Hell's Kitchen

“The tapes you stole? Why’d you give them back to me?”

“I thought by confessing to the smaller crime you wouldn’t suspect me of the bigger one.” She moved her hand within a millimeter of Pellam’s. Didn’t touch him. “I didn’t want anybody to die. But it happened that way. It always happens that way, at least in places like Hell’s Kitchen it does. Can’t you just let it go?”

Pellam said nothing, moved his hand and touched the point of his Nokona, lifted off a dry, curled leaf.

“Please,” she said.

Pellam was silent.

She said, “I’ve never had a home. All I’ve had are the wrong men and the wrong women.” Her whisper was desperate. When she saw Pellam rise Carol too stood. “No, don’t go! Please!”

Then she glanced toward the highway, where the three police cars were parked. She smiled faintly, almost relieved, it seemed – as if she’d finally received bad news long anticipated.

“I had to,” Pellam said. He nodded at the cars.

Carol slowly turned back to him. “You know poetry? Yeats?”

“Some, I guess.”

“ ‘Easter 1916’?”

Pellam shook his head.

She said, “There’s a line in it. ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.’ It’s my theme song.” Carol laughed hollowly.

The Circle-Line was long out of sight, hooking past Battery Park.

Carol suddenly tensed and swayed closer, as if about to embrace and kiss him.

For an instant compassion stirred in John Pellam and it occurred to him that perhaps the harms Carol had endured were just as deep and numerous as those she had inflicted. But then he saw Ettie Washington, betrayed by Billy Doyle, and by so many others just like Carol Wyandotte. He stepped coldly away.

A horn brayed over the water, resonating from the Moran tug that pushed a barge as long as a football field through the roiling current. Pellam glanced at the sunlight shattered on the waves. The horn blared again. The pilot was signaling to a fellow sailor steaming upriver.

Carol whispered something Pellam didn’t hear – a single word, it seemed – and her pale eyes turned to the skyline, remaining on this vista as she stepped backward so placidly that she tumbled into the gray-green water and was swept deep into the barge’s undertow before he could take a single step toward her.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The story was big.

The suicide of the youth center director who’d hired the mad pyromaniac… This was the classic stuff of the New York Post and Geraldo.

The Live at Five broadcast showed the Coast Guard cutters and the tiny blue police boats searching New York Harbor for Carol Wyandotte’s body. The Associated Press got the most dramatic shot, which featured Ellis and Liberty Islands in the background s they lifted the woman’s body from the water. Pellam saw the picture in the New York Times. Her eyes were closed. He remembered how pale they were, as pale as her skin after all those hours in the cold water.

Wolf eyes…

The charges against Ettie were dropped. That part of the story was almost no

The bulk of the reporting devoted itself to the gala topping-off ceremony at McKe

At four-forty-five on Friday afternoon John Pellam pushed open one of the tall brass doors of the Criminal Courts Building and helped Ettie Washington outside then down the few stairs to the wide sidewalk.

They stood on Centre Street under a clear sky, the late afternoon unusually cool for August. It was the end of the civil servants’ day and hundreds of government workers passed before them on their way home.

“You doing okay?” he asked the gaunt woman.

“Fine, John, just fine.” Though she still limped and occasionally winced at the pain from her broken arm when she adjusted her makeshift sling. Pellam noticed that his signature was still the only one on her cast.

The woman had been released from the lockup without ceremony. She seemed even more frail than the last time Pellam had seen her. The guards were somewhat less antagonistic than on previous visits though Pellam put that down to lethargy, not contrition.

“Hey, wait a minute,” the voice called from down the sidewalk.

They turned to see the rumpled man in windbreaker and jeans. He was trotting toward them. “Pellam. Mrs. Washington.”

“Lomax,” Pellam said, his face an angry mask. Of all the batterings he’d taken in the last few days – bullet streaking across the cheek, the fire, the Irish Mafia – it was the fire marshal’s ski

Lomax paused. He’d stopped Pellam and Ettie as he’d pla

“I don’t guess anybody came by to apologize,” Lomax said.

“The President and the First Lady just left,” Pellam said.

“I thought Lois Koepel’d send flowers,” the fire marshal tried.

“Maybe FTD was closed.”

Ettie didn’t participate in the uneasy banter.

“We made a mistake,” he said. “I’m sorry for that. And I’m sorry you lost your home.”

Ettie thanked him, still wary – as she probably had always been around cops and always would be. They talked for a few minutes about how shocking it was that a youth director had been behind the arson.

“Was a time when nobody would’ve cared what happened in the Kitchen,” Lomax said. “Life’s changing. Slowly. But it’s changing.”

Ettie said nothing but Pellam knew what her response would be. He remembered, almost verbatim, one of her quotes.

“… That fancy building, that tower across the street, it’s a nice one. But whoever’s putting it up, I hope for his sake he doesn’t expect too much. Nothing lasts in the Kitchen, don’t you know? Nothing changes but nothing lasts either.”