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

by Mark McNease

  “A neighbor of Mr. Corcoran’s from Stockton, New Jersey, responded to our earlier report on a body found in the woods and called authorities. Apparently Mr. Corcoran has been missing for several days and the neighbor thought the description was familiar. The coroner is declining comment on a cause of death until an autopsy’s been performed. As you can see, police continue to search the area for evidence of just what happened here, and when. If you have any information about Happy Corcoran and his movements, please contact them immediately. All calls are kept confidential. This is Ellie Cameron from Philly6, back to you, Carlton.”

  Kyle hit the mute button. He and Danny both stared at the television, stunned.

  “That reporter’s a long way from Philly,” Danny said. “I think. I mean, where the hell is Chester Creek?”

  “Far enough from civilization that a body could lie there for days without anyone seeing it. And a body in a creek is news for a local Philadelphia station. It’s only an hour from here.”

  “This isn’t going to go well,” Danny said, and Kyle knew he meant at the Lodge. “We can’t be the only people who saw this. Poor Cowboy Dave. They had a thing, you know. Before Happy and Teddy. Or maybe at the same time, kids are like that.”

  “I didn’t know, but I guessed. The way Dave talked about him. So sad. And so mysterious. I mean, think about it. Happy goes missing three days ago. Teddy dies at the bottom of the pool yesterday.”

  “Do you want to check out?” Danny said. “Go back to the City?”

  Kyle looked at him, surprised. “God no, not now. I want to know what’s going on here. I want to talk to Detective Sikorsky.” He swung his legs around and sat up on the edge of the bed. He was wearing the red plaid pajama bottoms he always slept up. He slid his feet into the slippers Danny had given him. “And I want to do some research. Something about the exchange at dinner between Sid and that Bo woman, it was odd. And she said she wasn’t going to the bar last night but did, and left with the detective! I don’t know, I’m just curious. Please tell me you brought the laptop, I haven’t seen it out.”

  “It’s in the suitcase,” Danny said. “Have I ever forgotten it?”

  “Yes, in Key West.”

  “And you’ll never let me forget it. All those amazing photographs that had to wait for you to post on your blog until we got home. Consider it a lesson in patience.”

  Kyle got out of bed and walked over to the suitcase. He wanted his morning coffee and some time with a search engine.

  “You want the sound back on?” he asked.

  “Leave it off,” Danny said, sliding his papers to the side. “We’ve had enough excitement for now, and a lot more waiting up the hill.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Room 202

  The moon was so large the sight of it took Bo’s breath away as she glanced across the bed, out past the window into the night sky. The blackness of the heavens in the Pennsylvania countryside had struck her the first night here; before that, even, as she’d driven from St. Paul, along back roads, far away from city lights that stole the majesty of the stars. They were bare and innumerable here. She likened them to the beauty of the woman lying next to her, breathing gently in her sleep. She chose to ignore the irony of sleeping next to the very woman whose choices in life were her polar opposite: Linda Sikorsky, detective, seeker of facts, if not truth, justice personified as she followed and tracked and peered into puzzles, with her one goal of solving them and stopping even that small evil in the world. Bo Sweetzer, Emily Lapinsky as a child, a good person from all appearances, a woman set on revenge behind the goodness. She didn’t fool herself; while many people would say the men she’d killed had only got what they deserved, she knew in a society reliant on law and order that she, too, was a murderer. There were no degrees of murder and those who commit it: killing was killing, and here she was, a killer, watching someone she could so easily love, asleep and dreaming beside her, who would not hesitate to see her sentenced to a life behind bars.

  What was an assassin to do? Should she slip away now, so soon after first light? Should she abandon her mission, let the old man live, and try to build a life with this policewoman? A life of secrets and lies? Or should she—and this she knew to be the answer—complete the one true objective of her life: to silence the voices that had haunted her for thirty years, to put an end to the screams of a child watching her parents be coldly, brutally murdered. For a handful of cash. A television set. A watch. She sighed, knowing what she had to do, that she would be taking one life while setting free another, and that after the coming day she would never see this woman again, this woman whose shoulders she now leaned over gently and caressed.

  Bo rolled over in her empty bed and stared out the window, seeing it would be a sunny day. The clouds had moved on and left in their place a startling blue sky. She let the fantasy go, let it evaporate like morning dew, and was both amused and troubled by her willingness to think the unthinkable. Nothing had happened between them except in her imagination. It was just as well, since her imagination had always been a dark and lonely place. Only the men she exacted revenge upon belonged there.

  They had had coffee and pie at the Eagle Diner in New Hope. Bo admitted to herself she had wanted more—expected more, in the way we sometimes allow ourselves to think we are entitled to something simply because we wish it—but Sikorsky had not promised anything at all, spoken or unspoken, and she had not led Bo to believe their trip away from the Lodge was anything other than a friendly ride to a nearby diner for a private chat. That was something almost charming about people unsure of their own sexuality: they often didn’t realize there might be something suggestive in simply asking someone out for coffee. By the time they’d finished, however, Bo wasn’t so sure the detective was just curious, or that she hadn’t meant to send signals.

  It had started simply enough: Bo had been unable to sleep. After two hours of lying in bed in a dark room, staring at the ceiling, she decided to head to the piano bar and have something to drink. Non-alcoholic, since she seldom drank and had committed not to while she carried out her mission. But anything would help, and she’d hoped that being in the bar would distract her mind enough that after a while she could return to her room and sleep.

  She had never been a bar-goer. Bars unsettled her. They upended her sense of the world as essentially a lonely place where even two people who shared a life remained strangers in some ways. Quiet ways. Ways never spoken of, for saying them out loud might peel away the illusions so central to love and companionship. Bo had loved only once, and that, she’d come to know, was a mistake. As for companionship, it was dangerous. Even someone as tightly controlled as she was could let something slip; it was much better never to court error. But there she was, sitting on a stool at the Lodge’s bar, watching as some guests chatted and mingled in costumes, others in their street clothes. She recognized the lesbian couple Eileen and Maggie. Eileen didn’t notice her, and Maggie was busy once again reading something on her cell phone. The man Danny had so disliked—Lionel? Linus?—continued to hold court, this time around a small table with the two disciples who’d been at each arm since he arrived. The young boy-toy was nowhere in sight.

  She was halfway through her Ginger Ale when she felt someone come up behind her. She didn’t believe in a sixth-sense, but that we feel shifts in the air, or we manage to connect very distant dots and determine their destination point before they get there. Mysterious, yes, but not inexplicable. She just knew someone was behind her, and she swiveled around on her barstool. Much to her surprise she found Detective Linda Sikorsky not more than two feet away, as startled to have Bo turn around just then as Bo was to see her there. She was wearing jeans and a blouse, Bo noticed, looking much less like a cop and much more like the kind of women she imagined sought one another out in the bars she did not go to.

  “Hello, Ms. Sweetzer,” the detective said. She didn’t extend her hand, and already Bo could tell she was nervous, unsure if a handshake was called for or if w
ithholding it would be rude.

  “I prefer ‘Miss,’ actually,” Bo said. “I’ve never been a missus and the whole ‘Ms’ thing is too much of an artifice for me. Call me old-school.”

  Linda smiled, and Bo couldn’t tell if she was amused or pleased; possibly both.

  “Well, then, Miss Sweetzer, how are you enjoying your evening? Have you been here before?”

  Bo was suddenly suspicious. She’d told the detective in their morning interview that she had never been to Pride Lodge before. She wondered if the approach was just part of the job, or if Linda Sikorsky was trying to trip her up for some reason.

  “Oh, wait, you told me that,” Linda said, shaking her head at her own forgetfulness. “Even cops forget things.”

  And she’s a mind-reader, too, Bo thought. I like this woman.

  “I tried to go to sleep,” Bo said. “I’m not really a party person, or a bar person, but I am an insomniac on occasion. This was one of those occasions. I figured a drink might settle my mind down.”

  Linda looked at the half-empty glass on the counter in front of Bo. “May I get you another?” she asked.

  “It’s only soda. Not the sort of thing that makes you want more.”

  There was a moment of silence that quickly grew awkward, and Bo realized that Linda wasn’t very skilled in these situations. Chasing down criminals she could do very well, but striking up and maintaining a conversation with another woman in a gay bar? Not so used to that.

  “How about some coffee?” Linda said.

  Bo burst out laughing.

  “What? What did I say?”

  “You just asked an insomniac if she’d like a cup of coffee.”

  “And I forgot you’d never been here,” Linda said, embarrassed. “Strike two. But maybe I meant decaf. Yes! I meant decaf! And a piece of pie . . . unless sugar keeps you up, too.”

  Bo thought about it a moment.

  “Not here,” Linda said. “The kitchen’s closed down anyway. But there’s a restaurant not far from here, the Eagle Diner. Twenty-four hour place. It’d give you a chance to see a little more of the area.”

  “In the dark.”

  “Well, yeah. But that’s not a bad way to see it. We could come across some deer in the headlights.”

  Bo wondered who was the deer, and who was the headlights. Sikorsky was clearly a very intelligent woman, and she might yet have questions in mind to ask Bo that Bo would not answer, at least not truthfully. But she couldn’t sleep, and she found the detective attractive, and she was very skilled at only revealing what she wanted people to see. So why not?

  “Let’s go,” Bo said, sliding off the stool. “I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather end the night than at the Eagle Diner. Unless that’s not where it ends.”

  She saw the sudden flush in Linda’s face: Bo had her number, and the detective knew it. “Relax,” she said. “I was just having some fun. Now let’s go get that pie! They have ice cream there?”

  “It’s a diner,” Linda said. “Of course they do.”

  The two women headed out of the bar. Cowboy Dave watched them go and smiled: another romance blossoming at Pride Lodge. He’d seen more than a few.

  The Eagle Diner was on Highway 202, a stone’s throw from the Giant grocery store and just up the road from the Raven, a gay hotel, restaurant and gathering place that had been there for decades, with the occasional interruption. They knew each other, of course, the Raven and Pride Lodge, and had remained friendly as long they’d both been in business. Pride Lodge was more out of the way, and people who stayed there tended not to be the same customers who would stay at the Raven. There had never been any real rivalry between the two: there were enough gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender patrons to keep them both operating this long. Throw in the Q’s, I’s, and any letters not yet added to the acronym, and business should stay brisk for years to come.

  Bo’s suspicions that Linda Sikorsky was somehow on to her vanished quickly enough once they were seated in a booth. The diner had quite a few customers even this close to midnight, and the two women did not stand out in any way. They’d each ordered apple pie and coffee (Bo had started to suggest one pie, two forks, but thought better of it) and were several bites in when Sikorsky made her motives known.

  “I’ve lived in this area all my life,” she said, glancing around nervously to make sure no one was eavesdropping. She was well-known enough in New Hope that she had to always be aware someone might recognize her. “I’m thirty-six years old. Everybody knows me.”

  “And everybody thinks you’re a lesbian,” Bo said.

  Linda stared at her, taken aback. While she wasn’t going to state it that way—unsure exactly how she would state it—that’s what she was thinking and trying to articulate.

  “But you’re not,” Bo continued. “Or you’re not sure, and what better way to crystallize it for yourself than ask a real one out for coffee and advice.”

  “You’re either a cop,” said Linda, laughing nervously, “or a psychic.” She paused a moment. “I don’t suppose you’re wondering, why you.”

  “I know why me. Because I’m cute! Shorter than you, about the right age, Minnesota nice, and, from your own notes, I’m sure, single.”

  “I’ve never dated a woman,” Linda said. “I’ve thought about it. My father’s dead and my mother lives alone in Philly. It’s not like I have to worry what they’ll think of me. And my only sibling is a brother who lives in New York City with a man twenty years older than him that he calls his benefactor. Who the hell cares if I’m a lesbian? Which I’m not saying I am, since it’s hard to say when you’ve never done anything but imagine it.”

  “Well,” said Bo gently, “you’re free to imagine it all you want to with me. I won’t ask you to act on it.” And she winked. “Not tonight.”

  Linda visibly relaxed. She had fantasized for years having this conversation with someone, but she had honestly never thought the right time—or the right woman—would come. If she were simply blunt with herself she would say yes, Linda, you’re attracted to women, and that pretty much makes you a lesbian, but she had not been honest. She had clung to uncertainty as a way of avoiding having to come clean: to her friends, who probably already knew, to her neighbors, and to her colleagues—the people she dreaded telling most. It was a small force, and she knew, she truly knew, they would think just as highly of her after she came out as they had the moment before, and that they would probably start trying to line her up with dates. Marriage was a reality for same-sex couples these days, even if they had to travel out of state to do it, and knowing the people she worked with every day, a few of them would expect to be invited to her wedding, the sooner the better.

  “You’re here until when?” Linda asked. “Just in case I have a few more questions about the investigation, of course.”

  “Of course,” Bo said. “I’m set to check out Sunday, but who knows, I kind of like the place, I might want to stay a few days and see more. If it’s got an Eagle Diner, I can only imagine what else is going on here.”

  The two women laughed. Bo felt her heart sink, suddenly, painfully conscious of the lie she’d told and what it meant. She would never see Linda Sikorsky again after tonight. She intended to see her mission through to its deadly conclusion and be gone well before Sunday’s first light flooded the sky. Unless . . .

  “Are you coming to the party tomorrow?” Bo asked. “The Halloween party?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” Linda replied, and she waved at the waitress for the check. “But now I’m thinking maybe. I don’t have a costume.”

  “Come as Cupid,” Bo said, smiling. “It’s a natural fit.”

  Bo wondered why she was doing this to herself, asking a woman she clearly desired to come back the next night, the night she planned to claim her final revenge and go. You’re slipping, Bo, she told herself, all the while smiling as Dottie, the waitress, left the check on the table between them. Maybe you don’t have the heart for it, maybe you want a
happy ending after all. She felt a sting in her eyes—an unfamiliar fall for a woman who had not cried in thirty years, and she quickly looked away. It wouldn’t matter if the cop came, it wouldn’t matter how she felt about Bo or how she made Bo feel. The die had been cast in that bedroom three decades ago, and there was only one roll left. So let her come, let her think Bo had made a fool of her as she vanished in the night, let her never know the truth and how high its price.

  Linda slid out of the booth and started to reach for Bo’s hand. She happened to look over and see and old straight couple she had known for years, used her hand to wave to them instead, and led the way out.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Past Catches Up

  Kyle hit a dead end in his internet searching. He’d been unable to find anything about Sid Stanhope until he ran across a group picture from a bank office in Newark. It was Sid alright, fifteen years younger but identifiable. And years later the items about Pride Lodge. Kyle realized Sid was not the type to spend much time online. He doubted he was on Facebook and he probably thought tweeting was something baby birds did when they were hungry. He had hit a dead end until he started thinking again about the odd, tense exchange between Sid and Bo at the restaurant. Maybe he was looking in the wrong direction, for the wrong person. Maybe she was a better lead to follow. Letting his hunch take him where it may, he started looking into Bo Sweetzer. BoAndBehold, pleasant jewelry designer from St. Paul. Ten minutes into his search he found the same article Sid had found and his breath stopped. Bo Sweetzer was not who she had always been. Once upon a time she’d been a young child named Emily Lapinsky, living far from St. Paul.

  Kyle’s pulse accelerated as he jumped from one link to the next, one dot to the next, connecting them at digital speed. He was reading what little he could find from so long ago when up popped a website called DeathWatchLA. At first glance it appeared to just be lurid, tabloid fodder: morgue photos of dead celebrities, macabre stories of people murdered in sudden, gruesome acts of violence. It wasn’t until he read the “about” section and saw that there had been a print predecessor, that in fact the website was based on a cheaply produced throwaway newspaper that hadn’t been much more than a flyer in the 1980s, and that there were scanned PDF copies of the old issues available for $4.99 each (PayPal or credit card accepted), that he knew he might be onto something. He quickly got his Visa and randomly selected a dozen old issues, dating back to 1980. He was halfway through them, having read six without finding anything that struck him, when he came upon the Lapinsky murders. A burglary gone horribly wrong, involving a trio of thieves. The Los Feliz Gang, as the media dubbed them. Three men, a dead husband and wife, and a daughter who had escaped execution by hiding in the closet. There was a photo showing her in a Catholic school girl’s uniform.