Hells Kitchen

there’re fifteen of them and the thing is, Roger McKennah doesn’t have a single friend—I mean, forget fifteen—who’d be willing to endure him long enough to stay overnight.”
    The young man shivered with laughter and drank some more of the alcohol that the butt of his mean joke was providing. A blonde in a low-cut red dress cruised past. She caught the eyes of both Pellam and the young man and suddenly the young man vanished as if he were the tail and she, the dog.
    Pellam gazed out the window again, at the huge plume of smoke.
    In the hour he’d been here he’d learned a few things about McKennah, much of it like the sniping he’d just heard, none of it particularly helpful. The developer was forty-four. Stocky but fit. His face was a younger, puffier Robert Redford’s. His net worth was rumored to be two billion. Pellam had observed that the developer had a kaleidoscope of expressions; McKennah’s visage flipped from boyish to greedy to demonic to pure ice in a fraction of a second.
    In fact the most telling thing that Pellam had learned was that no one really knew much about Roger McKennah at all. His only conclusion was that the developer had some inexpressible quality that drove guests like these—attractive or powerful or obsessed with the attractive or powerful—to pray for invitations to his parties, where they would drink his liquor and think of clever ways to insult him behind his back.
    He eased closer to McKennah, who had moved on and was cruising slowly through the crowded room.
    A young couple double-teamed the developer by the beluga table.
    “Nice, Roger,” the husband said, looking around. “Very nice. Know what this room reminds me of? That place in Cap d’Antibes. On the Point? L’Hermitage. That’s where Beth and I always stay.”
    “You know it?” the woman, presumably Beth, asked McKennah. “It’s so wonderful.”
    The developer demurred with a faint pout. “’Fraid I don’t,” he said, to their delight. Then he added, “When I’m over there I usually stay with the prince in Monaco. It’s just easier. You know.”
    “I hear you,” the husband said, hearing nothing really. The couple pasted glazed smiles on their faces, evidence of how snugly their hearts had been nailed by the chubby Roger McKennah.
    The substantial crowd milled and hovered over the tables filled with caviar like black snowdrifts and sushi like white jewels, while a tuxedoed pianist played Fats Waller.
    “But he didn’t go to Choate,” Pellam overheard someone whisper. “Read it carefully. He gives them money, he lectures there, but he didn’t go there. He went to some parochial school on the West Side. In his old neighborhood.”
    “Hell’s Kitchen?” Pellam asked, breaking into the circle.
    “That’s it, yes,” responded the woman, whose face-lift was remarkably good.
    So, McKennah was a Kitchen pup himself. It must’ve taken years to polish off the rough edges.
    Then suddenly Pellam himself became the prey. The crowd had momentarily parted like the Red Sea andMcKennah was staring directly at him, fifty feet away. A memory came back to Pellam—the limousine in front of Ettie’s building. It had probably been McKennah’s.
    But the developer gave no greeting. And as the crowd swept back together McKennah turned and stepped into a cluster of guests and turned his attention on them like klieg lights on a movie set. Then the developer was moving again, on stage, always questioning, poking, probing.
    Ambition’s a bitch, ain’t it?
    He was about to follow when, from behind him, a woman’s voice said in a very Northeastern accent, “Howdy, partner.”
    Pellam turned to see an attractive blonde woman in her forties, holding a champagne flute. Her eyes were faded, but not from drinking, merely from exhaustion. With a sequined shoe she tapped Pellam’s boot, explaining the greeting.
    “Hi,” he said.
    Her eyes flitted to McKennah. Pellam followed her gaze. She said, “Which one?”
    “I’m sorry?” Pellam asked.
    “You a betting man?”
    He said, “To paraphrase Mark Twain, there are only two times a man shouldn’t gamble. One, when he can’t afford to lose money. And two, when he can.”
    “That didn’t answer my question.”
    “Yep, I’m a gambling man,” Pellam said.
    “You see those two women. The brunette and the redhead?”
    Pellam spotted them easily. They stood by the sweeping staircase, chatting with McKennah. Both in their late twenties, good figures,