He said, “My brother doesn’t know how deep my bitterness runs. We’ve never discussed the subject of Rath.”
“Besides,” Cynthia said lightly, her smile forced, “what could Tim say to the invitation but yes? He and Curt had just, well, patched things up after being estranged for so long... he could hardly refuse him. And, besides, who could be mad at Curt for inviting Rath? It was the natural thing for him to do.”
“Why?” I asked. “Because Rath always praised Curt in the Chronicler?”
“That,” Cynthia said, “and, of course, they go back a very long way.”
That was news to me. I said so.
“Oh, they go back ages,” she said, as if everybody knew that. “Curt’s son Gary was Kirk’s roommate when they were college kids at NYU.”
“It’s the first I heard of it.”
Culver spoke, reluctantly. “That’s part of why I allowed Rath to sucker me. He was like one of Curt’s family.”
“Or anyway, he was back in those days,” Cynthia added. “I think it was meeting Curt that turned the young Kirk Rath on to mystery fiction in the first place.”
“And with Gary gone, now,” Culver said, “my brother feels a bond to that little bastard.” He meant Rath. “So I wasn’t about to bring up my feelings about Rath, not with Curt still so broke up.”
“About the loss of his son, you mean,” I said.
Culver nodded. Then he shrugged facially. “I guess it’s like old home week for Curt.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
Culver shrugged his shoulders. “That social director here, what’s her name? She’s the one that booked Curt in to do this Mystery Weekend.”
“Mary Wright, you mean?”
“Yeah. Mary Wright. She was thick with both of them.”
“Both of who?”
“Kirk and Gary. She went with Gary, for a while, I think, back at NYU. They were schoolmates there, the three of them.”
15
Jack Flint was giving a talk, which he’d begun at ten o’clock, on the differences between real-life private eyes and fictional ones. I would have loved to hear it, under other circumstances; but what I was there for was Mary Wright, who I found standing in the back of the Parlor, in her blue Mohonk blazer, clipboard in hand.
I had asked Jill to wait in our room; I knew she didn’t like Mary Wright, and I knew Mary Wright didn’t like her. So I figured I might get further with the Mohonk social director, alone.
“Could I have a few minutes of your time?” I asked her.
She looked at me gravely, dark brown eyes narrowing; as one of the handful who knew about the Rath murder, all I meant to her was bad news. Any inclination to flirt with me was long gone, now.
“Is something wrong?” she whispered.
“Everything’s peachy. Where can we talk privately?”
We went to her small office on the ground floor; she sat behind the desk and fussed with some artificial flowers in a vase as we spoke. A framed print of kittens playing with a ball of yarn hung on the wall nearby. I sat across from her.
“Yes, I knew Kirk Rath,” she said. “Did I ever say I didn’t?”
“No. But it does seem relevant.”
“Does it?”
“I think so. Why didn’t you mention it?”
“Why should I? Is it so surprising? Did you suppose I arranged weekends like these by placing my finger on some random name in the phone book? Of course I call upon people I know.”
“Then it was you who invited Rath here.”
“I suggested him to Curt, when I first invited Curt to do the Mystery Weekend. He was reluctant at first...”
“To invite Rath?”
She shook her head, mildly irritated. “No, to take over planning the Mystery Weekend. You see, previously we had Don Westlake, and Curt was reluctant to follow in Don’s footsteps.”
I understood that; Curt worked the same literary territory as Westlake but had always played second fiddle to him with the reviewers.
“But then he said yes,” she said, “after I told him some of my ideas.”
“One of which was to have Rath as a murder victim.”
“Well, to invite him, anyway, yes, that was my idea. You know what a wicked sense of humor Curt has, and Kirk was certainly a controversial figure. I thought it would be... fun.”
“It has been a million laughs, hasn’t it?”
She said nothing, frowning, fiddling with the artificial flowers.
“You didn’t — and don’t — seem too broken up about the death of your old friend, now do you?”
She shrugged, her mouth tightening; then she said, “We were never close. Just acquaintances. We went to school together, college I mean, ran with the same bunch.”
“Specifically, Curt’s son.”
She frowned. “Yes. Gary was a mutual friend.”
“He was your boyfriend, wasn’t he?”
“Gary?” Now she smiled, but there was sadness in it. “We were just friends.”
“Didn’t you go together?”
“Briefly. We tried to make it work. Look, Mr. Mallory, this is getting a little personal.”
“As opposed to something as detached as murder.”
She sat up; looked at me pointedly. “Kirk Rath is dead, and I’m sorry, but there can be little doubt that the mean-spirited way he treated people got him killed.”
“I hate it when a critic pans me,” I said, “but I never killed one for it. I don’t know of any instance in the history of man where a critic got killed by his unhappy subject.”
“Maybe you don’t know your history,” she said coldly, looking away from me now, playing with the flowers again.
“Or history maybe got made here,” I said.
“Is that all? I’m a busy woman.”
“Ah yes. You have a weekend to run. Answer my question, and I’ll go.”
“What question?”
“I guess I never got around to asking it. Why did you and Gary break up?”
She sighed, straining for patience, looking at me with mock-pity and genuine condescension. “Gary was gay, Mr. Mallory.”
“Oh.”
“He didn’t know it, or didn’t admit it to himself, till college. He tried to be straight. Wanted to. We were friends... we tried to make something more of it. It just didn’t work out.”
“I see.”
“Now, if you’re quite through prying into my personal life, could I ask you to leave? I believe you have a role to play in just a few minutes...”
She was right; at eleven-thirty, to be exact. This was Saturday morning, which marked the second and final interrogation of suspects in The Case of the Curious Critic, just half an hour from now. I excused myself, and she wasn’t sorry to see me go. I went to the room, reported Mary Wright’s revelations to Jill, who said nothing, just mulled them over as she helped me get ready, as once again I nerded myself up to be Lester Denton — pencil mustache, Brylcreem, window-glass glasses, black-and-red-and-white-plaid corduroy suit and all.
But my heart was not in it, as I again sat in the little open parlor, with the cold frosted windows to my back and a roaring fireplace to my left, and a new batch of eager Mystery Weekenders all around, all but grilling me over that open fire.
The teams had divided their memberships up differently, so that no player would interrogate the same suspect twice — with one notable exception: Rick Fahy was again in the audience, in a front-row seat, in fact. Today he wore a green sweater and blue jeans, but his expression remained pained, and the gray eyes behind the thick glasses were still red-veined and dark-circled. He looked like hell.
Only today he didn’t ask a single question; his Hamilton Burger routine at yesterday’s interrogation — and the one conducted in earnest in last night’s encounter in the hall, for that matter — was conspicuously absent. He just sat staring at me with haunted eyes, unnerving me.