The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3 (22 page)

Chapter 8

Apartment 5G

“S
top staring at
me,” Danny said. “You should know after all these years the sad-eyes routine won’t work with me. And judging from the size of you, neither does this diet cat food.”

He was standing at the kitchen sink having just given Smelly, their rotund six-year-old tiger, her evening ration of dietetic cat food that was costing them $2 a can from the vet. Smelly no longer smelled badly but she was eighteen pounds heavier and nothing they had tried seemed to slim her down. Danny often described her as a bowling ball with legs, a barb she ignored. She sat staring up at him, her pleading eyes calculated to get at least a small cup of the dry food her feline housemate Leonard enjoyed, fed separately behind a closed door in the bathroom. Leonard indulged his status as the alpha cat and could often be seen throwing a smug glance back at Smelly as he was put in the bathroom with a tasty dish of calorie-rich dry food for only him to savor.

“I really don’t have time for this,” Danny said, as Smelly did her usual approach-and-retreat to her food bowl before hunger finally made the decision for her. She caved, walked over to the food bowl and began eating. She would only tolerate this treatment for so long before she would find a way out of this place, this prison of veterinary design, and live freely once again among the trash bags. They may think it an idle threat, as she had many times dashed into the hallway when the front door opened, only to panic at the great unknown and come slinking back in. But she meant it, damnit, and if they insisted on feeding her this awful, tasteless mud, she would make it to the stairwell next time, through the door, down the stairs and out, and who would be sorry then?

“What are you doing in there?” Danny shouted. Kyle had been in their second bedroom, one they used as an office except for the rare occasions when company came. One of those occasions was upon them; Kyle’s mother, Sally Callahan, was arriving Friday from Chicago to be at the opening of his photo exhibit and they still needed to get the room in order. Absent a guest, it tended to get sloppy, dusty, and generally used.

“A photograph, what else would I be looking for in here?”

“A book maybe,” Danny said, wiping his hands on a dishtowel and heading into the room. “Papers of some kind.”

They had turned the second bedroom into an office shortly after Kyle moved in. He had been the one to give up most of his furniture and belongings, since there was simply not enough room for two full apartments in one, but he had insisted on a working space of his own. He needed a room with a door he could close while he spent hours working on his photographs, cataloging his photographs, archiving his photographs. He was rarely without a camera around his neck or in his backpack, and had long been in the habit of shooting hundreds of pictures to get a few good ones. Images were like that: so many flashed by in the course a day that you had to grab as many as you could and hope for a diamond or two. Even the same image might need to be shot ten times, from ten different angles, to find its essence.

His share of the room consisted of a file cabinet and his father’s large maple desk. It was the only thing of his father’s he requested; he wanted it for its history, the stains in the wood, the burns from when his father smoked, and not at all for the fact his father died with his face pressed against the desktop. An aneurism had felled Bert Callahan in a matter of seconds and Sally had come home to find him slumped over his papers, cold and departed. She was glad Kyle had wanted anything at all by which to remember his father, given the chill of their relationship from the time Kyle was a boy, and she was happy to be rid of another reminder of her loss.

The back wall that divided their respective office spaces, Kyle’s to the left, Danny’s to the right, with a window between them, was taken up with bookshelves. Both men were bibliophiles, Kyle more so, and it was probably his books more than anything that gave him a sense of continuity. Some of the books he’d had as a child, and he could let his eyes wander slowly up and down the shelves remembering periods of his life by reading the book spines.

Kyle was at his computer scanning photographs. He would pick one out of a dozen, enlarge it and peer at the people in it. He had learned early that the eye doesn’t always know what it is seeing. In this case he was looking at people who had come to the opening night of the New Year New Visions show. He could name some of them: Devin, Richard Morninglight, Kate and Stuart Pride, others among the crowd he knew from the gallery. He was hoping to recognize the man from across the street that morning, without being sure why he thought this is where he’d seen him.

“What are you looking for?” Danny asked, resting his hand on Kyle’s shoulder.

“Not ‘what,’ but ‘whom’,” Kyle replied. “A man I saw outside Breadwinner’s this morning, staring at the gallery. He looked so familiar, but it was one of those things, you see somebody and you swear you know them …”

“Happens to me all the time. Hundreds of people come into the restaurant in a week, I remember a fraction of their names.”

“Not his name, so much, just where I saw him. The New Visions show, it’s stuck in my mind for some reason but I don’t see him in any of the photos.”

“The invisible man,” Danny said, as he moved away from Kyle, looking around the room. “We should get someone in to clean.” He slid his finger along a bookshelf and examined the dust that came off it.

“I can clean.”

“Before Friday? Your mother’s coming.”

Kyle sighed. Yes, his mother was coming. She stayed in this room on the sofa bed and it needed to be dusted at least. The reminder of his mother’s impending arrival got him thinking of it again.

“I’m worried,” Kyle said, swiveling around in his chair.

“It’s not cancer,” Danny said. He knew where this was going. Sally had told her son she had something to talk about. Kyle, being prone to imagine the worst, assumed she was going to tell him she was seriously ill. He was already imagining a leave of absence from Tokyo Pulse, flying to Chicago to spend a month with his ailing mother. Danny was looking forward to Sally coming out with whatever it was and putting and end to the morbid speculation.

“I never said it was cancer,” Kyle replied. “But something. She doesn’t keep secrets from me. Even less so since my father died.”

Kyle spoke to his mother at least twice a week and always on Saturday. He had worried about her after Bert died just shy of their forty-seventh wedding anniversary. To his surprise, she had adapted well and quickly, but she was still a seventy-five year old woman living alone in Chicago and he considered it his duty as her only child to fret over her.

“She’s probably moving to Florida, or San Miguel. Lots of ex-pats down there in Mexico, you can live very well, very cheaply.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I listen to my customers, talking is what they’re there for. Talk, food, and sometimes a chat with Margaret. Speaking of which, I think your mother is not the only one with a secret.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Danny said. “Something’s going on with Margaret. She’s had that new lawyer of hers –”

“The rodent.”

Danny smiled. He had referred to Claude Petrie as a rodent when he first told Kyle about him. “That’s the one. He’s been to see her several times, and today Chloe told me he was in with two other men.”

“Smells like investment.”

“Possibly. But in what? Chloe thinks it’s her estate, that she’s getting things in order. Why the two men, though? Claude could easily do a will, which I’m sure she had done a long time ago with old man Evans”

“You have to just wait and ask her.”

“Exactly,” Danny said. “Same with your mother. You have to wait and ask her what this big secret is. Life is change, Kyle, that’s the nature of it. It’s not by design.”

Kyle froze suddenly, struck by Danny’s words. “Exactly!” he shouted.

“Is there an echo in here?”

“No, no,” Kyle said, excited. He got up and crossed to a bookshelf. “I remember now the other death, the one I couldn’t think of when we were watching the news.”

He skimmed along the bottom shelf and found what he was looking for. It was the catalog for that year’s New Year New Visions show at the gallery. Devin was one of the artists, but it wasn’t Devin he was looking for. He opened the front cover and read the credits.

“There,” he said, holding the catalog up so Danny could see as he pointed to a name: Shiree Leone.

“Who’s that?”

“She was the graphic designer for the catalog. Designer.
Design,
you just said it. I couldn’t remember her name, or what the connection was. It was just a fly buzzing around in my head after we saw the news on Devin.”

“What about her?” Danny asked.

“She’s dead!”

Great, Danny thought. Here we go again. The murders at Pride Lodge were a fading memory, but a memory still new enough, and he feared Kyle would go off on another chase at precisely the worst time, with his mother coming and his show opening on Friday.

“Murdered, I suppose,” Danny said.

“No. Yes. They don’t know. That’s what I remember. She fell in front of a subway train.”

“Coincidences happen, Kyle, no matter what people say.”

“But nobody saw it! There was no one else on the platform, I remember that. They were asking for any witnesses, just like Devin’s murder the other night. They assumed she fell or had a seizure or something.”

“But you know better.”

“She could have been pushed.”

“There was no one there, you said so yourself.”

“No one
saw
,” Kyle said. “That’s not the same thing. Maybe there was someone there. An invisible man.”

“I was joking. There is no such thing as an invisible man.”

“Devin might beg to differ with you. And Shiree.”

“Please don’t say you have to find out.”

“What choice do I have? This could be connected to the Katherine Pride Gallery. There could be more already dead … and more to come. I can’t just wait and see what happens, can I?”

Danny did not respond. He knew anything he said to Kyle to dissuade him would fall on deaf ears. This is what Kyle did, along with photography and being a personal assistant: he solved murders. Stopping him would be tantamount to taking a thought from his head and putting it outside, go away, thought, you’re not wanted here. They were Kyle’s thoughts, in Kyle’s mind, and nothing Danny could do or say would chase them away. Even if Kyle said he would drop the subject, Danny knew he wouldn’t.

“When does Detective Linda get here?” Danny asked, referring to Linda Sikorsky, the homicide detective from New Hope, Pennsylvania, they had befriended after the Pride Lodge murders. She had since come fully out as gay and was making a trip to the city for Kyle’s show.

“Tomorrow. We’re having lunch.”

“Good. Tell her whatever theories you have flapping around in your brain. If you’re going to go running after killers, at least have back up.”

“I’m not going to get hurt,” Kyle said. He stepped to Danny and put his arms around him. “Don’t worry about me.”

“And you don’t worry about your mother, and I won’t worry about Margaret, and nobody will ever worry about anyone again.”

Kyle took Danny by the hand. “Come with me,” he said, leading them out of the office and toward the bedroom.

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Just start with the top button and we’ll see.”

Danny smiled as they walked down the hallway. It had been two weeks since they last had sex. That seemed pretty much the norm in relationships that lasted more than a few years, and they were men in their fifties, whatever part that played. It was good to know they could still cut loose when the opportunity and the desire came upon them. For the next hour he would not be concerned with anything else, including a killer whose trail Kyle had picked up in an art gallery catalog. He knew Kyle would go where it led, and the best he could do was hope he made it back safely.

Chapter 9

A Corner Table at Osaka

L
inus Hern didn’t
care for sushi, but the restaurateur knew his two investors were very fond of it, and it was their money he would be using in his most recent and most anticipated venture: to buy Margaret’s Passion, with neither Margaret nor her flying monkey, Danny Durban, knowing it. As far as Hern was aware, Danny didn’t even know the old lady was selling, and if all went well he wouldn’t find out until it was too late. By then Linus could step out from behind the curtain and tell Durban his services were no longer needed. It would be a costly vindication, but one he’d imagined for years, ever since the two men first met and knew it was disdain at first sight.

Linus had made a career of starting restaurants, and in some cases taking them over, getting them ready for their big debut, which would be covered by absolutely anyone worth being called press, launching them into the nightlife stratosphere, and getting out with his investment doubled. What happened to the restaurants after that was not his concern, and most had not lasted more than a year, by which time Linus Hern was long gone, his bank account that much fatter, convincing the next investors to ride his coattails to the New York Times Food Section. He was a venture capitalist, a man of industry. He knew how to open with a bang and close without leaving a trace. A master, if he said so himself.

He was tall, even seated at a corner table. He was wearing a blood-red velvet sport coat, something as uncommon as it was distinctive, with spotless white leather jeans. His high forehead masked a receding hairline and at the same time favored his face, highlighting sharp blue eyes that just last year had undergone Lasik surgery. At fifty-six, Linus refused to wear glasses; he didn’t care how fashionable they were, or which top names were designing them. Linus Hern was determined to appear a superman, a specimen of the highest order. Glasses would be a blemish in an otherwise flawless presentation.

He motioned to the waiter for another Scotch. One was normally his limit, but his venture partners were late and he needed something to sip. Late was a mortal sin to Linus Hern, but considering the amount of money they were putting into this, he would make an exception.

Osaka was the latest in Japanese fusion, whatever the hell that was. Anytime someone added a new ingredient it became “fusion.” Some Thai farmer adds carrots to the pot for the first time and it’s “Thai fusion.” Hern disdained such labels, knowing them as a marketing ploy and only really meaningful to lower-tier food critics and the floods of trendy young diners lining up to get a table at the latest “fusion” restaurant.

He got a table, of course, probably one that had been reserved for lesser people who would be told upon arrival that there had been a mix up, so sorry, that table is taken. “That table” being the best one in the place, nineteen stories up in Midtown, southwest corner overlooking the nighttime Manhattan skyline. The City was Linus Hern’s only true love; that and making money. Men were treats, tasty bonbons he enjoyed and discarded as quickly as a caramel nugget might melt in his mouth. What was the last one’s name? The one he’d taken for that regrettable weekend at Pride Lodge. Carlos, was it? What a mess that whole business turned out to be. The Lodge was still standing but Linus had no idea who ran it now, and no plans to go back. Murder had a way of making a place less attractive.

He looked over and saw his partners arrive, a full fifteen minutes past due. Had they not already given him a hefty retainer with much more on the way he would have left them greeting an empty table. But he was shrewd, a winner, and rather than even glance at his watch to tell them they were late, he smiled, stood, and offered a warm hand.

“Victor,” he said to the taller of the two, a man near his own height whose air of stupidity was underscored by a scar running from his left eye to his chin. The result of a car crash in his twenties, but a very effective visual when someone needed to be intimidated. (Margaret Bowman had not been among them, and took pity on the man whose face had been disfigured at such a young age.)

“Linus,” Victor said, shaking his hand and taking a seat in the booth to Linus’s right.

The second man was downright jolly, more than balancing any discomfort people might feel in Victor’s presence. Jay Tierney was a financier, a venture capitalist like Hern, only his specialty was in demolition: tearing down the old, the decrepit, and putting up the new. Tierney was robust, affable, his hair cropped short and his face round and pink. He smiled easily and often, and had mastered the art of including that smile in his eyes, something most predators simply could not do. It was impossible to tell with Jay Tierney if his smile was fake or not, only that it was meant just for you, and you might find yourself being swallowed by it if you weren’t careful.

Jay Tierney and Victor Gossett had been business partners for twenty years, with dealings that stretched from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to San Francisco’s waterfront. They could buy a building like Margaret Bowman’s with the change rattling around in their pockets. The plan being presented to the old woman was to save her restaurant and secure her final years by buying the building and everything in it. She would have enough money to live comfortably anywhere she chose, and the restaurant would pass to Danny when she died. What only the three men at Osaka knew was that it was all a lie: Margaret’s Passion would be permanently closed for renovations, and the building that had stood there for over a century would be replaced by something shiny, new, and very costly to inhabit.

It helped that her old lawyer had passed on. Evan Evans had been smart and worldly, and this particular sleight of hand would never have gotten past him. But the young one, Claude Petrie, that had been a stroke of luck. He still lived in the old man’s shadow and pressured himself to make his own mark, establish his own credentials. Finding new owners for Margaret’s building had been the best timing of his life. He had been on the verge of disappearing and had started looking into exactly how someone does that, when Hern showed up in his office with a proposition.

Linus had come up with the plan when he first heard rumors of the old woman’s troubles. There may be 20,000 restaurants in New York City, but the world of the best is a small one. When something happened at The Greenery, or Casa Pueblo, it was known by all the others in hours. When Margaret Bowman had her young new lawyer put out feelers for a buyer, Linus Hern was among the very first to hear it. He had quickly contacted his fellow predators Victor and Jay, and in amazingly short order the three of them had formulated a plan. A plan so slick, with a truth behind it so carefully guarded, that Margaret Bowman and her sidekick Danny Durban, a man Linus could not wait to fire, wouldn’t know what hit them until it was too late.

Linus again waved his hand, summoning their table server.

“I’m still waiting for my Scotch,” he said to the young Asian looking woman, wondering if she was some kind of fusion, too. “Not a good sign.”

“In so sorry, Mr. Hern,” she said, even bowing a bit to emphasize her embarrassment. “Right away. And the gentlemen? What may I bring you?”

That was better, Linus thought, as the other two placed their drink orders. He wasn’t listening. He was drifting away for a moment, daydreaming of the sweetness he would feel when he’d accomplished his greatest coup. Margaret’s Passion would be no more.