Nice Weekend for a Murder (13 page)

“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.

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.”