Hell's Kitchen Read Online Free PDF Page B

told him, taking his check for the broker’s fee and first month’s rent as if he’d owed her the money for months. “People’re totally dying for them nowadays.”) Fourth-floor walk-up, the linoleum floor a dirty beige and walls green as Ettie Washington’s hospital room. And what, he’d been wondering, was that smell ?
    In his years doing location work Pellam had scouted in Manhattan only a few times. The local companies largely had the business locked up and, besides, because of the high cost of shooting here the Manhattan you saw in most movies was usually Toronto, Cleveland or a set. The films actually shot in the city had little appeal to him—weird little Jim Jarmusch student-quality independents and dull mainstreams. EXT. PLAZA HOTEL—DAY, EXT. WALL STREET—NIGHT. The scouting assignments had less to do with being the director’s third eye than filling out the proper forms in the Mayor’s Film Office and making sure cash went where it was supposed to go, both above and below the table.
    But scouting was behind him for the immediate future. He was a month away from finishing the rough cut of his first film in years and the first documentary he’d ever made. West of Eighth was the title.
    He showered and brushed his unruly black hair into place, thinking about the project. The schedule allowed him only another week of taping then three weeks of editing and post-pro. September 27 was the deadline for mixing and delivery to WGBH in Boston, where he’d work with the producer on the final cut. PBS airing was planned for early next spring. Simultaneously he’d have the tape transferred to film, re-edited and shipped for limited release in art theaters in the U.S. and on Channel 4 in England next summer. Then submissions to festivals in Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin and to the Oscars.
    Of course that had been the plan. But now?
    The motif of West of Eighth had been the tenement at 458 West Thirty-sixth Street and the residents wholived there. But Ettie Washington was the centerpiece. With her arrest he wondered if he was now the proud owner of two hundred hours of fascinating interviews that would never find their way to TV or silver screen.
    Outside he bought a newspaper then flagged down a cab.
    The clattering vehicle wove right and left through traffic, as if the cabbie were avoiding hot pursuit, and Pellam tightly gripped the handhold as he tried to read about the fire. The story was dwindling in news value and today’s paper reported only that Ettie’d been arrested and confirmed what he’d known—that the only serious injury was Juan Torres. Pellam remembered the boy clearly. He’d interviewed his mother and recalled the energetic twelve-year-old, standing in his apartment, by the window, left-hooking a package of Huggies like a punching bag and saying to Pellam insistently, “My daddy, he know Jose Canseco. No, no, no. Really. He does!”
    The boy’s condition was still critical.
    A picture of Ettie, being led by a woman cop out of Manhattan Hospital, accompanied the article. Her hair was a mess. Light flares sparked off the chrome cuffs on her wrists, just below the cast that Pellam had signed.
    Etta Washington, formerly Doyle, neé Wilkes, was seventy-two years old. Born in Hell’s Kitchen she’d never lived anywhere else. The 458 W. Thirty-sixth Street building had been her home for the past five years. She’d resided for the prior forty in a similar tenement up the street, now demolished. All her other residences had been in the Kitchen, within five square blocks of one another.
    Ettie had ventured out of New York state only threetimes for brief trips, two of them funerals of kin in North Carolina. Ettie had been a star student in her first two years of high school but dropped out to work and try to become a cabaret singer. She’s performed for some years, always opening for better-known talent. Mostly in Harlem or the Bronx, though occasionally she’d land a job on Swing