“Yeah,” I said. “I figure immaturity is one of my more admirable qualities. That, and poor judgment.”
Culver said, “You don’t seriously think you saw anything more than some amateur theatrics, do you?”
“I guess not,” I said.
Cynthia’s brittle laugh rose to the high ceiling. “If only it were true.”
“Pardon?” I said.
She was putting preserves on a muffin as she responded: “If only somebody had knifed that little bastard.”
I had no answer for that, so I smiled and nodded and joined Jill.
“So,” Tom said as I sat across from him, “somebody made a sap out of you.”
A waiter poured coffee in my cup and I drank some. “It’s nice of Curt to tell everybody what a fool I made of myself last night.”
Tom smiled; even his beard twinkled. “So they murdered ol’ Kirk Rath in the moonlight, huh?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“I tell ya,” Tom said, “this place is like some kind of demented summer camp. I mean, they really go all out here.”
“No kidding.”
I wrote up our order on the little menu sheet provided for us — French toast for me, scrambled eggs for Jill — and Tom sat appraising me over his coffee cup.
“What is it, Mal?” he said.
“What’s what?”
“Come on. I’ve known you for a long time. Nobody likes a joke better than you. But you’re bristling about this thing.”
“I was in a great mood till I walked in here and realized I was wearing size eighteen shoes.”
Jill seemed uneasy; I think she was hoping I’d leave this alone. And I would have, but Tom pressed on: “I still say you like a good laugh. But you’re not laughing. Why?”
I smiled at him, a poker player’s smile. “What would you say if I told you I’m not convinced what I saw wasn’t real?”
His expression turned blank. “You think somebody killed Kirk Rath outside your window. Really killed him?”
I shrugged. Sipped my coffee.
“Aw, Mal, that’s crazy.”
“If murder never happened, Tom, we’d be in another line of work.”
He gestured with two hands; be reasonable. “But Rath left,” he said.
“Supposedly. Where’s your room?”
“What?”
“Your room. We’re in number sixty-four. What room are you in?”
“Just up the hall from you — fifty-eight.”
“Do you have a view of the lake from your room? The gazebo, the little Japanese bridge?”
“Sure.”
“Did you see anything last night? Around ten-thirty?”
“Just Pete’s movie.”
“Did you see Jack Flint there?”
“He was sitting a few rows behind me. Why? What is this, Dragnet?”
Jill said, “Don’t mention TV shows to him, Tom. He’s still suffering video withdrawal.”
Jill was trying to lighten the mood, but it wasn’t necessary; Tom wasn’t offended — he was just curious, interested.
“You really think Rath was murdered,” he said.
“It’s a possibility, that’s all.”
“And I’m a suspect!” He said this with glee.
“He suspects everyone,” Jill said, “and he suspects no one.”
Now I was a little embarrassed. Just a little.
“Look,” I said, “I just want to know if I’m the only guy who saw this particular Saturday Night Live sketch.”
“TV reference again,” Jill said. “Watch it.”
“Maybe it was staged specifically for you,” Tom said.
“Curt didn’t think so,” I said. “Everybody knows all the guest authors are billeted in that wing. Curt says I just happened to be the one who got snookered.”
Tom pushed his empty coffee cup aside. “What do you think?”
“I think I’m going to do what all these game-players are doing this weekend.”
“What’s that?”
Dum da dum dum.
“Play detective.”
8
YOU ARE LESTER DENTON — age thirty-seven. Small-town boy, introverted, Middletown High Class of ’67 — Least Likely to Succeed (also member of Chess and Poetry Clubs). A life-long nerd, you are an asexual bachelor living with your rather wealthy, widowed mother. Despite being a timid soul who rarely ventures out of the house, you have succeeded in realizing a lifelong dream: you have had a mystery novel published, The Apple Red Take-off. But your dreams have been dashed by critic Roark K. Sloth, in whose Mystery Carbuncle your debut novel has been unmercifully panned. You blame the lack of financial success of the novel directly on Sloth’s heartless review. When you check into the Mohawk Mountain House one wintry Thursday evening for a mystery writer’s convention, you are at first distressed to find Sloth one of the guest lecturers. Then, upon second thought, you decide his presence presents a unique opportunity to rectify an unpleasant situation. You go to Sloth’s room that evening and offer the critic money to “simply ignore” the next (and, if sales don’t pick up, probably last) Lester Denton novel, Death Is a Fatal Disease. Sloth not only laughs at you, he pledges to reveal your “pathetic” attempt to bribe him in a Carbuncle article; and when, though flustered, you shrewdly point out that there are no witnesses to the bribery attempt, and therefore Sloth would be putting himself on the line for a libel suit, the critic laughs smugly and reveals a pocket tape recorder — on which the entire conversation has been captured! You leave, tail tucked between your legs, defeated, but notice private eye Rob Darsini coming down the hall, apparently on his way to Sloth’s room. The next morning, you are as surprised as the other guests to discover that Sloth has been found dead in his hotel room with a knife in his back, slumped over his typewriter, a sheet in which bears the cryptic dying clue: TOVL FOF OY. And no tape of your bribe attempt is found.
YOU WILL NOT LIE — but you will not volunteer information about the visit to Sloth’s room unless asked by an interrogator. You will, if confronted directly, admit having attempted to bribe Sloth. You will reveal having seen Darsini. You are not the killer; you did not steal the tape.
This, as written by Curt Clark, was all I knew about the character I would be portraying in the Mohonk mystery this weekend; each of the author guests had received similar instruction sheets by mail, though we weren’t privy to each other’s. I tucked mine back in the envelope it had come in (MALLORY — EYES ONLY), which also included a sheet with one-paragraph descriptions of the other suspects, and placed it in my inside suitcoat pocket, for handy reference. I looked at myself in the mirror, straightened my red bow tie, which was color-coordinated with my pale pink shirt, combed back my heavily Brylcreemed hair, which was parted in the middle, adjusted my window-glass glasses so that they were halfway down the bridge of my nose, under which a pencil-line moustache twitched, and adjusted the SUSPECT badge on one lapel of my double-breasted black-and-red-and-white-plaid corduroy suit.
I was, for all intents and purposes, Lester Denton, suspect in the Roark K. Sloth murder, The Case of the Curious Critic. While I’d never thought of myself as a nerd, nor did I have a wealthy, widowed mother, Denton was, in some respects, a cute if nasty-around-the-edges parody of myself and my own situation with Kirk Rath. In light of the murder I’d witnessed (or was that “murder”?), I found the wry, sardonic echoes of real life in Curt’s scenario more disturbing than amusing. I wondered if the other authors were playing roles that struck them as somewhat uncomfortably similar to themselves and their own bitterness toward Rath.