Hells Kitchen

building across the street. Their gazes took in a somber discussion between a keen-faced, dark-suited lawyer and his dumpling of a gloomy client. As it happened, Pellam’s eyes were fixed on the lawyer; Bailey’s, the man he represented. Two bailiffs sat down near them and began eating cold noodles with sesame paste. The courthouse was three blocks from Chinatown. That was the smell, Pellam understood: overused vegetable oil.
    “I’m worried about her, Louis. Can you get her into protective custody?”
    “Nobody’s doing me any favors. Not until the pyro’s caught.”
    Pellam tapped his wallet.
    “I’ve got no connection with the Department of Corrections. If I can do anything, it’ll have to be the old-fashioned way. A noticed motion. Order to show cause.”
    “Can you do that?”
    “I don’t think they’ll buy it but I can try.” His eyes watched a huge cluster of pigeons in a frenzy over a scrap of hotdog bun a businessman had thrown onto the ground.
    “Level with me,” Bailey said.
    Pellam cocked an eyebrow.
    “The bail situation threw you, didn’t it? You were pretty upset.”
    “I don’t want her to spend any more time in jail,” Pellam said.
    “I don’t either but it’s not the end of the world.” After a moment he asked, “What exactly is this all about?”
    “What?—”
    Bailey said, “I’m asking what’re you doing here, Pellam.”
    “She’s an innocent woman in jail.”
    Bailey said, “So’re, say, twenty percent of the people in there.” He nodded toward the detention center. “That’s old news too. Why’re you playing detective, what’s your stake in this whole thing?”
    Pellam looked out over busy Centre Street. Courthouses, government buildings . . . Justice at work. He thought of an ant farm. Finally he said, “If she goes to jail, my film’s worthless. Three months of work down the tubes. And I’ll end up probably thirty, forty thousand in hock.”
    The lawyer nodded. Pellam supposed that this commercial motive wouldn’t sit too well with Bailey, who may have been a worldly gear-greaser but was also a friend of Ettie’s. But that was all Pellam was willing to say to the lawyer on the subject.
    Bailey said, “I’ll get started on the protective custody order. You want to come back to the office?”
    “Can’t. I’ve got to meet somebody about the case.”
    “Who?”
    “The worst man in the city of New York.”
    *   *   *
    Seven men stared silently at him.
    T-shirts dusty with cigarette ash. Long hair, dark from dirt and sweat. Black crescents under fingernails in need of a trim. Pellam thought of a word from his adolescence, a word that’d been used to describe theblack-leather-jacket element at Walt Whitman High in Simmons, New York: Greasers.
    A young woman sat on one man’s lap. He had a long, bony face and gangly arms. He swatted the girl on her taut butt and she scooted off with a resentful scowl. But she snagged her purse and left quickly.
    Pellam glanced at each of the seven. They all stared back though only one—slightly built, curly-haired, resembling a monkey—returned his gaze with anything that resembled a flicker of sobriety and intelligence.
    Pellam had already decided not to go through the pretense of ordering anything at the bar. He knew there was only one way to handle this and he asked the long-faced man,“You’re Jimmy Corcoran?”
    Of all the things the man might’ve said he offered none of them and surprised Pellam by asking, “You’re Irish?”
    He was, as a matter of fact, on his father’s side. But how could Corcoran tell? He believed his other side was more prominent—a hybrid traceable, so the family legend went, to Wild Bill Hickok, the gunfighter turned federal marshal. It included Dutch and English and Arapahoe or Sioux.
    “Some,” Pellam told him.
    “Yeah, yeah. Thought I could see it.”
    “I’d like to talk to you.”
    On the table he saw seven shot glasses and a forest of tall-necked beer bottles, too many to count.
    Corcoran nodded, gestured at an empty table in the corner of the bar.
    Pellam glanced at the bartender, a man who had that rare talent of being able to look over an entire room and not see a single person in it.
    “You’re not a cop,” Corcoran said, sitting down. This wasn’t a question. “I can tell. It’s like a sixth sense for me.”
    “No. I’m not.”
    Corcoran called out, “Bushy.”
    A moment later a bottle of Bushmills and two glasses appeared. In the far corner