Hells Kitchen

wouldn’t ordinarily?”
    “No, not that I can think. Oh, wait. I had to pay some money to the government few months ago. They gave me too much social security by mistake. One check had three hundred more’n I ought to get. I knew about it but I kept it anyway. They found out and wanted it back. That’s what I hired Louis for. He handled it for me. All I had to pay was half what they wanted. I gave him a check and he sent it to ’em with this form. See, the government, maybe they’re out to get me, John. Maybe the social security people and the police’re working together.”
    This manic talk of conspiracies unsettled him. But Pellam cut her some slack. Under the circumstances she was entitled to be a little paranoid.
    “How ’bout samples of your handwriting? How could somebody get them?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Have you written any letters lately to somebody you don’t normally write?”
    “Letters? I can’t think of any. I write to Elizabeth and send cards sometimes to my sister’s daughter in Fresno. Send ’em a few dollars on their birthdays. That’s about it.”
    “Anybody broken into your apartment?”
    “No. I always lock my windows and door. I’m good about that. In the Kitchen you got to be careful. That’s the first thing you learn.” She played with her cast, traced Pellam’s signature. The answers made sense but they weren’t compelling. To a jury they might be true, might be fishy. As with so much else about Hell’s Kitchen he wasn’t sure what to believe.
    Pellam slipped his notebook into his pocket and said, “Will you do something for me?”
    “Anything, John.”
    “Tell me the end of the Billy Doyle story.”
    “Which story? About his doing time?”
    “That one, yeah.”
    “Okay. My poor Billy. Here’s what happened. I told you all along that his goal in life was to own land. For a man with wanderlust he couldn’t go past a lot or a building with a for-sale sign on it without looking it over and calling up the owner and asking questions about it.”
    Ettie’s eyes glowed. This was where she belonged, Pellam thought, weighing memories and using them to spin her stories. He knew the seductive lure of storytelling too; he was after all a film director. Except that her stories were true and she expected nothing in return for them. No critical acclaim. No percentage of gross.
    “You remember I told you about my brother, Ben. He was about Billy’s age, a year or two younger. Ben came to Billy and said he had this idea how to get some money for a down payment for some land, only he needed a partner to help him. Well, it wasn’t an idea at all. It was just a scam. Ben knew some people at a union headquarters and he did some fake contracts and gotthem slipped in when the bosses weren’t there. Ben listened too much to Grandpa Ledbetter’s stories about the Gophers and the gangs. He wanted to be in one real bad—even though there weren’t any black gangs in the Kitchen, then or now. But he was real proud of this scam of his.
    “But Ben didn’t tell my Billy about the scam part. He thought they were just real contracts for hauling and stuff, they were taking a broker’s fee on. He lived on the edge, Billy did, but he wasn’t stupid. There might’ve been people he’d scam but the union wasn’t one of them. Then Lemmy Collins, the longshoremen’s vice-president, found out there was money missing. He thought Ben’d done it. He knew Billy was tight with Ben but he knew an Irishman wouldn’t steal from his own but a black man’d steal from Irish without thinking twice. So Lemmy came to see my brother with two other men from the union and a baseball bat.
    “Just as they were about to beat him to death they got a call from union headquarters. The police had called. It seemed that my Billy’d confessed to the whole thing. It was all his idea. Since the police were involved then Lemmy couldn’t kill Ben even thought he wanted to. The union got the money back and Billy did a year in jail. See, he knew being Irish and white he could get away with his life. If Ben had gone down he would’ve died. If not in the Kitchen then in Sing Sing.”
    “He took a rap for somebody,” Pellam said.
    “For my own brother,” Ettie said.
    Pellam added softly, “He did that for you, you know.”
    “I know he did.” Ettie was wistful. “But I think that year changed him. I got my brother saved but I think I might’ve lost my husband because of it. It was a yearafter he got