Hells Kitchen

responded. “I broke it.”
    “That quite a cast.” The brown eyes took in John Pellam’s signature.
    “What’s your name?” Ettie asked her, struggling to sit up.
    “No, no, Mother, you stay lying down. I’m Hatake Imaham, Mother.”
    “I’m Ettie Washington.”
    “We know.”
    Ettie tried again to sit. She felt helpless, weaker than she already was, on her back.
    “No, no, no, Mother, you stay there. Don’t get up. They brung you in like a sacka flour. Them white fuckers. Dropped you down.”
    There were two dozen cots, bolted to the floor. The mattresses were an inch thick and hard as dirt. She might as well have been lying on the floor.
    Ettie had a vague memory of the cops moving her here from the hospital room. She’d been exhausted and doped up. They used a paddy wagon. There was nothing to hold onto and it seemed to her that the driver had taken turns fast—on purpose. Twice she’d fallen off the slick plastic bench and often she banged her broken arm so badly it brought tears to her eyes.
    “I’m tired,” she said to Hatake and looked past the huge woman to the other occupants of the cell. The detention center was a single large room, barred and painted beige. Like many Hell’s Kitchen residents Ettie Washington knew something about holding cells. She knew that most of these women would be in here for pissy crimes, who-cares crimes. Shoplifting, prostitution, assault, fraud. (Shoplifting was okay because it helped you feed your family. If you were a prostitute—Ettie hated the term “ho”—it was because youcouldn’t get a job doing decent work for decent pay; besides at least you were working and not on the dole. Assault—well, whaling on your husband’s girlfriend? What’s wrong with that? Ettie’d done it herself once or twice. And as for ripping off the welfare system—oh, please. Trees ripe for the picking. . . .)
    Ettie had a taste for some wine. Wanted some badly. She’d snuck a hundred dollars into her cast but it didn’t look like anybody here was connected enough to get her a bottle. Why, these’re just girls, here, most of ’em babies.
    Hatake Imaham stroked Ettie’s head once more.
    “You lie right there, Mother. You be still and don’t you worry ’bout nothing. I’ma look out for you. I’ma get you what you need.”
    Hatake was a huge woman with cornrows and dangling, beaded African hair—exactly the way Elizabeth had worn it the day she left New York City. Ettie noticed that the holes in Hatake’s ear lobes were huge and she wondered about the size of the earrings that had stretched the skin so much. She wondered if Elizabeth wore jewelry like that. Probably. The girl had an ostentatious side to her.
    “I’ve gotta make a phone call,” Ettie said.
    “They let you but not now.” The woman touched her good arm, squeezed it gently.
    “Some son of a bitch took away my pills,” Ettie complained. “One of the guards. I need ’em back.”
    Hatake laughed. “Honey, them pills, they ain’t even in this building no more. They sold an’ gone. Mebbe we see what we can find, us girls. Something help you. Bet it hurts like the devil’s own dick.”
    Ettie almost said that she had some money and couldpay. But she knew instinctively to keep the money secret for the time being. She said, “Thank you.”
    “You lie back. Get some rest. We look out for you.”
    Ettie closed her eyes and thought of Elizabeth. Then she thought of her husband Billy Doyle and she thought of, finally, John Pellam. But he was in her thoughts for no more than five seconds before she fell asleep.
    “Well?”
    Hatake Imaham returned to the cluster of women on the far end of the cell.
    “That bitch, she the one done it. She guilty as death.” Hatake didn’t claim to be a real mambo but it was well known in the Kitchen that she did possess an extra sense. And while she hadn’t had much success laying on hands to cure illness everyone knew that she could touch someone and find out their deepest secrets. She could tell that the hot vibrations radiating off Ettie Washington’s brow were feelings of guilt.
    “Shit,” one woman spat out. “She burn that boy up, she burn up that little boy.”
    “The boy?” another asked in an incredulous whisper. “She set that fire in the basement, girl—didn’t you read that? On Thirty-sixth Street. She coulda killed the whole everybody in that building.”
    “That bitch call herself a mother,” a skinny woman with deep-set eyes