Nice Weekend for a Murder (14 page)

“Anything’s possible,” I said. A waiter came by and I handed him my filled-out menu and Jill’s.

“Well, anyway, they were talking to me about my Charlie Chan movie book,” Pete said, “and really got me going. Some subjects, if you get me started, it’s like I’ve fallen off a cliff—I just don’t stop till I hit bottom.”

Jill was studying Pete; not too openly, I hoped. She said, “Why do you say the Arnolds can be devious?”

Pete’s enthusiasm for life was contagious, and his laughter was too. “They were
studying
me, waiting for me to make a slip, a mistake, asking me to recount various plots of mystery films, wondering about the ‘structure’ of the mystery form....”

“That sounds innocent enough,” Jill said.

Tom pushed his plate away, clean. “You don’t know Pete. If he saw a parallel between one of those stories and this weekend’s mystery, he might blurt it out. Not thinking.”

“Ah,” Pete said, “but I’m always thinking. It’s just that my enthusiasm gets in the way of my better judgment, at times.”

“What role are you playing in
The Case of the Curious Critic
?” Jill asked him.

“I’m Rick Butler,” Pete said, sitting up, proudly. “Dapper man about town. Didn’t you see me in my tux this morning?”

“Oh yes,” Jill said, smiling. A waiter slipped a bowl of oxtail soup down in front of her. Me next.

“Curt’s poking some fun at me,” Pete said, smile settling in one corner of his mouth, “but I don’t mind.”

Tom was leaning back in his chair, grinning, gesturing at Pete with a thumb. “Curt turned Pete into a fashion plate.”

“With a neatness fetish yet,” Pete said. “You see before you a man who has now played
both
roles in
The Odd Couple
. My character also is an extremely fussy nonsmoker. Allergic to cigarette smoke, to be exact. Whereas if I don’t have a cigarette immediately, I’ll begin throwing chairs.” He stood and told Jill how charming she was and shambled off for his smoke.

“I like him,” Jill said. “He has a gentlemanly manner.”

“He’s a nice man,” I said. “But as much as he hates Kirk Rath, it’s a little surprising he’s here this weekend.”

Tom shrugged. “Pete’s just that kind of guy. He wouldn’t let a louse like Rath spoil his weekend.”

Jill was studying Tom, now. “Are you like everybody else around here?” she asked. “Did you hate Rath?”

“Rath or Sloth?” Tom asked.

Her past tense had confused him.

“Rath,” she said, a little nervously, realizing her slip.

“I don’t hate him exactly,” Tom said. “He’s cost me some money. I lost a series because of him.”

“Really?” Jill said, surprised but trying not to show it. “TV?”

“Books,” Tom said.

“What series was that?” I asked.

“That series I was going to do with a racetrack background. About a detective who worked for the racing commission?”

“Oh, yeah.... Didn’t you do one of those?”

“Right. Only I was set to do two more till
The Mystery Chronicler
hung me out to dry.”

Tom’s bitterness had an edge to it, like the ice in the snow outside.

“What role do you play in Curt’s mystery?” Jill asked. She was doing her best to seem casual; I could read her like a book, however, and like a book I wrote, at that. But maybe Tom couldn’t.

“I’m Rob Darsini,” he was saying, “A boxer turned private eye who is suspiciously like my character Jacob Miles. I was working for Sloth, it seems, but he tried to stiff me for my bill.”

“Cost you money, in other words,” Jill said. “Like in real life.”

“Pete’s character echoes real life, too,” Tom said with a little shrug. “He mentioned it even touches on his having had a friend die by suicide after critic ‘Sloth’ trashed him—which is uncomfortably close to what happened to Pete’s mentor C.J. Beaufort.”

Jill seemed almost shocked. “Isn’t it in rather bad taste of Curt to include such a thing?”

Tom laughed, but it was forced and a little weary. “Cute and nasty, that’s our Curt. Though I think in fairness to him, it should be said it’s Rath he meant to needle. I’m sure he’s as disappointed as the rest of us that Rath split.”

“Disappointed?” I said.

“Sure!” Tom said. “Weren’t
you
hoping he’d hang around and be the murder victim? Don’t we deserve that
vicarious
pleasure, at least?”

And he rose and said he’d see us later and left us to our supper.

The entertainment for the evening was Peter Christian’s Charlie Chan movie marathon—three flicks preceded by an informative but not at all dry slide show, with Pete regaling the attentive crowd in the Parlor with anecdotes and little-known facts while flashing onto the screen rare stills, movie posters, and candid shots of the various movie Chans, as well as photos of the oriental detective’s creator, Earl Derr Biggers, and dust jackets of first editions and early paperbacks. From George K. Kuwa, the screen’s first Chan (in an abbreviated appearance in a 1926 silent), to the relatively recent (and disastrous) Peter Ustinovstarring-as-Chan film, it was all there.

And, as a mystery buff and late show devotee from way back, I was enjoying myself; but for my investigative purposes the evening’s entertainment was a bigger disaster than the Ustinov movie. Tomorrow night a dance was scheduled in this time slot, which would be ideal for mingling and casual questioning; however, this was tonight, and movies. In most Charlie Chan films, there is a scene in which all the suspects are gathered in one room and, suddenly, somebody turns out the lights! The situation tonight was similar—all the suspects were gathered here, in this mammoth hall, but the lights were already out. And, unlike a Chan film, where the lights would be out but for a moment, this would be a four-hour haul. In the dark.

Out of courtesy to Pete (and because his presentation was plenty of fun, even for somebody as preoccupied as I was), I sat through the slide show; movie nut Jill insisted on sitting through
Charlie Chan at the Opera
, during which she bet me a million dollars I didn’t know who wrote the opera Boris Karloff and the others were singing. I won the bet. It was Oscar Levant, and Jill still hasn’t paid up.

When
Charlie Chan at Treasure Island
started unfolding, Jill grabbed my arm and whispered. “This is my favorite one. I
have
to see it.”

“What happened to playing Nora to my Nick?”

“All your suspects are watching the movies,” she whispered.

“Culver isn’t here.”

“He was.”

“Well, he ducked out in the last reel of the
Opera
.”

“How
could
he?”

“It was easy.” I thought for a moment. “You know, this might be a good chance for me to get him alone.”

Cynthia Crystal hadn’t left; she was sitting with Jack Flint and his wife, drinking in Sidney Toler’s finest Chan.

“I’m watching the movie,” Jill said. “It’s only an hour. See you at the room, after?”

“What about the next Chan up?”

“It’s a Roland Winters. I like it okay, but enough’s enough.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that. I don’t know if I want to hang around with a woman who’d sit through
three
Charlie Chan movies.”

Somebody in the row in front of us turned and said, angrily, “Shusssh!” Quite rightly, too—generally I feel people who talk during movies should be shot.

Feeling guilty for violating one of my own rules, I rolled my fingers at Jill in a Stooges wave and slinked out of the Parlor.

I went to Culver’s room, which was just a few doors down from ours, and knocked. No answer.

So I began exploring the mountain house, wandering its endless halls, occasionally finding little covens of Mystery Weekenders, who were playing hookey from the night’s entertainment to keep working on their solution to
The Case of the Curious Critic
. Since a number of the gamesters were puzzle fanatics as opposed to mystery fans, their absence from the Chan festival, and their obsession with working on the puzzle, made sense. Using “sense” loosely.

Anyway, they were here and there, in the little sitting rooms with the plush furnishings and the fireplaces, many of which were going now, the snow piling up outside the frosted-over windows. Strangely, I’d heard no one complain about being stranded. Perhaps that was because all of us were, in a manner of speaking, stranded here already, and of our own free will. Being snowbound merely added to the atmosphere, whether
Ten Little Indians
—Agatha Christie, or
The Shining
—Stephen King.

I should have been depressed, I supposed. A man had died; I’d seen him killed one day, and found his body the next. That I had done both seemed wildly coincidental to me, certainly nothing I’d try to get away with in one of my books. But it had happened, so what was I supposed to do about it? You can start over in fiction; in life you’re stuck with what you’re dealt.

But I felt a certain charge out of the situation—being snowbound, having a chance to try to find out “whodunit” before the police got here (tomorrow or Sunday or Monday or whenever the hell snow and fate allowed), having one up on the murderer
by knowing about the murder when he or she thought it had gone as yet undetected and, well, it was exciting. I was like any other Mohonk game-player—I enjoyed the challenge, and I wanted to solve the puzzle.

At the same time my more rational self was cautioning me not to consider this a game; to remember the ghastly slashed face of Rath (as if I could forget) and to keep in mind that the person I was pursuing had committed that violent crime. It might be a Christie situation, but some King-style violence was in the air.

I discovered the big-screen TV room, finally; the monstrous thing was shut off, the chairs before it empty—Pete’s Chan show was getting the ratings tonight. Next I ran across a cementfloored game room, tucked away at the end of one hall like a poor relation, where pinballs and video games were being played by young off-duty employees, and a Yuppie-ish young couple was playing pool. No sign of Culver, but the pool-playing Yuppies were my new friends, Jenny and Frank Logan. They were just racking up for another game when they noticed me.

“Oh!” Jenny said. She wore a green sweater and gray slacks and filled them out nicely, thank you. “We’d been hoping to run into you. And this makes a good out-of-the-way place to talk.”

It was; the game room was dark and dingy and was very much like most of the bars back in Port City, only I didn’t notice anybody serving beer, let alone hard stuff.

“This must be where the Quakers go to go nuts,” I said.

“We’ve got our own little bar back in our room,” Jenny said.

“But,” Frank warned, beige cardigan, pale blue shirt, gray slacks, “we’re liable to be interrupted by our fellow team players.”

Jenny smirked in a good-humored way. “We’re sort of hiding out from them.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They want to keep hashing and rehashing the interrogation info,” she said.

“I thought you two took this stuff pretty seriously.”

“Sure,” Frank said, “but we don’t go overboard.”

“Besides,” Jenny said with a smug little smile, “we know who did it.”

“Oh?”

“And,” she went on, “we won’t be working on the creative aspects of our presentation till tomorrow, so what the hell. Let’s live a little.”

I glanced around the game room. “If you call this living.”

“We’ve spent hours today in one little hotel room,” she said, heaving a theatrical sigh, “huddled with our fellow game-players. Just had to get away.”

“So you know who did it?” I said. Amused in spite of myself.

“Sure,” she said, grinning. “You.”

And they looked at me. Watched me. Even, one might say, studied me.

Finally I said, “Am I expected to confirm that or deny it or something?”

They shrugged, wearing smirky smiles.

“You guys are real cute,” I said, and took up a pool cue and broke their balls. I started shooting around the table, not playing any game, just randomly sinking the balls, missing now and then.

“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” Jenny said, sidling up next to me. She was wearing Giorgio perfume; I’m no expert, but I recognized it as what Jill wears. The combination of being reminded of jealous Jill, and Jenny’s husband lurking nearby, kept me from letting my thoughts run wild. But it did occur to me, for a fleeting, frightening instant, that Frank might let
me sleep with his wife if I’d tell them what I knew about the nonexistent Sloth murder.

Jenny said, “We asked around for you.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s great.” I didn’t know how to tell them that their efforts had been pointless. I wasn’t about to let them know I’d established that the “prank” had been real, via finding the very real corpse.

Frank sidled up on the other side of me; he smelled like English Leather. I used to use it. Now I wear nothing at all.

Frank said, “We think maybe the Arnolds pulled that stunt.”

“The Casablanca restaurant couple?”

“Yes. She used to be an actress, and he’s—”

“A karate expert,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”

Jenny said, “Have you talked to them yet?”

“No, uh... but I will.”

Frank moved away, leaned over the table and banked the eight ball into a corner pocket. “They seem to be the only group this year,” he said, “that brought along fairly elaborate theatrical gear.”

“That we know of for sure,” she added. “There are at least half a dozen theater pros here, and some of them may have brought along more stuff than they were willing to cop to, to the ‘enemy.’ ”

I put the pool cue away. I liked these people, but they were too attractive and smelled too good for me to be comfortable around them.

“Thanks for checking,” I said. “You don’t need to do anything more.”

“It was fun,” Jenny said. “We felt like industrial spies.”

Frank slipped his arm around her waist. “We still think you did it,” he said.

“No comment,” I said. “How do you like being snowbound?”

“I think it’s cool,” Jenny said, beaming.

An understatement worthy of Hammett.

They went back to playing pool and hiding out, and I walked out into the hall. I was nearing our room when somebody called out to me.