Nice Weekend for a Murder (21 page)

Jack Flint took charge of Fahy, pasty-faced, slack-jawed, limp, just some flesh and bones flung into evening clothes; and Cynthia and Culver were restraining Kim, whose screaming was subsiding into sobs, while I leaned over Curt’s body and touched the side of his face. His glasses had come off. His eyes were open, wide. But they didn’t seem tortured now. That was something, anyway.

“Shit, Curt—damn it all, anyway. I’m sorry—I’m sorry....” He couldn’t hear me, I suppose; but I had to say it. I was as responsible for this as Fahy, in a way; but not as responsible as Curt Clark.

Jill was at my side, pulling me up, helping me, making me stand. “Mal, I’m sorry—so very sorry.”

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” I said.

“Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to,” she said.

Neither one of us felt much like Nick or Nora.

Sunday

At ten o’clock the next morning—the time that had been set aside for the solutions to Curt Clark’s
Case of the Curious Critic
—a haggard Mary Wright in an uncharacteristically wrinkled blue Mohonk blazer stood before the three hundred or so assembled Mystery Weekenders in the Parlor and gave a brief, apologetic explanation about why this morning’s festivities had been cancelled.

“A tragic series of events has eclipsed our make-believe mystery,” she said into the microphone, her amplified voice sounding hollow. “The mystery community has lost two of its most interesting, respected figures: in separate, but related, turns of extreme, unfortunate circumstance, both Kirk Rath and Curt Clark have lost their lives. Out of respect to their memories, our mystery this weekend must go unsolved. If we might have a few moments of silence....”

The old cough-drop boys in the high-framed pictures looked down in their Quaker way on us poor sinners as we each in his or her own fashion said good-bye to two tragically linked men.

Then Mary put on a small, intrepid smile and said, “For those of you interested, we are providing a rain check of sorts to any of you wishing to attend either of next year’s Mystery Weekends. Also, a partial refund will be sent to each and every
one of you, as we were not able to deliver our entire package as promised.”

Business considerations. Death was the biggest thing there was in life, except for business; nothing could stand in the way of business considerations.

On the whole, though, I thought Mary Wright had handled the situation tactfully, and nobody among the game-players seemed to be complaining much, though many were clearly disappointed. And Mary’s vague references to the two murders didn’t raise any particular questions among them. The police, who had arrived just after one
A.M.
last night, had questioned a number of the Weekenders—the Arnolds and the Logans among them. The real story had gotten out, over breakfast; hardly fitting table conversation, even at a Mystery Weekend, but what are you going to do?

As the crowd filed out, I stopped Mary and told her I thought she’d handled an impossible task pretty well.

“Thanks, Mal. I still feel numb from last night.”

She referred not only to that ill-fated encounter group I’d led in the little lounge, but to the questioning by Chief Colby, which lasted till dawn. Colby, a heavyset, no-nonsense man, had taken dispassionate charge of the murder scene and sorted out the wild tales and various speculations of myself and others with enviable calm. It was six-thirty
A.M.
before Jill and I had crawled into the sack; she had dropped right off, but even extreme exhaustion wasn’t enough to erase the unpleasant images from my mind. I’d stayed up, tagging along with Colby, till breakfast, where a glass of orange juice had been all I could stomach. Jill was still back in the room asleep right now, most likely.

“I feel pretty washed out myself,” I told Mary. “When does the bus leave?”

“Three o’clock this afternoon,” she said. “There should be no holdup—the snowplows have been out in force; everything’s clear.”

“I may skip lunch and catch some sleep. I think I’m finally tired enough to put all this out of my mind for a while.”

She sighed. “I envy you. I still have to stage-manage what’s left of my weekend. Is it crass of me to wonder what will become of our famous Mystery Weekends in the light of this tragedy?”

“Yes,” I said.

She let out a rueful little laugh. “You never cut me any slack, do you, Mallory?”

“I try not to,” I said, finding a smile for her. “Besides, this isn’t a setback.”

“No?”

“Of course not. Two murders at the Mohonk Mystery Weekend... that’ll be big news. Major publicity.”

Curt himself had pointed that out.

“You don’t think it’ll scare people away...?”

“Yours is the only mystery weekend ever to deliver the real thing. Don’t underestimate the morbidity of the public.”

“That sounds like something Kirk Rath might have said.”

“It does, doesn’t it? I do need some sleep.”

“You really admired Curt, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I admired his writing, certainly, and always will. And I admired him as a person, until events conspired to unbalance him.”

“You feel he was... insane?” Her delivery was an unintentional reminder of that TV pitchman, Crazy Eddie.

“All murderers are insane,” I shrugged. “Whether Curt would have been deemed
legally
insane is a question I’m not qualified to answer. And a moot one, at that, thanks to Rick
Fahy. Who may be deemed legally insane himself, when the time comes.”

Fahy, of course, was in custody; he’d been taken to the holding tank in the New Paltz police station almost immediately after Colby’s arrival last night. He hadn’t said a word since he’d swung into action; he was silent, seemed as dead, in his way, as Curt. As Rath.

A female staffer in a crisp blue Mohonk blazer approached Mary with a worried look and a question, and I left the social director to her job, and headed for the room, where Jill was indeed still sleeping. I crawled under the covers with her, our twin beds still mating, and sank into sleep.

So deep did I fall that my dreams left me alone, and when I woke, around two, I felt groggy but rested. And, for a moment, I wondered if any of it had really happened. But it only took a moment for reality to assert itself: my shirt from last night, spattered with some of Curt’s blood, hung over a nearby chair.

I nudged Jill awake and she took one final shower and so did I, and we packed hurriedly, and soon we were heading down the long hall with our bags in our hands, not fooling around waiting for bellboys.

Before long we had moved out through the cold, clear afternoon, breath smoking, and piled onto the bus. Tom Sardini and Pete Christian were the only fellow suspects of ours aboard, as the Flints were taking the second, later bus. (We hadn’t been able to say any good-byes to Tim Culver and Cynthia Crystal; they were staying by Kim’s bedside—she was sedated in her room.) Tom and Pete were in the two seats just across the aisle from us, and as the Arnolds climbed on—the last passengers to do so—they paused in the aisle and pointed at Pete.

“You did it,” Millie said.

Pete said, “If you’re referring to
The Case of the Curious Critic
, I must take the fifth.”

“Give us a break,” Millie said, pleading, emphatic, red hair tumbling. “You know whether you’re the murderer or not.”

“Curt’s final mystery died with him,” was all Pete would say.

Millie turned and looked at me and smiled, embarrassedly. “Do you think I’m terrible to be concerned about how the mystery came out?”

The bus was starting to move; the Victorian man-made cliffs of Mohonk were receding into the background.

“No,” I said. “You and all the other teams worked all weekend coming up with your solutions. You put a lot of creative energy into it. I don’t blame you for being disappointed.”

Curt, it seemed, had not written his solution down; he had planned to deliver it extemporaneously, in his usual freewheeling manner.

“I was afraid you’d think we were terrible,” Millie said, like a child pretending she was sorry.

“Not at all,” I said cheerfully. “I think you’re lunatics, and that’s quite another matter.”

She took that well, and said, “Most of the teams are in agreement that Pete’s character did it. Through process of elimination, he was the only one whose alibi wasn’t confirmed, and we caught him in an apparent lie—and only the murderer is allowed to lie, you know. He claimed he hadn’t seen the tapes, when we knew that two other witnesses had seen him burning them in an outdoor trash barrel. Besides, his character’s last name is ‘Butler’—you know, Butler did it? That seems like the sort of cutesy clue Curt Clark might slip in.”

“It sure does,” I said. “Maybe next year.”

“Next year,” she said, and moved along. Deadpan Carl brought up the rear, and he shrugged, and smiled a little, Buster Keaton with a Chaplin mustache.

“How can they think about their stupid mystery?” Jill asked, a bitter edge in her voice.

“Honey, they spent all weekend working on it. I don’t blame them. Of course it’s eating at them, not knowing for sure who did it. It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

Then I leaned across the aisle and said to Pete, “By the way, I know you did it, too.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah. Rick Butler killed Roark Sloth.”

“Suppose we did,” Pete said, smiling coyly. “Can you prove it?”

“Sure,” I said, and leaned across and whispered the solution to him.

“No kidding!” he said. “I should’ve figured that out myself.”

Jill said, “You know how to prove that Pete was the killer in Curt’s mystery?”

“Sure.”

“How?”

So I whispered it to her: the answer was the cryptic typed message found in the critic’s typewriter, TOVL FOF OY. The dying man had placed his hands one key to the right on his typewriter, turning his message into gibberish; by moving the letters on the keyboard back one space to the left, the dying message would read: RICK DID IT.

“Oh my,” Jill said. She was making an ironic connection—after all, a man named Rick had killed Curt Clark.

“Yup,” I said. “Just as cute and pat as one of Curt’s mystery stories.”

“And you aren’t going to tell the Arnolds or any of the other game-players?”

“What,” I said, “and spoil the mystery?”

Photo Credit: Bamford Studio

Max Allan Collins is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Road to Perdition
and multiple awardwinning novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations, and historical fiction. He has scripted the
Dick Tracy
comic strip,
Batman
comic books, and written tie-in novels based on the
CSI, Bones
, and
Dark Angel
TV series; collaborated with legendary mystery author Mickey Spillane; and authored numerous mystery series including Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, Eliot Ness, and the bestselling Nathan Heller historical thrillers. His additional Mallory novels include
No Cure for Death, The Baby Blue Rip-Off, Kill Your Darlings
, and
A Shroud for Aquarius
.