by Mark McNease
Another feature of the new Meatpacking District was its shops and galleries. Nothing said Old World quite like a Stella McCartney dress shop next to an art gallery whose least expensive item was for sale at $75,000. In some ways it was an odd location choice for Katherine Pride, since she valued new artists, up-and-comers, artists whose work might go for the average week’s salary of a local secretary. She showcased more established artists and photographers from time to time, but her real pleasure was in introducing someone new to the art world, and, more importantly, to the public. And if an artist went on to fame and fortune and happened to remember the break Katherine gave them, well, great, she could sell their work and make ends meet on the East Village condo she shared with her husband Stuart.
Katherine Pride had been Katherine O’Connor before her marriage twenty years ago to Stuart Pride. She’d planned to keep her own name if she married, but the chance at having such a unique and bold last name was too good to pass up. Even then, when she was working behind the ticket booth at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she knew a branding opportunity when she saw one. She’d had no specific idea of what her place in the art world would be, but could see the name Katherine Pride emblazoned on a business even then, at twenty-three. All these years later she was still married to the doting Stuart Pride, a successful real estate broker, and the Katherine Pride Gallery was an established, well-respected gallery among her peers and in the neighborhood.
Katherine was what people often called statuesque, standing just over six feet in heels, thin and possessed of a strong posture. Her late mother had instilled in a young Kate (as most people called her) the sense that posture was destiny: anyone who wanted to go places in this world needed to see where they were going, and you don’t do that by hanging your head or slouching. Stand up straight! Stand up tall! Head back! Kate and her brother Justin had heard these commands many times, and when their father died in a freak boating accident, the calls to be straight and tall only grew more frequent and more insistent. Pamela O’Connor became a widow and a single mother on the same day, when Kate was only twelve and Justin nine, and she brooked no nonsense in a world that afforded her none. That was in Louisville, where her mother managed to survive and raise two successful children, until she, too, lost her life. Breast cancer made Kate and Justin O’Connor orphans much too young.
Kate quickly made her way to New York City after college. She didn’t know then what she wanted to do, but she knew exactly where she wanted to live. New York City was the epicenter of art, fashion, literature and finance. Somewhere in there was her future, and not long after she began working at the Met she knew which one it would be: art, for art’s sake and for profit, for better and for worse in a fickle world that loved you one minute and pawned you the next. She was a gallery owner who kept her distance from the sharks and the scene, a wife who loved spending evenings with her goofy, lanky, adoring husband more than attending another cocktail party for another shining star. Still, she loved the gallery and what it could offer people like Kyle Callahan, the photographer she’d befriended after meeting his partner, Danny Durban. Kate and Stuart had enjoyed lunch at Margaret’s Passion some years ago, their first time there, and who should show up at a gallery exhibit two days later but Danny Durban. She knew it was marketing, making sure a customer came back, but she had liked Danny straight off, and she took great pleasure in having been the catalyst for his relationship with Kyle. They had met at that exhibit and were still madly in love. Or at least in love enough to be sharing their lives together forever and ever, Amen.
Kate had been encouraging Kyle to show his photographs to the public. He was a bit shy, but with a definite gift for images. She would never have known this if Danny hadn’t told her, and even once she had seen Kyle’s pictures it had taken a few years of nudging to finally get him to accept that he should have his own show, which was now only four days away.
Kyle was waiting with two cups of coffee when she got to the gallery at 10:00 a.m. Monday morning. One thing about businesses in New York City: they may stay open until midnight, but finding much besides diners and drugstores open before mid-morning was a challenge. Even the Katherine Pride Gallery didn’t open until 11:00, but Kate had wanted to go over the details and exhibit photos with Kyle before the final installation.
“You’re alone today,” Kate said, fishing a key ring from her oversized brown leather purse. Danny usually came with Kyle on these visits and would head from there to Margaret’s Passion.
“Danny’s on vet duty. Smelly has some kind of nasal infection,” Kyle said, referring to one of their two cats. Smelly had been with Kyle when they met, and Danny had been spending his life alone with Leonard, Smelly’s senior by three years. Smelly was a she, and Kyle had found her as a kitten outside his apartment in Brooklyn, digging through trash that had seeped onto her coat, giving her the name. He’d thought about changing it to something else, Gloria, or Smittens, but Smelly had stuck and he never gave it a second thought now.
“She’s sneezing a lot. And he’s getting her weight checked again.”
“She’s diabetic, yes?”
“Pre,” Kyle replied. “But she’s been pre-diabetic since she was two years old. She’s just an ample girl, I think.”
Kate slid open the iron gate that protected the front glass, unlocked the door and led them into the gallery. “I see you brought me coffee from Breadwinner’s. Very thoughtful.”
“I’m used to getting Imogene’s on the way to work,” Kyle said, following her into the reception area and setting the coffee cups down on the front desk.
“How is she, by the way?” Kate asked. “She moved up or something, you said, after those murders in New Jersey.”
“Pennsylvania. Pride Lodge. Yes, they were quite the hit in Japan. She’s on the general news beat now.”
Kyle had been the personal assistant to Imogene Landis for the past five years. A diminutive woman whose height was overshadowed by her personality, she was once a successful TV reporter in New York, but had a habit of telling her bosses and anyone else what she thought of them, their competence, and at least once, their toupee. She subsequently found herself on the downslope of a career that could have kept rising, had she been more politically savvy. Now she worked as an English language reporter for Tokyo Pulse, a cable TV show that aired in Japan three hours before sunup and was produced by Japan TV3, who had their New York studio on 46th Street. Kyle met her there most days with two cups of coffee from their local spot, Cecil’s. Kyle had tipped Imogene to the murders at Pride Lodge last Halloween. The story caused a cult sensation in post-midnight Japan and got her off the financial beat. She was back into the city she loved, covering everything from City Council meetings to bathtub decapitations. She couldn’t be happier.
“You’re good to her, Kyle, I hope she appreciates it. Danny, too.”
“Oh, I’m sure they do. I didn’t even have to coerce Danny into the vet visit this morning, and that’s something he always wiggles out of. He hates doctors’ offices, even when they’re for the cats.”
The Katherine Pride Gallery looked like most galleries. It’s all about wall space and lighting. A dividing wall here, some pedestals there, and you have your basic art gallery.
Kate had gone into business on her own eight years ago. Before that she was an assistant to the late, great Hildegarde “Hildy” Bingham, the woman who had single-handedly discovered most of the top geniuses of the New York art world in the 1970s. She was already old and well past legend status when she hired Kate as her personal assistant. Kate had studied at the feet of an art world icon, spending many evenings on the floor in Hildy’s Upper West Side penthouse, taking notes for the autobiography that was still unpublished nearly a decade after her death.
“When’s Corky come in?” Kyle asked, referring to the young man who worked the front desk at the gallery. Corky was somewhere in his mid-twenties and loved – absolutely looooooved – working at an art gallery, for Katherine Pride, in the Meatpac
king District, a neighborhood he only knew in its sanitized state. Corky very much wanted to get married, but he didn’t have a boyfriend and had reminded Kyle more than once that he was on the market, should Kyle or Danny know anyone with a suitable income.
“I gave him the day off,” she said, setting her purse on the front desk chair. “He had a wisdom tooth removed Friday and he’s still mending. Funny thing to call it, the boy doesn’t have a lick of sense in his head.”
“Wisdom comes with age. Sometimes not even then.”
“So,” Kate announced, waving her left hand toward the walls as she flipped the track lighting switch with her right.
Kyle turned and marveled at his own photographs on the walls. He’d seen them when they entered, of course, but having them lit now, a penlight aimed at each individual photograph, sent an unexpected charge through him. He saw himself as a shutterbug, just a guy with a camera who liked taking pictures. A couple years ago he took the next step and started putting them on a Tumblr photoblog, AsKyleSeesIt, with no intention of ever presenting them in any professional sense, and none of charging money for what he loved to do.
Frowning suddenly, Kyle said, “What if they hate them?”
“Who’s ‘they’, Kyle? You mean the critics?”
“Never having displayed my pictures before means never having read a review of them. So yes, the critics.”
“You know as well as anyone we do these things for love. Your photographs, Stuart being a real estate agent in a city stuffed with them, me running an art gallery. It’s all because we love doing it, and sometimes we make some money. What other people think of what we do really doesn’t matter.” She sipped her coffee. “And if the guy from the New York Times calls you an amateur, well … you are!”
Kyle looked at her, horrified, just as she winked to let him know she was joking.
“Now let’s take a slow tour through the rooms and see what all the fuss is about with this Kyle-Somebody.”
They started with the first photograph, left wall as people would enter the gallery. It was among his favorites, but also an emotional reminder. “Lonely Blue Pool” was the picture he had taken of the empty swimming pool at Pride Lodge, the pool where his friend Teddy Pembroke had been found dead just last Halloween, his neck broken from a shove into the cold, waterless pool.
“I still can’t believe it’s not a painting,” Kate said, staring at the photograph. It was what everyone said when whey saw it: an expanse of blue, with just a white ladder running down it and a gathering of brown leaves at the bottom, near the drain. So simple, and so beautiful.
Kate and Kyle were watched from across the street as they made their way further into the gallery along the wall. Kieran thought he would feel excited to be this close to his prey, this close to winning a game only he knew he was playing. Devin knew, of course, but Devin was dead. He’d recognized Kieran just as the knife was coming out, and the puzzled look on his face was immediately replaced by fear and terror.
What whispers?
The ones I heard when you thought I wasn’t listening.
What whispers?
The ones that sealed your fate.
“You want a refill on that?”
He jumped, startled by the young barista at Breadwinner’s who had stopped by his table while he stared across the street, lost in his thoughts. They didn’t have waiters at coffee shops like this, but she was wiping down the tables and happened to notice his empty cup. He turned and saw how pretty she was, her long curly hair held back with a purple ribbon, her brown eyes liquid and trusting. If he’d been into women he would put her at the top of his list, but he wasn’t, and the only list he was keeping was getting shorter and shorter as he killed the people on it.
“No, thank you” he said. “But I appreciate your asking. It’s a rare courtesy these days. Nobody gives a shit anymore. You give a shit, it’s very touching.”
She wasn’t sure how to take this man and there was something disturbing about him, not least the way he was speaking to a stranger who had only thought to ask him if he wanted more coffee. She smiled nervously and headed back behind the safety of the cash register.
He turned back to the window and saw that Kate Pride and the Callahan guy were gone, having turned at a dividing walling into the next room. He would get to her soon and hoped it wasn’t a situation where Callahan was with her when the time came. He didn’t want to kill an innocent man – as far as anyone can really be innocent in this life – but he would if he had to.
Kyle was happy with the layout. He and Kate had chosen the photographs carefully over the last two weeks. He’d been sure to include one of Danny’s favorites and one of his mother’s favorites. The other thirteen, for a total of fifteen of his best pictures, were lined along the walls in a way that reflected not so much a progression of any style, but a small set of subjects. Two from his shoe series, in which he took shots of people’s shoes as he went about his daily life in New York City. Three from his “blur period” as he called it, when he was fascinated by blurred photographs, a few of his seasonal photos, and the best of his interiors – rooms, hotel lobbies, office buildings, and two cathedrals. It was a fair and solid representation of Kyle Callahan, Amateur Photographer, and as much as Kate wanted to believe she’d found another rising star, Kyle wasn’t invested in the outcome. He just loved taking pictures.
“I have to head to the studio,” he said, letting out a deep sigh.
“I thought you loved your job,” said Kate, misreading the sound.
“Oh, the sigh, no, that was for the show. The people. The nakedness of it all. My mother’s coming from Chicago, Danny’s parents from Queens, our friend Detective Linda from New Hope, it’s too much.”
“You’ll be fine. And trust me, you’ll want more. The limelight can be intoxicating. Just don’t become addicted.”
Kyle hugged his friend and mentor, for Kate Pride had become both, with her encouragement and her insistence that Kyle take himself seriously as an artist. He was thinking how lucky he was to have Danny, his mother, Kate, so many supportive people in his life, when he noticed a man across the street in front of Breadwinner’s, staring at them. “Who’s that?”
But as quickly as Kate released the hug and turned to the window, the man was gone. “Who’s who?” she said.
“Nobody, really. Just someone I thought I recognized.” He tried to think of where he would have seen the man, but nothing clicked and he let it go. “Speaking of recognizing someone, it’s terrible about Devin, I saw it on the news.”
Kate’s smile fell. “Yes,” she said. “Horrible. No one would want to hurt Devin intentionally, he was a sweetheart. All that rough and tumble, it was just attitude. The guy was a creampuff. It had to be the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I’m not so sure,” Kyle said.
“Why’s that?”
“Something keeps nagging at me, another death, but I can’t remember it. We’ll talk about it later, maybe you can help me jog it loose. I have to be at the office ten minutes ago. Imogene’s one virtue is punctuality.”
They hugged a last time, and Kyle wondered, as he breathed in Kate’s subtle perfume, if anyone was ever truly in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Chapter 6
Margaret’s Passion
Margaret’s Passion had been at 21st Street and 3rd Avenue in the Gramercy Park neighborhood for thirty years. The park itself was only a block away, occupying a private, gated rectangle that was one of the most historic and famous in a city filled with landmarks. The area was once a swamp, and a developer named Samuel Ruggles proposed the idea to drain it and turn it into a park. “Gramercy Square,” as it was first called, is now held in common as one of the city’s two privately owned parks, which the general public must enjoy by gazing at it through wrought iron bars.
Margaret’s restaurant had been a number of businesses over the hundred years the building had stood. Some of its previous incarnations included a pub, a bookstore, and a
haberdashery. Margaret and her husband, Gerard, first leased the space, while living in one of the twelve apartments on the three floors above it – theirs being directly over the main dining area and accessible by a staircase they had built in the rear of the kitchen. After ten years of success, the Bowmans bought the building, which became a curse as well as a blessing. Neither of them had any experience as landlords and they finally hired an agent to manage that unwanted part of the business, which left only the restaurant for Margaret to deal with after Gerard died.
The death of Gerard Bowman was a greater blow to Margaret than she had anticipated. The man she had spent nearly fifty years of her life with, first meeting him when they were both still teenagers, had been a lifelong smoker. She was able to get him to stop smoking in their apartment, which led in a way to his untimely death. It was while smoking on the side of the building that he was run over by an impatient livery driver. It had been raining, and he had walked to the curb to stamp out his cigarette butt. Just as he was doing that, a black sedan came flying through the light, determined not to have to wait for the next one. The driver lost control somehow and plowed into Gerard. He died instantly from a head trauma, the one mercy the Bowmans were given from that terrible day.
Margaret wasn’t the same after her husband’s death. Already short and thin, she all but stopped eating, and reached a critical point when her doctor threatened to have her hospitalized. Her hair, naturally graying, became all white, and while she kept it long and tied back with ribbons most of the time, it began to fall out. She was determined to keep Margaret’s Passion open and thriving, but it was something she now forced herself to do. A year after Gerard’s death, Margaret was at a crucial juncture. She was just about to walk way from it all, including New York City, when a man come into her restaurant for lunch. His name was Danny Durban, and Margaret happened to be down in the restaurant that day. He was very cheerful, and the two of them struck up a conversation. He invited her to join him, and she did – something she had refrained from as a business policy all these years. It was one thing to sit for a moment with a dining couple or a family (never alone with a man), but eating with them in your own establishment was simply not done.