by Mark McNease
“A lodge. In Pennsylvania.”
“Well, I’ll be. She’s a piece of work, that one. You can just tell.”
“Yes, you certainly can.”
Olivette held the door open for him.
“If you think of anything else,” Kyle said.
“I try not to, to be honest. But if I do, I’ll call Imogene’s assistant, don’t you doubt it.”
Kyle saw a gleam in her eye, a hint of mischief, and it came as a relief. Olivette Washburn would survive. He suddenly wished they’d met under different circumstances, that the coffee they shared could have been over a very different conversation.
“Thank you again,” he said, as she nodded and closed the door behind him.
Chapter 12
Penn Station
Detective Linda Sikorsky had not been to New York City in thirty-five years. Her last visit was with her parents, to see a production of “A Christmas Carol” and tour the light-strewn city in mid-December. It was the most magical time to be in Manhattan, with giant toy soldiers guarding street crossings and reindeer flying over Fifth Avenue. It was also three months before her father was gunned down in an act of random violence outside a grocery store in their hometown of Cincinnati. They’d flown to New York for the occasion, Linda, her father, Peter, and her mother, Estelle. It had been planned for a year, and the anticipation had built through September, October, November, until finally Linda burst off the airplane in Queens and never stopped talking about all the things she saw on the taxi ride into Manhattan. So magical had it been, and in such horrible contrast to the death of her father the following March, that Linda had never come back.
Pete Sikorsky had been a Cincinnati cop for fifteen years when he was shot outside a corner grocery, off-duty, an innocent bystander killed in a senseless act of violence. It was a nightmarish bookend to the time they’d had in New York, and Linda had never wanted to see the city again. Not when she lived in Ohio, not when her mother remarried and moved them to Philadelphia, and not when she became an officer on the New Hope, Pennsylvania, police force. A mere two hours away by car, less by train. It was as if she could look out her kitchen window and see, far in the distance, the city that had put a divider in her life between the good and the evil, the before and the after. For her New York City would always be a perfect memory followed by a perfect loss, and the fragility of it had kept her away, until she met Kyle and Danny.
All these years later she was living a life she would never have imagined that glorious Christmas thirty-five years ago, followed so soon by the defining tragedy of her father’s death, and it was time to chase away the ghosts. She put her misgivings aside and took the train from Trenton to spend four days in Manhattan, to think about her new relationship, and to see Kyle and Danny, whom she had befriended during the Pride Lodge Murders – as they’d come to be known. In part because of Kyle’s boss, the overbearing television reporter who managed to revive her career with a story about the killings, and in part because it was an easy thing to call them. “The Murders at Pride Lodge.” She admitted it had a ring to it, and had even toyed with writing a book about it. Maybe she would do that when she left the New Hope police force, something she’d been discussing with Kirsten, and something she wanted to talk to Kyle about.
Kirsten. The other thing she wanted to talk about. The woman she met at a New Year’s Eve party four months ago, and who was now Linda Sikorsky’s first official girlfriend. Linda had wanted her to come along, but Kirsten wasn’t quite ready to meet “the family,” and both of them felt there would be plenty of time for it. Linda believed Kirsten would also be the only girlfriend she would ever have; she knew the odds were not in their favor, given the survival rate of relationships in general. But their ages – Linda at 43 and Kirsten at 47 – played into her thinking as well. They were not school girls in the throes of a crush. She had known she was lesbian pretty much all her life, but she had never acted on it. Not out of any doubt or self-loathing, but because she had lost someone she loved so completely – her father – at such a young age, that she associated love with pain. To love someone was to accept that you would eventually lose them, or they would lose you; it was as inevitable as death itself, and while Linda knew that might be a morbid way to look at it, it was her truth. Until Kirsten. Until she became aware that some pain down the line was worth the joy that could be found living in the present.
Linda was a tall woman, six feet in her stockings. She had let her blonde hair grow out since last October and wondered what Kyle would make of it. She’d become a bit more feminine, if that’s the word, influenced by Kirsten’s sense of style and ease with a makeup case. She was still what was her mother called a big-boned gal, but she had trimmed down a bit. Having a woman like Kirsten McLellan by her side made her want to look her best. Kirsten turned heads, with her ramrod bearing, her svelte physique, startling green eyes sprinkled with flecks of yellow, and her style. Kirsten was a real estate broker whose presence spoke high-end: she sold only the best, to only the most demanding. Kyle had even mentioned it as another connection between them all: Kate Pride’s husband was a real estate broker, too. Kyle was always looking for connections, as if he saw the world in dots, or pixilated patterns that could be brought into focus by staring at them long enough. Oh look, your girlfriend sells real estate, and the husband of the gallery owner who’s showing my photos sells real estate, it must mean something! To Linda it simply meant the world was smaller than most people think, and nearly all roads cross if you just stay on them long enough.
Kirsten was successful and demanding, yet her heart was as true and generous as any Linda had ever encountered. Kirsten McLellan knew how to win, that’s all, and when she was alone with Linda she turned that sense of competition off. The two women had nothing to prove to one another, and everything to enjoy. It was Kirsten who encouraged Linda to consider leaving the police force. Linda had long imagined opening a store in New Hope and spending her days talking to shoppers, selling them vintage finds she’d bought at auctions and flea markets. Not antiques, God no; Linda didn’t know an antique from an old piece of furniture. But she loved perusing aisles and bins, sifting through drawers and racks of gently worn clothes. She even had a name for the place: For Pete’s Sake. Named after her father, naturally. She would add some kind of sub-title, maybe Vintage Everything, something to tell people when they saw the store sign exactly what they were walking into. It was her dream, her fantasy, and until Kirsten came along she’d always kept it locked away. Maybe not much longer.
Her train pulled into Penn Station just as Kyle was getting back on the subway in the northernmost reaches of Manhattan, having learned enough from Olivette Washburn to know he was onto something. They had arranged to meet for lunch at a diner called the Stopwatch, a block from the station. She was early enough to have time to check into the hotel – she had paid for early arrival – and maybe even a short nap before heading to the restaurant. She had a lot to think through and already her nerves were on edge. She had wanted Kirsten to come with her, but there would be plenty of time and opportunity for them all to meet. They could come back in the summer, or get Danny and Kyle to visit New Hope again. They could even stay at Pride Lodge. It had changed managers since the killings, but the old man Jeremy who had been the silent partner in the whole affair still owned it.
“They’ll love you, Kirsten” Linda whispered to herself, hoping it to be true. How could it not be? Linda Sikorsky was level headed. Linda Sikorsky was an excellent judge of character. Love was not blind this time.
She eased up from her train seat and reached for her luggage in the overhead rack. All would be well. Kirsten was everything she’d fantasized in a partner. She was back in New York City and excited to see how it had changed, considering how little she remembered of it from her childhood. She was going to her friend Kyle’s first photography exhibit. Renewal and happiness were in the wind.
Chapter 13
Hotel Exeter, Hell’s Kitchen
Kieran watched the people on 36th Street six floors below hurrying for the sake of hurrying, as was the case with nearly everyone in Manhattan. He had noticed when he first moved here that everyone was in a mad dash to nowhere, thinking themselves terribly important with terribly important things to do. People didn’t so much walk on the streets of this city as maneuver, quickly circling around and through one another to get to the same destination five seconds faster. The first rule of life in New York was to seem to matter. To give the impression to anyone who might be looking, while assuming everyone was, that you had something to do right this minute. You were one of the busy people. There were only three stages of being here: up-and-coming, already arrived, or dead. He had never been the first two, and hoped the third was a long way off, but he had observed it around him since the moment he first arrived as a man without a home. Oklahoma was no place to go back to, and New York City was no place to stay. Between the two he had lived – drifted, really – from Salt Lake City to Seattle to New Orleans, never staying long enough to leave much trace of himself. Wherever he ended up, he would be on the run, and that was okay with him. He had been running all his life.
He hadn’t slept since returning from Philadelphia at one o’clock that morning. He’d thought he might, given how tiring it was to strangle someone. The only people who seem to know that are the people doing it. Everyone else experiences murder in the abstract, as part of a movie or a television show. But to actually straddle a man and nearly decapitate him with a guitar string, now that will exhaust you. He padded naked from the window into the bathroom for a third cup of instant coffee, made with hot tap water. He couldn’t afford real coffee, the kind that tasted good and didn’t make you feel like it was corroding your stomach. The kind that didn’t make you puke. He had been throwing up more lately and wasn’t sure if it was from the wretched instant coffee or from the excitement of killing people he’d been planning to for the past two months.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror mounted to the back of the bathroom door. The mirror was cracked and covered with stains; the maid service at the Exeter left as much to be desired as everything else about it. He set his cup down on the toilet lid and examined himself: not bad, he thought, thinner than he’d ever been, pale, in need of a haircut, but still a catch at thirty-five. He’d fallen far, there was no denying it, but he would rise again. He would put on a few pounds easily enough, get firmly back on his feet and face the day with a smile. It had been so long since he smiled.
He pushed the door in against the wall, tired of looking at himself and the things it made him think. He was too busy for idle thoughts. He had a plan to carry out and only four days left. The big opening at the art gallery was Friday night and here it was already Tuesday morning. All those fancy people coming to the opening of The Next Big Thing, the next artiste destined for fame. Some shutterbug, another photo-auteur, as if the world wasn’t overrun with people taking pictures on iPhones and calling them art. The picture he had in mind for them, the centerpiece, would not be an image at all but the real thing. Three-dimensional, sensory stimulation at its most unimaginable. Performance art they would be talking about for the rest of their lives. He’d bought a digital camera just for the occasion, the kind that makes video recordings, too. The internet was flooded with stupid videos from stupid people who thought dancing kittens were the best thing ever, or their stupid babies laughing at nothing while they recorded them and put them online, hoping to end up on some idiotic morning show. The next must-see, the next YouTube sensation! Boy, did he have something for them to watch ... very soon. It had taken most of his meager cash to buy, but once it was finished, once he had released it into the world, he would be complete and not in need of anything.
He finished making his coffee with the lukewarm water from the sink, stirred it with his finger, and walked back into the hotel room to work out his itinerary. His planning had been meticulous so far, and now more than ever he must focus, focus, focus.
Chapter 14
Tokyo Pulse
Kyle hurried across Ninth Avenue at 46th Street, carrying a bag filled with two medium coffees, a toasted bagel for himself, and a croissant for Imogene. He glanced to his left and saw the Hotel Exeter sign, visible from ten blocks away by virtue of an unobstructed view. He’d never been to the Exeter, or even known anyone who had, but the big red letters extending up above its rooftop provided a signpost, a way of orienting oneself in a city that can be very disorienting to the uninitiated.
He’d picked up the coffee at Cecil’s, a bagel shop he’d been stopping at every morning since he first started working at Japan TV3 as Imogene Landis’s personal assistant. Imogene was diminutive in body only: short, thin, with a brunette bob she somehow made fashionable, and an outsize personality that surprised many people coming from such a small woman. Tiny would be an apt description. But once she opened her mouth most people took cover, and the ones who didn’t tended to be thick-skinned, since Imogene’s language was more like pepper spray. She’d lost more than one job because of it, and had been on the verge of leaving this one just when the murders in Pennsylvania made her a hit on late-night TV in Tokyo. The show was called Tokyo Pulse, produced by Japan TV3, whose English-language correspondents were in New York – all three of them – and whose bosses in Tokyo knew a novelty act when they saw one. She’d been their financial correspondent, interviewing C-level economists and talking about financial matters she knew nothing about, nor cared to. And then, death in the countryside. A gay resort. Murder, mayhem, and ratings that shot up like a rocket. Now Imogene Landis was as close to a star as someone on television at 3:00 a.m. in Tokyo can be. She’d even learned to speak enough Japanese to sound ridiculous in the occasional asides she did to camera. But mostly it was business, as she now covered the city in a segment called Straight Up New York. Crime, politics, some culture when she got lucky. But a headliner in any event. Imogene-san was a hit.
Japan TV3 was located on the third floor of CityScape Studios, which were really just a large office building converted to television studios in the 1980s. They were big, and they weren’t much to brag about, but they generated considerable revenue for the building’s owners. They were also home to some of the best bad television shows no one has ever heard of. The YouTube of shoestring budget broadcasting. It was saying something that JapanTV3 could have an entire half-floor to itself. This is where you’ll find Kelly Gerson, national political reporter who only went from her apartment in Flushing to the studios and back and had never been to Washington, Michael W. Podesto (the middle initial was in his contract), who had taken over the financial beat when Imogene moved up and who was quite good at it, their boss Leonard “Lenny-san” Baumstein, who reported directly to the high-ups in Tokyo, Lenny-san’s icy assistant Gretchen, and, of course, Imogene and Kyle. The operation was supported by a dozen quasi-producers and assistants, and felt most days almost like a real TV show. There was even a deal in the works to expand beyond the single Japanese cable channel where New Yorkers could see the program. Someday soon, they all hoped, viewers would be able to enjoy Tokyo Pulse in every major American market. Imogene believed when that happened she would be able to write her own ticket, after thirty years in the business.
The elevator opened and Kyle hurried to his cubicle. The train back from Inwood had been delayed in two separate stations, once for traffic and another for a sick passenger, and he was almost an hour late. He managed to slip his jacket nearly off when Imogene saw him. She had her own cubicle – the days of an office were long gone – and was reading over a script when she looked up at the sound of the elevator.
“The withdrawals have already started, Kyle,” she said, referring to the coffee he brought her every morning.
“I’m sorry, I got stuck on a train.”
Kyle handed her coffee to her and set the croissant on her desk, at the same time draping his jacket over the back of his chair. Even though they sat back to back, in identical cubes, there was no m
istaking the two spaces: Kyle’s little fabric square was decorated only with a few photos of himself with Danny, their two cats, Danny’s parents and Kyle’s mother. Imogene, meanwhile, had given her cube the royal treatment, a sort of presidential suite of office cubicles. There were framed photographs her of her smiling next to New York City politicians, some whose names Kyle did not know (any Councilman would do), as well as a signed letter of thanks from Former President Bill Clinton, an invitation to some official state dinner that she probably picked up at a flea market, and a photograph of an Emmy. Imogene Landis had never won an Emmy, but anyone stopping by her cubicle would not know that. One of her favorite truisms, true mostly to Imogene, was that “Appearances matter.” She could be heard saying it at least once a week. It was lost on her that an over-decorated 5 x 5 foot cubicle spoke more of desperation than success.
“You’re coming to the opening, yes?” Kyle asked. He’d been counting on Imogene to attend his exhibit at the Pride Gallery. While she wouldn’t cover it for Tokyo Pulse (she had pitched it to Lenny-san but he deemed it not interesting to a middle-of-the-night Tokyo audience), she promised as Kyle’s long time boss and friend she would be there.
“I’ve made dinner reservations a block from there, of course I’m coming!” she said. “Lenny-san is my date.”
“Lenny’s coming?” Kyle was shocked. Their boss was a sixty-ish, squat, barrel-chested, balding Jewish man everyone knew was gay but who had never come out. He had lived alone with his aging father until the old man passed away two years ago, after which Lenny moved from Staten Island to Chelsea, expecting no one to notice.
“I may yet get him to let me do a short piece,” she said, referring to the opening. “A sort of ‘Tokyo Pulse’ reporter makes good’ thing.”
“I’m not a reporter.”
“They don’t know that. It’s three o’clock in the morning there, for fuck sake!” She sipped her coffee and sniffed her croissant – an odd habit she had of smelling her food. “If you want to be successful – “