Nice Weekend for a Murder (6 page)

And they were off, talking, gesturing as they went.

“She’s nice,” I said.

“ ‘It was a pleasure meeting you
finally
,’ ” Jill said with infinite sarcasm.

“Huh?”

“Come with me, Romeo.” She yanked me by the sweaty hand, and we walked down a hallway. It took a jog and we were suddenly at our room. She had the key and was working it in the door.

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” I asked.

“What for?” she said.

“Just because I was polite to that girl.”

“She’s not a girl. She’s thirty-five if she’s a day.”

“So are you.”

“You always know just the right thing to say.” She opened the door and smiled tightly and gestured for me to go in. I did.

Jill began undressing, and I sat on one of the twin beds looking at her while she did. When she was down to her wisp of
a bra and her sheer panties, she said, “If I hadn’t come along on this trip, you’d be cozying up to that little flirt, wouldn’t you?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Was that a gun in your pocket, or were you just glad to see her?”

“Hey, there wasn’t
anything
in my pocket!”

I got out of my clothes. Turned out the lights. Sat back down on the bed.

“You have no right to be jealous,” I said. “You’re the one who’s leaving
me
, after all.”

“I have to. My job in Port City is finished.”

“A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

“I have to work, Mal.”

“There are other jobs. You could find something in Port City, or anyway the surrounding area.”

“And you could pack up and come with me. You’re a writer—you can work anywhere. Nothing’s keeping you in Port City.”

We’d had this conversation dozens of times, in minorly varying forms. My next remark would be that I had property in Port City—not only my house, but the farmland my parents had left me, which I had to keep an eye on, and... well, anyway, that’s what I would normally say next. And she had something to say that came after that, but to hell with it. An impasse is an impasse.

“We weren’t going to talk about this,” I said, “this trip.”

“I know.”

“So how did we get onto it?”

Her voice was a little sad as she said, “I guess I can’t stand the thought of, after I leave, you taking up with some little chippy the minute I’m out of the city limits.”

“Chippy?” I said, savoring the word. “Chippy? I was thinking more of finding some floozie. Or perhaps a hussy. Or maybe a bimbo; yeah, that’s the ticket. I think I’ll find me a bimbo to take your place, the minute you leave town.”

“Very funny,” she said, and there was enough moonlight filtering in through the window for me to see that she was indeed smiling a little.

“What do you want to do about these twin beds?” I asked.

“Push them together,” she said.

“Good idea.”

I moved the nightstand out of the way, and we mated twin beds, and then we just plain mated.

“We should have made a fire,” she said, snuggling with me in my twin bed.

“What do you call what we just did?”

“You know what I mean. It’d be very romantic, the fireplace going in this otherwise dark room.”

“ ‘Otherwise dark room,’ huh? Pretty fancy talk. You must hang around with a writer or something.”

She snuggled closer. “An author,” she said.

“We’ll have our fire tomorrow night. Forecast says it’s going to get colder and maybe snow some, over the weekend.”

“An author who talks like a TV weatherman,” Jill amended, then sat up in bed and stretched; the moonlight made her body look smooth, bathed it in ivory.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said, yawning.

“Do you want to get dressed and take in Pete’s movie, after?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve seen
Laura
a million times. Anyway, I’m bushed. You can go if you like, though.”

“You’d trust me?”

“For the next couple hours or so. Your powers of recuperation being what they are.”

“You couldn’t have trusted me that long when I was twenty-five.”

“Well, Mal, you’re thirty-five, like the rest of us, and I’ll trust you till midnight.”

She slid out of bed and padded barefoot into the bathroom and the sound of the shower’s spray soon began lulling me. I lay there trying to decide whether I wanted to get out of bed and get dressed and take in that flick. I was fairly keyed up, despite the long day. But the sheets felt cool and the blankets warm and the bed soft and the phone woke me.

It was only a minute or so later; the shower was still doing its rain dance. But the phone, over on the table by the window, was ringing.

I sat up, yawned, tasted my mouth (which in one minute had accumulated the unpleasant film and sour breath of a full night’s sleep) and bumped into things as I made my clumsy way across the room to the insistent phone.

“Yes,” I said.

“Mal? Curt. I hope I didn’t wake you—it’s early yet, I didn’t expect you to sack out so soon.”

“Me, either.” He sounded a little hyper. “What’s up?”

“I wondered if you’d mind doing double duty tomorrow.”

“How so?”

“You have a speech to give, but after that, we need to fill Rath’s slot with something, remember?”

“Yeah....”

“I was hoping you and Tom and Jack could throw together a sort of panel on the resurgence of the hard-boiled private-eye in mystery fiction.”

“That’s a mouthful, Curt... but, sure. Why not?”

“I knew you’d come through for me.”

“You sound a little frazzled.”

“Mary Wright’s upset with me. She’s an efficient young woman, but she doesn’t deal well with surprises, or with changes of plan. She doesn’t know how to think on her feet, like us mystery writers.”

“I do most of my thinking sitting down, but I know what you mean.”

“Anyway, I promised her I’d get everything rescheduled tonight. That way she can sleep soundly, I guess.”

“Well, anything I can do to help out.”

“Much appreciated, Mal. I guess I screwed up, thinking I could depend on that pompous ass Rath to play my corpse.”

“The only thing you can depend on that pompous ass to be,” I said, “is a pompous ass.”

“You’re right,” he said, laughing a little. Then he sighed. “This thing is starting to get to me. I just hope we don’t get snowbound.”

“Why, is that what they’re predicting now?”

“Yeah. Heavy snow tonight or tomorrow. Is it snowing out there?”

I glanced out the window. It wasn’t snowing; there was nothing out there, except two people standing on that open walkway bridge, in the gazebo. They seemed to be arguing.

“No snow,” I said.

“Yet,” he said fatalistically.

We hung up, and I stood there a moment looking out at the moonlit lake and cliffs and evergreens.

But those people in the gazebo got in the way of any peacefully reflective moment.

The two figures were both heavily bundled in dark winter clothing, one of them, at left, a stocky figure in a red and black ski mask—probably, but not necessarily, a man. The other, at right, was bareheaded and obviously a man, or one very shorthaired woman. Two figures standing on the gazebo at night was hardly remarkable, even if they were arguing—except these figures were going beyond that, shoving each other around. The bareheaded guy gave Ski Mask a shove that about knocked him (or her) off the bridge—a fall of about a story and a half.

Ski Mask managed to keep his/her balance, and the shoving stopped, but the body English of the two figures was even more disturbing. They were, indeed, arguing. Violently. Their gestures, at least, were violent.

It wasn’t my business, but I couldn’t not watch; and I felt oddly removed from it—distant—as if I were the audience and they were the play, an ominous pantomime, as the thick pane of glass that separated me from the outside was keeping the sound of the argument from getting in. I couldn’t hear them argue, but I could watch them. Which I did, my face tensed, my eyes narrowed, watched the quarrel turn into something ugly.

Something dangerous.

The bareheaded man pushed past Ski Mask and walked down off the bridge, onto the patch of ground sloping down to the lake, which stretched out before my window; his feet scuffed the powdery snow.

Ski Mask followed quickly, down off the bridge, sending up little flurries as his/her feet cut a quick path toward the bareheaded man, who didn’t seem to know his pursuer was behind him. Something caught in my throat as I saw an object in Ski Mask’s hand catch the moonlight and wink.

A blade.

Ski Mask’s free hand settled on the near shoulder of the bareheaded man—they were less than a hundred feet from my window, now—and spun him around. I cried out, but couldn’t be heard, it seemed; my role was so minor in this little drama as to be meaningless. The bareheaded man’s back was to me now, as Ski Mask raised his/her arm, the blade catching the moonlight again and I yelled, “Hey! Goddammit, stop!”, my mouth almost against the window, fogging it up, and I rubbed my fist against the fog and cleared it and could see that knife going up, coming down, going up, coming down, stabbing, slashing, stabbing, slashing.

The bareheaded man stumbled toward me; he was scarcely fifty feet from me when he fell, his face distorted from two long ragged red strokes from the blade, his dark blue quilted winter jacket shredded in front, turning wet with blood. Then he dropped into the snow, facedown, and Ski Mask began hauling him away by the ankles.

I was trying to open the window now, but it was jammed, and I was yelling, screaming, they hadn’t even fucking seen me, and Jill hadn’t heard me either, the needles of the shower in her ears and I ran into the bathroom, pulled her out, confused, naked, and wet.

“Mal, what the hell?”

“Look out there!”

“I’m naked, for God’s sake—I don’t want to stand next to a window.”

I pulled a blanket off the bed and tossed it at her.

“Now, look, dammit! What do you see?”

“Nothing,” she said.

I looked out the window.

I didn’t see anything, either.

Just the lake, the gazebo and bridge, the cliffs, the evergreens, the snowy ground, as peaceful and unreal as a landscape painting you’d buy in a shopping mall. You could see where some feet had disturbed the snow, but that was the only sign.

The body was gone. From the window, at least, there was no blood in the snow.

And certainly no body.

Even if I had clearly seen through my window the bloodstreaked face of a dying Kirk S. Rath.

“I don’t know what the hell to do,” I said, although I was in fact in the process of doing something: throwing on some clothes.

Jill was drying off with a towel, looking at me carefully, as if I were a UFO she wasn’t sure she was seeing.

“You’re sure you saw what you said you saw,” she said flatly, a statement.

“No, I’m not sure. It might have been Santa and his reindeer, or Charo’s midnight show at the Sands. But it sure looked like somebody getting murdered to me.”

“Calm down,” she said, coming over to me, naked, which is no way to calm me down. She patted my shoulder, smiled reassuringly, like I was her child who’d had a bad dream.

“I’m calm,” I said. “I am not having an acid flashback, either. Haight-Ashbury was a long time ago.”

She tried a kidding smile. “Maybe you’re going into television withdrawal.”

“Yeah, right. I haven’t seen any mindless violence all day, so my psyche conjures some up for me. Well, my imagination rates an Emmy tonight. Jill, I’m shaking. Excuse me.”

I brushed past her and kneeled before the porcelain god and made that offering sometimes known as a technicolor yawn. Soon she was kneeling beside me, dressed now, putting an arm around me, patting me.

“You’ll be okay, sugar,” she said.

I stood up on my rubbery legs. “Try to avoid calling me any pet names that are in any way related to any of the major food groups, okay? For the next hour or so, at least.”

“Anything you say, dumplin’,” she said, with her ironic smile, rising, and I told her she was a caution.

Then I was heading out into the hall and she was following.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Curt’s just down the hall... I got to talk to him.”

“Maybe you should call the front desk. Call the cops.”

I shook my head. “I’ll talk to Curt, first. He’ll know what to do.”

I knocked and almost immediately the door cracked open and Curt peeked out; the sliver of him visible told me he was in his underwear.

“Now you’ve got
me
out of bed,” he said, with a wry one-sided grin. “So we’re even. What’s up?”

“I’m not sure.”

His face turned serious. “Is something wrong, Mal? Really wrong?”

“I think I just witnessed a murder.”

He pulled his head back and pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes in an expression that said, Are you putting me on?

“I am not putting you on. I just saw something, and it looked a hell of a lot like a man getting killed.”

“You really
are
serious....”

“I really am.”

His expression grave now, he said, “Give me a second. Kim’s already in bed; I’ll just wake her and let her know I’m stepping out for a second.”

The door closed. I heard him say something to Kim in there, and a minute or so later he emerged fully dressed, in the same patched-elbow sports coat and cords as before.

“Let’s go to your room,” he said.

“Good idea. That’s where I saw it from.”

Jill and I led him there, where I took him to the window and pointed out at the now peaceful white landscape that had minutes before seemed violent and blood-red. I explained what I’d seen.

As my explanation progressed, a sly smile began to form on Curt’s face; by the conclusion, he stood with his arms folded, rocking on his heels, looking down at me—both figuratively and literally—with open amusement.

“I fail to see what’s even remotely comic about this,” I said, petulantly. Curt was one of my literary godfathers, and I didn’t like feeling a fool before him.

“They reeled you in, Mal,” he said, chuckling. I hate it when people chuckle.

“What the hell do you mean?”