, Pellam paced. Minutes passed like days then finally the telephone chirped.

The developer dramatically snagged the phone from its cradle the way he probably always did when others were present. He listened, then put his palm over the mouthpiece and looked at Pellam.

“Got ’em.”

He jotted a note and hung up. Showed it to Pellam. “This name mean anything to you?”

Pellam stared at the paper for a long moment. “I’m afraid it does,” he said.