12
Jill and I went back to our room and crashed for a while. We both felt unclean — the cold and snow hadn’t kept us from working up a sweat hiking, and the lingering effect of finding a corpse had left a certain psychic film, a clammy residue over our minds, if not our bodies, that a shower wouldn’t do much for, but we took one anyway. Together.
It wasn’t a two-person orgy, so voyeurs in the audience can let loose of their expectations. In fact, it wasn’t very sexual, really, or even romantic exactly. It was steamy, but only because we leaned on the hot water. We soaped each other’s backs, massaged each other’s tense neck muscles, clinging to each other a bit, nuzzling, but nothing more — just hurt animals licking each other’s wounds. The shower stall provided a needed closeness, the fog of steam and the drilling of hot water on our bodies numbing us into something approaching relaxation, a melancholy mist we could get lost in for a while.
We shared a towel — conserving one for tomorrow morning — after which Jill slipped into her terry cloth robe, leaving me with the towel for a loincloth. She was rubbing her short black hair dry with a hand towel.
“I could build a fire,” I said.
The wind was howling through the window.
“Let’s save that for later,” she said.
I sat next to her; the twin bed squeaked. “Why did you want me to go along with that bullshit about keeping the murder quiet?”
Her smile was one-sided and wry as she kept toweling her hair, looking at me sideways. “Surprised you, didn’t it?”
“I should say. Especially since a man getting murdered seemed to upset Miss Wright primarily because her Mystery Weekend might get spoiled.”
She kept toweling her hair. “The concealment wasn’t Mary Wright’s idea, though, was it?”
“No, it was that hick cop.”
“How do you know he’s a hick? Besides, this is New York; they don’t have hicks in New York.”
“Really? He used the word culprit in a sentence.”
“Oh dear. Well, I still think he was right, anyway.”
“Why?”
She leaned her head back and shook her hair; droplets flew, and I blinked a couple away. “The murderer doesn’t know that we know a murder has been committed,” she said.
“So?”
“God, you’re thick. And here you’re supposed to be an amateur detective of sorts.”
“Emphasis on the ‘of sorts.’ Anyway, there aren’t any amateur detectives in real life.”
She smiled flatly and shook her head again, not in an effort to rid it of more water, though more droplets indeed flew, but in a gesture of amused frustration, as if from trying to reason with a slow child of whom you’re rather fond.
“This isn’t ‘real life,’ ” she said. “It’s Mohonk. More precisely, it’s the Mohonk Mystery Weekend.”
“Yeah, and Kirk Rath is really going all out in his role.”
She ignored that and patted my bare leg. “Think of yourself as an unlicensed private eye,” she said. “You figured out the circumstances of your friend Ginnie Mullens’s murder, didn’t you? I saw you in action, there; I know what you’re capable of. So do it already — play unlicensed private eye again.”
It was sinking in. “You mean, I could go around asking casual questions about Rath...”
She nodded eagerly; I liked the clean smell of her. “Yes, asking your various fellow ‘suspects’ in Curt’s Case of the Curious Critic about their real-life relationships with Rath.”
“And,” I said, picking up on it, “get a reading on them, without the murderer among them knowing that I know a murder’s even been committed.”
“Exactly. With the exception of Curt Clark and Mary Wright, of course, who also know about the murder. And are also suspects.”
I sighed, shrugged. “As far as I know, Mary Wright and Rath weren’t even acquainted. And Curt’s probably the only person here who doesn’t have a motive to kill the critic. Besides; Curt’s a tall drink of water, and the killer was a short, stocky person in a ski mask.”
“Ah! The least likely suspect...”
“Oh, shut up. This is a real murder, not some stupid game.”
That hurt her feelings a little; she glanced away and started toweling her hair again, though it was pretty much dry by now.
“Sorry, kid,” I said. “I know you’re just as shaken by this goddamn thing as I am.”
In a voice that seemed small for Jill Forrest, she said, “Maybe more. Maybe I never saw anything like that before.”
I slipped my arm around her shoulder and she dropped the towel and we held each other; we weren’t shaking, we weren’t crying, but we did feel battered — or anyway I did. And, oddly, guilty. I told Jill as much.
“Why guilty?”
“Well,” I said and sighed again, slipping out of her embrace and standing, adjusting my towel, “I didn’t like the bum. I’ve said terrible things about the son of a bitch... R.I.P. That makes me feel... guilty, somehow, now that he’s dead.”
“You didn’t want him dead.”
“No.” I shrugged, shook my head, and smiled without humor. “But I don’t feel particularly bad that he’s dead. I mean, the most I can muster is I feel kind of sorry for the guy. Jeez. That doesn’t quite cut it, does it?”
Her mouth was a straight line, which turned into two straight lines as she said, “He was a smug, pompous, mean-spirited little jerk. And now he’s a dead, smug, pompous, mean-spirited little jerk. Getting murdered doesn’t make him a saint.”
I went to the dresser and got out some fresh clothes. I dropped the towel and climbed into my shorts; when a man climbs into his shorts, it’s very likely the moment that day he will feel the most vulnerable, the most mortal. Then putting the rest of his clothes on, a man begins to feel less like some dumb doomed animal. It’s probably much the same for women. Getting into that outer skin of clothes, putting on the surface of civilization, applying the social veneer, creates a sense of order, taps into the security of ritual, makes us feel we’re going to live forever. Or at least the rest of the day.
“I feel I owe Rath something,” I said. “Maybe an apology. Or maybe to find his killer.”
“Would you be surprised if I said I could understand that?”
I smiled at her; she smiled back, and it was as warm as the fire we’d almost made.
I said, “You’re a constant surprise, as a matter of fact, but not in this instance. I’ve already picked up on your urge to play Nora to my Nick.”
She laughed a little. “It always comes back to that — role playing, game playing. We are at Mohonk. No getting around it.”
“And so is a murderer.”
“So is a murderer.”
I walked to the window; couldn’t see much out of its frosted surface. The howl of the wind and snow kept finding its way through the cracks and crevices of the old hotel, a constant underpinning of all conversation, like an eerie score from an eerie movie.
Jill noticed it, too. “Maybe God put Bernard Herrmann in charge of the weather this weekend,” she said.
I looked back at her, who still sat in her terry robe, hair dry now.
“We’re well and truly snowbound,” I said, “that’s for sure. So we’ll have this evening and most of tomorrow, unless I miss my guess, to do some casual investigating.”
“Good,” she said with a tight smile, fists in her lap.
“I will do the talking,” I said, gesturing with a lecturing finger. “We have to be very careful. Very careful. If the murderer tips to what we’re up to, we’re in deep shit.”