Hell's Kitchen

The stench was horrific.

Pellam finally spotted the man he’d been looking for. There’d been a costume change; he was now wearing jeans, a windbreaker and fireman’s boots.

Ducking under the tape, Pellam walked up to the fire marshal, pasting enough authority on his face to get him all the way to the building itself without being stopped by the crime scene techs and firemen milling about.

He heard Lomax say to his huge assistant, the man who’d pi

The marshal crouched and examined something on the ground. Pellam stopped a few feet away. Lomax looked up. Pellam had showered and changed clothes. The camouflage on his face was gone and it took a moment for the marshal to recognize him.

“You,” Lomax said.

Pellam, thinking he’d try the friendly approach, offered, “Hey, how you doing?”

“Get lost,” the marshal snapped.

“Just wanted to talk to you for a second.”

Lomax’s attention returned to the ground.

At the hospital they’d taken his name and checked with NYPD. Lomax, his detective friends and especially the big assistant seemed to regret that there was no reason to detain Pellam, or even to search him painfully, and so they settled for taking a brief statement and shoving him down the corridor, with the warning that if he wasn’t out of the hospital in five minutes he’d be arrested for obstruction of justice.

“Just a few questions,” he now asked.

Lomax, a rumpled man, reminded Pellam of a high school coach who was a lousy athlete. He rose from his crouch, looked Pellam over. Quick eyes, sca

Pellam asked, “I want to know why you arrested her. It doesn’t make any sense. I was there. I know she didn’t set the fire.”

“This is a crime scene.” Lomax returned to his spalling. His words didn’t exactly sound like a warning but Pellam supposed they were.

“I just want to ask you-”

“Get back behind the line.”

“The line?”

“The tape.”

“Will do. Just let me-”

“Arrest him,” Lomax barked to the assistant, who started to.

“Not a problem. I’m going.” Pellam lifted his hands and walked back behind the line.

There he crouched and took the Betacam out of the bag. He aimed it at the back of Lomax’s head. He turned it on. Through the clear viewfinder he saw uniformed cop whisper something to Lomax, who glanced back once then turned away. Behind them, the smoldering hulk of the tenement sat in a huge messy pile. It occurred to Pellam that, even though he was just doing this for Lomax’s benefit, it was grade-A footage.

The fire marshal ignored Pellam for as long as he could then he turned and walked to him. Pushed the lens aside. “All right. Can the bullshit.”

Pellam shut the camera off.

“She didn’t start the fire,” Pellam said.

“What’re you? A reporter?”

“Something like that.”

“She didn’t start it, huh? Who did? Was it you?”

“I gave my statement to your assistant. Does he have a name, by the way?”

Lomax ignored this. “Answer my question. If you’re so sure she didn’t start the fire then maybe you did.”

“No, I didn’t start the fire.” Pellam gave a frustrated sigh.

“How’d you get out? Of the building?”

“The fire escape.”

“But she says she wasn’t in her apartment when it started. Who buzzed you in?”

“Rhonda Sanchez. In 2D.”

“You know her?”

“Met her. She knows I was doing a film about Ettie. So she let me in.”

Lomax asked quickly, “If Ettie wasn’t there then why’d you go in at all?”

“We were going to meet at ten. I figured if she was out she’d be back in a few minutes. I’d wait upstairs. Turns out she’d been shopping.”

“Didn’t that seem kind of strange – an old lady out on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen at ten p.m.?”

“Ettie keeps her own hours.”

Lomax was now in a talkative mood. “So you just happened to be beside the fire escape when the fire started. Lucky man.”

“Sometimes I am,” Pellam said.

“Tell me exactly what you saw.”

“I gave him my statement.”

Lomax snapped back, “Which didn’t tell me shit. Give me some details. Be helpful.”

Pellam thought for a moment, deciding that the more cooperative he was the better it would be for Ettie. He explained about looking into the stairwell, seeing the door blow outward. About the fire and smoke. And sparks. Lots of sparks. Lomax and his pro-wrestler assistant remained impassive and Pellam said, “I’m not much help, I suppose.”

“If you’re telling the truth you’re tons of help.”

“Why would I lie?”

“Tell me, Mr. Lucky, was there more flame or more smoke?”

“More smoke, I guess.”

The fire marshal nodded. “What color was the flame?”

“I don’t know. Fire-colored. Orange.”

“Any blue?”

“No.”

Lomax recorded these facts.

Exasperated, Pellam asked, “What do you have on her? Evidence? Witnesses?”

Lomax’s smile pled the Fifth.

“Look,” Pellam snapped, “she’s a seventy-year-old lady-”

“Hey, Mr. Lucky, lemme tell you something. Last year, fire marshals investigated ten thousand suspicious fires in the city. More than half were arson and a third of those were set by women.”

“That doesn’t really seem like admissible evidence. What was your probable cause?”

Lomax turned to his assistant. “Probable cause. He knows probable cause. Learn that from NYPD Blue? Murder One? Naw, you look like an O.J.-Simpsonwatcher to me. Fuck you and your probable cause. Get the hell out of here.”

Back behind the police line Pellam continued to take footage and Lomax continued to ignore him.

He was filming the grimy alley behind the building – memorializing the stack of garbage bags that had saved Ettie’s bacon – when he heard a thin wail, the noise smoke might make if smoke made noise.

He walked toward the construction site across the street, where a sixty-story high-rise was nearing completion. As he approached, the smoke became words. “One a them. I’ma be one a them.” The woman sat in the shadow of a huge Dumpster beside two eroded stone bulldogs, which had guarded the stairs to Ettie’s building for one hundred and thirty years. She was a black woman with a pretty, pocked face, her white blouse smudged and torn.

Crouching, Pellam said, “Sibbie. You all right?”

She continued to stare at the ruined tenement.

“Sibbie, remember me? It’s John. I took some pictures of you. For my movie. You told me about moving down here from Harlem. You remember me.”

The woman didn’t seem to. He’d met her on the doorstep one day when he’d come to interview Ettie and she’d apparently heard about him because without any other greeting she’d said she would tell him about her life for twenty dollars. Some documentary filmmakers might balk on the ethical issue of paying subjects but Pellam slipped her the bill and was shooting footage before she’d decided which pocket to put it in. It was a waste of money and time, though; she was making up most of what she told him.

“You got out okay.”

Distracted, Sibbie explained that she’d been at home with her children at the time of the fire, just starting a di

A mother’d let her children take a risk like that? Pellam shivered at the thought.

Behind her were a girl of about four, clutching a broken toy, and a boy, nine or ten, with an unsmiling mouth but eyes that seemed irrepressibly cheerful. “Somebody burn us out,” he said, immensely proud. “Man, you believe that?”