“I’ve gotta make a phone call,” Ettie said.

“They let you but not now.” The woman touched her good arm, squeezed it gently.

“Some son of a bitch took away my pills,” Ettie complained. “One of the guards. I need ’em back.”

Hatake laughed. “Honey, them pills, they ain’t even in this building no more. They sold an’ gone. Mebbe we see what we can find, us girls. Something help you. Bet it hurts like the devil’s own dick.”

Ettie almost said that she had some money and could pay. But she knew instinctively to keep the money secret for the time being. She said, “Thank you.”

“You lie back. Get some rest. We look out for you.”

Ettie closed her eyes and thought of Elizabeth. Then she thought of her husband Billy Doyle and she thought of, finally, John Pellam. But he was in her thoughts for no more than five seconds before she fell asleep.

“Well?”

Hatake Imaham returned to the cluster of women on the far end of the cell.

“That bitch, she the one done it. She guilty as death.” Hatake didn’t claim to be a real mambo but it was well known in the Kitchen that she did possess an extra sense. And while she hadn’t had much success laying on hands to cure illness everyone knew that she could touch someone and find out their deepest secrets. She could tell that the hot vibrations radiating off Ettie Washington’s brow were feelings of guilt.

“Shit,” one woman spat out. “She burn that boy up, she burn up that little boy.”

“The boy?” another asked in an incredulous whisper. “She set that fire in the basement, girl – didn’t you read that? On Thirty-sixth Street. She coulda killed the whole everybody in that building.”

“That bitch call herself a mother,” a skinny woman with deep-set eyes growled. “Fuck that bitch. I say-”

“Shhhh,” Hatake waved a hand.

“Do her now! Do the bitch now.”

Hatake’s face tightened into a glare. “Quiet! Damballah! We gonna do this th’way I say. You hear me, girl? I ain’t kill her. Damballah don’t ask more than what she done.”

“Okay, sister,” the girl said, her voice hushed and frightened. “Okay. That’s cool. Whatcha saying we do?”

“Shhhhh,” Hatake hissed again and glanced out the bars, where a lethargic guard lounged out of earshot. “Who gonna see the man today?”

A couple of the girls lifted their arms. The prostitutes. Criminal Term batched those arraignments and disposed of them early, Hatake knew. It was like the city wanted them back on the street with a minimum of lost time. Hatake looked at the oldest one. “You Dannette, right?”

The woman nodded, her pocked face remained peaceful.

“I’ma ask you do something for me. How ’bout that, girl?”

“Whatchu want me to do?”

“You talk to yo man when you get into the courtroom.”

“Yeah, yeah, sister.”

“Tell him we make it worth his while. After you get out, I wan’ you to come back.”

Dannette frowned. “You want… You want what?”

“Listen to me. I want you to get back in here. Tomorrow.”

Dannette had never stopped nodding but she didn’t understand this. Hatake continued, “I want you to get something, bring it in here to me. You know how, right? You know where you hide it? In the back hole, not the front. In a Baggie.”

“Sure.” Dannette nodded as if she hid things there every day.

She looked around at the other women. Whatever she was being asked to do was being seconded by everybody.

“I’ll pay you for this, for coming back again.”

“You get me rock?” the girl asked eagerly.

Hatake scowled. It was well-known that she hated drugs, dealers and users. “You a cluckhead, girl?”

The pocked face went still. “You get me rock?”

“I give you money,” the huge woman spat out. “You buy whatever you want with it, girl. Fuck up your life, you want. That your business.”

Dannette said, “What it is you want me to bring you back?”

“Shhh,” whispered Hatake Imaham. A guard was wandering past the door.

SIX

“Hell of a visiting room.”

“Oh, John, am I in the soup?”

Pellam told Ettie, “Not exactly. But you’re walking around the edge of the bowl, looks like.”

“It’s good to see you.” They sat across from each other in the fluorescent-lit room. A roach meandered slowly up the wall, past the corpses of his kin crushed to dry specks. Beneath a sign that read NO PHYSICAL CONTACT John Pellam took the bandaged hand of Ettie Washington. The squat uniformed matron nearby looked coldly at this disregard of regulations but didn’t say anything. Pellam said. “Louis Bailey’s going to get you out on bail.”

Ettie looked bad. She seemed too calm, considering everything that had happened to her. He knew she had a temper. He’d seen it when she talked about her husband – Billy Doyle’s leaving her. And about the time she was fired from her last job. After years working for a jobber in the Fashion District she’d been let go without a single day’s severance. He expected to see her fury at whoever had set the blaze, at the police, at the jailors. He found only resignation. That was a lot more troubling to him than anger.

She picked at a worn spot on her shift. “The guards’re all saying it’ll go easier if I tell ’em I did it and tell ’ em who I hired. I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Pellam debated for a moment then decided to ask. “Tell me about the insurance policy.”

“Hell, I didn’t buy any insurance, John. They think I’m a stupid old lady, doing something like that?” She pressed the palm of her good hand against her stiff gray-and-black hair as if fighting off a migraine. “Where I’m gonna get money to buy insurance?” She winced in pain, continued. “I can barely pay my bills, as is. I can’t even do that half the time. Where’m I gonna get money to buy insurance?”

“You’ve never been in any insurance agencies in the last month?”

“No. I swear.” Her face was drawn up, as she eyed the guard suspiciously.

“Ettie, I’ve got to ask you these questions. Somebody recognized you taking out the policy.”

“That’s their problem,” she said, tight-lipped. “It wasn’t me.”

“Somebody else saw you at the back door of the building that night. Just before the fire.”

“I go in the back door usually. A lot of times I do that – if I’ve been to the A &P. It’s a shortcut. Saves me some steps.”

“Do all the tenants have keys to the back?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so.”

“You locked it behind you?”

“It locks by itself. I think I heard it close.”

Ettie was often digressive. One thought brought up ten others. One question could lead via a colorful stream of consciousness to a different time and place. Pellam noted that today, though, her responses were succinct, cautious.

The guard had tolerated Pellam’s hand upon Ettie’s arm long enough. “No contact,” she snapped. Pellam sat back. The guard’s nose was pierced three times with gold studs and each ear sprouted ten or twelve small rings. Her belligerence suggested that she was waiting for someone to ridicule the jewelry.

“Louis Bailey,” Pellam asked Ettie. “You think he’s a good lawyer?”

“Oh, he’s good. He’s done stuff for me before. I hired him six, eight months ago, for this social security problem I had. He did an okay job… That guard over there keeps looking at us with an evil eye, John. She’s too jaunty for my taste. Sticking pins in her nose.”

Pellam laughed. “This witness told me she saw some men in the alley just before the fire. Did you see them when you got home from the store?”

“Sure.”

“Who was it?”

“Nobody I recognized. Some boys from the neighborhood. They’re always there. You know, it’s an alley. Where kids always hang out. Did fifty years ago. Do now. Some things never change.”

Pellam remembered what Sibbie’s son had told her – what earned him the slap in the face. He asked Ettie, “Were they from the gangs?”