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.
&n
bsp; “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.”
Nice Weekend for a Murder (A Mallory Mystery) Page 10