Hells Kitchen

TV down in Florida, or wherever she is. She’d see me and give me a call.”
    “You know, Ettie, that confession to Lomax was a nice try.”
    The woman looked in her purse and extracted a handkerchief. Pellam remembered that she washed them in perfumed water and let them dry on a thin string above the bathtub. She wiped her eye. “That was the one thing that hurt me so much—that you’d be thinking I lied to you. Or I tried to hurt you.”
    “Never thought that for a second.”
    “You should’ve,” Ettie scolded. “That was the whole point. You should’ve gone home to California like you were supposed to. And stayed out of harm’s way. You should’ve gone and you should’ve stayed gone.”
    “You thought that if you confessed then the killer’d give up, wouldn’t try to hurt me again. It’s the same thing Billy Doyle did: confessing so your brother wouldn’t get killed.”
    “What he did gave me the idea,” she explained. “See, I knew I wasn’t the one who hired that psycho to burn down the building. But somebody did and they were still out there. And as long as you kept poking around that somebody was gonna try and hurt you.”
    Ettie gazed at the elaborate verdigris crown of the Woolworth building, sprouting gargoyles. Finally she said, “They took so much away from me, John. My Billy Doyle got taken away by his own nature. And some crazy man with a gun took my Frankie. And Elizabeth got taken off by some fancy man. Even my neighborhood—the developers and rich people’re taking it. I didn’t want ’em to take you too. I couldn’t’ve stood that. I thought, Hell, I’ll be out of jail in a few years. Then maybe you’ll still want to talk to me, keep putting me on tape and listening to my stories. Oh, maybe you wouldn’t and I’d’ve understood that. But I’d rather you were alive and well.” She laughed a frail laugh. “That was the little bit I wanted to save for myself. See, sometimes you can fool ’em. Oh, yes, yes, sometimes you can. I’m tired. I think I’d like to be getting home now.”
    Pellam strode into the street, directly into the path of an empty cab, which squealed to a halt a foot from him. Pellam escorted Ettie forward, past three burly men hurrying a manacled prisoner toward the courts. The prisoner was the only one of the quartet who nodded respectfully at the elderly woman. Ettie nodded back. They climbed into the cab.
    The Pakistani driver looked at Pellam, inquiring silently about their destination.
    “Hell’s Kitchen,” Pellam answered.
    He blinked.
    Pellam repeated it but the cabby just shook his head.
    “Thirty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue,” Pellam said.
    His sunken eyes gazed at Pellam a moment longer, then he stabbed the meter and they clattered off madly through the busy streets.

TWENTY-NINE
    The next evening, Pellam and Louis Bailey stood in the lawyer’s newly painted office.
    They were in identical poses. Leaning out an open window, squinting.
    “The governor,” Bailey said.
    “No, I don’t think so,” Pellam responded. Though it had been almost twenty years since Pellam had been a resident of the Empire State and he had only a vague idea of what any governor, past or present, looked like.
    “I’m sure.”
    “Ten bucks,” Pellam bet. It was hardly a lock. But confidence, he had it on good authority, is everything.
    “Uhm. Five.”
    They shook.
    At the far end of the block the limo deposited its dignitary, whoever it might be, on the red carpet of McKennah Tower’s main entrance and the tuxedoed gentleman and several bodyguards entered the building.
    “The plate,” Bailey said, “read, ‘NY 1.’”
    “It’s probably a Mets pitcher.”
    “Then it sure as hell wouldn’t say number one,” Bailey countered sadly. The long black Lincoln vanished around the corner. Bailey closed the window.
    Currently playing across the street was perhaps the only topping-off ceremony that had ever been held on ground level. Not being able to fit McKennah’s six thousand invitees on the roof of the Tower, the ceremony was taking place in the building’s theater, a lavish place intended for full-production Broadway musicals and plays. Tonight the placed rocked with MTV music, lasers, banks of video monitors, Dolby SurroundSound, computer graphics.
    Pouring a very small glass of the jug wine, Pellam tuned in again to Louis Bailey. The man was ebullient and couldn’t stop talking about the case, while in a dim corner of the freshly