Max Collins - Nice Weekend for a Murder

I discovered the big-screen TV room, finally; the monstrous thing was shut off, the chairs before it empty — Pete’s Chan show was getting the ratings tonight. Next I ran across a cement-floored game room, tucked away at the end of one hall like a poor relation, where pinballs and video games were being played by young off-duty employees, and a Yuppie-ish young couple was playing pool. No sign of Culver, but the pool-playing Yuppies were my new friends, Jenny and Frank Logan. They were just racking up for another game when they noticed me.

“Oh!” Jenny said. She wore a green sweater and gray slacks and filled them out nicely, thank you. “We’d been hoping to run into you. And this makes a good out-of-the-way place to talk.”

It was; the game room was dark and dingy and was very much like most of the bars back in Port City, only I didn’t notice anybody serving beer, let alone hard stuff.

“This must be where the Quakers go to go nuts,” I said.

“We’ve got our own little bar back in our room,” Jenny said.

“But,” Frank warned, beige cardigan, pale blue shirt, gray slacks, “we’re liable to be interrupted by our fellow team players.”

Jenny smirked in a good-humored way. “We’re sort of hiding out from them.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They want to keep hashing and rehashing the interrogation info,” she said.

“I thought you two took this stuff pretty seriously.”

“Sure,” Frank said, “but we don’t go overboard.”

“Besides,” Jenny said with a smug little smile, “we know who did it.”

“Oh?”

“And,” she went on, “we won’t be working on the creative aspects of our presentation till tomorrow, so what the hell. Let’s live a little.”

I glanced around the game room. “If you call this living.”

“We’ve spent hours today in one little hotel room,” she said, heaving a theatrical sigh, “huddled with our fellow game-players. Just had to get away.”

“So you know who did it?” I said. Amused in spite of myself.

“Sure,” she said, grinning. “You.”

And they looked at me. Watched me. Even, one might say, studied me.

Finally I said, “Am I expected to confirm that or deny it or something?”

They shrugged, wearing smirky smiles.

“You guys are real cute,” I said, and took up a pool cue and broke their balls. I started shooting around the table, not playing any game, just randomly sinking the balls, missing now and then.

“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” Jenny said, sidling up next to me. She was wearing Giorgio perfume; I’m no expert, but I recognized it as what Jill wears. The combination of being reminded of jealous Jill, and Jenny’s husband lurking nearby, kept me from letting my thoughts run wild. But it did occur to me, for a fleeting, frightening instant, that Frank might let me sleep with his wife if I’d tell them what I knew about the nonexistent Sloth murder.

Jenny said, “We asked around for you.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s great.” I didn’t know how to tell them that their efforts had been pointless. I wasn’t about to let them know I’d established that the “prank” had been real, via finding the very real corpse.

Frank sidled up on the other side of me; he smelled like English Leather. I used to use it. Now I wear nothing at all.

Frank said, “We think maybe the Arnolds pulled that stunt.”

“The Casablanca restaurant couple?”

“Yes. She used to be an actress, and he’s—”

“A karate expert,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”

Jenny said, “Have you talked to them yet?”

“No, uh... but I will.”

Frank moved away, leaned over the table and banked the eight ball into a corner pocket. “They seem to be the only group this year,” he said, “that brought along fairly elaborate theatrical gear.”

“That we know of for sure,” she added. “There are at least half a dozen theater pros here, and some of them may have brought along more stuff than they were willing to cop to, to the ‘enemy.’ ”

I put the pool cue away. I liked these people, but they were too attractive and smelled too good for me to be comfortable around them.

“Thanks for checking,” I said. “You don’t need to do anything more.”

“It was fun,” Jenny said. “We felt like industrial spies.”

Frank slipped his arm around her waist. “We still think you did it,” he said.

“No comment,” I said. “How do you like being snowbound?”

“I think it’s cool,” Jenny said, beaming.

An understatement worthy of Hammett.

They went back to playing pool and hiding out, and I walked out into the hall. I was nearing our room when somebody called out to me.

“Excuse me!”

I turned and looked.

It was the intense young man with glasses who’d been so dogged in his questioning at the interrogation this morning; he was wearing the same gray sweater, and the same pained expression.

“Mr. Mallory,” he said. “A moment of your time, please.”

It was the kind of politeness that respects social ritual but not you. His words were bullets, fired in a rush at me, and they fairly dripped dislike.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said.

His hair was short and mouse-colored, and the eyes behind the thick glasses were as gray as his sweater and bore dark circles and red filigree. He would have been a bigger nerd than Lester Denton, except he seemed muscular, if a head shorter than me, and the veins stood out in his hands. That is, his fists. Clenched fists, actually — it may seem redundant to describe a fist as “clenched,” but not if you saw these fists.

“I’m Rick Fahy,” he said.

Not to be confused with Rick Butler, Pete’s character in the weekend mystery, of course.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. I guessed. I extended a hand for him to shake. He thought about it, unclenched his right hand, and we shook. His grip was a vise and my fingers were so many toothpaste tubes to be squeezed.

I pulled back my hand; I could feel my pulse five times in it.

“Okay,” I said. “So you work out. I’m impressed. Who the hell are you?”

“I told you. I’m Rick Fahy. Has something happened to Rath?”

That stopped me. I rolled Fahy’s name around in my brain and gathered who he was.

“I know you,” I said, pointing at him. “You’re with The Mystery Chronicler .”

“That’s right,” he said.

“You’re up here covering the weekend for your magazine.”

“Yes.”

“A piece from the perspective of someone who’s been here and played the game.”

“Yes. Has something happened to Rath?”

“Not that I know of,” I lied. “Why?”

He looked at me hard; his mouth was a thin pale line. A vein throbbed in his forehead. The skin around his eyes was crinkly, like Charles Bronson deciding who to kill. Was I about to get the crap beaten out of me by a Chronicler intellectual? And if so, why the hell?

“I asked you this morning,” he said, carefully; the bullets firing more slowly now, “if you saw something out your window last night.”

“Actually,” I said, “you asked Lester Denton if he’d seen Roark K. Sloth killed outside his, that is, Denton’s , window last night.”

“I don’t like smart-asses.”

“I don’t like threats.”

He thought about that; he tasted whatever was in his mouth at the time. Baskin-Robbins Flavor of the Moment, perhaps.

Then he said, “Did you see Rath outside your window last night?”

This time I thought before responding. Then I told him what I’d seen, ending with, “But whether it was Rath or not, I couldn’t say. Maybe it was — I thought at the time it was — but I understand there are plenty of players here with theatrical training, and makeup kits and props and such along with them.”