The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3

by Mark McNease

  The seller was an old man in Detroit by the name of Frank. Down on his luck, as she imagined he had probably spent most of his criminal life. But still an intelligent man, a man who knew enough about the value of a watch to keep it. Desperate now, she knew, as he was selling it for a mere $500, a third its current value. He either didn’t know, or didn’t care, and she had to move quickly. She would not be the only one seeing it, so she immediately emailed him from an anonymous account, one she had set up for exactly this opportunity, explaining she ran a jewelry business and had a client looking for just such a watch. A wealthy client willing to pay $1000, cash. If that was agreeable to Frank from Detroit she would be there the following day. Yes, he wrote back, it was very agreeable, and he took the item down from the auction site. Bo smiled, something she did not do much, and she imagined her father coming to her soon in another dream, telling her she had done well.

  She did not like losing herself in reverie. There was danger in the distraction of daydreaming—or in this case, late-night dreaming. She glanced at the clock: eleven forty-five p.m. She hadn’t made any judgments yet of this Pride Lodge. She knew what history of the place she had read on its website and was aware the original owners had moved on, one to the hereafter and another to Florida. The only person she’d spoken to since arriving was the desk clerk, Ricki, who told her most people came the next day, Friday. All the better; she wanted to come in under the radar, to get herself into place so she could go unnoticed. She was not a killer, not really, and she had driven all this way (guns did not travel well by airplane) for just one purpose, to put an end to her late-night dreaming and her reveries and let her dead parents know that while little Emily had escaped, the men who did this had not.

  She began unpacking the one suitcase she’d brought with her. She lifted out her father’s gun, one she had practiced with a thousand times at a Minneapolis firing range and used in real-life, real-time, once in Detroit. It had served her well and she knew it as an extension of her hand. That’s exactly how it had felt when she lifted it quickly and smoothly from her purse and aimed it at Frank Grandy. He had been so surprised, so flabbergasted. “You can take the watch. Take my money. I don’t have much . . . “

  “You don’t remember me?” she had said.

  He’d looked at her then, clearly not comprehending who she was.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s right. You never saw me. But I saw you. I was in the closet.”

  Then he knew. She could see it in his eyes as they widened and he whispered, “The little girl . . . “

  “Yes,” she said. “The little girl.” After some brief negotiation in which he attempted to barter his life for information on his co-criminals, she shot him in the forehead. It hadn’t felt good. It hadn’t felt anything. She had not smiled. She had simply taken the watch from the case he had it in and left. It was the only thing the police reported stolen, and the very thing Sam Tatum read about that told him they had not escaped the past.

  She wasn’t sure if she would use the gun again. An ice pick had worked well in Los Angeles, and she may yet find a way to make it look like an accident. There were plenty of stairs here to fall down, a ravine or two to go tumbling into. Ways to die in nature as if nature were the cause. She put away her last pair of slacks, undressed, and slid beneath the covers of her double bed. She reached over and in the last gesture of a long day she turned off the night stand light.

  Chapter 4

  Lonely Blue Pool

  Kyle always beat the sunrise. He couldn’t remember the last time he woke up and saw light outside. He thought it was a form of insomnia; while he had no trouble getting to sleep, his mind sometimes turned on at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and would not shut off again. He would try not to disturb Danny as he turned carefully from side to side, doing his best to remain still until the reasonable hour of 5:00, when he would slip out of bed, walk quietly into the kitchen and make his first cup of coffee. He’d used instant for many years but Danny had recently given him a Keurig single-serving machine for his birthday and Kyle had found a new love. So much that they now traveled with the cheapest version of the machines so Kyle could have one of a variety of his favorites wherever they went.

  On this early morning Kyle lay on his back staring up at the ceiling. Their room had a picture window looking out on a hillside, and though it was still dark, Kyle could see the large tree outside Cabin 6 outlined against the slowly lightening sky. He was thinking of their life back in Manhattan and wondering if their cats, Smelly and Leonard, were nestled together in the empty space in bed where Kyle and Danny would normally be. The men slept entwined most nights, Kyle behind Danny, with a cat on each side. Smelly, Kyle’s 6-year-old gray tiger, had been named as a kitten when he found her outside his Brooklyn apartment eating from a ripped trash bag. Whatever was in the bag had coated her fur, leaving her with a stench that gave her her name. She was just a tiny, scrawny thing then, a far cry from the 16 pound ball of love she’d become. Danny said she looked like a bowling ball with sticks for legs, and they both worried about her weight. Kyle was determined Smelly would not become diabetic, and after an annual visit to the vet he put her on low-calorie food with a fixed feeding schedule that, after six months, appeared to have failed. She’d lost a quarter pound.

  A year after adopting Smelly he met Danny, who had been sharing his life with his three-year-old yellow tabby named Leonard. Leonard was as fit and lithe as a cat who’d spent his life outdoors, even though he had never ventured further out than the hallway. Danny adopted him from Spoiled Brats, a pet store on 49th Street that ran a cat shelter in the back. He had decided that summer he would never meet a man to spend his life with, and a cat was the next best thing. Maybe a better thing. He’d seen Leonard walking around the store trying to decide which of the customers should adopt him, and there Danny was, an obvious and easy mark. Leonard came up to him, just nine months old but already more confident than most humans will ever be. Now they were a family: two men, two cats, and a cursed aquarium where perfectly healthy fish went to die.

  Kyle had lived in Brooklyn his thirty years in New York City. He had moved there from Chicago chasing a college sweetheart who had transferred to Columbia from the University of Illinois. David Grogan was his name, and he wanted to be a journalist. Columbia J-school, as it’s called, was the top destination for anyone wanting to be a serious journalist. Or at least that’s what David believed. Kyle had been studying psychology and English literature for no specific reason. He got his B.A., had no interest in either psychology or English literature, and didn’t think twice about moving east with the man of his dreams. It was that love, in fact, that had prompted Kyle to come out to his parents. It had filled his heart to bursting and he had the need to declare it to the world, which wasn’t something he thought could be done from a closet. His mother wasn’t surprised or upset, and while she assured Kyle that his happiness was her only concern, she questioned the wisdom of moving to New York City. She didn’t fight it, knowing Kyle would do what Kyle had set his mind to, but neither did she hide the bad feeling she had that youth was more at the bottom of it than love. Kyle’s father simply remained as distant as he had always been with his only child. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t mind, as that he didn’t care. For a man who had no other children, Bert Callahan had always been cool to his son. Kyle could never tell if it was because his father sensed something different about him, something he couldn’t accept, or if he was simply one of those people who should never have had children. It made telling his father he was moving to New York City to follow a boyfriend a relief to them both.

  Kyle soon learned that first loves are called that for a reason: they are not the last. He and David rented an apartment in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, and within six months David told him he was too young to give his life to someone; there was too much in the world to see (meaning, Kyle knew, too many men to sleep with) for him to be tied down at twenty-two, it just wouldn’t be fair to Kyle. Yes, yes, Ky
le said, thank you for thinking of me, I’ll be moving out at the end of the month. He kept his promise. He also kept the friendship, and it was to Kyle David turned when his partner was dying from AIDS ten years later, and when David’s mother passed away last spring. Their friendship had survived thirty years, and David had already been pegged as Kyle’s best man when the time came. It was to Danny’s credit that he wasn’t jealous, that he understood time was the one thing of true value we can give to one another. He had welcomed David as part of their extended family and had even tried fixing him up a few times with men of their age who dined alone at Margaret’s. Nothing had clicked so far, but Kyle and Danny were themselves proof that love did not discriminate by age.

  Thirty years, Kyle thought suddenly, swinging his feet out of bed. Time to get a move on before it moves on! He was ready for his coffee.

  Danny owned a two-bedroom co-op on the border of Gramercy Park and Murray Hill (also called Curry Hill for all the Indian restaurants on Lexington Avenue). He’d bought it with a loan from his parents twenty-five years ago. No mortgage, low maintenance, a second bedroom he occasionally used as an office, perfect for sharing with Kyle and one of the few pieces of furniture Kyle had kept when he moved in: his father’s desk from Highland Park. It was an odd thing to ask for when Bert died and Sally Callahan decided to move to a condo on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. Why he would want the desk of a man whose death he felt so little about was a mystery, but not one he was interested in exploring with a therapist. He simply asked for the desk and his mother gave it to him. It was pine with knots in the grain, deep sliding drawers and cigarette burns along the right side from when Kyle was a child and his father smoked. It fit perfectly into the spare room that became a shared office, in the apartment he moved into seven months after meeting Danny. His mother had not been surprised about that; Kyle still did what Kyle wanted to do, but Sally Callahan had no trepidation this time. She was as sure of this as Kyle was. Kyle gave up his apartment, gave away all the furniture since there was nowhere to put it in Danny’s place, packed up Smelly and told her to get ready to meet her match, a yellow tabby named Leonard she would be sharing her life with, whether she liked it or not.

  Kyle could see the sun beginning to rise, spilling early morning light across the landscape. He wanted to go for a walk to the Lodge soon, stopping on the way to see the empty blue pool. It was busy in the summer, a center of activity for Lodge guests, but emptied when the weather turned cold. The empty pool had provided Kyle with one of his best and most-loved photographs, one he called “Lonely Blue Pool.” It had been an accident, really, one of those pictures he took as he strolled around with a camera slung over his neck, aiming and clicking at anything that might be an interesting shot. It was his method of capturing the surreptitious portrait, the off-guard expressions on people’s faces, as well as some striking blurred photographs (he believed in the plasticity of art, the many ways in which it presents and the many ways a single instance of it can be viewed; he liked seeing people cock their heads at a picture trying to figure out not just what the image was, but how he captured it). The day he took the pool photo he’d been walking up the slight hill toward the pool and cabana, when he noticed it was empty and he quickly took several pictures. There were leaves collected at the bottom, gathered by wind and gravity into a brown patch, and there along the deep-end wall was a white ladder that Kyle had used himself to climb from the water last summer. It was happenstance, the luck of the shutter, and the picture had turned out so lovely many people thought it was a painting. But no, it was just Kyle taking one of the thousands of photographs he took. It was one of the first he put on his Tumblr blog, and two years later he’d had two dozen requests for it. He was so flattered by people liking his pictures and calling them his “work” that he didn’t charge them—he would simply sign them in the corner and ship them off, asking the recipients to pay postage. But it had been his first inkling that someday, maybe, he could think of taking himself seriously.

  Danny wouldn’t be awake for another hour. He was an afternoon and evening person, while Kyle had his energy, ideas and focus in the morning. It was their routine that Kyle would get quietly out of bed and have his coffee. At home in their apartment he would leave the bedroom, pulling the door almost closed behind him (but never fully, as the cats did not like closed doors and would either scratch at them or cry all night until someone obeyed them and opened the damn door). He would head to their office room with a second cup of coffee and start in at his computer, either uploading pictures to his blog or sifting another two dozen he’d taken recently, or just reading websites and newspapers. He was also a news junkie, having become more so since he got into the business as Imogene’s assistant.

  There was no job to get up and go to when they traveled and Kyle had never been someone who could just lie in bed with his mind racing, so he would usually have a primer cup of coffee in the room, then slip out and head to a coffee shop downstairs or across the street from whatever hotel they were in. Here at Pride Lodge he could sit outside in one of the old wooden chairs that lined the walkway in front of the cabins, or he could head up to the Lodge and help himself to one of the newspapers they kept around and a cup of coffee they put out at 6:00 a.m.

  This Friday he pulled on his khaki slacks and a sweatshirt, slung his camera around his neck, grabbed his smartphone (he could read his emails before Danny saw him and told him to stop) and headed up the road to the Lodge, by way of the pool.

  That was when he saw the commotion. A police cruiser and what looked like an unmarked sedan were parked in the front driveway. Behind them was an ambulance that had made no noise, which struck Kyle as odd until he learned why, and a small crowd had gathered around the deep end of the pool. He hurried up the grass hill to the poolside, having the presence of mind to quickly slip off the lens cap and take several photos as he climbed toward the crowd. Ricki was already there; he may have spent the night at the Lodge, which he did sometimes when they had a busy weekend coming. Sid and Dylan were standing near the edge at the deep end, Dylan with his face buried in Sid’s chest, Sid looking down into the pool. They both appeared to have just gotten up. Dylan’s hair was disheveled and Sid’s eyes looked red from sleep. Both men wore jeans, but Sid wore a pajama top under his black leather jacket. Two women Kyle didn’t recognize were standing off to the side, one of them texting furiously on her phone. Or maybe she was tweeting whatever it was they’d witnessed. Nothing is private anymore, Kyle thought as he reached the top of the hill and headed toward them.

  As the pool came fully into view Kyle looked down into it and stopped, his breath freezing in his chest. There at the bottom of the lonely blue pool, his neck bent so parallel to his shoulders it looked like a stalk that had been broken off, was the body of Teddy Pembroke. He was wearing blue jeans faded nearly white and a blue dress shirt. His tennis shoes were red, his socks black, and his hair had been recently died jet black, no doubt at Happy’s suggestion. No 50-year-old man has jet black hair with a bald spot in back and a rapidly receding hairline in front. His horn-rimmed glasses he’d been so fond of now that they’d come back in fashion lay shattered a few inches from his face. His left arm was bent at the elbow, the hand nearly to his lips as if he had suddenly thought of something the instant he died, and there, just a few inches from it, a broken martini glass.

  Teddy was the general handyman for Pride Lodge and had held different jobs there over the years. At one point he’d run the Karaoke bar, and he had done a year’s stint as the desk manager when Ricki had to go home to Memphis to take care of his ailing mother. For the past two years he had been helping Sid and Dylan upgrade the property, re-carpet the rooms, fix the many little things that had run down over the twenty-five years Pucky and Stu had the place. He had also been Kyle’s friend and reached out to him the previous year when he needed to talk to someone about his problems.

  “You take a lot of pictures, Kyle,” Teddy had said, one afternoon when they were alone in the Lo
dge’s great room.

  “I don’t know why,” Kyle replied. “I think I see the world in images. Even videos, which I don’t much care for, are just thousands of single images flashing in front of you.”

  “Do you ever talk to them?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The people you take pictures of. I’ve seen you. Very sly, the way you do that.”

  Kyle had blushed, having never been caught red handed before—or in this case red faced.

  “Well, no, I don’t talk to them,” Kyle said, waving Teddy over to the large couch in front of the bay window. Teddy came over and sat down, putting his coffee cup on a coaster on the side stand.

  “The point of taking pictures of people when they don’t know it, is that they don’t know it,” Kyle said.

  “Yeah, but I bet if you asked them they’d say yes anyway. And then you could have a conversation, get to know them a little. The way you do it, you only ever know what you imagine.”

  Kyle saw Teddy in a different light after that. Not that he had ever assumed Teddy wasn’t a man of substance, only that he hadn’t considered him the potential friend he became. They were never especially close; that’s hard to do when Kyle and Danny lived in Manhattan and Teddy lived at Pride Lodge. They only saw each other the few times a year when the couple stayed there, but they emailed and sometimes they spoke on the phone, as they had just two nights before when Teddy told him he would be leaving the Lodge soon but didn’t want to discuss it on the phone.