Max Collins - Nice Weekend for a Murder

Nobody said anything.

“It’s not passable,” she said, shrugging again. “It’s heavily drifted, over a sheet of ice. And it’s still coming down.”

I held out my open palms to her. “Don’t you have plows...?”

“Yes,” she said. “And they’re not getting anywhere. It’ll be hours — maybe longer — before we can get that road cleared. Until it stops snowing, we won’t even try.”

“What!”

“Mr. Mallory,” she said quietly, “there is no reason to, even if we could. Our guests are safe and warm and perfectly content here at the mountain house. They aren’t going anywhere.”

“What about Kirk Rath?” Jill said.

Curt said, “He isn’t going anywhere either.”

Mary said, “It’s not uncommon for us to be snowbound here at Mohonk for several days. Par for the course, really.”

I stood. Paced. “If the murderer is somebody here at the mountain house — one of the guest authors, for example, all of whom hated Rath — then he or she is stuck here, too.”

“That’s right,” Mary said. Nodding sagely.

The phone rang again. Again it was for Mary.

Who spoke to Chief Colby for about five minutes, most of her contribution to the conversation being, “Uh-huh” and “Yes.”

Then Colby asked to speak to me.

“Mr. Mallory,” he said, “we may not be able to begin investigating for a while yet. You may have a murderer in that lodge somewhere. I’d suggest you keep what you know to yourself.”

“Why?”

“To keep the murderer under that roof. Whoever it is, they don’t know they’ve been found out yet. They don’t know anybody’s found the body. Let’s keep it that way. Maybe when I can get my buggy up that mountain, we can catch the culprit flat-footed.”

“I don’t think it matters much either way,” I said, not knowing what to make of a modern-day cop who used the word culprit .

“Listen here. If that murderer finds out he’s been found out, somebody else might get killed. Leave the damn lid on, okay?”

“Okay, Chief. I’ll go along with you.”

“Fine. Now, let me talk to Miss Wright again.”

I did.

While she was talking to him, I explained to Curt and Jill that we were supposed to keep the murder under wraps, and why.

“I think that’s a good idea,” Jill said.

That response surprised me. “Why?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

Mary hung up and came over and managed to smile a little. “I’m glad we’re agreed to keep quiet about this, for now. We can proceed with our weekend and not spoil anything for our guests.”

“Except for Kirk Rath,” Jill said. “The weekend’s pretty well shot for him.”

“You’re drunk,” Mary said nastily.

“Not drunk enough,” Jill said. “When I look at you, you’re still in focus.”

They glared at each other for a while. Neither one seemed terribly well composed.

Curt was still working on his Scotch. He seemed vaguely amused. “Perhaps in the long run it will boost the Mystery Weekends, Mary. Think of the publicity.”

“ Bad publicity,” she said, shaking her head, almost scowling.

“No such thing as,” Curt affirmed, saluting her with his glass. Then he raised it in a more general toast: “And here’s to Kirk Rath. God have mercy on him. Poor bastard.”

I finished my Scotch.

But I was still cold inside.

Nevertheless, I was warmer than Kirk Rath, even if by now he was under a blanket.

Jill and I went back to our room and crashed for a while. We both felt unclean — the cold and snow hadn’t kept us from working up a sweat hiking, and the lingering effect of finding a corpse had left a certain psychic film, a clammy residue over our minds, if not our bodies, that a shower wouldn’t do much for, but we took one anyway. Together.

It wasn’t a two-person orgy, so voyeurs in the audience can let loose of their expectations. In fact, it wasn’t very sexual, really, or even romantic exactly. It was steamy, but only because we leaned on the hot water. We soaped each other’s backs, massaged each other’s tense neck muscles, clinging to each other a bit, nuzzling, but nothing more — just hurt animals licking each other’s wounds. The shower stall provided a needed closeness, the fog of steam and the drilling of hot water on our bodies numbing us into something approaching relaxation, a melancholy mist we could get lost in for a while.

We shared a towel — conserving one for tomorrow morning — after which Jill slipped into her terry cloth robe, leaving me with the towel for a loincloth. She was rubbing her short black hair dry with a hand towel.

“I could build a fire,” I said.

The wind was howling through the window.

“Let’s save that for later,” she said.

I sat next to her; the twin bed squeaked. “Why did you want me to go along with that bullshit about keeping the murder quiet?”

Her smile was one-sided and wry as she kept toweling her hair, looking at me sideways. “Surprised you, didn’t it?”

“I should say. Especially since a man getting murdered seemed to upset Miss Wright primarily because her Mystery Weekend might get spoiled.”

She kept toweling her hair. “The concealment wasn’t Mary Wright’s idea, though, was it?”

“No, it was that hick cop.”

“How do you know he’s a hick? Besides, this is New York; they don’t have hicks in New York.”

“Really? He used the word culprit in a sentence.”

“Oh dear. Well, I still think he was right, anyway.”

“Why?”

She leaned her head back and shook her hair; droplets flew, and I blinked a couple away. “The murderer doesn’t know that we know a murder has been committed,” she said.

“So?”

“God, you’re thick. And here you’re supposed to be an amateur detective of sorts.”

“Emphasis on the ‘of sorts.’ Anyway, there aren’t any amateur detectives in real life.”

She smiled flatly and shook her head again, not in an effort to rid it of more water, though more droplets indeed flew, but in a gesture of amused frustration, as if from trying to reason with a slow child of whom you’re rather fond.

“This isn’t ‘real life,’ ” she said. “It’s Mohonk. More precisely, it’s the Mohonk Mystery Weekend.”

“Yeah, and Kirk Rath is really going all out in his role.”

She ignored that and patted my bare leg. “Think of yourself as an unlicensed private eye,” she said. “You figured out the circumstances of your friend Ginnie Mullens’s murder, didn’t you? I saw you in action, there; I know what you’re capable of. So do it already — play unlicensed private eye again.”

It was sinking in. “You mean, I could go around asking casual questions about Rath...”

She nodded eagerly; I liked the clean smell of her. “Yes, asking your various fellow ‘suspects’ in Curt’s Case of the Curious Critic about their real-life relationships with Rath.”

“And,” I said, picking up on it, “get a reading on them, without the murderer among them knowing that I know a murder’s even been committed.”

“Exactly. With the exception of Curt Clark and Mary Wright, of course, who also know about the murder. And are also suspects.”

I sighed, shrugged. “As far as I know, Mary Wright and Rath weren’t even acquainted. And Curt’s probably the only person here who doesn’t have a motive to kill the critic. Besides; Curt’s a tall drink of water, and the killer was a short, stocky person in a ski mask.”

“Ah! The least likely suspect...”

“Oh, shut up. This is a real murder, not some stupid game.”