Nice Weekend for a Murder (12 page)

And now I was in the Great Out-of-Doors, on a rocky, rootveined hard dirt path upon which icy snow was settling, only it was too late to turn back. We were almost there.

And in five minutes, we were. Our path merged with a crushed-rock road, a one-lane affair used by horses and service vehicles (our map called it a carriage road), which had wound its own way to Sky Top, that plateau where on a clear day you could see forever, or anyway New Jersey and four or five other states. This wasn’t a clear day but, from the outcroppings of boulders along the edge, you could see a panorama of winter gray, broken up by evergreens, that did take the breath away, or maybe it was just the climb.

“Oh, Mal,” Jill said, her gloved hand grasping mine. “Isn’t it breathtaking!”

“Maybe it’s just the climb,” I offered, but I smiled at her.

Sky Top was a clearing about half the size of a football field, and in its midst was a tower of rough-cut stone, a fairly squat two stories or so, with a spire that aspired to another story, capped by a gray-green helmet wearing a flagpole. No flag flew today, and when we tried the tower door, it was locked.

The crushed-rock carriage road extended around the tower, and as we strolled, gloved hand-in-hand, around it to try out another view from Sky Top, we noticed something.

A car.

A car parked on the carriage road, behind the tower. It was fairly well covered with snow, a sporty little dark blue Fiat. I tried the doors, but they were locked. I rubbed the frost from a side
window and peered in. On the backseat a stack of magazines sat like a forgotten passenger.

The latest issue of
The Mystery Chronicler
, forty or fifty copies, probably.

“I think I know whose car this is,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Jill asked; her eyes were wide.

“Let’s have a look around.”

We found him in one of the outcroppings of rocks. Like his car, he was fairly well covered with snow. The front of his jacket was slashed and blood was dried there, or frozen, or something. Dark and crusty, whatever it was. His face was slashed several times, and the wounds were not recent; they had snow in them, and were jagged and crusted with black blood, but the features were recognizable.

It was Kirk S. Rath, all right.

And Jill, not being a stereotypical female, did not scream; neither did I. I’d seen dead bodies before. I’d even seen this dead body before. I bent over him, poked at him a bit: no question he was gone. There seemed to be two deep wounds in his chest; those stab wounds, not the facial slashes, had killed him. Rath’s face seemed oddly passive, for having been slashed; peaceful, youthful, though older than this you don’t get. I checked his pockets. His billfold, containing several hundred dollars in cash, was intact in his back pocket. The envelope in which he’d received his mystery weekend instructions was folded in his pocket; in it was the list of the suspects in his—or Roark K. Sloth’s—murder.

Then I backed away from him. Away from the rocks, away from the drop-off, away from the long, cold fall. For all my bitching, I hadn’t noticed the sound of the storm till now; but now the wind seemed to be fairly screaming. The snow was really coming
down, now, and there was indeed ice in it. Crystals glistened on the slashed face of the corpse sprawled on Sky Top’s rocks.

Jill and I stood shivering together, not entirely from the cold, and then started down. The map suggested walking the carriage path on the return, for a “gentler” return trip. But our near-panic and the increasing snow and the steepness of the way had us stumbling, sliding. By the time the carriage road intersected with Sky Top Path at the foot of the mountain, we were walking through a blizzard. We were just about to really panic when suddenly the Mountain House loomed before us.

We stood under the bare beams of the east porch, breathing hard and smoky, shaking the snow off our clothes onto the bare gray wooden slats beneath us. Despite the blizzard out there, the direction of the wind was such that the floor of the open porch was barely dusted with white, when I’d expected it to be drifted. Which it soon would be—the wind was whirling and would get around to it; the lake already was gone, its gray-blue surface buried beneath the white. Faces in the windows along the porch stared out into the ever-whitening world, some awestruck, others indifferent, while below the windows countless rocking chairs made a wooden chorus line. This time of year no one sat out in them, not in this cold, so the chairs were turned on end, rockers up, like a row of curved yellowed tusks in some elephant’s graveyard.

We stamped the snow from our feet on the mats inside the porch doors, but didn’t take off our outer winter clothing, barreling right on into the Lake Lounge, where Curt Clark was giving an informal question-and-answer session during the traditional Mohonk afternoon “tea”—cookies and cups, very genteel. Just like in a British drawing-room mystery.

Only I didn’t remember grotesquely maimed corpses like Kirk Rath’s showing up in such polite mysteries; or, if they did, the author would present an image considerably more tasteful
than the police-photo-accurate dead-body picture that was burned in my brain like a concentration camp tattoo.

Curt glanced at me, smiled, squinted, not knowing what to make of our barging in, all bundled up and with winter dandruff on our shoulders. A hundred or so Mystery Weekenders were seated at tables and some again sat Indian-style on the floor as he stood before them fielding their questions, one of which he was currently in the process of answering: “So, while you may find it hard to accept, there are several movie versions of my novels that I have not seen. That I refuse to see. Friends have warned me off them. And I trust my friends.”

Upon the word
friends
he had glanced at me, squinting again, shaking his head in some unasked question. Perhaps my expression was sufficiently grave to tell him something was up; I glanced at Jill and her expression told nothing—like the Great-Out-of-Doors we’d just left behind us, her face was frozen.

Mary Wright, in a blue Mohonk blazer (its symbol—a tiny gazebo—on one breast pocket) and a white blouse with a blue ascot, approached us, looking confused and a little put out. Curt was, in the meantime, fielding another question. Mary smiled, but it was a strain; you just don’t walk into the Lake Lounge all wet and snowy.

“Is something wrong?” Mary asked, giving us the benefit of the doubt.

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps we should talk in your office.”

“All right. Should Curt be there? If I read your tone of voice correctly, this is something serious.”

“Yes.”

She took me by the arm, huddled close. “Does it affect our weekend?”

“Oh yes.”

“Let me get Curt, then. He’s almost finished with this....”

Jill looked at her with flat dislike and said, “This can’t wait, honey.”

Mary let go of my arm and smiled at Jill. It was a smile that had nothing to do with humor or goodwill or cheerfulness. It was a smile that had a lot to do with one woman not appreciating another woman calling her “honey.”

“Mohonk moves at its own pace, dear,” she said to Jill. “No crisis is going to ruffle
our
composure. Understood?”

Jill just looked at her. She didn’t like being called “dear” any more than Mary liked being called “honey.”

Curt was saying, “And I think that about wraps it up. The rest of the afternoon is open for you to begin sorting through the information you gathered at this morning’s interrogations. Just remember the Mystery Writers of America’s slogan—‘Crime doesn’t pay... enough.’ ”

A ripple of laughter was followed by applause, and Curt moved rather more quickly through the crowd than he might otherwise have, not pausing to chat or sign any of the books of his which various guests had brought along to the session. He knew something was afoot.

“What is it, Mal?”

“Not here,” I said. “Ms. Wright’s office?”

“It’s Miss,” she said, and smiled at me.

“There’s been a fucking murder,” Jill almost hissed. Nobody heard it but Mary and Curt and me, but she’d made her point.

Mary wasn’t shocked by Jill’s profanity, Mohonk manners, Quaker tradition, or not. But she did purse her lips in a skeptical smile and narrow her eyes the same way... but only for a moment. Our expressions apparently were ominous enough to get the point across.

Not to Curt, though.

“Mal,” he said, grinning, “if you’re pulling some cute counter-prank and making us the butt—”

“Let’s go to Miss Wright’s office,” I said. “Now.”

Curt pushed the air with his palms in a conciliatory manner. “Settle down, settle down. We’ll go to my suite. It’s closer, and we can have a drink. Mary’s office is shockingly short on Scotch.”

We walked wordlessly down the corridor, Jill unzipping her ski jacket, climbing out of it, her face blank, but blank in a way that I knew meant anger. Whether the cause of that was the intrusion of Rath’s death upon our more or less pleasant afternoon, or her dislike of Mary Wright, I couldn’t say. And I wasn’t about to ask.

Curt unlocked the room. We stood out in the hall as he went in. I caught a glimpse of his wife Kim, napping on the bed in a lacy slip, her bosom half-spilling out, heaving with sleep; she was a beautiful woman, but I didn’t give a damn. Violent death puts a damper on my libido.

A few minutes later, Kim exited, wearing a turtleneck sweater and slacks and a dazed expression. She smiled sleepily.

“Curt said you wanted some privacy,” she said. “Ours is not to reason why....” And she shrugged and waved and went away.

We went in. I unsnapped my jacket and found a chair to lay it on. Curt was pouring himself a glass of Scotch over at the table that served as a makeshift bar. Some vodka and bourbon and various bottles of soda were there as well.

“Can I get anyone anything?” he asked.

Mary Wright said no, and Jill went over and poured herself a couple fingers of bourbon. I asked him for some Scotch.

“On the rocks?” he asked.

Boy did
that
conjure the wrong image. I shivered and said, “Straight up will do. Just a little. I just want to warm up inside.”

Jill stood looking at the orange and yellow and red painting that leaned in its frame against the wall above the fireplace; its whirlpool effect seemed to draw her in. Then she pulled away and downed the bourbon in a couple of belts.

Curt sat on the edge of the bed, swirling his Scotch in his glass; Mary Wright stood nearby. So did I. Jill and her bourbon lurked back by the painting.

“Mal,” Curt said. “Before we get into this, I’d like to say I can understand your wanting to stage some sort of reprisal. You’re stubborn and you don’t like to be had. I can understand that. But you’re having fun this weekend, aren’t you? Let it go at that.”

Mary said, “What are you talking about?”

Curt said, “Do you mind if I tell her?”

“Go ahead,” I said.

And he did. His version, of course, treated what I’d seen last night out my window as if its being a prank were an established fact.

But when he finished, I said, “What I saw was not a prank. Kirk Rath really is dead.”

Curt smirked and sighed as if both amused and frustrated by the behavior of an irrepressible child; Mary Wright’s eyes again narrowed, and she tilted her head to one side, brunette hair swinging.

I told them, slowly, carefully, what Jill and I had seen.

“You’re serious,” Curt said, though not sure yet.

“Deadly fucking,” I said.

“Quit saying that word,” Mary said, suddenly irritated.

“
I’m
the one who said it before,” Jill said.

Mary whirled on Jill. “Why don’t you just shut up?”

Jill said, “What are you going to do about it?”

“What do you
want
me to do? Pull your
hair
out?”

“I mean about the murder,” Jill said. Hands on her hips. “Don’t lose your composure, dear.”

Mary had nothing to say to that. Her face fell, and her rage went with it. Ashen, she sat on the bed next to Curt; they looked like lovers in the midst of a bedroom quarrel, not sure what move to make next. Curt had one hand on one of his knees, the other, with the Scotch, was in his lap. He was studying me.

“You
are
serious,” he said, as if he didn’t believe his own words. “This is not a joke.”

“It’s not a joke. It’s not a goddamn joke! Do we look like we’re kidding? Are either of us that good an actor?”

He looked at me hard and then he stood; Mary continued to sit, lost in worry.

He came and put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have laughed off what you told me before.” He was shaking his head; he seemed embarrassed and bewildered. “What can I say? I steered you wrong.”

“I can see how you thought what you thought,” I said. “I’ve been around these people today. I’ve seen how caught up in their game they are. How obsessive they are about it. I can see why you figured it for a prank.”

“But it wasn’t a prank,” Jill said. She was over pouring herself some more bourbon.

“So it would seem,” Curt said, shaking his head, more in amazement than bewilderment now.

“I should call the police,” Mary said, sick about it.

“Yes you should,” I said.

She used Curt’s phone. Before long she was talking to somebody called Chief Colby. I wondered if that meant he was head cheese.

Soon I was talking to the chief, filling him in.

“You’re a good observer, Mr. Mallory,” he said.

“Thank you. What do we do now?”

“Wait there at the mountain house. We’ll be right up.”

I hung up the phone. Outside the wind was rattling the windows, whistling through its teeth.

“Cops are on the way,” I said.

“Good,” Jill said.

“They’ll have a hell of a time,” I said, “getting up to Sky Top now.”

“It really is coming down,” Curt said with a fatalistic shrug, looking out the frosted window at the snow. “What was he doing back here?”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? Rath. He left last night—why did he come back and get himself killed?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe he only pretended to leave.”