Hell's Kitchen

by Jeffery Deaver

  The flames kissed and the flames killed.

  “Merde! Mon dieu! Allez, allez! Giselle, où es tu?”

  In the downstairs banquet room, where three white jacketed busboys cowered, there was a sudden flashover – the whole space grew so hot it ignited like one huge match head.

  Upstairs a young man, fully clothed, leapt into a brimming bathtub, thinking cleverly that this would protect him. Sickened rescue workers would find what was left of his body, two hours from now, in water still heated to a slow boil.

  One woman in a frenzy of panic flung open the door of her room and with the in-rush of oxygen an explosion engulfed her. The last scream she uttered wasn’t a human sound at all but a burst of flame popping from her mouth.

  One man fled from searing wall of flames and hurtled through a fifth-floor window. He cartwheeled elegantly in silence to the roof of a yellow taxi below. The glass in the cab’s six windows turned instantly opaque as if coated with winter frost.

  Another man stepped onto a fire escape so heated by flames that the metal rods of the stairs melted through his running shoes in seconds. He climbed, screaming, on burnt, bloody feet to the roof.

  In rooms on the higher floors some of the guests believed they were safe from the fire itself; they noticed only a faint haze of smoke around them. They calmly read the in-case-of-emergency cards and, as those reassuring words instructed, soaked washclothes and held them over their faces. Then they sat down calmly on the floor to wait for help and died peacefully in the sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning.

  In the lobby, there was another flash-over. A sofa exploded in orange fire. So did the body of a tourist, lying on the carpet. He contracted into the pugilistic attitude – knees drawn up, fists clenched and arms bent at the elbows. In front of him a Pepsi machine melted and exploding soda cans shot through the lobby, the contents turning to steam before the aluminum hit the floor.

  Sonny caught glimpses of these vignettes because he’d placed the jug of burning juice in the elevator on the sixth floor and then leisurely made his way down the fire escape. Lingering, watching. He told himself to flee, to be more cautious. But naturally he couldn’t help himself. His hands were no longer shaking, he wasn’t sweating.

  The NYFD trucks began to roll up. Sonny slipped into an alley across the street and continued to watch, observing with pleasure that it was an “all-hands” blaze. This was quite a feather in his cap. There were ladders, engines and trucks from number of companies. My God, it was a whole-battalion fire! He hadn’t set one of those for months. He listened to his Radio Shack scanner and learned that it was a ten-forty-five, Code 1.

  Fatalities already.

  But he knew that.

  The apparatus kept arriving. Dozens of Seagrave and Mack fire trucks and engines and ladders. Some red, some Day-Glo yellow-green. Intersection horns blaring harshly. Ambulances. Police cars, marked and unmarked. Men and women in heat-proof gear, with air tanks and masks, hurried into the conflagration. More ambulances. More police. Lights and noise, cascades of water. Steam everywhere, like ghosts of the dead. Cars parked illegally were hacked open to make paths for the hoses.

  Crowds filled the streets, looters sized up the risk.

  The hotel became a storm of orange flame, towering up to the eighth-floor penthouse.

  When the flames were largely under control the EMS medics started bringing out the bodies. Some were cyanotic – bluish-tinted due to lack of oxygen. Some were red as lobsters from the flames and heat. Some were charcoal colored and bore no resemblance whatsoever to the human beings they had once been.

  More windows burst outward. Slivers of black glass rained to the street as rooster tails of water rose from the huge nozzles and converged on the weakening flames, turning to scalding steam.

  Sonny watched it all from an alley nearby.

  He watched it all until, finally, finally, he saw what he’d been waiting for.

  His mother had told Sonny that his father used to enjoy hunting. Flushing birds with a boisterous lab named Bosco, Sonny’s father had been a good hunter and he’d spent a lot of time perfecting his skill – though he probably shouldn’t have, Sonny had concluded, because when he and Bosco were away his wife fucked anything that came to the door.

  Sonny’s mother’s last lover, on the other hand, never hunted for much of anything – except a way out of his burning bedroom. Which he never did find, of course, thanks to Sonny and a very handy spool of wire.

  Now, in the smokey chaos of the dying Eagleton hotel, Sonny saw the bird he’d flushed (using an all-hands blaze, rather than a cheerful black dog): Alex, the fag with the chipped tooth and a mole like a tiny leaf on his right shoulder blade.

  Gasping for breath, staring at the building, the young man leaned against a lamppost. Probably thinking what people always thought at times like that: I could’ve been trapped in there. I could’ve died in there. I -

  “True, you little faggot,” Sonny whispered, “You might have.” His head was close to the boy’s ear.

  Alex spun around. “You… I…”

  “What does that mean?” Sonny asked him, frowning. “ ‘You I…’ Say, is that faggot talk?”

  Skinny Alex turned to run but Sonny was on him like a mantis. He clocked him on the side of the head with a pistol, looked around and dragged him deeper into the deserted alley.

  “Like, listen!”

  Sonny slipped the pistol behind the young man’s ear. Whispered. “Like, you’re dead.”

  Pellam, breathless from running, paused, leaning against the chain-link fence of a construction site across the street from the Eagleton.

  Oh, no. No…

  The hotel was gone. You could see sky through some of the windows of the upper stories and gray brown smoke flowed from the dead heart of the building. He said to a passing EMS technician, round man with a sweaty, soot-stained face, “I’m looking for a teenager. A blond kid. Skinny. He was in there. Name might be Alex.”

  The weary 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, 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 lo
ok 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 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 W ll 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 prompted, “Come on, Newton. Pellam’s a friend.”

  “Okay, okay… Well, nobody’s sure. Couldn’t prove anything. But recently there’ve been some accidents. Some union men – one of them went off the thirtieth floor of a building on Lexington. And a building inspector who hadn’t been willing to pocket money got beaned by a stack of two-by-fours. None of this happened on a McKennah job site, of course, but they all were involved with Mr. McKennah one way or another. Suppliers who tried to extort him – their trucks got hijacked. And yeah, a couple of places were fire-bombed – sellers who set ridiculously high prices. People who wouldn’t deal. That was Mr. McKennah’s complaint. He doesn’t mind negotiations. He doesn’t even mind getting bested. But he hates it when people won’t even sit down with him. That’s the most important thing for Mr. McKennah. You don’t have to play fair but you have to play.”

  Pellam recalled the steely eyes of the brunette at the developer’s party. Tough adversary, playing the game. “How’d you find out all of this?”

  “Pellam’s right to be suspicious, Newton.” Bailey turned to him. “But we don’t have to worry. Newton’s sources are impeccable.” More wine sloshed. “And so’
s his motive for helping us out here, isn’t it? Pristine.”

  Pellam explained what Jolie had told him and asked, “Exactly how desperate is he?”

  “His casinos have failed big. He’s step away from bankruptcy. And I mean complete bankruptcy. Apocalyptic bankruptcy.”

  “Now we come to the crux of it, right, Newton?”

  The toupee was adjusted to quell an itching scalp. “Mr. McKennah needs the Tower.” He nodded toward the shaded window, on the other side of which the highrise soared into the sky. “It’s his last chance,” added the flatlined voice.

  McKennah, Clarke explained, had several tenants lined up for the Tower when it was completed but there was only one lease he really cared about. RAS Advertising and Public Relations was consolidating all of its many operations in one location – fifteen floors in the Tower under a ten-year lease, with generous cost-of-living increases annually. RAS would be paying annual rent of more than $24 million.

  The ad agency employees, however, were upset about their move from midtown and were concerned that commuting through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen would be dangerous. RAS would sign the lease only if McKennah, at his own expense, built a four-block-long tunnel connecting the building with the Long Island Railroad commuter line in Penn Station, which also had a subway stop.

  The deal was signed and, like a piranha, McKennah’s company began devouring underground rights to build the tunnel. The company negotiated easements to every building on the planned route of the tunnel – except one. A small plot of land on Thirty-seventh Street, directly behind the lot on which Ettie’s building had sat.

  “Odd coincidence,” Bailey explained wryly. “The land was bought by someone just three days before McKennah’s company approached the old owner.”

  “So, somebody had inside information that McKennah needed it. Who?”

  “Jimmy Corcoran,” Bailey said. “How ’bout that?”