by Mark McNease
“Why do they call it Chelsea?” she asked. The only other Chelsea she knew of was in London. She also knew it was the kind of information Kyle would have; he was a sponge for just this sort of trivia.
It was warm out, but not yet humid. Kyle hated the humidity that came with summers in Manhattan. It was the only season he didn’t like, and he knew come July he would have his annual impulse to move to Seattle or San Francisco, places he’d never been but that he imagined remained in the cool 70s all year round. He wouldn’t move, of course, but he would want to.
“Funny you should ask,” Kyle said. “It was originally an estate of a British major, who called it Chelsea in honor of Sir Thomas Moore’s estate in London. Land was added to it over the years and it became the Chelsea we’re walking in. Which, by the way, mysteriously expanded since I moved here.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Chelsea twenty years ago ran from 14th Street to 23rd. They extended it to 34th Street when the neighborhood gentrified so they could attract renters. Funny how that works. North of 34th it’s Hell’s Kitchen, which was called Clinton for awhile, but now that there’s nothing the least bit seedy or dangerous about it everybody calls it Hell’s Kitchen again. It gives the residents someplace interesting to say they live.”
They were both wearing shorts today, a rarity for Kyle who preferred his legs covered in public, and he was thankful Linda would have perfect weather for her brief visit with them. She was leaving for Phoenix on Monday and he wanted her to have a good time, something to take her mind off the situation with her terminally ill mother-in-law.
“I’m sorry about Kirsten’s mother,” he said.
“Dot. That’s what everybody calls her, she’d tell you to call her that, too.”
“Dot.”
“I like that name. Dorothy’s nice, but there’s something unique about Dot. I don’t know any other Dots, do you?”
“I can’t say I do,” Kyle said.
“It’s hard. But Kirsten’s holding up through it. She has to. I can’t tell you how much it meant to her for Dot to make it one last time to New Jersey for our wedding. And how much it meant to me that you and Danny were there.”
They were nearing Eighth Avenue now and Linda noticed several couples holding hands. Men with men, and at least one young lesbian couple who seemed happy and in love as they stopped to look at puppies in a pet shop window. A sadness came over her as she thought of all the years she’d missed, all the years she had kept her truest self a secret. At the same time, she was thrilled to live in a changing world, a world in which she could walk down the street—at least some streets, in some cities—holding Kirsten’s hand without succumbing to the impulse to hide.
“Where are we going?” Linda asked. Kyle had told her he wanted to take a walk, but not where they were walking to. Danny had gone to his restaurant to meet with Chloe the day manager, and to plan for what would be both a celebration and the saddest event of his life: saying goodbye to old Margaret Bowman as she prepared to move to Florida. Danny was the party planner, as he had been for every party at Margaret’s Passion the last eleven years. Kyle had suggested Danny let someone else arrange this one, that it would be too difficult, but Danny would have none of it. It was his restaurant, purchased from Margaret, and she was his second mother. No, he’d said, this was something he had to do.
“I want you to meet Imogene,” Kyle said as they kept walking west. Once they reached Ninth Avenue they would turn right and head toward 38th Street. It was a good long walk, and he planned to stop for coffee and bagels as he always did, taking one of each for his boss, Imogene Landis. He wondered briefly if she, too, would be moving on soon. It was not a welcome thought and he waved it aside.
“Bugs?” Linda said, seeing Kyle wave his hand in the air.
“No, just something I don’t want to think about.”
Imogene Landis was a television reporter who’d slid very near the bottom of her profession until events gave her career a second wind. When Kyle started working as her assistant six years ago she’d been reduced to a position as the English language financial reporter for a show called Tokyo Pulse. The show was put out by Japan TV3, whose studios they were walking toward. The 3:00 a.m. Tokyo crowd got a good laugh out of Imogene; she knew nothing about financial reporting, and her attempts to include a few words in Japanese had them howling on their living rooms floors. Then, a year and a half ago, she’d covered the murders at Pride Lodge—the same murders that brought Kyle and Linda together, and the next thing she knew, she was a star. A minor star, to be sure, but bright enough for her bosses in Tokyo and the New York station manager, Leonard Baumstein (“Lenny-san”), to promote her to city reporter. Since then she’d been back in the thick of things, covering politics, art, even the occasional noteworthy homicide. She was a celebrity of sorts now, and she’d caught the eye of several TV stations across the country. Kyle believed it was only a matter of time before one of them made her an offer she would accept.
They reached Ninth Avenue and turned, walking north. Most of New York City was a grid, something Kyle appreciated. It was both easy to find your way here, and harder to get lost. He’d walked this way a thousand times and wondered if he would keep walking this way if there was no Imogene waiting. He supposed he would, as a matter of habit, at least for awhile.
“I haven’t wanted to bring this up …” he said
Linda knew he was talking about the news he’d read that morning.
“There’s nothing you can do, Kyle. Maybe it’s not who you think it is, this Pride Killer. Maybe your doorman’s brother drowned in the river. People drink too much, sometimes they stumble.”
“No, this wasn’t an accident. It’s him. I know it is.”
“So leave it to the police.”
“You are the police!”
“Retired, Kyle. And I was on the New Hope force, a long way and a world of difference from New York City. I have a bad feeling about this one, I think we should stay out of it.”
“And wait to read about two more? He kills in threes. No, this time he struck close to home. This time it’s personal. I want to talk to Vinnie.”
“Your doorman?”
“Yes, when the time’s right.” Kyle didn’t know when Vincent Campagna would return to work but when he did, Kyle wanted to have a very delicate conversation with him.
“Well,” said Linda, “if this is the Pride Killer and he claims his victims every Pride weekend –”
“Minus the last two.”
“Minus the last two … I’d say time isn’t something we have much of.”
She was right. Kyle sighed, knowing he ought to stay out of it, but what if this killer got away with it again? He’d done his dirty work for years before stopping, and now that he was back he would probably do it for years again. Something had to be done, but not this moment. For now Kyle was taking them to meet his beloved, infuriating, demanding boss, and that was where his mind should be.
“Cecil’s is just up ahead,” Kyle said. Cecil’s was the bagel shop where he always bought coffee and a breakfast treat of some kind for himself and Imogene. He was comforted that Cecil’s had been around as long as it had—at least as long as Kyle had worked for Imogene. Some things needed to stay the same, he thought, even if it’s just a bagel shop. Otherwise the impermanence of life would be too much to bear.
“I could use another cup of coffee,” Linda said.
They walked on, approaching the back of the Port Authority bus terminal. Some parts of New York City were breathtaking, and other parts were permanently ugly. But this is New York City, all of it, and Kyle wanted Linda to see as much of it as she could in the next four days. He put the thought of killers and floating bodies out of his mind for now. It was a glorious day at one of the most festive times of year, at least for the hundreds of thousands who would flood Fifth Avenue for the parade Sunday, and he wanted no rain, no sadness, no death. This morning he would have none of them.
Chapter 6
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br /> Keller and Whitman was not the most well known men’s clothing store in Manhattan, but it was certainly considered among the best. D’s uncle, Leo Whitman, had eschewed growth, turning his nose up at the bigger stores and having disdain for chain operations. He was interested in quality, not quantity, and he had educated D slowly and steadily in the ways of the discerning man. You succeeded very well, Uncle, D thought as he entered the store that bore his name. Not only are my customers discerning, but I’m quite the connoisseur myself. Take Kevin, for instance …
He was in especially good spirits this morning. The letdown of his first kill had eased and he attributed it to being out of practice. His time in Berlin had numbed his senses, like eating too much bad food for too long, then suddenly tasting something exquisite. His palate had not been ready for it, but it would be the next time. He was back in form.
“Good morning, Mr. K,” Jarrod said when he saw D come through the front door.
Jarrod Sperling was a good man and an even better store manager. His efficiency and way with customers, each of whom he made to feel as if they were the only truly valuable customer in the world, were what had saved him from becoming D’s third victim nearly seven years ago. Had it not been for these qualities D spotted in him when they met for a drink, Jarrod would be a forgotten headline now. But he’d impressed D with his manners and his knowledge of the garment business, and instead of killing him D hired him to help with the store. In very quick order Jarrod proved himself capable of keeping things going on his own, and he’d run the business very well when D was in Berlin. For that D must find a way to thank him. Perhaps a ridiculously large Christmas bonus.
“Good morning, Jarrod. I trust you’re well.”
“Very, Mr. K. And I have good news.”
I have even better news, D thought, but I’ll never be able to tell you.
“What might that be?”
“You know Michael Marzen …”
“I know of Michael Marzen, yes. He’s on the cover of everything these days.”
Michael Marzen was a software billionaire who had decided to gift most of his fortune to charity. Charities, of course, had lined up for a piece of the action, and Marzen had been giving interviews on the virtues of philanthropy.
“Well,” said Jarrod, in a deliberately self-effacing way, bowing his head just so as if to say he was a humble man, with humble tidings, “He wants a new wardrobe, and he wants it from Keller and Whitman.”
This was indeed good news. A man of Marzen’s means could provide the store with enough income to show a profit for the year. Keller and Whitman always showed a profit, but this would be exceptional.
“Good man,” D said.
Jarrod blushed and smiled, not quite a puppy who’d been patted on the head, but almost.
“Now how about a cup of tea from the bakery? And get a scone for yourself, something to tide you over. I’ll be taking lunch out today. I have a prospective client to meet. Not nearly as wealthy or famous as Michael Marzen, but a true catch … if I’m able to catch him.”
“Oh my,” Jarrod said. “You haven’t lost your touch, Mr. K.”
“No, I haven’t.”
Jarrod then did as he was told and left the store, walking briskly across Lexington Avenue to the small bakery that had served the Upper East Side neighborhood for twenty years. They were top notch, with a reputation that needed no preceding, and had been satisfying the tastes of fickle customers since they first opened their doors. D would skip the scones. He never ate before an interview.
Diedrich Kristof Keller III moved to New York City—Brooklyn, to be precise—when his mother went crawling back to Germany in defeat. He was only sixteen at the time, living in the wasteland that was Anaheim, California. It had Disneyland, but that only served to make the point. Even as a teenager, D saw humanity as a vast sea of half-awake people stumbling through their lives from one event to the next, with the in-between filled by boredom. Anaheim was utterly boring. He hated it, and wondered why his parents ever moved there.
His father, also Diedrich, amounted to little and was so unimaginative that he’d thought a large, dull swath of land in Southern California was the place to be. He took his then-pregnant wife and moved from Germany to America, imagining himself an adventurer. But he was not; the most adventurous thing he ever did was also the thing that made D hate him so much—he left his wife and son when D was twelve. Not only did he leave them to fend for themselves in a land both of them despised (D’s mother never did like this strange country with its over-inflated sense of itself), but he left them for a man! D’s father, it turned out, was running not just from a life he found lacking, but to a life he fantasized silently about until one day he announced at breakfast that he was leaving. He did not say where he was going, or whom he planned to meet there, but D and his mother knew. Samuel was the man’s name. He met D’s father at the Boeing factory in Anaheim where both men worked assembling aircraft. For a year the two men spent all their spare time together and Marta Keller, while pretending there was nothing amiss as Samuel became a fourth member of their family, knew better. Her husband had changed. He had become happy. He had never been happy with her, and he always treated his son as a peculiar child he wanted nothing to do with but felt obligated to raise.
That sense of obligation vanished one Saturday morning. D was eating pancakes at their small kitchen table. Marta was making a second stack for her husband, with several sausages in a small skillet next to the pancakes, when D’s father walked into the room carrying a duffel bag. He announced he was moving to San Francisco with Samuel, picked a sausage from the skillet, bit half and tossed the rest back with the others, and left. Just like that. D never spoke to the man again.
Marta Keller tried to hang on. She got an office job at the same Boeing factory where her traitorous husband met the man of his dreams and her nightmares. She worked there for four years, slowly descending into the neurotic depressed woman she would spend the rest of her life being. Finally, as abruptly as Diedrich Keller had left his family, she told D they were moving back to Germany. As much as he hated Anaheim, he knew nothing of Berlin. He didn’t speak the language, and imagined Germany to be a cold wet country cloaked in guilt and regret for its crimes against humanity. He resisted. He was sixteen by then and all but self-sufficient. Marta at last gave him an option (though running away had become his first choice, had things not taken a turn for the better): he could go to Berlin with her, or he could move to Brooklyn and live with his uncle Leo. Leo Whitman was her older brother and had moved to the United States a decade before the Kellers moved to California. Leo was also a successful tailor, unmarried, and willing to take his nephew in. D had only met the man once, when Leo came to visit during Christmas. D was ten years old. The Kellers never went to Brooklyn and D had no idea what it was like, but he believed it must be more interesting than where he was. Any place would be. He jumped at the chance, acted as if it were a difficult choice, and said goodbye to his mother one rainy September. By the evening of that day he was living in Brooklyn, set on a path that changed his life completely, and his mother was on an overnight flight to Berlin.
It was D’s idea to open a store on the Upper East Side, D’s cajoling and flattering that got his uncle Leo to believe he could be more than a very fine tailor for a very fine clientele. It was also D’s money, earned and saved from a series of side jobs while he helped his uncle grow his business, that got them started. Hence the name Keller and Whitman. D played his cards carefully and never suggested he was more than an eager apprentice learning at the knee of a master, but when it came time to open the store he insisted, in the nicest way one can insist, that his name come first. Leo Whitman had no objections, and when D was twenty-two he became a businessman. Ten years later he was a very successful businessman, clothier to celebrities and politicians. A year after that he bought his townhouse, thanked his uncle for everything he’d made possible for D, then shoved him down the stairs of the five-flight walkup they
shared. D told the police it was a tragedy waiting to happen. Leo was in frail health, he said, and D had tried to convince him for years to move to an elevator building. Leo would have none of it, and one day D came home from work to find his uncle with a broken neck at the bottom of the stairs. It had all been terribly sad. He’d cried and cried but carried on in his uncle’s memory. Marta Keller did not come for the funeral. D inherited everything.
D enjoyed his tea while Jarrod nibbled at his blueberry scone in the back office. Food was not allowed in the store, and only D was allowed to have a beverage in front. He kept it below the cash register where he could quickly conceal it if a customer came in. It was just eleven o’clock and only two men had come to the store, one a regular client and the other looking for a suit for a funeral. D had attended to them both and already made two sales for the day.
Jarrod came back in, having carefully wiped his hands and any stray crumbs from his sport coat. Jarrod had just turned fifty-three and was, to D’s knowledge, eternally single. His fastidiousness might be the cause, D thought, but it made Jarrod a very good store manager.
“I’m leaving now, Jarrod,” D said, finishing his tea and handing his trusted manager the cup.
“Anyone I might know?” Jarrod asked. He rarely asked questions, but there had always been a nosiness to him when it came to clients. Even a man who had checked the inseams of some of New York City’s most powerful and influential players could still be star struck.
“No one I might know of, either!” D said, with a short practiced laugh. “No, just someone who was referred to me and is staying at the Arlington. I’ve arranged to meet him for coffee.