by Mark McNease
She’d been interviewing guests and staff at an out of the way table in the restaurant she had chosen strategically for its window view of the pool below. She wanted to gauge the reactions, subtle or obvious, of people who sat across from her and could see where the death had taken place. A lot could be learned from how some averted their gaze, or how hard they tried not to. Normally the restaurant would be serving breakfast, but Dylan had told the twins Austin and Dallas, who had both worked at Pride Lodge since their days of filling in for summer work, to offer people a continental breakfast in the great room. Now in their mid-twenties, their youth was less a novelty than the fact they were identical twins, providing ornamentation as much as table service.
“Please, have a seat,” she said to Kyle, motioning to the chair opposite her at the small table for two. She did not stand or offer her hand. “And you would be?”
“I’m not sure who I would be,” Kyle said dryly, “but I am Kyle Callahan.”
She smiled so slightly Kyle wasn’t sure she had.
“Not the best view,” he said, nodding at the window and the pool below. He had brought his camera with him and set it on the table. “It’s only been an hour and a half since they took poor Teddy away. Death by shove? Assisted falling?”
“Well, I’m not convinced there’s a lot going on here. A man drinks too much near an empty pool . . .”
“It wasn’t an accident,” he said, and he motioned for Dallas, who had been standing near the entry trying to eavesdrop. “Could I get some coffee?” And to Sikorsky, “Do you mind?”
“Not at all. Then he’ll be free to leave the room,” she said, tapping her ear to indicate the young man had been listening in.
Dallas scurried away to fetch Kyle’s coffee. Kyle wanted to get a good look at this detective, scan her, so to speak, and see what conclusions he might draw, but she wouldn’t look down or away. He quickly experienced her unnerving habit of looking directly at him. He assumed she did this with everyone and that it was some kind of interrogation technique meant to unsettle the people she spoke to.
“Mr. Callahan,” she said, “why are you so sure this wasn’t an accident? Everyone else I’ve spoken to, including some guests whom you would think didn’t know things this personal, has told me he was a drinker. A lush.”
“An alcoholic. ‘Lush’ belongs in the lyrics of a song, not as something to call another person. Teddy was a good man, and he had turned his life around this past year. Well, six months, actually, that’s how long he’d been sober. He went in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous for a few months before that.”
Linda was not unkind. On the other hand, she was too world-wise and experienced to let emotion and attachment influence her critical thinking.
“People relapse, Mr. Callahan,” she said as gently as possible. Clearly this man had been friends with the dead man, and she did consider it an accident at this point, having discovered neither evidence nor motive to think otherwise.
Dallas came gliding up with Kyle’s coffee, ending their conversation just long enough for Kyle to nod his thanks and wait for Dallas to head away. When the young man tried to take up his position by the door, Kyle waved at him to keep going, completely out of the restaurant.
“Teddy didn’t relapse,” he said, leaning in as if Dallas might still be able to hear them. “I know he didn’t. We spoke every couple of weeks. He called me just a few days ago very disturbed, saying he was leaving Pride Lodge.”
“Maybe he was upset about breaking up with—” and she quickly referenced the notes she’d been taking from interviews—“Happy Corcoran.”
Kyle studied her a moment. “I just don’t believe Teddy would go over the deep end about Happy. He knew the odds. Teddy was fifty, Happy’s just a kid.”
“Twenty-five, I believe,” she said. “That makes him an adult. What other people think of a twenty-five-year-old being involved with a man twice his age is irrelevant. I was told by more than one person that Happy, whose real name was Happy, by the way, took a liking to Teddy Pembroke not long after he started working here, as a bar back I think.”
“Yes, a bar back.”
“It sounds more like a kid’s summer job to me, but it became a permanent one. Whether their affair was on the rocks or not, I don’t know. I do know that Happy has not been seen for three days.”
“Surely there’s no connection,” Kyle said, sounding uncertain.
“We’ll have a better idea of that when Happy shows up,” said Linda. “Until then I think we’re about through here.”
“But you haven’t asked me anything.”
“I don’t think you have much to tell me, Mr. Callahan.”
“Kyle. And I may not have much to tell you, if you consider a distress message from a dead man last night ‘nothing.’ He texted me, he was getting frantic. If that’s nothing, fine then, but I do have something to show you.”
Kyle picked up his camera, held it out for the detective to see the photographs he’d taken, and showed her the zoom-in of the martini glass.”
“And?” she said, unimpressed with the evidence. “Are you suggesting this was a murder weapon, a martini glass?
“Yes, and no. It wasn’t used to kill him, but it tells me somebody did. You see, Detective, this ‘lush’ didn’t drink martinis. I doubt he’d ever had one in his life. He was a bourbon and whiskey kind of man. Whoever pushed him into the bottom of the pool obviously didn’t think anyone would notice and threw the glass in as misdirection.”
“I’m trying to be fair here,” she said, handing him back the camera. “I’ve known alcoholics, my uncle among them, who would drink Listerine to get high if nothing else was around. I just can’t see this as anything significant. Maybe he had bourbon in a martini glass, maybe that was the only glass on hand when he took it. Did that occur to you?”
It had not occurred to him and Kyle blushed, feeling exposed. He didn’t for a moment think Teddy, a creature of habit like everyone else, would grab a martini glass when he’d been drinking from tumblers for thirty years. She was right, though; all he had were strong suspicions that would not go away as easily as this detective was dismissing them.
“I’m a detective, not a guest here,” she said, deliberately softening her tone. “You were friends with Mr. Pembroke, who by all accounts had a serious drinking problem. From the looks of things he fell off the wagon and into an empty swimming pool. I’m sorry your friend is dead, but I’ve got nothing here to say this was anything but a tragic accident.”
“I’ve told you it wasn’t.”
“That’s not how these things work,” she said, closing her notebook and making it clear she was about to finish up and leave. “Aside from his boyfriend taking off, which is likely what happened with this Happy, nothing indicates foul play. It’s a terrible, lonely way to die, although I’d guess it was instantaneous.”
Kyle had noticed throughout their conversation how nice she seemed, despite keeping a professional distance. He thought, incongruously, that he would like to meet her under different circumstance, to speak to her and photograph her.
“That’s it?” he said. “You’re just going to call it a day, case closed?”
“Yes and no,” she said, standing from the table. “I’ll be heading out now, but I won’t close the case, not yet. The medical examiner needs to determine the cause of death. If it’s anything other than from the fall . . . say, drowning in an empty pool . . . that’s another story. Even if it is the fall, if some new information comes up, the boyfriend confesses or we find another body, then that’s a different ballgame. As mundane as it sounds, an intoxicated fall into a swimming pool may be the final explanation as well as the simplest one, we’ll have to wait and see.”
Detective Linda Sikorsky then gathered her notebook and pen, about to leave the resort she had driven past many times but never been to. “By the way,” she said, as if a thought had just occurred to her. “How much do you suppose a place like this costs? To buy, I mean.”
Kyle thought it was an odd question and wondered if she might be looking for an investment opportunity at a most inappropriate time.
“I’ve never bought property, I wouldn’t have any idea. Dylan and Sid could tell you, they bought it two years ago. Maybe a couple million?”
“Around that,” she said, as if she had the figure in mind all along. “Anyway, thank you,” and this time she reached out to shake his hand. “Enjoy your stay.”
She left him sitting at the table with his coffee and his thoughts. Her parting words, “enjoy your stay,” seemed off the mark, given the circumstances, but the situation was awkward all around. Everything about the morning had been either awful, confusing or awkward. What does one say at the end of a brief police interrogation that could hardly be called an interview? And now, the weekend was ahead of them. The ultimate in awkward: a man had died here, in the pool just below the window Kyle was looking out now. Someone known and loved by all (although, if Kyle’s instinct was correct, seriously un-loved by someone). What would Sid and Dylan do? Would they send everyone home? Would they cover the front porch in a black mourning sash, or lower the rainbow flag to half-mast? What would they tell people? Surely they would tell people, surely they would cancel the Halloween festivities in honor of Teddy? The one thing Kyle knew for certain was that he and Danny would not be leaving for the City. They would stay here as planned, and Kyle would not rest until he could prove to others what he knew for himself: Teddy Pembroke had been murdered.
Chapter 8
Room 202
Bo Sweetzer had wondered about the detective during their interview. Linda Sikorsky was a looker by anyone’s standards, what might have been referred to as Amazonian in less politically self-conscious times. Bo had tried to drop hints, mentioning a local lesbian hangout she’d read about in the New Hope Gay Guide. There had been no reaction from Sikorsky, no tell-tale glance. Maybe people were so much more open now that code between gay people was a lost language. Or, more likely, Sikorsky was straight and didn’t know she was being tested. She acknowledged having heard of the bar but never having been there, and she suggested to Bo that an inquiry at the front desk would be more informative. No nonsense, that one, Bo thought, standing at her window and watching the unmarked car drive away.
She had never had a real relationship, including the one that had gotten her from California to Minnesota. That had been puppy love with fangs and had finished the job of hardening her heart. She knew from a few years of therapy in her twenties that her inability to feel was a direct consequence of the trauma she’d experienced watching her parents killed in cold blood. Not the least of it was survivor’s guilt: why should she be allowed to go on living when her parents had been brutally murdered? Indeed, she wondered, turning from the window and heading to the clothes closet, exactly who would have allowed it or disallowed it? God? She snorted derisively at the thought. She did not believe in God and had little use for those who did. God had ceased to exist for little Emily the moment that trigger was pulled and she glimpsed her father flying back on the bed. God went silent at the sound of her mother’s sudden scream, cut short by a second gunshot. God was for fools and cowards, and she was neither.
She was looking forward to seeing more of this Pride Lodge, of smiling and chatting and blending in as she wove her way into the tapestry of the place. Most of the women here were in pairs, she’d already noticed that. Pairs or groups. It might be the only thing that set her apart: she was a woman alone, a solitary assassin (again she smiled at the word) with only one objective. When she had accomplished that, the mission would be over. There were no other names on her hit list. She had no grudge toward anyone who did not deserve her vengeance, and only three men fit that description. Three men who had broken into her home when she was just ten years old and robbed her of any semblance of a normal life; three men who would pay with their lives. It was that simple, that necessary.
She chose a beige cotton blouse appropriate for the fall weather, and a light gray sweater that would suffice if she decided to walk the property—which she surely would, wanting to refine her plans, to identify places and opportunities. Jeans and black penny loafers finished the outfit, making her look like most of the other women here, and the men, too. Casual wear was like that nowadays, very little gender difference, and that was fine with her. She wanted to be just another flower against the flowered wallpaper.
She laid her clothes on the bed and padded barefoot into the bathroom to get ready for the day. She had completed her interview with the intriguing Detective Sikorsky in the same clothes she’d arrived in the night before; she hadn’t expected to be interviewed at all and had not gotten ready before Ricki, the desk clerk, knocked on her door to tell her the detective wanted to speak to everyone who was at the Lodge that morning.
“Do I have time to shower and change?” she’d asked, not opening the door wide enough for Ricki to enter or even get a good view.
“I can’t say that,” he’d said, clearly wanting to move on to the next guest.
Rather than risk losing her turn in line, if there was one, she had simply slipped on her slacks and windbreaker and headed downstairs. It had been a smart move, as she found herself immediately sitting across from Linda Sikorsky, wondering if, had circumstances been completely different, she might ask the woman out.
The killer and the cop. The thought amused her, even as it reminded her of her essential loneliness. She sighed at life’s absurdities, the contrast often found between what was and what one wished could be, and she stepped into the shower.
Chapter 9
The Show Goes On
Sid and Dylan both insisted it’s what Teddy would want, that canceling the Halloween party and sending the guests home would only make a tragic situation worse.
“We don’t even have to tell people,” Dylan had said when the two of them were discussing it alone in their suite.
“Excuse me?” Sid had replied, startled at the suggestion they hide Teddy’s death. “You honestly think no one who was here this morning is going to talk about it?”
“No, no,” said Dylan. “I know they will, they’ve probably already got it on their Facebook pages. I just mean we don’t have to make a signature issue of it. Teddy wouldn’t want that any more than he would want us cancelling. It just draws attention to how he died . . . the booze, I mean.”
The two Lodge owners then met with the staff mid-morning and everyone agreed the show would go on. They would not refuse to discuss Teddy’s death, and they certainly wouldn’t pretend that nothing had happened, but they would leave it to anyone arriving to ask about it or wonder where Teddy was. The guests would make sure they knew anyway. There was nothing they could do to keep them from talking. But they would carry on. This was Teddy’s favorite weekend at the Lodge, and to cancel it all, to hang the place in black bunting or some such thing, would only bind the annual weekend to his passing.
“Maybe they’re right,” Danny said, sipping a hot chocolate as he sat in one of the great room’s overstuffed chairs. There were two of them, both a soft, sinking beige, with a matching couch given more color by a large green plaid sham thrown over its back. An empty brown recliner faced the television mounted high in a corner.
Kyle was sitting next to Danny, the chairs angled slightly to face each other, as he watched more guests check in. He had been doing his usual surreptitious picture-taking, the camera at chest angle so no one looking would know he was taking their photograph, the zoom set just right for getting snapshots of incoming guests at the front desk.
“Yes and no,” Kyle said, just then clicking the shutter for a shot of two middle-aged men checking in. Kyle didn’t know them, but judged from their easy way with each other they were a couple. “I mean, it’s kind of unnerving. It’s not even noon and everything’s back to normal, if you don’t count a death, interviews with a homicide detective and a staff meeting to see if they should close the place down.”
“Teddy wouldn’t want that.�
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“Does anyone really know what Teddy would want? Maybe it’s Sid and Dylan who don’t want to lose the money.”
“That’s cold.”
“And having a Halloween party after the death of someone who’s worked here for fifteen years isn’t?”
“Not the way they see it,” Danny said. “Not the way most of the people here are going to see it.”
“Right. The show must go on.”
“Why are you being like this?” asked Danny. He didn’t like it when Kyle was surly, and while the morning’s events were more than unsettling, there was nothing anyone could do about it, no way to bring Teddy Pembroke back from the dead.
“I’m being like this because my friend is dead and everyone thinks he took a drunken fall and I don’t believe it for an instant.”
“Leave that to the police.”
“She thinks he fell, too! And if it were true—which it’s not—it only makes the whole thing more unseemly. Oh, let’s have a party so everyone can get drunk and raise a toast to poor drunken Teddy, poor dead Teddy, the lush at the bottom of the pool.”
“We could just leave, you know. We’ll check out, tell them it’s not for us, and be back to the City by mid-afternoon. Smelly and Leonard would be thrilled. She’s gotten too fat, Smelly has, have you noticed?”
“She’s always been fat. But fatter, yes, we’ll have to watch that. Cats get diabetes just like people. And no, I don’t want to check out.”
Kyle turned and angled the camera for another quick shot, this one of Diane Haley and her girlfriend, just arrived in an Escalade Kyle had watched them park in the side lot. Diane was in her mid-40s, tall and on the butch side with a platinum crew cut and an impeccable turquoise pantsuit. Over-dressed, but then Diane always was. She owned a very successful hair salon in Princeton called Diane’s, of course. You couldn’t step through the door for less than $200. She’d been coming to Pride Lodge for years and, Kyle noticed, had managed to stay with the same woman for two of them. Her girlfriend, Cecelia-something, was what used to be termed a lipstick lesbian. Just a few years younger than Diane, she still looked like the high-priced runway model she once was. This was a pair who could not enter a room unnoticed.