Hells Kitchen

It’s a white man’s world.”
    The screen of the cheap Motorola flickered reluctantly to life, showing this:
    Ettie Wilkes Washington sat comfortably in front of the camera. She’d wanted to be filmed in her favorite rocker, an oak relic her husband Eddie Doyle had bought for her. But even the slight rocking motion had been a distraction and he’d moved her to a straight-backed chair. (As a young assistant Pellam had worked on Jaws and remembered Spielberg telling the director of photography to bolt the camera to the deck of Robert Shaw’s boat during the location shots. The seasoned DP wisely suggested that they better shoot handheld—or else risk sending sea-sick audiences racing for restrooms around the country.)
    So Pellam had moved her to an overstuffed armchair. He’d wanted her in front of a window, with the construction work going on outside. You could also see, in the frame, another antique—an old rolltop desk, filled with papers and letters. On the wall behind it hung a dozen pictures of family.
    “You asking ’bout Billy Doyle, my husband? I’ll tell you, he was a funny man. Nobody like him I ever met. I’ll tell you what he looked like first of all. He was handsome, yessir. Tall and, well, you know, very white. We’d walk down the street together. He always made me take his arm. Didn’t matter whether we were uptown near San Juan Hill, where the blacks were mostly, and they didn’t like mixed couples, or in Hell’s Kitchen, where it was white. The Irish and Italian boys there didn’t like mixed couples either. We got glares from everybody. But he always had me on his arm. Day or night.
    “And he’d always go to clubs with me when I sang. He’d sit at a table with a whisky in front of him—the man loved his whisky—sit there, th’only white man in the whole place and he kept getting looks. But after a while nobody’d pay any attention to him. I’d look down from the stage and there he’d be, eating chitlins and talking with a couple, three men, smiling up at me, knocking them on the shoulders and saying I was his gal. Then I’d look down and see him arguing. I knew he was talking ’bout Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith.
    “But the thing about him was he never found himself. And that was hard for a man. Hardest thing there is, a man who doesn’t come into his own. Sometimes he doesn’t really have to find it. Sometimes he just ends up someplace and digs his heels in and some years go by and that’s who he is and he’s all right with that. But Billy was always looking. What he wanted most was land. To own something. That’s the funny thing—it’s why we never really had a home, because he wasted all his time on these schemes to get a building, get some land. He wanted it bad and that was why he served that time in jail.”
    Documentary filmmakers should never intrude. But off camera a surprised Pellam asked, “He did time?”
    But just then Ettie shifted in her chair and looked up, turned her head. Pellam remembered that Florence Besserman, Ettie’s friend from the third floor, had come to the door unexpectedly. The tape went blank. She’d never finished the story about Billy Doyle’s criminal history and Pellam had agreed to come back—on the night of the fire, as it had turned out—to record the details. Pellam now rewound the tape to the beginning and found what he’d been looking for. Not Ettie but some footage of pretty, pudgy Anita Lopez, apartment 2A, who spoke in her machine-gun voice, her fire-engine-red nails flying everywhere, despite Pellam’s reminders to keep her hands still.
    “. . . Sí, sí, we got gangs. Just like what you see in the movies. They got guns, they get into trouble, they drink, they got cars. Boom-boom, these big speakers. Ai! So loud. Used to be the Westies. They gone now. What we got is we got the Cubano Lords, they is the big gang now. They got a apartment and they don’t mind if everybody know where. I tell you. On Thirty-ninth, between Ninth and Tenth. Oh, they scare me. Don’t say nothing to nobody I told you. Please.”
    Pellam shut the VCR off. He dropped to his knees and inventoried the canvas bag, which contained everything an astute documentarian ought to have: the Betacam, the Ampex deck, the Nicad battery pack, two extra cassettes, a cardioid mike with sponge wind guard, steno notebook, pens. And a Colt Peacemaker single-action pistol. Five of the six chambers loaded with .45-caliber shells. The rosewood grip was