Max Collins - Nice Weekend for a Murder

“Quit grumbling,” she said, a few steps ahead of me but not, unfortunately for her, out of earshot. Her rear end looked cute in the black ski pants, which matched her black ski jacket, which matched her black-and-white stocking cap.

“I hate this,” I said. My jacket wasn’t wintry enough and, even with the sweater on underneath it, I was cold. The path, which had begun deceptively wide, now left barely room for two people; my legs ached from walking on this bed of snow-dusted pine needles and twigs and rocks.

“No kidding.”

“Let’s turn back. The snow’s really coming down.”

And it was. Not a blizzard, but it had been lightly snowing all day, and it did seem to be picking up.

“Sissy,” she said.

“No, really,” I said. “There’s some ice in it. If it keeps at it, we could have a rough time getting back down, once we get up. By rough I mean slippery.”

And, I should point out, that while at our left was a forest not unlike Jill’s last name, at our right were a few rocks and a whole lot of drop-off. Of the plummeting-to-the-earth-flailing-your-arms-and-legs-and-screaming-holy-hell-all-the-way-down variety.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, stepping on one of the roots that served as a step and slipping just a little, despite her boots. I caught her, even though I was wearing Hush Puppies, and she looked back at me and, with friendly malice, stuck out her tongue. She got snow on it.

“Let’s go back,” I said.

“No! We’ll rest a minute.”

Well, I needed the rest — we were probably halfway up this goddamn glandular-case hill, and I had shin splints and sore calves — but, as I pointed out to her, pausing to rest would only allow the snow to gain on us.

“Coward,” she said, and veered off from the path to the right — you remember the right: a sheer drop-off to nothingness? — across some boulders to a gazebo, where she plopped her pretty butt down on the rough wooden bench and waited for me to develop the cojones to join her.

I did, finally, even if my cojones hadn’t yet developed, and if they hadn’t by my age they were unlikely to, and we sat and squinted down at a cold, gray, but eerily beautiful vista that included the blue-gray expanse of frozen Mohonk Lake and the oversize Victorian dollhouse that was the hotel. Mountain house.

“Takes your breath away,” she said.

“So does a seven-hundred-foot fall.”

She pursed her lips in a smirk. “You’re so romantic.”

“I’m so cold. Let’s press on.”

We both slipped a little on the boulders, heading back for the path, where I pointed out the snow was undisturbed.

“So?” she asked, taking the lead again.

“So, we’re the only ones today foolhardly enough to make this trek, in the snow, in the cold.”

She glanced back. “That’s because the hotel is filled with crazy people. They don’t want to enjoy the scenery. They don’t want to drink in God’s grandeur.”

“You can’t drink it if it’s frozen.”

“They,” she continued, ignoring me, not glancing back anymore, “would rather stay inside and try to solve some phony mystery.”

I didn’t quite understand the appeal of that, either, but I didn’t admit it to Jill; I had enjoyed playing a suspect, but playing detective — if the crime wasn’t real, anyway — held no fascination for me.

“They,” she continued to continue, “would rather sit in a drafty hall and listen to some pompous windbag talk about his theories on mystery writing.”

“Low blow!” I said.

“You wish,” she said. And now she glanced back, and her smile would’ve been impish, if I were the kind of writer to use a word like impish .

I caught up to her; there was just room enough on the snowy path to walk two abreast. Depending on the size of the breasts.

“I thought my little talk went pretty well,” I said, in a mild pout.

She smiled warmly, despite the cold. “So did I, really. You were cute as lace pants.”

“That’s a Raymond Chandler line.”

“I know. You had me reading Farewell, My Lovely last week, remember?”

“I remember. Did I really seem pompous?”

“Not at all. You were funny.”

I had gotten a few good one-liners off. Not during the speech itself, which was a fairly serious discussion of the difficulties I’d encountered turning real crimes into fictional ones. In my case, some of my books were derived from my own life — crimes I’d been caught up in; times when I had played detective for real.

But the question-and-answer session had gone especially well, and that’s where I managed to get a few laughs.

“Are you going to turn this weekend into a novel?” one of them had asked.

“Not unless I find a body,” I’d said.

Which got a particularly nice laugh.

Only a part of me didn’t find that so funny — the part that was still trying to figure out whether what I’d seen out my window last night was histrionics or homicide.

And, before my little speech in the big Parlor, where high windows looked out on the lake and pictures of old Smileys (the Mohonk founding family) looked down on me and my audience like the bearded faces on cough-drop packages, I had discovered something disturbing: Kirk Rath had indeed not made it home yet.

From our room I had called the business number at Rath’s house and got one of his coeditors.

“No sign of Kirk here,” he had said, followed by a nervous laugh. Whenever somebody from the Chronicler called me on the phone — which they did from time to time, to acquire publishing information for their news column — they invariably followed whatever they stated or asked with a nervous laugh. I read that as embarrassment out of having to deal face-to-face, even if it were over the phone, with another human being whose work they had inhumanly lambasted in their smug pages (and if you don’t think a page can be smug, you’ve never read the Chronicler — even the ink is smug).

“Do you expect Kirk?” I asked him.

“No. He’s on vacation this week.”

“Well, he was here at Mohonk.”

“Oh, you’re calling from the resort?”

“Yes. And Kirk left here last night. I wondered if he’d gotten home yet.”

“No, but then we don’t expect him. He was going to go into New York City after Mohonk.”

“Business?”

“No. Vacation. We don’t even have a number to reach him.”

“Does he do that often?”

“Now and then, Mallory. But why the questions?”

“I need to talk to him. Personal matter.”

“Oh. Well, he may have told Rick Fahy where he was going.”

“Rick Fahy... isn’t he one of your contributors?”

“Yes. He’s there at Mohonk, playing the mystery. We’re going to do a story on the weekend from the point of view of an attendee.”

“I’ve never met Fahy; I’ll look him up and ask him.”

“Fine. If Kirk does show up, would you like me to have him call you?”

“Yes, immediately. Here at Mohonk. My room number is sixty-four. I’ll be here till Sunday afternoon.”

I’d made one other call, to the guard who’d been on duty at the Gate House last night. Mary Wright had provided his number. He hadn’t seen Rath leave, but that didn’t necessarily mean Rath hadn’t left.

“I log in every car that enters,” he said, a young voice, college kid maybe, “but don’t pay much attention to who leaves.”

It seemed a good number of Mohonk employees were residents of nearby New Paltz, so a rather steady stream of them left during the evening hours. Rath, if he had left, left unnoticed.

Which meant my question about the reality, or lack thereof, of what I’d witnessed out my window remained no closer to being established. All this really nailed down was that Rath did not leave and come back through the Gate House, because if he had, he’d have been logged in.