Death by Pride: A Kyle Callahan Mystery

by Mark McNease

  “You’re very nice looking,” Kevin said.

  “I try.”

  “This isn’t something I normally do, meet men online.”

  “Nor I. But a friend has been encouraging me ever since my wife died.”

  “Oh, you had a wife.”

  “To whom I was faithful until she died three years ago. Then I decided it was time to be true to myself. I’d always known, you see, but never acted on it.”

  D liked to present himself as somewhat of a novice. He also knew that some men were turned on by sleeping with married men—or in this case widowed.

  They talked for another twenty minutes. Kevin told D much about his life, how he’d grown up on Staten Island and taken his job at the bank three years ago. Working at a bank wasn’t his dream but it was a job, and jobs these days were more important than ambitions. Besides, he’d worked his way up quickly from teller to branch manager, and it could be a career if he wanted it to be.

  D told him all about his fictitious life as a Manhattan real estate broker, the pressures of selling multi-million dollar apartments, and the stresses of living in an Upper East Side penthouse.

  “Those are some stresses I might like to have,” Kevin said.

  D watched as the young man’s interest in him grew the more he told him about his wealth, position and prestige. Ah, youth, he thought, so easily lured.

  Kevin was proving to be a prime candidate. D did not think of them as targets, but as interviewees for the most important position they would ever hold: provider of D’s greatest pleasure in life. The pleasure itself only lasted for an evening, but gave D a lifetime of precious memories.

  D was leaning heavily toward Kevin and was considering canceling his drink date with Scott that afternoon when Kevin’s phone buzzed. He’d had the courtesy to turn the ringer off but he’d left it on vibrate.

  “Sorry,” Kevin said, taking his phone out of his shirt pocket.

  “No problem,” D replied, but it was a problem. He waited to see what Kevin said to whoever had called him. If he gave a location or any information that might lead to D, things would change quickly.

  “Hi, Mom,” Kevin said. He held up a finger to say, “Just a minute,” to D and walked over to a corner to speak to his mother.

  This was not a good turn of events. D had no way of knowing what Kevin was saying to his mother. Worse, he was talking to his mother. What grown man speaks to his mother while he’s meeting another man for sex? It was the kind of call you would let go to voicemail, unless you mother’s place in your life was overly prominent.

  Kevin ended the call and came back, saying, “My apologies, really. My mom’s alone now. My dad passed away five years ago from leukemia. I don’t have any siblings, so I’m all she’s got. I kind of have to take her calls.”

  Normally this sort of story would not effect D. Life was full of minor tragedies and heartache. But something about a young man as the only living family for a widow who was probably not much older than D himself troubled him. He never gave any thought to the survivors; sentimentality was not an asset in the serial killer business. But something just felt wrong this time.

  “Where does your mother live?” D asked as Kevin sat back down.

  “With me.”

  “With you?”

  “Well, to be honest, I live with her. It’s my parents’ house.”

  D waited a moment. “You live at home?”

  “Yeah, it saves a lot of money and it helps my mom. Is that a problem?”

  “Not at all,” D said, having decided it was. For all his youthful charm and attraction, Kevin was not the one for him. He hid his disappointment, as he hid all his emotions. (People mistakenly think sociopaths don’t have emotions, but of course they do. Excitement, exhilaration, joy at the kill and sadness when it was over until the next time—were these not emotions?)

  Kevin could sense things had taken a bad turn. “Listen,” he said, “I really like you, Leo …”

  “And I like you, Kevin, very much. I just have some other business to attend to today. How about if I send you an email this evening and we see where it goes?”

  “Oh, okay, sure.” Kevin had been blown off before, he knew what was happening.

  D waved for the check. Kevin dug in his pocket for his wallet and D said, “This one’s on me.”

  “Fine,” said Kevin. “I’ll get the next one.”

  He knew there would not be a next one. What he did not know was that his life had just been spared.

  They parted ways with a handshake in front of the Arlington. D waited while poor, forlorn, rejected Kevin made his way up the block. He did not want Kevin seeing which direction he took. He glanced at his watch. He was not scheduled to meet Scott until five-thirty.

  It was going to be a long afternoon.

  CHAPTER Ten

  D did not know when he became a killer, only when he began to kill. It was as if the impulse had always been with him but never satisfied until he shoved his uncle down the stairs and the sight of him with his neck broken, his head twisted strangely perpendicular to his body, that he realized the full pleasure of what he had only fantasized until then. He had not tortured animals as a child; he had not set fires. He had been a fairly obedient boy, doing as he was told by his parents. Then his father left them and his mother sank into an acidic bitterness that corroded their lives. By the time D was fifteen he’d had enough—enough of his mother’s toxicity, enough of her complaining about the world. He also knew very well she had little attachment to her son. He reminded her in too many ways of the man who’d walked out on her for another man. He had the same name, the same basic physical features, the same eyes.

  “It’s not my fault,” she would say, for no apparent reason and out of context to anything they had been discussing. He knew it came from her deep belief of the opposite: that if she had been enough, if she had been a better wife, if she had done some crucial something differently her husband would have stayed and they would have had the ideal life he’d promised her in America. He knew, too, that she blamed him somehow, as if having a child had set them on the course to ruin—at least the ruin of her life.

  D was startled when his mother announced she was going back to Berlin and gave him the options of going with her or moving to Brooklyn to live with his uncle. None of this had been discussed with him, and by the way she presented it he could tell which choice she preferred. D was part of the life she’d come to hate. D was unwelcome. D reminded her too much of the source of her anger.

  “He has a nice apartment and a spare room. You could live in New York City, imagine how exciting that will be.”

  Not “would be,” but “will be,” as if the decision had been made for him.

  D was relieved. He did not want to move to Germany, and the thought of being free from his mother’s stifling emotions and her increasingly erratic behavior made him think escape was in sight. So on that rainy September morning he said goodbye to the woman he’d taken to calling Marta and boarded a plane for New York.

  D’s father began sending him letters a year after he moved to Brooklyn. He wanted to make amends, he said. He wanted to reconnect. He was living happily in San Francisco with Samuel and they had started a card shop together. A card shop! Rainbow Spirit was the name of the store. D hated it immediately. He also hated that the letters arrived in a variety of custom cards that Samuel made and sold at their store. It was quite a change from working in a Boeing factory.

  His uncle Leo would hand him the cards using just his thumb and index finger, as if the cards might carry something nasty on their envelopes. Leo was on his sister Marta’s side, even if he would never, ever, consider moving back to Germany. He was an American now, with citizenship and a thriving tailor business. D found out that Leo had offered to take them both in, but Marta had refused. She said America was a cruel and lonely place for cruel and lonely people. D came to believe her, at least about the cruelty.

  D’s father also had the temerity to include p
hotos. There was his father and Samuel at the wharf. There was his father and Samuel in front of the card shop. There was his father, Samuel and a half dozen friends at a Pride parade. A Pride parade? What, D wondered, was there to be proud of in leaving your wife and young son in a wasteland? What was there to be proud of in opening a pitiful card shop with rainbows, triangles and pink shit all over the place? Pink shit. Pride shit. Rainbow shit. It was all shit to D, and the more he stared at the photos of his father and Samuel, the more he wanted to kill them both. You did this to me, he thought. I’m living with an old man in Brooklyn, sewing suits for men who would wipe us from the bottoms of their shoes if they found a better tailor, a better clothier. I have no friends. The only thing good to come out of it for D was that he loved New York City. He loved the vastness of it, its famed anonymity. He loved the tides of people swelling its streets. He loved the variety, the diversity, and, as time passed, its great opportunity. You could kill someone here and, depending on who it was, they would never be missed. You could set up shop with the most select customers imaginable and when the bodies were found no one would ever come around asking questions. That is, if you were cunning, careful and meticulous. If you were D himself.

  He became aware of his sexuality in high school. He’d known much younger that other boys caught his eye, but at first he experienced it as a fascination rather than an attraction. He was fascinated by all things male. He liked the shape of men, the sound of men, the smell of men. By the time he was thirteen he was not interested in anyone his own age. He preferred to spend time at the barbershop, and he would purposely go when it was busiest, at lunch time or at the end of the work day. He would get in the back of the line and sit, pretending to read a newspaper, just so he could prolong his stay. He would sit and breathe the men in, the smell of the aftershave and many times their sweat.

  He continued his visits to barber shops after he moved to Brooklyn. Some people liked libraries, some people liked restaurants. D liked the barber shop. By the time he was eighteen he was aware that some of the men looked at him with more than passing glances. He was a handsome teenager and looked a few years older than he was. Ripe, he thought. Ripe for the picking. But in his private thoughts (aren’t all thoughts private?), he knew they were the ripe ones and he would someday do the picking.

  He did not consider himself gay. Gay to D was an identity, and it was not his. He was instead same-sex attracted. That is how he had always defined it for himself. His father was gay. Samuel was gay. Parades and card shops and mannerisms and magazines were gay. D had no use for any of those things … yet.

  Then, when he was thirty-two years old, he killed his uncle. It wasn’t very gratifying. His uncle was a good man. His uncle had been kind and offered D a place to live. His uncle had taught him the business and opened a store with both their names on it. But his uncle was in the way. He’d also begun asking D why there were no women in his life. Because I’m not interested in killing women, he’d wanted to say. Instead he offered the well-worn excuse that he hadn’t met the right woman. He did not want to end up in a bad relationship or, worse, divorced like his parents. And besides, Uncle, we have too much work to do, too many things to accomplish together. Then the stairs and the broken neck, and he could finally set about making the life he wanted.

  Becoming the Pride Killer was an accident of timing, really. He hadn’t planned or anticipated making himself one of the most successful serial killers in New York City history at the same time all the gay people were celebrating. It had just been an auspicious day. He’d met the man named Oscar at a bar that catered to older gentlemen who liked younger ones. D was the younger one in the crowd that night, and within a few hours he had convinced the man to go home with him. His apartment was just a few blocks way. They could have another drink there in privacy. Sure, said Oscar, and fifteen minutes later they were in the townhouse D had purchased with his uncle’s life insurance. It had given him enough for a down payment at a time before real estate reached the stratosphere. It was a fixer-upper, and D had fixed it up nicely, especially the basement.

  He invited Oscar in and quickly offered him a cocktail. Oscar, having already consumed several drinks, gladly acquiesced. And then, finally, it was a trip to the basement to show Oscar his wine collection. Such a refined man to have a wine collection, and so young! Oscar was impressed and followed him down the stairs. He came back up in a large duffel bag.

  The next day D realized, as he waited for news of the floater in the East River, that it was Pride weekend. Talk about perfect timing! He quickly formulated his plan and by the time of the festivities that always followed the parade he was known as the Pride Killer. Some clever reporter at the New York Herald had deemed him that. He thought it was appropriately tawdry, given his low opinion of all things Pride. He might have thought of a better name for himself but it stuck and he’d become fond of it. It was also when he decided on killing in threes.

  He’d had to move quickly after Oscar. He found another victim on Thursday night, and a final on Saturday. No more from the bars. The internet made risks much easier to take, provided you had the sense to cover your tracks—and D had always been a man of uncommon sense.

  That was seven years ago. He had not been caught, not even close. Some of his success he attributed to having been older when he started, in his mid-thirties. He was not youthfully impulsive. He planned carefully and executed (pun intended) his plan to the T. Or to the D, depending on how you look at it.

  He was as professional at killing as he was at providing top-flight suits to top-flight men who had no idea the tailor measuring their inseams could kill them in sixty seconds. He had taken three years off to watch his mother disintegrate in a dreary Berlin apartment, two Pride weekends without their namesake’s killer, and now he was back. His mother was dead. His father still sent him letters he left unanswered and immediately shredded—though both the card shop and Samuel were gone. He had a thriving men’s store, a townhouse, and above all a career as the Pride Killer. He’d thought of retiring, especially since he had not been caught and wanted it to stay that way. But not yet. Maybe next year, or the year after that. For now he had two more victims to select and set free into oblivion. He saw himself as doing them a favor. Life was grief, anger and tears, for those weak enough to cry. D had never cried in his life.

  CHAPTER Eleven

  The Stopwatch Diner was a Manhattan landmark specific to the area of Penn Station, where it had been in business since the mid-1940s. A gaudy neon stopwatch graced the front entrance, forever frozen at the ten-second mark above the front door. Inside it was much like a thousand other diners across America, but done in a racing motif: checkered flags on the walls, giant framed photos of famous race car drivers spewing champagne into the air.

  Linda and Kyle had eaten here before, on her last trip to the city to see Kyle’s photography exhibit. It was also where Danny had confronted his nemesis, Linus Hern, the restaurateur who’d hated him for years and who had conspired to secretly buy, through intermediaries, Margaret Bowman’s building and the restaurant that bore her name. Danny had thwarted that scheme, found himself owning Margaret’s Passion, and finally discovered why Linus was set on revenge: Danny had been hired by Margaret to replace Hern’s young boyfriend ten years earlier. Sal was his name, and he took the loss of his position hard. He’d slipped back into addiction and finally gotten sober with a plunge off the 59th Street Bridge. Linus Hern blamed Danny, who’d had no part in it or knowledge of it, and set his sights on vengeance he almost achieved.

  “Whatever happened to Linus Hern?” Linda asked as she and Kyle settled into a booth. The diner was full to capacity—it always was. A steady stream of customers came through the doors fresh off their trains, joining tourists who read about the Stopwatch on travel websites, and not a few locals who liked the moderate prices and the atmosphere.

  “I don’t know,” said Kyle. “After the situation with Margaret’s Passion he vanished. The last I heard he’d moved t
o Philadelphia.”

  “Maybe he got it out of his system, that whole business with Danny.”

  “I don’t think Linus ever gets anything out of his system. I think he just moved on. I’d guess there were opportunities in Philly and he headed that way. He could smell an opportunity the way a predator smells blood.”

  A waiter came over to them to take their order. They’d been handed menus by the maître d’ when she seated them. It was lunch time and both ordered club sandwiches, Linda getting tuna and Kyle the turkey. The waiter nodded and hurried off. Everything moved very quickly at the Stopwatch; meals were served and tables turned over in record time, and Kyle wondered if the staff were all being timed. It was the Stopwatch Diner, after all.

  “Your boss is something else,” Linda said. “It has to be a challenge working for her.”

  “It has been, and it’s a challenge I’ll miss.”

  “She’s leaving?”

  “Eventually. And I can’t blame her. She was just about on the career skids when she covered the Pride Lodge murders. That made her a star of sorts. Then the bosses in Tokyo moved her into covering the city, and now she’s a B-list reporter in a very niche market. She wants out of the niche before she’s too old to make another move.”

  “What will you do if she leaves New York?”

  “Stay,” said Kyle, looking down at the checkered placemat. He did not want to talk about his boss’s future, which would mean talking about his own. “How’s Kirsten’s mother?”

  Dot McClellan had been hit by her third bout with cancer and this one she was rapidly losing. Linda was amazed that Dot had made it nine months, but neither she, Kirsten, nor Dot’s oncologist expected Dot to see August.

  “It’s been very hard on Kirsten,” Linda said. “Sometimes I think it was too much change for one person. She sold her interest in McClellan and Powers, she moved into the house with me, and her mother’s dying.”