“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.”
“I’ve tried to call Rath.”
“So have I,” I said, “and I haven’t had any luck.”
He looked at me like I was a slug; then he looked away. He sighed. There was frustration in it, and anger, too.
I said, “If you’re a friend of Rath’s—”
“He’s my employer. And he’s missing.”
“Did you know he was going to stalk out like that Thursday? Refuse to play the weekend game?”
Fahy’s lip curled ever so slightly; it wasn’t a sneer exactly—it seemed to correspond with him thinking, deciding whether or not to answer me.
He decided.
Not to.
He walked away and I watched him go, and shrugged, and went into the room.
Where I found Jill sitting before a roaring fire, a blanket wrapped around her like an Indian chief.
“What happened to Charlie Chan?”
“I watched half an hour,” she said. “Then my mind started to wander... thinking about the murder and all.”
“Ah.” I pulled my sweater off.
“Come sit with me.”
I stripped off the rest of my clothes, and did. It was cold outside, the windows rattling, wind whistling, snow piling up,
but it was toasty warm in here, two naked people in a blanket before a fire.
“You should’ve let me build this,” I said, rubbing my hands, basking in the orange glow and the warmth.
“You build a truly pathetic fire,” she said.
“I do not!”
“But you do.”
“Well. I suppose.”
“The really good fires, back in Iowa, have been the ones
I
started.”
“This is true,” I admitted. She was starting a sort of fire right now, as a matter of fact.
“Did you find Culver?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Did you talk to anybody?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Who?”
“Later,” I said, and kissed her.
And then I kissed her again.
“Nick...”
“Yes, Nora?”
“Let’s do what married people do.”
And we did. Maybe we didn’t have the river view from my little house in Port City, Iowa, but we did have the fire, the blanket, and each other. And we sure didn’t give a damn about anything else.
For the moment.
Saturday
I woke up rested, but aching. Yesterday had been a long day, and despite everything I had on my mind, I slept soundly. Nobody at Mohonk, save possibly Kirk Rath himself, could have had a deeper night’s sleep. I had no memory of having dreamed, so apparently my exhaustion had kept me from pursuing Rath’s killer through slumber-land. But the mountain hike in the real world had taken its toll: muscles I didn’t know I had made their acquaintance by twanging like painfully out-of-tune guitar strings whenever, wherever I moved.
Jill was again showering—it was a wonder she didn’t go all pruney, as many showers as she took—and I stumbled into the john and took an unceremonious pee. I brushed my teeth and splashed some water on my face and pretty soon Jill came out, wrapping her slim, tan, water-beaded body in a towel (a body whose attributes I noted only with clinical interest, because anything more than thought would have twanged too many painful guitar strings) and bequeathed the shower to me.
Five hot minutes later, I was refreshed, awake, still hurting, but also thinking. The Rath murder had hold of me and it wasn’t going to let me go till I did something about it.
Jill sat in her terrycloth robe, doing her makeup at the dresser, “How are you feeling today, Nick?”
“Couldn’t be better, Nora. Unless I could trade this tired old body in for a new one.”
“I like your body just fine.”
“My body isn’t interested. Not until it gets some aspirin, anyway. What’s the situation outside?”
“Still snowing.”
“You’re kidding! Hasn’t let up?”
“Well, if it did, it started back up again.”
I went to the window and rubbed a place to look out. The snow was piled up just past the sill. The white stuff was indeed still coming down, however rather lazily now—just dusting the drifts. The blizzard was over, apparently, but its aftermath would take an army of snowplows.
“It’ll be a miracle if the cops get up here today,” I said, climbing into my shorts.
Jill was stepping into some loose-fitting gray slacks. “Looks like we’re still in the detective business.”
Her remark made my enthusiasm for the real-life
Curious Critic
case wilt like the ardor of a bridegroom whose mother-in-law showed up at the honeymoon.
I finished dressing and went over to her. “We have to talk. Sit down for a minute.”
She did, on the edge of the bed, looking at me curiously.
I sat next to her, put my hands on her shoulders, and stared her right in those cornflower-blue eyes that had helped make me fall so hard for her.
I said, “I think maybe we should forget about the Nick and Nora bit. I think maybe we should wait for the police like everybody else, even if it does take till tomorrow.”
“Nobody’s waiting for the police except you and me and Mary Wright and Curt Clark.”
“Don’t get technical. You saw that body.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You
saw
that body,” I said.
She looked away.
“Look at me, Jill. Look at me!”
She looked, but her mouth was twisted up a bit.
“You saw that body,” I said. “You saw the way Rath was killed.”
She sucked in some breath; then, slowly, she let it out, nodding as she did, nodding several times.
“You get my drift? And I’m not talking about the weather.”
“I get your drift,” she said. “There’s a murderer among us.” The latter was delivered rather archly.
My hands were still on her shoulders. I squeezed. “There
is
a murderer among us. Somebody vicious. Rath’s body wasn’t the result of a scuffle that got out of hand or something. That was a savage goddamn
murder
—a bloody, psychopathic job of one, too, I’d say.”
“So we should just wait for the police,” she said, “to sort it all out.”
I took my hands off her shoulders. “Yes. In the cool clear light of day, that’s how I see it.”
“It’s not cool, it’s cold, and if there’s any clear light out there, you’ll freeze your butt off in it.”
“Agreed. But you do get my point?”
“I get your point. I get your drift.”
She rose. Walked to the door.
“It’s quarter till nine,” she said, indifferently. “They only serve breakfast till nine. Shake a leg.”
In my condition, shaking a leg was out of the question, but I did follow her, down the hall, and I do mean follow. She was
walking quickly. I couldn’t keep up with her at first. Finally I caught up, grabbing her arm, gently but firmly, stopping her.
“Why are you angry?”
She pouted. “Because you’re no fun.”
“I’m no fun.”
She smirked in a one-sided, humorless fashion. “That’s not it, really. It’s that you’re... well... shit. It’s that you’re
right
.”
I smiled at her, just a little. “I can’t help it. I just don’t want you or me, singly or together, to do anything that will put you—or us—in any danger. Which if we keep nosing around, we will be.”
She nodded, faintly amused, overtly disappointed, hooked her arm in mine, and we walked up the stairs and down the hall to the big dining room.
Which at this hour was damn near empty.
Instead of sitting at our own table, we went to the adjacent one, where Curt and the rest of the guests usually sat. Curt wasn’t there, however—the only person left at the fairly large table was Cynthia Crystal, who sat drinking a cup of coffee, gazing into not much of anything.
“You mind if we join you?” I asked.
Cynthia’s trance broke, and she smiled in her elegant, crinkly fashion. She was dressed in designer jeans and a red
MURDER INK
sweatshirt, which was as casual as I’d ever seen her; but she still looked like a million dollars. Two.
“Do please join me,” she said, gesturing to a chair on either side of her.
We took our places, and a waiter came over and I asked him if we were too late for breakfast, and he said, “Not at all,” even though we were. Jill and I quickly circled our chosen items on
the little green gazebo-crested menus, and passed them along to him.
“Tim’s out jogging,” Cynthia said. “He jogs every morning without fail.”
“In
that
?” I said, pointing, vaguely, toward the Great White Out-of-Doors.
“No, dear,” she said with a brief brittle laugh, “he’s running the halls on the upper floors. My Tim is eccentric, but no fool.”
“You know, Cynthia,” I said, carefully, “the last time I saw you, you and Tim seemed, well...”
“On the verge of the abyss, where our relationship was concerned? Ah, yes. But we’ve retreated to the sunny countryside of connubial bliss. Which is to say, now we’re planning to get married. Make it official.”
“No kidding! Congratulations.”
I offered her my hand to shake, but she shook her head and smiled in near embarrassment, as if to say,
How gauche
, and turned her cheek for me to kiss. Which I did.
Jill congratulated Cynthia as well, asking, “How did you manage to go from nearly splitting up, to about to tie the knot? If I’m not prying.”
“Oh you
are
prying,” Cynthia said, without malice, smiling rather regally, “but as a gossip myself, I don’t mind at all. Fact is, Tim... and Mal knows all about this... was rather jealous of me.”
Jill narrowed her eyes, tilted her head, not understanding.
Cynthia clarified: “Not of my ability to charm the... socks off the likes of young Mallory, here... nothing so sexy as that. Well, you tell her, Mal. My modesty prevents me.”
“Your modesty,” I said to Cynthia, “wouldn’t prevent much of anything. But in fact,” I continued, directing this to Jill,
“Cynthia’s had a good deal of success in recent years. And while Tim’s always been a critical darling, his books have never sold very well. He’s bounced from publisher to publisher, never taking hold.”
Jill was nodding—our earlier conversation with Cynthia coming back—saying, “Whereas his brother Curt’s done well both in book sales and with all those movies.”
“Precisely,” Cynthia said, precisely. “So God bless Kirk Rath.”
“And Lawrence Kasdan,” Jill put in.
The waiter put my orange juice down in front of me. I sipped it, then said, “Then the combination of Tim’s movie sale and Curt’s favorable
Chronicler
reviews not only got Tim and his brother Curt back on speaking terms, but—”
“But helped Tim overcome his career jealousy of me, as well, yes,” she said. “Thanks to that little weasel Rath.”
Her praise for the critic surprised me, even if it was lefthanded. “I sensed Thursday night there was no love lost between Rath and Tim,” I said. “Tim seemed about an inch away from pounding Rath into jelly, for getting rude with you.”
“Tim despises Rath,” Cynthia said, lightly.
“But I saw two major articles on Tim in the
Chronicler
, and even an interview....”
“Yes,” Cynthia said, “but remember—Tim’s never been lacking for critical praise. That’s
typical
of Rath, the little dilettante, giving favorable reviews to someone who’s safely singled out already by other, more astute, critics.”