Nice Weekend for a Murder (16 page)

“Still,” Jill said, “why dislike somebody who praises your work, whatever the reason? It seems like plenty of people have been burned by Rath. Shouldn’t your fiancé be relieved, at least, that Rath’s never attacked him?”

“Fiancé,” Cynthia said, rolling it around. “That has a nice sound, doesn’t it?”

She was ducking the issue.

“Weren’t Rath and Tim rather close, at one time?” I asked.

“Yes we were, Mr. Mallory,” Tim Culver said.

He had come up behind us. Like his brother, whom he resembled just enough to make it spooky, he was a big, lean man; he was wearing another lumberjack plaid shirt and jeans. He was polishing his wire-rim glasses with a napkin from a nearby table and his expression was solemn and not particularly friendly.

I stood. “Please call me Mal, if you would. And I apologize for prying.”

“No problem,” he said, though it clearly was. He sat next to his fiancée, in the chair I’d warmed, and I moved to the other side of Jill.

Who rushed in where Mallory feared to tread, saying, “We were just wondering why you would dislike somebody who gave you so much favorable press. Rath, that is.”

Culver sighed; pressed his lips together. Turned inward even more, to consider whether or not to address this subject.

Then he called a waiter over and said, “Breakfast?”

“Certainly, sir,” the waiter said, and Culver put his glasses back on and quickly marked a menu and handed it along.

Then Culver looked past his fiancée and Jill, toward me, and said, “I blame myself.”

Culver intimidated me a little, so I said nothing.

Jill doesn’t intimidate worth a damn, and said, “Blame yourself for what?”

Another heavy sigh. “For being... seduced.” The latter was spoken with quiet but distinct sarcasm.

“How so?” Jill asked.

“Rath’s praise was so effusive, it took me in.”

“Was it?” Jill said, continuing to prompt him. Culver spoke in telegrams.

“I’d never had that kind of praise before.”

I finally got the nerve to get in the act. “Tim—if you don’t mind my calling you that—you’ve had nothing but praise from critics since the day you published your first novel....”

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.”

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....”

“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.