Hells Kitchen

stop himself.

EIGHTEEN
    Stupid, he thought.
    Pellam pulled the Colt from his waistband, dropping into a crouch.
    Hitting the light switch had just announced to the burglar that Pellam had returned. Should’ve left it out.
    He remained frozen in the doorway for a long moment, listening for footsteps, for cocking pistols. But he heard nothing.
    Making his way slowly through the ransacked apartment, he opened closet doors and looked under the bed. Every conceivable hiding place. The burglar was gone.
    He surveyed the damage, walking from room to room. The discount VCR and TV were still there. The Betacam and deck too, sitting out in plain view. Even the most low-tech thieves would have guessed the camera’d be worth a bundle.
    And when he saw the camera he understood what had happened. He felt the shock and dismay like the blast of heat from the fire that destroyed Ettie’s building. He dropped to his knees, ripping open the canvas bag where he kept the master videos of West of Eighth.
    No . . .
    He rummaged through the bag, hit Eject on the Ampex deck attached to the Betacam. And surveyed the damage. Two tapes were gone. The two most recent—the one in the camera and the one containing footage he’d shot last week and the week before.
    The tapes . . . Who’d known about them? Well, practically everyone he’d talked to about Ettie’s disappearance or who’d seen him with the camera. Ramirez, the elusive Alex. McKennah. Corcoran. Hell, even Ismail and the boy’s mother, Carol and Louis Bailey knew. For that matter, Lomax and the entire fire marshal’s department. Probably the whole West Side.
    The Word on the street. Faster than the Internet.
    Who? was one question. But why? was just as interesting. Had Pellam inadvertently taped the pyro himself? Or maybe the man who’d hired him? Or had there been some evidence he’d recorded that had escaped Lomax and the investigators?
    He had no answers to these questions and as significant as they were to Ettie’s case there was another implication to the missing tapes. In feature films, all the exposed footage was insured—not for the cost of the celluloid itself but for what it cost to shoot and process, which could run to thousands of dollars a foot. If a daily rough of a feature film is destroyed in a fire the muses may weep but at least the producers recoup their money. Pellam, however, hadn’t been able to afford film completion insurance for West of Eighth. He couldn’t recall what was on those twenty or so hours but the interviews might very well have been the heart of his film.
    He sat for a moment in a squeaky chair, staring outthe window. Then lazily he punched in 911, spoke to a dispatcher. But the tone of the woman’s voice told him that a crime like this was low on the precinct’s priorities. She asked if he wanted some detectives to come over.
    Shouldn’t they be volunteering to do that themselves? Pellam wondered. He said, “That’s okay. Don’t want to trouble anybody.”
    The woman missed the irony.
    “I mean, they will,” she explained.
    “Tell you what,” Pellam said, “if he comes back I’ll let you know.”
    “You be sure and do that now. You have a good day.”
    “I’ll try.”
    *   *   *
    It was a dusty little office in the fifties, West Side, not far from where he’d sat beside Otis Balm and listened to the hundred-and-three-year-old man tell him about the Hell’s Kitchen of long ago.
    “. . . Prohibition was the most fanciest the Kitchen ever got. I seen Owney Madden, the gangster, many times. He was from England. People don’t know that. We’d follow him ’round the streets. You know why? Not for the gangster stuff. We was just hoping he’d say something so we could hear how English people talked. That was stupid of us ’cause he was also called Owney the Killer and a lot of people around him got shot. But we was young then and, don’t you know, it takes twenty, thirty years of getting by in the world for death to start meaning anything to you.”
    Pellam sized up the office, prepared his mental script and then pushed into the office. Inside, the bitter smell of paper filled the air. A fat fly buzzed repeatedly into the dusty window, trying to escape from the heat; the air conditioner was a twin of Louis Bailey’s.
    “I’m looking for a Flo Epstein,” Pellam asked.
    A woman with serpentine cheeks, hair pulled back in a sharp bun, walked up to the counter. “That’s me.” It was impossible to