Nice Weekend for a Murder (17 page)

Taking Jenny and Frank Logan’s places in the Overenthusiastic Yuppie Division were the fabled Arnolds, Millie and Carl. Millie—a slim little bubbly redheaded woman with attractive, angular features—was the interrogator, while her dark, mustached husband—a small man behind whose mild demeanor lurked a black belt in karate—sat taking the notes. They both wore ski sweaters and jeans, and sat forward, hanging on Lester’s every word.

“Are you aware that Sloth had published a vicious review of his own
grandmother’s
first mystery novel?” Millie said, her words rushing out. All of Millie’s words came rushing out.

“No,” I said. I was aware, however, that the grandmother role was being played by Cynthia Crystal.

“And that upon reading the review,” Millie continued, “she had a heart attack?”

“No,” I said. None of this was on my Suspect sheet; they were wasting their time going down this alley. But what the hell, it was their time.

Another player—a heavyset woman of about forty, dressed all in dark blue—gestured with her pen and said, “Sloth’s grandmother was seen going to his room shortly before you did. Did
you
see her?”

“No,” I said, meekly. “But I’m most relieved to hear the dear lady made a full recovery.”

“Then you weren’t aware,” Millie said, “that Sloth hired a thief to break into his grandmother’s house, to see if she’d changed her will, in the aftermath of that review?”

“No,” I said. All I knew of this aspect of Curt’s mystery was that Tim Culver was playing the thief.

Carl Arnold spoke; his deadpan expression barely cracked as he said, “Did Sloth say anything about his grandmother when you saw him?”

“No,” I said.

“He said nothing about a bribe?” Millie pressed.

“Well...”

“Did he say anything about a bribe? Specifically, that he told his grandmother he’d review her next book favorably, if she put him back in the will?”

“I knew nothing of that,” I said.

Another of the players, another Yuppie male in a white cardigan and pale blue shirt, picked up on my reaction to the word
bribe
and said, “You have a wealthy background, don’t you, Mr. Denton?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘wealthy’....”

“What
would
you say?”

“Mother is well-fixed.”

“Did you offer money to Sloth that night?”

“Well, uh...”

“
Did
you, Mr. Denton?”

Whereupon I broke down and confessed having attempted to bribe Roark K. Sloth; I further confessed to his having laughed off my “pathetic” attempt to do so.

Millie Arnold’s eyes were glittering; she smelled blood, and it put a great big smile right under her nose. “Did Sloth threaten you with a tape recording?”

“Y-yes,” Lester and I said. “He had recorded our entire conversation on a pocket machine.”

Soon the interrogation was over; I’d done an all right job—not as good as the first time around, but the first time around I
had only a probable prank on my mind, not a real live murder. Still, a number of the interrogators hung around to compliment me and chat and laugh a little. They were having a great time, the players were; this was the best Mystery Weekend yet, several veterans said.

Among the lingerers were the Arnolds. Millie approached me and asked if she could give Lester a kiss; I said sure and she bussed Lester’s cheek.

“You were
great
,” she said, slapping me on the shoulder. I wasn’t great. She was just enthusiastic.

Jill wandered up and I made introductions all around.

“You seemed pleased to get that piece of business about the tape,” I said to Millie and Carl, making polite conversation.

“Oh, yes—that helps us confirm a suspicion. Sloth taperecorded everybody—Tom Sardini’s private-eye character has admitted to helping Sloth go so far as to wiretap.”

“Also,” Carl added, “Jack Flint’s character admitted to being threatened with a blackmail tape... but no tapes were found in Sloth’s room.”

“I see,” I said, not really giving a damn.

“Could I ask you a question?” Millie said, which was a question itself, actually.

“Sure,” I said.

“Did you send Jenny Logan around to check up on us? We figured she was trying to find out if we pulled that stunt outside your window. Because we brought our theatrical gear along and all.”

“Actually, I did ask her to check around.”

“Then you weren’t in on it?” Carl said.

“In on what?”

“The stunt,” Millie said. “We figured it was a part of the Mystery Weekend—something Curt Clark cooked up. Most of the teams are working it into their solutions.”

“Then they’re going down the wrong road,” I said. “The mystery is strictly limited to the information you gather from the interrogation sessions—nothing else before or after counts.”

“Then why,” Millie said, her constant smile momentarily disappearing into puzzlement, “would Rath have gone along with it?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Why would he have taken part in that stunt?”

I exchanged glances with the unusually silent Jill. She shrugged and smirked—you’re on your own, brother.

So I said to the Arnolds, “Uh, who says he did?” I didn’t know what else to say, short of expressing the view that the “stunt” hadn’t been a stunt at all, but a real murder in which Rath (one would suppose) took only a reluctant part. Which I couldn’t hope to prove without mentioning that I’d stumbled upon Rath’s body in a condition consistent with the way he died in said “stunt.”

“Oh, it was him, all right,” Millie said.

Jill, interest piqued, cut in. “Why are you so sure?”

“Well,” Carl said, ever deadpan, “I guess it’s possible it was somebody else. Somebody playing Rath.”

Millie said, “But Carl’s right—Rath
was
around.”

“What?” Jill and I said.

Carl said, “Rath only
pretended
to leave.”

“Why do you say that?” I said, just me, though Jill no doubt was thinking it.

Millie lectured Carl, waggling a forefinger. “You don’t
know
for a
fact
he pretended to leave.... He could’ve left and come back.”

“Same difference,” Carl shrugged.

“But who was he helping, by playing along?” Millie asked her husband. “Somebody on one of the teams?”

“What the hell are you two
talking
about?”

They looked at me, shocked to have heard such force coming from me, who after all was still wearing the Lester Denton facade. A little dab’ll do ya.

“It’s just that we saw him Thursday night,” Millie said, shrugging elaborately, eyes wide, palms up.

“
After
he got mad and supposedly left,” Carl added.

Jill asked, “When was this?”

“We were out walking in the snow,” Millie said. “We were on that little gazebo bridge by the lake.”

“What did you see?” I said, grasping Millie’s arm.

She pulled back, wincing, not understanding my urgency. “Hey, take it easy! We didn’t see anything, much—just Kirk Rath.”

“Yeah,” Carl said, thumbing through his notebook, “I jotted some notes. Wasn’t sure it might not have something to do with the Mystery Weekend. We saw him out walking, along by the bushes near the lake, all by himself. It was about eleven fifteen....”

But that was
after
I’d seen Rath killed!

I was mentally reeling, so it was Jill who asked, “Are you sure of this?”

“Sure,” Carl deadpanned. “It seemed odd to me, that’s all.”

Now I had presence of mind to speak again: “What did?”

“The front of his jacket was all slashed, ripped up. But he was fine.”

That evening, at seven o’clock, the high-ceilinged pine dining hall transformed itself into a dimly lit night spot, where Frank Sinatra and big band music held sway. The snowstorm had prevented the arrival of the New York City–based dance band who’d been booked, but Mary Wright had put together a sound system and found a nice stack of smooth forties and fifties pop sides to create a nicely nostalgic aura; whether you were into Christie or Chandler, it didn’t matter—all mystery fans like to slide into the past.

Mary Wright herself was playing DJ, in a pretty pink satin gown rather than a Mohonk blazer for a change, and I—looking pretty natty myself in my cream sports jacket and skinny blue tie and navy slacks—went up to her and asked if she had any Bobby Darin.

“I think I can round up ‘Beyond the Sea,’ ” she said.

“Thanks. It’s not a ‘Queen of the Hop’ crowd, anyway.”

She smiled at that and it was a pretty, pretty nice smile; I wished things hadn’t gotten tense between us. But what the hell, it kept Jill from pinching me.

I went back to our regular table, where a few of us—myself and Jill included—were finishing up dinner (as this was a dinner dance, after all). Sardini and I were having a Vienna nut torte (not the same one) and Jill was putting away some pumpkin pie.
Jack Flint and his wife sat across from us, and Jack was having a drink. Quaker roots or not, the Mohonk dining room did serve drinks with the evening meal, if you insisted on it.

I hadn’t. I wanted my brain nice and clear. While the day had been uneventful since my talks with Mary Wright and the Arnolds, I was still trying to make sense of what I’d learned. After the noon buffet, and before the afternoon panel on which Flint and Sardini and I discussed the recent comeback of the private-eye story, Jill and I had tried to put some of the pieces together—and hadn’t gotten anywhere much.

Fact Number One: Kirk Rath had been seen by the Arnolds
after
I supposedly saw him killed.

How was that even possible? Were the Arnolds confused about the time, or maybe just confused in general? Or did they see somebody else who merely resembled Rath—but if so, how do you explain the shredded jacket?

Fact Number Two: Kirk Rath and Mary Wright and Curt’s son Gary were college chums.

What did that mean? Nothing much that we could see, other than that Mary entered the circle of suspects by virtue of having previously known Rath.

Fact Number Three: Gary Culver (Culver being Curt Clark’s real last name, as you may recall) had been homosexual.

Did
that
mean anything? If Kirk Rath was Gary’s college roommate, did that make
Rath
homosexual as well? And if so, so what?

The latter subject Jill and I had disagreed on hotly, in an afternoon brainstorming session in our room. I insisted that the notion that Rath might have been gay was nonsense. In college, as a rule, you’re
assigned
roommates in dorms, particularly in the first year. So, the odds were (poor choice of words,
admittedly) Gary and Kirk had become roommates by chance. Just because Gary had been gay, that hardly meant it figured Kirk was, too.

“Besides,” I told her, “Rath was too conservative. Politically, he was a reactionary—he’s taken stands on issues that make the Moral Majority look like the American Civil Liberties Union.”

“A perfect reason to stay in the closet,” Jill had said.

“He just wasn’t the type.”

“You mean, he wasn’t particularly effeminate? Grow up, Mal. Don’t expect every gay male to be a drag queen.”

“Give me a break, will you? I’ve seen him at various mystery conventions and such, and he’s always in the presence of a stunning girl.”

“Girl or woman?”

“I’d call them ‘girls’—late teens, early twenties.”

“Have you ever seen him with the same girl twice?”

I thought about that.

“No,” I said. “It’s always been a different one, but then I’ve only seen him at three or four conventions.”

“Real babes?” she asked, archly.

“Yeah—real babes.”

“Prostitutes, perhaps?”

“Oh, Jill, don’t be ridiculous—”

“A call girl makes a nice escort for a gay man who’s pretending to be straight.”

I gave her a take-my-word-for-it look. “Look, I’ve heard rumors that he was a real stud, okay?”

“Rumors fueled by his being seen with knockout women. I think Rath was trying a little too hard to seem heterosexual.”

“Ah, I just don’t buy it.”

“Mal, he was a guy in his late twenties living in a houseful of men, right?”

“That’s his place of business—they all work with him.”

“I got a news flash for you, kiddo—at most businesses, you don’t sleep in.”

“I just don’t buy it.”

“Notice that you no longer can find any reasonable counterarguments. Notice that you begin to sound like a broken record.”

“Notice that you are getting obnoxious.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, patting the air. “Just think about it.... Rath was a guy who liked to smear people. He was politically conservative, a regular self-styled William F. Buckley of the mystery world. If—and I say only
if
—he were gay, wouldn’t he be likely to hide it?”

“Jill—”

“If. Hypothetical time.”

“If he were gay, yeah, I guess he might try to hide it.”

“Somebody as hated as Rath, somebody as into smearing people as Rath, somebody who was very likely just as insecure as he was egotistical, sure as hell might have tried to keep his off-center sexual preference under wraps.”

“I just can’t buy it.”

“Change the needle. When you called his business, which is to say his home, where he and all the boys bunked, where did they say he was going on vacation?”

“Well... after Mohonk, he was going into the city. New York.”

“And didn’t they say he couldn’t be reached—that even his staff couldn’t reach him?”

“Yes. But I don’t see...”

With elaborate theatricality, she said, “Why would the editor and publisher of the
Chronicler
, a magazine so intrinsically tied to the personal vision of selfsame editor and publisher, not tell even his own
staff
where he could be reached? Does that sound like reasonable business behavior to you?”

“Sometimes executives do like to get away, Jill. Sometimes they need to be able to get away from the pressure, and the phones. That’s not so uncommon.”

“Yeah, and maybe he went into New York from time to time, for a little taste of forbidden fruit.”

“Bad, Jill. Very bad.”