by Mark McNease
“What about her?” Danny asked.
“She’s dead!”
Great, Danny thought. Here we go again. The murders at Pride Lodge were a fading memory, but a memory still new enough, and he feared Kyle would go off on another chase at precisely the worst time, with his mother coming and his show opening on Friday.
“Murdered, I suppose,” Danny said.
“No. Yes. They don’t know. That’s what I remember. She fell in front of a subway train.”
“Coincidences happen, Kyle, no matter what people say.”
“But nobody saw it! There was no one else on the platform, I remember that. They were asking for any witnesses, just like Devin’s murder the other night. They assumed she fell or had a seizure or something.”
“But you know better.”
“She could have been pushed.”
“There was no one there, you said so yourself.”
“No one saw,” Kyle said. “That’s not the same thing. Maybe there was someone there. An invisible man.”
“I was joking. There is no such thing as an invisible man.”
“Devin might beg to differ with you. And Shiree.”
“Please don’t say you have to find out.”
“What choice do I have? This could be connected to the Katherine Pride Gallery. There could be more already dead … and more to come. I can’t just wait and see what happens, can I?”
Danny did not respond. He knew anything he said to Kyle to dissuade him would fall on deaf ears. This is what Kyle did, along with photography and being a personal assistant: he solved murders. Stopping him would be tantamount to taking a thought from his head and putting it outside, go away, thought, you’re not wanted here. They were Kyle’s thoughts, in Kyle’s mind, and nothing Danny could do or say would chase them away. Even if Kyle said he would drop the subject, Danny knew he wouldn’t.
“When does Detective Linda get here?” Danny asked, referring to Linda Sikorsky, the homicide detective from New Hope, Pennsylvania, they had befriended after the Pride Lodge murders. She had since come fully out as gay and was making a trip to the city for Kyle’s show.
“Tomorrow. We’re having lunch.”
“Good. Tell her whatever theories you have flapping around in your brain. If you’re going to go running after killers, at least have back up.”
“I’m not going to get hurt,” Kyle said. He stepped to Danny and put his arms around him. “Don’t worry about me.”
“And you don’t worry about your mother, and I won’t worry about Margaret, and nobody will ever worry about anyone again.”
Kyle took Danny by the hand. “Come with me,” he said, leading them out of the office and toward the bedroom.
“Are you asking me or telling me?”
“Just start with the top button and we’ll see.”
Danny smiled as they walked down the hallway. It had been two weeks since they last had sex. That seemed pretty much the norm in relationships that lasted more than a few years, and they were men in their fifties, whatever part that played. It was good to know they could still cut loose when the opportunity and the desire came upon them. For the next hour he would not be concerned with anything else, including a killer whose trail Kyle had picked up in an art gallery catalog. He knew Kyle would go where it led, and the best he could do was hope he made it back safely.
Chapter 9
A Corner Table at Osaka
Linus Hern didn’t care for sushi, but the restaurateur knew his two investors were very fond of it, and it was their money he would be using in his most recent and most anticipated venture: to buy Margaret’s Passion, with neither Margaret nor her flying monkey, Danny Durban, knowing it. As far as Hern was aware, Danny didn’t even know the old lady was selling, and if all went well he wouldn’t find out until it was too late. By then Linus could step out from behind the curtain and tell Durban his services were no longer needed. It would be a costly vindication, but one he’d imagined for years, ever since the two men first met and knew it was disdain at first sight.
Linus had made a career of starting restaurants, and in some cases taking them over, getting them ready for their big debut, which would be covered by absolutely anyone worth being called press, launching them into the nightlife stratosphere, and getting out with his investment doubled. What happened to the restaurants after that was not his concern, and most had not lasted more than a year, by which time Linus Hern was long gone, his bank account that much fatter, convincing the next investors to ride his coattails to the New York Times Food Section. He was a venture capitalist, a man of industry. He knew how to open with a bang and close without leaving a trace. A master, if he said so himself.
He was tall, even seated at a corner table. He was wearing a blood-red velvet sport coat, something as uncommon as it was distinctive, with spotless white leather jeans. His high forehead masked a receding hairline and at the same time favored his face, highlighting sharp blue eyes that just last year had undergone Lasik surgery. At fifty-six, Linus refused to wear glasses; he didn’t care how fashionable they were, or which top names were designing them. Linus Hern was determined to appear a superman, a specimen of the highest order. Glasses would be a blemish in an otherwise flawless presentation.
He motioned to the waiter for another Scotch. One was normally his limit, but his venture partners were late and he needed something to sip. Late was a mortal sin to Linus Hern, but considering the amount of money they were putting into this, he would make an exception.
Osaka was the latest in Japanese fusion, whatever the hell that was. Anytime someone added a new ingredient it became “fusion.” Some Thai farmer adds carrots to the pot for the first time and it’s “Thai fusion.” Hern disdained such labels, knowing them as a marketing ploy and only really meaningful to lower-tier food critics and the floods of trendy young diners lining up to get a table at the latest “fusion” restaurant.
He got a table, of course, probably one that had been reserved for lesser people who would be told upon arrival that there had been a mix up, so sorry, that table is taken. “That table” being the best one in the place, nineteen stories up in Midtown, southwest corner overlooking the nighttime Manhattan skyline. The City was Linus Hern’s only true love; that and making money. Men were treats, tasty bonbons he enjoyed and discarded as quickly as a caramel nugget might melt in his mouth. What was the last one’s name? The one he’d taken for that regrettable weekend at Pride Lodge. Carlos, was it? What a mess that whole business turned out to be. The Lodge was still standing but Linus had no idea who ran it now, and no plans to go back. Murder had a way of making a place less attractive.
He looked over and saw his partners arrive, a full fifteen minutes past due. Had they not already given him a hefty retainer with much more on the way he would have left them greeting an empty table. But he was shrewd, a winner, and rather than even glance at his watch to tell them they were late, he smiled, stood, and offered a warm hand.
“Victor,” he said to the taller of the two, a man near his own height whose air of stupidity was underscored by a scar running from his left eye to his chin. The result of a car crash in his twenties, but a very effective visual when someone needed to be intimidated. (Margaret Bowman had not been among them, and took pity on the man whose face had been disfigured at such a young age.)
“Linus,” Victor said, shaking his hand and taking a seat in the booth to Linus’s right.
The second man was downright jolly, more than balancing any discomfort people might feel in Victor’s presence. Jay Tierney was a financier, a venture capitalist like Hern, only his specialty was in demolition: tearing down the old, the decrepit, and putting up the new. Tierney was robust, affable, his hair cropped short and his face round and pink. He smiled easily and often, and had mastered the art of including that smile in his eyes, something most predators simply could not do. It was impossible to tell with Jay Tierney if his smile was fake or not, only that it was meant just for you, and you might find your
self being swallowed by it if you weren’t careful.
Jay Tierney and Victor Gossett had been business partners for twenty years, with dealings that stretched from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to San Francisco’s waterfront. They could buy a building like Margaret Bowman’s with the change rattling around in their pockets. The plan being presented to the old woman was to save her restaurant and secure her final years by buying the building and everything in it. She would have enough money to live comfortably anywhere she chose, and the restaurant would pass to Danny when she died. What only the three men at Osaka knew was that it was all a lie: Margaret’s Passion would be permanently closed for renovations, and the building that had stood there for over a century would be replaced by something shiny, new, and very costly to inhabit.
It helped that her old lawyer had passed on. Evan Evans had been smart and worldly, and this particular sleight of hand would never have gotten past him. But the young one, Claude Petrie, that had been a stroke of luck. He still lived in the old man’s shadow and pressured himself to make his own mark, establish his own credentials. Finding new owners for Margaret’s building had been the best timing of his life. He had been on the verge of disappearing and had started looking into exactly how someone does that, when Hern showed up in his office with a proposition.
Linus had come up with the plan when he first heard rumors of the old woman’s troubles. There may be 20,000 restaurants in New York City, but the world of the best is a small one. When something happened at The Greenery, or Casa Pueblo, it was known by all the others in hours. When Margaret Bowman had her young new lawyer put out feelers for a buyer, Linus Hern was among the very first to hear it. He had quickly contacted his fellow predators Victor and Jay, and in amazingly short order the three of them had formulated a plan. A plan so slick, with a truth behind it so carefully guarded, that Margaret Bowman and her sidekick Danny Durban, a man Linus could not wait to fire, wouldn’t know what hit them until it was too late.
Linus again waved his hand, summoning their table server.
“I’m still waiting for my Scotch,” he said to the young Asian looking woman, wondering if she was some kind of fusion, too. “Not a good sign.”
“In so sorry, Mr. Hern,” she said, even bowing a bit to emphasize her embarrassment. “Right away. And the gentlemen? What may I bring you?”
That was better, Linus thought, as the other two placed their drink orders. He wasn’t listening. He was drifting away for a moment, daydreaming of the sweetness he would feel when he’d accomplished his greatest coup. Margaret’s Passion would be no more.
Chapter 10
The Hamilton Inn, Philadelphia
The Hamilton Inn was located in the heart of Philadelphia’s gay neighborhood, an area of Philly’s Center City district that ran from Market Street on the north to Spruce on the south, and from 11th Street on its west edge to Juniper on the east. It was among the nation’s most well known and well liked concentrations of LGBT urban life that were once called gay ghettos. But unlike many such enclaves, Philly’s had not fallen on hard times; it had seen itself prosper, becoming and remaining one of the city’s most vital attractions.
Two of those attractions were the Gilliam Museum of Modern Perspective, and the Hamilton Inn, a storied old hotel that had remained gay-owned and mostly gay-populated for forty years. The late Marcus Gilliam founded his museum, which was really more of a midway point between a high-end gallery and a true fine art institution, in the 1980s during the height of the AIDS crisis. His longtime lover died from complications of the disease and left Gilliam with two dozen specimens of art so modern it wasn’t worth anything at the time. Gilliam had two objectives in launching his museum: to effectively erect a monument to Jonathan, his lover and partner, and to demonstrate his remarkable eye for an investment. Considering how much the art was now worth, his prescience could not be disputed. He had specialized in finding new artists, much like his peer Kate Pride in Manhattan, whom he had known for several years before his own death from prostate cancer in 2009. Since then a foundation had run the Gilliam, but it had not compromised his vision. The museum still featured a mix of established artists and those well on their way. It was just such a show that brought Richard Morninglight to Philadelphia that weekend; and where else would a gay painter on the verge of art world stardom stay in Philadelphia but the Hamilton?
The Hamilton Inn had been around since the 1920s. Its premiere suite, while no longer called Presidential, had seen its share of American Presidents resting their heads on its pillows. Just five stories high, the Inn had fallen on hard times in the 1970s and was very close to being demolished, when an entrepreneur and friend of the very same Marcus Gilliam who opened his hybrid gallery/museum decided to recreate the Hamilton as a specialty gay hotel. Back then “gay hotel” was something one could say, before the arrival of the acronym LGBT and before there were many people now called allies. The hotel no longer advertised itself as gay, and it made every marketing effort to welcome all visitors to the fine city of Philadelphia and this amazing neighborhood. But it was still gay-owned and operated, and rare was a visit from a guest who didn’t know it.
Richard Morninglight had checked into room 306 Friday night, just about the time a fellow artist named Devin was having his life stolen at the end of a knife blade. Richard’s last name was not Morninglight, but once he had decided on a career as an artist, long before he was anywhere near achieving it, he concluded that his last name Smith simply would not do. Even adding a middle initial, which remained popular among artists and writers for reasons he didn’t understand, would not make the name Richard Smith any more arresting. Ah, but he painted in the morning light; he studied effects of the morning light on canvas and the objects he painted; he had a vision one sunrise in the morning light, and that was that: Richard Morninglight was born.
Richard had few real friends. He’d been ambitious all his life, even as a child, and he had known instinctively that ambition was an all-consuming master. Given the choice between achieving his aims and having friends who wanted this or that part of him, let alone a lover who wanted it all, he had chosen achievement. He’d found soon enough that there seemed to be a ratio of friends to success (one increases with the other), and as for lovers, they came cheaply enough. Ads in local papers, profiles online. Why get into the mess of a relationship when all he really wanted was his needs attended to?
He wasn’t an unattractive man, and at thirty-two he was still young. He’d gained too much weight since the checks began coming in for his paintings, but not one young man had complained about the extra twenty pounds. He was middling height, with a pronounced nose, what might be called Roman, and brown eyes that were just the slightest bit crossed, something he’d had to deal with as a child wearing corrective glasses. He wore his thinning black hair long and in a ponytail – it just seemed to go with his name – and he’d gotten his first tattoo to commemorate the show at the Katherine Pride Gallery just a few months ago that had launched him into semi-fame.
Success had not come easy, but adjusting to it had. Richard had imagined the finer things for years; becoming accustomed to them felt natural, as if he had always been entitled to the best life had to offer. His artwork had been selling since he was in his early twenties, but the Pride show had taken it to another level, exposed him to people like the Gilliam’s curator, in town to see what was on the art horizon. While several of the artists for the show had gained attention, Richard was one of the two real breakout stars, along with Javier Velasco. Velasco was somewhere in South America these days, maybe Argentina, wowing whomever constituted the art world there, and here Richard was in Philadelphia, a nice enough town for a stepping stone. Now that he’d made it to the Gilliam, MOMA couldn’t be far behind.
He sipped his red wine and slipped off his robe. He’d had several emails back and forth with Kevin, the young hustler who called himself an escort and who must be on his way right about now. He had already laid out the scenario with him. Rich
ard would be naked, face down on the bed, pretending to be sleeping. Kevin would let himself in through the unlocked door – how careless of me! – and Richard would be startled, feigning panic just as Kevin scrambled onto the bed and held him down. So helpless. So exciting. He eased down onto the bedspread, slipped his hands under the pillows, and waited for the sound of the door opening.
Kieran never cared much for Philadelphia. History was its only real selling point. If you didn’t care where the Constitution was signed or who the hell signed it, Philly was just another big city with funny accents and greasy food. He admitted to enjoying its skyline, though. He had a fondness for skylines; they represented for him a far away place he had almost arrived at, a destination of soaring towers and deep, shadowed canyons. For some it was as if they were going into a land of light, neon and fluorescence; for him it was a descent into night. He felt safest then, when no one could see him. His power of invisibility was strongest in the darkness, when onlookers strained to see and he became a shadow among shadows.
He arrived at the bus station just as the sun was setting. All bus stations seemed the same to him. On the upside, they tended to be seedy. Someone with a limp and a filthy backpack, unshaved and gaunt, was just another Joe coming off the bus. One among hundreds.
He made his way to the Hamilton Inn and stood outside looking up at its lush green awning. There was only a tasteful, polished brass plaque on the building to announce its presence in the neighborhood. Pretense, he thought, as he walked quietly and quickly along the side of the building to where he knew there was a service entrance. Once upon a time this is where the dark-skinned dishwashers and laundresses, the hotel maids and the chauffeurs, made their way to the hotel basement from where they would fan out on their duties, always around and always unseen until needed. He knew about the entrance from a reconnaissance trip two weeks ago. He knew as much about the people on his list as he needed to, which was much more than they would ever know about him. He knew where they went, when they went, and how often. He knew Richard Morninglight stayed at the Hamilton, and that he enjoyed the company of unfamiliar young men when he did. It had been easy; too easy, and he felt a certain disappointment that there wasn’t more effort needed. He would have to take his satisfaction in the killing itself and leave the challenge to the last one, the one who would see him in broad daylight. Unlike the fool Morninglight or the hapless Devin, startled by recognition into thinking he’d come as a friend and not an executioner.