Hells Kitchen

showed them my social work license and a massaged resume. And they hired me. If they find out who I am they’ll fire me in a second.”
    “For the good of the children . . . Why’d you lie to me?”
    “I didn’t trust you. I didn’t know who you were. All I know about reporters is that they look for the dirt. That’s all they fucking care about.”
    “Well, we’ll never know what I would’ve done, will we? You never gave me the chance.”
    “Please don’t be angry, Pellam. What I do here is so important to me. It’s the only thing I have in my life. I can’t lose it. I lied when I met you, yes. I wanted you to go away but I also wanted you to stay.”
    Pellam glanced down at the cassettes. “I’m not interested in today’s Kitchen. It’s an oral history of the old days. I wasn’t even going to mention the YOC. If you’d asked I would have told you.”
    “No, don’t leave like this. Give me a chance . . .”
    But Pellam pushed open the door. Slowly, undramatic. He walked down the stairs then continued through the lobby of the YOC and stepped outside into a midtown filled with a searing sun and the cacophony of engines and horns and shouting voices. He thought Carol’s might have been one of them but then decided he didn’t care.
    *   *   *
    Walking east, toward the Fashion District on the way to the subway.
    Crazy name for a neighborhood, Pellam was thinking. The least fashionable of any neighborhood in the city. Trucks double- and triple-parked. Tall, grimy buildings, dirty windows. Feisty workers in kidney belts and sleeveless T-shirts, pushing racks of next spring’s clothing.
    A woman stood at a phone kiosk, hanging up the receiver then tearing a slip of paper into a dozen shreds. Now there’s a story, Pellam thought. Then he forgot the incident immediately.
    He paused at a construction site on Thirty-ninth Street to let a dump truck back out, its urgent beep-beep-beep reverse warning jarring his nerves.
    “. . . Thirty-ninth Street—that was Battle Row, the headquarters of the Gophers. The worst place in the city. Grandpa Ledbetter said the police wouldn’t even come west of Eighth a lot of the time. They wouldn’t have any part of it over here. He had a boot with a streak across the toe where he got hit by a bullet from this shoot-out on Battle Row when he was a boy. That’s what he said to us children. I never quite believed him. But maybe it was true—he kept that old boot till he died.”
    Two shrill whistles rose from the pit of the construction site. The sound brought more spectators to the viewing holes crudely cut in the plywood fence lining the sidewalk. He paused and looked through one. A huge explosion. The ground leapt under Pellam’s boots and the mesh dynamite blanket shifted as the explosive shattered another fifty tons of rock into gravel.
    Ettie’s words wouldn’t leave his mind, they looped endlessly.
    “There was always construction going on here. Papa had an interesting job for a while. He called himself a building undertaker. He was in one of the crews that’d take the old demolished tenements out to Doorknob Grounds in Brooklyn. They dumped hundreds of old buildings in the water. Build up a shoal with the junk, and the fish’d love it there. He always came back with bluefish or halibut to last for days. I can’t look at fish now for any money.”
    Three loud whistles. Apparently the all clear from the demolition crew. Hard-hatted workers appeared and a bulldozer moved forward. Pellam started back up the sidewalk. Something caught his eye and he glanced at yet another developer’s billboard.
    He stopped, feeling the shock thud within him like a replay of the explosion a moment before. He read the sign carefully, just to make sure. Then he started off at a slow walk but, despite the overwhelming August heat, by the time he was at the corner he was sprinting.

TWENTY-FIVE
    “It’s a construction site.”
    Bailey asked, “What is?”
    “The St. Augustus Foundation. I remembered the number—Five hundred West Thirty-ninth Street. It’s across the street from the church. But it’s just a hole in the ground.”
    They were in Bailey’s bedroom—his temporary office—because of the fire in the main room. It didn’t seem much different from his office; the most noticeable difference was that the cooler for his wine rested beside the bed, not the desk. This room also sported a better used air conditioner than the office; if not cold, at