Hells Kitchen

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 a 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, at 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 andthe 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