Death by Pride: A Kyle Callahan Mystery

by Mark McNease

  “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.

  D was just about to leave the store when Jarrod said, “Did you see the news this morning?”

  D stopped halfway to the door. He knew he’d made a mistake giving into his impulse with Victor, but he knew, too, that Jarrod would never connect his boss with what happened.

  “I’m afraid I did not,” D said.

  “A young man was found dead in the East River early Tuesday morning.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, and there was something very familiar about him. They showed his picture on the news. I’d swear he was here the other day.”

  D, his back to Jarrod, said, “He may have been. We get so much traffic some days, Jarrod, I can’t remember everyone who walks in the door.”

  Jarrod thought a moment, trying to remember. “Victor, they said. That was his name. Victor something.”

  “Victor something.” D’s voice was flat and emotionless. “That’s quite an unusual name. Now I really must be going. I leave the store in your capable hands, as always.”

  “As always!”

  The compliment worked, distracting Jarrod’s attention away from the news and a man
he vaguely remembered seeing in the store.

  “Memory plays tricks on us all, Jarrod. I’d think nothing of it.”

  “No, Sir, I won’t. Good luck with the new client.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it.” D glanced at his reflection in the store window and walked out onto Lexington Avenue. June had brought the first real warmth of the season. For a moment he held his face up to the sky, appreciating the sun and the clearness of the day, then he began walking west.

  CHAPTER Seven

  The television studio for Japan TV3 was originally a garment factory, an outlier in what was once a thriving industry in New York City. Fifty years ago, and for many preceding decades, fabrics were central to Manhattan’s industrial machine. Long contained in an area called the garment district that stretches from Sixth to Ninth Avenues east-to-west and between 34th and 40th Streets south-to-north, it still serves as a center of fashion, with some of the world’s leading designers maintaining factories, but the days of clothing the world are long gone. Shirts, dresses and all other kinds of clothes are now made for a few dollars by people earning pennies in places like Indonesia, Thailand and Bangladesh. But when “Made in America” was the norm, the factory that now housed a Japanese-owned television studio and its offices was humming with the sounds of sewing machines and the silence of an army of workers whose job was to sew, not talk.

  Kyle explained all this to Linda as they walked the last few blocks along Ninth Avenue and turned left at 38th, heading west another long block. Linda was impressed if not quite dazzled by the sheer number of people in this city. She also noticed, as Kyle had when he first moved here, the tendency people had to move quickly for no apparent reason. They seemed to maneuver more than walk, each wanting an advantage over the rest in terms of how quickly they got where they were going.

  “Why’s everyone in such a hurry?” Linda asked as they reached the studio.

  “Because they think they have to be,” Kyle said. “You can sense it the moment you get back into Manhattan from anywhere, this rush everyone’s in.”

  “And they do it all without seeing where they’re going!” She was referring to the omnipresence of smartphones, headsets and ear buds. Almost everyone had one, their eyes fixed on tiny screens in their hands, their ears plugged and deadened by music, their thumbs twitching out text messages and emails. They had all this in rural New Jersey, too, but it was decidedly slower there. Even New Hope, which was as big-city as it got around the area where Linda lived, wasn’t nearly as visibly distracted and manic as this.

  Kyle held the door for Linda and followed her into the studio. It was like many buildings in this part of the city, architecturally interesting on the outside, with its century-old brickwork and large windows, but basically a series of boxes on the inside. The exception was the second floor studio, which had been divided into three units where programs were made for a mostly-Tokyo audience. The offices where Kyle worked were on the third floor, with the first floor given to nondescript and unidentified rooms.

  “What’s on the first floor?” Linda asked.

  “I have no idea,” Kyle replied. “You can spend years in a building here and not know who your neighbors are.” He waved at Franklin, the security guard by the front door who had never been required to secure anything and whose waking state only appeared different from his sleeping state because his eyes were open.

  Kyle led them past the elevator to the stairs and opened the stairwell door.

  “Aren’t we taking the elevator?” Linda asked.

  “It’s broken.”

  “For how long?”

  “Oh, about six months. Don’t worry, you won’t be winded. It’s only two flights up.”

  Kyle walked up the stairs carrying a bag with coffee and a bagel for Imogene, and a cup of fruit for their station manager, Lenny-san. He was Jewish but everyone called him that because the bosses in Tokyo did. Kyle, however, had never been Kyle-san.

  They reached the third floor and Kyle opened the door, ushering Linda onto a brightly lit floor that looked like a million others in offices everywhere. It was an open seating plan, with a maze of cubicles. Only Lenny-san had an office. Linda followed along as Kyle headed down one row of cubes, turned left at the far wall and walked down another row identical to the one they’d just passed. Finally, in the southwest corner, he reached the cubicle he’d spent his workdays in for the last six years. Next to it, unmistakably, was Imogene Landis’s. She had installed tall plants at the entrance to her cube and strung a row of blinking lights. Had she not been one of the stars of the operation none of this would be tolerated and Imogene would surely have left, even if it meant stringing her lights and watering her plants at home while she collected unemployment.

  “Oh! My! God!” Imogene shouted when she saw him. “You’re on vacation, Kyle, what the fuck are you doing here?” Imogene was known for her loudness and her inappropriate language. “Don’t tell me you came here to bring me coffee and a bagel!”

  Linda noticed that Imogene tended to exclaim everything.

  “Oh, wait, of course!” Imogene said, jumping up out of her chair. “You came to introduce me to … to …”

  “Detective Linda,” Kyle said. Linda was retired but had stopped correcting him months ago.

  “Detective Linda,” Imogene said, putting her hand out. “The Detective Linda. You solved the Pride Lodge murders.”

  Linda demurred. “Well, yes and no. I investigated them.”

  “That’s right, that’s right. The killer got away.”

  “One of them,” Kyle said. “But we’re not here to talk about that. I wanted to show Linda where I worked, and to introduce you.”

  Imogene Landis was diminutive and thin, a pixie of a woman with an outsized voice and an even bigger personality. She was wearing red cat-eyes glasses attached to a black necklace around her neck. When she was in front of the camera or out in public—anywhere but the office and at home—the glasses came off. She would prefer to see the world through blurred vision than have the world know she needed corrective lenses.

  “Where’s Lenny-san?” Kyle asked, looking at the empty office with its lights off. “I brought him some fruit.”

  Lenny-san had been on a diet for several years, the length of it extended because he would have his fruit and top it off with a chocolate croissant he’d snuck in in his briefcase.

  “I can’t say,” Imogene said. “He doesn’t tell me when he’s coming in late. He’ll be here. Just leave the fruit with me, unless you plan on staying awhile.”

  “No,” said Kyle. “Just a few minutes. It is my vacation day and I’d rather not get roped into anything.”

  “I’d love to get roped into something,” Imogene said. She was always looking out for the next big story. The Pride Lodge murders were fading into memory and she needed something explosive. “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing,” Kyle said. He was concerned about being waylaid and was already thinking they shouldn’t have come. He was a loyal assistant, but that came with a cost. Imogene emailed him and called him at all hours, and as often as she’d promised not to, she still did it out of habit.

  “There was a news item this morning,” Linda said.

  Kyle shot her a glance and Linda realized her mistake.

  “What news item was that?” Imogene took her coffee and bagel from Kyle and set it on her desk.

  “Nothing.”

  She looked at him like a cat eyeing a toy. “Come on, Kyle, you know something.”

  “I don’t know anything. It was just a body found in the river.”

  “Oooooh, I like that.”

  Imogene was not heartless, she was simply driven. She knew dead bodies did not get their feelings hurt, so she kept it honest. Dead bodies in rivers were interesting, depending on how they got there.

  “Fine,” Kyle said. “But it’s your story to run with. I’m not working on it with you, I’m not calling sources, I wasn’t even here this morning. You’re imagining me.�
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  “Deal. Just some details, that’s all, I’ll take it from there.”

  “Well,” Kyle said, “I don’t know if you remember the Pride Killer.”

  “Of course I do. He killed people every Gay Weekend or something.”

  “Pride weekend. It’s not called ‘Gay Weekend.’”

  “Am I not supposed to say ‘gay’ anymore? I can’t keep up with the language, it all becomes offensive to someone so quickly.”

  Kyle sighed. Imogene was hopeless in some ways, amazing in others. He looked at Linda, who had decided to lean against the outer cubicle wall and watch it all with amusement.

  “The Pride Killer did his killing for three or four years in June every year, coinciding with the Pride festivities. Yes, they’re gay. They’re a lot of other things too, including the time of year he terrorized the gay community. Then, three years ago, he stopped. He was never caught, obviously. The police never even had any suspects, unless they kept that to themselves. We thought he’d died or gone to prison for something else, or simply moved away. But a body was found in the East River early Tuesday morning and I’m convinced he’s back.”

  “Good, good,” Imogene said. She had grabbed a reporter’s notebook and pen and was quickly jotting things down in her own indecipherable scribble. “Not good that someone’s dead, of course, but the good start to a story. What else do you know?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Goddamn her, Kyle thought. Maybe getting this close to anyone was a mistake. Only Danny could read him that easily and quickly.

  “Okay,” Kyle said. “So the young man he killed was the brother of our doorman.”

  “Can you get me an interview?”

  “No! You’re out of your mind. For one thing, he’s been on leave the past two nights, for obvious reasons. For another … no … you can’t interview him. At least not through me.”