Hells Kitchen

out that I came home one night and found the note.”
    “Excuse me, sir,” the guard said pleasantly. “I’m afraid time’s up.”
    Pellam nodded to the guard. “Just one more thing. Hey, Mrs. Washington, look up.”
    There was a snap and the soft buzz of a small motor.
    She blinked at the flash as Pellam took the Polaroid.
    “What’re you doing there, John? You don’t want to remember me this way. Lemme fix my hair, at least.”
    “It’s not for me, Ettie. And don’t you worry. Your hair looks just fine.”

FIFTEEN
    Lefty came through.
    Pellam was in his bitchen, boots off, listening to messages, as he sat on the plywood sheet turning the bathtub into a table. There was one hang-up, then another. Finally Alan Lefkowitz’s mile-a-minute voice was telling him about a party Roger McKennah had planned and that Pellam had only to drop Lefty’s name and he’d be admitted into the “inner sanctum of New York business,” a line the producer actually recited without noticeable irony. Pellam, however, rolled his eyes as he listened to it, kicking his foot against the wall to scare off a wise-ass pigeon that alighted on his window sill.
    The lengthy message continued with relevant details, including the orders to dress for the event.
    An hour later, Pellam, suitably “dressed” (new black jeans and polished Nokona cowboy boots) strolled out into the suffocating heat and took a subway to the Citicorp building. From there he walked to an address on Fifth Avenue and ducked into the revolving door. Once inside nobody knew that he, unlike most of the other guests, hadn’t arrived via Bentley, Rolls-Royce,or—for the impoverished—the stately yacht of a Lincoln Continental.
    *   *   *
    “Look, it’s another one.”
    The woman spoke breathlessly and the crowd on the top floor of the triplex murmured less in horror than appreciation.
    “Oh, man. Look at that. You can see the flames.”
    “Where?”
    “There. See?”
    “Ronnie, go see if someone’s got a camera. Joan, look!”
    Pellam eased closer to the window, six hundred feet above the sidewalk on which Cartier, Tiffany and Henri Bendel hawked their wares. He gazed west. Another fire, he noticed with disgust. A building somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen, north of Louis Bailey’s block. Occasionally you’d see a lick of flame shooting through a massive cloud of smoke. Rising a thousand feet into the milky sky, it blossomed like the mushroom of an atomic bomb.
    “Oh, God,” a woman whispered. “It’s the hospital! Manhattan Hospital.”
    Where he and Ettie had been treated, he realized. Where Juan Torres had died.
    “You think it’s him? Where is that camera? I want to get a snap. You know who I mean? That crazy man I read about in the Times this morning?”
    “Is that the fifth one he’s set? Or the sixth?”
    The flames had grown and were now clearly visible.
    No cameras materialized and after five minutes the fire became just another part of the scenery. Alone or ingroups of two or three the guests turned back to the party.
    Pellam continued to watch for a few moments. The silent ballet of the flames, the cloud of gray smoke rising high above Manhattan.
    “Hey, how you doing?” The man’s voice was close by, riddled with Long Island lockjaw. “You’re dressed like an artiste. Are you an artiste?”
    Pellam turned, found himself standing in front of a drunk, beefy young man in a tuxedo.
    “Nope.”
    “Ah. Quite a place, isn’t it?” He gestured his groggy head around the two-story living room in the Fifth Avenue penthouse triplex. “Roger’s little abode in the sky.”
    “Not too shabby.”
    At that moment Pellam caught sight of his quarry across the room. Roger McKennah. Then the real estate developer was lost in the crowd again.
    “You know the story?” Pellam’s new friend began laughing drunkenly. Sipped more of his martini.
    “The story?” Pellam responded.
    The young man nodded enthusiastically but said nothing more.
    Pellam prompted, “The one about the priest, the rabbi and the nun?”
    The man frowned, shook his head then continued drunkenly and began explaining how the triplex here was latticed with rabbit warrens of rooms McKennah described as dens and parlors and music rooms and entertainment spaces.
    “Uh-huh,” Pellam said uncertainly, looking over the crowd for McKennah once more.
    “They’re really just bedrooms, see?” the young man told Pellam, spilling vodka on his patent leather shoes. “But