The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3

by Mark McNease

  She didn’t tell Danny Durban much that day. It was not her style to pour her heart out to anyone but the man who had died outside their restaurant. But he was kind, and inviting, and amusing, and experienced in the very same business. Danny was then working as the day manager at a restaurant on the Upper East Side that was struggling to survive and likely would not. As it turned out, Margaret was looking for a day manager herself: Pierre, the one she’d had for twenty-five years, had retired six months earlier and the new man, Salvatore, was not working out. She had decided to let him go but needed someone to bring in as his replacement. Meeting Danny Durban was a long-needed moment of serendipity.

  Two weeks later Danny was working for Margaret, and a relationship that would shape both of their lives was born.

  It was less than a ten minute walk from Danny and Kyle’s apartment to Margaret’s and the weather couldn’t be better. While Danny enjoyed California and points west, he couldn’t imagine living without the distinct change of seasons that people east of the Mississippi enjoyed. The East Coast was particularly nice. It didn’t have the kinds of harsh winters you found in Chicago or Minneapolis, yet there was never any question which season you were in; and of the four, only summer made Danny wish he were somewhere else. The heat and smell of summers in Manhattan could be nasty.

  Margaret’s Passion had the feel of a restaurant that had been running successfully for three decades. That comfortable, settled feeling was part of its attraction. Like a number of other well-known eateries in Manhattan, it valued its place in the neighborhood, as if it were an old friend who, along with the residents, had weathered good times and bad and managed to survive. There was a large bay window looking out onto 21st Street, through which passersby could see people dining, conversing, and eating some of the best food in the city. The entry was narrow, reminiscent of its pub days, and just inside was the lectern where the maître d’ greeted guests. It was dark wood, matching the rest of the wood in the restaurant’s interior, and – so Margaret claimed – had belonged to the church in Poughkeepsie where her parents’ married hastily just before her father went off to combat in World War I.

  Chloe was on duty today when Danny got there late after taking Smelly home from the vet. She was the senior day waitress and a real pro, making each diner feel as if they were the center of her attention, and for it pocketing tips that kept her living in style.

  Danny waved good morning to Trebor, the bartender, who was behind the long oak bar serving a few early customers. Trebor was the youngest of the people working in the restaurant, aside from some of the kitchen staff, and had been with Margaret’s for four years now. Danny had poached him from one of Linus Hern’s restaurants. Linus was Danny’s nemesis, and the restaurateurs’ version of a vulture capitalist: he got restaurants off the ground, then sold them for a profit and quickly vanished, leaving nearly all of the buyers bankrupt a year later with “Closed for Renovations” signs in their windows, which meant they were never coming back. Danny knew the future did not look good for Trebor and offered him a job, telling him as discreetly as possible that the restaurant he was working in, having been sold by Hern, was in all probability doomed. It was only after Trebor started at Margaret’s Passion that Danny discovered it was Robert spelled backward. Clever boy.

  Chloe made a cup of coffee for Danny, a routine she had that he had not discouraged, and set it on the table closest to the kitchen. That was where the two of them would usually have coffee and go over details for the day. The menu didn’t change, but there was a checklist Danny adhered to faithfully. It was also their time for some casual conversation before the lunch crowd showed up.

  Chloe took a seat, stirring cream into her coffee. “He was back this morning,” she said. “Her new lawyer. And he wasn’t alone.”

  Margaret’s longtime lawyer, a man named Evan Evans who had been with her since she and Gerard opened the restaurant, had passed away nine months ago at the age of eighty-six. The old gentleman, whom Danny had always found to be as mischievous as he was gracious, had been a weekly figure there for many years. He would come in for lunch every Thursday, eat alone, then head upstairs to visit with Margaret. He was as much a companion for a woman whose companions had nearly all died as he was an attorney. At that age the wise tend to make preparations, and he had suggested Margaret hire a young lawyer named Claude Petrie – the man who, Chloe had just explained, had come in again to see Margaret, this time with two other men.

  Claude bothered Danny, though he couldn’t say why. He was not much taller than Danny, but considerably heavier. He could always be found in a suit and tie, with a briefcase in his hand, although Danny had the feeling it was for effect and probably empty. Claude seemed to need people to think he was very busy, and of late that might be true: he had been to see Margaret several times the last month, never for very long. Unlike the man who had recommended him, Claude did not dally, did not sit for a leisurely lunch on the house, and spoke little to anyone, including Danny.

  “Something’s up,” Danny said to Chloe. She nodded, having concluded the same thing.

  “Estate stuff?” she said. Margaret was now an octogenarian and likely sensing her own mortality these days.

  “I’ll find a way to ask her,” Danny said, a dark mood starting to descend. He couldn’t imagine life without Margaret, and the thought of it reminded him his own parents were getting old. Once they were gone, he and Kyle were next in line. That’s the way it went in the human carnival.

  Fortunately customers began to arrive, pushing thoughts of funerals and grieving periods out of his mind as he rose to greet them with a smile. Ever pleasant, ever present. Just another lunch Margaret’s Passion.

  Chapter 7

  Hotel Exeter, Hell’s Kitchen

  The reporters had moved onto another story by Monday afternoon. New York City had been cleaned up over the last twenty years, but it was still the nation’s largest city, with plenty of crime stories to shock its jaded citizens. Kieran didn’t care; he had watched the same reports of the murder he had committed enough times to be bored by them. Brutally stabbed, sixteen times, no leads, call this hotline, blah blah blah. He was just waiting for them to say a reward had been posted, contingent on his capture and conviction, and they could check off all their little murder story boxes and move on.

  Kieran wasn’t interested in watching television, anyway. He was interested in the man in Philadelphia who had answered his ManCatch ad. He had used one of the computers at the internet café on 9th Avenue, which was really just another overpriced, pretentious coffee shop with mouse turds in the muffins and a couple bolted-down laptops customers could use for .50 cents a minute if they didn’t bring their own.

  ManCatch.com was a symptom of a society gone digitally wrong, where no one really had to meet anyone unless there was an exchange to their mutual benefit, usually of bodily fluids, and where everyone could pretend to be someone else. That’s what he’d done, placing an ad on the Philly page of the website, posing as exactly the kind of young man Richard Morninglight would notice immediately: barely legal, with an aw-shucks tone in his message they both knew was a put-on. Roles, games, players. For thirty or so words he had played the part of a young college student trying to pay the bills, for which he would gladly be an escort, no harm in that, and if anything untoward happened, well, he was a willing student of experience. He knew this is what Morninglight enjoyed, and sure enough, not long after the artist arrived in Philadelphia for a show that would take his career several steps up the ladder, he responded to Kieran in New York, not knowing where he was. Among the Internet’s dubious advantages was that you could be anyone, and anywhere. Hi, Kevin, Morninglight wrote. I’m at the Hamilton Inn the next few nights for a convention (of course he wouldn’t tell the truth) and would love to help out with the cost of those college books! Email me back and let’s see what we can do.

  What they could do, it turned out, was arrange for Kieran, posing as Kevin the college student, to arrive at Richar
d Morninglight’s hotel that night. As soon as Morninglight knew he was downstairs, he would leave his door unlocked, slip naked into his bed as if he were sleeping, and wait with every cell of his body tingling in anticipation.

  He probably won’t even open his eyes, Kieran thought as he gathered his Latex gloves, the guitar strings he’d bought that morning, and a change of clothes in case things got messy. Morninglight will think the man climbing into bed on top of him is there at his pleasure, just another pretend college student making ends meet. But no, Richard, he thought. The pleasure will all be mine.

  He zipped up the gym bag, grabbed his brand new hoodie from the bed, the one with “I Love NY” stenciled on it that he picked up next to the liquor store, took one last look around a room he would soon be checking out of forever, and headed to the bus terminal for the ride to Philly.

  Chapter 8

  Apartment 5G

  “Stop 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.”