Hell's Kitchen

FOUR

Windy this morning.

An August storm was approaching and the first thing Pellam noticed when he woke, hearing the wind, was that he wasn’t swaying.

It’d been over three months since he’d parked the Winnebego Chieftain at Westchester Auto Storage in White Plains and temporarily forsaken his nomadic lifestyle. Three months – but he still sometimes had trouble sleeping in a bed that wasn’t atop steel springs badly in need of replacement. With this much wind today he ought to be swaying like a passenger in a gale.

He also hadn’t gotten used to paying fifteen hundred a month for a one-bedroom East Village shotgun flat, whose main attraction was a bathtub in the kitchen. (“It’s called a bitchen,” the real estate woman told him, taking his check for the broker’s fee and first month’s rent as if he’d owed her the money for months. “People’re totally dying for them nowadays.”) Fourth-floor walk-up, the linoleum floor a dirty beige and walls green as Ettie Washington’s hospital room. And what, he’d been wondering, was that smell?

In his years doing location work Pellam had scouted in Manhattan only a few times. The local companies largely had the business locked up and, besides, because of the high cost of shooting here the Manhattan you saw in most movies was usually Toronto, Cleveland or a set. The films actually shot in the city had little appeal to him – weird little Jim Jarmusch student-quality independents and dull mainstreams. EXT. PLAZA HOTEL – DAY, EXT. WALL STREET – NIGHT. The scouting assignments had less to do with being the director’s third eye than filling out the proper forms in the Mayor’s Film Office and making sure cash went where it was supposed to go, both above and below the table.

But scouting was behind him for the immediate future. He was a month away from finishing the rough cut of his first film in years and the first documentary he’d ever made. West of Eighth was the title.

He showered and brushed his unruly black hair into place, thinking about the project. The schedule allowed him only another week of taping then three weeks of editing and post-pro. September 27 was the deadline for mixing and delivery to WGBH in Boston, where he’d work with the producer on the final cut. PBS airing was planned for early next spring. Simultaneously he’d have the tape transferred to film, re-edited and shipped for limited release in art theaters in the U.S. and on Channel 4 in England next summer. Then submissions to festivals in Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin and to the Oscars.

Of course that had been the plan. But now?

The motif of West of Eighth had been the tenement at 458 West Thirty-sixth Street and the residents who lived there. But Ettie Washington was the centerpiece. With her arrest he wondered if he was now the proud owner of two hundred hours of fascinating interviews that would never find their way to TV or silver screen.

Outside he bought a newspaper then flagged down a cab.

The clattering vehicle wove right and left through traffic, as if the cabbie were avoiding hot pursuit, and Pellam tightly gripped the handhold as he tried to read about the fire. The story was dwindling in news value and today’s paper reported only that Ettie’d been arrested and confirmed what he’d known – that the only serious injury was Juan Torres. Pellam remembered the boy clearly. He’d interviewed his mother and recalled the energetic twelve-year-old, standing in his apartment, by the window, left-hooking a package of Huggies like a punching bag and saying to Pellam insistently, “My daddy, he know Jose Canseco. No, no, no. Really. He does!”

The boy’s condition was still critical.

A picture of Ettie, being led by a woman cop out of Manhattan Hospital, accompanied the article. Her hair was a mess. Light flares sparked off the chrome cuffs on her wrists, just below the cast that Pellam had signed.

Etta Washington, formerly Doyle, neé Wilkes, was seventy-two years old. Born in Hell’s Kitchen she’d never lived anywhere else. The 458 W. Thirty-sixth Street building had been her home for the past five years. She’d resided for the prior forty in a similar tenement up the street, now demolished. All her other residences had been in the Kitchen, within five square blocks of one another.

Ettie had ventured out of New York state only three times for brief trips, two of them funerals of kin in North Carolina. Ettie had been a star student in her first two years of high school but dropped out to work and try to become a cabaret singer. She’s performed for some years, always opening for better-known talent. Mostly in Harlem or the Bronx, though occasionally she’d land a job on Swing Street – Fifty-Second. Pellam had heard some old wire recordings transcribed onto tape and was impressed with her low voice. For years she’d worked odd jobs, supporting herself and sometimes lovers, while resisting the inevitable proposals of marriage that a beautiful woman living alone in Hell’s Kitchen was flooded with. She finally married, late and incongruously: her husband was an Irishman named Billy Doyle.

A handsome, restless man, Doyle left her years ago, after only three years of marriage.

“He was just doing what a man does, my Billy. They got that runaway spirit. May be their nature but it’s hard to forgive ’em for it. Wonder if you’ve got it too, John.”

Sitting beside the camera as he’d recorded this, Pellam had nodded encouragingly and reminded himself to edit out her last sentence and her accompanying chuckle.

Her second husband was Harold Washington, who drowned, drunk, in the Hudson River.

“No love lost there. But he was dependable with the money and never cheated and never raised his voice to me. Sometimes I miss him. If I remember to think about him.”

Ettie’s youngest son, Frank, had been caught in a cross fire and killed by a man wearing a purple top hat in a drunken shoot-out in Times Square. Her daughter, Elizabeth, of whom Ettie was immensely proud, was a real estate saleswoman in Miami. In a year or two, Ettie would be moving to Florida to live near her. Her oldest son, James – a handsome mulatto – was the only child she had by Doyle. He too caught the wanderlust flu and disappeared out west – California, Ettie assumed. She hadn’t heard from him in twelve years.

The elderly woman had been, in her youth, sultry and beautiful if somewhat imperious (as evidenced by a hundred photos, all presently burned to gray ash) and was now handsome woman with youthful, dark skin. She debated often about dying her salt-and-pepper hair back to its original black. Ettie talked like a quick, mid-Atlantic Southerner, drank bad wine and cooked delicious tripe with bacon and onions. And she could unreel stories about her own past and about her mother and grandmother like a natural actress, as if God gave her that gift to make up for others denied.

And what would happen to her now?

With a jolt the cab burst across Eighth Avenue, the Maginot Line bordering Hell’s Kitchen.

Pellam glanced out the window as they passed storefront, in whose window the word Bakery was painted over, replaced by: Youth Outreach Center – Clinton Branch.

Clinton.

This was a raw spot with longtime residents. The neighborhood to them was “Hell’s Kitchen” and would never be anything but. “Clinton” was what the city officials and public relations and real estate people called the ’hood. As if a name change could convince the public this part of town wasn’t a morass of tenements and gangs and smokey bodegas and hookers and pebbles of crack vials littering sidewalks but was the New Frontier for corporate headquarters and yuppie lofts.

Remembering Ettie’s voice: “You hear the story how this place got its name? The one they tell is a policeman down here, a long time ago, he says to another cop, ‘This place is hell.’ And the other one goes, ‘Hell’s mild compared to here. This’s hell’s kitchen.’ That’s the story, but that’s not how it happened. No sir. Where the name came from was it’s called after this place in London. What else in New York? Even the name of the neighborhood’s stolen from someplace else.”

“Look I am saying,” the cabbie broke into Pellam’s thoughts. “Same fucking thing fucking yesterday. And for weeks.”

He was gesturing furiously at a traffic jam ahead of them. It seemed to be caused by the construction work going on across from the site of the fire – that high-rise nearing completion. Cement trucks pulled in and out through a chain-link gate, holding up traffic.

“That building. I am wanting them to go fuck themselves. It has ruins fucking neighborhood. All of it.” He slapped the dashboard hard, nearly knocking over his royal orb air freshener.

Pellam paid and climbed out of the cab, leaving the driver to his muttered curses. He walked toward the Hudson River.

He passed dark, woody storefronts – Vinnie’s Fruits and Vegetables, Managro’s Deli, Cuzin’s Meats and Provisions, whose front window was filled with whole dressed animals. Booths of clothing and wooden stands filled with piles of spices and herbs packed the side-walks. A store selling African goods advertised a sale on ukpor and ogbono. “Buy now!” it urged.

Pellam passed Ninth Avenue and continued on to Tenth. He passed the shell of Ettie’s building, floating in a surreal grove of faint smoke, and continued on toward a scabby six-story, red-brick building on the corner.

He paused in front of the handwritten sign in the grimy window of a ground floor apartment.

Louis Bailey, Esq. Attorney at Law/Abogado. Criminal, Civil, Wills, Divorces, Personal Injuries. Motorcycle Accidents. Real Estate. Notary Public. Copies Made. Send Your Fax.

Two window panes were missing. Yellow newspaper had replaced one. The other was blocked by a faded box of Post Toasties. Pellam stared at the decrepit building then checked to make sure he had the name right. He did.

Send your fax…

He pushed inside.

There was no waiting room, just a single large room of an apartment converted into an office. The place was jam-packed with papers, briefs, books, some bulky, antiquated office equipment – a dusty, feeble computer and a fax machine. A hundred law books, some of which were still sealed in their original, yellowing cellophane wrappers.

A sign proclaimed NOTARY PUBLIC.

The lawyer stood at his copier, feeding pages of legal documents through the wobbly machine. Hot sun came through the filthy windows; the room must have been a hundred degrees.

“You Bailey?”

His sweaty face turned. Nodded.

“I’m John Pellam.”

“Ettie’s friend. The writer.”

“Filmmaker.” They shook hands.

The portly man touched his coif of long gray hair, which was thinning reluctantly. He wore a white shirt and wide, emerald-colored tie. His gray suit was one size off in both directions – the pants too big, the jacket too small.

“I’d like to talk to you about her case,” Pellam said.

“It’s too hot in here.” Bailey stacked the copied papers on the desk and wiped his forehead. “The A.C.’s misbehaving. How about we retire to my other office? I’ve got a branch up the street.”

Another branch? Pellam thought. And said, “Lead the way.”

Louis Bailey waved toward the doughy woman bartender. He said nothing to her but she waddled off to fix what must have been the lawyer’s usual. In a brogue she called to Pellam, “Whatcha want?”

“Coffee.”

“Irish?”

“Folgers,” he replied.

“I meant with whisky?”

“I meant without.”

Bailey continued. “So. The scans came back negative. The MRI or whatever. She’ll be fine. They’ve moved her to Women’s Detention Center.”

“I tried to visit her yesterday. They wouldn’t let me. Lomax, that fire marshal, wasn’t much help.”

“They usually aren’t. If you’re on our side of the fence.”

Pellam said, “I finally found a cop who told me she’d hired you.”

With an awkward squeak the door opened and two dark-suited young men entered, looked around with dismay and left. Bailey’s uptown office – the abysmal Emerald Isle Pub – was not the sort of place for a business brunch.

“Can I see her?” Pellam asked.

“Now that she’s in detention we can work that out, sure. I’ve talked to the A.D.A.”

“The…?”

“Assistant District Attorney. The prosecutor. Lois Koepel’s her name. She’s not bad, not good. She’s got an attitude. Jewish thing, I think. Or woman’s thing. Or a young thing. I don’t know which is worse. I threatened her with an order to show cause, they don’t take better care of Ettie – make sure she gets pain pills, change her bandages. But they couldn’t care less, of course.”

“Guess not.”

Over Pellam’s sour coffee and Bailey’s martini the lawyer gave his assessment of the case. Pellam was trying to gauge the man’s competence. From the man’s mouth came no statutes, case citations or court rules. Pellam reached a vague conclusion that he’d have preferred someone more outraged and, if not smarter, t least chronologically closer to law school.

Bailey sipped the drink and said, “What’s this film of yours about?”

“An oral history on Hell’s Kitchen. Ettie’s my best source.”

“The woman can tell her stories, that’s for sure.”

Pellam folded his hands around the hot mug. The bar was freezing. A bitter wind shot from a sputtering air conditioner above the door. “Why’d they arrest her? Lomax wouldn’t tell me anything.”

“Yeah, well, I gotta tell you, they’ve found some stuff.”

“Stuff.”

“And it’s not good. A witness saw her entering the basement just before the fire. It started down there, next to the boiler. She’s got a key to the back door.”

“Don’t all the tenants?”

“Some do. But she was the one seen opening the door five minutes before the fire started.”

“I met somebody at the building yesterday,” Pellam said. “She told me she saw some people in the alley. Just before the fire. Three or four men. She couldn’t describe them any better than that.”

Bailey nodded and jotted a few sentences in a battered leather notebook embossed with initials not his own.

“She couldn’t have done it,” Pellam said. “I was there. She was on the stairs above me when it started.”

“Oh, they don’t think she actually started the fire. They think she opened the basement door and let a pyro in.”

“A professional arsonist?”

“A pro, yeah. But a psycho too. A guy’s been working in the city for a few years. The M.O.’s that he mixes gas with fuel oil. Just the right proportion. He knows what he’s doing. See, gas alone’s too unstable so he adds oil. The fire takes a little longer to get going but it burns hotter. Then – get this – he also adds dish detergent to the mix. So the stuff sticks to clothes and skin. Like napalm. Burning-for-bucks guys, I mean, pure for-hire stuff, they wouldn’t do that. And they don’t set fires when there’re people around. They don’t want anybody to get hurt. This guy likes it… The fire marshals and the cops’re worried. He’s getting crazier. There’s pressure on ’em from above to get him.”

“So Lomax thinks she hired him,” Pellam mused. “What about the fact that she was almost killed too?”

“The A.D.A.’s speculating she tried to get to her apartment so she’d have an alibi. There was a fire escape outside her window. Only the timing got screwed up. They also think she planned it when you were coming over so you could confirm she was there.”

Pellam scoffed. “She wouldn’t hurt me.”

“But you were early, weren’t you?”

Pellam finally said, “A few minutes, yeah.” Then: “But everybody’s missing one thing. What’s her motive supposed to be?”

“Ah, yes. The motive.” As he’d done several times before Bailey paused and organized his thoughts. He drained his martini and ordered another. “Full jigger this time, Rosie O’Grady. Don’t let those massive olives lure you into cheating. Last week Ettie bought a tenant’s insurance policy for twenty-five thousand dollars.”

Pellam sipped from the cup then pushed it away from him. The vile taste in his mouth was only partly the coffee. “Keep going.”

“It’s a declared-value policy. Ever hear of that? It means she pays a high premium but if the apartment is destroyed the insurer pays off whether she’s got Chippendale furniture or orange crates inside.”

“Pretty damn obvious. Buying a policy then burning the building the next month.”

“Ah, but the police love obvious crimes, Mr. Pellam. So do juries. New Yorkers don’t do well with subtleties. That’s why clever bad guys get away with murder.” The martini arrived and Bailey hovered over the glass, like a child eyeing a present on Christmas morning. “On top of that, women are prime suspects in insurance fraud and welfare scams. See, if you’re a welfare mom and your place burns down you get moved to the top of the list for a nicer place. Happens everyday. The fire marshal saw a woman, an insurance policy and a suspicious fire. Bingo, his job’s done.”

“Somebody’s setting her up. Hell, if it was insurance, why burn the whole building? Why not just her own apartment?”

“Less suspicious. Anyway, this pyro goes for the most damage he can. She just happened to hire him. Probably didn’t even know what he was going to do.”

Pellam, a former independent filmmaker and script writer, often thought of life as a series of storylines. There seemed to be some holes in this one. “Okay, they must’ve sent the insurance policy to her. What did Ettie say when she saw it?”

“The agency claims she picked up the application, filled it out, mailed it back. They forwarded it to the home office. Her approved copy of the policy’d just been mailed from the headquarters the day before the fire so she never received it.”

“Then the agent or clerk could testify that it wasn’t Ettie,” Pellam pointed out.

“The clerk identified her picture as the woman who picked up the application.”

Pellam, long suspicious of conspiracy theories, felt a plot worthy of an Oliver Stone movie at work. “What about the premium check?”

“Paid in cash.”

“And Ettie says?” Pellam asked.

“She denies it all, of course,” Bailey said, dismissingly, as if a denial were as foremsically useful as the fly walking on the bar beside them. “Now, let’s talk practicalities. The arraignment is scheduled for tomorrow. The A.D.A.’s making rumblings about a postponement. You know what the arraignment is? That’s where-”

“I know what it is,” Pellam said. “What’s the bail situation?”

“I don’t think it’ll be too high. I’ll talk to some bailbondsmen I know. She’s a good risk, not being very mobile. And it’s not a homicide.”

“Mr. Bailey,” Pellam began.

The lawyer held up a hand. “Louis, please.” Louie. Bailey growled the name and for a moment he became the Damon Runyon character he aspired to be.

“You’ve done this before?” Pellam asked. “Cases like this?”

“Ah.” Bailey leaned his head back, touched a flabby jowl and caught Pellam’s gaze with eyes suddenly clear and focused. “I’ve seen you studying me. My bargain-cellar tie. My frayed cuffs. My Men’s Shack suit. Notice the plaid’s a bit mismatched? I wore out the original pants a year ago and got the closest I could find. And you’ve been gentlemanly enough not to mention my liquid brunch.”

He pointed to his right hand – an otherwise dramatic gesture he managed to underplay. “This’s a class ring from New York Law School. That’s not NYU, by the way. Big difference. And I went at night while I served process during the day. And graduated somewhere to the left of the middle of my class.”

“I’m sure you’re a fine lawyer.”

“Oh, of course I’m not,” Bailey snorted a laugh. “But so what? This isn’t an Upper East Side case. It’s not a SoHo or Westchester case. For those, you need a good lawyer. This is a Hell’s Kitchen case. Ettie’s poor, she’s black, the facts are against her and the jury’ll’ve found her guilty before they’re even empaneled. The law’s irrelevant.”

“What is relevant?”

“The gears,” he whispered, the theatricality filling his voice like sump water.

Pellam didn’t feel like playing straight man. He remained silent. A car drove past slowly. A BMW convertible. Even inside the bar you could hear the raw bass beat of a popular rap song Pellam had heard several times before on neighborhood radios.

“It’s a white man’s world, now don’t be blind…”

The car cruised on.

“The gears,” Bailey continued, teasing his olive. “Here’s what I mean: the first thing you learn about the Kitchen is that anybody can kill you, for any reason. Or for no reason. That’s a given. So what can you do to stay alive? Well, you can make it an inconvenience to kill you. You stay away from alleys when you walk down the street, you don’t make eye contact, you dress down, you stay close to people on street corners, you drop the names of union bosses or cops from Midtown South in bars like this one… You see what I’m saying? You gum up the gears. If it’s too much trouble to kill you, maybe, just maybe they’ll go on to someone else.”

“And Ettie?”

“Everybody – the A.D.A., the cops, the press – they take the path of least resistance. If something clogs up the gears of the case they’ll go fishing for somebody else. Find themselves another jim-dandy suspect. That’s the only thing we can do for Ettie. Gumming gears.”

“Then let’s give them another suspect. Who else’d have a motive? The owner, right? For the insurance.”

“Possibly. I’ll check the deed and find out what the owner’s insurance situation is.”

“Why else would somebody burn a building?”

“Kids do it for kicks. That’s number one in the city. Number two, revenge. So and so is sleeping with somebody’s wife. Squirt a little lighter fluid under his door, presto. Lot of perps set fires to cover up other crimes. Rape murders especially. Burglary. Welfare fraud, like I said. Vanity fires – the mailroom boy sets a fire in the office and then puts it out himself. He’s a hero… Then in the Kitchen we see a lot of landmark torchings – the city gives old buildings this special status ’cause they’re historical. Generally if a landlord owns an old building that doesn’t make money because it’s too expensive to maintain he tears it down and builds a more profitable one. But landmarked buildings can’t be torn down – they’re protected. So what happens? Lord have mercy, there’s a fire. What a coincidence! He’s free to build whatever he wants. If he doesn’t get caught.”

“Was Ettie’s building landmarked?”

“I don’t know. I can find out.”

The way Bailey emphasized the last sentence explained a little bit more about how gears got gummed up. Pellam slipped his wallet out of his back pocket, set it on the bar.

The lawyer’s face broke into a ginny smile. “Oh, yessir, that’s how it works in Hell’s Kitchen. Everybody’s a sellout. Maybe even me.” The smile faded. “Or maybe I just have a high price. That’s ethics around here – when it takes a lot to buy you.”

A police car shot past the window with its lights going but its siren off. For some reason the silent passage made its mission seem particularly harrowing and urgent.

Then Bailey grew very somber, so suddenly that Pellam guessed the second – or was it third? – Beefeater had kicked in with a stab of melancholy. He touched Pellam’s arm in a fatherly way and you could see reluctant shrewdness through the haze in his eyes. “There’s something I want to say.”

Pellam nodded.

“You’re sure you want to get involved in this? Wait. Before you answer, let me ask you something. You’ve talked to a lot of people around here? For your movie?”

“Ettie mostly. But also a couple dozen others.”

Bailey nodded, examining Pellam’s face up close, scanning it. “Well, people in the Kitchen’re easy to approach. They’ll pass you a quart of malt liquor and never wipe the bottle when you hand it back. They’ll sit on doorsteps with you for hours. Sometimes you can’t shut ’em up.”

“That’s what I’ve found. True.”

“That puts you right at ease, right?”

“Does. Yep.”

“But it’s just talk,” Bailey said. “It doesn’t mean they accept you. Or trust you. And don’t ever think you’ll hear anybody’s real secrets. They won’t tell ’em to somebody like you.”

“And what are you telling me?” Pellam asked.

The lawyer’s shrewdness became caution. There was a pause. “I’m telling you it’s dangerous here. Very dangerous. And getting more dangerous. There’ve been a lot of fires lately, more than normal. Gangs… shootings.”

The Times Metro section was full of shooting stories. Kids smuggling guns into grade school. Innocent people were gunned down in cross fires or by crazed snipers. Pellam had stopped reading the papers his second week in town.

“This is a rough time in the Kitchen.”

As opposed to when? Pellam wondered.

Bailey asked him, “Are you really sure you want to get involved?” As Pellam started to speak the lawyer held up a hand. “Are you sure you want to go where this might take you?”

Pellam answered the question with one of his own. “How much?” He tapped his wallet.

Bailey dipped again back into his alcohol haze. “For everything?” Shrugged. “I’ll have to find a cop to sneak me the arson report, the name of the insurance agent, anything else they have on her. The landlord and deed’re public records but it takes weeks if you don’t, you know-”

“Grease the gears,” Pellam muttered.

“I’d say a thousand.”

Pellam wondered what the real object of the bargaining was: abstract morality or his own gullibility.

“Five hundred.”

Bailey hesitated. “I don’t know if I can do it for that.”

“She’s innocent, Louis,” Pellam said. “That means we have God on our side. Doesn’t that buy us a discount?”

“In Hell’s Kitchen?” Bailey roared with laughter. “This is the neighborhood that God forgot. Give me six and I’ll do the best I can.”