Nice Weekend for a Murder (A Mallory Mystery)

by Max Allan Collins

  “How does this compare to California-style fare?” I asked, knowing Flint was from San Francisco.

  The pleasant features of his rather full face all seemed to smile at once, particularly the gray eyes. “It beats sprouts,” he granted me.

  His wife, Janis, sitting next to him, was an unassumingly attractive blonde, wearing a white, yellow, and orange print dress and no makeup. She seemed to be eating only salad and such.

  “This menu does play hell with a vegetarian,” I said to her.

  She smiled shyly and nodded.

  Jill, next to me, said, “I’m a something of a vegetarian myself, only I allow myself chicken and fish.”

  Also hot dogs, tacos, and pepperoni pizza, if truth be told, but why spoil the spell?

  Janis Flint said, “I eat fish too.” And smiled. She seemed almost painfully shy, but if anybody could bring her out, it would be Jill.

  In fact, Jill began trading information with Janis—who, it turned out, was a grade-school teacher and who was involved in educational television, which gave cable maven Jill something to latch onto—while I questioned Flint.

  At first I unashamedly told him about my agent problems, and he recommended his own guy—“He’s British and long on tact”—and wrote the info down on the back of one of his cards, telling me to feel free to mention his name. He had made a friend forever.

  Actually, I was a little embarrassed by his straightforward kindness and, so, we ate in silence for a while after; silence but for Jill talking with Janis, who had loosened up some. I told you so.

  “Haven’t seen a book from you in a while,” I said to him, finally.

  Flint took time out from the breast of chicken he was working on to shrug and reply. “I’d like to, but the money is so much better in Hollywood.”

  “Why, uh, have you moved there... ?”

  He smiled. “No, but I’ve been writing for them. A couple of Mike Hammers and a Magnum, last season; a Riptide coming up. And the screenplay for Black Mask.”

  Black Mask was Flint’s most famous novel—a historical fantasy about a murder committed at a dinner attended by all the famous pulp writers of the thirties; Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett team up to solve the crime, which turns out to have been committed by Carroll John Daly. A movie had been in the works for years; Spielberg himself had optioned it. Big bucks.

  “Is that movie going to happen?”

  He shrugged. “They’re in so-called preproduction now. Spielberg has one of his film-school cronies on it. The shooting script doesn’t have much to do with my book or my script.”

  “That must be disappointing.”

  “No. It’s just Hollywood.”

  “Well, I sure hope your Case File novels get going again.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “After what the critics did to the last one, how dare I?”

  “Don’t be silly. The critics love your books.”

  “Well, the last Case File didn’t even rate a New York Times review... and that little S.O.B. Rath savaged it. Library sales were pitiful. The paperback bailed us out a little.”

  “Uh... I guess you aren’t aware that...”

  “Rath is an ‘honored’ guest here? Yes, I am. Curt warned me; he knows how I feel about Rath. I came anyway.”

  “How do you feel about Rath?”

  “Let’s just say I wish I was the murderer.”

  I remembered some of Rath’s reviews of Flint’s books. Rath had called Flint misogynistic and psychopathic, because his most recent novel focused on a psychotic rapist (is there any other kind?) as narrator. It was a bold book, a chilling and distinctive performance, perhaps the best novel of its kind since Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. The latter sentence is my opinion, however—not Rath’s. Rath trashed the novel and, by assuming the narrator’s sensibilities mirrored the author’s, made the most unpardonable blunder in literary criticism.

  “His Mystery Chronicler is probably the single major obstacle keeping me out of the book business,” Flint said matter-of-factly.

  “Is he that important?” Jill asked, her conversation with Mrs. Flint having gotten sidetracked as Flint and my discussion about Rath gathered steam.

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. “He’s hurt me, too. My editor at Crime Club feels Rath’s negative reviews may be keeping my series out of paperback.”

  “One reviewer?” Jill said. “That doesn’t seem possible!”

  Flint wiped his chin with a napkin and gestured with a thick hand with delicate fingers. “It’s quite possible, Ms. Forrest.”

  “Jill, please.”

  “Jill. It’s quite possible. Mysteries don’t garner a lot of reviews, anyway... only those bigger books that ‘cross over,’ ‘break out of category,’ as they say. Enough negative reviews in The Mystery Chronicler can break a career.”

  “That seems absurd,” Jill said.

  “Doesn’t it,” Flint said.

  A waiter leaned in and refilled my iced tea glass. “Actually,” I said, “most of the Chronicler’s reviewing is pretty evenhanded. They favor no specific school, but single out what they see as the best work in every phase of the mystery.”

  “That’s part of the problem,” Flint said. “The Chronicler isn’t as consistently tough as, say, Kirkus. It’s just when they do do a negative review—and Rath almost always writes those himself—it’s a devastating one.”

  Tom Sardini, who was sitting next to Janis Flint, looked up from his dessert—a portion of strawberry shortcake a story or so high—to comment, “Jeez, Jack, I thought you were one of Rath’s favorites.”

  “I was for a while,” Flint said with a rueful smile. “He really put me on a pedestal. Called me my generation’s ‘Hammett,’ which is the kind of praise any writer in our field dreams to hear.”

  I laughed, only there wasn’t any humor in it. “That’s his classic approach. He singles somebody out for praise, builds ’em up over a period of time and, then, when he deems ’em too big for their britches, tears ’em down. Rath giveth, Rath taketh away. He’s a Frankenstein who comes to resent all the monsters he’s created.”

  “Your metaphor stinks, Mallory,” Flint said, in a friendly way. “It’s Rath who’s the monster.”

  The table next to us was where Curt Clark and his wife Kim, an exaggeratedly pretty, rather zoftig brunette, were seated; so was another of the guest writers, my old friend Pete Christian, author of so many fine books on mystery movies. Curt rose and came over to check us out, apparently having overheard Rath’s name mentioned.

  “Am I forgiven yet for inviting your Rath?” Curt asked us, eyes atwinkle, leaning in between Mr. and Mrs. Flint. “And that’s a pun, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “Aren’t puns a capital crime in New York state?” Flint asked.

  “I wish a bad pun were all that Kirk S. Rath was,” I said. “It’s easy for you to take this lightly, Curt. I’ve never seen him give you a bad review.”

  Curt shrugged. “I don’t much care. I don’t read reviews.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Not more than three or four times,” he said. “How do you like the food? It’s not fancy, but there’s plenty of it.”

  Jack Flint smiled up at Curt and said, “Do you always answer your own questions?”

  “Do I? I don’t think so.”

  Tom Sardini tore himself away from his strawberry shortcake long enough to say, “And where is the ever-popular Mr. Rath?”

  “He’s already eaten,” Curt explained. “The dining room’s been serving since six o’clock, and it’s almost eight now.”

  “He wasn’t on our bus,” Jack said.

  “Or ours,” I said.

  “He drove up in his own car,” Curt said. “Have you ever met Rath?”

  The question seemed to be posed to me, so I answered it: “Yeah, a couple of times. He was at the last couple Bouchercons, and I ran into him at an Edgar Awards dinner a few years back. He was nasty, but he lacks sting when he isn’t in print. Strikes me more as
immature and... well, naive, than anything else.”

  “I’ve never met him,” Jill said. “And I’m dying to.”

  Curt checked his watch. “Well, you’ll get your chance in twenty minutes. That’s when the game begins, downstairs in the big parlor. I know drawing-room mysteries ain’t the style of you hardbitten private-eye writers, but just do your best to fit in.”

  Curt smiled and returned to his table, while a waitress set my strawberry shortcake in front of me. The berries were blood-red and juicy. Jill was already working on hers. Even the thought of Kirk Rath couldn’t kill our appetites.

  4

  Outside the dining room, Pete Christian caught up with us. Pete was a warm, enthusiastic man, an eternal precocious kid wrapped up in a slightly stocky, vaguely disheveled, middle-aged package. In his rumpled Rumpole-of-the-Bailey suit, he looked like the lone survivor of a town hit by a tornado—a survivor whose only comment was, “What wind?”

  “Mal,” he said, eyes dancing behind dark-rimmed glasses, moustache twitching with his smile, “it’s so good to see you. I’ve been meaning to call.”

  We shook hands and patted each other’s shoulders and grinned at each other.

  “Jill, this is Peter Christian. He wrote that book on the Charlie Chan movies I loaned you, remember?”

  “That was a terrific book,” Jill said, pumping his hand.

  “Are you a mystery fan?” Pete asked her, pumping back.

  “Not really. But I always liked Charlie Chan movies on the late show, when I was a kid.”

  “My dear, you’re still a kid, but a kid with very good taste. I think Sidney Toler’s underrated, don’t you?”

  “Definitely,” she said. “But then I even like the Roland Winters ones. I like all those old movies.”

  “Well, then you’re in luck; I’m in charge of the film program here, and we’re showing three of the best ones... including Charlie Chan at Treasure Island.”

  Her face lit up. “Ah! The one about magicians, with Cesar Romero.”

  “Yes! And for the Warner Oland purists we’ll be leading off with Charlie Chan at the Opera.”

  “Boris Karloff is wonderful in that,” Jill said.

  Pete gave me a mock reproving look. “I thought you said she wasn’t a mystery fan! She knows more about mysteries than you do.”

  “I now pronounce you man and movie buff,” I said. “You two can go trivially pursue yourself all weekend, for all I care. As far as I’m concerned, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.”

  We had been moving—Pete’s a restless type, and when you talk to him he paces, chain-smoking—and were now at the mouth of the Parlor, the massive capital P parlor, which was really a lecture hall and would double as the screening room. Both the dining hall and the Parlor were on the so-called first floor (the real first floor being designated as the ground floor, in the European manner).

  “Are you going to be a suspect or a player?” Peter asked Jill.

  “Neither,” she said.

  “I hope you’re not here for a rest,” he told her, wagging a finger. “This place will be a virtual madhouse for the next forty-eight hours. The Mohonk Mystery Weekenders take their mystery very seriously.”

  “I thought they were here for fun,” she said.

  “You’ll find all sorts of brilliant professional people here,” Pete said. “Intensely competitive types in their work—and in their play. They’re out for blood, my dear.”

  “I hope it doesn’t get unpleasant.”

  “If you’re a student of human nature, you’ll have a fine time. Anyway, I don’t take this as seriously as some do, yet I’ve guessed the murderer seven out of nine times.”

  “How many of these have you attended?”

  “All but one. This is my first time as a suspect.”

  “I’m impressed,” she said.

  “Mal,” Pete said, “sometime this weekend, we must get together. There’s something we need to work on.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been lobbying to get a Grand Master’s Award for Mickey Spillane.”

  “From the Mystery Writers of America? Is there any hope of that happening?”

  Pete shrugged elaborately, did a little take, put out a cigarette, found another, and got it going. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Spillane’s never joined the MWA, and some of the members feel he’s snubbed them.”

  “Well, a lot of them have snubbed him. You can’t deny his influence on the genre, even if you don’t like his work. He deserves that recognition.”

  “I agree, most heartily. I just wondered if you’d help me draft a letter on the subject to the proper committee chairman.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “There is a problem with that,” a voice said. Not my voice. Not Pete’s.

  We turned to look at the source of the voice, which was across from us on a bench. A small, thin man in his late twenties in a gray three-piece suit with a dark blue tie snugged tight in the collar of a light blue button-down shirt sat with his legs crossed, ankle on knee, arms crossed, smirking. Handsome in an angular way, he was blue-eyed, pale as milk, with carefully coiffed longish blond hair. He had paid more for that haircut than I had for my last three.

  “And what problem is that?” I asked.

  “Mickey Spillane is a cretin,” Kirk S. Rath said. “He is—if you’ll pardon my crudity—a shitty writer.”

  Jill swallowed and looked at me, knowing I wouldn’t take that well.

  “If you’ll pardon my crudity,” I said, “you’re full of shit.”

  And I turned back to Pete, who was, after all, the person I’d been having my private conversation with, and said, “When do you want to draft that letter? Let’s not make it tonight. I’m pretty wasted from two days in NYC, and that bus trip...”

  Rath was standing next to me now; I hadn’t seen him come over. It was like a jump cut in a film.

  “I don’t see any reason to get personal, Mallory,” Rath said.

  I sighed. “You referred to a writer I respect—a man I’ve met and like—as a cretin. That strikes me as personal. Sort of like the personal conversation you inserted your opinion into.”

  He smirked again. “Now I’m being accused of intellectual rape.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “I don’t think you could get it up.”

  The smirk dissolved into a sneer.

  “You have a decided suicidal streak, don’t you, Mallory?”

  “Why, because you’ll pan my next book? As opposed to those glowing things you’ve said about me in the past? Go to hell, Kirk.”

  “You’re rude and you’re crude.”

  “And I’m a hip-talkin’ dude. What do you know, Kirk? We’re rappin’! Now go away.”

  Rath looked at Pete, sharply, and said, “I don’t like your choice of company, Christian.”

  “I don’t like people who barge into private conversations,” Pete said, with some edge.

  Jill glanced at me, and I glanced at her.

  Rath pointed a finger at Pete like a manicured gun. “You’re vulnerable, too, my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend,” Pete said. “I haven’t forgotten what you did to C.J. Beaufort.”

  “What I did? Beaufort wrote very bad books, and killed himself. I had nothing to do with either.”

  “You destroyed him in print!” Pete was shaking a fist. “It shattered him!”

  Rath ignored Pete’s fist and laughed. “Writers are public figures; their work is submitted for public consumption. If they can’t take the heat, they should get the hell out of the literature.”

  Pete was trembling; really worked up. “C.J. Beaufort was a kind, gentle man... and he was my friend!”

  I stepped in between Pete and Rath. “I hate to break up this little family reunion, but we were all due downstairs about five minutes ago.”

  Rath shook his head, said, “You people are pathetic,” and clomped down the nearby stairs.

  “So that was Kirk S. Rath,�
� Jill said, shaken.

  “Himself,” I said, feeling a little battered myself.

  “I should have thrown him down the stairs,” Pete said as we started down them. He was huffing with anger.

  “I shouldn’t have baited him,” I said, regretting having ignited the scene between them. “I was rude and crude.”

  “Nonsense! We were talking and he butted in. That arrogant little bastard. You knocked him down a peg or two.”

  “Yeah, right. That brings his ego almost down into the stratosphere.”

  Jill said, “He’s amazing. Did you see his eyes?”

  “What about them?” I asked.

  “He’s certifiable,” she said. “He’s a sociopath.”

  “He doesn’t feel a shred of remorse over Beaufort’s suicide,” Pete said, a little amazed.

  “Kirk Rath isn’t a sociopath,” I said. “He’s just immature. He’s an arrested adolescent. Or is that an adolescent who should be arrested?”

  “You’re too easy on him,” Pete said, shaking his head, lighting up another cigarette.

  “I think he truly doesn’t understand why his criticism is taken so personally,” I said. “He’s a permanent grad student, dazzled by his own William F. Buckley vocabulary and arch prose style.”

  “He knows about the power of the pen,” Pete said, nodding, “But he doesn’t understand the responsibility that goes with it.”

  “Maybe that’s why everybody and his duck is suing him,” Jill offered.

  “C.J. Beaufort can’t sue him,” Pete said.

  And he walked on into the large downstairs parlor where the game players were assembling.

  Jill looped her arm in mine. “What’s the story on this guy Beaufort?”

  “I don’t know all the details,” I said. “Beaufort was a pulp writer, dating back to the Black Mask days. He was an alcoholic. He had some success in the forties, then faded, and wrote paperbacks under many names, for many years. He had some vocal fans, Pete among them, but mostly he was thought of as a solid pro, a journeyman, nothing special. Till Rath.”