Max Collins - Nice Weekend for a Murder

“I’m relieved to hear that. So, then... how would you rate his bitterness toward Rath?”

“On a scale of one to ten? Seven.”

“Okay,” I said, smiling a little, and handing her over to her husband, with whom I stood and chatted briefly, before heading back to the room.

The halls were deserted, of course, everybody back partying at the dance, and I again thought of The Shining and wondered if that kid on his Big Wheel would finally come rounding the next corner to run me down. My feet padded on the carpet and I watched them walk, as my mind sorted through the tidbits I’d picked up tonight.

So Jack Flint’s bitterness toward Rath was a seven on a scale of one to ten. That hardly seemed a murder motive; particularly when you considered that Jack Flint was making a small fortune in TV and movie writing.

And Curt had told his wife about Rath’s murder. That didn’t surprise me much — as I’d said to Kim, most husbands in his situation would have shared that awful secret. It’s not the kind of thing you can keep to yourself; if you swallowed it, it’d just burn a hole in your stomach.

As for Pete Christian and Tim Culver, there seemed to be no enmity there, despite Tim’s inadvertent role in C.J. Beaufort’s suicide. That didn’t make either of them less a suspect though, did it? If anything, it opened up a new possibility: a team effort to wipe out Rath.

I’d also learned that the only person who called Cynthia Crystal “Cindy” was her Aunt Cynthia. The question was, where was Cynthia’s aunt when Rath was killed?

Screw it, I thought, and a hand settled on my shoulder and jerked me around.

A red-faced Rick Fahy was standing there; he was in evening clothes — I’d spotted him at the dance, earlier — and apparently he’d followed me.

“What do you want?” I said irritably, picking his hand off my shoulder like a scab.

“This,” he said and smacked me.

I took it on the side of the jaw, and it didn’t feel good, swinging my face to one side, but one thing about my jaw is, it ain’t glass, nor am I slow to react, and I threw one back at him.

And he deflected it with a karate-style swipe of a hand; I sensed I was in deep shit. Where was Carl Arnold when you needed him?

Fahy grabbed me by the lapels of my sports coat and flung me against the nearest wall; I slid down and just sat. It was humbling being tossed around by somebody smaller than me.

Nonetheless, I got up and charged him, and he stepped aside and sent me crashing into another wall, like an outfoxed bull. But I braced with my hands, didn’t hit my head, and managed to turn and give him a sharp elbow in his side.

That hurt him, and he stumbled back, and I sent a good right hand into his face and bloodied his nose some.

He did not go down, though, tough little bastard; and when I threw my left, he deflected it again, karate style, speaking of which, his next blow was a sideways chop to my stomach, which doubled me over, and all the wind in me went south as first my knees, then my head, hit the floor.

He climbed on the back of me, like I was a bronc, forcing me flat on my stomach. I wondered, idly, why we were fighting. Only we weren’t fighting anymore, were we? I had lost.

He grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked back, till I thought my Adam’s apple would punch through my throat.

“You’re going to tell me what you know,” he said.

Then he let go of my hair and my head flopped forward and hit the carpeted floor. Ouch.

I said, “Any particular subject?” It was hard to get it out; my wind was barely back.

“Kirk Rath,” he said.

“He’s dead.”

There was silence.

I felt him climb off my back. I rolled on my side. Fahy was stumbling; it was like I’d gotten in that telling lick that when we were fighting I never managed to. He braced himself against the wall, like a drunk.

I got on my feet somehow.

“Are you okay?” I asked him. I shouldn’t have cared, but I could tell already he was in worse shape than me.

He swallowed, thickly. “Tell me what you know,” he said. It wasn’t a demand, this time. In fact, he added, rather pathetically I thought, “Please.”

So I told him. I stood next to him in the hall while he leaned against the wall and I told him everything, from what I’d seen outside my window, to finding the body, to such strange items as the Arnolds claiming to have seen Rath after he’d seemed to have been killed.

About halfway through, he began crying.

Quietly. Tears just rolling down a face that seemed impassive if you didn’t notice the quivering.

A while after that he sat on the floor. Crying. Still crying. Listening to my story. By this time I was sitting next to him.

“You were his lover, weren’t you?” I asked.

Fahy nodded.

“Did he tell you he was going to storm out Thursday night like he did?”

“N-no. I was as surprised as anybody. He told me we’d be seeing plenty of each other this weekend.” He sighed, raggedly. “Carefully, of course.”

I chewed on that for a minute.

Then I said, “Remember that little lounge area, where I played Lester Denton?”

He looked at me, narrowed his eyes, shook his head yes.

“Meet me there at eleven-thirty.”

“W-why?”

“I’m going to round some people up,” I said. “We may be able to sort this thing out before the police get here.”

He nodded again; I helped him up. Me, the guy he’d just beat the ever-living crap out of, helping him up. The poor bastard.

I knocked on the door of our room and Jill answered it, her eyes going very round and very wide.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“I think I just figured out who killed Kirk Rath,” I said, licking some blood out of the corner of my mouth. “Though I hope to hell I’m wrong.”

It was nearly midnight by the time everybody showed up. There was some grumbling, but everybody made it: I’d enlisted Tom and Jill, and we tracked everybody down just as the dance was starting to dwindle. Pete, who’d had to impose on a friend to change reels for him on the film currently showing in the Parlor, was the last to arrive; he’d somehow found time to change into a sweater. The rest, still in their evening clothes, mostly sat on the plush furniture, some of them squirming, others just going with the flow, chatting, basking in the soft yellow light; the shadows of the flames from the fireplace flickering over them. The exceptions were Mary Wright, who leaned against a pillar in the background, brooding, and Cynthia Crystal, who sat on a bench at the nearby baby grand, noodling various Cole Porter tunes. Tim Culver, a drink in hand, stood nearby, leaning against the piano.

We’d have the small sitting room to ourselves — the Mystery Weekenders were either at Pete’s movie in the Parlor or holed up in their rooms preparing their presentations. An occasional gamester might wander by, but this party would be a private one. No one would even think to crash it.

Two of my invited guests were roaming, a bit. Pete Christian, chain-smoking, was pacing as usual, sitting only occasionally; and Curt Clark stood by the fireplace, encouraging the fire with an iron poker, at one point tossing a log on. His wife Kim sat nearby in a big thronelike chair with her hands folded in her lap, looking in her tight low-cut gown like an overdeveloped and emotionally battered teenage girl.

The only one irritated, however, was Jack Flint, leaning forward in his seat like an angry bear, his wife putting a slight but restraining hand on his arm. “What’s this about?” he growled. “I wanted to see that movie. I never got a chance to see it before.”

“I’ll send you a videocassette,” I told him flatly, giving him a look that said I wasn’t kidding around here. That seemed to momentarily calm him. I was standing; I’d prepared the seating before the others arrived to create a sort of semicircle — although Cynthia had chosen to sit outside of it, at the piano — with me near the fireplace. Curt was now sitting, on the arm of Kim’s chair, near the fireplace, which he continued to now and then prod with the wrought-iron poker, reaching in his long-limbed way from where he sat.