Nice Weekend for a Murder

7

Jill was showering again. The sound of it brought me up out of a deep but turbulent sleep. Closing the curtain on that window last night hadn’t kept the images I’d viewed out of it from returning to mock me in almost delirious Daliesque dreams — none of which were sticking with me, exactly, as I sat up and rubbed the sand out of my eyes. But the feel of them lingered, the mood, and I knew they’d been about what I’d seen from my ringside seat at the window. I did remember one specific dream fragment: crashing through the window, glass shattering but harmlessly, I leapt like a hero into the fray, yanking the ski mask off the killer’s head... and seeing the face of a stranger.

When Jill came out, her slim dark body barely wrapped in a towel, another smaller one on her head like a turban, she looked like a cute Arab. I told her so.

“Oh?” she said. “And you look like hell.”

“Sweet talker.”

“Rough night?”

“Awful. Sick dreams. I don’t have to tell you what about.”

She sat next to me on the bed. “Does it seem any less real today?”

I hadn’t been up long, but, groggy or not, I was firm on this one. “No,” I said. “What I saw was convincing.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll think in the shower.”

I did; the water invigorated me, first cold, then hot, and some notions started tickling the inside of my skull and I started to smile. I’d been tired last night; beaten down by agents and editors and bus rides and, just possibly, Mohonk Mystery Weekenders. Screwy dreams or not, I’d had some sleep, and this was a new day. Something would be done about what I’d witnessed.

I started to sing.

When I came out in my Tarzan towel, Jill was dressed — a red jacket over a white blouse with navy slacks, patriotism Kamali style — and she smiled on one side of her pretty face and said, “You’re the only person I know of who sings ‘Splish Splash, I was takin’ a bath’ in the shower.”

“World’s number one Bobby Darin fan,” I explained without embarrassment and a little pride. “If you want something more current, go out with somebody ten years younger. Than either of us.”

“I better not risk it,” she said, sitting at a dresser before a mirror, putting on some abstract-shape earrings. “Heavy Metal in the shower might get me electrocuted.”

I was over at the phone, by the curtained window, dialing. “You haven’t even met this younger guy yet,” I said, “and already you’re in the shower with him. Have you no shame?”

“Who are you calling?”

“Front desk. Want to check up on something.”

“Front desk,” a female said. A nice sultry alto.

“This is Mr. Mallory in room sixty-four. I’m one of the guest authors this weekend.”

“Yes, Mr. Mallory.” Perky for an alto.

“I wonder if you could give me some information about the hotel?”

“We’re always anxious to provide information about the mountain house, Mr. Mallory.”

The staff got touchy here when you referred to Mohonk as a “hotel.”

“When my bus arrived last night,” I said, “a man was on duty down toward the bottom of the mountain. In a sort of a little house.”

“Yes. That’s the Gate House.”

“I didn’t see a gate.”

“There was one years ago. It’s still called the Gate House. We’re big on tradition at Mohonk, Mr. Mallory.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, the bus driver checked in with him before we headed up the mountain.”

“Yes.”

“Is that common procedure?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Mallory. No one is allowed in unless their name is on the list.”

“I see. You don’t get a lot of walk-in traffic at the hotel, then?”

“None. And it’s a house.”

“Right. How long is that guard on duty?”

“Well, there are several shifts. But someone is there all the time.”

“Someone’s on duty twenty-four hours?”

“That’s right.”

“Any way up to the hotel other than that road?”

“It’s a house, sir. And no there isn’t.”

“Any way to get to that road, bypassing the Gate House?”

“No.”

“Hmmm. I wonder if I could talk to the man who was on duty in the Gate House last evening.”

“Sir, I believe he’d be sleeping, now... and I couldn’t give out his home number. You might check with someone in management.”

“Okay. Thank you very much. You run a nice hotel here.”

“It’s a house,” she said, but there was a smile in her voice; she knew I was needling her.

Jill was putting on her lipstick. “What was that about?”

I slipped on my clothes and as I did told her what the front desk alto had told me.

“So if Rath really left,” she said, pointing at me like a teacher, “he’d probably have been seen by the guard at the Gate House.”

“Right. And more important — if he left only to return, he’d have been seen returning. Not only seen, he’d have had to log in with the guard.”

“You mean you’d have a specific time.”

“Exactly.” I was smiling. Also dialing.

“Now who are you calling?”

“Kirk Rath,” I said.

The cornflower-blue eyes got very large, and she sat on the edge of the bed nearby. I called the hotel (mountain house) operator and she put me through to information for Albany, New York; Rath’s home number was listed. I wasn’t sure it would be. On the other hand, somebody as adversarial by nature as Rath wouldn’t duck a fight by going through life unlisted.

The phone rang in my ear. I pulled the curtain as I waited. The view out the window seemed even less real in the cold gray dawn; several couples in winter clothes were making their way across the little bridge. One couple paused in the gazebo, to chat, their breath smoking. I didn’t find it particularly inviting — winter not being my favorite season in any state, New York and Iowa included — but neither was it ominous.

On the ninth ring, he answered: “This is Kirk Rath.”

“Kirk!” I said. “This is—”

“At the sound of the tone, leave any message you might have for me, obscene or otherwise.”

Shit.

At the tone I said, “Kirk, this is Mallory up at Mohonk. If you’re alive, give me a call today, as soon as possible.”

I hung up. Scratched my head.

“Think he’ll call back?” she said.

“That hinges at least partly on whether or not he’s alive,” I said, sitting by her.

“Do you think he might be home and just has the answer machine on?”

“With answer machines, that’s always a possibility. It’s still relatively early — he could be sleeping. A little later this morning I can call the business number.”

“Didn’t you say the Chronicler was published out of his house?”

“Yup,” I said. “Everything but printed on the premises. But it’s a separate number, the business is, and I’ll bet his staff will be working there even if he’s not. They live right there. It’s like a big fraternity house, I understand.”

“So you can find out from somebody whether he showed up or not.”

“Should be able to.”

Jill sighed. “It’s too bad Rath himself didn’t just answer and put an end to this.”

I said, “Suppose last night he had second thoughts, and came back, to play his weekend role? And got killed — really killed — for his trouble.”

“Who by?”

“Jesus, Jill. I haven’t even been able to establish the poor S.O.B. is really dead. Don’t ask me to name the killer just yet, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, with a little smile.

“But one thing I do intend to find out,” I said, standing, looking down at her, touching her nose with the tip of a forefinger, “is which of these teams of game-players has theater pros on ’em, and who among ’em brought their makeup kits along.”

She stood and straightened the collar on my pullover shirt, the type the Beach Boys and I have been wearing for decades.

“Feeling more like a detective now, are you?” she said.

“Thinking like one. That long day yesterday threw me.”

She gave me a peck of a kiss and a wry grin and said, “Put on your Miami Vice jacket and let’s go down and have breakfast.”

“Did you have to mention Miami Vice? This is Friday and we still don’t have a TV.”

“I asked at the desk about that,” she said, helping me into my white linen jacket. “They have a projection TV in one of the parlors.”

“But will it fit in this room?”

I opened the door for her and in the hall we met Jack Flint and his wife, Janis, just coming back from breakfast apparently. Jack wore a lime blazer and a pastel green shirt, and Janis another floral print dress, yellows and greens; they looked like California. I wondered if, God help me, I looked like Iowa.

We exchanged good mornings and, with a small wicked grin, Jack said, “I hear you got stung last night.”

“Pardon?”

“Curt mentioned that some of the game-players staged a little skit outside your window.”

“So it seems,” I said. “I think George Romero directed it.”

Janis cocked her head like she hadn’t heard me right, not understanding the reference; movie buff Jill said to her, “Night of the Living Dead.”

“Oh,” Janis said. Nice of Jill to coach the wife of a screenwriter in film lore.

Meanwhile, Jack was laughing. “Bunch of overgrown kids. We’ll be putting on a show for them, in an hour or so.”

He meant, of course, Curt’s mystery in which we were playing roles.

“Yes,” Janis said, “and I’m scared to death.”

Jill resisted telling her that that was the title of Bela Lugosi’s only color film and said instead, “Why? Are you playing one of the suspects?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so,” Janis said, with a nervous little smile. “Aren’t you?”

“No. Mal didn’t tell them I was coming along till the last minute.”

Janis grasped Jill’s arm, in mock panic that was only part mock. “You wouldn’t want to take over my role, would you?”

Jill grinned and shook her head no. “I’m no mystery fan, or puzzle freak, either. I’m here for a little peace and quiet; I mean to roam these endless halls and sit in every one of the hundred and eighty-one gazebos on this property. As Elmer Fudd once said, ‘West and wewaxsation at wast.’ ”

I put a hand on Jack’s arm and said in almost a whisper, “Did you see any of that out your window last night?”

“Your little passion play? No. When did it go on?”

“Just before eleven.”

“Janis and I went up and watched Pete’s flick. I’d forgotten how good Laura was.”

“Yeah,” I said, glumly, “well, my favorite Otto Preminger film is Skidoo.”

Jack did a little take; he’d apparently seen Skidoo.

“He’s kidding,” Jill said, and took me by the arm and we exchanged good-byes with the Flints and were off to breakfast.

Where, in the big pine dining hall, we found Tom Sardini sitting at our designated table, having a cup of coffee; Cynthia Crystal and Tim Culver were over at Curt’s table, only neither Curt nor wife Kim were present. I said good morning to Cynthia and Tim, both of whom (even the normally dour Culver) grinned at me. I had the feeling I was a comical figure.

Jill went on over to our table, but I stopped and stood behind and between Cynthia and Culver, and leaned in, a hand on the back of either of their chairs.

“Good morning, gang,” I said. “What’s so funny?”

“Oh, Mal,” Cynthia said, the arcs of her pale blonde hair swinging as she looked back at me, blue eyes sparkling, “I just treasure it when you behave like a gullible hick.”

“Me, too,” I said. “Takes me back to the days when I traveled with Spike Jones and the band.”

Culver’s smile was gone now; he sensed my feathers were ruffled. So did Cynthia — she just didn’t care. But Culver said: “Curt told us about that practical joke. Didn’t mean to rub it in.”

“Oh, Mal,” Cynthia said, “how could you fall for amateur theatrics like that?”

“Why?” I said, looking at her sharply. “Did you see it too?”

“No, no,” Cynthia said, brushing the notion away with one lovely hand. “Last evening Tim and I went walking for hours around this charming old hotel.”

“House,” I corrected.

“Whatever,” Cynthia said. “But I’ve done several of these weekends before — never Mohonk, but Tim and I were on an ocean cruise variation of this, for Karen and Billy Palmer, last year. We know all about the lengths these lovable loons will go to, to get in the spirit of mystery and crime and spillikins in the parlor.”

At Mohonk, that could be a lot of spillikins, because there were a lot of parlors.

I said, “Your room does look out on the lake, though.”

“Yes,” Cynthia said. “And it’s a lovely view.”

“That’s debatable,” I said.

She pressed my arm. “You’re such a child. That’s what I love about you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I figure immaturity is one of my more admirable qualities. That, and poor judgment.”

Culver said, “You don’t seriously think you saw anything more than some amateur theatrics, do you?”

“I guess not,” I said.

Cynthia’s brittle laugh rose to the high ceiling. “If only it were true.”

“Pardon?” I said.

She was putting preserves on a muffin as she responded: “If only somebody had knifed that little bastard.”

I had no answer for that, so I smiled and nodded and joined Jill.

“So,” Tom said as I sat across from him, “somebody made a sap out of you.”

A waiter poured coffee in my cup and I drank some. “It’s nice of Curt to tell everybody what a fool I made of myself last night.”

Tom smiled; even his beard twinkled. “So they murdered ol’ Kirk Rath in the moonlight, huh?”

“That’s what it looked like.”

“I tell ya,” Tom said, “this place is like some kind of demented summer camp. I mean, they really go all out here.”

“No kidding.”

I wrote up our order on the little menu sheet provided for us — French toast for me, scrambled eggs for Jill — and Tom sat appraising me over his coffee cup.

“What is it, Mal?” he said.

“What’s what?”

“Come on. I’ve known you for a long time. Nobody likes a joke better than you. But you’re bristling about this thing.”

“I was in a great mood till I walked in here and realized I was wearing size eighteen shoes.”

Jill seemed uneasy; I think she was hoping I’d leave this alone. And I would have, but Tom pressed on: “I still say you like a good laugh. But you’re not laughing. Why?”

I smiled at him, a poker player’s smile. “What would you say if I told you I’m not convinced what I saw wasn’t real?”

His expression turned blank. “You think somebody killed Kirk Rath outside your window. Really killed him?”

I shrugged. Sipped my coffee.

“Aw, Mal, that’s crazy.”

“If murder never happened, Tom, we’d be in another line of work.”

He gestured with two hands; be reasonable. “But Rath left,” he said.

“Supposedly. Where’s your room?”

“What?”

“Your room. We’re in number sixty-four. What room are you in?”

“Just up the hall from you — fifty-eight.”

“Do you have a view of the lake from your room? The gazebo, the little Japanese bridge?”

“Sure.”

“Did you see anything last night? Around ten-thirty?”

“Just Pete’s movie.”

“Did you see Jack Flint there?”

“He was sitting a few rows behind me. Why? What is this, Dragnet?”

Jill said, “Don’t mention TV shows to him, Tom. He’s still suffering video withdrawal.”

Jill was trying to lighten the mood, but it wasn’t necessary; Tom wasn’t offended — he was just curious, interested.

“You really think Rath was murdered,” he said.

“It’s a possibility, that’s all.”

“And I’m a suspect!” He said this with glee.

“He suspects everyone,” Jill said, “and he suspects no one.”

Now I was a little embarrassed. Just a little.

“Look,” I said, “I just want to know if I’m the only guy who saw this particular Saturday Night Live sketch.”

“TV reference again,” Jill said. “Watch it.”

“Maybe it was staged specifically for you,” Tom said.

“Curt didn’t think so,” I said. “Everybody knows all the guest authors are billeted in that wing. Curt says I just happened to be the one who got snookered.”

Tom pushed his empty coffee cup aside. “What do you think?”

“I think I’m going to do what all these game-players are doing this weekend.”

“What’s that?”

Dum da dum dum.

“Play detective.”

8

This, as written by Curt Clark, was all I knew about the character I would be portraying in the Mohonk mystery this weekend; each of the author guests had received similar instruction sheets by mail, though we weren’t privy to each other’s. I tucked mine back in the envelope it had come in (MALLORY — EYES ONLY), which also included a sheet with one-paragraph descriptions of the other suspects, and placed it in my inside suitcoat pocket, for handy reference. I looked at myself in the mirror, straightened my red bow tie, which was color-coordinated with my pale pink shirt, combed back my heavily Brylcreemed hair, which was parted in the middle, adjusted my window-glass glasses so that they were halfway down the bridge of my nose, under which a pencil-line moustache twitched, and adjusted the SUSPECT badge on one lapel of my double-breasted black-and-red-and-white-plaid corduroy suit.

I was, for all intents and purposes, Lester Denton, suspect in the Roark K. Sloth murder, The Case of the Curious Critic. While I’d never thought of myself as a nerd, nor did I have a wealthy, widowed mother, Denton was, in some respects, a cute if nasty-around-the-edges parody of myself and my own situation with Kirk Rath. In light of the murder I’d witnessed (or was that “murder”?), I found the wry, sardonic echoes of real life in Curt’s scenario more disturbing than amusing. I wondered if the other authors were playing roles that struck them as somewhat uncomfortably similar to themselves and their own bitterness toward Rath.

“You make a truly convincing nerd,” Jill said, smirking cutely, skin crinkling around the corners of her cornflower-blue eyes.

“I know you are,” I said nasally, “but what am I?”

“Takes one to know one,” she said nasally back at me.

I gave her a sloppy, nerdy smooch and slipped my arm around her shoulder and we walked out into the hall and down to Curt’s room, where all the role-playing authors were assembling, prior to the first of the weekend’s two interrogation sessions, which was to begin just fifteen minutes from now. Partylike sounds were going on behind Curt’s door; we paused before going in.

“You look so cute with that little mustache,” she said, pinching my cheek (facial cheek). “I’m tempted to just be a groupie and hang around and watch your performance.”

I shook my head no. “I’d really prefer you to circulate — listen to the other ‘suspects.’ ”

“What am I supposed to get out of that?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Just make sure you catch a glimpse of each of them, noting whether or not they seem unduly ill at ease.”

“If they do, it won’t necessarily mean anything more than stage fright.”

“Maybe not, but jot down some notes anyway. Also, look for any particularly obsessive game-players; anybody who seems to be taking this too seriously, or is really pushy in the interrogation sessions.”

“How am I supposed to know what their names are?”

I pointed to my badge. “They’ll be wearing them.”

“Ah.”

We knocked on Curt’s door, which Curt himself opened. “Well, Lester Denton in the flesh!” he said above the crowd’s conversation, doing a pop-eyed take. “Where on earth did you find that suit?”

Jill said, “You’d be surprised. I didn’t have to dig all that far back in his closet to unearth it.”

I shrugged. “The early seventies were a do-your-own-thing kind of era; apparently my thing was tacky plaid suits.”

“Yesterday’s trendsetter,” Curt said, ushering us in, “today’s nebbish.” His room, which was filled with the other suspects, was easily twice as large as ours, a suite really; the fireplace was bigger, and the twin beds were boxed together, I noted. The suspects were all in costume, of course; only Curt was in civvies, a casual blue shirt and brown slacks. He had a glass of something in his hand — ginger ale, as it turned out — and he got us some.

“Well,” he said, “you certainly look your part. Ready to live it as well as look it?”

“Sure. How long did you say this session’s going to be?”

“One hour; they get another hour with you tomorrow morning. Say, you know, you really loosened everybody up.” He gestured to the costumed suspects around him.

“How’s that?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Ah, well...” He put them back down. “I think my sense of black comedy got the best of me, in whipping up this mystery; some of the guests — Jack Flint and my brother, in particular — took a little offense at the way I’d written their roles, especially in regard to ‘Roark K. Sloth.’ ”

“Hit a little too close to home, did you?”

He mock-grimaced for just a moment. “Guess so. Anyway, that prank that got pulled on you last night, when the word got around, gave everybody a laugh.”

“I noticed.”

He put a hand on my shoulder, pretended to be somber. “You’re not angry with me?”

“For making me the laughingstock of Mohonk? I’m livid. I’ll never speak to you again.”

He shrugged, mugged. “Just so we cleared that up,” he said, and moved on to mingle with other members of his cast.

Jill, who’d been at my side listening to all this, said, “You sure cut that guy a lot of slack.”

“He’s done me plenty of favors. Remember my mentioning that one of my teachers at a writers’ conference helped me get an agent?”

“Sure.”

“Well, Curt was that writer. I’d written him fan letters for years, and my early short stories were all brazen imitations of his work. He felt flattered, rather than plagiarized, and gave me a lot of help.”

“So he’s a mentor. Like Roscoe Kane.”

I lifted a lecturing finger. “There’s a difference... Kane’s dead. Curt’s alive.”

“One of your few surviving heroes, then.”

“Yup. So I’ll cut him some slack any ole time.”

Nearby, Tom Sardini was chatting with Mary Wright; both of them were in costume — Tom in his trenchcoat and fedora, Mary in a slinky shiny red low-cut gown that showed her figure off to good advantage.

“The Quakers wouldn’t approve,” I said, nodding toward her impressive decolletage.

“To hell with the Quakers,” Mary said, toasting us with her plastic glass of ginger ale, slipping her arm around my shoulder mock-drunkenly and as if we were (ahem) bosom buddies.

Jill pinched me; the plaid suit was so heavy I barely felt it, though I got the point.

Jill said to her, coldly, “I didn’t know you were an author.”

“I’m not,” Mary said, her arm still around my shoulder, as she paid Jill’s manner no noticeable heed. “But a few of the roles had to be filled by Mohonk staff members.”

I smiled and slipped out from Mary’s arm as gracefully as possible and got Jill and myself some more ginger ale. We were standing sipping it when Cynthia Crystal slid over and put her arm around me; she seemed seductive despite her costume and makeup: she had transformed herself into a grandmother type, hair in a gray bun, wearing granny glasses and a blue calico Mother Hubbard.

“What big eyes you have, Granny,” I said.

“Was I rude this morning?” she said.

“A little.”

“Did it surprise you?”

“Not in the least.”

She let loose her brittle laugh. “You really have me pegged, don’t you, Mal?”

“I think so,” I said with a lecherous grin. “But I love you anyway, Cynthia.”

Jill pinched me again; this time she found her way under my coat to my pink shirt, under which was my pink flesh.

“Ow,” I said.

“What?” Cynthia said.

“Nothing. Where’s your Mr. Culver?”

She nodded over toward the fireplace. “Talking with his brother.”

So he was. Culver was dressed all in black; what separated him from Johnny Cash were gloves, a beret, and a domino mask. Between the brothers, making a strange backdrop, was an oil painting in a fancy frame, leaned up above the fireplace, on the mantle — a striking abstract work in which shades of orange and yellow and red swirled in an off-center spiral, a whirlpool of color.

“What happened to their famous family feud?” I said.

“Fizzled, finally,” Cynthia alliterated. She adjusted her granny wig. “It was mostly jealousy, you know.”

Curt had had great success in Hollywood with his comedy caper novels, five of which had been made into movies and God only knew how many more of which had been optioned. But the critics had always been tough on Curt — unfairly, I thought — often referring to him as “a road company Donald E. Westlake.” On the other hand, Tim Culver had earned kudos from even the toughest critics for his series about professional thief McClain; the acclaim included multiple Edgars and overseas awards. But in over a twenty-year career, he had never had any success in Hollywood — never generated a dime of option money (I knew the feeling).

“Tim envied Curt’s financial success,” Cynthia said, with a shrugging smile, “and Curt envied Tim’s critical success.”

“What turned that around?” Jill asked Cynthia. “They seem to be getting along now.”

And they did. They were chatting, even smiling a little. Not warm; cool as the unlit fireplace, actually. But not feuding. One having invited the other, and the other having accepted.

“Tim sold McClain to the movies,” Cynthia explained. “Lawrence Kasdan took an option on the whole series, and the first of them, McClain’s Score, is in preproduction now.”

“Lawrence Kasdan,” Jill said. “Body Heat! Wow!”

“Movie buff,” I explained to Cynthia. “Ignore her. She won’t take me seriously until I sell to the movies.”

“You did sell to the movies,” Cynthia said.

“TV doesn’t count,” Jill said.

“Especially at Mohonk,” I added. “But as for the brotherly feud — am I right to assume that the glowing reviews Kirk Rath lavished on Curt helped smooth things over between him and Tim?”

“It certainly did,” Cynthia confirmed. “Rath may not be liked — scratch the ‘may’ — but he is influential. Other reviewers pay attention to him and the Chronicler; a lot of critics have been reassessing Curt’s work since Kirk started championing him.”

“So he and Tim,” I said, “have no reason to be jealous of each other anymore.”

“Happy ending, darling,” Cynthia said, with her best cocktail party smile.

Jack Flint lumbered over, like a small tank; he was dressed as I’d seen him this morning — seemed not to be in costume. On closer look, he had extra gold chains around his neck; otherwise, business as usual.

He answered my unasked question with a shrug, saying, “The character I’m playing is so close to me, I didn’t bother with dressing up. My wife, on the other hand, is not cast to type.”

I looked around for her, and finally spotted Janis, sitting in a chair to one side; frankly, I felt she had been typecast: the outside of her had just been made to match her shy, quiet, inner nature; her cheery, bright California dresses had been replaced with a drab brown one. Her hair was pulled back and she wore no makeup.

I went over to her. “Nervous?”

Her smile was just a slight pulling back of the upper lip over tiny teeth. “Terrified.”

“Don’t be. The game is the thing, here. Our performances don’t need to be Oscar level. Besides, aren’t you a teacher? You should be used to being in front of people.”

“I got out of teaching,” she said. “It made me nervous, too.”

“You’re still in education, though.”

“Yes. I’m assistant principal, primary level.” She smiled again. “Peter Principle, I suppose. I wasn’t much of a teacher so I got kicked upstairs.”

“I’m sure you do a fine job. And I’m sure you’ll do fine today, too.”

“You’re a nice man, Mr. Mallory.”

“Call me Mal. And today I’m not a man, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“You seem to be more a mouse.”

“I do at that.”

She smiled more broadly now. “They really gave you a ribbing about that prank last night.”

“They sure did.”

“I wish it were true.”

“What?”

“What you saw last night. That, or this mystery we’re acting out.”

“In what sense?”

She talked through her tiny teeth. “In the sense that that awful little bastard Kirk Rath would really be dead.”

“Oh. That sense.”

Still waters run deep.

I wished her luck with her performance and wandered back to Jill, who was talking with Cynthia and getting along well.

“I don’t see Curt’s wife anywhere,” I said.

“She’s in the loo,” Cynthia said. Cynthia was the only person I knew who would use that expression. “Putting the finishing touches on her makeup and costume. Oh. There she is, now...”

And there she was.

Poured into a slinky black gown. Like Mary Wright, her figure was shown off to great advantage. Kim was slightly top-heavy, and a lot of creamy skin was showing.

“I’m just looking,” I said to Jill. “No pinching, please.”

“We’ll just both keep our hands to ourselves,” Jill said agreeably.

Kim’s eyes locked on mine and she grinned and, snugging her tight dress in place on the way, she came over to us. I hadn’t seen her since my last New York trip the year before.

“I hate tight clothes,” she said, not at all coy, as if she were unaware the clinging dress made the most of her voluptuous figure. She had a high, slightly breathy, Judy Holliday sort of voice, and exaggerated Madeline Kahn features, which landed her a lot of second female leads in Neil Simon comedies on the bus-and-truck circuit. Kim had only been in one Broadway production, and then late in its run, though she’d appeared in several off-Broadway shows.

I introduced Jill to her, and Jill immediately started asking her what films she’d been in. Kim had some impressive credits — everything from King of Comedy to The Muppets Take Manhattan — but she’d only done extra work in them. Jill was wowed anyway. Then Pete Christian, dressed to the nines in a rented tux, stole Jill away to talk film buff talk.

Kim smiled like an ornery kid and said, “I hear somebody auditioned for you last night.”

“Out my window, you mean.”

She nodded, batted her big brown eyes. “I’ve heard of off-off-Broadway, but this is ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous is right.”

“You make a fabulous nerd, Mal.”

“Gee, thanks. Have you been working, Kim?”

“Here and there. I’m curtailing the roadshows for a while.”

“Why’s that?”

She smiled a little, not showing her teeth. “Curt and I are buying a little house in Connecticut. After five years of marriage, we’re finally going the whole domestic route.”

“I thought you’d stay in Greenwich Village forever. Surely you’re not giving up the stage?”

“No! Just the traveling. And the Village is getting a little lavender for Curt’s taste. Anyway, I can commute to Manhattan for any theatrical or TV work that comes along.”

“Does ‘going the whole domestic route’ mean to imply that you and Curt are expecting an addition to the family...?”

“Not yet,” she said. Smiling a little. Then, in a whisper: “But we are trying.”

“Well, that’s great, Kim.”

She got serious all of a sudden. “It would mean a lot to Curt. He... he lost Gary six months ago, you know.”

Gary was his son, his only child, by his first marriage; his wife Joan had died in an automobile crash seven years ago. The novel he wrote thereafter — It Feels So Good When You Stop — was his first brush with critical acceptance; it had dealt, in a tragicomic manner, with the loss of Joan.

As for Gary, I’d never met him; knew nothing about him, except that he was an artist and Curt was proud of him.

“When you say ‘lost’...”

“I mean dead,” she said, with a sad shrug. “Pneumonia.”

“Damn. Aw, shit.”

“Curt took it pretty hard; but he’s getting over it. He’s working on a book, after a dry spell of a few months, and he took on this Mohonk weekend, at Mary Wright’s urging.”

“I wish I’d known,” I said. “I feel awful, not giving him any support...”

“You know Curt. He’s very open in some senses, but private in others.”

“Aw, damn. I’m so removed, living in Iowa. Something like this happens to a friend and I don’t even hear about it till six months later.”

She touched my arm. “Don’t give it another thought.”

“Is it too late for me to express my sympathy?”

“No. Not if you find the right time. It’s still very much on Curt’s mind. You saw the painting over the fireplace?”

“Yes, I did. Is that one of Gary’s?”

She looked over at it, smiling in a bittersweet way, nodding. “Curt won’t go anywhere without one of Gary’s paintings along.”

“That’s really sad.”

“I don’t think so,” she said cheerily. “He doesn’t stare broodingly at it,” she went on, nodding toward the swirling, fiery painting above the unlit fireplace, “but it comforts him having a part of his son in the room with him.”

“I wish I’d known Gary.”

“You’d have liked him, Mal. He was a lot of fun. Only twenty-six when he died... and if that isn’t a goddamn shame I don’t know what is.”

“Nor do I.”

Curt came over and said, “I see you’re putting the make on my young bride.”

I gave him a lopsided smile. “How else can I get back at you for spreading tales about me?”

“Think twice about dallying, my dear,” he said to Kim. “Would you really want our firstborn to look like that?” And he pointed to my nerdy countenance.

I had no snappy comeback for that, and, even if I had, it would have done no good: Curt was now moving toward the center of the room, and began waving his hands, impresario-like.

“Showtime!” he shouted, and the room quieted down. “If you don’t know where you’re supposed to be positioned for your interrogation session, stop and ask me on the way out. Any other questions? No? Do you want to save the malt shop? Then let’s put on a show! And like we say in show business — not to mention the mystery biz — knock ’em dead!”

9

I ignored the plush, plump loveseats and the velvet cushioned armchairs and went directly for a straightback chair in one corner of the little open parlor, one of several on the second floor, off a wide, open hall. Morning light filtered in through the sheer-curtained windows, bounced lazily off the mirror over the fireplace. Glasses perched midway down my nose, bow tie straight, hair slick, I sat with my legs together, hunched a bit, striving to be inconspicuous. But the SUSPECT badge on my plaid suit gave me away.

“Are you Lester?” asked a young woman with short hair, glasses, and a red sweater. A short, plump woman in a blue sweater was with her.

“Yes,” I said timidly.

“Lester,” the young woman said, smiling warmly but with eagerness in her eyes, “could I ask you a few questions?”

“Yes,” I said woefully.

And the interrogators began to file in, some taking chairs, others standing, others plopping down on couches, but none of them leaning back — all angled forward, backs straight as boards, notebooks at the ready, expressions as alert as hunting dogs. Like reporters in a press conference, they began hurling questions at me, sometimes stepping on each other’s toes, verbally. They were members of competing teams, after all.

“When did you last see Roark K. Sloth alive?” an intense man in glasses and gray sweater asked.

“Last night,” I said.

“What were the circumstances?”

I swallowed. “Unpleasant.”

Some of them laughed at that; others seemed impatient with me. Time was precious, after all. But I made them dig for each truffle and, piece by piece, they were able to draw forth from me the story in Curt’s script. I held back only on the bribe, which I figured to reveal in the second of the sessions, tomorrow morning.

“Did you see anyone else entering or leaving Sloth’s room?” a guy who looked almost as nerdy as me asked.

“No,” I said. “But... well, it’s not really my place to gossip.”

A woman in a red and white ski sweater was amused by that, but followed up. “No, Lester. Go on. We’re interested in anything you saw that might be helpful.”

“Well...” I leaned forward conspiratorially. “I did see that private detective — that Darsini person — walking in the hall as I departed. He might have been going to Mr. Sloth’s room.”

“Were you aware that Darsini was in Sloth’s employ?”

“No,” I said.

“When did you find out about Sloth’s death?”

“This morning. The police came to my room to question me.”

The intense guy in gray pointed a pencil at me and made an accusation. “Isn’t it true that you saw Sloth murdered outside your window last night?”

That threw me. I’d done a pretty good job, I thought, of settling into the nerdy persona of Lester Denton; I’d even done a pretty fair job of putting Kirk Rath, and what may or may not have happened to him, outside my mind for a time.

But the story of the so-called prank last night had obviously found its way beyond the inner circle of authors and out into the mainstream of Mystery Weekenders, who (at least some of them) were dealing with what I’d seen as if it were a part of Curt’s staged mystery. And I didn’t quite know how to handle that.

Meanwhile, the intense guy in gray was doing his Hamilton Burger impression. “Answer the question, Mr. Denton!”

“I did,” I said. Or Lester said. “I did see it. But I must have been dreaming. I reported what I saw to the hotel staff, but when we went outside, there was no corpse in the snow. I must have imagined it.”

“Did you tell the police about this?” another interrogator asked.

Now I was floundering. I had done pretty well, as long as I had Curt’s script to lean on; but now that I had allowed myself to wander from it, I was no longer swimming; I was treading water, and not terribly well.

“The hotel manager told them about it,” I said. “And they questioned me, yes. But, as I told them, if I were involved somehow, why would I go to the front desk to report what I’d seen?”

The guy in gray was pointing his pencil at me again. “Yet you saw him killed with a knife — and that is precisely the way he was killed.”

He was just obnoxious enough to make me glad he was wasting his time down this blind alley.

“Excuse me for my boldness,” I said, “but wasn’t Mr. Sloth’s body found in his room, sitting at his... its... typewriter?”

“Yes,” said the guy in gray. “But the coroner has established time of death as late last night — corresponding with what you saw!”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d been trying to explain away the prank (or whatever it was) within the context of the fictional mystery they sought to solve, because otherwise it would only serve to throw them unfairly off their game. But we weren’t supposed to break character during the Interrogation Sessions, so stopping to explain (as Mallory) seemed out of the question.

And speaking of questions...

An attractive brunette in black said, “Are you Jewish, Mr. Denton?”

Was I? Curt hadn’t said. I winged it: “No, ma’am. But some of my best friends are.”

I — or Lester — got a little laugh out of that one.

“But do you speak or read Yiddish, Mr. Denton?” she continued. “Or are conversant with any dialect related to Yiddish?”

“No, ma’am.”

“So you couldn’t translate the phrase, tovl fof oy?”

“No, ma’am.”

And we seemed to be off the subject of what I — or Lester or anybody — had seen out my (his/her/their) window last night.

As the questioning continued, various interrogators left, while fresh blood filled in. Each team had assigned one or two members to be at each of the suspect’s grillings, and when their team representatives deemed a suspect sufficiently grilled, they were free to move on and help grill another one.

But my grilling was over; the hour was up.

I smiled and took off my bow tie and said, “Lester isn’t here anymore.”

There were some expressions of frustration, but mostly laughs and even a little applause. People were smiling; they’d all had a good time, except for the anal-retentives like the guy in gray, who were taking this charade a bit too seriously. This was supposed to be a vacation, after all. What the hell was relaxing about trading the pressure of your work for the pressure of some goddamn game?

The attractive brunette who’d asked the question about Yiddish stopped to shake my hand. She had sharp but pretty features, and jade-green eyes.

“You were terrific,” she said. “You make Ed Grimley look like a macho man.”

Her reference was to a Second City character created by Martin Short, which led me to compliment her on her taste.

“I’m a big Second City fan myself,” I said.

“TV or stage?”

“Both. I’ve seen various Chicago companies, oh, I bet a dozen times; and a couple of the Toronto companies, including the one that seeded the original Saturday Night Live.”

“Are you an actor yourself?”

“No, no. I’m strictly a writer.”

She seemed a little embarrassed. “Well, I know you’re a writer; it’s just that your performance as Lester made me wonder if you’d had professional training.”

“The last play I was in was My Fair Lady in high school.”

She laughed a little. “You know, I have to admit I’ve never read anything of yours, but I plan to remedy that.”

“That’s nice to hear. And, I must say, you’re a very attractive young woman. I make that observation well realizing that the sturdy young man lurking behind you is very likely your boyfriend.”

“Husband,” she said, smiling; she motioned for him to step forward, and he did. Like her, he was in his late twenties, blond, handsome in a preppy way, sweater and Calvins; they were as perfect as a couple in a toothpaste ad.

“I’m Jenny Logan,” she said, offering a hand to shake, which I took. “And this is my husband, Frank.”

I shook Frank’s hand too; he had a firm grip and a white, if shy, smile.

“You wouldn’t happen to be in showbiz, would you?” I asked them.

“Frank’s a lawyer,” she said, patting his shoulder fondly. “But he doesn’t do trial work, so I guess you’d have to say he’s not in showbiz. I, however, am.”

“In New York?”

“Yes. Mostly commercials.”

Maybe I had seen her in a toothpaste ad.

“Could I talk to you two, for a moment?” I said, even though I already was. I gestured toward a comfortable-looking velvet couch near a baby grand piano.

We sat, Jenny in the middle.

“Have you ever been to Mystery Weekend at Mohonk before?” I asked them.

Frank nodded, but Jenny lit up, all smiles and enthusiasm.

“Oh yes, and it’s great!” Jenny said, like the captain of the Mohonk cheerleaders. Then she forced herself to calm down: “At least I think it’s great. Frank isn’t a puzzle freak like I am — though he figured last year’s out, darn him.”

“Your team was one of the winners?”

“Yes,” she said. “Funny thing is, we were going all out to win ‘most creative,’ and thanks to Frank, here, we won for accuracy!”

“Attaboy, Frank,” I said. “What are you going after this year?”

“Whatever we can get, Mr. Mallory,” Frank said, smiling, proving he could speak.

“Make it Mal,” I said. “And I was just wondering if you’d brought any theatrical gear along.”

She shrugged. “A little. Some makeup and such. It’d be nice to bring more — all sorts of props and stuff. It’d really help score points in the ‘most creative’ category. But it’s hard to know what to bring, since we don’t know what the mystery’s going to be till we get here.”

“I want to ask you something,” I said. “And I promise if you’ll be truthful, you won’t get into any trouble.”

Jenny narrowed her eyes, leaned her head forward. “Trouble?”

“I would greatly appreciate it if you’d put my mind to rest and admit to what you did last night.”

Frank grinned. “Is that really necessary? We are married, you know.”

“I’m not kidding around,” I said. “Was it you?”

Jenny was shaking her head. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Mal.”

“You heard me being questioned about ‘Sloth’ being killed outside my window, last night.”

“Yes...”

“Well, something did happen outside my window last night.”

“We know,” Jenny said, shrugging again.

“You know?”

“Everybody’s talking about it,” she said. “It’s part of the weekend, right? Something Curt Clark staged to get things off with a bang?”

I sighed. “If Curt staged it,” I said, “he’s keeping me in the dark. He says it’s a prank pulled by one of the teams.”

“Oh!” Jenny said. “I get it. You thought we might have been the ones behind it... but we weren’t. I swear.”

“Don’t kid around with me, please.”

Frank said, “We’re not. Are you sure this isn’t Clark’s doing? Part of his weekend?”

“I was very upset last night,” I said, “and we’re good friends, Curt and I. He has a nasty sense of humor, granted. But he would’ve told me.”

Ever suspicious, like any true Mystery Weekender, Jenny said, “Where was he when the prank was pulled?”

“He was in his room,” I said. “I’d spoken to him on the phone, moments before. He just didn’t have time to get outside, even if he climbed out a window. Besides, the ‘killer’ was a short, stocky person; and of course Curt’s lanky and tall.”

“You’re telling us,” she said, surprised, “that this isn’t part of the mystery.”

“That’s right,” I said. “When somebody brought it up during the interrogation, I tried to deflect it, but I only helped things to get more out of hand.”

“So we know something the other teams don’t,” she said, with a smug, squeezed smile.

“Yes,” I said. “Though I wouldn’t mind it spreading to the other teams.”

“No way,” she said, with a wave of finality. “Let ’em do their own investigating.”

Brother.

“I’d like to ask a favor of you,” I said.

She shrugged. “Sure. As long as it doesn’t help out some other team.”

“Well, it does involve the other teams: do you know if any of them have theatrical pros on them?”

“A few that I know of do,” Jenny nodded. “I could ask around a bit. See if anybody wants to pool props and makeup. You’d like to know if any of the other teams staged that ‘murder,’ I take it?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“What’s in it for us?” she said, with an evil little smile. “Will you tell us whether or not you’re the killer?”

“No,” I said. “But I will do this for you: I won’t tell any other game-players that the prank isn’t a part of Curt’s mystery. That’ll give your team one up on everybody else.”

“Deal,” she said, and we shook hands.

They got up and wandered off, Jenny glancing back and reminding me that if I didn’t keep my end of the bargain, I’d have to talk to her lawyer; and Jill sat down.

“Who was the dish you were talking to?” she said.

“Don’t pinch me again, please, I think I’d cry.”

“I meant the guy,” she said.

I smiled and shook my head and filled her in. “How were the other interrogation sessions?”

“Interesting,” she said, her tan face impassive. “I don’t have any insights into your fellow suspects, though, I’m afraid. Nobody seemed particularly nervous, including Janis Flint. But one funny thing... did you know that what happened outside our window last night is getting itself worked into the weekend mystery?”

“Tell me about it,” I sighed. “I tried to do some fancy footwork around that and fell all over my feet. How’d the other suspects do, fielding it?”

She lifted one eyebrow for a moment. “A couple of them, it really threw. Specifically, Tom and Pete. Tom actually broke character for a moment and said he didn’t know anything about that.”

“Hmmm. How about the questioners?”

“I’ve got the names of a few intense types written down in my little notebook.”

“Good. Let’s go back to the room; I want to try to call Rath again.”

“Okay. Then some lunch, and then you have to give a little talk, right?”

“Right.”

“And then maybe we can bust out of this joint.”

“I don’t think so. I’m supposed to be on a panel after that, filling in for the missing Mr. Rath.”

“No you aren’t,” she said, with a certain glee. “Tom told me to tell you his private-eye panel won’t be till tomorrow afternoon; Curt’s own talk has been moved up in its place. So it’s official. We’re going over the wall, pal.”

I sat up; sought to be a man despite my nebbish exterior. “Oh yeah? You’re not going to drag me along on some damn nature hike, are you?”

“I most certainly am.”

“Jill, you disappoint me. What was the first thing the pioneers did when they got to the wilderness?”

“I know, I know. They built a cabin and went inside. You’ve told me a million times. But I’m not standing for being cooped up all afternoon with these mystery maniacs and puzzle paranoids — not when there’s a big beautiful outdoors waiting for us out there!”

“Okay. But you owe me one.”

She looped her arm in mine and batted her cornflower blues. “Sure. You can collect right now, back in the room.”

“Before lunch?”

“Why not? But you have to promise me one thing.”

“And what’s that?”

“You’ll leave the little mustache on...”

10

The Mohonk Hiker’s Map listed Sky Top as a “moderate walk” (as opposed to those walks labelled “short and easy” or “strenuous”). If this was a moderate walk, Mussolini was a benevolent dictator.

Of course, just on general principles, I hate the Great Out-of-Doors. I grew up on a farm, and from my early childhood swore I would one day live in the city — Port City, as it turned out, but that counts, technically at least. Will Rogers said he never met a man he didn’t like; I never milked a cow I liked.

The last period of my life during which I spent an inordinate amount of time in the Great Out-of-Doors was a place called Vietnam, where roughing it meant something other than a Winnebago and a six-pack of Bud. Camping trips don’t appeal much to those of us whose boondockers got soggy in a rice paddy. I swore to myself if I ever got back on good old dry American soil I’d spend as much time as possible indoors. Or, as I like to put it, the Great Indoors.

If this seems irrational and rambling, well, so was my state of mind as I climbed with the lovely Jill Forrest — whose very name suggests a kinship to trees, and she can have them — making our way up a seemingly ever-narrowing path with the mountaintop our goal.

Why does one climb such a path? To get to the top. And what does one do once one gets there? One hikes back to the bottom. Ask me why I do not want to climb a mountain and I will tell you simply: because it’s there.

“Quit grumbling,” she said, a few steps ahead of me but not, unfortunately for her, out of earshot. Her rear end looked cute in the black ski pants, which matched her black ski jacket, which matched her black-and-white stocking cap.

“I hate this,” I said. My jacket wasn’t wintry enough and, even with the sweater on underneath it, I was cold. The path, which had begun deceptively wide, now left barely room for two people; my legs ached from walking on this bed of snow-dusted pine needles and twigs and rocks.

“No kidding.”

“Let’s turn back. The snow’s really coming down.”

And it was. Not a blizzard, but it had been lightly snowing all day, and it did seem to be picking up.

“Sissy,” she said.

“No, really,” I said. “There’s some ice in it. If it keeps at it, we could have a rough time getting back down, once we get up. By rough I mean slippery.”

And, I should point out, that while at our left was a forest not unlike Jill’s last name, at our right were a few rocks and a whole lot of drop-off. Of the plummeting-to-the-earth-flailing-your-arms-and-legs-and-screaming-holy-hell-all-the-way-down variety.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, stepping on one of the roots that served as a step and slipping just a little, despite her boots. I caught her, even though I was wearing Hush Puppies, and she looked back at me and, with friendly malice, stuck out her tongue. She got snow on it.

“Let’s go back,” I said.

“No! We’ll rest a minute.”

Well, I needed the rest — we were probably halfway up this goddamn glandular-case hill, and I had shin splints and sore calves — but, as I pointed out to her, pausing to rest would only allow the snow to gain on us.

“Coward,” she said, and veered off from the path to the right — you remember the right: a sheer drop-off to nothingness? — across some boulders to a gazebo, where she plopped her pretty butt down on the rough wooden bench and waited for me to develop the cojones to join her.

I did, finally, even if my cojones hadn’t yet developed, and if they hadn’t by my age they were unlikely to, and we sat and squinted down at a cold, gray, but eerily beautiful vista that included the blue-gray expanse of frozen Mohonk Lake and the oversize Victorian dollhouse that was the hotel. Mountain house.

“Takes your breath away,” she said.

“So does a seven-hundred-foot fall.”

She pursed her lips in a smirk. “You’re so romantic.”

“I’m so cold. Let’s press on.”

We both slipped a little on the boulders, heading back for the path, where I pointed out the snow was undisturbed.

“So?” she asked, taking the lead again.

“So, we’re the only ones today foolhardly enough to make this trek, in the snow, in the cold.”

She glanced back. “That’s because the hotel is filled with crazy people. They don’t want to enjoy the scenery. They don’t want to drink in God’s grandeur.”

“You can’t drink it if it’s frozen.”

“They,” she continued, ignoring me, not glancing back anymore, “would rather stay inside and try to solve some phony mystery.”

I didn’t quite understand the appeal of that, either, but I didn’t admit it to Jill; I had enjoyed playing a suspect, but playing detective — if the crime wasn’t real, anyway — held no fascination for me.

“They,” she continued to continue, “would rather sit in a drafty hall and listen to some pompous windbag talk about his theories on mystery writing.”

“Low blow!” I said.

“You wish,” she said. And now she glanced back, and her smile would’ve been impish, if I were the kind of writer to use a word like impish.

I caught up to her; there was just room enough on the snowy path to walk two abreast. Depending on the size of the breasts.

“I thought my little talk went pretty well,” I said, in a mild pout.

She smiled warmly, despite the cold. “So did I, really. You were cute as lace pants.”

“That’s a Raymond Chandler line.”

“I know. You had me reading Farewell, My Lovely last week, remember?”

“I remember. Did I really seem pompous?”

“Not at all. You were funny.”

I had gotten a few good one-liners off. Not during the speech itself, which was a fairly serious discussion of the difficulties I’d encountered turning real crimes into fictional ones. In my case, some of my books were derived from my own life — crimes I’d been caught up in; times when I had played detective for real.

But the question-and-answer session had gone especially well, and that’s where I managed to get a few laughs.

“Are you going to turn this weekend into a novel?” one of them had asked.

“Not unless I find a body,” I’d said.

Which got a particularly nice laugh.

Only a part of me didn’t find that so funny — the part that was still trying to figure out whether what I’d seen out my window last night was histrionics or homicide.

And, before my little speech in the big Parlor, where high windows looked out on the lake and pictures of old Smileys (the Mohonk founding family) looked down on me and my audience like the bearded faces on cough-drop packages, I had discovered something disturbing: Kirk Rath had indeed not made it home yet.

From our room I had called the business number at Rath’s house and got one of his coeditors.

“No sign of Kirk here,” he had said, followed by a nervous laugh. Whenever somebody from the Chronicler called me on the phone — which they did from time to time, to acquire publishing information for their news column — they invariably followed whatever they stated or asked with a nervous laugh. I read that as embarrassment out of having to deal face-to-face, even if it were over the phone, with another human being whose work they had inhumanly lambasted in their smug pages (and if you don’t think a page can be smug, you’ve never read the Chronicler — even the ink is smug).

“Do you expect Kirk?” I asked him.

“No. He’s on vacation this week.”

“Well, he was here at Mohonk.”

“Oh, you’re calling from the resort?”

“Yes. And Kirk left here last night. I wondered if he’d gotten home yet.”

“No, but then we don’t expect him. He was going to go into New York City after Mohonk.”

“Business?”

“No. Vacation. We don’t even have a number to reach him.”

“Does he do that often?”

“Now and then, Mallory. But why the questions?”

“I need to talk to him. Personal matter.”

“Oh. Well, he may have told Rick Fahy where he was going.”

“Rick Fahy... isn’t he one of your contributors?”

“Yes. He’s there at Mohonk, playing the mystery. We’re going to do a story on the weekend from the point of view of an attendee.”

“I’ve never met Fahy; I’ll look him up and ask him.”

“Fine. If Kirk does show up, would you like me to have him call you?”

“Yes, immediately. Here at Mohonk. My room number is sixty-four. I’ll be here till Sunday afternoon.”

I’d made one other call, to the guard who’d been on duty at the Gate House last night. Mary Wright had provided his number. He hadn’t seen Rath leave, but that didn’t necessarily mean Rath hadn’t left.

“I log in every car that enters,” he said, a young voice, college kid maybe, “but don’t pay much attention to who leaves.”

It seemed a good number of Mohonk employees were residents of nearby New Paltz, so a rather steady stream of them left during the evening hours. Rath, if he had left, left unnoticed.

Which meant my question about the reality, or lack thereof, of what I’d witnessed out my window remained no closer to being established. All this really nailed down was that Rath did not leave and come back through the Gate House, because if he had, he’d have been logged in.

And now I was in the Great Out-of-Doors, on a rocky, root-veined hard dirt path upon which icy snow was settling, only it was too late to turn back. We were almost there.

And in five minutes, we were. Our path merged with a crushed-rock road, a one-lane affair used by horses and service vehicles (our map called it a carriage road), which had wound its own way to Sky Top, that plateau where on a clear day you could see forever, or anyway New Jersey and four or five other states. This wasn’t a clear day but, from the outcroppings of boulders along the edge, you could see a panorama of winter gray, broken up by evergreens, that did take the breath away, or maybe it was just the climb.

“Oh, Mal,” Jill said, her gloved hand grasping mine. “Isn’t it breathtaking!”

“Maybe it’s just the climb,” I offered, but I smiled at her.

Sky Top was a clearing about half the size of a football field, and in its midst was a tower of rough-cut stone, a fairly squat two stories or so, with a spire that aspired to another story, capped by a gray-green helmet wearing a flagpole. No flag flew today, and when we tried the tower door, it was locked.

The crushed-rock carriage road extended around the tower, and as we strolled, gloved hand-in-hand, around it to try out another view from Sky Top, we noticed something.

A car.

A car parked on the carriage road, behind the tower. It was fairly well covered with snow, a sporty little dark blue Fiat. I tried the doors, but they were locked. I rubbed the frost from a side window and peered in. On the backseat a stack of magazines sat like a forgotten passenger.

The latest issue of The Mystery Chronicler, forty or fifty copies, probably.

“I think I know whose car this is,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Jill asked; her eyes were wide.

“Let’s have a look around.”

We found him in one of the outcroppings of rocks. Like his car, he was fairly well covered with snow. The front of his jacket was slashed and blood was dried there, or frozen, or something. Dark and crusty, whatever it was. His face was slashed several times, and the wounds were not recent; they had snow in them, and were jagged and crusted with black blood, but the features were recognizable.

It was Kirk S. Rath, all right.

And Jill, not being a stereotypical female, did not scream; neither did I. I’d seen dead bodies before. I’d even seen this dead body before. I bent over him, poked at him a bit: no question he was gone. There seemed to be two deep wounds in his chest; those stab wounds, not the facial slashes, had killed him. Rath’s face seemed oddly passive, for having been slashed; peaceful, youthful, though older than this you don’t get. I checked his pockets. His billfold, containing several hundred dollars in cash, was intact in his back pocket. The envelope in which he’d received his mystery weekend instructions was folded in his pocket; in it was the list of the suspects in his — or Roark K. Sloth’s — murder.

Then I backed away from him. Away from the rocks, away from the drop-off, away from the long, cold fall. For all my bitching, I hadn’t noticed the sound of the storm till now; but now the wind seemed to be fairly screaming. The snow was really coming down, now, and there was indeed ice in it. Crystals glistened on the slashed face of the corpse sprawled on Sky Top’s rocks.

Jill and I stood shivering together, not entirely from the cold, and then started down. The map suggested walking the carriage path on the return, for a “gentler” return trip. But our near-panic and the increasing snow and the steepness of the way had us stumbling, sliding. By the time the carriage road intersected with Sky Top Path at the foot of the mountain, we were walking through a blizzard. We were just about to really panic when suddenly the Mountain House loomed before us.

11

We stood under the bare beams of the east porch, breathing hard and smoky, shaking the snow off our clothes onto the bare gray wooden slats beneath us. Despite the blizzard out there, the direction of the wind was such that the floor of the open porch was barely dusted with white, when I’d expected it to be drifted. Which it soon would be — the wind was whirling and would get around to it; the lake already was gone, its gray-blue surface buried beneath the white. Faces in the windows along the porch stared out into the ever-whitening world, some awestruck, others indifferent, while below the windows countless rocking chairs made a wooden chorus line. This time of year no one sat out in them, not in this cold, so the chairs were turned on end, rockers up, like a row of curved yellowed tusks in some elephant’s graveyard.

We stamped the snow from our feet on the mats inside the porch doors, but didn’t take off our outer winter clothing, barreling right on into the Lake Lounge, where Curt Clark was giving an informal question-and-answer session during the traditional Mohonk afternoon “tea” — cookies and cups, very genteel. Just like in a British drawing-room mystery.

Only I didn’t remember grotesquely maimed corpses like Kirk Rath’s showing up in such polite mysteries; or, if they did, the author would present an image considerably more tasteful than the police-photo-accurate dead-body picture that was burned in my brain like a concentration camp tattoo.

Curt glanced at me, smiled, squinted, not knowing what to make of our barging in, all bundled up and with winter dandruff on our shoulders. A hundred or so Mystery Weekenders were seated at tables and some again sat Indian-style on the floor as he stood before them fielding their questions, one of which he was currently in the process of answering: “So, while you may find it hard to accept, there are several movie versions of my novels that I have not seen. That I refuse to see. Friends have warned me off them. And I trust my friends.”

Upon the word friends he had glanced at me, squinting again, shaking his head in some unasked question. Perhaps my expression was sufficiently grave to tell him something was up; I glanced at Jill and her expression told nothing — like the Great-Out-of-Doors we’d just left behind us, her face was frozen.

Mary Wright, in a blue Mohonk blazer (its symbol — a tiny gazebo — on one breast pocket) and a white blouse with a blue ascot, approached us, looking confused and a little put out. Curt was, in the meantime, fielding another question. Mary smiled, but it was a strain; you just don’t walk into the Lake Lounge all wet and snowy.

“Is something wrong?” Mary asked, giving us the benefit of the doubt.

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps we should talk in your office.”

“All right. Should Curt be there? If I read your tone of voice correctly, this is something serious.”

“Yes.”

She took me by the arm, huddled close. “Does it affect our weekend?”

“Oh yes.”

“Let me get Curt, then. He’s almost finished with this...”

Jill looked at her with flat dislike and said, “This can’t wait, honey.”

Mary let go of my arm and smiled at Jill. It was a smile that had nothing to do with humor or goodwill or cheerfulness. It was a smile that had a lot to do with one woman not appreciating another woman calling her “honey.”

“Mohonk moves at its own pace, dear,” she said to Jill. “No crisis is going to ruffle our composure. Understood?”

Jill just looked at her. She didn’t like being called “dear” any more than Mary liked being called “honey.”

Curt was saying, “And I think that about wraps it up. The rest of the afternoon is open for you to begin sorting through the information you gathered at this morning’s interrogations. Just remember the Mystery Writers of America’s slogan — ‘Crime doesn’t pay... enough.’ ”

A ripple of laughter was followed by applause, and Curt moved rather more quickly through the crowd than he might otherwise have, not pausing to chat or sign any of the books of his which various guests had brought along to the session. He knew something was afoot.

“What is it, Mal?”

“Not here,” I said. “Ms. Wright’s office?”

“It’s Miss,” she said, and smiled at me.

“There’s been a fucking murder,” Jill almost hissed. Nobody heard it but Mary and Curt and me, but she’d made her point.

Mary wasn’t shocked by Jill’s profanity, Mohonk manners, Quaker tradition, or not. But she did purse her lips in a skeptical smile and narrow her eyes the same way... but only for a moment. Our expressions apparently were ominous enough to get the point across.

Not to Curt, though.

“Mal,” he said, grinning, “if you’re pulling some cute counter-prank and making us the butt—”

“Let’s go to Miss Wright’s office,” I said. “Now.”

Curt pushed the air with his palms in a conciliatory manner. “Settle down, settle down. We’ll go to my suite. It’s closer, and we can have a drink. Mary’s office is shockingly short on Scotch.”

We walked wordlessly down the corridor, Jill unzipping her ski jacket, climbing out of it, her face blank, but blank in a way that I knew meant anger. Whether the cause of that was the intrusion of Rath’s death upon our more or less pleasant afternoon, or her dislike of Mary Wright, I couldn’t say. And I wasn’t about to ask.

Curt unlocked the room. We stood out in the hall as he went in. I caught a glimpse of his wife Kim, napping on the bed in a lacy slip, her bosom half-spilling out, heaving with sleep; she was a beautiful woman, but I didn’t give a damn. Violent death puts a damper on my libido.

A few minutes later, Kim exited, wearing a turtleneck sweater and slacks and a dazed expression. She smiled sleepily.

“Curt said you wanted some privacy,” she said. “Ours is not to reason why...” And she shrugged and waved and went away.

We went in. I unsnapped my jacket and found a chair to lay it on. Curt was pouring himself a glass of Scotch over at the table that served as a makeshift bar. Some vodka and bourbon and various bottles of soda were there as well.

“Can I get anyone anything?” he asked.

Mary Wright said no, and Jill went over and poured herself a couple fingers of bourbon. I asked him for some Scotch.

“On the rocks?” he asked.

Boy did that conjure the wrong image. I shivered and said, “Straight up will do. Just a little. I just want to warm up inside.”

Jill stood looking at the orange and yellow and red painting that leaned in its frame against the wall above the fireplace; its whirlpool effect seemed to draw her in. Then she pulled away and downed the bourbon in a couple of belts.

Curt sat on the edge of the bed, swirling his Scotch in his glass; Mary Wright stood nearby. So did I. Jill and her bourbon lurked back by the painting.

“Mal,” Curt said. “Before we get into this, I’d like to say I can understand your wanting to stage some sort of reprisal. You’re stubborn and you don’t like to be had. I can understand that. But you’re having fun this weekend, aren’t you? Let it go at that.”

Mary said, “What are you talking about?”

Curt said, “Do you mind if I tell her?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

And he did. His version, of course, treated what I’d seen last night out my window as if its being a prank were an established fact.

But when he finished, I said, “What I saw was not a prank. Kirk Rath really is dead.”

Curt smirked and sighed as if both amused and frustrated by the behavior of an irrepressible child; Mary Wright’s eyes again narrowed, and she tilted her head to one side, brunette hair swinging.

I told them, slowly, carefully, what Jill and I had seen.

“You’re serious,” Curt said, though not sure yet.

“Deadly fucking,” I said.

“Quit saying that word,” Mary said, suddenly irritated.

“I’m the one who said it before,” Jill said.

Mary whirled on Jill. “Why don’t you just shut up?”

Jill said, “What are you going to do about it?”

“What do you want me to do? Pull your hair out?”

“I mean about the murder,” Jill said. Hands on her hips. “Don’t lose your composure, dear.”

Mary had nothing to say to that. Her face fell, and her rage went with it. Ashen, she sat on the bed next to Curt; they looked like lovers in the midst of a bedroom quarrel, not sure what move to make next. Curt had one hand on one of his knees, the other, with the Scotch, was in his lap. He was studying me.

“You are serious,” he said, as if he didn’t believe his own words. “This is not a joke.”

“It’s not a joke. It’s not a goddamn joke! Do we look like we’re kidding? Are either of us that good an actor?”

He looked at me hard and then he stood; Mary continued to sit, lost in worry.

He came and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have laughed off what you told me before.” He was shaking his head; he seemed embarrassed and bewildered. “What can I say? I steered you wrong.”

“I can see how you thought what you thought,” I said. “I’ve been around these people today. I’ve seen how caught up in their game they are. How obsessive they are about it. I can see why you figured it for a prank.”

“But it wasn’t a prank,” Jill said. She was over pouring herself some more bourbon.

“So it would seem,” Curt said, shaking his head, more in amazement than bewilderment now.

“I should call the police,” Mary said, sick about it.

“Yes you should,” I said.

She used Curt’s phone. Before long she was talking to somebody called Chief Colby. I wondered if that meant he was head cheese.

Soon I was talking to the chief, filling him in.

“You’re a good observer, Mr. Mallory,” he said.

“Thank you. What do we do now?”

“Wait there at the mountain house. We’ll be right up.”

I hung up the phone. Outside the wind was rattling the windows, whistling through its teeth.

“Cops are on the way,” I said.

“Good,” Jill said.

“They’ll have a hell of a time,” I said, “getting up to Sky Top now.”

“It really is coming down,” Curt said with a fatalistic shrug, looking out the frosted window at the snow. “What was he doing back here?”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? Rath. He left last night — why did he come back and get himself killed?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe he only pretended to leave.”

“But why?” Curt asked. “And why would somebody kill him Thursday night, outside your window, in the broad moonlight, and then lug him up to Sky Top?”

“Beats me,” I said. “Hell of a place to hide a corpse — right out in the open where the next hiker will find him.”

“Whoever did it,” Jill said, “hauled the corpse up in Rath’s own car. Maybe to get both of them out of sight, just for the moment.”

“Just for that evening,” Curt said, nodding. “Perhaps the murderer did his — or her — deed and then took off.”

Mary seemed to perk up, just a bit. “You mean it wasn’t necessarily someone who was here for the Mystery Weekend?”

“Not necessarily,” I agreed. “It could have been somebody who followed him here, or came looking for him. His coworkers knew where he was going; it was no secret.”

The phone rang. Curt answered it, then held it out for Mary. “It’s for you.”

“Yes?” she said. “Yes? Oh... oh, really. Well, I’m not surprised... Yes, well, thank you.” She hung up and sighed and looked around the room at all of us, including Jill, shrugged elaborately and said, “That was the Gate House. The road up the mountain’s been shut down.”

Nobody said anything.

“It’s not passable,” she said, shrugging again. “It’s heavily drifted, over a sheet of ice. And it’s still coming down.”

I held out my open palms to her. “Don’t you have plows...?”

“Yes,” she said. “And they’re not getting anywhere. It’ll be hours — maybe longer — before we can get that road cleared. Until it stops snowing, we won’t even try.”

“What!”

“Mr. Mallory,” she said quietly, “there is no reason to, even if we could. Our guests are safe and warm and perfectly content here at the mountain house. They aren’t going anywhere.”

“What about Kirk Rath?” Jill said.

Curt said, “He isn’t going anywhere either.”

Mary said, “It’s not uncommon for us to be snowbound here at Mohonk for several days. Par for the course, really.”

I stood. Paced. “If the murderer is somebody here at the mountain house — one of the guest authors, for example, all of whom hated Rath — then he or she is stuck here, too.”

“That’s right,” Mary said. Nodding sagely.

The phone rang again. Again it was for Mary.

Who spoke to Chief Colby for about five minutes, most of her contribution to the conversation being, “Uh-huh” and “Yes.”

Then Colby asked to speak to me.

“Mr. Mallory,” he said, “we may not be able to begin investigating for a while yet. You may have a murderer in that lodge somewhere. I’d suggest you keep what you know to yourself.”

“Why?”

“To keep the murderer under that roof. Whoever it is, they don’t know they’ve been found out yet. They don’t know anybody’s found the body. Let’s keep it that way. Maybe when I can get my buggy up that mountain, we can catch the culprit flat-footed.”

“I don’t think it matters much either way,” I said, not knowing what to make of a modern-day cop who used the word culprit.

“Listen here. If that murderer finds out he’s been found out, somebody else might get killed. Leave the damn lid on, okay?”

“Okay, Chief. I’ll go along with you.”

“Fine. Now, let me talk to Miss Wright again.”

I did.

While she was talking to him, I explained to Curt and Jill that we were supposed to keep the murder under wraps, and why.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Jill said.

That response surprised me. “Why?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

Mary hung up and came over and managed to smile a little. “I’m glad we’re agreed to keep quiet about this, for now. We can proceed with our weekend and not spoil anything for our guests.”

“Except for Kirk Rath,” Jill said. “The weekend’s pretty well shot for him.”

“You’re drunk,” Mary said nastily.

“Not drunk enough,” Jill said. “When I look at you, you’re still in focus.”

They glared at each other for a while. Neither one seemed terribly well composed.

Curt was still working on his Scotch. He seemed vaguely amused. “Perhaps in the long run it will boost the Mystery Weekends, Mary. Think of the publicity.”

“Bad publicity,” she said, shaking her head, almost scowling.

“No such thing as,” Curt affirmed, saluting her with his glass. Then he raised it in a more general toast: “And here’s to Kirk Rath. God have mercy on him. Poor bastard.”

I finished my Scotch.

But I was still cold inside.

Nevertheless, I was warmer than Kirk Rath, even if by now he was under a blanket.

12

Jill and I went back to our room and crashed for a while. We both felt unclean — the cold and snow hadn’t kept us from working up a sweat hiking, and the lingering effect of finding a corpse had left a certain psychic film, a clammy residue over our minds, if not our bodies, that a shower wouldn’t do much for, but we took one anyway. Together.

It wasn’t a two-person orgy, so voyeurs in the audience can let loose of their expectations. In fact, it wasn’t very sexual, really, or even romantic exactly. It was steamy, but only because we leaned on the hot water. We soaped each other’s backs, massaged each other’s tense neck muscles, clinging to each other a bit, nuzzling, but nothing more — just hurt animals licking each other’s wounds. The shower stall provided a needed closeness, the fog of steam and the drilling of hot water on our bodies numbing us into something approaching relaxation, a melancholy mist we could get lost in for a while.

We shared a towel — conserving one for tomorrow morning — after which Jill slipped into her terry cloth robe, leaving me with the towel for a loincloth. She was rubbing her short black hair dry with a hand towel.

“I could build a fire,” I said.

The wind was howling through the window.

“Let’s save that for later,” she said.

I sat next to her; the twin bed squeaked. “Why did you want me to go along with that bullshit about keeping the murder quiet?”

Her smile was one-sided and wry as she kept toweling her hair, looking at me sideways. “Surprised you, didn’t it?”

“I should say. Especially since a man getting murdered seemed to upset Miss Wright primarily because her Mystery Weekend might get spoiled.”

She kept toweling her hair. “The concealment wasn’t Mary Wright’s idea, though, was it?”

“No, it was that hick cop.”

“How do you know he’s a hick? Besides, this is New York; they don’t have hicks in New York.”

“Really? He used the word culprit in a sentence.”

“Oh dear. Well, I still think he was right, anyway.”

“Why?”

She leaned her head back and shook her hair; droplets flew, and I blinked a couple away. “The murderer doesn’t know that we know a murder has been committed,” she said.

“So?”

“God, you’re thick. And here you’re supposed to be an amateur detective of sorts.”

“Emphasis on the ‘of sorts.’ Anyway, there aren’t any amateur detectives in real life.”

She smiled flatly and shook her head again, not in an effort to rid it of more water, though more droplets indeed flew, but in a gesture of amused frustration, as if from trying to reason with a slow child of whom you’re rather fond.

“This isn’t ‘real life,’ ” she said. “It’s Mohonk. More precisely, it’s the Mohonk Mystery Weekend.”

“Yeah, and Kirk Rath is really going all out in his role.”

She ignored that and patted my bare leg. “Think of yourself as an unlicensed private eye,” she said. “You figured out the circumstances of your friend Ginnie Mullens’s murder, didn’t you? I saw you in action, there; I know what you’re capable of. So do it already — play unlicensed private eye again.”

It was sinking in. “You mean, I could go around asking casual questions about Rath...”

She nodded eagerly; I liked the clean smell of her. “Yes, asking your various fellow ‘suspects’ in Curt’s Case of the Curious Critic about their real-life relationships with Rath.”

“And,” I said, picking up on it, “get a reading on them, without the murderer among them knowing that I know a murder’s even been committed.”

“Exactly. With the exception of Curt Clark and Mary Wright, of course, who also know about the murder. And are also suspects.”

I sighed, shrugged. “As far as I know, Mary Wright and Rath weren’t even acquainted. And Curt’s probably the only person here who doesn’t have a motive to kill the critic. Besides; Curt’s a tall drink of water, and the killer was a short, stocky person in a ski mask.”

“Ah! The least likely suspect...”

“Oh, shut up. This is a real murder, not some stupid game.”

That hurt her feelings a little; she glanced away and started toweling her hair again, though it was pretty much dry by now.

“Sorry, kid,” I said. “I know you’re just as shaken by this goddamn thing as I am.”

In a voice that seemed small for Jill Forrest, she said, “Maybe more. Maybe I never saw anything like that before.”

I slipped my arm around her shoulder and she dropped the towel and we held each other; we weren’t shaking, we weren’t crying, but we did feel battered — or anyway I did. And, oddly, guilty. I told Jill as much.

“Why guilty?”

“Well,” I said and sighed again, slipping out of her embrace and standing, adjusting my towel, “I didn’t like the bum. I’ve said terrible things about the son of a bitch... R.I.P. That makes me feel... guilty, somehow, now that he’s dead.”

“You didn’t want him dead.”

“No.” I shrugged, shook my head, and smiled without humor. “But I don’t feel particularly bad that he’s dead. I mean, the most I can muster is I feel kind of sorry for the guy. Jeez. That doesn’t quite cut it, does it?”

Her mouth was a straight line, which turned into two straight lines as she said, “He was a smug, pompous, mean-spirited little jerk. And now he’s a dead, smug, pompous, mean-spirited little jerk. Getting murdered doesn’t make him a saint.”

I went to the dresser and got out some fresh clothes. I dropped the towel and climbed into my shorts; when a man climbs into his shorts, it’s very likely the moment that day he will feel the most vulnerable, the most mortal. Then putting the rest of his clothes on, a man begins to feel less like some dumb doomed animal. It’s probably much the same for women. Getting into that outer skin of clothes, putting on the surface of civilization, applying the social veneer, creates a sense of order, taps into the security of ritual, makes us feel we’re going to live forever. Or at least the rest of the day.

“I feel I owe Rath something,” I said. “Maybe an apology. Or maybe to find his killer.”

“Would you be surprised if I said I could understand that?”

I smiled at her; she smiled back, and it was as warm as the fire we’d almost made.

I said, “You’re a constant surprise, as a matter of fact, but not in this instance. I’ve already picked up on your urge to play Nora to my Nick.”

She laughed a little. “It always comes back to that — role playing, game playing. We are at Mohonk. No getting around it.”

“And so is a murderer.”

“So is a murderer.”

I walked to the window; couldn’t see much out of its frosted surface. The howl of the wind and snow kept finding its way through the cracks and crevices of the old hotel, a constant underpinning of all conversation, like an eerie score from an eerie movie.

Jill noticed it, too. “Maybe God put Bernard Herrmann in charge of the weather this weekend,” she said.

I looked back at her, who still sat in her terry robe, hair dry now.

“We’re well and truly snowbound,” I said, “that’s for sure. So we’ll have this evening and most of tomorrow, unless I miss my guess, to do some casual investigating.”

“Good,” she said with a tight smile, fists in her lap.

“I will do the talking,” I said, gesturing with a lecturing finger. “We have to be very careful. Very careful. If the murderer tips to what we’re up to, we’re in deep shit.”

“Understood.”

“I hope you do. Now get dressed and let’s get something to eat. It’s getting late, and they only serve till eight.”

“How can you even think of eating?”

“Not only can I think of it,” I said, coming over and taking her by one upper arm and pulling her up, “I can actually do it. Finding a dead body does take an edge off one’s appetite, true. But hiking a couple of miles outweighs that, doesn’t it? And besides, I haven’t had a bite in over seven hours, and neither have you.”

She was on her feet. “You’re right. I am hungry.”

And she threw on a shaggy gray sweater with wide shoulders and tugged on her black leather pants.

Soon we were sitting with Tom Sardini and Pete Christian among the dwindling diners in the huge dining room. Tom, in a cheery orange and white ski sweater over which he wore a Miami Vice white linen jacket (jackets were required for evening meals at Mohonk), was working on his dessert, a Linzer torte. Pete seemed restless, looking, in his rumpled brown suit and tie, as if he’d walked away unscathed from a building that had been demolished about him. But then he always did.

“My,” Pete said, smiling, “you held out even longer than we did. I got in a conversation with some of the game-players and almost forgot to eat.”

I wondered if Pete had noticed yet that we were snowbound; I didn’t bother asking, though.

Jill said, “Is that kosher? Fraternization between suspects and players?”

“Sure!” Pete said, permitting that for all time with a wave of the hand. “You just have to watch them, that’s all. Do you know the Arnolds?”

I was filling out my menu, circling my choices. “Millie and Carl, you mean? Of the Casablanca Restaurant? Sure.”

“Well, they can be devious,” he said. He thumped a finger on the tablecloth. “You know, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they proved to be the ones who staged that phony killing outside your window the other night.”

“Somehow I doubt it,” I said.

“Don’t rule it out,” Pete said, smiling, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “Millie has a theatrical background, and Carl’s a karate expert. He could’ve staged some pretty convincing stunts on that snowy proscenium.”

“Anything’s possible,” I said. A waiter came by and I handed him my filled-out menu and Jill’s.

“Well, anyway, they were talking to me about my Charlie Chan movie book,” Pete said, “and really got me going. Some subjects, if you get me started, it’s like I’ve fallen off a cliff — I just don’t stop till I hit bottom.”

Jill was studying Pete; not too openly, I hoped. She said, “Why do you say the Arnolds can be devious?”

Pete’s enthusiasm for life was contagious, and his laughter was too. “They were studying me, waiting for me to make a slip, a mistake, asking me to recount various plots of mystery films, wondering about the ‘structure’ of the mystery form...”

“That sounds innocent enough,” Jill said.

Tom pushed his plate away, clean. “You don’t know Pete. If he saw a parallel between one of those stories and this weekend’s mystery, he might blurt it out. Not thinking.”

“Ah,” Pete said, “but I’m always thinking. It’s just that my enthusiasm gets in the way of my better judgment, at times.”

“What role are you playing in The Case of the Curious Critic?” Jill asked him.

“I’m Rick Butler,” Pete said, sitting up, proudly. “Dapper man about town. Didn’t you see me in my tux this morning?”

“Oh yes,” Jill said, smiling. A waiter slipped a bowl of oxtail soup down in front of her. Me next.

“Curt’s poking some fun at me,” Pete said, smile settling in one corner of his mouth, “but I don’t mind.”

Tom was leaning back in his chair, grinning, gesturing at Pete with a thumb. “Curt turned Pete into a fashion plate.”

“With a neatness fetish yet,” Pete said. “You see before you a man who has now played both roles in The Odd Couple. My character also is an extremely fussy nonsmoker. Allergic to cigarette smoke, to be exact. Whereas if I don’t have a cigarette immediately, I’ll begin throwing chairs.” He stood and told Jill how charming she was and shambled off for his smoke.

“I like him,” Jill said. “He has a gentlemanly manner.”

“He’s a nice man,” I said. “But as much as he hates Kirk Rath, it’s a little surprising he’s here this weekend.”

Tom shrugged. “Pete’s just that kind of guy. He wouldn’t let a louse like Rath spoil his weekend.”

Jill was studying Tom, now. “Are you like everybody else around here?” she asked. “Did you hate Rath?”

“Rath or Sloth?” Tom asked.

Her past tense had confused him.

“Rath,” she said, a little nervously, realizing her slip.

“I don’t hate him exactly,” Tom said. “He’s cost me some money. I lost a series because of him.”

“Really?” Jill said, surprised but trying not to show it. “TV?”

“Books,” Tom said.

“What series was that?” I asked.

“That series I was going to do with a racetrack background. About a detective who worked for the racing commission?”

“Oh, yeah... Didn’t you do one of those?”

“Right. Only I was set to do two more till The Mystery Chronicler hung me out to dry.”

Tom’s bitterness had an edge to it, like the ice in the snow outside.

“What role do you play in Curt’s mystery?” Jill asked. She was doing her best to seem casual; I could read her like a book, however, and like a book I wrote, at that. But maybe Tom couldn’t.

“I’m Rob Darsini,” he was saying, “A boxer turned private eye who is suspiciously like my character Jacob Miles. I was working for Sloth, it seems, but he tried to stiff me for my bill.”

“Cost you money, in other words,” Jill said. “Like in real life.”

“Pete’s character echoes real life, too,” Tom said with a little shrug. “He mentioned it even touches on his having had a friend die by suicide after critic ‘Sloth’ trashed him — which is uncomfortably close to what happened to Pete’s mentor C.J. Beaufort.”

Jill seemed almost shocked. “Isn’t it in rather bad taste of Curt to include such a thing?”

Tom laughed, but it was forced and a little weary. “Cute and nasty, that’s our Curt. Though I think in fairness to him, it should be said it’s Rath he meant to needle. I’m sure he’s as disappointed as the rest of us that Rath split.”

“Disappointed?” I said.

“Sure!” Tom said. “Weren’t you hoping he’d hang around and be the murder victim? Don’t we deserve that vicarious pleasure, at least?”

And he rose and said he’d see us later and left us to our supper.

13

The entertainment for the evening was Peter Christian’s Charlie Chan movie marathon — three flicks preceded by an informative but not at all dry slide show, with Pete regaling the attentive crowd in the Parlor with anecdotes and little-known facts while flashing onto the screen rare stills, movie posters, and candid shots of the various movie Chans, as well as photos of the oriental detective’s creator, Earl Derr Biggers, and dust jackets of first editions and early paperbacks. From George K. Kuwa, the screen’s first Chan (in an abbreviated appearance in a 1926 silent), to the relatively recent (and disastrous) Peter Ustinov-starring-as-Chan film, it was all there.

And, as a mystery buff and late show devotee from way back, I was enjoying myself; but for my investigative purposes the evening’s entertainment was a bigger disaster than the Ustinov movie. Tomorrow night a dance was scheduled in this time slot, which would be ideal for mingling and casual questioning; however, this was tonight, and movies. In most Charlie Chan films, there is a scene in which all the suspects are gathered in one room and, suddenly, somebody turns out the lights! The situation tonight was similar — all the suspects were gathered here, in this mammoth hall, but the lights were already out. And, unlike a Chan film, where the lights would be out but for a moment, this would be a four-hour haul. In the dark.

Out of courtesy to Pete (and because his presentation was plenty of fun, even for somebody as preoccupied as I was), I sat through the slide show; movie nut Jill insisted on sitting through Charlie Chan at the Opera, during which she bet me a million dollars I didn’t know who wrote the opera Boris Karloff and the others were singing. I won the bet. It was Oscar Levant, and Jill still hasn’t paid up.

When Charlie Chan at Treasure Island started unfolding, Jill grabbed my arm and whispered. “This is my favorite one. I have to see it.”

“What happened to playing Nora to my Nick?”

“All your suspects are watching the movies,” she whispered.

“Culver isn’t here.”

“He was.”

“Well, he ducked out in the last reel of the Opera.”

“How could he?”

“It was easy.” I thought for a moment. “You know, this might be a good chance for me to get him alone.”

Cynthia Crystal hadn’t left; she was sitting with Jack Flint and his wife, drinking in Sidney Toler’s finest Chan.

“I’m watching the movie,” Jill said. “It’s only an hour. See you at the room, after?”

“What about the next Chan up?”

“It’s a Roland Winters. I like it okay, but enough’s enough.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that. I don’t know if I want to hang around with a woman who’d sit through three Charlie Chan movies.”

Somebody in the row in front of us turned and said, angrily, “Shusssh!” Quite rightly, too — generally I feel people who talk during movies should be shot.

Feeling guilty for violating one of my own rules, I rolled my fingers at Jill in a Stooges wave and slinked out of the Parlor.

I went to Culver’s room, which was just a few doors down from ours, and knocked. No answer.

So I began exploring the mountain house, wandering its endless halls, occasionally finding little covens of Mystery Weekenders, who were playing hookey from the night’s entertainment to keep working on their solution to The Case of the Curious Critic. Since a number of the gamesters were puzzle fanatics as opposed to mystery fans, their absence from the Chan festival, and their obsession with working on the puzzle, made sense. Using “sense” loosely.

Anyway, they were here and there, in the little sitting rooms with the plush furnishings and the fireplaces, many of which were going now, the snow piling up outside the frosted-over windows. Strangely, I’d heard no one complain about being stranded. Perhaps that was because all of us were, in a manner of speaking, stranded here already, and of our own free will. Being snowbound merely added to the atmosphere, whether Ten Little Indians — Agatha Christie, or The Shining — Stephen King.

I should have been depressed, I supposed. A man had died; I’d seen him killed one day, and found his body the next. That I had done both seemed wildly coincidental to me, certainly nothing I’d try to get away with in one of my books. But it had happened, so what was I supposed to do about it? You can start over in fiction; in life you’re stuck with what you’re dealt.

But I felt a certain charge out of the situation — being snowbound, having a chance to try to find out “whodunit” before the police got here (tomorrow or Sunday or Monday or whenever the hell snow and fate allowed), having one up on the murderer by knowing about the murder when he or she thought it had gone as yet undetected and, well, it was exciting. I was like any other Mohonk game-player — I enjoyed the challenge, and I wanted to solve the puzzle.

At the same time my more rational self was cautioning me not to consider this a game; to remember the ghastly slashed face of Rath (as if I could forget) and to keep in mind that the person I was pursuing had committed that violent crime. It might be a Christie situation, but some King-style violence was in the air.

I discovered the big-screen TV room, finally; the monstrous thing was shut off, the chairs before it empty — Pete’s Chan show was getting the ratings tonight. Next I ran across a cement-floored game room, tucked away at the end of one hall like a poor relation, where pinballs and video games were being played by young off-duty employees, and a Yuppie-ish young couple was playing pool. No sign of Culver, but the pool-playing Yuppies were my new friends, Jenny and Frank Logan. They were just racking up for another game when they noticed me.

“Oh!” Jenny said. She wore a green sweater and gray slacks and filled them out nicely, thank you. “We’d been hoping to run into you. And this makes a good out-of-the-way place to talk.”

It was; the game room was dark and dingy and was very much like most of the bars back in Port City, only I didn’t notice anybody serving beer, let alone hard stuff.

“This must be where the Quakers go to go nuts,” I said.

“We’ve got our own little bar back in our room,” Jenny said.

“But,” Frank warned, beige cardigan, pale blue shirt, gray slacks, “we’re liable to be interrupted by our fellow team players.”

Jenny smirked in a good-humored way. “We’re sort of hiding out from them.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They want to keep hashing and rehashing the interrogation info,” she said.

“I thought you two took this stuff pretty seriously.”

“Sure,” Frank said, “but we don’t go overboard.”

“Besides,” Jenny said with a smug little smile, “we know who did it.”

“Oh?”

“And,” she went on, “we won’t be working on the creative aspects of our presentation till tomorrow, so what the hell. Let’s live a little.”

I glanced around the game room. “If you call this living.”

“We’ve spent hours today in one little hotel room,” she said, heaving a theatrical sigh, “huddled with our fellow game-players. Just had to get away.”

“So you know who did it?” I said. Amused in spite of myself.

“Sure,” she said, grinning. “You.”

And they looked at me. Watched me. Even, one might say, studied me.

Finally I said, “Am I expected to confirm that or deny it or something?”

They shrugged, wearing smirky smiles.

“You guys are real cute,” I said, and took up a pool cue and broke their balls. I started shooting around the table, not playing any game, just randomly sinking the balls, missing now and then.

“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” Jenny said, sidling up next to me. She was wearing Giorgio perfume; I’m no expert, but I recognized it as what Jill wears. The combination of being reminded of jealous Jill, and Jenny’s husband lurking nearby, kept me from letting my thoughts run wild. But it did occur to me, for a fleeting, frightening instant, that Frank might let me sleep with his wife if I’d tell them what I knew about the nonexistent Sloth murder.

Jenny said, “We asked around for you.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s great.” I didn’t know how to tell them that their efforts had been pointless. I wasn’t about to let them know I’d established that the “prank” had been real, via finding the very real corpse.

Frank sidled up on the other side of me; he smelled like English Leather. I used to use it. Now I wear nothing at all.

Frank said, “We think maybe the Arnolds pulled that stunt.”

“The Casablanca restaurant couple?”

“Yes. She used to be an actress, and he’s—”

“A karate expert,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”

Jenny said, “Have you talked to them yet?”

“No, uh... but I will.”

Frank moved away, leaned over the table and banked the eight ball into a corner pocket. “They seem to be the only group this year,” he said, “that brought along fairly elaborate theatrical gear.”

“That we know of for sure,” she added. “There are at least half a dozen theater pros here, and some of them may have brought along more stuff than they were willing to cop to, to the ‘enemy.’ ”

I put the pool cue away. I liked these people, but they were too attractive and smelled too good for me to be comfortable around them.

“Thanks for checking,” I said. “You don’t need to do anything more.”

“It was fun,” Jenny said. “We felt like industrial spies.”

Frank slipped his arm around her waist. “We still think you did it,” he said.

“No comment,” I said. “How do you like being snowbound?”

“I think it’s cool,” Jenny said, beaming.

An understatement worthy of Hammett.

They went back to playing pool and hiding out, and I walked out into the hall. I was nearing our room when somebody called out to me.

“Excuse me!”

I turned and looked.

It was the intense young man with glasses who’d been so dogged in his questioning at the interrogation this morning; he was wearing the same gray sweater, and the same pained expression.

“Mr. Mallory,” he said. “A moment of your time, please.”

It was the kind of politeness that respects social ritual but not you. His words were bullets, fired in a rush at me, and they fairly dripped dislike.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said.

His hair was short and mouse-colored, and the eyes behind the thick glasses were as gray as his sweater and bore dark circles and red filigree. He would have been a bigger nerd than Lester Denton, except he seemed muscular, if a head shorter than me, and the veins stood out in his hands. That is, his fists. Clenched fists, actually — it may seem redundant to describe a fist as “clenched,” but not if you saw these fists.

“I’m Rick Fahy,” he said.

Not to be confused with Rick Butler, Pete’s character in the weekend mystery, of course.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. I guessed. I extended a hand for him to shake. He thought about it, unclenched his right hand, and we shook. His grip was a vise and my fingers were so many toothpaste tubes to be squeezed.

I pulled back my hand; I could feel my pulse five times in it.

“Okay,” I said. “So you work out. I’m impressed. Who the hell are you?”

“I told you. I’m Rick Fahy. Has something happened to Rath?”

That stopped me. I rolled Fahy’s name around in my brain and gathered who he was.

“I know you,” I said, pointing at him. “You’re with The Mystery Chronicler.”

“That’s right,” he said.

“You’re up here covering the weekend for your magazine.”

“Yes.”

“A piece from the perspective of someone who’s been here and played the game.”

“Yes. Has something happened to Rath?”

“Not that I know of,” I lied. “Why?”

He looked at me hard; his mouth was a thin pale line. A vein throbbed in his forehead. The skin around his eyes was crinkly, like Charles Bronson deciding who to kill. Was I about to get the crap beaten out of me by a Chronicler intellectual? And if so, why the hell?

“I asked you this morning,” he said, carefully; the bullets firing more slowly now, “if you saw something out your window last night.”

“Actually,” I said, “you asked Lester Denton if he’d seen Roark K. Sloth killed outside his, that is, Denton’s, window last night.”

“I don’t like smart-asses.”

“I don’t like threats.”

He thought about that; he tasted whatever was in his mouth at the time. Baskin-Robbins Flavor of the Moment, perhaps.

Then he said, “Did you see Rath outside your window last night?”

This time I thought before responding. Then I told him what I’d seen, ending with, “But whether it was Rath or not, I couldn’t say. Maybe it was — I thought at the time it was — but I understand there are plenty of players here with theatrical training, and makeup kits and props and such along with them.”

“I’ve tried to call Rath.”

“So have I,” I said, “and I haven’t had any luck.”

He looked at me like I was a slug; then he looked away. He sighed. There was frustration in it, and anger, too.

I said, “If you’re a friend of Rath’s—”

“He’s my employer. And he’s missing.”

“Did you know he was going to stalk out like that Thursday? Refuse to play the weekend game?”

Fahy’s lip curled ever so slightly; it wasn’t a sneer exactly — it seemed to correspond with him thinking, deciding whether or not to answer me.

He decided.

Not to.

He walked away and I watched him go, and shrugged, and went into the room.

Where I found Jill sitting before a roaring fire, a blanket wrapped around her like an Indian chief.

“What happened to Charlie Chan?”

“I watched half an hour,” she said. “Then my mind started to wander... thinking about the murder and all.”

“Ah.” I pulled my sweater off.

“Come sit with me.”

I stripped off the rest of my clothes, and did. It was cold outside, the windows rattling, wind whistling, snow piling up, but it was toasty warm in here, two naked people in a blanket before a fire.

“You should’ve let me build this,” I said, rubbing my hands, basking in the orange glow and the warmth.

“You build a truly pathetic fire,” she said.

“I do not!”

“But you do.”

“Well. I suppose.”

“The really good fires, back in Iowa, have been the ones I started.”

“This is true,” I admitted. She was starting a sort of fire right now, as a matter of fact.

“Did you find Culver?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Did you talk to anybody?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Who?”

“Later,” I said, and kissed her.

And then I kissed her again.

“Nick...”

“Yes, Nora?”

“Let’s do what married people do.”

And we did. Maybe we didn’t have the river view from my little house in Port City, Iowa, but we did have the fire, the blanket, and each other. And we sure didn’t give a damn about anything else.

For the moment.