Hell's Kitchen

“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 McKe

“Kay?” McKe

“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 McKe

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.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Yo, look, man. Her, she the bitch work at that place fo’ kids.”

“Man, don’t be talking ’bout her that way. She okay. My brother, he all fucked up and he stay there a month. Was a cluckhead. Got hisself off rock, you know what I’m saying?”

“This nigger say she a bitch. All y’all think that be a okay place but all kinda shit go on there. Why you dissing me?”

“I ain’t dissing you. I just saying she ain’t no bitch. Got a minda her own. And look out for people is what I’m saying.”

Carol Wyandotte sat on the pungent creosote-soaked pilings overlooking the murky Hudson and listened to the young men lope past on their way south. Where were they headed? It was impossible to tell. To jobs as forklift operators? To direct an independent film like John Singleton or young Spike Lee. To pull on throwaways, take a box cutter and mug a tourist in Times Square.

When she heard the exchange she thought, as she’d said recently to John Pellam, Oh, he doesn’t mean “bitch” that way.

But apparently he did.

Anyway, who was she to say anything? Carol had been wrong before about the people whose lives she’d wedged her way into.

She sat on this pier under a torrid sun and looked at the ships cruising up and down the Hudson. Tugs, few pleasure boats, a yacht. A ubiquitous Circle Line cruise ship, painted in the colors of the Italian flag, moved slowly past. The tourists on board were still excited and eager for scenery; but then their voyage had just begun. How enthusiastic would they be, hot and hungry, in three hours?

One thing was different about Carol Wyandotte today. She had pulled up the sleeves of her sweatshirt, revealing rather pudgy arms. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d appeared bare-armed in public. Already a slight blush of sunburn covered her skin. She looked down and turned her right arm over, gazing at the terrible mass of scars. She rubbed her hand absently over this ruined part of her body then buried her eyes in the crook of her arm and let the tears soak the skin.

The car door slammed some distance away and by the time she counted, obsessively, to fifty she heard footsteps rustling through the grass. They hesitated then continued. When she reached seventy-eight in her count she heard the voice. It was, of course, John Pellam’s. “Mind if I join you?”

“The property was willed to a charity years ago,” Carol told him, hugging her knees to her chest.

“And then got transferred to the Outreach Center. I was working in the main office then and saw those three lots on the books of the charity – the ones at 454, 456 and 458 Thirty-sixth. Then I noticed McKe

“And they believed you?”

“Oh, you bet. All I had to say was that if the media got hold of the fact that the YOC owned them, the publicity’d be devastating. They were horrified at the thought of bad press. They all are – rabbis, priests, philanthropists, CEOs, doesn’t matter. They’re all cowards. So the board dumped the lots at a sacrifice.” She laughed. “The broker called it a ‘fire sale’ price.”

“You bought them yourself?”

She nodded. “With drug money my ex and I’d stashed away. I set up the phoney St. Augustus Foundation. Learned how to do that when I was a legal secretary in Boston. I also knew I couldn’t tear down the building because it was landmarked. So I just held it. Then I met So

“How?”

“He stayed at the YOC for a couple years after his time in Juvenile Detention for burning down his mother’s house and killing his mother’s boyfriend.”

“And,” Pellam continued, “you also knew Ettie.”

“Sure,” the woman confessed. “I was her landlord. I had copies of her rent checks and of her handwriting. I sent this black woman who looked sort of like her to get the insurance application. Paid her a few hundred dollars. I used my master key to get into Ettie’s apartment while she was out shopping. I found her passbook.”

Pellam looked over the flat, grassy land around them. “And you took the money out of her account?”

“The same woman who got the insurance application made the withdrawals. And the note they found on So

“But why? You can’t take any money out of the foundation.”

She laughed. “Ah, Pellam. You’re so Hollywood. You think every crook has to steal ten million bucks worth of gold, or a hundred million in bonds. Like in a Bruce Willis movie. Life’s more modest than that. No, with the garage, the Foundation’d make a good profit and I’d hire myself as executive director. I could make seventy, eighty thousand a year without the Attorney General batting an eye. Add some petty cash, an expense account, and there’d still be enough money left to actually give some away to the poor folks in Hell’s Kitchen.”

She offered a grim smile. “Not contrite enough for you, m I?” The wolf eyes were like pale ice. “Pellam, you know the only times I’ve cried, I mean, really cried, in the past year? Five minutes ago, thinking about you. And the morning after we spent the night together. After I stole those tapes from your apartment I took the subway to work. I sat in the car and cried and cried. I was almost hysterical. I thought what kind of life I might’ve had with somebody like you. But it was too late then.”

A car drove past and they heard powerful bass beat from the radio’s speakers. That song again. It’s a white man’s world… Slowly the beat faded.

Pellam stared at the woman’s horribly scarred arms. He found himself saying, “But you didn’t cry for Ettie, did you?”