“Corcoran?” Pellam remembered Jacko Drugh’s telling him that Jimmy and his brother were planning some kind of big deal. And he recalled too what Jolie had said – the late-night meetings.
Corcoran doing a deal with Roger McKennah… Now, that was a bizarre thought.
Bailey continued. “And Jimmy’s basically extorting McKennah. ’Cause without that parcel, no tunnel. No tunnel, no lease and hello bankruptcy court.”
“Here’s what the deal is,” Clarke said, finally displaying some animation. “Corcoran owns the land Mr. McKennah needs, right? Well, he’s agreeing to lease it to Mr. McKennah. Only Corcoran insisted on taking a cut of the profits, not a flat fee. He gets one percent of the revenues generated by the property. That’s brilliant for Corcoran because it looks like McKennah Tower’s going to be making close to a hundred twenty million in annual rents.”
“That psychotic punk is going to wind up with one point two million a year,” Bailey said.
Clarke continued. “Mr. McKennah’s never given anybody a percent of the action before. That’s how desperate he is.”
Pellam considered this. He said, “Ettie’s building – the one that burned – was right in between the Tower and Corcoran’s property.”
“Right,” Bailey confirmed.
“So McKennah needs it to finish the tunnel. It’s the last piece.”
“So it seems,” the lawyer said.
“What about this?” Pellam mused. “He cuts a deal with the owner – the St. Augustus foundation – so they let him build the tunnel. Only McKennah finds out he can’t dig under the building. Maybe it’s too old, maybe it’s not stressed right. So he hires the pyro to burn the place down and make it look like Ettie did it. McKennah gets his tunnel and the Foundation can put up a new building.”
Clarke shrugged. “All I can say is what I said before. I’ve never seen him this desperate.”
Pellam asked, “What exactly happens if the Tower fails?”
“A dozen banks’ll call Mr. McKennah’s loans. They’re personally guaranteed,” Clarke whispered, as if disclosing a social disease. “He’ll go bankrupt. He owes a billion five more than he’s got.”
“Hate it when that happens,” Pellam said.
Bailey asked Clarke, “You find anything at the office about granting underground rights to the property that burned?”
“Nothing, no. But McKennah always plays things close to his chest. The partners’re always complaining that he never keeps them informed.”
Bailey grimaced. “Never easy, is it? Well, all right, Newton, back you go to the salt mines.”
Clarke hesitated then, eyes on the dusty, scuffed floor.
“What?” Pellam asked him.
But when he spoke it was to Bailey. He said, “He hurts people, Mr. McKennah does. He screams at them and he fires them when they don’t do exactly what he wants even if it turns out later he was wrong. He has temper tantrums. He gets even with people.” Finally the eyes swung toward Pellam momentarily. “Just… be careful. He’s a very vindictive man. A bully.”
Cloaked as a warning, the man’s words meant something else. They meant: Forget the name Newton Clarke.
He stood and left hurriedly, his disco boots making virtually no noise on the linoleum.
“So, we’ve got a motive,” Pellam said.
“Greed. The Old Faithful of motives. One of the best.” Bailey refilled his glass. He lifted the shade, looked out at the construction site.
Pellam said, “We’ve got to find out if McKennah has the underground rights to the land below Ettie’s building. The head of the Foundation could tell you. Father… whatever his name is. Did he ever call you back?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Let’s try him again.”
But Bailey was shaking his head. “I don’t think we should trust him. But I can find out.”
“Cleg?” Pellam asked. The skinny horseman, armed with his liquor bottles.
“No,” Bailey said, reflecting. “I’ll do this one myself. We should meet back here at, say, eight?”
“Sure.”
Bailey looked up and found Pellam’s eyes on him. “Thought I treated him a little harshly? Newton?”
Pellam shrugged. “I’ve finally nailed down your secret. How you clog up gears, Louis.”
“Have you now?”
“You cultivate debts.”
The lawyer sipped wine and chuckled, nodding. “I learned a long time ago about the power of debt. What’s the one thing that makes a man powerful, a president, a king, a corporate executive? That people owe him – their lives, their jobs, their freedom. That’s the secret. A man who knows how to milk debt is the man who can keep power the longest of anyone.”
The dull ice cubes clinked on the surface of the lemon-colored wine.
“And what does Clarke owe you?”
“Newton? Oh, in crass terms, about thirty-thousand dollars. He used to be a broker. He came to me with a real estate investment partnership idea a few years ago and I plunked down a chunk of my life savings. I found out later it was all phoney. The U.S. Attorney and the SEC caught him and I lost the money.”
“And this is how he’s paying you off?”
“As far as I’m concerned, information is negotiable tender. Tough luck that none of his other creditors feel that way.”
“How long till he pays you off?”
Bailey laughed. “Oh, he probably has. Ages ago. But he doesn’t believe it, of course. And he never will. That’s the marvelous thing about debts. Even after you repay them, they never really go away.”
No one paid any attention to the young worker as he wheeled the 55-gallon drum of cleaning fluid up the ramp to the apartment building. It was seven-thirty, dusk, but Thirty-sixth Street was lit up like a carnival, workers scurrying to get McKennah Tower ready for the topping-off ceremony.
Wearing white overalls, Sonny rested the dolly carrying the drum on the floor and in front of the door. He glanced at the tarnished sign, Louis Bailey, Esq. He listened and heard nothing. Then he knocked several times and when there was no answer he easily picked the lock – a talent that he didn’t possess when he entered Juvenile Detention but that he had with him when he left – and then wheeled the drum inside.
Sonny was a worried man now. The Eagleton fire had galvanized the police and fire department. He’d never seen so many cops and marshals on the West Side. They were practically stopping cars on the street and frisking drivers. They were getting close and he had to stop them. A rough drawing of him had made the dinnertime news.
Shaking hands, sweaty face.
And tears. He was so frustrated and frightened that once or twice on the way over here, wheeling the drum up Ninth Avenue from his apartment, he’d found himself crying.
Walking into the office and parking the drum beside the lawyer’s desk. The young man then sat down in the swivel chair. Fake leather, he thought disdainfully. Agent Scullery – a bit shorter and a lot deader than she’d been when she looked down at him like a squirrel – had had much better taste in interior designs. Still, the office pleased him. There was plenty of paper. He’d never burned a lawyer’s office and he thought that it would go up very fast because there was sooo much paper.
Sonny pulled a few books off the shelf, flipped them open. Looked down at the gray blocks of type. He had no idea what these particular words meant. Sonny used to read books all the time (though he preferred his mother’s reading to him). But that was years ago and he realized now that they no longer interested him. He wondered why that was. He couldn’t remember when he’d last read a book. Years ago. What was it?
The book drooped in his hand…
Yes, he remembered. It was a true story. About the Ringling Brothers circus fire in Hartford in 1944. More than a hundred and fifty people were killed when the big top burned in a matter of minutes. The bandleader played Stars and Stripes Forever – the traditional circus disaster march – to warn all the performers and workers of the blaze but the
y hadn’t been able to save that many people. Sonny remembered particularly the story of Little Miss 1565, who died in the crush of the audience trying to escape. She was clearly recognizable but no one ever claimed the body.
Why, Sonny thought when he finished the book, didn’t he feel the least bit bad about the girl?
He stopped brooding and returned to his task.
On the desk he noticed Pellam’s name and phone number written on a piece of yellow paper. The Midnight Cowboy Joe Buck faggot Antichrist… Sonny’s hands began to shake again – the sweat was already peppering his forehead – and he felt the urge to cry once more.
Stop it stop it stopit stopstopstop itttttt!
He had to pause for a moment until he calmed. Get to work. Keep busy. He unscrewed the lightbulb from the old lawyer’s desk lamp and carefully opened his knapsack, taking out one of his special light bulbs, heavy and fat with the slick, milky juice. He rested it carefully on the desk and then turned to the oil drum and took his wrench from his overall pocket. He began to work the lid off.
TWENTY-TWO
Sparks flew high above his head, cascading off the top of McKennah Tower, an eighth of a mile into the air. He could see a dozen tiny suns of welders’ arcs.
Thinking about Carol Wyandotte, remembering how he’d seen this same astonishing building on his way to her apartment, the night he’d stayed over.
He’d just returned from the Youth Outreach Center, looking for her. But she’d already left for the night. Her assistant said that Carole had been in court all day. One of the kids staying at the YOC there had pulled a knife on an undercover cop during a buy-and-bust operation and Carole had spent six hours with the A.D.A. trying to convince them that he’d just been scared, he hadn’t really intended to murder the officer.
It hadn’t been a good day for her and she’d been pretty upset, the assistant told him. She’d left no message for Pellam at the YOC. And there’d been none on his machine at home.
Pellam was returning to Louis Bailey’s office, to meet the lawyer as planned. He looked down from the crown of the Tower and once again examined the billboard that he’d seen at a dozen times on his way to interview Ettie. An ad for McKennah Tower. He noticed that beneath the slick picture of the building were bulletpoints of features. The 60-story structure would be computer-controlled (a “smart” building), would have a ten-thousand-square-foot public atrium, utomated pneumatic waste removal, custom landscaping, a five-thousand-seat Broadway theater, a gourmet restaurant, boutiques, high-R-value insulation, water-conserving toilets, self-programming elevators…
He was, however, less impressed with this than he was with the facts that weren’t quite so public, the facts Louis Bailey had told him: the labyrinthine deals McKennah had cut with City Hall, P &Z, the Board of Assessment, the Landmark Preservation Commission, the MTA, the Department of Revenue, the unions, the Clinton Community Association, the West Side Democratic Club – the deals in which every inch of the building had been bought, sold or liened in exchange for tax abatements and promises of contracts and public works renovations and sidewalk improvements and employment and oh yes hard cash pressed into very eager hands call them contributions or call them what you will. The actual construction of the monumental edifice was a dull anticlimax to the deal-making that resulted in its building.
Maybe someday he’d do a documentary on a highrise like this.
Skyscraper would be the title.
Buy the companion book.
Pellam turned away from the Tower and walked into Louis Bailey’s building. He was surprised to find the door unlocked and partway open – the rooms inside, he could see, were dark. Pellam squinted and saw Bailey’s form hunched over the desk. The lawyer’s head was resting on a law book and Pellam thought, Hell, passed out drunk. He smelled wine.
And something else. What? Cleanser? Something strong and chemical.
“Hey, Louis,” Pellam called, “rise and shine. How ’bout a little light?”
He flipped up the wall switch.
The explosion was very soft, not much more than the pop of a plastic bag, but the sphere of liquid flame that leapt out of the lamp was huge.
Jesus!
The fiery liquid splashed over the desk and enveloped the lawyer, who jerked back in a hideous, writhing gesture. His face and chest were masses of white flame, and from his throat came an animal’s desperate scream. He fell behind the desk and began to thrash, his heels making loud thuds on the floor as his hands tried manically to beat the flames away.
Looking for a blanket or towel to beat out the flames, Pellam ran into the bedroom. By the time he found an old quilt smoke had completely filled the office, thick vile smoke, burnt-meat smoke.
“Louis!” Pellam flung the blanket over the lawyer but it ignited immediately and just added to the growing mass of fire. Pellam grabbed the phone and hit 911. But the line went dead; the flames had melted the cord. Pellam dropped the set and ran into the hallway, hit the fire alarm on the wall and grabbed the old-fashioned canister extinguisher. He charged back into the office and turned the tank upside down, firing a hissing stream of water at the flames.
As he stood dousing the fire ghastly smoke encircled him, slipped into Pellam’s lungs. He began choking and his vision filled with black pebbles. He kept blasting away with the extinguisher, covering the black mass of Bailey’s quivering body with the gray water.
The desk and a bookcase were still on fire and Pellam turned the extinguisher toward them. The flames were shrinking. But the room continued to grow black with the thick smoke.
Pellam spit the black crud from his mouth, dropped the empty extinguisher and staggered back toward the door to find another one. Outside, a dozen people were fleeing the building. He tried to call out to them but he couldn’t. He felt himself starting to suffocate. He fell to the floor. The air was a little better down here but it was still filled with smoke and the stench of broiling death.
His lungs began to give out. He turned, stumbled toward the door. A fireman appeared.
“In here,” Pellam said. And passed out on the floor.
Pellam sucked hard on the mask, the dizziness from smoke replaced by the dizziness from pure oxygen.
A dozen emergency lights flashed around him. Fire trucks, ambulances, police cars. Piercing white light. And red and blue.
“You’re okay,” encouraged the EMS attendant, a young man with a faint blond moustache. Bulky medical equipment and supplies dangled from his belt and filled his pockets. “Breathe it in. Come on, big guy. Keep going.”
The technician wrote on a clipboard then looked into Pellam’s eyes with a thin flashlight and took his blood pressure.
“Looking good,” the high voice confirmed.
The memory of the horrible fire returned. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Him? ’Fraid so. Didn’t stand a chance. But it’s a blessing, believe me. I’ve had burn cases before. Better for him to’ve gone fast than deal with sepsis and skin grafts.”
He looked over at the body lying on the ground nearby, a sheet draped over it.
The task of giving the bad news about Louis Bailey to Ettie was looming in his mind when a hand descended to Pellam’s shoulder and a figure crouched beside him.
“How you feeling?” the man asked.
Pellam wiped smoke tears from his eyes. His vision was a blur. Finally the face came into focus. In a shocked whisper he said, “You’re here. You’re okay.”
“Me?” Louis Bailey asked.
“That’s not you. I thought it was you.” Pellam nodded toward the body.”
Bailey said. “It was almost me. But it’s him – the pyro.”
“The arsonist?”
The lawyer nodded. “The fire marshal said he was rigging a trap – to get us both, I’d imagine.”
“I turned the light switch on and set it off,” Pellam whispered. He coughed hard for a moment.
“The son of a bitch should’ve unplugged the lamp first,” a voice growle
d. It was Lomax. He walked up to the two men. “Pyros eventually get careless. Like serial killers. After a while the lust takes over and they stop worrying about details.” He nodded toward the bag. “He had all the windows in your office closed. There was no ventilation and an open drum of that napalm crap he makes. He passed out from the fumes. Then you got here, Mr. Lucky, and turned on the light. Ka-boom.”
“Who was he?” Pellam asked.
The fire marshal held up a badly scorched wallet in a plastic bag.
“Jonathan Stillipo, Jr. Oh, we heard about him. Goes by the nickname of Sonny. Did juvenile time for torching his mother’s house in upstate New York – of course, it just happened that his mother’s boyfriend was locked in the bedroom upstairs. Fits the classic pyro mold. Momma’s boy, loner in school, sexual conflicts. Did vanity fires in college – you know, sets a fire then puts it out for the heroics. He’s been burning for fun and profit ever since. He was on our list to talk to about the recent fires but he went underground a while ago and we didn’t have any leads. We found this in his back pocket. You can still read some of it.”
Pellam looked at a scorched map of the city. Circles around Xs marked the sites of the recent fires: the subway on Eighth Avenue, the department store. Two of the Xs weren’t circled and Pellam assumed those were the targets to be. One was Bailey’s building. And the other was the Javits Center.
“My God,” Bailey whispered. The convention hall was New York’s largest.
Lomax said, “There’s a fashion exhibition scheduled for tomorrow. Twenty-two thousand people would’ve been inside. Would have been the worst arson in world history.”
“Well, he’s dead,” Pellam said. He dded, “I guess he won’t be able to testify about who hired him.”
Then he caught the glance that passed between Bailey and the fire marshal.
“What, Louis?” Pellam asked.
Lomax motioned to a uniformed policeman, who walked up and handed him a plastic bag.
“This was in his wallet too.”
The bag contained a sheet of paper. The plastic made a crinkling sound that Pellam found disturbing. It reminded him of the flames he’d just doused. He thought of Sonny’s shaking body. Of the smell.
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