Hells Kitchen

technician said, “Sorry, mister. I didn’t treat anyone like that. But we got eight BBRs.”
    Pellam shook his head.
    The tech explained. “‘Burned beyond recognition.’”
    Walking through the numb crowds, Pellam asked about the boy. Somebody thought he might have seen the young man climb down the fire escape but he couldn’t be sure. Somebody else, a tourist, asked him to take his picture in front of the building and held out his Nikon. Pellam stared in silent disbelief and walked on.
    Closer to the building he stepped away from the crowd and nearly ran into Fire Marshal Lomax. The marshal glanced at Pellam and didn’t say a word. His eyes returned to four bodies lying on the ground, arms and legs drawn up in the pugilistic pose. They were loosely covered with sheets. His radio crackled and he spoke into his Handi-Talkie. “Battalion commander has advised fire is knocked down as of eighteen hundred hours.”
    “Say again, Marshal Two-five-eight.”
    Lomax repeated the message then added, “Appears to be suspicious origin. Get the crime scene buses down here.”
    “That’s a roger, Marshal Two-five-eight.”
    He put the radio back in his belt. A rumpled man in general, he was now a mess. Shirt soot-stained,drenched in sweat, slacks torn. There was a gash on his forehead. He pulled on latex gloves, bent down and tossed the sheet off one of the victims, searched the horrible corpse; Pellam had to look away. Without glancing up, Lomax said in a calm voice, “Let me tell you a story, Mr. Lucky.”
    “I—”
    “Few years ago I was working in the Bronx. There was this club on Southern Boulevard, a social club. You know what a social club is, right? Just a place for people to hang out. Drink, dance. The name of the place was Happy Land. One night there was maybe a hundred people inside, having a good time. It was a Honduran neighborhood. They were good people. Working people. No drugs, no guns. Just people . . . having a good time.”
    Pellam said nothing. His eyes dipped to the macabre spectacle of the corpse. He tried to look away but couldn’t.
    “There was this guy,” Lomax said in his eerie, dead voice, “who’d been going out with the coat-check girl and she’d dumped him. He got drunk and went out and bought a buck’s worth of gas, came back and just poured it in the lobby, lit it and went home. Just like that: set a fire and went home. I don’t know, maybe to watch TV. Maybe have some dinner. I don’t know.”
    “I hope he got caught and went to jail,” Pellam said.
    “Oh, yeah, he did. But that’s not my point. What I’m saying is there were eighty-seven people killed in that fire. The biggest arson murder in U.S. history. And I was on the ID team. See, it was a problem—because they were dancing.”
    “Dancing?”
    “Right. Most of the women didn’t have purses on them and the men’d left their jackets, with their wallets, hanging on the chairs. So we didn’t know who was who. What we did was we laid all the bodies out and then we’re thinking, Jesus, we can’t have eighty-seven families walk up and down the street and look at this. So we took Polaroids of them. A couple shots of each body. And put it in this notebook for the families to look at. I was the one who handed the book to every mother or father or brother or sister whose kids were at Happy Land that night. I’m never going to forget that.”
    He covered up the body and looked up. “One guy did all that. One guy with a fucking dollar’s worth of gasoline. I just wanted to tell you I’m putting a call to the D.A. to move Ettie Washington out of protective isolation.”
    Pellam began to speak. But Lomax, fatigue in every move, stood and walked to the second body. He said, “She killed a kid. Every prisoner in Detention knows that by now. I give her a day or two. At best.”
    He crouched down and pulled the sheet off.

TWENTY-ONE
    The shades were down in Bailey’s office.
    Maybe to stave off the heat, Pellam guessed. Then he realized that the blackout must’ve been at the request of the nervous man who sat forward on a rickety chair across from the lawyer. He was continually adjusting his position and looking around the room as if a hitman were sighting on his back from across the street.
    Pellam paid no attention to the visitor. To the lawyer he said, “I found Alex but the pyro got to him first.”
    “The Eagleton fire?” Bailey asked, nodding knowingly.
    “Yep.”
    “He’s dead?”
    Pellam