Out of courtesy to Pete (and because his presentation was plenty of fun, even for somebody as preoccupied as I was), I sat through the slide show; movie nut Jill insisted on sitting through Charlie Chan at the Opera, during which she bet me a million dollars I didn’t know who wrote the opera Boris Karloff and the others were singing. I won the bet. It was Oscar Levant, and Jill still hasn’t paid up.
When Charlie Chan at Treasure Island started unfolding, Jill grabbed my arm and whispered. “This is my favorite one. I have to see it.”
“What happened to playing Nora to my Nick?”
“All your suspects are watching the movies,” she whispered.
“Culver isn’t here.”
“He was.”
“Well, he ducked out in the last reel of the Opera.”
“How could he?”
“It was easy.” I thought for a moment. “You know, this might be a good chance for me to get him alone.”
Cynthia Crystal hadn’t left; she was sitting with Jack Flint and his wife, drinking in Sidney Toler’s finest Chan.
“I’m watching the movie,” Jill said. “It’s only an hour. See you at the room, after?”
“What about the next Chan up?”
“It’s a Roland Winters. I like it okay, but enough’s enough.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. I don’t know if I want to hang around with a woman who’d sit through three Charlie Chan movies.”
Somebody in the row in front of us turned and said, angrily, “Shusssh!” Quite rightly, too — generally I feel people who talk during movies should be shot.
Feeling guilty for violating one of my own rules, I rolled my fingers at Jill in a Stooges wave and slinked out of the Parlor.
I went to Culver’s room, which was just a few doors down from ours, and knocked. No answer.
So I began exploring the mountain house, wandering its endless halls, occasionally finding little covens of Mystery Weekenders, who were playing hookey from the night’s entertainment to keep working on their solution to The Case of the Curious Critic. Since a number of the gamesters were puzzle fanatics as opposed to mystery fans, their absence from the Chan festival, and their obsession with working on the puzzle, made sense. Using “sense” loosely.
Anyway, they were here and there, in the little sitting rooms with the plush furnishings and the fireplaces, many of which were going now, the snow piling up outside the frosted-over windows. Strangely, I’d heard no one complain about being stranded. Perhaps that was because all of us were, in a manner of speaking, stranded here already, and of our own free will. Being snowbound merely added to the atmosphere, whether Ten Little Indians — Agatha Christie, or The Shining — Stephen King.
I should have been depressed, I supposed. A man had died; I’d seen him killed one day, and found his body the next. That I had done both seemed wildly coincidental to me, certainly nothing I’d try to get away with in one of my books. But it had happened, so what was I supposed to do about it? You can start over in fiction; in life you’re stuck with what you’re dealt.
But I felt a certain charge out of the situation — being snowbound, having a chance to try to find out “whodunit” before the police got here (tomorrow or Sunday or Monday or whenever the hell snow and fate allowed), having one up on the murderer by knowing about the murder when he or she thought it had gone as yet undetected and, well, it was exciting. I was like any other Mohonk game-player — I enjoyed the challenge, and I wanted to solve the puzzle.
At the same time my more rational self was cautioning me not to consider this a game; to remember the ghastly slashed face of Rath (as if I could forget) and to keep in mind that the person I was pursuing had committed that violent crime. It might be a Christie situation, but some King-style violence was in the air.
I discovered the big-screen TV room, finally; the monstrous thing was shut off, the chairs before it empty — Pete’s Chan show was getting the ratings tonight. Next I ran across a cement-floored game room, tucked away at the end of one hall like a poor relation, where pinballs and video games were being played by young off-duty employees, and a Yuppie-ish young couple was playing pool. No sign of Culver, but the pool-playing Yuppies were my new friends, Jenny and Frank Logan. They were just racking up for another game when they noticed me.
“Oh!” Jenny said. She wore a green sweater and gray slacks and filled them out nicely, thank you. “We’d been hoping to run into you. And this makes a good out-of-the-way place to talk.”
It was; the game room was dark and dingy and was very much like most of the bars back in Port City, only I didn’t notice anybody serving beer, let alone hard stuff.
“This must be where the Quakers go to go nuts,” I said.
“We’ve got our own little bar back in our room,” Jenny said.
“But,” Frank warned, beige cardigan, pale blue shirt, gray slacks, “we’re liable to be interrupted by our fellow team players.”
Jenny smirked in a good-humored way. “We’re sort of hiding out from them.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They want to keep hashing and rehashing the interrogation info,” she said.
“I thought you two took this stuff pretty seriously.”
“Sure,” Frank said, “but we don’t go overboard.”
“Besides,” Jenny said with a smug little smile, “we know who did it.”
“Oh?”
“And,” she went on, “we won’t be working on the creative aspects of our presentation till tomorrow, so what the hell. Let’s live a little.”
I glanced around the game room. “If you call this living.”
“We’ve spent hours today in one little hotel room,” she said, heaving a theatrical sigh, “huddled with our fellow game-players. Just had to get away.”
“So you know who did it?” I said. Amused in spite of myself.
“Sure,” she said, grinning. “You.”
And they looked at me. Watched me. Even, one might say, studied me.
Finally I said, “Am I expected to confirm that or deny it or something?”
They shrugged, wearing smirky smiles.
“You guys are real cute,” I said, and took up a pool cue and broke their balls. I started shooting around the table, not playing any game, just randomly sinking the balls, missing now and then.
“Can’t blame a girl for trying,” Jenny said, sidling up next to me. She was wearing Giorgio perfume; I’m no expert, but I recognized it as what Jill wears. The combination of being reminded of jealous Jill, and Jenny’s husband lurking nearby, kept me from letting my thoughts run wild. But it did occur to me, for a fleeting, frightening instant, that Frank might let me sleep with his wife if I’d tell them what I knew about the nonexistent Sloth murder.
Jenny said, “We asked around for you.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s great.” I didn’t know how to tell them that their efforts had been pointless. I wasn’t about to let them know I’d established that the “prank” had been real, via finding the very real corpse.