The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3 (6 page)

Chapter 7

Detective Sikorsky

D
etective Linda Sikorsky
was the only detective on the New Hope police force. The town’s population was a mere 2,525 in the latest census, though it was a well known and popular tourist destination (some who lived there would say trap), and the actual number of bodies in town increased several fold on warm sunny days. Linda had endured the initial resentment from her colleagues after being promoted into the position two years earlier, following the retirement of the city’s last detective. A few of the others on the force didn’t take to the idea of a less senior member of their ranks stepping into a job they thought should go to one of them; add to that some unspoken resentment over the job going to a woman and she had her challenges, to say the least. No one dared say aloud that her gender played a role in any opposition to her, but Linda Sikorsky was no fool. She had a lifetime of experience as a woman in a world that in many ways was still a man’s and knew well the subtle discrimination that went on, the doubts and silent skepticism men had about their female colleagues, especially their female superiors.

Some things never change, she thought, finishing notes from her last interview with the desk clerk Ricki . . . what was his last name, she wondered, flipping back through her notepad . . . Hernandez. Ricki Hernandez. Skittish man, she thought, but not in a guilty way. More hyper than anxious, a subtle but distinct difference. It probably made him good at his various jobs. It must take a tremendous amount of energy, she thought, to be a desk clerk during the day in a busy hotel, or resort, or whatever they called the place, and a restaurant hostess at night. He had explained to her that he was not a drag queen, necessarily, and not transgender or transsexual. He had leaned over and whispered, glancing around to make sure no one could hear him, “I’m a transvestite. I know I’m not supposed to say that, it’s very politically incorrect these days, but I like the word. It comes from vestments, clothes, you see. Trans-clothes. It’s elegant, really, I don’t know why people think it’s some kind of bad word.” He explained that he liked the particular character he’d made up as the hostess, also conveniently named Ricki. He had invented her, he said, after the woman who used to do the job went ex-gay and just stopped showing up for work. (He knew about the ex-gay part because she had gone on to write a book and cash in as a motivational speaker for self-hating gay people, despite continued sightings of her at Manhattan’s Wild Orchid and other well-known lesbian hotspots on the East Coast.) Her name was Leslie and she went by LaLa until she was saved from the homosexual lifestyle and went on a book tour. One afternoon Leslie/LaLa resigned with an angry phone call to Pucky, after not having been to work for a week, and warned him of the danger to his soul. He thanked her and asked Ricki to fill in at the restaurant. Ricki had the idea then and there to do the job as a hostess and had been doing it ever since.

Linda Sikorsky was tall, nearly six feet in flat shoes (another reason some of the men at the precinct had been intimidated by her). She was also, as her grandmother would say, a big-boned gal. She was a formidable foe to any criminal who thought New Hope and its citizens were easy marks. She wore minimal makeup, having always thought it must have been invented by men as a form of torture; her hair was dark blonde and had once been long, but she’d learned to keep it short in police work—one less thing for a bad guy to grab hold of. She wore glasses, but only for reading, and she pushed them up on her nose as Kyle walked over and took the seat across from her.

She’d been interviewing guests and staff at an out of the way table in the restaurant she had chosen strategically for its window view of the pool below. She wanted to gauge the reactions, subtle or obvious, of people who sat across from her and could see where the death had taken place. A lot could be learned from how some averted their gaze, or how hard they tried not to. Normally the restaurant would be serving breakfast, but Dylan had told the twins Austin and Dallas, who had both worked at Pride Lodge since their days of filling in for summer work, to offer people a continental breakfast in the great room. Now in their mid-twenties, their youth was less a novelty than the fact they were identical twins, providing ornamentation as much as table service.

“Please, have a seat,” she said to Kyle, motioning to the chair opposite her at the small table for two. She did not stand or offer her hand. “And you would be?”

“I’m not sure who I would be,” Kyle said dryly, “but I am Kyle Callahan.”

She smiled so slightly Kyle wasn’t sure she had.

“Not the best view,” he said, nodding at the window and the pool below. He had brought his camera with him and set it on the table. “It’s only been an hour and a half since they took poor Teddy away. Death by shove? Assisted falling?”

“Well, I’m not convinced there’s a lot going on here. A man drinks too much near an empty pool . . .”

“It wasn’t an accident,” he said, and he motioned for Dallas, who had been standing near the entry trying to eavesdrop. “Could I get some coffee?” And to Sikorsky, “Do you mind?”

“Not at all. Then he’ll be free to leave the room,” she said, tapping her ear to indicate the young man had been listening in.

Dallas scurried away to fetch Kyle’s coffee. Kyle wanted to get a good look at this detective, scan her, so to speak, and see what conclusions he might draw, but she wouldn’t look down or away. He quickly experienced her unnerving habit of looking directly at him. He assumed she did this with everyone and that it was some kind of interrogation technique meant to unsettle the people she spoke to.

“Mr. Callahan,” she said, “why are you so sure this wasn’t an accident? Everyone else I’ve spoken to, including some guests whom you would think didn’t know things this personal, has told me he was a drinker. A lush.”

“An alcoholic. ‘Lush’ belongs in the lyrics of a song, not as something to call another person. Teddy was a good man, and he had turned his life around this past year. Well, six months, actually, that’s how long he’d been sober. He went in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous for a few months before that.”

Linda was not unkind. On the other hand, she was too world-wise and experienced to let emotion and attachment influence her critical thinking.

“People relapse, Mr. Callahan,” she said as gently as possible. Clearly this man had been friends with the dead man, and she did consider it an accident at this point, having discovered neither evidence nor motive to think otherwise.

Dallas came gliding up with Kyle’s coffee, ending their conversation just long enough for Kyle to nod his thanks and wait for Dallas to head away. When the young man tried to take up his position by the door, Kyle waved at him to keep going, completely out of the restaurant.

“Teddy didn’t relapse,” he said, leaning in as if Dallas might still be able to hear them. “I know he didn’t. We spoke every couple of weeks. He called me just a few days ago very disturbed, saying he was leaving Pride Lodge.”

“Maybe he was upset about breaking up with—” and she quickly referenced the notes she’d been taking from interviews—“Happy Corcoran.”

Kyle studied her a moment. “I just don’t believe Teddy would go over the deep end about Happy. He knew the odds. Teddy was fifty, Happy’s just a kid.”

“Twenty-five, I believe,” she said. “That makes him an adult. What other people think of a twenty-five-year-old being involved with a man twice his age is irrelevant. I was told by more than one person that Happy, whose real name was Happy, by the way, took a liking to Teddy Pembroke not long after he started working here, as a bar back I think.”

“Yes, a bar back.”

“It sounds more like a kid’s summer job to me, but it became a permanent one. Whether their affair was on the rocks or not, I don’t know. I do know that Happy has not been seen for three days.”

“Surely there’s no connection,” Kyle said, sounding uncertain.

“We’ll have a better idea of that when Happy shows up,” said Linda. “Until then I think we’re about through here.”

“But you haven’t asked me anything.”

“I don’t think you have much to tell me, Mr. Callahan.”

“Kyle. And I may not have much to tell you, if you consider a distress message from a dead man last night ‘nothing.’ He texted me, he was getting frantic. If that’s nothing, fine then, but I do have something to
show
you.”

Kyle picked up his camera, held it out for the detective to see the photographs he’d taken, and showed her the zoom-in of the martini glass.”

“And?” she said, unimpressed with the evidence. “Are you suggesting this was a murder weapon, a martini glass?

“Yes, and no. It wasn’t used to kill him, but it tells me somebody did. You see, Detective, this ‘lush’ didn’t drink martinis. I doubt he’d ever had one in his life. He was a bourbon and whiskey kind of man. Whoever pushed him into the bottom of the pool obviously didn’t think anyone would notice and threw the glass in as misdirection.”

“I’m trying to be fair here,” she said, handing him back the camera. “I’ve known alcoholics, my uncle among them, who would drink Listerine to get high if nothing else was around. I just can’t see this as anything significant. Maybe he had bourbon in a martini glass, maybe that was the only glass on hand when he took it. Did that occur to you?”

It had not occurred to him and Kyle blushed, feeling exposed. He didn’t for a moment think Teddy, a creature of habit like everyone else, would grab a martini glass when he’d been drinking from tumblers for thirty years. She was right, though; all he had were strong suspicions that would not go away as easily as this detective was dismissing them.

“I’m a detective, not a guest here,” she said, deliberately softening her tone. “You were friends with Mr. Pembroke, who by all accounts had a serious drinking problem. From the looks of things he fell off the wagon and into an empty swimming pool. I’m sorry your friend is dead, but I’ve got nothing here to say this was anything but a tragic accident.”

“I’ve told you it wasn’t.”

“That’s not how these things work,” she said, closing her notebook and making it clear she was about to finish up and leave. “Aside from his boyfriend taking off, which is likely what happened with this Happy, nothing indicates foul play. It’s a terrible, lonely way to die, although I’d guess it was instantaneous.”

Kyle had noticed throughout their conversation how nice she seemed, despite keeping a professional distance. He thought, incongruously, that he would like to meet her under different circumstance, to speak to her and photograph her.

“That’s it?” he said. “You’re just going to call it a day, case closed?”

“Yes and no,” she said, standing from the table. “I’ll be heading out now, but I won’t close the case, not yet. The medical examiner needs to determine the cause of death. If it’s anything other than from the fall . . . say, drowning in an empty pool . . . that’s another story. Even if it is the fall, if some new information comes up, the boyfriend confesses or we find another body, then that’s a different ballgame. As mundane as it sounds, an intoxicated fall into a swimming pool may be the final explanation as well as the simplest one, we’ll have to wait and see.”

Detective Linda Sikorsky then gathered her notebook and pen, about to leave the resort she had driven past many times but never been to. “By the way,” she said, as if a thought had just occurred to her. “How much do you suppose a place like this costs? To buy, I mean.”

Kyle thought it was an odd question and wondered if she might be looking for an investment opportunity at a most inappropriate time.

“I’ve never bought property, I wouldn’t have any idea. Dylan and Sid could tell you, they bought it two years ago. Maybe a couple million?”

“Around that,” she said, as if she had the figure in mind all along. “Anyway, thank you,” and this time she reached out to shake his hand. “Enjoy your stay.”

She left him sitting at the table with his coffee and his thoughts. Her parting words, “enjoy your stay,” seemed off the mark, given the circumstances, but the situation was awkward all around. Everything about the morning had been either awful, confusing or awkward. What does one say at the end of a brief police interrogation that could hardly be called an interview? And now, the weekend was ahead of them. The ultimate in awkward: a man had died here, in the pool just below the window Kyle was looking out now. Someone known and loved by all (although, if Kyle’s instinct was correct, seriously un-loved by someone). What would Sid and Dylan do? Would they send everyone home? Would they cover the front porch in a black mourning sash, or lower the rainbow flag to half-mast? What would they tell people? Surely they
would
tell people, surely they would cancel the Halloween festivities in honor of Teddy? The one thing Kyle knew for certain was that he and Danny would not be leaving for the City. They would stay here as planned, and Kyle would not rest until he could prove to others what he knew for himself: Teddy Pembroke had been murdered.

Chapter 8

Room 202

B
o Sweetzer had
wondered about the detective during their interview. Linda Sikorsky was a looker by anyone’s standards, what might have been referred to as Amazonian in less politically self-conscious times. Bo had tried to drop hints, mentioning a local lesbian hangout she’d read about in the New Hope Gay Guide. There had been no reaction from Sikorsky, no tell-tale glance. Maybe people were so much more open now that code between gay people was a lost language. Or, more likely, Sikorsky was straight and didn’t know she was being tested. She acknowledged having heard of the bar but never having been there, and she suggested to Bo that an inquiry at the front desk would be more informative. No nonsense, that one, Bo thought, standing at her window and watching the unmarked car drive away.

She had never had a real relationship, including the one that had gotten her from California to Minnesota. That had been puppy love with fangs and had finished the job of hardening her heart. She knew from a few years of therapy in her twenties that her inability to feel was a direct consequence of the trauma she’d experienced watching her parents killed in cold blood. Not the least of it was survivor’s guilt: why should she be allowed to go on living when her parents had been brutally murdered? Indeed, she wondered, turning from the window and heading to the clothes closet, exactly who would have allowed it or disallowed it? God? She snorted derisively at the thought. She did not believe in God and had little use for those who did. God had ceased to exist for little Emily the moment that trigger was pulled and she glimpsed her father flying back on the bed. God went silent at the sound of her mother’s sudden scream, cut short by a second gunshot. God was for fools and cowards, and she was neither.

She was looking forward to seeing more of this Pride Lodge, of smiling and chatting and blending in as she wove her way into the tapestry of the place. Most of the women here were in pairs, she’d already noticed that. Pairs or groups. It might be the only thing that set her apart: she was a woman alone, a solitary assassin (again she smiled at the word) with only one objective. When she had accomplished that, the mission would be over. There were no other names on her hit list. She had no grudge toward anyone who did not deserve her vengeance, and only three men fit that description. Three men who had broken into her home when she was just ten years old and robbed her of any semblance of a normal life; three men who would pay with their lives. It was that simple, that necessary.

She chose a beige cotton blouse appropriate for the fall weather, and a light gray sweater that would suffice if she decided to walk the property—which she surely would, wanting to refine her plans, to identify places and opportunities. Jeans and black penny loafers finished the outfit, making her look like most of the other women here, and the men, too. Casual wear was like that nowadays, very little gender difference, and that was fine with her. She wanted to be just another flower against the flowered wallpaper.

She laid her clothes on the bed and padded barefoot into the bathroom to get ready for the day. She had completed her interview with the intriguing Detective Sikorsky in the same clothes she’d arrived in the night before; she hadn’t expected to be interviewed at all and had not gotten ready before Ricki, the desk clerk, knocked on her door to tell her the detective wanted to speak to everyone who was at the Lodge that morning.

“Do I have time to shower and change?” she’d asked, not opening the door wide enough for Ricki to enter or even get a good view.

“I can’t say that,” he’d said, clearly wanting to move on to the next guest.

Rather than risk losing her turn in line, if there was one, she had simply slipped on her slacks and windbreaker and headed downstairs. It had been a smart move, as she found herself immediately sitting across from Linda Sikorsky, wondering if, had circumstances been completely different, she might ask the woman out.

The killer and the cop. The thought amused her, even as it reminded her of her essential loneliness. She sighed at life’s absurdities, the contrast often found between what was and what one wished could be, and she stepped into the shower.