by Mark McNease
Kyle walked over to the two women who had moved away from the pool’s edge. The one busy thumbing the news of a dead body in a pool to her hundreds of Twitter followers didn’t look up. She was squat, with a distinctly wide bottom in stone-washed jeans a dark green hoody. Her hair was short, red and curly, and she wore a pair of pink cat-eye glasses, the most striking thing about her. The taller woman had a more evolved sense of style, with navy slacks, a turquoise blouse and a gray p-coat. She stood tall, her posture impeccable, and Kyle pegged her as a professional woman, someone aware of her appearance at all but the least guarded moments. She did not wear glasses, as so many of the Lodge guests did (it went with the demographic), and her hair was just going gray, most of it raven’s black and tied loosely back. She nodded at Kyle and extended her hand.
“Eileen,” she said, shaking hands. “That’s Maggie. Don’t mind her, she thinks she’s a citizen journalist. Or sixteen, I’m never sure.”
Maggie seemed unaware that her companion was talking to anyone, or that Kyle had come into their presence.
“What happened?” Kyle said. “I didn’t hear an ambulance.”
“There wasn’t a life to save, that’s my guess,” said Eileen. “I mean, he’s dead, you can tell that.”
Kyle looked down into the pool and just then noticed a woman—a detective, he presumed—kneeling by the body as one paramedic climbed down the pool ladder while a second eased a gurney along from the shallow end.
“It’s horrible,” Dylan said, coming over to them.
“You saw it?” Kyle asked.
“Nobody saw it! Sid was making his morning rounds and found him. I’m guessing he was drinking and slipped. I kept telling him to stop, you have to stop, Teddy, I just had a feeling it would end badly for him.”
“Death by Appletini,” said Eileen.
“I like that!” blurted Maggie, momentarily aware of her surroundings, then tweeting what she’d just heard.
Dylan looked at him and discreetly shook his head: this was not something to discuss further in front of Lodge guests. The death alone might mean a change in plans. He had to think, he had to talk to Sid and see what they should do.
Kyle watched as the detective stepped away from the body and allowed the paramedics to set up their gurney and go about removing poor Teddy from the bottom of the pool. He realized suddenly that the scene would soon change as the EMT workers removed the body; evidence that was there now might be gone or contaminated simply by being handled. He hurried over to the edge of the pool, aimed his camera down into it with a quick adjustment of the zoom, and took a half dozen photographs in rapid succession, moving very slightly each time to create, once he had the pictures in front of him, a wide, detailed view of the scene in the pool. As he was about to take a shot of Teddy’s body being moved to a stretcher, he felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling his arm away from the camera.
“No photographs,” said a cop, the one Kyle had not noticed in the turmoil. “You from the news?”
Kyle turned to the officer. He was older and heavy, probably not far from retirement, and Kyle wondered why he would still be a patrol cop. You didn’t usually see men of his age out from behind desks. His patrol car identified him as being from the New Hope Police Department. His hair was a gray crew-cut, and his nose was red and pitted as if he’d had a few too many Appletinis himself over the years.
“No,” said Kyle. “I’m not in the media. I’m staying here at the Lodge. I just take pictures.”
“Well not today, not here,” said the cop. And then, to all of them, “Don’t go far. Detective Sikorsky is going to want to speak to everyone.”
“Is this a murder?” asked Maggie, hoping for something juicy to share on her social networks.
“It’s not for anyone to say,” the cop said, “but frankly it looks like too many drinks and a step in the wrong direction.”
This, Kyle knew, was not the case. At least, he was as sure of it as he could be, given Teddy’s history and the personal things he had shared with Kyle over the last year. Kyle hurried away from the group, back down the hill to Cabin 6 to get Danny out of bed and tell him what was happening. The lonely blue pool wasn’t lonely anymore.
Chapter 5
Room 202
The woman whose name was once Emily watched the scene play out poolside from her second-floor window. The sound of the ambulance and police arriving had woken her fully up, even though no sirens had blared. Before then she’d been lying in bed in a half-dream state, remembering the shock on the man’s face in Detroit and how sorry he had professed to be, so very sorry for what he believed had been a momentary lapse in judgment. It seemed he considered killing her parents while she cowered in a closet a bad split decision. So convinced was he of his own powers of persuasion that he readily gave up the names of the other two men, and while not all three had stayed in contact the connection had never been completely lost. Tracing one to the other would not be difficult and he would in fact be happy to help her, something for which he would need to be alive. She thanked him for the offer and shot him in the head.
“Oh,” she said to his corpse on the couch, his head thrown back with a bullet hole above the left eye, as she slipped her father’s watch into her pocket, “I kept the gun, too.”
She wished she could say that killing a man was the last thing she could imagine herself doing, but it was the one thing she had imagined every day for thirty years. She had fantasized it, prepared for it, and now, in a shabby apartment in a dilapidated city, she had done it. The only thing that surprised her as she collected her things and wiped down what few fingerprints she may have left, was how plain it felt, how anticlimactic. It was, she realized sadly, as cool and unemotional as it must have been for the man she’d just killed to murder her parents. At least she knew now she could do it, and would do it twice more.
She shook off the memories and made a cup of coffee with the machine in her room, then stood by the window and watched the commotion at the pool, standing to the side so no one looking up would see her. She had heard no argument outside the night before or in the pre-dawn, no noise at all, and she wondered how the man managed to die at the bottom of the empty pool without making a sound. She guessed it would be seen as an accident, but she had her doubts about that. It was so clean and neat, with a feeling of deliberateness about it. Could it possibly have something to do with her mission here? Might the hunted be doing some hunting himself? If that was the case, then he knew about his old friends in Detroit and Los Angeles and he was making moves of his own. Good, she thought, blowing on the hot coffee. Let him worry. Worried men make mistakes.
She set her cup on the dresser top and headed to the closet, taking out her clothes for the day, meditating on what an interesting weekend it was going to be.
Chapter 6
Cabin 6
As much as Danny prodded Kyle to leave Imogene and the job behind, he was guilty of always being on duty himself, even if it meant only thinking about the job. He sat at the small round table provided in each room, sipped his own single-serving cup of coffee and reviewed plans for a very special private luncheon at Margaret’s Passion the following Wednesday. Margaret was turning 80 and a select who’s-who of city politics, entertainment and culture were on the guest list. There would be toasts from Broadway legends as well as the mayor, and the cake was being made by culinary icon Billy Cervette himself, repaying the loyalty he’d had for Margaret since she gave him his start twenty years ago. The list was short—only sixty people—and already there had been rumblings of displeasure from the names left off. Each of them would receive a sincere apology from Margaret, written and sent out by Danny, explaining that it was a space issue, no offense was intended. Margaret’s Passion had been famous for years for how difficult it could be to get into, since it only had ten tables of four and ten of two: the math was easy enough, and there was simply no way to accommodate more, as much as she wished there had been since each and every one meant so very much to her. Dan
ny had crafted the apology with exceeding care; it did not do to offend anyone at any point in their career, since a year from now they could be nominated for a Tony or taking an oath of office.
He’d just finished his coffee when Kyle came into the cabin, his manner flustered and urgent.
“He’s dead,” Kyle said, taking the camera from around his neck and dropping it onto the bed.
“Who’s dead?” asked Danny. “What are you talking about?”
Kyle crossed around the bed and sat on the corner nearest to Danny.
“I should have called him last night. He wasn’t right, something was going on, he told me that. Why didn’t I just pick up the phone and call?”
“Is this Teddy you’re talking about? What do you mean, he’s dead?”
Kyle stared out the window into the woods beyond. He felt as if he were still trying to wake up, that the morning’s events had been a dream and if he just closed his eyes tightly enough he would open them to a different reality, one in which he and Danny were having their usual weekend at Pride Lodge and death was no part of it.
“Yes, Teddy,” Kyle said. “At the bottom of the pool.”
“Drowned?!”
“No! There’s no water in it this time of year, they empty it for the winter.”
Danny imagined poor Teddy falling twelve feet into an empty concrete pool. “That’s terrible.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Kyle declared, standing up suddenly and going to the coffee machine. “That’s what they’ll say, but I don’t believe it.”
“You’re getting way ahead of things,” Danny said. “Why would you think it wasn’t an accident?”
“Because of the martini glass,” Kyle said. He held his camera out and scanned the photographs he’d just taken at the pool until he found the one that struck him. There at the bottom of the pool, near the drain that had collected leaves, was the broken glass. He hadn’t realized what was off about it until he was on his way back to the cabin. “Teddy didn’t drink anymore, and he never drank martinis. He was a bourbon man, Danny. If he was going to take a dive off the wagon, he would have done it with something he liked drinking. It just proves that he didn’t!”
“Oh,” said Danny. He knew about Teddy’s struggles with drinking and hated to disillusion Kyle.
“He stopped drinking six months ago,” Kyle continued, “precisely because of this sort of thing. He didn’t want to die an alcoholic’s death. Drunk behind the wheel of a car, killed by someone he picked a fight with in a blackout . . . dead at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. He saw it coming if he didn’t stop. Those were his exact words to me. ‘I see it coming, Kyle, and it’s ugly. I’ve had enough ugly in my life, I don’t want it to end that way.’”
Danny walked over to Kyle and gently put his hand on his shoulder. “I don’t want to disappoint you . . .”
Kyle knew what Danny was going to say and stopped him. “He did not relapse, Danny, I know he didn’t. He had support, he had his AA meetings, and when he called me the other day about coming here he was still sober. I even asked him, Danny. I said, ‘You’re not going to drink over this, whatever it is, right?’ No, no, he was sure of it, he needed his wits about him, he said. I know he didn’t drink.”
“Can you at least allow for the possibility?” Danny said carefully. “Maybe that was the big news he had and he couldn’t bear to tell you on the phone.” He saw the hurt in Kyle’s expression and wished he didn’t have to say this. “I never had anything against Teddy. I didn’t know him, and you know I don’t make judgments about people I don’t know. But he was an alcoholic, Kyle.”
It was true. Not only did everyone know Teddy from his years at the Lodge, but they all knew Teddy was a drunk. He would get his work done well enough, and the man was universally liked, but there was also an element of pity to how people felt about him. He most often greeted guests with a telltale whiff of bourbon on his breath, and too many times he’d been found passed out on one of the sofas in the Lodge’s great room or downstairs in one of the bar’s green leather booths. Then, after reaching out to Kyle and confronting his problem, he started to get sober. It took time, with a few false starts, but Teddy had been abstinent for six months when he was found dead that morning. Kyle was convinced of it. Teddy had turned a crucial corner and there was no way in hell he was going to end his life with a broken neck and a shattered martini glass next to him, unless someone else ended it for him.
“I don’t really want to go over this again,” Kyle said. “I know you didn’t like him calling me in the middle of the night—”
“He should have been calling his AA friends at that hour. His sponsor, whatever. You’re not part of that circle.”
“I was his friend. That was enough. At least until last night.”
“This is not your fault,” Danny said. “It was late, too late to return anyone’s phone call, they wouldn’t expect it.”
“No one but Teddy.”
“Listen, if you want to beat yourself up over this you can, it’s one of your favorite pastimes, but you did not have any part in Teddy’s death simply because you didn’t call him back last night.”
“Fine, fine,” Kyle said. “We should get ready and go.”
“Where?” asked Danny, thinking for a moment that Kyle wanted to check out and return to Manhattan.
“Up to the Lodge. There’s a detective up there. She wants to talk to the guests and staff, anyone who was here when it happened.”
“They know when it happened?”
“It happened,” Kyle said, taking his coffee cup and heading toward the bathroom, “when Teddy needed someone most and no one was there.”
Danny sighed and let it go as Kyle closed the bathroom door behind him. He knew there was no changing Kyle’s mind once he had decided to believe something against all evidence—in this case that he could have prevented Teddy’s death with a phone call. He knew, too, that Kyle would not stop chewing on this bone until he got to the very marrow of it.
Danny put away the seating chart and menu for Margaret’s 80th birthday luncheon and set about preparing for what he suspected was going to be a very long weekend.
Chapter 7
Detective Sikorsky
Detective 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 po
litically 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.