The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3 (30 page)

Chapter 27

The Katherine Pride Gallery

T
he back office
of the Katherine Pride Gallery had once been a utility closet. Kate had expanded it to twice the size, which made it just large enough for a small metal desk, two folding chairs and a water cooler that held a five-gallon jug. This was where many a hopeful artist first learned she would be stepping into the limelight with the blessing and support of one of Manhattan’s most experienced art dealers. Kate Pride had been around long enough to be considered part of the establishment, but not long enough to be irrelevant. She knew the day was coming when she would be seen as entirely Old Guard and she didn’t care. She loved sitting in this little office at her small gallery meeting new creative minds, welcoming new talent into the world.

“So,” Linda said, sitting in the visitor’s chair to the side of Kate’s desk. “Here’s what we’re thinking.”

“We? You have a partner?” Kate asked.

She glanced at her phone, noticing the red “message” light was on. Probably a call from her husband; they were set to have lunch again that afternoon.

Linda blushed at the question about a partner. She had several: Kirsten McLellan in New Hope, Bryan Frazier on the force, not technically a partner but the one other cop she’d really bonded with, and Kyle Callahan.

“Kyle,” she said.

“Photographer Kyle?”

“Yes, that Kyle, the one who has a show here Friday night.”

“He solves murders?”

Kate could tell Linda was becoming frustrated. “Sorry, I just had no idea. What is it you’re thinking, you and Kyle?”

Linda reached for her tote bag, the one she’d bought at Grand Central with the subway map stenciled on it, and took out the New Year New Visions catalog. She placed it on the desk. “Someone involved, somehow, with the New Visions show is very unhappy and taking it out on the others.” She looked gravely at Kate. “That could include you, Ms. Pride.”

“Kate, please.”

“Kate. After all, you’re the ringmaster, if I may put it that way. I need to know what became of the others, the ones who aren’t dead as far as we know, and especially the ones we’ll never know at all.”

Kate took the catalog and opened to the front. She remembered the artists very well. That year’s New Visions show had been one of her most successful, in terms of launching the artists’ careers. The show had become quite the hot ticket every January; style pages and art blogs across the city started anticipating the show as early as October, speculating on who might be included and what waves they would send through art circles.

“The graffiti couple are in Paris,” Kate said. “I just read about them in Le Monde. That’s the French paper. I don’t speak it well but I can read fair enough. I’m a Francophile, what can I say. Suzanne DePris is in Seattle last I heard, and Javier Velasco’s in Argentina.”

“You know this for a fact? That they’re all alive and well?

“I don’t know if they’re well, that’s a very broad term, but it’s easy enough to find them and ask them.”

“That’s my next stop,” Linda said. “Back to the hotel for research, then meeting Kyle at an event he went to. I’m very much in need of some answers by then. What about the ones you rejected?”

Kate closed the catalog and handed it back to Linda. “There weren’t any,” she said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

Linda put the catalog back in her bag. “How does it work then? I can’t imagine you accept everyone who wants to be in the show.”

“It’s not a matter of acceptance or rejection. I find
them
, you see. Everybody knows about the New Year New Visions show, it’s gotten a lot of attention, and people do try to persuade me, mostly agents and dealers. Some of the artists, sure. But my policy is also very well known. No one gets rejected because I do the asking. Submissions are not accepted. The New Year New Visions is an invitation-only show.”

Invitation
-
only
. No one gets rejected.
The information didn’t so much change things as narrow it. Detective Linda now knew she was looking at a smaller field, more limited choices. It had to be someone connected to the artists who had been in the show.

The thought hit her like ice water in the face.
What if it was one of the artists who
was
in the show
? What if success had not come to everyone – and why would it? Maybe one of them had found themselves in the shadows instead of the bright, warm light of fame? She needed to track them down, and quickly.

She thanked Kate for her time, feeling hurried now to narrow the field even more. The smaller the focus got, the closer they would be to an answer. As Kate Pride was showing her out, she stopped just in front of the desk. Corky quickly pretended to be looking at his computer, all the while listening for any scraps of data-power he could collect.

“Did any of them limp?” Linda asked.

“Limp?” said Kate.

Corky suddenly looked up.

“Yes, limp. Walk … differently.”

“Oh my god,” Corky said. “I tried to tell you! He was here. The guy with the limp.”

Kate and Linda turned to him. Kate had no idea what the significance of the limping man was, while Linda knew very well and Corky, to his horror, guessed.

“You think he’s the one doing this?” he said. “To Devin and Richard Morninglight? The man who was standing right where you are yesterday? Oh my god.”

Kate remembered Kyle insisting someone had been watching them from across the street that Monday morning. Could it have been this man? And is he the one she remembered from the New Visions show, standing off to himself, peering at the opening night crowd from a corner?

“There was someone with a limp,” Kate said, taking Linda gently by the arm and leading her away. Corky could be overly dramatic and she didn’t want to fuel that fire. “But he wasn’t one of the artists …”

Kate Pride walked out of the gallery with Linda, telling her what little she knew about the strange man. There wasn’t much to tell, mostly whispers she had overheard.

She had no way of knowing he had heard them, too.

Chapter 28

Hotel Exeter – Checkout Time

K
ieran Stipling should
have known better than to believe his troubled life had changed with the chance meeting of someone who claimed to see his inner beauty. He was a good looking man, that was true; he had always been attractive, handsome they said, and he had compensated for his misshapen hips by making sure that every other inch of him was superb. He’d begun working out as a kid, not yet a teenager, lifting and squatting and curling and pressing. By the time he was fourteen he had the physique of a young man who worked in a rock quarry or who had set his eyes on competition. He’d almost gone that route, too, into competition, where he would be able to show them all, but he had feared he would be seen as the exception, not the rule, the loser who managed to slip into a room of winners and deceive them just until his mask fell. Beneath the mask was a lonely child, molded more by his isolation and troubled emotions than he ever would be by his body. That was what Javier had told him, two years ago this coming June, and what he had believed until the truth came out. He had taken Javier’s kisses for a guarantee they would always be together. He had opened the gates of his body and his heart, allowing this man in, this
other
whom he would have run from all his life before, and for his trust he had been betrayed. Abandoned. Turned out. Or so Javier thought. The amazing Javier Velasco. The shining new star that had shone so brightly even the lights of New York City could not obscure him. And once he knew it, once Javier Velasco saw himself the way all those fawning sycophants saw him, there was no room for something so flawed as his broken lover. Kieran and his crooked walk would draw the focus; people would whisper. Little had Javier known their whispers would be overheard and give rise to the shouts of Kieran’s rage.

Katherine Pride and her wretched gallery were at the center of his pain. Until that show, until Javier had seen what could be his, had been told what could be his by that tight little circle of traitors, Kieran had believed they were inseparable. He had been happy in their studio apartment in Washington Heights, living among the Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and the influx of the young with their big dreams in the big city. Kieran and Javier were just another couple in the neighborhood. The men who ran the corner bodega knew them. The old Korean woman at the Laundromat knew them. It had been a perfect life … until that show. Until critics came around with their ten-dollar words and their blessings. Oh, how that had changed things. Javier Velasco was one to be watched. Javier Velasco was tomorrow’s news. Javier Velasco was halfway up the mountain already, so talented, so gorgeous. Too bad he had that gimp tagging along. He could do so much better.

Javier believed them easily enough because he wanted to. He pretended nothing had change, for a month or two. They traveled. They went to San Francisco and Buenos Aires for Javier to be toasted by the town’s art royalty; and the whispers had grown louder, the looks more cruel. Finally, Javier had said he had to go, Kieran with his sad eyes and his bad hips. He would always love Kieran, but they should be good friends, nothing more.

Nothing more
.

The words echoed, bouncing off one side of Kieran’s skull, careening to the other and back, as he stared up at the gray afternoon sky.
It’s never really dark here
, he thought. Not the kind of dark you find on a country road. Two things you cannot see in New York City: stars and the absolute, final, blackness of the universe. He intended to soon see them both. Once he was finished. He would take a bus and ride west, into the desert. Somewhere on the road to Las Vegas he would step off, never to be seen again. He would lie on his back and gaze up into an infinity wrapped in stars and blackness. And sometime, many years from now or maybe just a week, he would take his last breath attempting to count a billion flickering lights. Now it was afternoon and dreary, an appropriate landscape for the painting he had in mind.

Kieran felt a strange sadness as he prepared to leave the hotel room, the last place in New York City he would call home. It had been fitting: to go from living alone in a tiny basement apartment on the Lower East Side, to life with Javier in the upper reaches of Manhattan as their star –
their
star
– was in its ascendency, to the unimaginable fall from grace that left him here in a hotel room that had seen a thousand like him. There were people who actually lived here, but most came and went like shadows moving across the filthy carpet. Some had left stains; he looked at one of them, a dark red oval near the closet, and wondered if it was blood. He would be gone in a moment, and the thousand who had come before him would be followed by a thousand after.

He packed his backpack with the few thing he would need: his one change of clothes, a toothbrush with no toothpaste, a pre-paid cell phone about to run out of minutes, his camera for capturing the finer moments just ahead, the ones that would make up his ultimate still life, and the knife he had used to kill Devin. He had exacted each revenge in a different way, with a different killer’s tool. Only the knife would be a repeat performance. He had thought about trying to buy a gun, but he had no idea how one goes about purchasing a firearm on the streets of New York City. He’d bought cocaine once, from an itchy prostitute who walked the corner near his cousin’s delicatessen in Flatbush, but that was the extent of his black market experience. He had quickly abandoned the idea of a gun and settled instead on the knife, a guitar string, and his own hands. He was his own weapon of choice, as it should be. He took full responsibility for what he was doing, and full pleasure in doing it. These people had harmed him irreparably; they had crushed his dreams as well as his soul. He had to settle accounts face to face, in as personal a way as possible.

Take it personally, Kate Pride. Take it very personally.

Today he would be closing out the accounts altogether. He had made an appointment to see a condominium in SoHo. The sort of living space he had visited recently as part of Javier’s growing entourage, but that he would never, ever, live in. Those doors had been shut to him when he was turned away. But just this once, this one last time, he would stand in an apartment he could not dream of affording, smiling politely at Katherine Pride’s husband – yes, yes, lovely closet space, the second bathroom is a bit small, but that view! – and waiting patiently for his wife to arrive. If it meant Stuart Pride took his last breath there, if things went a little wrong and there was collateral damage, so be it. That’s what Kieran was, after all, collateral damage. But sometimes, yes, sometimes, the damaged strike back.

He zipped his backpack, slung it over his shoulder, and left the seedy little Hotel Exeter, knowing he would never return.

Chapter 29

The Katherine Pride Gallery

C
orky was sipping
blueberry herbal tea, watching Kate Pride show her husband the exhibit layout. The opening was Friday night and they had 125 registrations already. Fire code limited the number of occupants to 160 and Corky knew there would be a flurry of last minute comers. Shows at the Pride Gallery were a top ticket, not just to see the new artists being exhibited, but to be seen as well. Openings were about hobnobbing, glancing around for the nearest camera, complaining about the same papparazi they had tipped to their presence with a phone call on the way over. It didn’t matter that no one had ever heard of the photographer Kyle Callahan. That was part of the experience, coming to see what new fabulous talent Kate Pride had discovered. Corky would be working the event and he looked forward to an evening of networking, moderate drinking of wine and eating of cheese, and possibly finding a new boyfriend. His last one, Phillip, had left a bitter taste in his heart and he was eager to move one. Nothing said ‘next!’ like a fresh romance.

Kate had shown Stuart the lineup of Kyle’s photographs and he was duly impressed. He’d met Kyle and Danny a few times, and the couples had dinner once at Margaret’s Passion, but they weren’t more than acquaintances to him. Stuart and Kate Pride kept separate lives in many ways: professionally and, when they were not together, personally. Kate had her New York art world friends, her gallery, and her love of reading biographies; Stuart had his real estate sales, his preference for horror fiction, and his philately: Stuart was a stamp collector. Kate had no interest in stamps beyond how much it cost to do her gallery mailings.

The couple had enough common interests that being without children was of no significance to them. Of their parents, only Kate’s mother remained alive, and her gay brother Douglas with his partner and three children provided all the extended family she needed. She could get her kid fix anytime by calling her young nephews and niece. Kate and Stuart had survived this long in a child-centric culture, they might as well go all the way.

Stuart looked at his watch. He’d had a new client call from out of the blue. The man had reached him directly, rather than going through his office. He thought it was odd at the time, since his cell number was private. When he asked the man how he got the number, the man told him Javier Velasco had given it to him. Stuart had shown the artist several one-bedrooms in TriBeCa just a month ago.

“Another showing?” Kate asked, seeing her husband look at the time.

“Yes, and it’s a big one. Just came on the market. SoHo, three bedrooms, top floor.”

“Anybody I know?”

Stuart smiled at his wife’s curiosity. As the owner of a respected art gallery, Kate knew just about everyone there was to know in Manhattan’s upper atmosphere, and if she didn’t know them, she knew someone who did. Her Rolodex was her networking and in her opinion it still worked better than any social media. Index cards: the first LinkedIn.

“Possibly,” he said. “A gentleman from Buenos Aries, says he got my number from Javier Velasco.”

Corky looked up at the name. He thought of interrupting but decided it could wait. The Prides were a couple he hoped to emulate with his next boyfriend who would love him as completely and faithfully as Stuart loved Kate, and he didn’t want to take a moment away from their time together. He knew their busy lives did enough of that.

“Ah, Javier, yes,” Kate said. “Full of himself but talented. Sometimes I regret the egos I unleash on the world. He’s in Buenos Aries now, from what I know.”

“That’s the connection then. Nouveau riche, I suspect.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I’ve read a lot about that. Depressed housing market in the U.S., foreigners buying up all our best views. Be sure to invite him to the opening Friday. We take Argentine pesos, too.”

They’d come back into the front of the gallery and were standing by the desk.

“I’ll call you after this appointment,” Stuart said. “Maybe we can have dinner.”

“There’s a new bistro on Gansevoort Street, Melissa’s, I think it’s called.”

“Sounds fine to me, we like new places. Everything set for the opening here?”

She frowned. Mentioning the opening reminded her that the Katherine Pride Gallery was not MOMA. Everything here was done on a tight budget.

“I’d love to have passed hors d’oeuvres and hot waiters, or maybe it’s passed waiters and hot hors d’oeuvres! But we don’t have the funds and I want people looking at the photographs, not the men serving them Vienna sausages.”

“You’re a shrewd businesswoman, Kate Pride. Frugality is a virtue.”

“It’s about the art, not the money, right?”

“Right. We can leave the money making to me. Speaking of which, I have to dash.”

Stuart Pride, standing a good five inches taller than the woman he had been in love with from the moment he’d met her, leaned down and kissed her, first on the cheek, and then, quite un-customarily in public – for Corky was considered public – he eased his face around and kissed her full-on on the lips. She, too, felt compelled to kiss him, long and deeply. It wasn’t something they ever did when they could be seen, not in the gallery’s front room, not on a street corner, and they were both taken by this sudden passion, this need.

Corky swiveled his chair around to face the wall, as if there were a spot on the paint he needed to inspect.

Finally, Kate and Stuart separated. She had blushed a bright red, and he kept looking down, embarrassed, but not apologetic.

“Well, that was unexpected,” she said.

“Under the circumstances,” he agreed, nodding toward Corky.

Kate ran her palms down the sides of her dress, as if they’d done more than kiss. “You’d better hurry,” she said. “Cabs can be tricky here.”

He kissed her once more on the cheek. “Call you,” he said, and he left the gallery.

Kate watched after him. The passion of a moment ago was suddenly replaced by a longing sadness. It was as unexpected as their kiss had been, and she wondered where it came from. Was it age? Were they running out of time? She had the momentary, intense premonition that something terrible was coming their way. But those things were ridiculous, like imagining yourself falling from a subway platform when you never got that close to the edge. She felt strangely close to the edge. She shook it off, just as she’d shaken off the awkwardness of kissing her husband in front of Corky.

“You got a message,” Corky said behind her. He’d turned back from the wall. “I didn’t want to interrupt when you were talking.”

She walked to the desk, expecting a message slip.

“Javier Velasco,” Corky continued. “Another of your success stories. But he’s not in Buenos Aires.”

Kate was surprised to hear from Velasco. He’d quickly moved beyond the Katherine Pride Gallery, and while she didn’t begrudge him his success, he was one of the few whose careers she wished she’d left for someone else to launch. Javier Velasco had the kind of self-regard that quickly went from down-and-out to entitled.

Corky saw her waiting for the message. “Oh,” he said. “No number, nothing. He said he’d call back and was hoping to see you.”

“Hmm,” she said. Maybe he’d changed. Maybe some vicious critic in Argentina had taken him down a few pegs, or someone, somehow, had reminded him where he came from.

“Find me if he calls again, please,” she said. “I’ll be in the office.” She wanted to go over the details of Friday’s opening with Corky but would review them first, making sure she’d checked off everything she needed to do.

“Can I bring you anything?” Corky asked. “I’m dashing to Breadwinner’s”

“I’m fine,” she said. Then, as unexpectedly as she had kissed Stuart, she said, “Oh, and Corky, let’s start locking this door, can we? I’ll get a buzzer.”

She looked around the gallery once more, picked up her iPad from the desk and headed to her office for some intimate time with a spreadsheet.