by Mark McNease
Chapter Five
Room 202
The woman whose name had once been Emily watched the scene play out poolside from her second-floor window. The sound of the ambulance and police arriving had woken her fully up, even though no sirens had blared. Before then she’d been lying in bed in a half-dream state, remembering the shock on the man’s face in Detroit and how sorry he had professed to be, so very sorry for what he believed had been a momentary lapse in judgment. Killing her parents while she cowered in a closet, it seemed, was what he considered a bad split decision. So convinced was he of his own powers of persuasion that he readily gave up the names of the other two men, and while not all three had stayed in contact the connection had never been completely lost. Tracing one to the other would not be difficult and he would in fact be happy to help her, something for which he would need to be alive. She thanked him for the offer and shot him in the head, just like that.
“Oh,” she said to his corpse on the couch, his head thrown back with a bullet hole above the left eye, as she slipped her father’s watch into her pocket, “I kept the gun, too.”
She wished she could say that killing a man was the last thing she could imagine herself doing, but it was the one thing she had imagined every day for thirty years. She had fantasized it, prepared for it, and now, in a shabby apartment in a dilapidated city, she had done it. The only thing that surprised her as she collected her things and wiped down what few fingerprints she may have left, was how plain it felt, how anticlimactic. It was, she realized sadly, as cool and unemotional as it must have been for the man she’d just killed to murder her parents. At least she knew now she could do it, and would do it twice more. She saw that Frank used a laptop and she took that on her way out. She didn’t believe there was any way to trace what little correspondence she’d had with this man from an anonymous email account, but she might as well throw his computer in the river for good measure.
She shook off the memories and made a cup of coffee with the machine in her room, then stood by the window and watched the commotion at the pool, standing to the side so no one looking up would see her. She had heard no argument outside the night before or in the pre-dawn, no noise at all, and she wondered how the man managed to die at the bottom of the empty pool without making a sound. She guessed it would be seen as an accident, but she had her doubts about that. It was so clean and neat, with a feeling of deliberateness about it. Could it possibly have something to do with her mission here? Might the hunted be doing some hunting himself? If that was the case, then he knew about his old friends in Detroit and Los Angeles and he was making moves of his own. Good, she thought, blowing on the hot coffee. Let him worry. Worried men make mistakes.
She set her cup on the dresser top and headed to the closet, taking out her clothes for the day, meditating on what an interesting weekend it was going to be.
Chapter Six
Cabin 6
As much as Danny prodded Kyle to leave Imogene and the job behind, he was guilty of always being on duty himself, even if it meant only thinking about the job. He sat at the small round table provided in each room, sipped his own single-serving cup of coffee and reviewed plans for a very special private luncheon at Margaret’s Passion the following Wednesday. Margaret was turning 80 and a select who’s-who of city politics, entertainment and culture were on the guest list. There would be toasts from Broadway legends as well as the mayor, and the cake was being made by culinary icon Billy Cervette himself, repaying the loyalty he’d had for Margaret since she gave him his start twenty years ago. The list was short—only sixty people—and already there had been rumblings of displeasure from the names left off. Each of them would receive a sincere apology from Margaret, written and sent out by Danny, explaining that it was a space issue, no offense was intended. Margaret’s Passion had been famous for years for how difficult it could be to get into, since it only had ten tables of four and ten of two: the math was easy enough, and there was simply no way to accommodate more, as much as she wished there had been since each and every one meant so very much to her. Danny had crafted the apology with exceeding care; it did not do to offend anyone at any point in their career, since a year from now they could be nominated for a Tony or taking an oath of office.
He was drifting off into thoughts of Margaret and how close they’d become since he started working for her. So close he did not mention it to his own mother; while he knew one was his mother and the other his employer, emotions, jealousy among them, were tricky things. Margaret had taken him under her wing, much as she had a young chef named Billy Cervette, but Billy had gone on to international fame while Danny had stayed, spending his work life and a fair amount of his private life one floor down from where Margaret had lived for thirty-five years, fifteen of them as a widow. Why me, Danny wondered, when there must have been others she could have all but adopted. It was the way their personalities clicked. She humored his eccentricities, much the way Kyle did now. She listened patiently to his occasional tirade at something gone wrong in the restaurant, which he would express to her rather than take out on the staff. She had welcomed Kyle into both their lives as if he was the complement to everything Danny was. She understood, too, about the mother issue, and she had always been careful not to give the impression that she misunderstood the boundaries. Danny’s aging parents lived in Astoria, and more than once over the last ten years Danny had asked Margaret for advice and she had suggested he speak to his mother. He and Kyle took the N train to Astoria every Sunday for mid-day dinner unless they were travelling. Danny remained sensitive to Eleanor Durban’s feelings and left Margaret out of conversation when they were there.
Danny had just finished his coffee when Kyle came into the cabin, his manner flustered and urgent.
“He’s dead,” Kyle said, taking the camera from around his neck and dropping it onto the bed.
“Who’s dead?” asked Danny. “What are you talking about?”
Kyle crossed around the bed and sat on the corner nearest to Danny.
“I should have called him last night. He wasn’t right, something was going on, he told me that. Why didn’t I just pick up the phone and call?”
“Is this Teddy you’re talking about? What do you mean, he’s dead?”
Kyle sighed, staring out the window into the woods beyond. He felt as if he were still trying to wake up, that the morning’s events had been a dream and if he just closed his eyes tightly enough he would open them to a different reality, one in which he and Danny were having their usual weekend at Pride Lodge and death was no part of it.
“Yes, Teddy,” Kyle said. “At the bottom of the pool.”
“Drowned?!”
“No! There’s no water in it this time of year, they empty it for the winter.”
Danny thought about it a moment, imagining poor Teddy falling twelve feet into an empty concrete pool. “That’s terrible.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Kyle declared, standing up suddenly and going to the coffee machine. “That’s what they’ll say, but I don’t believe it.”
“You’re getting way ahead of things,” Danny said. “Why would you think it wasn’t an accident?”
“Because of the martini glass,” Kyle said. He held his camera out and scanned the photographs he’d just taken at the pool until he found the one that struck him. There at the bottom of the pool, near the drain that had collected leaves, was the broken glass. He hadn’t realized what was off about it until he was on his way back to the cabin. “Teddy didn’t drink anymore, and he never drank martinis. He was a bourbon man, Danny. If he was going to take a dive off the wagon, he would have done it with something he liked drinking. It just proves that he didn’t!”
“Oh,” said Danny. He knew about Teddy’s struggles with drinking and hated to disillusion Kyle.
“He stopped drinking six months ago,” Kyle continued, “precisely because of this sort of thing. He didn’t want to die an alcoholic’s death. Drunk behind the wheel of a car, killed by so
meone he picked a fight with in a blackout . . . dead at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. He saw it coming if he didn’t stop. Those were his exact words to me. ‘I see it coming, Kyle, and it’s ugly. I’ve had enough ugly in my life, I don’t want it to end that way.’“
Danny walked over to Kyle and gently put his hand on his shoulder. “I don’t want to disappoint you . . . “
Kyle knew what Danny was going to say and stopped him. “He did not relapse, Danny, I know he didn’t. He had support, he had his AA meetings, and when he called me the other day about coming here he was sober as a judge, although where anybody got the idea judges were sober . . . I even asked him, Danny. I said, ‘You’re not going to drink over this, whatever it is, right?’ No, no, he was sure of it, he needed his wits about him, he said. I know he didn’t drink.”
“Can you at least allow for the possibility?” Danny said carefully. “Maybe that was the big news he had and he couldn’t bear to tell you on the phone.” He saw the hurt in Kyle’s expression and wished he didn’t have to say this. “I never had anything against Teddy. I didn’t know him, and you know I don’t make judgments about people I don’t know. But his drinking, Kyle . . . “
It was true. Not only did everyone know Teddy from his years at the Lodge, but they all knew Teddy was a drunk. He would get his work done well enough, and the man was universally liked, but there was also an element of pity to how people felt about him. He most often greeted guests with a telltale whiff of bourbon on his breath, and too many times he’d been found passed out on one of the sofas in the Lodge’s great room or downstairs in one of the bar’s green leather booths. Then, after reaching out to Kyle, who’d done some research and connected Teddy with an AA group in New Hope, he started to get sober. It took time, with a few false starts, but Teddy had been sober for six months when he was found dead that morning. Kyle was convinced of it. Teddy had turned a crucial corner and there was no way in hell he was going to end his life with a broken neck and a shattered martini glass next to him, unless someone else ended it for him.
“I don’t really want to go over this again,” Kyle said. “I know you didn’t like him calling me in the middle of the night—“
“He should have been calling his AA friends at that hour. His sponsor, whatever. You’re not part of that circle.”
“I was his friend,” Kyle said. “That was enough. At least until last night.”
“This is not your fault,” Danny said. “It was late, too late to return anyone’s phone call, they wouldn’t expect it.”
“No one but Teddy.”
“Listen, if you want to beat yourself up over this you can, it’s one of your favorite pastimes, but you did not have any part in Teddy’s death simply because you didn’t call him back last night.”
“Fine, fine,” Kyle said. “We should get ready and go.”
“Where?” asked Danny, thinking for a moment that Kyle wanted to check out and return to Manhattan.
“Up to the Lodge. There’s a detective up there. She wants to talk to the guests and staff, anyone who was here when it happened.”
“They know when it happened?”
“It happened,” Kyle said, taking his coffee cup and heading toward the bathroom, “when Teddy needed someone most and no one was there.”
Danny sighed and let it go as Kyle closed the bathroom door behind him. He knew there was no changing Kyle’s mind once he had decided to believe something against all evidence—in this case that he could have prevented Teddy’s death with a phone call. He knew, too, that Kyle would not stop chewing on this bone until he got to the very marrow of it.
Danny put away the seating chart and menu for Margaret’s 80th birthday luncheon and set about preparing for what he suspected was going to be a very long weekend.
Chapter Seven
Detective Sikorsky
Detective Linda Sikorsky was the only detective on the New Hope police force. The town’s population was a mere 2,525 in the latest census, though it was a well known and popular tourist destination (some who lived there would say trap), and the actual number of bodies in town would increase several fold on warm sunny days. Linda had endured the initial resentment from her colleagues after being promoted into the position two years before, following the retirement of the city’s last detective. A few of the others on the force didn’t take to the idea of a less senior member of their ranks stepping into a job they thought should go to one of them; add to that some unspoken resentment over the job going to a woman and she had her challenges, to say the least. No one dared say aloud that her gender played a role in any opposition to her, but Linda Sikorsky was no fool. She had a lifetime of experience as a woman in a world that in many ways was still a man’s and knew well the subtle discrimination that went on, the doubts and silent skepticism men had about their female colleagues, especially their female superiors.
Some things never change, she thought, finishing notes from her last interview with the desk clerk Ricki . . . what was his last name, she wondered, flipping back through her notepad . . . Hernandez. Ricki Hernandez. Skittish man, she thought, but not in a guilty way. More hyper than anxious, a subtle but distinct difference. It probably made him good at his various jobs. It must take a tremendous amount of energy, she thought, to be a desk clerk during the day in a busy hotel, or resort, or whatever they called the place, and a restaurant hostess at night. He had explained to her that he was not a drag queen, necessarily, and not transgender or transsexual. He had leaned over and whispered, glancing around to make sure no one could hear him, “I’m a transvestite. I know I’m not supposed to say that, it’s very politically incorrect these days, but I like the word. It comes from vestments, clothes, you see. Trans-clothes. It’s elegant, really, I don’t know why people think it’s some kind of bad word.” He explained that he liked the particular character he’d made up as the hostess, also conveniently named Ricki. He had invented her, he said, after the woman who used to do the job went ex-gay and just stopped showing up for work. (He knew about the ex-gay part because she had gone on to write a book and cash in as a motivational speaker for self-hating gay people, despite continued sightings of her at Manhattan’s Wild Orchid and other well-known lesbian hotspots on the East Coast.) Her name was Leslie and she went by LaLa until she was saved from the homosexual lifestyle and went on a book tour. One afternoon Leslie/LaLa resigned with an angry phone call to Pucky, after not having been to work for a week, and warned him of the danger to his soul. He thanked her and asked Ricki to fill in at the restaurant. Ricki had the idea then and there to do the job as a hostess and had been doing it ever since. He looked wonderful in his gowns and wigs inspired by Ginger from Gilligan’s Island and he took a no-camp approach, so successfully that some people new to the Lodge asked who that woman was seating people for dinner, unaware it was the man who had checked them in that afternoon.
Linda Sikorsky was tall, nearly six feet in flat shoes (another reason some of the men at the precinct had been intimidated by her). She was also, as her grandmother would say, a big-boned gal. Someone less kind would say hefty, and she really didn’t care what description was used. She thought of herself as ample, plenty, abundant in size, competence and dedication to the job. A formidable foe to any criminal who thought New Hope and its citizens were easy marks. She wore minimal makeup, having always thought it must have been invented by men as a form of torture; her hair was dark blonde and had once been long, but she’d learned to keep it short in police work—one less thing for a bad guy to grab hold of. She wore glasses, but only for reading, and she pushed them up on her nose as Kyle walked over and took the seat across from her.
She’d been interviewing guests and staff at an out of the way table in the restaurant she had chosen strategically for its window view of the pool below. She wanted to gauge the reactions, subtle or obvious, of people who sat across from her and could see where the death had taken place. A lot could be learned from how some averted their gaze, or how hard they tri
ed not to. Normally the restaurant would be serving breakfast, but Dylan had told the twins Austin and Dallas, who had both worked at Pride Lodge since their days of filling in for summer work, to offer people a continental breakfast in the great room. Now in their mid-twenties, their youth was less a novelty than the fact they were identical twins, providing ornamentation as much as table service. They had not been there when the body was found, but did as they were asked and steered the few early morning guests looking for food into the great room.
“Please, have a seat,” she said to Kyle, motioning to the chair opposite her at the small table for two. She did not stand or offer her hand. “And you would be?”
“I’m not sure who I would be,” Kyle said dryly, “but I am Kyle Callahan.”
She smiled so slightly Kyle wasn’t sure she had.
“Not the best view,” he said, nodding at the window and the pool below. He had brought his camera with him and set it on the table. “It’s only been an hour and a half since they took poor Teddy away. Death by shove? Assisted falling?”
“Well, I’m not convinced there’s a lot going on here. A man drinks too much near an empty pool . . .”
“It wasn’t an accident,” he said, and he motioned for Dallas, who had been standing near the entry clearly trying to eavesdrop. “Could I get some coffee?” And to Sikorsky, “Do you mind?”
“Not at all. Then he’ll be free to leave the room,” she said, tapping her ear to indicate the young man had been listening in.
Dallas scurried away to fetch Kyle’s coffee. Kyle wanted to get a good look at this detective, scan her, so to speak, and see what conclusions he might draw, but she wouldn’t look down or away. He quickly experienced her unnerving habit of looking directly at him. He assumed she did this with everyone and that it was some kind of interrogation technique meant to unsettle the people she spoke to.