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.
Curt and Kim were at my left; Jill was sitting at my right, and next to her was a putty-faced Rick Fahy—the life seemed drained out of him. The warmth of the fireplace was to my back.
“I asked you all here,” I said, “so that we might be able to prepare ourselves for the police, who should be arriving within the hour.”
“The
police
?” Flint said, and his stunned look was a typical reaction; questions came from everybody all at once, words tumbling on top of each other, but I made a stop motion with my hands, pushing back the air.
“This will take a while,” I said, “but I intend to explain everything that I know—and then to share some speculations with you. Frankly, I intend to share these speculations in the
hope that I’m wrong. I want to confront the person I suspect before I share any suspicions with the police; and I want to share those suspicions with all of you, in case some of you might have something pertinent to add. And, to be quite honest with you, I would like to put everything I know, and everything I suspect, out in the open
now
—before the police arrive—in the hopes that we might arrive at some conclusion among ourselves... since, like you, I will soon be a suspect in a murder investigation.”
The place went up for grabs, of course, but I quieted them down, by gesturing and waving as if they were a rebellious choral group I was directing.
“Please don’t ask any questions,” I said, forcing my voice above their collective one. “I think I can anticipate most of your questions, and after I’ve put the basic facts before you, you can grill me all you want.”
Curt Clark said, “Let Mal speak. He’s been wanting to report a murder all weekend.”
“Thank you, Curt,” I said. “And he’s right. All of you know about the ‘prank’ I witnessed outside my window Thursday night. What only a few of you know—specifically, Curt, Kim, Mary Wright, Jill Forrest and I—is that Kirk Rath really
was
murdered.”
They kept it down this time, but they were whispering among themselves, heads were shaking,
is that guy crazy or what?
, but all eyes were on yours truly. I had the floor; I hadn’t had so much attention since I played Lester Denton this morning in this same little parlor.
I told them about the mountain hike and how Jill and I had found Rath’s body; also that the police chief had asked the few of us who knew about the murder to keep mum for the time being—a directive I now felt compelled to ignore.
“So the prank wasn’t a prank,” Tom Sardini said, matter-of-factly. He wasn’t a guy who fazed easily. “Rath was killed outside your window, and somebody hauled his body in Rath’s own car up to Sky Top and dumped it.”
“That’s how it looks,” I said. “But why do that? The body was bound to be found there before very long; if it hadn’t started snowing yesterday, there’d have been other hikers out besides Jill and me, and the body would’ve been found even sooner. That’s a standard hike to take when you’re visiting Mohonk.”
Jack Flint, his irritation gone, was somber as he said, “You don’t hide a body out in the open like that—not with all these woods around.”
“Exactly my point,” I said. “Somebody wanted that body found while we were all still here.”
“Why?” Flint asked.
“To get the inevitable investigation over with,” I said. “We were all invited here because we had real-life motives to kill Kirk Rath. Oh, some of us aren’t really very convincing suspects, I’ll grant you. As I pointed out to somebody earlier tonight, you generally don’t kill somebody over a bad review. But Kirk Rath was no ordinary reviewer. He caused a lot of misery—Pete blames him for a death and so does Tim Culver. Most of us have suffered career setbacks because of Rath. Face it... we’re suspects. That’s why we were invited here.”
Curt stood and said, “But
I
invited you here, Mal. I invited all of you here.”
“I know. But then, unless I’m very mistaken—and God knows I hope I am, Curt—you killed Kirk Rath.”
Curt’s smile was faint; the shadows of flames from the nearby fireplace reflected off his glasses and made him look just a little crazy. Which is exactly what he was.
But he was also smart and shrewd, and he said, “Don’t be silly. I couldn’t have killed Rath. You and I spoke on the telephone, just moments before you saw him killed.” He pointed at me like Humphrey Bogart pointing at Mary Astor. “And you yourself said the killer was a stocky man; in case you haven’t noticed, I’m about six-three in my bare feet.”
“For the record, I didn’t say Rath’s supposed assailant was a man; I said ‘person.’ It could’ve been a woman.”
Cynthia had long since stopped noodling at the piano; she was quite serious as she asked, “Why do you say ‘supposed assailant’? Haven’t you been saying all along that what you saw outside your window was a real killing?”
I laughed a little. “I sure have. Because Curt was right, from the very beginning—what I saw
was
a prank. A ‘Grand Guignol farce,’ as he put it, staged for my benefit.”
Now people were shaking their heads and shifting in their seats and climbing all over each’s attempt to tell me how ridiculous I was.
“Wait,” I said, holding up my hand, palm out, stop. “Just wait.”
They quieted, somewhat reluctantly.
I said, “Curt wrote, produced, and directed that skit; but he didn’t appear in it. He had an accomplice for that. But consider this—he and Mary Wright have been making all the arrangements for the weekend—”
From the back of the room, Mary Wright said, “I had nothing to do with this—leave me out of this!”
I ignored her, pressed on: “The point is, Curt knew well in advance which room was mine. In fact, Thursday evening, he dropped by and looked it over... walked to the window and glanced out, like a producer checking out the theater the
afternoon before the night the curtain goes up on his new show. Oh, and he was ready for that curtain to go up. Before I checked in, he’d been in that room—for one thing, he dragged my phone from the nightstand over to a table by the window. Having the phone by the window allowed him to call me later, supposedly about a scheduling crisis caused by Rath’s leaving, but in reality merely making sure I was right there at the window to witness the show he was staging. He even directed my attention where it was supposed to be, by asking me to look out my window to see if it was snowing yet. Also, he’d jammed my window shut, beforehand—superglue, nails, what have you. Somehow he made sure that window wouldn’t open, to keep me from getting into the act.”
Curt said, “I wish you’d refrain from referring to me in the third person. And, if I might add, this is the most harebrained plot you’ve ever come up with. Just who was playing the role of Kirk Rath in this supposed charade of mine?”