The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3

by Mark McNease

  Devin had no time to wonder what the glint of metal was, where it belonged in this picture, this rainy night in Brooklyn, before the knife blade entered between his ribs. Once, twice, a final total of sixteen times as the man he knew but didn’t know reached his free hand around Devin and pulled him close, stabbing and stabbing.

  Anyone watching would think two men were hugging each other goodbye, a familiar sight just about anywhere in New York City. But no one was watching. No one saw the man ease Devin, now unconscious and quickly bleeding to death, down to the sidewalk and carefully drape him there, then turn as easily as he’d come and walk away.

  “So much for art,” the man mumbled to himself, clutching the knife in his shirt pouch. He turned and began heading slowly back the way he’d come. He would not take the train, but instead walk, walk all night if he had to, over the Brooklyn Bridge and back into the darkness of Manhattan, pulling the night ever more tightly around himself as he thought about the next one.

  Chapter 3

  Wedding Bell Blues

  Kyle had been fretting about the wedding for two months, ever since the sudden decision had been made for the two of them to marry. It wasn’t unexpected; they’d been talking about it for the past year, but now that it was upon them he hoped they’d made the right decision, that it would be, as every cultural assumption about wedded bliss predicted, the happiest day of their lives – a day to remember, not a day to regret.

  He and Danny had rented tuxedos since neither of them could fit into the ones they owned. Kyle had never worn one until he met Danny, but once they began going on cruises together it was a must-have for the formal dinners: at least once on every cruise the diners would dress to the nines, giving the evening the odd feel of a doomed celebration (Kyle always imagined the ship jerking suddenly as it hit an iceberg, the diners pretending not to notice and carrying on with their fancy meal).

  “I’m feeling especially confined in this,” Kyle said, as Danny adjusted his bowtie. Danny was a good six inches shorter than Kyle, who was not a particularly tall man, and he had to lean up on the toes of his spit-shined shoes to get a direct look.

  “Well you can’t blame weight gain,” Danny replied. “We just rented these yesterday.” He stepped back and nodded with satisfaction at the tie adjustment.

  “In a hurry, at that,” Kyle said. “If I’d gotten it last week like I meant to, I’d know it was too tight. Jesus.”

  “Just relax. It’s nerves, Kyle, that’s what has you feeling trapped, not the penguin suit.”

  Danny stepped back and examined his partner. Not bad. Kyle Callahan was still as handsome as ever to Danny, though both would admit it was a plain-handsome. Kyle still had a full head of hair, and, like most men his age, he wore glasses. He had a slightly high forehead, and he wore his hair brushed back with just a touch of pomade, opening up a soft, inviting, and distinctly intelligent face. Standing in front of his “perpetual fiancé” as he now called Danny, he suddenly had a flash at what they might look like at their own wedding when it came.

  “I know this is hard for you,” Danny said quietly.

  “It’s not hard. I’m very happy for David. Elliot’s a great guy, and being the best man …”

  “At the wedding of your first love, yes, I’m sure you have no mixed feelings.”

  Kyle had moved to New York City from Chicago nearly thirty-three years ago with his then-boyfriend David Grogan. David wanted to be a journalist and insisted he must go to Columbia – all serious journalism students went there, or to another of a select few schools that turned out the true stars of the profession. And while he never became a journalist, let alone a star, the young, ambitious David packed his things and drove the 800 miles to upper Manhattan, with Kyle Callahan following behind in his used Gremlin. Both their cars were soon sold, given the complete lack of a need for automobiles in the city, and upper Manhattan was immediately traded for Brooklyn, where rents were halved from anything livable on the island. The two love birds managed to nest for just three months before David announced that he was too young for this kind of commitment; and while Kyle knew it meant there were too many other men David wanted to sleep with, he took it in stride, as devoted first-loves sometimes do. He moved out, letting David live his life as he needed to, make the mistakes he had to make, and suffer the losses. There were some devastating losses over those thirty years, too. David’s partner Tom, who died from AIDS-related lymphoma in 1992. David’s mother Patricia, who passed away on David’s fiftieth birthday. Jobs, moves, over a decade of being single for both of them, and now … Kyle the best man in David’s wedding. Life was nothing if not surprising, when you just gave it time.

  They both turned toward the door when they heard Joshua start singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel. Joshua was Elliot’s twenty-two year old son, soon to be David’s stepson. From what David had told him, Joshua and his sister Clarice, eighteen and heading for UCLA in the fall, had accepted their father’s gayness with more of a yawn than a shock and he, David, was quite excited at the prospect of becoming a stepfather at fifty-four, especially since having children wasn’t something he’d ever allowed himself to imagine. Babies were a must-have accessory with same-sex couples these days, but men like David, Elliot, Kyle and Danny were from a generation just across the border, when having kids was still an anomaly in the gay community. Now, it seemed, they were everywhere, and David was delighted to come into stepfather-hood when the kids were all grown up.

  “He has a lovely voice,” Danny said, feeling some nerves himself. He knew David well enough, but he hadn’t been in a wedding party since his sister Jennifer married her husband Henry twenty years ago.

  “Is this not weird?” Kyle said, glad they were alone in the choir room. The other men of honor, friends of David’s and Elliot’s Kyle did not know, had already gone into the sanctuary at Manhattan’s Blessed Redeemer Church and he and Danny were the last of the wedding party still straggling behind. Maybe Danny was right. Maybe he was sad about David getting married, and he was dragging his wingtips to the last minute, postponing the inevitable.

  “Is what not weird?” Danny said, aware they needed to join the others.

  “The whole thing. It’s so … normal. We used to be outlaws.”

  Danny smiled. “I doubt you were ever an outlaw, Kyle Callahan. But you can be my Butch Cassidy any time.”

  “And you my Sundance Kid,” Kyle said, leaning down and kissing Danny gently just before leading him out to join the happiest day of the happy couple’s lives.

  Kyle Callahan and Danny Durban had been together for six years this coming November. They’d met by accident at the Katherine Pride Gallery on Little 12th Street in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The show that time was photography; Kyle had gone to support the photographer, a friend of his, and Danny had gone to keep things oiled with Katherine Pride, the gallery owner and a new customer at Margaret’s Passion, the Gramercy Park restaurant where Danny was the day manager. Margaret had turned eighty last October and used to make these homages herself. It was good business, good relations, and good publicity: a satisfied customer was a returning customer, and one who told others.

  Danny had come around a corner with a glass of white wine in his hand and walked right into Kyle, spilling both their drinks. After an initial glare, their eyes softened, their smiles spread, and four months later they were living together in Danny’s apartment at 25th Street and Lexington Avenue, kept company by their cats, Smelly and Leonard.

  Kyle was the assistant to Imogene Landis, a down-on-her-luck television reporter who would never admit to being anywhere but at the top of her game, while Danny managed Margaret’s, still a hot ticket after thirty years in business. Margaret Bowman lived in an apartment above the restaurant and had all but adopted Danny as her only child, having been widowed for fifteen years with no children of her own. Danny had been with her for ten of those years and, next to his mother, held no woman in more esteem. He had taken lately
to fretting over her health – eighty struck him as a mile marker toward the end of the road. There was nothing he could do about the passing of time, and he shook off his worries as he searched for Kyle at the wedding reception. The guests had moved from the church to a trendy new hotel named Heaven that had opened in Hell’s Kitchen. Danny wondered if the name was some kind of wordplay, given the neighborhood, and he worked his way through the crowd in the hotel’s ballroom.

  Kyle saw Danny looking for him and waved him over. He was standing at one of two bars the ballroom boasted, sipping on a vodka and cranberry, marveling how the crowd had managed to balloon since coming over from the church. He was thinking it might be wedding crashers, or hotel guests who felt entitled to a party when they saw one. Behind the bartender, mounted on the wall, was a flat-screen television with the sound muted. Kyle was using the straw in his drink to play with the ice when an item on the news caught his eye. A photograph of an artist he knew had been pinned to the corner while the reporter talked into his microphone.

  “Excuse me,” Kyle said to the bartender, a pleasant enough man who made his living as much on his looks as on his skills (or maybe not, Kyle thought, depending on what those skills were). His nametag identified him as Todd. He looked like most of the guests in a tuxedo, but he was clearly uncomfortable in it; this was a man who belonged in faded blue jeans and a vest with no shirt.

  “Yes, Sir?” Todd said, sliding a drink across the bar to a guest and moving over toward Kyle.

  “Could you turn the volume up on that? Just a little. I know the person they’re talking about.”

  Todd shrugged, sure, and turned the volume up enough to be heard without disturbing the revelry.

  “Hey,” Danny said, walking up to Kyle at the bar. “There you are, I was looking all over for you.”

  “Shhh,” Kyle said, putting his finger to his lips. “I want to hear this.” He leaned across the bar as much as he could, trying to get every word from the television reporter.

  “ … Devin – no last name – lived just three buildings from where he was attacked,” the reporter said. “The victim was stabbed multiple times. Police say robbery does not appear to be a motive and so far no witnesses have come forward.”

  Kyle recognized the reporter as having started on NYNow and moved on to a network. It happened with quite of few of the local reporters, cutting their teeth on the popular local station and then heading to one of the Big Three affiliates. The segment was live, and Carlos Espinoza, the reporter, had been doing these updates all morning.

  “What’s this about?” Danny asked.

  “I know this guy who was killed. Devin. From the Katherine Pride Gallery, multimedium, transman.”

  “A multi-medium transman?” Danny said, surprised.

  “Shhh!”

  “Much of what evidence there might have been was washed away in the last night’s heavy rains,” Carlos said, as the camera panned from him to the empty sidewalk and up the street, showing apartment buildings, brownstones and yellow crime tape stretching across the sidewalk. “If you have any information at all on this brutal murder, please contact your local police precinct. All calls are kept strictly confidential.”

  Kyle turned to Danny, his brow furrowed as he thought about the news he’d just heard. “They’re two separate things,” he said. “Devin was a transgender man, and a multi-medium artist. That’s how I knew him. Through the gallery.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Danny said.

  “I didn’t really know him,” Kyle said. “Not in more than a very conversational way. He had a show at the gallery in January, part of the New Year New Visions exhibit Kate does every year.”

  “The one she wanted your photography in.”

  “Yes, well …” Kyle had been encouraged by Kate Pride to finally show his photos, but he’d thought it was too soon. He was also discovering he had an ego, and being part of the New Visions exhibit meant sharing the spotlight. So he had passed, and instead was preparing to have his own show a week from now. His first show. The one, depending on the public’s reaction, that would determine if there would ever be a second.

  “I should call Kate.”

  “We’re at a wedding reception!” Danny said. “Celebrating the marriage of your oldest, dearest friend aside from me. This is a happy time, let’s keep it light.”

  “He was stabbed to death!” Kyle said. “That’s not exactly light. And there’s something there … something I’m not recalling just now, but a connection.”

  “The only connection for us to be concerned with today is making sure David and Elliot have the time of their lives. Hopefully this wedding will be the last for both of them.”

  Kyle nodded, Danny was right. What happened to Devin was terrible, but he was dead; there was nothing Kyle could do about it at the moment. The police were on it. Someone would most certainly come forward with information, or an eyewitness account. Whatever connection was nagging at the back of Kyle’s mind could wait. It was just about time for a toast to the happy couple.

  Chapter 4

  Hotel Exeter, Hell’s Kitchen

  As Kyle and Danny toasted the blessed event of their friend’s marriage, Kieran Stipling balanced on the edge of his bed in a sleazy hotel room and toasted himself from a half-pint of bourbon. He’d had to spend more of his dwindling cash to buy it, but what the hell, he thought, watching with an irrepressible smile as some hack reporter standing not ten feet from where Kieran had been last night told the city there were no suspects in the brutal murder in Brooklyn. Of course there weren’t. Kieran had developed an ability to remain invisible when it suited him. He had been invisible in Buenos Aires, invisible on an uptown Manhattan subway platform, and completely invisible on that Brooklyn street where the reporter kept repeating himself every half hour. He took another swig from the bottle and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. Staying in a dump like this was no hardship; it was part of the plan, part of the way he remained unseen.

  In the sanitized oasis of wealth New York City had become under successive mayors determined to fumigate it, to rid it of crime and, as many believed, a soul, there were still pockets of degeneration, islands of poverty and decay that had not been whitewashed. Among those throwbacks to a time few people missed was the Hotel Exeter, located in the aptly named Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. The Exeter was a fleabag hotel, a flophouse, where rooms could be rented for $45 a day – a sum that for many who found themselves there might as well be a million dollars.

  Hell’s Kitchen had become fashionable again in the 1990s, as the city found itself scrubbed clean and the hookers, drug addicts and street-level criminals pushed ever further uptown. For awhile the neighborhood called itself Clinton, but once the yuppies and the Gen-Xers felt safe on the surrounding streets they decided it was cooler to be Hell’s Kitchen again. They enjoyed the thrill of living in a place with one of the meanest reputations in the history of New York City, but now without the mean. Mean can’t afford the rents here, and the survival of the Hotel Exeter was a fluke of zoning and location. Sitting on a corner of 36th Street, the hotel overlooked the Lincoln Tunnel entrance and exit, which would not be exchanged any time soon for the smiling faces of Mickey Mouse and Snow White. So for the time being the hotel stood, as grimy as it had been forty years ago, a beacon to the likes of the man who congratulated himself from the edge of a bed and who had been staying there for the past three weeks. Soon he would have no money left, and that was okay with him; he only had a few more things to do, a couple of loose ends to secure. All he would need then was enough for a bus ticket far away, to some border town where he could practice his Spanish and disappear into the woodwork. For a man with the power of invisibility, it would be especially easy. His dreams, dark and bloody as they were, will have come true, and things like hotel rooms and paying for them would no longer matter.

  Kieran smiled as he stared down at the cars coming off the highway, driving into the heart of the city, merging and mingling with traffic from th
e Lincoln Tunnel. He had long believed the people in New York were all in a mad rush to nowhere. He had lived here for five years, having arrived an innocent in many ways, believing in the power to reinvent his life. He was proof that dreams were still shattered here, and that no amount of prettifying and industrial cosmetic surgery would ever rid the Big Apple of its rotten core. That is where he had found himself, the dark heart of a city putrefied beneath the shine and glitter, and where he was now. Living in a hotel room barely large enough to turn around in, sharing it with hundreds of roaches that did not have to come up with $45 a day to stay there. The three dresser drawers were empty, except for his two changes of clothes, minus his favorite sweatshirt he’d had to throw away because of the blood. Sixteen times were simply too many to stab someone without making a mess. The room’s television had never been converted to hi-def; just as well, since the cable was out and the best he could do were the local channels barely grasped by a rusted antenna. But it was enough to watch the news, enough to make him smile as he finished off his bourbon, wondering if he should spend ten dollars to buy more. He would be making a trip soon, a side journey of utmost importance and ultimate delight. He muted the TV and reached for his wallet. He deserved to celebrate a little more, and by the time he got back from the liquor store they would be running the news clip again. Murder in Brooklyn, no suspects, no witnesses. Reality television at its best.

  Chapter 5

  The Katherine Pride Gallery

  Much like Hell’s Kitchen, the Meatpacking District had a very Old City sound to it while having little Old City about it except a few stray cobblestone streets. The area was originally the home of Fort Gansevoort, also known as the “Great White Fort” for its many coats of whitewash. The name was Dutch, appropriate given the original settlers of the island, whose presence could still be felt in place names around the boroughs. Following the Civil War, the area became home to butchers and meat packers serving the thriving, crowded city, and these slaughterhouses gave it the name its current residents still used, even though the only meat to be found there now was on high-priced dinner plates at high-end restaurants.