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

by Mark McNease

  On this early morning Kyle lay on his back staring up at the ceiling. Their room had a picture window looking out on a hillside, and though it was still dark, Kyle could see the large tree outside Cabin 6 outlined against the slowly lightening sky. He was thinking of their life back in Manhattan and wondering if their cats, Smelly and Leonard, were nestled together in the empty space in bed where Kyle and Danny would normally be. The men slept entwined most nights, Kyle behind Danny, with a cat on each side. Smelly, Kyle’s 6-year-old gray tiger, had been named as a kitten when he found her outside his Brooklyn apartment eating from a ripped trash bag. Whatever was in the bag had coated her fur, leaving her with a stench that gave her her name. She was just a tiny, scrawny thing then, a far cry from the 16 pound ball of love she’d become. Danny said she looked like a bowling ball with sticks for legs, and they both worried about her weight. Kyle was determined Smelly would not become diabetic, and after an annual visit to the vet he put her on low-calorie food with a fixed feeding schedule that, after six months, appeared to have failed. She’d lost a quarter pound.

  A year after adopting Smelly he met Danny, who had been sharing his life with his three-year-old yellow tabby named Leonard. Leonard was as fit and lithe as a cat who’d spent his life outdoors, even though he had never ventured further out than the hallway. Danny adopted him from Spoiled Brats, a pet store on 49th Street that ran a cat shelter in the back. He had decided that summer he would never meet a man to spend his life with, and a cat was the next best thing. Maybe a better thing. He’d seen Leonard walking around the store trying to decide which of the customers should adopt him, and there Danny was, an obvious and easy mark. Leonard came up to him, just nine months old but already more confident than most humans will ever be, and off he went to live in Gramercy Park. Now they were a family: two men, two cats, and a cursed aquarium where perfectly healthy fish went to die.

  Kyle had lived in Brooklyn his thirty years in New York City. He had moved there from Chicago chasing a college sweetheart who had transferred to Columbia from the University of Illinois. David was his name, and he wanted to be a journalist. Columbia J-school, as it’s called, was the top destination for anyone wanting to be a serious journalist. Or at least that’s what David believed. Kyle had been studying psychology and English literature for no specific reason. He got his B.A., had no interest in either psychology or English literature, and didn’t think twice about moving east with the man of his dreams. It was that love, in fact, that had prompted Kyle to come out to his parents. It had filled his heart to bursting and he had the need to declare it to the world, which wasn’t something he thought could be done from a closet. His mother wasn’t surprised or upset, and while she assured Kyle that his happiness was her only concern, she questioned the wisdom of moving to New York City. She didn’t fight it, knowing Kyle would do what Kyle had set his mind to, but neither did she hide the bad feeling she had that youth was more at the bottom of it than love. Kyle’s father simply remained as distant as he had always been with his only child. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t mind, as that he didn’t care. For a man who had no other children, Bert Callahan had always been cool to his son. Kyle could never tell if it was because his father sensed something different about him, something he couldn’t accept, or if he was simply one of those people who should never have had children. It made telling his father he was moving to New York City to follow a boyfriend a relief to them both.

  Kyle soon learned that first loves are called that for a reason: they are not the last. He and David rented an apartment in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, and within six months David told him he was too young to give his life to someone; there was too much in the world to see (meaning, Kyle knew, too many men to sleep with) for him to be tied down at twenty-two, it just wouldn’t be fair to Kyle. Yes, yes, Kyle said, thank you for thinking of me, I’ll be moving out at the end of the month. He kept his promise. He also kept the friendship, and it was to Kyle David turned when his partner was dying from AIDS ten years later, and when David’s mother passed away last spring. Their friendship had survived thirty years, and David had already been pegged as Kyle’s best man when the time came. It was to Danny’s credit that he wasn’t jealous, that he understood time was the one thing of true value we can give to one another. He had welcomed David as part of their extended family and had even tried fixing him up a few times with men of their age who dined alone at Margaret’s. Nothing had clicked so far, but Kyle and Danny were themselves proof that love did not discriminate by age.

  Thirty years, Kyle thought suddenly, swinging his feet out of bed. Time to get a move on before it moves on! He was ready for his coffee.

  Danny owned a two-bedroom co-op on the border of Gramercy Park and Murray Hill (also called Curry Hill for all the Indian restaurants on Lexington Avenue). He’d bought it with a loan from his parents twenty-five years ago. No mortgage, low maintenance, a second bedroom he occasionally used as an office, perfect for sharing with Kyle and one of the few pieces of furniture Kyle had kept when he moved in: his father’s desk from Highland Park. It was an odd thing to ask for when Bert died and Sally Callahan decided to move to a condo on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive. Why he would want the desk of a man whose death he felt so little about was a mystery, but not one he was interested in exploring with a therapist. He simply asked for the desk and his mother gave it to him. It was pine with knots in the grain, deep sliding drawers and cigarette burns along the right side from when Kyle was a child and his father smoked. It fit perfectly into the spare room that became a shared office, in the apartment he moved into seven months after meeting Danny. His mother had not been surprised about that; Kyle still did what Kyle wanted to do, but Sally Callahan had no trepidation this time. She was as sure of this as Kyle was. Kyle gave up his apartment, gave away all the furniture since there was nowhere to put it in Danny’s place, packed up Smelly and told her to get ready to meet her match, a yellow tabby named Leonard she would be sharing her life with, whether she liked it or not.

  Kyle could see the sun beginning to rise, spilling early morning light across the landscape. He wanted to go for a walk to the Lodge soon, stopping on the way to see the empty blue pool. It was busy in the summer, a center of activity for Lodge guests, but emptied when the weather turned cold. The empty pool had provided Kyle with one of his best and most-loved photographs, one he called “Lonely Blue Pool.” It had been an accident, really, one of those shots he took as he strolled around with a camera slung over his neck, aiming and clicking at anything that might be an interesting shot. It was his method of capturing the surreptitious portrait, the off-guard expressions on people’s faces, as well as some striking blurred photographs (he believed in the plasticity of art, the many ways in which it presents and the many ways a single instance of it can be viewed; he liked seeing people cock their heads at a picture trying to figure out not just what the image was, but how he shot it). The day he took the pool photo he’d been walking up the slight hill toward the pool and cabana, when he noticed it was empty and he quickly took several pictures. There were leaves collected at the bottom, gathered by wind and gravity into a brown patch, and there along the deep-end wall was a white ladder that Kyle had used himself to climb from the water last summer. It was happenstance, the luck of the shutter, and the picture had turned out so lovely many people thought it was a painting. But no, it was just Kyle taking one of the thousands of photographs he took. It was one of the first he put on his Tumblr blog, and two years later he’d had two dozen requests for it. He was so flattered by people liking his pictures and calling them his “work” that he didn’t charge them—he would simply sign them in the corner and ship them off, asking the recipients to pay postage. But it had been his first inkling that someday, maybe, he could think of taking himself seriously.

  Danny wouldn’t be awake for another hour. He was an afternoon and evening person, while Kyle had his energy, ideas and focus in the morning. It was their routine that Kyle would g
et quietly out of bed and have his coffee. At home in their apartment he would leave the bedroom, pulling the door almost closed behind him (but never fully, as the cats did not like closed doors and would either scratch at them or cry all night until someone obeyed them and opened the damn door). He would head to their office room with a second cup of coffee and start in at his computer, either uploading pictures to his blog or sifting another two dozen he’d taken recently, or just reading websites and newspapers. He was also a news junkie, having become more so since he got into the business as Imogene’s assistant.

  There was no job to get up and go to when they traveled and Kyle had never been someone who could just lie in bed with his mind racing, so he would usually have a primer cup of coffee in the room, then slip out and head to a coffee shop downstairs or across the street from whatever hotel they were in. Here at Pride Lodge he could sit outside in one of the old wooden chairs that lined the walkway in front of the cabins, or he could head up to the Lodge and help himself to one of the newspapers they kept around and a cup of coffee they put out at 6:00 a.m.

  This Friday he pulled on his khaki slacks and a sweatshirt, slung his camera around his neck, grabbed his smartphone (he could read his emails before Danny saw him and told him to stop) and headed up the road to the Lodge, by way of the pool.

  That was when he saw the commotion: a police cruiser and what looked like an unmarked sedan in the front driveway, an ambulance that had made no noise, which struck Kyle as odd until he learned why, and a small crowd gathered around the deep end of the pool. He hurried up the grass hill to the poolside, having the presence of mind to quickly slip off the lens cap and take several photos as he climbed toward the crowd. Ricki was already there; he may have spent the night at the Lodge, which he did sometimes when they had a busy weekend coming. Sid and Dylan were standing near the edge at the deep end, Dylan with his face buried in Sid’s chest, Sid looking down into the pool. They both looked to have just gotten up. Dylan’s hair was disheveled and Sid’s eyes looked red from sleep. Both men wore jeans, but Sid wore a pajama top under his black leather jacket. Two women Kyle didn’t recognize were standing off to the side, one of them texting furiously on her phone. Or maybe she was tweeting whatever it was they’d witnessed. Nothing is private anymore, Kyle thought as he reached the top of the hill and headed toward them.

  As the pool came fully into view Kyle looked down into it and stopped, his breath freezing in his chest. There at the bottom of the lonely blue pool, his neck bent so parallel to his shoulders it looked like a stalk that had been broken off, was the body of Teddy Pembroke. He was wearing blue jeans faded nearly white and a blue dress shirt. His tennis shoes were red, his socks black, and his hair had been recently died jet black, no doubt at Happy’s suggestion. No 50-year-old man has jet black hair with a bald spot in back and a rapidly receding hairline in front. His horn-rimmed glasses he’d been so fond of now that they’d come back in fashion lay shattered a few inches from his face. His left arm was bent at the elbow, the hand nearly to his lips as if he had suddenly thought of something the instant he died, and there, just a few inches from it, a broken martini glass.

  Teddy was the general handyman for Pride Lodge and had held different jobs there over the years. At one point he’d run the Karaoke bar, and he had done a year’s stint as the desk manager when Ricki had to go home to Memphis to take care of his ailing mother. For the past two years he had been helping Sid and Dylan upgrade the property, re-carpet the rooms, fix the many little things that had run down over the twenty-five years Pucky and Stu had the place. He had also been Kyle’s friend and reached out to him the previous year when he needed to talk to someone about his problems.

  “You take a lot of pictures, Kyle,” Teddy had said, one afternoon when they were alone in the Lodge’s great room.

  “I don’t know why,” Kyle replied. “I think I see the world in images. Even videos, which I don’t much care for, are just thousands of single images flashing in front of you.”

  “Do you ever talk to them?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The people you take pictures of. I’ve seen you. Very sly, the way you do that.”

  Kyle had blushed, having never been caught red handed before—or in this case red faced. He had indeed thought he was sly, clever in a way, getting realistic expressions of the faces of people who had no idea they were being photographed. It was a violation of sorts, he knew, and he was startled that Teddy, of all people, had the goods on him. He had known Teddy as the guy who came into their cabin room if something was broken, the handyman he saw around the property these past five years. But clearly he was an observer, too, and he’d caught Kyle at his own game.

  “Well, no,” Kyle said, waving Teddy over to the large couch in front of the bay window. Teddy came over and sat down, putting his coffee cup on a coaster on the side stand.

  “The point of taking pictures of people when they don’t know it, is that they don’t know it,” Kyle said.

  “Yeah, but I bet if you asked them they’d say yes anyway. And then you could talk to them, get to know them a little. The way you do it, you only ever know what you imagine.

  Kyle saw Teddy in a different light after that. Not that he had ever assumed Teddy wasn’t a man of substance, only that he hadn’t considered him the potential friend he became. They were never especially close; that’s hard to do when Kyle and Danny lived in Manhattan and Teddy lived at Pride Lodge. They only saw each other three times a year when the couple stayed there, but they emailed and sometimes they spoke on the phone, as they had just two nights before when Teddy told him he would be leaving the Lodge soon but didn’t want to discuss it on the phone.

  Kyle walked over to the two women who had moved away from the pool’s edge. The one busy thumbing the news of a dead body in a pool to her hundreds of Twitter followers didn’t look up. She was squat, with a distinctly wide bottom in stone-washed jeans a dark green hoody. Her hair was short, red and curly, and she wore a pair of pink cat-eye glasses, the most striking thing about her. The taller woman had a more evolved sense of style, with navy slacks, a turquoise blouse and a gray p-coat. She stood tall, her posture impeccable, and Kyle pegged her as a professional woman, someone aware of her appearance at all but the least guarded moments. She did not wear glasses, as so many of the Lodge guests did (it went with the demographic), and her hair was just going gray, most of it raven’s black and tied loosely back. She nodded at Kyle and extended her hand.

  “Eileen,” she said, shaking hands. “That’s Maggie. Don’t mind her, she thinks she’s a citizen journalist. Or sixteen, I’m never sure.”

  Maggie seemed unaware that her companion was talking to anyone, or that Kyle had come into their presence.

  “What happened?” Kyle said. “I didn’t hear an ambulance.”

  “There wasn’t a life to save, that’s my guess,” said Eileen. “I mean, he’s dead, you can tell that.”

  Kyle looked down into the pool and just then noticed a woman—a detective, he presumed—kneeling by the body as one paramedic climbed down the pool ladder while a second eased a gurney along from the shallow end.

  “It’s horrible,” Dylan said, coming over to them.

  “You saw it?” Kyle asked.

  “Nobody saw it! Sid was making his morning rounds and found him. I’m guessing he was drinking and slipped. I kept telling him to stop, you have to stop, Teddy, I just had a feeling it would end badly for him.”

  “Death by Appletini,” said Eileen.

  “I like that!” blurted Maggie, momentarily aware of her surroundings, then tweeting what she’d just heard.

  Dylan looked at him and discreetly shook his head: this was not something to discuss further in front of Lodge guests. The death alone might mean a change in plans. He had to think, he had to talk to Sid and see what they should do.

  Kyle watched as the detective stepped away from the body and allowed the paramedics to set up their gurney and go about removing poor Teddy
from the bottom of the lonely blue pool. He realized suddenly that the scene would soon change as the EMT workers removed the body; evidence that was there now might be gone or contaminated simply by being handled. He hurried over to the edge of the pool, aimed his camera down into it with a quick adjustment of the zoom, and took a half dozen photographs in rapid succession, moving very slightly each time to create, once he had the pictures in front of him, a wide, detailed view of the scene in the pool. As he was about to take a shot of Teddy’s body being moved to a stretcher, he felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling his arm away from the camera.

  “No photographs,” said a cop, the one Kyle had not noticed in the turmoil. “You from the news?”

  Kyle turned to the officer. He was older and heavy, probably not far from retirement, and Kyle wondered why he would still be a patrol cop. You didn’t usually see men of his age out from behind desks. His patrol car identified him as being from the New Hope Police Department. His hair was a gray crew-cut, and his nose was red and pitted as if he’d had a few too many Appletinis himself over the years.

  “No,” said Kyle. “I’m not in the media. I’m staying here at the Lodge. I just take pictures.”

  “Well not today, not here,” said the cop. And then, to all of them, “Don’t go far. Detective Sikorsky is going to want to speak to everyone.”

  “Is this a murder?” asked Maggie, no doubt hoping for something juicy to share on her social networks.

  “It’s not for anyone to say,” the cop said, “but frankly it looks like too many drinks and a step in the wrong direction.”

  This, Kyle knew, was not the case. At least, he was as sure of it as he could be, given Teddy’s history and the personal things he had shared with Kyle over the last year. Kyle hurried away from the group, back down the hill to Cabin 6 to get Danny out of bed and tell him what was happening. The lonely blue pool wasn’t lonely anymore.