Hell's Kitchen

THIRTY-TWO

The roles were reversed.

Now it was Ettie Washington’s turn to visit Pellam in the hospital. Unlike him, she’d had the foresight to bring a present. Not flowers or candy though. Something more appreciated. She now poured the smuggled wine into two plastic cups and offered him one.

“To your health,” she said.

“Yours.”

He swallowed his in one gulp. Ettie, as he remembered her doing when he gazed at her through the viewfinder of the Betacam, sipped hers judiciously. She was the epitome of a frugal homemaker, having learned those skills, Pellam recalled, young from Grandmother Ledbetter.

The private room in which Pellam now lay was below the one where Ettie’d been arrested and above the room where Juan Torres, the poor child, had died. Where would Sonny’s body be? he wondered. The morgue was probably in the basement. Or maybe he was in the city morgue. A routine autopsy then a final trip to Potters’ Field would be his fate.

“People keep asking me what happened, John. Asking me – because I know you. The police, that fire marshal, reporters too. They want to know how you got away from that firebug fella. They think you know but you’re aren’t talking.”

“Miracle,” Pellam offered wryly.

But Pellam wasn’t going to complicate the lives of his improbable friends by telling anyone how Ismail hadn’t gone back to the YOC at all but had hung around waiting to spend more time with Pellam, had seen Sonny’s attack, and had run up the street to summon Hector Ramirez.

“Well, that’s between you and the doorpost,” Ettie said, echoing a favorite expression of her grandfather’s. “And that fire marshal said something else. Which I didn’t exactly understand. He was saying that you might want to think about leaving the city before your name becomes Mr. Unlucky… So. That what you going to be doing, John? Leaving?”

“Not hardly. We’ve got a film to finish.”

“That boy came by to see you. When you were asleep.”

“Ismail?”

Ettie nodded. “Gone now. Has quite a mouth on him for a youngster. I put him in his place, though. T lking to grown-ups that way… He said he’ll be back.”

Pellam didn’t doubt it.

I be your friend.

Well, I be yours, Ismail.

That’s the marvelous thing about debts. Even after you repay them, they never go away.

Ettie had also brought him a Post, the huge headline (“Towering Inferno”) next to an equally huge photo of the flames consuming McKennah Tower.

There’d been no deaths. Fifty-eight people had been injured – mostly from smoke inhalation. The napalm in the theater had not ignited and the only injuries there were from crowds pushing their way out in panic. The most serious was a broken leg received when bodyguards shoved a woman aside to make sure their dignitary escaped before the commoners (the governor, as it turned out, costing Pellam a fiver, payable to Louis Bailey, the king of gears, both greased and clogged).

The Tower was totaled. Burnt to the ground. It was insured, of course, but the policy covered only the cost of the structure itself, not lost profits. Without the rents from the advertising agency the developer would miss his fourth quarter interest payments on his worldwide loans. McKennah and his companies were already preparing papers for the bankruptcy filing.

The sidebar in the paper read, “Welcome to the club, Rog.”

Curiously, none of the pictures of the developer showed anything but a matter-of-fact businessman who seemed completely blasé about the prospect of losing several billion dollars. One shot showed him striding cheerfully into his lawyers’ office accompanied by an attractive young woman identified only as his personal assistant. His eyes were on her; hers, on the camera.

The hospital room bristled around Pellam and grew dark for a moment. Pellam slipped a merciful Demerol into his mouth. He washed it down with wine.

When he looked at Ettie he noticed her face was stern. But her expression had nothing to do with mixing alcohol with medicine. She said, “John, you did so much for me. You almost got yourself killed. You should’ve just took off. You didn’t owe me anything.”

Should he say it or not? For the past several months Pellam had been debating. A dozen times he’d been on the verge. Finally, he said, “Oh, but I do, Ettie.”

“You’re looking pretty funny, John. What’re you talking about?”

“I owe you a lot.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Well, it’s not exactly my debt. It’s my father’s.”

“Your father? I don’t even know your father.”

“You did. You married him.”

After a moment she whispered, “Billy Doyle?”

“He was my natural father,” Pellam said.

Ettie sat completely motionless. It was the only time in all the months that he’d known her that he couldn’t find a trace of any emotion in her face.

“But… how?” she finally asked.

Pellam told her what he’d told to Ramirez – about his mother’s confession – her husband being away all the time, her lover, Pellam’s suspect pedigree.

Ettie nodded. “Billy told me he’d had a girlfriend upstate. That’d be your mother… Oh, my. Oh, my.” She thought back, her sumptuous memory unreeling. “He told me that he loved her but she wouldn’t leave her husband. So he left her and came down here, to the Kitchen.”

“She said she got one letter from him,” Pellam said. “There was no return address but the postmark was from the general post office – on Eighth Avenue. That’s why I came to the city – to find him. Or at least to find out about him. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to meet him or not. I did some digging in public records and found his wedding license application.”

“To me?”

“To you. And your marriage certificate. It gave the address of the old tenement on Thirty-Sixth.”

“The one we lived in after we got married, sure. Got torn down a few years ago.”

“I know. I asked around the neighborhood and found out that Billy was long gone and that you’d moved up the street. To the 458 building.”

“And you came a-calling. With that camera of yours. Why didn’t you say anything to me, John?”

“I was going to. But then I found out that he’d run out on you. I figured it was the last thing you’d want to do, spend any time talking to me.”

She squinted and looked at his face. “That’s why you remind me of James.”

When Ettie had told him about her son a month ago, Pellam realized he’d have to spend some time getting used to the idea that he was no longer an only child. He had a sibling, a half-brother.

Ettie, she squeezed his arm. “That Billy Doyle… Let’s see, my husband and your father. What’s that make us, you and me, John?”

“Orphans,” Pellam suggested.

“I was never one to chase after a man. When he left I never thought about going after him. Never looked for him. But I’m curious.” A coy smile. “You ever get any clue where he might’ve gone off to?”

Pellam shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve tried all the recorders of deeds in the area. No trace.”

“He talked about going back to Ireland. Maybe he did, who knows?” She added, “There are some of his old friends still around. I see ’em sometimes in some of the taverns. We could maybe talk to some of them if you want. They might’ve heard from him.”

He’d have to think about that. He couldn’t decide. He looked out the window and saw gray and brown and buff tenements next to squat warehouses next to shimmering high-rises next to the blackened bones of razed buildings.

West of Eighth…

It occurred to Pellam that Hell’s Kitchen was in some ways just like his search for Billy Doyle: failure not wholly disappointing, hope not wholly desired.

The white apparition of the Southern nurse who’d tended Ettie last week floated into the room and told Ettie she probably ought to leave.

“He’s lookin’ a bit tuckered out,” she said with that rasping Texas drawl of hers. Pellam thought she had freckles but his vision was still pretty blurry. She said. “Honey, don’t you feel like restin’ for a bit??”

“Not really,” Pellam said. Or thought he did. Maybe not. His eyes closed and the glass drooped in his hand. He felt it being taken away, smelled a breath of floral perfume, and then surrendered to sleep.