Hells Kitchen

would call her back into the stock room and touch her chest and say don’t tell. One touched her between her legs and before he could say don’t tell he received his own knife deep in his thigh. He was bandaged up and given the day off with pay. Ettie was fired.
    Age seventeen, sneaking into clubs to hear Bessie Smith on Fifty-second Street.
    “. . . Wasn’t much in the way of entertainment in the Kitchen. But if Mama and Papa had an extra dollar or two, they’d go down to the Bowery on the East Side, where they had what they called ‘museums,’ which weren’t what you think. They were arcades—freak shows and varieties and dancers. Vaudeville. For a reallygood time Mama and Papa’d go to Marshall’s on Fifty-third. You never heard of that but it was a hotel and nightclub for blacks. That was the big time, none better. Ada Overton Walker sung there. Will Dixon too.”
    Age thirty eight, a decade of cabaret jobs behind her, the singing work drying up. Ettie, falling for a handsome Irishman. Billy Doyle, a charmer, a man with, apparently, a criminal record (Pellam was still waiting to hear the end of that story).
    Age forty-two, the marriage not working. She was restless, still wanting to sing. Billy was restless too. Wanting to succeed, looking for his own niche. Finally he told her he was going off to find a better job and would send for her. Of course he never returned and that broke her heart. All she ever heard from him was a short note that accompanied the Nevada divorce decree.
    At forty-four, marrying Harold Washington, who died drunk in the Hudson River some years later. A good man in many ways, a hard worker, he still left more debt than seemed fair for a man who never played the horses.
    Tape after tape of these stories. Five hours, ten, twenty.
    “You can’t really be interested in all of this, can you?” Ettie had asked Pellam.
    “Keep going, Ettie. You’re on a roll.” Pellam had told himself to get outside and interview other residents of the infamous neighborhood. And he had—some of them. But Ettie Washington remained the heart of West of Eighth. Billie Doyle, the Ledbetters, the Wilkeses, the Washingtons, Prohibition, the unions, gangs, epidemics, the Depression, World War Two, the stockyards, the ocean liners, apartments, landlords.
    Ettie was on a roll. And the roll never stopped.
    Until her arrest for murder and arson.
    Now, a blistering afternoon, a uniformed guard handed John Pellam a pass and ushered him through the dank halls, where the scent of Lysol ran neck and neck with that of urine. He passed through the metal detector then stepped into the visiting room to wait.
    The Detention Center was chaotic today. Shouts in the distance. A wailing voice or two.
    “Me duele la garganta!”
    “Yo, bitch—”
    “Estoy enferma!”
    “Yo, bitch, I’ma come over there and shut you up fo’ good.”
    Five minutes later the green metal door opened, with a two-note creak. A guard came in, glanced at him. “You here for Washington? She’s not here.”
    Pellam asked where she was.
    “You better go to the second floor.”
    “Is she all right?”
    “Second floor.”
    “You didn’t answer me.”
    But the guard was gone.
    He walked through the bleak corridors until he came to the dark alcove where he’d been directed. It was no less dirty but it was cooler and quieter. A guard glanced at his pass and let him through another door. He pushed inside and was surprised to see Ettie sitting at a table, hands clasped together. There was a bandage on her face.
    “Ettie, what happened? Why’re you up here?”
    “Isolation,” she whispered. “They were going to kill me.”
    “Who?”
    “Some girls. In the cell downstairs. They heard about the Torres boy dying. They fooled me pretty good. I thought they were my friends but they were planning all along to kill me. Louis got some court order or another to move me. The guards came just as those girls were about to burn me. They sprayed stuff on me and were gonna burn my face, John. The stuff, it hurt my skin.”
    “How’re you feeling now?”
    She didn’t answer. She said, “Oh, I never thought that boy’d die. That gave me a turn. Oh, the poor thing. He was such a sweet little one. If he’d been at his grandmother’s like he was supposed to be he’d still be alive. . . . I prayed for him. I did! And you know me—I don’t waste any time on religion.”
    Pellam put his hand on Ettie’s good arm. He thought about saying,