Murder at Pride Lodge [A Kyle Callahan Mystery: 1]

by Mark McNease

  She had heard the men break into their home in Los Feliz, an affluent section of Los Angeles with its own boulevard snaking along past the Greek Theatre, east toward Glendale. She and her parents were supposed to be on a flight to London, part vacation, part present for her tenth birthday, but she had fallen seriously ill with a flu (there it was again, the guilt; it had been her fault somehow, another reason she must make amends and end these lives) and they had postponed the trip. Had they gone, had she not complained or registered a fever, her parents would be alive and her life would have had a completely different trajectory than the one leading her here, to this strange lodge outside a town she’d never been to or planned to see again.

  Her childhood bedroom was on the second floor down the hall from her parents’ room. She hadn’t been able to sleep, tossing and turning, sweating with her fever, and when she heard the glass shatter she thought at first she had imagined or dreamt it. That’s what fevers do to you. She sat up in bed and listened, hearing what to her was the distinct sound of someone in the house. She hurried out of bed in her nightgown and tip-toed quickly down the hall. Her father had always been a heavy sleeper, and her mother had the habit of using ear plugs to soften the sound of her husband’s snores. Emily—that was her name then—went to her father and shook him awake.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” she said, rocking him furiously. “There’s somebody downstairs!”

  Carl Lapinsky pulled himself from a deep sleep as quickly as he could, like a man swimming furiously up toward the surface. The alarm in his daughter’s voice told him there was no time to waste, and he put his fingers to his lips to tell her to be silent: he’d heard her perfectly well, even blanketed by sleep, and he leaned up on one elbow to listen to the silence outside the room.

  There it was, the sound of hushed voices. Carl cursed himself for not turning on the alarm. He’d seen a news report just the other day about the folly of having an alarm system you didn’t turn on when you were home. Men especially thought they didn’t need an alarm to protect a house they were in. It didn’t occur to them that the alarm was there to protect them and their families, not their possessions. Now, in the darkness with the sound of intruders coming up the stairs, Carl knew he would never make that mistake again.

  His wife Barbara had woken up, disturbed by the commotion in her bed, and was taking out her earplugs when Carl told his daughter to get into the closet and stay there. She did as her father told her, rushing to the closet and hunching down below her mother’s dresses, leaving the door open just a crack.

  It was Carl Lapinsky’s second mistake, and a fatal one. He owned a gun, but kept it in the closet, where he had just sent his daughter to hide. He cursed himself for not thinking clearly, and wondered if he had time to rush to the closet and get the gun he kept in a box on the shelf. He would try, he had to. He made a gesture of fingers-to-lips, shhhh, to his wife, and swung his legs off the bed, about to dash to the closet when a man stepped into the doorway.

  “What the fuck?” the man said. Clearly he had been surprised to find them there.

  Carl turned and saw him: a squat man, thick with a barrel chest, but an intelligent face that registered, in that instant, curiosity as much as menace. Even in the darkness Carl could make out the man’s appearance. He was wearing a blue or green flannel shirt, gray windbreaker, blue jeans, white sneakers and a belt with a ridiculously large silver buckle on it. One of those country-western type buckles you’d expect to find at a roadside honky-tonk holding up some fake cowboy’s pants. It did not belong with the sneakers and windbreaker, and Carl was wondering why anyone would wear a belt buckle like that without boots when the man slid a gun from his jacket pocket and shot Carl in the head. Barbara was fully awake by then, staring at the scene as if she were still dreaming. She screamed for only a moment before the man shot her, too. Two people dead, just like that. Two people who weren’t supposed to be there.

  From inside the closet Emily heard sounds of footsteps rushing into the bedroom. More men, though she couldn’t tell how many.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” shrieked one man.

  “They startled me,” said the shooter. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Not kill them,” said a third. “We don’t kill people. We don’t even carry guns. Why are you bringing a gun?”

  “You’re a moron,” said the shooter. “We break into homes. Did it never occur to you that just such a thing might happen? And that we’d be the ones staring at the barrel of a shotgun? That’s why I carry a gun, asshole.”

  “You’re the asshole.”

  “No, you’re the asshole. I just saved our lives!”

  “By killing two people! That’s life in prison! Jesus!”

  Emily listened, terrified but alert. The man who had shot her parents sounded bright, an articulate murderer. She would remember his voice for the rest of her life.

  “Where’s the daughter?” said the second man. “They have a kid, you said. Where’s the kid?”

  “What difference does it make?” said the shooter. “Just grab what you can and get the hell out.”

  “I’m not grabbing anything,” said the third man. “This is not cool, Frank, not cool at all. I’m outa here.”

  So off the third man ran, down the stairs and out the back door. Emily committed the killer’s name to memory: Frank. Well-spoken, brutal, murderous Frank. Unconcerned with her whereabouts, for even if they found her, he would simply kill her as well.

  “You running scared, too?” the man named Frank said to the second burglar. Getting no response, he said, “Just go through this room with me. There’s jewels, I’m sure of it, money. Check the wall pictures, there might be a safe in back.”

  The two men began rummaging through her parents’ room, opening drawers. There was a large jewelry box inside her mother’s armoire, and she could hear him throwing it open, grabbing the jewelry inside. There was also a watch box where her father kept one of his prize possessions, an antique Waltham pocket watch his great-grandfather had owned. His great-grandfather had been a train conductor, and the watch had a steam engine engraved on it. He’d never had it appraised and considered its value to be sentimental, but the watch was authentic and, had he researched it, would have fetched several hundred dollars at the time. Frank had no idea of the watch’s worth, but there was something about it that caught his eye, something that made him want to keep it, which is what he ultimately did and why he ultimately died.

  Justice took its time, she thought, remembering the watch. Justice delayed was not justice denied, as the famous quote had it. Not at all. Justice delayed was justice perfected, savored like the taste of something one would only taste once.

  The men might have found little Emily in the closet had a distant siren not spooked them. People intruding into other people’s homes tend to be on edge, and when they heard the siren they glanced at each other, a wordless communication Emily did not see. They grabbed what few things they’d taken and fled down the stairs and out the door. She waited for what seemed hours, although it was only about fifteen minutes, then she crept out of the closet, walked to the phone on the nightstand and, standing numbly over her father’s dead body, dialed 911.

  Emily went to live with her mother’s sister and her husband in Santa Barbara after “the tragedy”, as everyone called it. She did not get along with her Aunt Susan, and was frightened by her Uncle Joseph, a man who was even more stern with his adopted daughter than he was with his own two. Emily always had the feeling living with them that she’d been thrust into their midst, taken in because, well, somebody had to, and that she was damaged goods. What they never knew—what no one else ever knew—was that she’d been in the closet and seen the cold-blooded murder of her parents. She believed the reason she has not told the police was because her life’s mission had been set at the instant the first bullet flew; she would spend her life setting the scales back in balance, learning the skills she would need, from replacing her identity to firing a handgun
with precision, to bring that circle to its fullness. She did not know when or how, but the time would come; she believed it as surely as religious people believed in God or their reward in an afterlife. Emily would prepare, remain alert, and wait with supreme patience for that fleeting opportunity, that chance of a lifetime, when the great wrong of her life could be righted. For that reason only she had told the police she’d been under her bed, in her own bedroom. For that reason only she had never told anyone about the gun she took from her father’s closet when she was allowed back in the house to pack her things. The watch they knew about; its empty case was among the little evidence left behind by the killers. They’d not had enough time to take much more than jewelry and cash from her father’s wallet and her mother’s purse. And in exchange they had left nothing, no fingerprints, no hastily abandoned burglar’s tools. All they’d left behind them was a trail that quickly went cold. But Emily knew: a man named Frank, her father’s gun, and the watch no one would really think anything of. A few small things, but truly precious.

  After graduating high school, Emily moved to St. Paul to live with her girlfriend at the time. Cassy was from Minneapolis and had met Emily through an ad in a small lesbian magazine. She was also twelve years older than Emily, who, at eighteen, was old enough to make her own decisions but not old enough to make wise ones. Against her aunt and uncle’s wishes she packed up her used Mustang and drove to Minnesota, where she enrolled in the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus and very quickly discovered that sometimes age mattered. Her relationship with Cassy only lasted a year, but Emily liked St. Paul; she enjoyed the distance of the place and the harshness of its winters, and she stayed there.

  It was shortly afterward, on her twentieth birthday, she decided to disappear. She had no intention of moving, and it would be easy enough to tell the few friends she had that she was now someone else: changing one’s name was not all that uncommon, and she had been telling people various versions of a made-up life since she’d moved to St. Paul. People did not want to hear that her parents had been shot in bed, it was definitely a downer, and the ones who did were beneath her contempt. That was how it came to be that very few people who knew Emily knew her past. She protected it from them, just as she protected her other secrets as she waited patiently to tell them to the only three people who mattered: three men who had intruded into her life and never left. For that, for privacy, for escape, for so many reasons, Emily Lapinksy became Bo Sweetzer. She didn’t know where the name came from, only that it was on her lips one early morning as she awoke from a dream in which her father was standing over her and her mother was crying. “Emily,” her father kept saying in the dream. He was disappointed in her. She didn’t know how she knew that, or why he was disappointed, only that he was. “Emily,” he said, shaking his head. She replied, “My name is Bo. My name is Bo.” She awoke saying it, and just as surely added, “Bo Sweetzer.” She was immediately convinced her father had been disappointed because ten years had passed and no justice had been found. She would bring him peace, she knew then and there. She would be Bo Sweetzer, and she would find a way to end it in the only way it could be ended, even if it took her the rest of her life.

  She dropped out of the University and started making jewelry, a pastime she’d had that she connected with the loss in her life. It became a passion, and, to her delight (as much as a lesbian assassin could be delighted), her income. She had never been much for a 9-5 job and within a year she was running a business from a custom catalog. Bo and Behold, jewelry made to order, quickly became a success, but never a huge one. She didn’t want the notoriety, nor the pressure of running a business any bigger than could be managed from her apartment. Once the internet came around she launched BoAndBeholdJewelry.com, and would also sell her items on eBay and BidderSweet, online auction websites. It was there, on BidderSweet, one Sunday afternoon as she was looking around, that an alert showed up in her message box. She’s had them set up on a dozen sites to let her know when certain items she was interested in became available. It had been a lot of work for nothing, sifting through hundreds of ads for crap, some of them for treasure, but none of them turning up the one thing she wanted. And then, that day, there it was: an antique watch for sale. She looked at the photograph and couldn’t believe her eyes. She knew that watch very well, including the dent above the smoke rising from the train’s engine. She had caused that dent when her father had let baby Emily hold the watch and she had promptly swung it, slamming it against her crib. He had reminded her of it many times, as a way of saying, “See this? This will always remind me of you as a baby. It’s a great dent, I think, one of those dents in life that means something.”

  She had no idea what he meant at the time, but she understood now: this was indeed a dent in life that meant everything. The seller was an old man in Detroit by the name of Frank. Down on his luck, as she imagined he had probably spent most of his criminal life. But still an intelligent man, a man who knew enough about the value of a watch to keep it. Desperate now, she knew, as he was selling it for a mere $500, a third its current value. He either didn’t know, or didn’t care, and she had to move quickly. She would not be the only one seeing it, so she immediately emailed him from an anonymous account, one she had set up for exactly this opportunity, explaining she ran a jewelry business and had a client looking for just such a watch. A wealthy client willing to pay $1000, cash. If that was agreeable to Frank from Detroit she would be there the following day. Yes, he wrote back, it was very agreeable, and he took the item down from the auction site. Bo smiled, something she did not do much, and she imagined her father coming to her soon in another dream, telling her she had done well.

  She did not like losing herself in reverie. There was danger in the distraction of daydreaming—or in this case, late-night dreaming. She glanced at the clock: eleven forty-five p.m. She hadn’t made any judgments yet of this Pride Lodge. She knew what history of the place she had read on its website and was aware the original owners had moved on, one to the hereafter and another to Florida. The only person she’d spoken to since arriving was the desk clerk, Ricki, who told her most people came the next day, Friday. All the better; she wanted to come in under the radar, to get herself into place so she could go unnoticed. She was not a killer, not really, and she had driven all this way (guns did not travel well by airplane) for just one purpose, to put an end to her late-night dreaming and her reveries and let her dead parents know that while little Emily had escaped, the men who did this had not.

  She began unpacking the one suitcase she’d brought with her. She lifted out her father’s gun, one she had practiced with a thousand times at a Minneapolis firing range and used in real-life, real-time, once in Detroit. It had served her well and she knew it as an extension of her hand. That’s exactly how it had felt when she lifted it quickly and smoothly from her purse and aimed it at Frank Grandy. He had been so surprised, so flabbergasted. “You can take the watch. Take my money. I don’t have much . . . “

  “You don’t remember me?” she had said.

  He’d looked at her then, clearly not comprehending who she was.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s right. You never saw me. But I saw you. I was in the closet.”

  Then he knew. She could see it in his eyes as they widened and he whispered, “The little girl . . . “

  “Yes,” she said. “The little girl.” After some brief negotiation in which he attempted to barter his life for information on his co-criminals, she shot him in the forehead. It hadn’t felt good. It hadn’t felt anything. She had not smiled. She had simply taken the watch from the case he had it in and left. It was the only thing the police reported stolen, and the very thing Sam Tatum read about that told him they had not escaped the past.

  She wasn’t sure if she would use the gun again. An ice pick had worked well in Los Angeles, and she may yet find a way to make it look like an accident. There were plenty of stairs here to fall down, a ravine or two to go tumbling into. Ways to die
in nature as if nature were the cause. She would have to sleep on it, give herself to that reverie that mostly haunted her, seeking in it a solution. She put away her last pair of slacks, undressed, and slid beneath the covers of her double bed. She reached over and in the last gesture of a long day she turned off the night stand light.

  Chapter Four

  Lonely Blue Pool

  Kyle always beat the sunrise. He couldn’t remember the last time he woke up and saw light outside. He thought it was a form of insomnia; while he had no trouble getting to sleep, his mind sometimes turned on at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and would not shut off again. He would try not to disturb Danny as he turned carefully from side to side, doing his best to remain still until the reasonable hour of 5:00, when he would slip out of bed, walk quietly into the kitchen and make his first cup of coffee. He’d used instant for many years but Danny had recently given him a Keurig single-serving machine for his birthday and Kyle had found a new love. So much that they now traveled with the cheapest version of the machines so Kyle could have one of a variety of his favorites wherever they went. He’d never known anyone who traveled with a coffee machine but suspected he wasn’t the only one. Hotel coffee was usually weak and half the time the coffee machines didn’t work or the maid forgot to leave a fresh packet when she cleaned the room. It was easier to just bring his own.