Max Collins - Nice Weekend for a Murder

Cheerful nonsense.

“So,” I said, “I’m the butt of a fraternity initiation sort of joke, then?”

He waved that off. “Not you specifically. It could have just as easily been me that witnessed this ‘murder.’ The guests know that the authors are all grouped together in this wing of the hotel. Do you think it’s an accident that this event was staged outside all our windows? You just happened to be the one of us who caught the show.”

“And the hook,” I said.

“And the hook,” he said, nodding. He slid an arm around my shoulder and walked me away from the window. Jill followed. “Mal, I’m convinced you’ve witnessed a prank, nothing more — a grisly piece of impromptu theater by some Mystery Weekenders unknown.”

“ I’m not convinced,” I said.

He walked out into the hall and I followed him. So did Jill.

“Well,” he said, “we can go down to the front desk and report it. Right now. New Paltz is nearby; the police could come right up.”

“Let’s do that.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. Let me tell you why.”

“Please do.”

He gestured with an open palm, in a reasoning manner. “If the police come up here, you’re going to get some of the hotel’s guests in trouble, and some very bad publicity could be stirred up. You might put a damper on the whole weekend; Kirk Rath’s little temper tantrum would be nothing compared to this. I don’t think that would be a useful thing, do you?”

“I... suppose not.”

“Besides which, everybody here saw Rath leave in a huff. In a minute and a huff. How could he be who you saw out your window? He left .” Curt hunched his shoulders and gestured with both hands in mock seriousness; very melodramatic, he intoned, “Or did he come back? If so, why? In which case, what was he doing here, then?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, ignoring his kidding manner. “But those strike me as legitimate questions.”

“You strike me as somebody who’s had a long day and ought to catch some z’s.”

“I’m tired, but I’m not seeing things.”

“I know you aren’t,” he said, unconvincingly. “Hey. Why don’t you go have a look around outside? If you find anything, see anything, come knock on my door. I’ll be up for another hour — I’m working on some last-minute materials for tomorrow’s fun and games. We have to kill Rath again tomorrow morning, you know — in absentia . Anyway, if after that you still want to go down to the desk, I’ll accompany you.”

“All right,” I said.

He smiled and patted my shoulder again. “But if you don’t find anything, then go get some sleep. These game-players are crafty and they’re cute — don’t let ’em get to you. You’ll need to be fresh in the morning. You have to play one of my suspects, remember.”

Then he shut himself back in his room.

I looked at Jill.

“Could he be right about this?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“But do you think he’s right?”

“No. But he thinks he’s right. And I can see how this looks to him.”

“Yes.”

“Only he didn’t see what I saw out that window, did he?”

“No.”

“Let’s get our coats.”

“Let’s,” she said.

I stopped at the front desk and asked if I could borrow a flashlight; the guy behind the counter was accommodating and friendly — he didn’t even ask what I wanted it for, he just handed it to me. I wondered how accommodating (and friendly) he’d be if I came back later and reported a murder. Not to mention a disappearing corpse.

And it had disappeared, all right. The snow on the ground outside my window showed footprints, and you could see where something had been dragged away — but only for a few feet. Then the footprints resumed; only the wind was blowing the snow around and to call these footprints, in the sense that some real detective could pour plaster of Paris into them and make a moulage and trap a suspect, would be a joke. You could tell somebody had been walking in the snow, and that was all. That was the most you could say.

And there was no sign of blood. Or theatrical makeup or ketchup either.

I poked around with the flashlight, looking in the trees and bushes, Jill at my side. Nothing. We walked up on the bridge; stood in the gazebo; looked out at the impassive frozen lake and the mountain beyond. The night was chilly, and the wind had teeth. So did we, and they were chattering.

We went inside.

We went to bed.

“Some detective,” I said.

She was cuddling me on my side of the pushed-together twins.

“Who says you’re a detective? You’re a writer.”

“I’ve played at detective before. You helped me once, remember?”

“I vaguely remember.”

That was sarcasm: the time she’d helped me out, she had seen the aftermath of some very serious violence; I’d almost been killed, and two other men had. So she knew that none of this was anything I was taking lightly. She also knew I’d had some experience with crime, with violence, and wouldn’t be easily fooled by pranksters.

“Want to go down to the front desk?” she asked.

“And report what I saw?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know what I saw anymore.”

“Could it have been staged, like Curt thinks?”

“It did seem sort of... ‘Staged’ isn’t the word exactly. But it was like I was watching a scene in a movie, not real life.”

“Don’t discount its reality for that reason. I was in a rather bad accident once; I wasn’t hurt badly, but the car I was in got hit by a drunk driver.”

“Jesus. I never heard this story.”

She was sitting up in bed, now. “Well, this guy and I were driving home late at night, and a drunk driver got hypnotized by our lights or something and kept coming right at us. He wasn’t going fast, really, and we were able to slow almost to a stop, by the time he hit us. We swerved and he crashed into the side of the car. The guy I was with broke his arm; I had a little whiplash, is all.”

“That’s a relatively happy ending, then. But what’s your point?”

“My point is this: I had a minute at least during which to watch that car come toward us. Knowing the accident was going to happen. Knowing I might be killed.”

“Did you panic?”

“No. That’s the strange part. I felt detached. The world went slow motion on me. And — as you said — it was like watching a scene in a movie.”

“Then you think I may really have witnessed a murder.”

“I think you may have. What do you think?”

“I think maybe Curt’s right. Maybe it was a prank.”

“Yeah?”

“And maybe it wasn’t.”

She smiled, sighed. “We better try to get some sleep. You do have a role to play tomorrow morning.”

She was right; I was, after all, one of the prime suspects in Curt’s whodunit. I didn’t know what was going on in that mystery, either — all I knew for sure was that I wasn’t the killer.

But neither one of us could get to sleep till I got up and shut the curtain over that damn window.

Jill was showering again. The sound of it brought me up out of a deep but turbulent sleep. Closing the curtain on that window last night hadn’t kept the images I’d viewed out of it from returning to mock me in almost delirious Daliesque dreams — none of which were sticking with me, exactly, as I sat up and rubbed the sand out of my eyes. But the feel of them lingered, the mood, and I knew they’d been about what I’d seen from my ringside seat at the window. I did remember one specific dream fragment: crashing through the window, glass shattering but harmlessly, I leapt like a hero into the fray, yanking the ski mask off the killer’s head... and seeing the face of a stranger.