Hells Kitchen Read Free Page B

so.”
    The marshal put his large hands on his large hips.
    We can play it this way, we can play it that way. Pellam crossed his arms, spread his feet slightly. “I’m not leaving her.”
    “John, no, it’s okay.”
    Lomax: “This room’s sealed off from visitors. Uh, uh, uh, don’t ask why. It’s none of your business.”
    “I don’t believe my business is any of yours,” Pellam replied. The line came from an unproduced movie he’d written years ago. He’d been dying for a chance to use it.
    “Fuck it,” said one of the detectives. “We don’t have time for this. Get him out.”
    The assistant curled his vice-grip hands aroundPellam’s arm and walked him toward the door. The gesture shot a jolt of icy pain through his stiff neck. Pellam pulled away abruptly and when he did this the cop decided that Pellam might like to rest up against the wall for a few minutes. He pinned him there until his arms went numb from the lack of circulation, his boots almost off the floor.
    Pellam shouted at Lomax, “Get this guy off me. What the hell is going on?”
    But the fire marshal was busy.
    He was concentrating hard on the little white card in his hand as he recited the Miranda warning to Ettie, then arrested her for reckless endangerment, assault and arson.
    “Yo, don’t forget attempted murder,” one of the detectives called.
    “Oh, yeah,” Lomax muttered. He glanced at Ettie and added with a shrug, “Well, you heard him.”

THREE
    Ettie’s building, like most New York tenements built in the nineteenth century, had measured thirty-five by seventy-five feet and been constructed of limestone; the rock used for hers was ruddy, a terra cotta shade.
    Before 1901 there were no codes governing the construction of these six-story residences and many builders had thrown together tenements using rotten lathe and mortar and plaster mixed with sawdust. But those structures, the shoddy ones, had long ago crumbled. Tenements like this one, Ettie Washington had explained to John Pellam’s earnest video camera, had been built by men who cared about their craft. Alcoves for the Virgin and glass hummingbirds hovering above doorways. There was no reason why these buildings couldn’t last for two hundred years.
    No reason, other than gasoline and a match . . .
    This morning Pellam walked toward what was left of the building.
    There wasn’t much. Just a black stone shell filled with a jumble of scorched mattresses, furniture, paper, appliances. The base of the building was a thick ooze ofgray sludge—ash and water. Pellam froze, staring at a hand protruding from one pile of muck. He ran toward it then stopped when he noticed the seam in the vinyl at the wrist. It was a mannequin.
    Practical jokes, Hell’s Kitchen style.
    On a hump of refuse was a huge porcelain bathtub sitting on its claw feet, perfectly level. It was filled with brackish water.
    Pellam continued to circle the place, pushed closer through the crowd of gapers in front of the yellow police tape, like shoppers waiting at the door for a one-day Macy’s sale. Most of them had the edgy eagerness of urban scavengers but the pickings were sparse. There were dozens of mattresses, stained and burned. The skeletons of cheap furniture and appliances, waterlogged books. A rabbit-ears antenna—the building wasn’t wired for cable—sat on a glob of plastic, the Samsung logo and a circuit board the only recognizable part of the former TV.
    The stench was horrific.
    Pellam finally spotted the man he’d been looking for. There’d been a costume change; he was now wearing jeans, a windbreaker and fireman’s boots.
    Ducking under the tape, Pellam walked up to the fire marshal, pasting enough authority on his face to get him all the way to the building itself without being stopped by the crime scene techs and firemen milling about.
    He heard Lomax say to his huge assistant, the man who’d pinned Pellam against the wall in Ettie’s room, “There, the spalling.” He