Hells Kitchen

p.m.?”
    “Ettie keeps her own hours.”
    Lomax was now in a talkative mood. “So you just happened to be beside the fire escape when the fire started. Lucky man.”
    “Sometimes I am,” Pellam said.
    “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
    “I gave him my statement.”
    Lomax snapped back, “Which didn’t tell me shit. Give me some details. Be helpful. ”
    Pellam thought for a moment, deciding that the more cooperative he was the better it would be for Ettie. He explained about looking into the stairwell, seeing the door blow outward. About the fire and smoke. And sparks. Lots of sparks. Lomax and his pro-wrestler assistant remained impassive and Pellam said, “I’m not much help, I suppose.”
    “If you’re telling the truth you’re tons of help.”
    “Why would I lie?”
    “Tell me, Mr. Lucky, was there more flame or more smoke?”
    “More smoke, I guess.”
    The fire marshal nodded. “What color was the flame?”
    “I don’t know. Fire-colored. Orange.”
    “Any blue?”
    “No.”
    Lomax recorded these facts.
    Exasperated, Pellam asked, “What do you have on her? Evidence? Witnesses?”
    Lomax’s smile pled the Fifth.
    “Look,” Pellam snapped, “she’s a seventy-year-old lady—”
    “Hey, Mr. Lucky, lemme tell you something. Last year, fire marshals investigated ten thousand suspicious fires in the city. More than half were arson and a third of those were set by women.”
    “That doesn’t really seem like admissible evidence. What was your probable cause?”
    Lomax turned to his assistant. “Probable cause. He knows probable cause. Learn that from NYPD Blue ? Murder One ? Naw, you look like an O.J.-Simpson-watcher to me. Fuck you and your probable cause. Get the hell out of here.”
    Back behind the police line Pellam continued to take footage and Lomax continued to ignore him.
    He was filming the grimy alley behind the building—memorializing the stack of garbage bags that had saved Ettie’s bacon—when he heard a thin wail, the noise smoke might make if smoke made noise.
    He walked toward the construction site across the street, where a sixty-story high-rise was nearing completion. As he approached, the smoke became words. “One a them. I’ma be one a them.” The woman sat in the shadow of a huge Dumpster beside two eroded stone bulldogs, which had guarded the stairs to Ettie’s building for one hundred and thirty years. She was a black woman with a pretty, pocked face, her white blouse smudged and torn.
    Crouching, Pellam said, “Sibbie. You all right?”
    She continued to stare at the ruined tenement.
    “Sibbie, remember me? It’s John. I took some pictures of you. For my movie. You told me about moving down here from Harlem. You remember me.”
    The woman didn’t seem to. He’d met her on the doorstep one day when he’d come to interview Ettie and she’d apparently heard about him because without any other greeting she’d said she would tell him about her life for twenty dollars. Some documentary filmmakers might balk on the ethical issue of paying subjects but Pellam slipped her the bill and was shooting footage before she’d decided which pocket to put it in. It was a waste of money and time, though; she was making up most of what she told him.
    “You got out okay.”
    Distracted, Sibbie explained that she’d been at home with her children at the time of the fire, just starting a dinner of rice and beans with ketchup. They easily escaped but she and the youngsters had returned, risking the flames to save what they could. “But not the TV. We try but it too heavy. Shit.”
    A mother’d let her children take a risk like that? Pellam shivered at the thought.
    Behind her were a girl of about four, clutching a broken toy, and a boy, nine or ten, with an unsmiling mouth but eyes that seemed irrepressibly cheerful. “Somebody burn us out,” he said, immensely proud. “Man, you believe that?”
    “I ask you a few questions?” Pellam began.
    Sibbie said nothing.
    He started the Betacam, hoping her short-term memory was better than the recollections of her youth.
    “Yo, you with CNN?” the boy asked, staring at the glowing red eye of the Sony.
    “Nup. I’m working on a movie. I took some pictures of your mother last month.”
    “Geddoutahere!” He cloaked his astonished eyes. “A movie. Wesley Snipes, Denzel, yeah! Shit.”
    “You have any idea how the fire started?”
    “Be the crews,” the boy said quickly.
    “Shutcha mouth,” his mother barked,