Pellam pushed through the squeaking door.
Carol looked up at him from the desk. Her wan smile faded as soon as she saw his expression.
“Hi,” she said.
“Howdy.”
“Sorry I’ve been so hard to get a hold of,” she said. “We’ve been busy as hell here.” The words were leaden.
Silence. Motes of dust floated between them. Amoeba, caught in the brutal light.
“All right,” she said at last. “I didn’t call because I got scared. It’s been a long time since I got involved with somebody. And my history with men hasn’t been so great.”
Pellam crossed his arms. He looked down at what Carol was working on, a stack of papers. Government forms. They seemed overwhelmingly dense and complicated.
Carol sat back in her chair. “This isn’t about that, is it?”
“No.”
“So?”
“I just heard a few things I was curious about.”
“Such as?”
“The day of the fire you were asking about me.”
The Word. On the street.
“Hey, cute guy, wearing cowboy boots. Sure, I was asking.” She laughed but she couldn’t bring the levity off. Her hands rose to her pearl necklace then continued up to her glasses and compulsively kneaded the taped joint on the frame.
Pellam said, “You found out where I lived. And you broke into my apartment the morning I stayed over. While I was asleep in your bed.”
Carol was nodding. Not to agree or protest or to convey any message at all. It was a reflex. She looked around. Set her pen down. Her face was a grim mask as she considered something. “Can we go upstairs? It’s more private.”
They walked to the elevator. Inside, Carol leaned against the car wall, looking somber. She glanced down and brushed absently at some dust that marred the stalwart Latin word for truth on her sweatshirt.
Carol avoided Pellam’s eyes as she made meaningless conversation. She told him in a breezy voice that an elevator company was going to donate a new car to the YOC. It would have a big “compliments of ” plaque inside. As if the kids would run out and buy elevators of their own. “Crazy what people’ll do for publicity.” He gave no response and she fell silent.
The doors opened and Carol led them down a deserted corridor oppressive with dirty tiles and murky in the weak fluorescent light. “Here.” Carol pushed the door open and Pellam stepped in – before he realized that it wasn’t a lunch room or office, as he’d expected, but a dim storeroom.
Carol closed the door. She had purpose in her movements and her eyes had grown chill. In the back of the room she moved aside boxes. Bent down and rummaged for something.
“I’m so sorry, Pellam.”
She paused. Took a deep breath. He couldn’t see what she held in her hand.
His thoughts strayed to the Colt in his back waistband. Ridiculous to think that she’d hurt him. But this was the Kitchen.
You’re walking past a little garden at noon in front of a tenement, thinking, Hey, those’re pretty flowers, and the next thing you know you’re on the ground and there’s a bullet in your leg or an ice pick in your back.
And her eyes… her cold, pale eyes.
“Oh, what a fucking mess.” Carol’s mouth tightened. Then suddenly she turned, her hand rising, holding something dark. Pellam reached back for his gun. But in her pudgy fingers were only the two videocassettes she’d stolen from his apartment.
“For the past week, I’ve actually thought about running away. Going someplace else and starting a new life. Not saying a word, just vanishing.”
“Tell me.”
“That man who mentioned me. About saving his son?”
Pellam nodded. He remembered about the young man nearly dying inside a building about to be torn down, how she’d rescued him.
She said, “I was afraid you might have me on tape. I can’t afford any publicity.”
He remembered her distrust of reporters.
“Why?”
“I’m not who you think I am.”
A recurring motif in Hell’s Kitchen.
“And who are you?” Pellam snapped.
Carol hung her arm around the riser of a shelf and lowered her head onto her biceps. “A few years ago I was released from prison after serving time for dealing. In Massachusetts. I was also convicted…” Her voice faltered. “… convicted of endangering the welfare of a minor. I sold to some fifteen-year-olds. One of them overdosed and nearly died. What can I tell you, Pellam? What happened to me was so boring, so TV-movie… I dropped out of school, I met the wrong men. Street dealing, basing, smack, fucking for dollars… Oh, brother, I did it all.”
“What’s this got to do with the tapes?” he asked in a cold voice.
She compulsively ordered a stack of thin towels. “I knew you were making that movie about the Kitchen. And when I heard that man had mentioned me I thought you’d include me in the story. I thought somebody in Boston might hear about it and word would get back to the Outreach Center board. I couldn’t risk any publicity. Look, Pellam, I’ve ruined my life… I’m so messed up from abortions I can’t have kids… I’m a felon.”
Carol laughed bitterly. “You know what I heard the other day? This bank robber was released from Attica and was having trouble getting work. He was furious that somebody referred to him as an ex-con. He said he was ‘societally challenged.’ ”
Pellam wasn’t smiling.
“Well, that’s me. ‘Societally challenged.’ There’s no way I can get a job with a government social agency. No day care center in the world would give me the time of day. But the Youth Outreach Center board was so desperate for help they didn’t have much of a screening process. I 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 u
s 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 least the air was less stifling. The burnt smell was overwhelming but Bailey didn’t seem to mind.
“Maybe the Foundation moved,” Bailey said.
“Gets better,” Pellam said. “I asked at the church office. No one there’s ever even heard of a St. Augustus Foundation.” He walked to the dusty window, which was momentarily darkened by the shadow of a crane that was lifting a large piece of sculpture into the open plaza in front of McKennah Tower.
The statue was wrapped in thick kraft paper and it appeared to be in the shape of a fish. The derrick moved very slowly and he guessed the piece of stone or bronze weighed many tons. Around it workmen cleaned the grounds and tacked up banners and bunting for the Tower’s topping-off ceremony.
“But there is a St. Augustus Foundation,” Bailey said and shuffled through documents on the bed and found a stack of scorched photocopies bearing the seal of the Attorney General of the state. “It’s been incorporated under the not-for-profit corporation law. It exists. It’s got eight members on the board.”
Pellam looked over the list. The men and women on the board all lived nearby. He touched one name – at an ddress on Thirty-seventh Street, block away. James Kemper.
“Let’s see what he has to say.” Bailey picked up the phone. But Pellam touched his arm.
“Let’s pay a surprise visit.”
But there was no surprise, not to Pellam. Construction was scheduled to begin in two months on the vacant lot where the Mr. Kemper supposedly lived.
“It’s all fake,” Bailey muttered as they returned to his office.
“When you called the director – that minister – who did you get?”
“Answering service.”
“How do we find out who’s behind it?” Pellam asked. “Without tipping our hand?”
From the movie business he knew the complexity of incestuous corporate entanglements.
“It’s a not-for-profit foundation, which’ll make tracing things a lot harder than with Business Corporation Law companies.”
In Bailey’s bedroom again Pellam happened to glance down at a paper, also scorched, sitting next to the corporate filings. It was the expert’s report on the handwriting on the insurance application, comparing Ettie’s to the sample.
He’d asked Ettie about letters she might have written lately, thinking someone might’ve stolen a sample of her handwriting. But he and Ettie both had forgotten about the waiver she’d signed for McKennah’s company – giving permission for the Tower to exceed the Planning & Zoning height limit.
“It’s McKennah,” Pellam announced. Then, seeing Bailey’s expression, he held up his hand. “I know, you don’t think a top-of-the-line developer like him’d torch a tenement. And he wouldn’t for the insurance. But he would if the whole success of the Tower depends on the tunnel to Penn Station. Newton Clarke – and McKennah’s wife too – told us how desperate he was.”
“But…” Bailey lifted his hands, dismayed. “Why are you bothering? Even if McKennah’s behind the Foundation Ettie still confessed to the arson.”
“That’s not,” Pellam said, “going to be a problem.”
“But-”
“I’ll deal with that. The big question is how do we prove a connection between McKennah and the Foundation.”
The lawyer’s face grew troubled. “Developers’re geniuses at this sort of thing. And McKennah’s top of the line. We’ll have to trace offshore corporations, doing-business-as statements… It’ll take some time.”
“How long?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“When’s Ettie being sentenced?”
A pause. “Day after tomorrow.”
“Then I guess we don’t have a couple of weeks, do we?” Pellam’s eyes were on the construction site across the street. The wrapped sculpture was seated as unceremoniously as a girder. Several passersby gazed at it intently, wondering what it might be. But the workers walked away without tearing off the paper.
Wearing the Armani again and crowned with a stolen hard hat cocked over his brow, John Pellam walked matter-of-factly through the lobby of McKennah Tower. This part of the structure was virtually completed and was already occupied by several tenants – including two of McKennah’s development and operating companies and the real estate agency leasing future space in the building.
Pellam’s saunter told everybody in the office that he belonged here and that no one better delay what was obviously an urgent mission.
And no one did.
Clipboard in hand, he passed a row of secretaries and walked boldly through a large oak door into an office that was so opulent it had to be that of Roger McKennah, whom he’d seen leave five minutes earlier. He had several explanations prepared and rehearsed for the developer’s minions but his acting skills weren’t required; the room was unoccupied.
He strode to his desk, on which were two framed pictures – one of McKennah’s wife and one of his two children; Jolie gazed out of the expensive frame with an artificial smile painted large on her face. The boy and girl in the adjoining frame weren’t smiling at all.
Pellam started on the file cabinets. After fifteen minutes he’d worked his way through hundreds of letters, financial statements and legal documents but none of them mentioned the St. Augustus Foundation or the buildings on Thirty-sixth Street.
The credenza behind the desk was locked. Pellam chose the direct approach – he looked for a letter opener to break the lock with. He’d just found one in the top right-hand drawer when a booming voice filled the room. “Nice suit.” There seemed to be a bit of a brogue in it. Pellam froze. “But it’s not exactly you. You ask me, you’re more of a denim kind of guy.”
Pellam stood slowly.
Roger McKennah stood in the doorway, beside his unsmiling bodyguard, whose hand rested inside his coat jacket. Pellam, who’d suspected metal detectors in the Tower entryway, had left the Colt in Bailey’s office.
His eyes flicked from one man to th
e other.
“We’ve been looking for you,” McKennah said. “And what happens but you come to see me?” He nodded to the assistant, who lifted something to a table. It was Pellam’s Betacam. As of a few hours ago it had been hidden away in the bedroom closet of Pellam’s sublet in the Village. He wondered if the rest of his tapes were now destroyed.
McKennah said, “Let’s take a ride.” He opened a side door into the dark garage where sat the Mercedes limo.
The assistant picked up the camera and gestured with his head toward the door.
Pellam started to speak but McKennah held up a long index finger. “What could you possibly say? That you’re looking for the truth? You’re rubbing the places that feel good? You’ve got answers for everything, I’ll bet. But I don’t want to hear them. Just get in the car.”
TWENTY-SIX
They drove in silence for eight blocks.
The limo pulled up in front of a dilapidated old building somewhere in the Forties on the far West Side. The paint was scaling. It looked like dirty, white confetti. The wood trim was rotten and piled up against a side door were a dozen trash bags.
McKennah gestured toward it. “Artie.”
The bodyguard opened the limo door, took Pellam’s arm firmly, led him toward the side entrance. He shoved open a door and pushed Pellam forward. They waited as McKennah entered.
Down long, dark corridor. The developer went first. Pellam followed, trailed by Artie, who carried the camera as if it were a machine gun.
Pellam looked around, squinting, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He slipped his hand into his sleeve to grip the handle of the letter opener he’d copped from McKennah’s office. It felt flimsy but Pellam knew from prison what kind of damage even the most delicate of weapons could do.
The corridor was lit by only one low-watt bare bulb. He coughed at the smell of mold and urine. A blur of motion at their feet. McKennah whispered, “Jesus,” as the huge rat passed indifferently in front of them. Pellam ignored it. He gripped the letter opener again. Felt the point against his arm. Waited for reassurance. He felt none.
Hell's Kitchen Page 24
