Nice Weekend for a Murder (A Mallory Mystery)

by Max Allan Collins

  From the back of the room, Mary Wright said, “I had nothing to do with this—leave me out of this!”

  I ignored her, pressed on: “The point is, Curt knew well in advance which room was mine. In fact, Thursday evening, he dropped by and looked it over... walked to the window and glanced out, like a producer checking out the theater the afternoon before the night the curtain goes up on his new show. Oh, and he was ready for that curtain to go up. Before I checked in, he’d been in that room—for one thing, he dragged my phone from the nightstand over to a table by the window. Having the phone by the window allowed him to call me later, supposedly about a scheduling crisis caused by Rath’s leaving, but in reality merely making sure I was right there at the window to witness the show he was staging. He even directed my attention where it was supposed to be, by asking me to look out my window to see if it was snowing yet. Also, he’d jammed my window shut, beforehand—superglue, nails, what have you. Somehow he made sure that window wouldn’t open, to keep me from getting into the act.”

  Curt said, “I wish you’d refrain from referring to me in the third person. And, if I might add, this is the most harebrained plot you’ve ever come up with. Just who was playing the role of Kirk Rath in this supposed charade of mine?”

  “It was typecasting,” I said. “Rath was playing himself.”

  I expected a chorus of what’s from my audience, but they had settled down, now. They had decided I was worth listening to. I hadn’t convinced anybody yet, but they were willing to listen.

  “When I found Rath’s body on those rocks, two things struck me—first, his face was passive, not contorted, as it had been when I’d seen him slashed outside my window. This, on reflection, suggests to me that Rath’s face might have been slashed after he was dead, as part of an effort to keep his corpse consistent with what I’d witnessed. Second, when I checked his pockets I found his envelope of instructions, like the one I’d been sent by Curt for my role in the mystery weekend. But if you’ll recall, we all received two things: a list of our fellow suspects in Roark Sloth’s murder; and, for our eyes only, a description of our own role in the weekend’s festivities. In Rath’s envelope, however, I found only the list of suspects. Not the instructions for his own part. Why? I think it’s because the murderer—which is to say, you, Curt—destroyed that sheet.”

  Pretending amusement, Curt said, “And why would I do that?”

  “Because it would reveal that Kirk Rath was only playing the game you outlined for him to play.”

  He laughed at that, glancing at Kim, shaking his head; she wasn’t laughing.

  “You instructed Kirk Rath to throw that tantrum and leave,” I said to him. “You told him that that was part of his role this weekend—to storm out, pretend to leave... but then appear near my window later and, with someone’s help, playact a murder.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “The Mohonk Mystery Weekend thrives on the preposterous. The scenario I’ve just suggested is very much in keeping with the activities here. My guess is that Rath thought he was supposed to make a surprise reappearance the next morning, perhaps after the suspect interrogation; he probably planned to sneak back in, to a room you arranged, later Thursday night, possibly wearing a ski mask to keep from being recognized—or he could have stayed in a motel in New Paltz. That detail I’m not sure of. But I feel very sure that Rath—like so many of the game-players here this weekend—thought the prank was a part of the mystery. Hell, the Arnolds and the Logans have as much as hit me over the head with that... that it had to be part of the Mystery Weekend, in which case it could only be the work of one person: Curt Clark.”

  Curt’s smile seemed nervous now; twitching, just a little. “How,” he asked, rather archly, “did all of this lead Kirk Rath to Sky Top and his grisly fate?”

  “You asked him to meet you there. He was like the rest of us—he’d received his instructions by mail and needed some on-the-spot final instruction, final coaching. You told him to drive up to Sky Top after the ‘stunt,’ where you could speak privately, without giving away the joke you and he’d pulled on the Mystery Weekenders. And, in return for his cooperation, you killed him.”

  Curt was smiling, shaking his head.

  “He trusted you—you’d been friends for years. Some friend. You slashed him, you stabbed him; it was very brutal. You hated him. Enough to kill him that savage way, enough to plot it like one of your mystery stories—intricately, cleverly.”

  He ignored that, saying, “How did you come up with this theory? You have no proof whatsoever; it’s the purest of speculation, based on almost nothing.”

  “Not really. One of the couples here—the Arnolds, I mentioned them before—said they saw Kirk Rath skulking around out in the snow, after what I’d seen out my window. That’s what got me thinking about the possibility of the so-called prank being a for-real prank.”

  He wasn’t smiling now; his expression was blank, though he held his head back, rather patricianly, I thought.

  “Also,” I said, gesturing over to the expressionless Fahy, “this gentleman was a good friend of Rath’s. His name is Rick Fahy, as some of you know, and he writes for The Mystery Chronicler. He is here at Mohonk as a game-player, as a matter of fact—to write about the Mystery Weekend from the perspective of a participant. Kirk Rath told Mr. Fahy, here, that they’d be spending a good deal of time together this weekend. I take this to mean Rath intended to stay around.”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t storm out on impulse,” Tim Culver said. He was still standing over by Cynthia, but he was challenging me with hard eyes that crossed the distance easily. I was putting his brother on trial, after all.

  I said, “Mr. Fahy insists that he would have at least had a phone call from Rath, in the aftermath of that; and he didn’t.”

  Pete, who was smoking and pacing along the right wall, stopped to ask: “Why didn’t Rath tell his friend Fahy about the prank, if that’s what it was? That he’d be pretending to leave and all?”

  “Rath and Mr. Fahy were very close,” I said. “So close that I believe Rath would have told his friend all about it—under any circumstances but one: Rath had assigned Mr. Fahy to a story for the Chronicler—and the dictates of that story were that Mr. Fahy play the game like everybody else. Rath would’ve been breaking the rules—and spoiling the story for his magazine—if he shared his role-playing secrets with Mr. Fahy.”

  “It wasn’t even my idea to invite Kirk Rath,” Curt said, openly defensive now.

  “No,” I admitted. “It was Mary Wright’s. And she told me she had great difficulty talking you into coming to Mohonk to stage the mystery... that is, until she mentioned her idea about inviting Kirk Rath. And that’s when you said yes to Mary Wright. Because that’s when your mystery-writer mind started whirring. Only a mystery writer could commit a murder like this. Only Curt Clark could commit a murder so convoluted, so nasty, so... cute.”

  “I’d take that as a compliment,” Curt said, “had I really done all this.”

  “Then convince me that you didn’t,” I said, meaning it. “I don’t want you to be guilty. You’re my friend. You gave me my first career break. I learned half of what I know about writing from you. I look up to you. Goddammit, Curt—tell me I’m wrong. Convince me I’m wrong.”

  Curt studied me and something human flickered in his eyes, behind the glass, or maybe it was just the shadows of the flames.

  But all he could find to say was, “It’s your show. Try to make it play. See if you can.”

  “Damn you, anyway. You know me too well. You knew how I’d react. That I’d buy what I saw out that window as real, and then you were right there, weren’t you, telling me it was a prank. But you knew me better than that—you knew I’d ask around. That I’d have to look into this.”

  “Why would any ‘murderer’ invite that?”

  “It was partly arrogance. But it was mostly a very clever way of clouding what really happened. You made me your alibi... and wh
at an alibi! Through me, you’d sell the cops that the murder had been committed Thursday night, outside my window. From my description of the killer, and because we’d just been talking on the phone, you’d be clear. No one would be asking questions about what you were doing an hour after I saw the ‘murder’—when you were really killing Rath, up on the mountain, your goddamn knife flashing in the moonlight.”

  “How writerly,” Curt said.

  “Shut up,” I said. “You did it. You even sucked your poor wife in.”

  Kim was covering her face with her hand; she was weeping, probably. The room was dim enough, you couldn’t tell.

  “She was in my room,” Curt said. “You heard me talking to her, when you came to our room, moments after what you saw—”

  “I heard you talk to her,” I said. “I didn’t hear her reply, and I certainly didn’t see her. No, she was your accomplice—unwitting in my opinion. Like Rath, she thought the prank was a part of the Mystery Weekend. She’s an actress, and a good one. She has the know-how to do the makeup, to stage the stunt; bundled up, in a ski mask, she made a convincing ‘killer.’ But she wasn’t in on it, not the real murder. I saw how shattered she was today, having found out Rath was really dead. You told her about it now, so you could manipulate her public behavior later. What, did you assure her you didn’t do it, but that if anybody ever found out about the ‘murder’ prank you’d both been involved in with Rath, no one would understand, and you could both be innocently dragged down? Something like that. Anyway, Kim doesn’t have it in her to have gone along with your loony plan. She may stand behind you—cover for you. She may do that. There isn’t much she wouldn’t do for you—from dressing to please you, to putting her career on hold so she could try to give you a second family, a second chance, which you should’ve taken. She loves you. Love makes people do deranged things. Like it made you do.”

  “Love?” Curt said.

  “Love for your son. He died six months ago, just twenty-six, of pneumonia. That struck me as strange, when Kim mentioned it. She said something else that threw me, though I didn’t think much about it at the time—that you were moving out of Greenwich Village because it was getting too ‘lavender’ for your tastes, Curt. That hit me funny, because for one thing, Greenwich Village didn’t just suddenly go lavender; even somebody from Iowa knows gays have been a part of the Village scene since around the dawn of time. But I also didn’t take you for somebody who’d be bigoted toward gays; I never saw it in you before, and in fact you’ve always been liberal in every way, the epitome of the hip New Yorker.”

  Curt was standing looking into the fire, now.

  “Then Mary Wright told me how she’d dated Gary for a while, in college, but they couldn’t make a go of it. Seems that first year, Gary had come to a realization: he was gay.”

  Just looking into the fire.

  “You worshipped your son, your only son, the only son of your first marriage; you loved your wife, your first wife, Joan, very much—and Gary was all you had left of her. You carry one of his paintings around with you, wherever you go. You love him, even now, to the point of obsession. But he was gay. Why, when your beloved son had been gay, did you suddenly begin to hate gays?”

  He turned to look at me sharply, and almost answered; but then he looked back at the fire, as if the flames were hypnotizing him.

  “Why,” I asked, “would a twenty-six-year-old man die of pneumonia? It’s hard to say; hard even to hazard a guess, why that would happen in this day and age. But add something to the description—a gay twenty-six-year-old man—and another possibility arises: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS—a disease you don’t die from, not exactly... it just destroys your body’s immune systems. So that a healthy young man is suddenly dead of pneumonia.”

  Cynthia Crystal had come over to put her arm around Kim, who was weeping openly now, into a handkerchief.

  “I’m only guessing,” I said, “but I think, Curt, you blamed your son’s gay lifestyle for his death. That’s your oversimplification, not mine, of course—AIDS is hardly God’s punishment for homosexuality, but it did allow you to focus blame somewhere. Suddenly sophisticated Curt Clark finds Greenwich Village ‘too lavender.’ But blaming gays in general for Gary’s death wasn’t enough. You had to get specific.”

  Curt turned to look at me; he was leaning against the hearth—he was sweating, he was so close to the flames. His expression was tortured. He said, “And how did I do that?”

  “You blamed the person who introduced your son to the gay lifestyle: his college roommate, Kirk Rath.”

  Some gasps came from my little audience; Rath’s homosexuality had indeed been well closeted.

  I went on, relentlessly: “You convinced yourself that if it hadn’t been for the unhappy circumstances of Gary drawing a gay roommate who, in your mind anyway, seduced him into that world, he might have led a happy, healthy, straight life. Why, he’d be alive today.”

  Curt swallowed. He said, “Wouldn’t he?” Bitterness tinged his words, but it was a question; some doubt was there.

  “Who can say? But you didn’t have any right to blame Rath; you can’t know for sure what was in your son’s heart, his mind. You don’t really know that Rath was, in fact, your son’s first brush with homosexuality. Logic and experience would say, probably not. It’s too easy an answer to blame a ‘seducer’ like Rath for the road your son chose to go down. Rath was a pretty rotten guy, but he didn’t deserve that rap; but perhaps his meanspiritedness makes a little more sense, now that we know that he lived a public lie, a smug facade behind which an unhappy man with a secret hid. If his public political and moral stance is to be at all believed, it’s a secret he was no doubt ashamed of. Did he give you all those good reviews because he knew you knew about his past, knew the truth about him? No matter. It is a little ironic, of course, that he invoked the wrath of a mystery writer like you... like me, like all of us poor schmucks in this business who write about a world where mysteries can be solved and blame can be placed and wrongs can be righted. The real world just isn’t like that. And when you treat the real world like it’s a mystery story, Curt—you’re going to make a mess of things. A real mess.”

  Curt smiled; turned to me. He was still near the fire, but he wasn’t leaning against the hearth anymore. He had his composure back, one hundred percent. But his eyes behind the dark-rimmed glasses were still tortured.

  He said, “If you expect me to confirm or deny any of what you’ve said, I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment. I applaud your audacious, if convoluted, plotting, but I would suggest that I’m only one of a roomful of suspects, here... and neither you, nor the police, will ever manage to single me successfully out from the pack.”

  Then Curt took a sudden step backward, looking past me, startled, and suddenly I was pushed to one side, something, somebody moving past me like a goddamn freight train. The audience I’d assembled was on its feet, now, calling out, crying out, as they and I saw Rick Fahy grab the iron poker and lift it and with one swift stroke, one savage blow, cave in the side of Curt Clark’s head.

  Fahy got in another bash before I pulled him back, by both elbows, and he struggled for a moment, but then relaxed, and dropped the bloody poker with a clunk, as he... as I... as we... saw Curt slump to the floor. His brains were showing. Those clever, creative brains; exposed. He flopped forward, and Kim began screaming.

  Jack Flint took charge of Fahy, pasty-faced, slack-jawed, limp, just some flesh and bones flung into evening clothes; and Cynthia and Culver were restraining Kim, whose screaming was subsiding into sobs, while I leaned over Curt’s body and touched the side of his face. His glasses had come off. His eyes were open, wide. But they didn’t seem tortured now. That was something, anyway.

  “Shit, Curt—damn it all, anyway. I’m sorry—I’m sorry....” He couldn’t hear me, I suppose; but I had to say it. I was as responsible for this as Fahy, in a way; but not as responsible as Curt Clark.

  Jill was at my side,
pulling me up, helping me, making me stand. “Mal, I’m sorry—so very sorry.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” I said.

  “Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to,” she said.

  Neither one of us felt much like Nick or Nora.

  PART FOUR

  Sunday

  19

  At ten o’clock the next morning—the time that had been set aside for the solutions to Curt Clark’s Case of the Curious Critic—a haggard Mary Wright in an uncharacteristically wrinkled blue Mohonk blazer stood before the three hundred or so assembled Mystery Weekenders in the Parlor and gave a brief, apologetic explanation about why this morning’s festivities had been cancelled.

  “A tragic series of events has eclipsed our make-believe mystery,” she said into the microphone, her amplified voice sounding hollow. “The mystery community has lost two of its most interesting, respected figures: in separate, but related, turns of extreme, unfortunate circumstance, both Kirk Rath and Curt Clark have lost their lives. Out of respect to their memories, our mystery this weekend must go unsolved. If we might have a few moments of silence....”

  The old cough-drop boys in the high-framed pictures looked down in their Quaker way on us poor sinners as we each in his or her own fashion said good-bye to two tragically linked men.

  Then Mary put on a small, intrepid smile and said, “For those of you interested, we are providing a rain check of sorts to any of you wishing to attend either of next year’s Mystery Weekends. Also, a partial refund will be sent to each and every one of you, as we were not able to deliver our entire package as promised.”

  Business considerations. Death was the biggest thing there was in life, except for business; nothing could stand in the way of business considerations.

  On the whole, though, I thought Mary Wright had handled the situation tactfully, and nobody among the game-players seemed to be complaining much, though many were clearly disappointed. And Mary’s vague references to the two murders didn’t raise any particular questions among them. The police, who had arrived just after one A.M. last night, had questioned a number of the Weekenders—the Arnolds and the Logans among them. The real story had gotten out, over breakfast; hardly fitting table conversation, even at a Mystery Weekend, but what are you going to do?