Max Collins - Nice Weekend for a Murder

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Why would he have taken part in that stunt?”

I exchanged glances with the unusually silent Jill. She shrugged and smirked — you’re on your own, brother.

So I said to the Arnolds, “Uh, who says he did?” I didn’t know what else to say, short of expressing the view that the “stunt” hadn’t been a stunt at all, but a real murder in which Rath (one would suppose) took only a reluctant part. Which I couldn’t hope to prove without mentioning that I’d stumbled upon Rath’s body in a condition consistent with the way he died in said “stunt.”

“Oh, it was him, all right,” Millie said.

Jill, interest piqued, cut in. “Why are you so sure?”

“Well,” Carl said, ever deadpan, “I guess it’s possible it was somebody else. Somebody playing Rath.”

Millie said, “But Carl’s right — Rath was around.”

“What?” Jill and I said.

Carl said, “Rath only pretended to leave.”

“Why do you say that?” I said, just me, though Jill no doubt was thinking it.

Millie lectured Carl, waggling a forefinger. “You don’t know for a fact he pretended to leave... He could’ve left and come back.”

“Same difference,” Carl shrugged.

“But who was he helping, by playing along?” Millie asked her husband. “Somebody on one of the teams?”

“What the hell are you two talking about?”

They looked at me, shocked to have heard such force coming from me, who after all was still wearing the Lester Denton facade. A little dab’ll do ya.

“It’s just that we saw him Thursday night,” Millie said, shrugging elaborately, eyes wide, palms up.

“ After he got mad and supposedly left,” Carl added.

Jill asked, “When was this?”

“We were out walking in the snow,” Millie said. “We were on that little gazebo bridge by the lake.”

“What did you see?” I said, grasping Millie’s arm.

She pulled back, wincing, not understanding my urgency. “Hey, take it easy! We didn’t see anything, much — just Kirk Rath.”

“Yeah,” Carl said, thumbing through his notebook, “I jotted some notes. Wasn’t sure it might not have something to do with the Mystery Weekend. We saw him out walking, along by the bushes near the lake, all by himself. It was about eleven fifteen...”

But that was after I’d seen Rath killed!

I was mentally reeling, so it was Jill who asked, “Are you sure of this?”

“Sure,” Carl deadpanned. “It seemed odd to me, that’s all.”

Now I had presence of mind to speak again: “What did?”

“The front of his jacket was all slashed, ripped up. But he was fine.”

That evening, at seven o’clock, the high-ceilinged pine dining hall transformed itself into a dimly lit night spot, where Frank Sinatra and big band music held sway. The snowstorm had prevented the arrival of the New York City — based dance band who’d been booked, but Mary Wright had put together a sound system and found a nice stack of smooth forties and fifties pop sides to create a nicely nostalgic aura; whether you were into Christie or Chandler, it didn’t matter — all mystery fans like to slide into the past.

Mary Wright herself was playing DJ, in a pretty pink satin gown rather than a Mohonk blazer for a change, and I — looking pretty natty myself in my cream sports jacket and skinny blue tie and navy slacks — went up to her and asked if she had any Bobby Darin.

“I think I can round up ‘Beyond the Sea,’ ” she said.

“Thanks. It’s not a ‘Queen of the Hop’ crowd, anyway.”

She smiled at that and it was a pretty, pretty nice smile; I wished things hadn’t gotten tense between us. But what the hell, it kept Jill from pinching me.

I went back to our regular table, where a few of us — myself and Jill included — were finishing up dinner (as this was a dinner dance, after all). Sardini and I were having a Vienna nut torte (not the same one) and Jill was putting away some pumpkin pie. Jack Flint and his wife sat across from us, and Jack was having a drink. Quaker roots or not, the Mohonk dining room did serve drinks with the evening meal, if you insisted on it.

I hadn’t. I wanted my brain nice and clear. While the day had been uneventful since my talks with Mary Wright and the Arnolds, I was still trying to make sense of what I’d learned. After the noon buffet, and before the afternoon panel on which Flint and Sardini and I discussed the recent comeback of the private-eye story, Jill and I had tried to put some of the pieces together — and hadn’t gotten anywhere much.

Fact Number One: Kirk Rath had been seen by the Arnolds after I supposedly saw him killed.

How was that even possible? Were the Arnolds confused about the time, or maybe just confused in general? Or did they see somebody else who merely resembled Rath — but if so, how do you explain the shredded jacket?

Fact Number Two: Kirk Rath and Mary Wright and Curt’s son Gary were college chums.

What did that mean? Nothing much that we could see, other than that Mary entered the circle of suspects by virtue of having previously known Rath.

Fact Number Three: Gary Culver (Culver being Curt Clark’s real last name, as you may recall) had been homosexual.

Did that mean anything? If Kirk Rath was Gary’s college roommate, did that make Rath homosexual as well? And if so, so what?

The latter subject Jill and I had disagreed on hotly, in an afternoon brainstorming session in our room. I insisted that the notion that Rath might have been gay was nonsense. In college, as a rule, you’re assigned roommates in dorms, particularly in the first year. So, the odds were (poor choice of words, admittedly) Gary and Kirk had become roommates by chance. Just because Gary had been gay, that hardly meant it figured Kirk was, too.

“Besides,” I told her, “Rath was too conservative. Politically, he was a reactionary — he’s taken stands on issues that make the Moral Majority look like the American Civil Liberties Union.”

“A perfect reason to stay in the closet,” Jill had said.

“He just wasn’t the type.”

“You mean, he wasn’t particularly effeminate? Grow up, Mal. Don’t expect every gay male to be a drag queen.”

“Give me a break, will you? I’ve seen him at various mystery conventions and such, and he’s always in the presence of a stunning girl.”

“Girl or woman?”

“I’d call them ‘girls’ — late teens, early twenties.”

“Have you ever seen him with the same girl twice?”

I thought about that.

“No,” I said. “It’s always been a different one, but then I’ve only seen him at three or four conventions.”

“Real babes?” she asked, archly.

“Yeah — real babes.”

“Prostitutes, perhaps?”

“Oh, Jill, don’t be ridiculous—”

“A call girl makes a nice escort for a gay man who’s pretending to be straight.”

I gave her a take-my-word-for-it look. “Look, I’ve heard rumors that he was a real stud, okay?”

“Rumors fueled by his being seen with knockout women. I think Rath was trying a little too hard to seem heterosexual.”

“Ah, I just don’t buy it.”

“Mal, he was a guy in his late twenties living in a houseful of men, right?”

“That’s his place of business — they all work with him.”

“I got a news flash for you, kiddo — at most businesses, you don’t sleep in.”

“I just don’t buy it.”

“Notice that you no longer can find any reasonable counterarguments. Notice that you begin to sound like a broken record.”

“Notice that you are getting obnoxious.”