Hells Kitchen

shrugged. “Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he just took off. I don’t know. There were unidentified bodies.”
    “Oh, my God,” offered the visitor. He looked like the sort who’d be wringing his hands if they weren’t gripping the seat of the chair so desperately.
    Pellam then told the lawyer what Lomax had said about protective custody.
    “No!” Bailey whispered. “That’s bad. She won’t last an hour in general population.”
    “Goddamn blackmail,” Pellam muttered. “Can you stop him from doing it?”
    “I can delay it is all. But they’ll release her. The D.A.’ll agree in an instant if they think it’ll pressure her into giving up the arsonist.” He jotted a note on a piece of sunbleached foolscap and turned his attention to the nervous man who sat before him. He was skinny, middle-aged and wore a clever toupee. His pants had a slight flair. A disco demon from the seventies. The lawyer introduced the men.
    Newton Clarke rose slightly and shook Pellam’s hand with a sopping palm, then deflated himself back to his cracked Naugahyde roost. He never held Pellam’s eye for more than a second.
    “Newton here has a few interesting things to tell us. Start over, why don’t you? Some wine, Pellam? No? You’re such an abstainer. Okay, Newton, talk to us. Tell us where you work.”
    “Pillsbury, Milbank & Hogue.”
    “Roger McKennah’s law firm. The one his wife told me about.”
    “Right.”
    Newton’s job, it seemed, was in the managing attorney’s office.
    Bailey explained, “They’re the ones who handle scheduling, make calendar calls and so on, filings. You get the picture. They’re not lawyers. Newton could be, right? With everything you know about the law.” A glance at Pellam. “But he wants an honest profession.”
    Clarke smiled uneasily. His eyes flicked to the window as a passerby cast a hurried shadow on the dusty blinds.
    Bailey swilled more wine. “Give us your take on Roger McKennah.”
    “Well, for one thing, he knows everything that goes on in the Kitchen.”
    “Like Santa Claus, is he? Making his list . . . Don’t you worry, Newton, your mission here’s safe. We’ll give you bushy eyebrows and a fake nose when you leave.”
    Clarke forced his shoulders back and sat up straight. He offered a humorless laugh. “Jesus, Louis, his building’s right across the street. We should’ve met someplace safe.”
    “Zurich, Grand Cayman?” Bailey asked with uncharacteristic acid. “Now what about McKennah?”
    The man told his story. Newton indeed had a clerk’s personality. Organized, precise, detailed. The kind of documentary interviewee, Pellam decided, who seemed perfect but whose testimony he could use only in small doses; for all his accuracy Clarke spoke without a bit of passion or color. We’ll take robust lies over the pale truth any day, Pellam had come to believe.
    “Should I—?”
    “From the beginning,” Bailey said. “The very beginning.”
    “Okay, okay. Well, Mr. McKennah grew up in the Kitchen. He was poor, crude . . . When he was in his twenties he decided to remake himself. He dumped the girl he was engaged to because she was Jewish.” Clarke glanced at Pellam’s features to see how inappropriate this comment was. Then he continued. “He hired a speech and dress coach to help him improve his image and he started working his way through New York real estate. He bought his first building in Flatbush when he was twenty-three. Then a building in Prospect Park, then Astoria, then a couple in the Heights and the Slope. He was twenty-nine. He had nine buildings.
    “Then he hocked all nine and came into Manhattan. One building on Twenty-fourth Street. Nobody was in that part of town then. It was a bum location. The city—the high-class commercial districts—went south to the Empire State Building and it stopped until you got to Wall Street. But he bought this building and what happened but New York Life bought it from him. Fast and with cash. He took that money and bought two more buildings, then three, then six. Then he built one. His first. Then he bought two more. And kept going. Now he’s got sixty or seventy throughout the Northeast.”
    Pellam was losing patience. He asked, “Was he ever connected with an arson?”
    “That’s my boy,” Bailey said, nodding toward Pellam. “Good movie-maker. Gets right to the proverbial chase scene.”
    Clarke responded, “Well . . .”
    But the words deflated as soon as they were spoken and Bailey