Nice Weekend for a Murder (A Mallory Mystery)

by Max Allan Collins

  Culver shook his head slowly, twice. “Not that kind of praise.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You mean, the mystery-fandom-goes-to-graduate-school sort of praise you got in the Chronicler. Highfalutin’, pretentious, toney-type praise. You and Hemingway and Faulkner and Hammett all in the same sentence.”

  “Yeah,” Culver said, disgusted with himself.

  “So,” Cynthia said, being cautious not to step on her lover’s reticent toes, “Tim agreed to be interviewed.”

  “I never give interviews,” Culver said, sneering faintly. “I’m like Garbo: leave me the hell alone.”

  “But you gave Rath an interview,” Jill said.

  “Yes,” Culver said.

  “Why?” Jill asked.

  He pounded the table with one fist; silverware jumped. “I said why. The little bastard flattered me into it.”

  Silence.

  The waiter brought Jill her poached eggs and me my corned beef hash and Culver some coffee, refilling Cynthia’s cup as well.

  Then Culver said, “I’d been drinking. They flattered me, and we began drinking, moved from bar to hotel room like so many seductions and then I said, ‘Sure. I’ll do an interview.’ ”

  Cynthia smiled nervously. “Tim does loosen up a bit when he drinks. Christ, I wish you could smoke in here.”

  Tim said, “I talked too much. I said things I shouldn’t have.”

  “Such as?”

  Tim drank some coffee. “I said insulting things about another writer.”

  I leaned forward, squinting at him, as if that would make me see inside him better. “You’re not involved in one of Rath’s libel suits, are you...?”

  “No! I wish to God I were.” He leaned an elbow on the table and covered his eyes with the thumb and third finger of his right hand.

  When he took the hand away, his eyes were red and a little wet. He said, “I said awful things about C.J. Beaufort.”

  “Oh,” I said. Pete Christian’s friend and mentor, the one who’d committed suicide not long ago, after several years of ridicule in the Chronicler.

  “I had nothing against Beaufort or his work,” he said. “I’ve probably not read more than a short story or two of his, over the years. But we were drinking, and Rath and his crony started laughing about the ‘King of the Hacks....’ ”

  Cynthia, one of whose hands rested on Culver’s nearest one, said quietly, “It grew out of a discussion of Tim’s working methods—out of the fact that Tim publishes only one book a year, a finely polished piece of work, unlike many others in the business—like your friend Sardini, say, who fairly churns them out.”

  “You have to make a living,” I said, in defense of those writers. “And some, like Tom, write very well.”

  “I know,” Culver said. “Perhaps I resent the likes of Sardini... and Beaufort. I had to supplement my writing career with a teaching job. They make a living from their words alone. But, hell—I had nothing against Beaufort. If I’d been given the opportunity to edit my interview, as I’d been promised, the references to Beaufort would’ve been deleted. I’d have been sober, then. Goddamn—I never even met Beaufort.” He shook his head, his mouth tight with self-disgust. “And the poor son of a bitch blew his brains out over a copy of the Chronicler. Opened to my interview.”

  The only sound in the high-ceilinged hall was the clink of a dish and the wind-rattle of the windows.

  I said, “You can hardly hold yourself responsible....”

  Culver looked at me with eyes like glowing coals and thumped his chest with a thick forefinger. “I hold myself responsible for every thing I do, every word I speak. And I have no respect for any man who doesn’t.”

  I swallowed. “That’s a pretty charitable outlook.”

  Culver scowled at me, and then looked away, and raised his coffee cup to his lips and drank.

  Jill, not knowing when to leave bad enough alone, said, “Why in God’s name did you agree to come here, then? If Rath was going to be here?”

  Culver put the coffee cup down. “Because my brother asked me.”

  Jill still didn’t get it. “If your brother knew about the bitterness between you and Rath, then why would he impose on you so?”

  If I’d asked him that, he might have smacked me; but his Hammett-like code included a certain surface chivalry toward the ladies.

  He said, “My brother doesn’t know how deep my bitterness runs. We’ve never discussed the subject of Rath.”

  “Besides,” Cynthia said lightly, her smile forced, “what could Tim say to the invitation but yes? He and Curt had just, well, patched things up after being estranged for so long... he could hardly refuse him. And, besides, who could be mad at Curt for inviting Rath? It was the natural thing for him to do.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Because Rath always praised Curt in the Chronicler?”

  “That,” Cynthia said, “and, of course, they go back a very long way.”

  That was news to me. I said so.

  “Oh, they go back ages,” she said, as if everybody knew that. “Curt’s son Gary was Kirk’s roommate when they were college kids at NYU.”

  “It’s the first I heard of it.”

  Culver spoke, reluctantly. “That’s part of why I allowed Rath to sucker me. He was like one of Curt’s family.”

  “Or anyway, he was back in those days,” Cynthia added. “I think it was meeting Curt that turned the young Kirk Rath on to mystery fiction in the first place.”

  “And with Gary gone, now,” Culver said, “my brother feels a bond to that little bastard.” He meant Rath. “So I wasn’t about to bring up my feelings about Rath, not with Curt still so broke up.”

  “About the loss of his son, you mean,” I said.

  Culver nodded. Then he shrugged facially. “I guess it’s like old home week for Curt.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  Culver shrugged his shoulders. “That social director here, what’s her name? She’s the one that booked Curt in to do this Mystery Weekend.”

  “Mary Wright, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Mary Wright. She was thick with both of them.”

  “Both of who?”

  “Kirk and Gary. She went with Gary, for a while, I think, back at NYU. They were schoolmates there, the three of them.”

  15

  Jack Flint was giving a talk, which he’d begun at ten o’clock, on the differences between real-life private eyes and fictional ones. I would have loved to hear it, under other circumstances; but what I was there for was Mary Wright, who I found standing in the back of the Parlor, in her blue Mohonk blazer, clipboard in hand.

  I had asked Jill to wait in our room; I knew she didn’t like Mary Wright, and I knew Mary Wright didn’t like her. So I figured I might get further with the Mohonk social director, alone.

  “Could I have a few minutes of your time?” I asked her.

  She looked at me gravely, dark brown eyes narrowing; as one of the handful who knew about the Rath murder, all I meant to her was bad news. Any inclination to flirt with me was long gone, now.

  “Is something wrong?” she whispered.

  “Everything’s peachy. Where can we talk privately?”

  We went to her small office on the ground floor; she sat behind the desk and fussed with some artificial flowers in a vase as we spoke. A framed print of kittens playing with a ball of yarn hung on the wall nearby. I sat across from her.

  “Yes, I knew Kirk Rath,” she said. “Did I ever say I didn’t?”

  “No. But it does seem relevant.”

  “Does it?”

  “I think so. Why didn’t you mention it?”

  “Why should I? Is it so surprising? Did you suppose I arranged weekends like these by placing my finger on some random name in the phone book? Of course I call upon people I know.”

  “Then it was you who invited Rath here.”

  “I suggested him to Curt, when I first invited Curt to do the Mystery Weekend. He was reluctant at first....”

&nb
sp; “To invite Rath?”

  She shook her head, mildly irritated. “No, to take over planning the Mystery Weekend. You see, previously we had Don Westlake, and Curt was reluctant to follow in Don’s footsteps.”

  I understood that; Curt worked the same literary territory as Westlake but had always played second fiddle to him with the reviewers.

  “But then he said yes,” she said, “after I told him some of my ideas.”

  “One of which was to have Rath as a murder victim.”

  “Well, to invite him, anyway, yes, that was my idea. You know what a wicked sense of humor Curt has, and Kirk was certainly a controversial figure. I thought it would be... fun.”

  “It has been a million laughs, hasn’t it?”

  She said nothing, frowning, fiddling with the artificial flowers.

  “You didn’t—and don’t—seem too broken up about the death of your old friend, now do you?”

  She shrugged, her mouth tightening; then she said, “We were never close. Just acquaintances. We went to school together, college I mean, ran with the same bunch.”

  “Specifically, Curt’s son.”

  She frowned. “Yes. Gary was a mutual friend.”

  “He was your boyfriend, wasn’t he?”

  “Gary?” Now she smiled, but there was sadness in it. “We were just friends.”

  “Didn’t you go together?”

  “Briefly. We tried to make it work. Look, Mr. Mallory, this is getting a little personal.”

  “As opposed to something as detached as murder.”

  She sat up; looked at me pointedly. “Kirk Rath is dead, and I’m sorry, but there can be little doubt that the mean-spirited way he treated people got him killed.”

  “I hate it when a critic pans me,” I said, “but I never killed one for it. I don’t know of any instance in the history of man where a critic got killed by his unhappy subject.”

  “Maybe you don’t know your history,” she said coldly, looking away from me now, playing with the flowers again.

  “Or history maybe got made here,” I said.

  “Is that all? I’m a busy woman.”

  “Ah yes. You have a weekend to run. Answer my question, and I’ll go.”

  “What question?”

  “I guess I never got around to asking it. Why did you and Gary break up?”

  She sighed, straining for patience, looking at me with mock-pity and genuine condescension. “Gary was gay, Mr. Mallory.”

  “Oh.”

  “He didn’t know it, or didn’t admit it to himself, till college. He tried to be straight. Wanted to. We were friends... we tried to make something more of it. It just didn’t work out.”

  “I see.”

  “Now, if you’re quite through prying into my personal life, could I ask you to leave? I believe you have a role to play in just a few minutes....”

  She was right; at eleven-thirty, to be exact. This was Saturday morning, which marked the second and final interrogation of suspects in The Case of the Curious Critic, just half an hour from now. I excused myself, and she wasn’t sorry to see me go. I went to the room, reported Mary Wright’s revelations to Jill, who said nothing, just mulled them over as she helped me get ready, as once again I nerded myself up to be Lester Denton—pencil mustache, Brylcreem, window-glass glasses, black-and-red-and-white-plaid corduroy suit and all.

  But my heart was not in it, as I again sat in the little open parlor, with the cold frosted windows to my back and a roaring fireplace to my left, and a new batch of eager Mystery Weekenders all around, all but grilling me over that open fire.

  The teams had divided their memberships up differently, so that no player would interrogate the same suspect twice—with one notable exception: Rick Fahy was again in the audience, in a front-row seat, in fact. Today he wore a green sweater and blue jeans, but his expression remained pained, and the gray eyes behind the thick glasses were still red-veined and dark-circled. He looked like hell.

  Only today he didn’t ask a single question; his Hamilton Burger routine at yesterday’s interrogation—and the one conducted in earnest in last night’s encounter in the hall, for that matter—was conspicuously absent. He just sat staring at me with haunted eyes, unnerving me.

  Jill was in the audience too, in the back, leaning against a support beam, getting her first look at Lester Denton in action.

  Taking Jenny and Frank Logan’s places in the Overenthusiastic Yuppie Division were the fabled Arnolds, Millie and Carl. Millie—a slim little bubbly redheaded woman with attractive, angular features—was the interrogator, while her dark, mustached husband—a small man behind whose mild demeanor lurked a black belt in karate—sat taking the notes. They both wore ski sweaters and jeans, and sat forward, hanging on Lester’s every word.

  “Are you aware that Sloth had published a vicious review of his own grandmother’s first mystery novel?” Millie said, her words rushing out. All of Millie’s words came rushing out.

  “No,” I said. I was aware, however, that the grandmother role was being played by Cynthia Crystal.

  “And that upon reading the review,” Millie continued, “she had a heart attack?”

  “No,” I said. None of this was on my Suspect sheet; they were wasting their time going down this alley. But what the hell, it was their time.

  Another player—a heavyset woman of about forty, dressed all in dark blue—gestured with her pen and said, “Sloth’s grandmother was seen going to his room shortly before you did. Did you see her?”

  “No,” I said, meekly. “But I’m most relieved to hear the dear lady made a full recovery.”

  “Then you weren’t aware,” Millie said, “that Sloth hired a thief to break into his grandmother’s house, to see if she’d changed her will, in the aftermath of that review?”

  “No,” I said. All I knew of this aspect of Curt’s mystery was that Tim Culver was playing the thief.

  Carl Arnold spoke; his deadpan expression barely cracked as he said, “Did Sloth say anything about his grandmother when you saw him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He said nothing about a bribe?” Millie pressed.

  “Well...”

  “Did he say anything about a bribe? Specifically, that he told his grandmother he’d review her next book favorably, if she put him back in the will?”

  “I knew nothing of that,” I said.

  Another of the players, another Yuppie male in a white cardigan and pale blue shirt, picked up on my reaction to the word bribe and said, “You have a wealthy background, don’t you, Mr. Denton?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘wealthy’....”

  “What would you say?”

  “Mother is well-fixed.”

  “Did you offer money to Sloth that night?”

  “Well, uh...”

  “Did you, Mr. Denton?”

  Whereupon I broke down and confessed having attempted to bribe Roark K. Sloth; I further confessed to his having laughed off my “pathetic” attempt to do so.

  Millie Arnold’s eyes were glittering; she smelled blood, and it put a great big smile right under her nose. “Did Sloth threaten you with a tape recording?”

  “Y-yes,” Lester and I said. “He had recorded our entire conversation on a pocket machine.”

  Soon the interrogation was over; I’d done an all right job—not as good as the first time around, but the first time around I had only a probable prank on my mind, not a real live murder. Still, a number of the interrogators hung around to compliment me and chat and laugh a little. They were having a great time, the players were; this was the best Mystery Weekend yet, several veterans said.

  Among the lingerers were the Arnolds. Millie approached me and asked if she could give Lester a kiss; I said sure and she bussed Lester’s cheek.

  “You were great,” she said, slapping me on the shoulder. I wasn’t great. She was just enthusiastic.

  Jill wandered up and I made introductions all around.

  “You seemed p
leased to get that piece of business about the tape,” I said to Millie and Carl, making polite conversation.

  “Oh, yes—that helps us confirm a suspicion. Sloth taperecorded everybody—Tom Sardini’s private-eye character has admitted to helping Sloth go so far as to wiretap.”

  “Also,” Carl added, “Jack Flint’s character admitted to being threatened with a blackmail tape... but no tapes were found in Sloth’s room.”

  “I see,” I said, not really giving a damn.

  “Could I ask you a question?” Millie said, which was a question itself, actually.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Did you send Jenny Logan around to check up on us? We figured she was trying to find out if we pulled that stunt outside your window. Because we brought our theatrical gear along and all.”

  “Actually, I did ask her to check around.”

  “Then you weren’t in on it?” Carl said.

  “In on what?”

  “The stunt,” Millie said. “We figured it was a part of the Mystery Weekend—something Curt Clark cooked up. Most of the teams are working it into their solutions.”

  “Then they’re going down the wrong road,” I said. “The mystery is strictly limited to the information you gather from the interrogation sessions—nothing else before or after counts.”

  “Then why,” Millie said, her constant smile momentarily disappearing into puzzlement, “would Rath have gone along with it?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Why would he have taken part in that stunt?”

  I exchanged glances with the unusually silent Jill. She shrugged and smirked—you’re on your own, brother.

  So I said to the Arnolds, “Uh, who says he did?” I didn’t know what else to say, short of expressing the view that the “stunt” hadn’t been a stunt at all, but a real murder in which Rath (one would suppose) took only a reluctant part. Which I couldn’t hope to prove without mentioning that I’d stumbled upon Rath’s body in a condition consistent with the way he died in said “stunt.”

  “Oh, it was him, all right,” Millie said.

  Jill, interest piqued, cut in. “Why are you so sure?”

  “Well,” Carl said, ever deadpan, “I guess it’s possible it was somebody else. Somebody playing Rath.”