Death by Pride: A Kyle Callahan Mystery

by Mark McNease

  McClellan and Powers Real Estate, the successful Bucks County business Kirsten had established with Madeleine Powers twenty years ago, was now just Powers Real Estate. The house they lived in was Linda’s in Kingwood Township, five wooded acres just a mile away from the Delaware River but a world away from New Hope, where Kirsten had owned a condominium. Kirsten had not looked for another profession; she was consumed with her mother’s care and her frequent trips to Phoenix, where Linda would be joining them Monday.

  “The wedding was lovely,” Kyle said, wanting to brighten things if he could. He and Danny had gone to New Jersey for the women’s intimate ceremony and met Dot McClellan on the last trip she would ever take.

  “Nothing like yours,” Linda replied.

  “Well … we had more in-laws, and a lot more people locally who had to be invited. If it had been up to me and Danny we would have just gone to City Hall.”

  “But it was up to you.”

  “Tell that to our mothers.”

  The food arrived and they began eating, both of them welcoming a break in the conversation. The topics had been difficult ones, and Kyle was hoping to steer things back to Linda’s visit to the city, the things she wanted to see this time and the places Kyle never went to unless they had company.

  “We could take the ferry to the Statue of Liberty,” Kyle said, picking just a handful of french fries from the plate and separating most of them into a pile he would not eat.

  “I hear there’s a sex museum,” Linda said, smiling.

  “Really? You want to see the sex museum?”

  “It’s a thought.”

  The waiter returned with a pot of coffee and Kyle placed his hand over his cup—he’d had three cups already today and was feeling jittery. The waiter dashed away to the next table.

  “I was thinking …” said Linda.

  “Yes?” Kyle knew where this was going and wished they’d stayed on the topic of their weddings, or even Linda’s mother-in-law.

  “If this Pride Killer strikes every week this time of year …”

  “Yes.”

  “And the first victim was found in the river Tuesday morning …”

  “Yes.”

  “Then there’s a second victim coming. Probably one he hasn’t killed yet, or maybe not even identified.”

  Kyle sighed. It was a sigh of surrender. He knew as well as Linda did they had to do something. The police had never caught the Pride Killer and hadn’t even had a suspect as far as Kyle knew.

  “Where would we start?” he said, not looking up from his plate. His mind was working, trying to map out a strategy.

  “He dumps the bodies in the river on the Upper East Side.”

  “Maybe he owns a car and drives them there from Long Island.”

  “Too risky.”

  “So maybe he has an accomplice, and the accomplice drives them there from Long Island.”

  “You’re not keeping it simple,” Linda said. “I think he feels invincible. He’s gotten away with this for years, from what you told me. I think he stays close to home.”

  “Well the cops must think it, too, and look what they’ve come up with! Zero.”

  “We don’t have much time.”

  Kyle thought another moment. “We have to talk to Vinnie.”

  “Your doorman? You said he was out on leave.”

  “I didn’t say we had to talk to him at our building.”

  “You want to go where he lives. Is that information you have?”

  “It’s information I can get,” Kyle said. “I’ll just say I want to send a food basket. Joseph will give me his address.” Joseph was the day-shift doorman and had been on the job for twenty-five years.

  “So let’s go,” Linda said. “The stopwatch is running.”

  Kyle waved at the waiter and made the sign of a pencil in the air, the universal gesture of asking for a check.

  Two minutes later they’d left the Stopwatch, walking quickly west on 32nd Street. Kyle thought of grabbing a taxi but decided they could use the time to think, plan, and work through the questions they would pose to a grieving, fragile Vincent Campagna. It was a delicate situation. Vinnie’s brother had just been found bloated and floating in the East River. They would have to be gentle. At the same time, they needed answers quickly. Victor Campagna was the first of three as far as they knew. They hoped they were right, that Victor had not been the second while the first was still undiscovered somewhere.

  CHAPTER Twelve

  The slowing of time is a phenomenon D was familiar with. Just as time can seem to pass ever more quickly, especially with age, it can also seem to drag, slower and slower, when one wants to be where one is not. Coming home from a trip, watching the clock as the workday passes, or waiting to meet someone who promises to fulfill your dreams. D dreamed of his next victim. He dreamed of the dance, the delicate charade as he pretended to be the man everyone thought he was while his true self slowly emerged. A conversation, a drink, a visit to the basement, and all would be revealed.

  He had returned to his store after the long walk back from the Arlington. He’d been disappointed—not crushingly so, but enough that he wanted time to think and clear his head. It had happened before over the course of his career and his life. He’d had to wait for years while he grew into manhood, years more for the opportunity to be rid of his uncle. And the worst waiting of all, in a dreadful Berlin, waiting for his mother to surrender her bitterness and her regret and finally free him. He’d had to wait, too, for a replacement victim when his first choice didn’t work out, twice that he could remember. But it always fell into place. It always came together, and it would this time, too.

  “How did it go?” Jarrod asked. It was a slow afternoon. Keller and Whitman was never overly busy. It wasn’t that kind of store and did not cater to that kind of customer. This was not the Gap.

  “Pardon?” D asked. He was going through the racks of suits, making sure none were wrinkled, the price tags were pristine.

  “With your client.”

  “Oh. You mean prospective client. Well, Jarrod, we win some and we lose some. He wasn’t for us.”

  Jarrod knew not to question his boss further on the matter. Diedrich Keller did not like losing customers, even ones who never bought anything.

  “I suggested he try Men’s Warehouse.” That said it all. The man had likely balked at the prices at Keller and Whitman. It was not a store for those who could not truly afford it. Sometimes they thought they could. They put on airs, they wasted Mr. K’s time with meetings at hotels. They’d seen some celebrity wearing a suit from the store and imagined having a closet full of them. Then they realized it would set them back two months’ rent or a trip to Disneyworld and they tried to bargain. Mr. K did not bargain.

  “Easy come, easy go,” Jarrod said.

  “Indeed,” D said.

  He looked at his watch—there was no clock in the store. It was now 2:30 p.m. and he had another three hours before meeting Scott. He’d suggested drinks at a piano bar in the Theater District that was always filled with tourists—just the kind of witnesses he liked if there were any at all. Tourists did not stay around long and were scattered to the wind by the time the police came around asking questions. He’d never been to this bar and would not go again after interviewing Scott. He’d been careful all these years never to be seen in the same establishment twice. Fortunately, Manhattan had enough places to go that this was not a problem.

  “I’ll be leaving early this evening, Jarrod,” he said. Normally he would stay until the store closed at 8:00 p.m. His uncle Leo used to stay open much later, always hoping to catch one more sale for the day, but D thought it made them look cheap. Souvenir shops stayed open till midnight, not fine men’s clothing stores.

  “Someone special?” Jarrod asked. He was careful to keep his few personal inquiries gender neutral. Mr. K had never spoken of his romantic life, if he had one, and Jarrod knew not to pry. But every now and then he would ask this sort of question. H
e liked his boss and hoped he would someday meet someone special, whether a man or a woman.

  D looked at him and said, “The only special person in my life died in Berlin, Jarrod. I’m still grieving.”

  “But of course, my apologies for asking.”

  “No need to apologize, I know you mean well. But no, no one special. I just have plans, Jarrod. Even lonely, single men have plans.”

  Jarrod blushed. He regretted having asked about it. It was none of his business, none at all.

  D glanced at his watch again. Ten minutes had passed since the last time he checked it. Time had slowed to a crawl. He decided to use some of it to practice what he would say to Scott, how he would get him to the townhouse, and what he would do if Scott, too, was not the right one. He doubted that would happen. He needed Scott to be the right one, and he was sure he was. He knew from experience that sometimes you had to settle. He wasn’t expecting that, but if it happened, he would take what he could get.

  CHAPTER Thirteen

  The lunch crowd at Margaret’s Passion was thinning. It was never especially busy, given the restaurant’s location in Gramercy Park—there were no office buildings to supply a stream of executive assistants and the bosses whose every whim they catered to. There also weren’t many tourists, except the ones on walking tours of the area.

  Gramercy Park was a historic district that was once a swamp. A developer named Samuel B. Ruggles proposed the idea for a park in the early 1800s, when Manhattan was just beginning to push northward. The property was called “Gramercy Farm” and Ruggles spent the then-vast sum of $180,000 to drain the swamp and landscape it around a square, deeding 66 parcels of land to various owners. Today Gramercy Park is held in common as one of Manhattan’s two privately owned parks and the park itself is gated, with keys given to the owners of each of the 39 surrounding structures. The Lexington Avenue subway had even been forced to re-route to Park Avenue so as not to go beneath the park and upset the privileged tenants.

  Among the residents of Gramercy Park are The Players and the Gramercy Park Hotel. The Players was founded by Edwin Booth, brother of James Wilkes Booth, best known for assassinating Abraham Lincoln. To walk the streets of Gramercy Park is to travel back in time, to see New York City as it once was. Small groups of tourists listen breathlessly, snapping pictures, as tour guides tell them stories of who lived in which building and what moments in American history were acted out along its streets. It’s not the sort of neighborhood where you’ll find throngs of gawkers looking for neon signs, cheap souvenirs and Broadway celebrities.

  It is where you’ll find Margaret’s Passion, there on a corner where Margaret Bowman first opened the restaurant in 1983. Like the neighborhood, little has changed about it—and Margaret always knew her customers liked it that way. A Who’s Who of New York City society has dined there for three decades—mayors, fashion designers, even the President of the United States on several occasions. But just as importantly, it has served the local residents of Gramercy Park all that time. They like its familiarity and its comfort. They like its elegant, old-looking interior. And they love Margaret Bowman. Danny could not imagine Margaret’s Passion without Margaret, and even though she seldom made the trip downstairs from her apartment to visit table to table as she’d done for years, they knew she was around, watching over them. Danny knew once she was gone they would rely on the restaurant staying the same. It was a bone of contention he had with Kyle’s mother Sally. She didn’t want to completely change the place, but she thought it needed “refreshing,” as she put it. He disagreed and was planning to have a long talk with her—soon.

  The restaurant closed at 2:00 p.m. and reopened for dinner at 6:00 p.m.. Chloe was getting things ready for the daily transition, changing out the menus and making sure the setup was done meticulously, with the help of Trebor the bartender. Danny had hired them both, and they had repaid his decision with loyalty and professionalism. He was sitting at the bar, having a cup of coffee, watching them. He remembered being new to the restaurant himself, hired by Margaret. Poached, really, from another restaurant, but she’d seen something in him she liked and wanted at Margaret’s Passion. She had not been wrong.

  “She knows you’re coming,” Chloe said.

  “Of course she does,” Danny replied. He made the trip upstairs to visit with her almost every day now. Her decision to move to Florida had been made, but Danny and Margaret had not yet talked about it in more than the abstract. The way people talk around things they would rather not discuss in specifics. Specifics are very real. Specifics say, this is happening, there’s no turning back.

  Danny finished his coffee and headed into the kitchen where the staircase was leading up to Margaret’s apartment. He nodded at Chef Cecily, who’d been brought on to replace Chef Jeff several months ago. Another excellent but hard decision (Jeff had been with the restaurant longer than Danny, but his father was ailing in Denver and he’d left to take care of him). He nodded at the dishwasher and the busboy, whose wives’ names he knew and whose children’s birthdays he remembered every year with gifts. It had been Margaret’s way, and now it was Danny’s. He climbed the back stairs, slowly, his eyes on the door at the top, wishing he would never get there.

  “Hello, Danny,” Margaret said, opening the door before he reached the top step. She always did, and he’d wondered many times how she knew he was coming just then. The stairs didn’t creak, he didn’t pound his feet. His ascent was silent, yet Margaret always knew he was coming and she always opened the door before he knocked.

  “Good afternoon,” Danny said.

  The stairs led into Margaret’s kitchen and she waved Danny in, closing the door behind him. There were two cups on the small kitchen table he’d sat at a thousand times, one with coffee for Danny, one with tea for Margaret. They were silent as Danny took his seat at the table. Silence was not something they shared often, but they both knew what was coming … and who was going.

  “I was thinking this morning,” Margaret said, “how many times you’ve greeted me with ‘Good afternoon’ over the last eleven years.”

  “It used to be downstairs,” Danny said.

  Until the last two or three years Margaret had gone down to the restaurant every day, often during the lunch service to say hello to her customers, and always to greet the staff.

  “A lot of things used to be, Danny.”

  She was right and he knew it, and it only made his heart heavier.

  “That’s what life is.” She sipped her tea and smiled at him. “One day you wake up—in my case at eighty-two—and you realize pretty much everything you’ve experienced in your life ‘used to be.’”

  Margaret had adopted Danny, not legally but emotionally. She and Gerard never had children, and when she hired Danny she soon discovered he was exactly the kind of man she would like to claim as her son.

  Danny took a sip of his coffee and cleared his throat. “I’ve been working on the list,” he said.

  “The list?”

  “The list for your party a month from now.”

  Could it really be coming that soon, he wondered. Her life in New York, her years with the restaurant, her decade with him coming up those stairs to talk about menus and waiters and guest lists.

  “Be sure to invite your parents,” she said. “And Kyle’s mother, if she’d like to come. And anyone else you’d like to have there.”

  He looked at her. “Seating’s limited. If I invite the politicians and the celebrities and ...”

  She cut him off with a shake of her head. “No, no, no, Danny. This one’s for you more than it is for me. I don’t care if any of those people are there. Unless you want them to come.”

  He stared at her. This one’s for you, Danny. He knew then she understood just how hard this was for him and that she had asked for this going away party to give him the sense of an ending. It wasn’t for Margaret. She could easily pack her bags and walk out the door tomorrow, but she wanted Danny to have this chance to say goodbye, a
nd say it in a big way.

  “Listen,” she said, sliding her hand across the table and placing it over his. “I have something for you. Stay here a moment.”

  She got up from the table and shuffled into the living room, leaving Danny to look around the kitchen he’d seen so many times. Was there anything he’d missed? Had he ever heard the cuckoo strike time on the wall clock? He couldn’t remember. Did he know what her view was through the small window above her sink? Had he ever stood there and looked to see?

  Margaret came back in with a manila envelope. She sat down and handed it to him.

  “What’s this?” he said, afraid to open it. Was it her will? Was it a photograph of some moment in their lives together?

  “Open it and see.”

  Danny pulled the flap back on the envelope and slid out a single piece of paper. It was a deed. He read it quickly, then said, “I don’t understand.”

  “I have the money you gave me to buy the restaurant,” she said. “It’s more than I’ll need to live another few years.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Okay, Danny, maybe ten. Is that long enough?”

  “Never is not long enough.” He felt his eyes sting.

  “I won’t tell you not to cry. I don’t know why people do that, it’s wrong. We all need to cry.”

  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and looked at the paper again. She was giving him the building.

  “I don’t want the building,” he said. “You have tenants. I’m not a landlord.”

  “And neither were we. Gerard had no idea how to be a landlord. So we hired a management company. You can do the same. Or you can sell it and do something else with the proceeds.”

  “I would never sell Margaret’s Passion.”

  “But you might have to, if someone else owned the building. You see? This way that can’t happen.”

  “I should talk to Kyle.”

  “So talk to Kyle. But the deed is done.” She laughed at the pun. “And just think, my dear Danny, you’ll be able to afford to buy out Sally Callahan soon.”