Nice Weekend for a Murder (A Mallory Mystery)

  Also by Max Allan Collins in the Mallory Series:

  The Baby Blue Rip-Off

  No Cure for Death

  Kill Your Darlings

  A Shroud for Aquarius

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1986 Max Allan Collins

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612185255

  ISBN-10: 1612185258

  For Ed Gorman

  Best friend Mallory ever had

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART ONE: Thursday

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  PART TWO: Friday

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  PART THREE: Saturday

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  PART FOUR: Sunday

  19

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Mohonk Mountain House is, of course, a real place; the Mohonk Mystery Weekend is a real event. But the mystery weekend in this book is a fictional one, as are the characters who take part in it—game-players, celebrity suspects, hotel staff, and the rest. It is my intention to summon types as opposed to doing roman à clef portraits of real people.

  Likewise, The Mystery Chronicler is a fictional publication and is not patterned on any real magazine in the mystery (or any other) field.

  My thanks to Faire Hart at Mohonk for her help, patience, and continual graciousness; to Peter Lewis and Kathe Mull for sharing their Sky Top memories; and to Don Westlake and Abby Adams for inviting me to one of the first Mohonk Mystery Weekends, where I had the honor of being the killer.

  PART ONE

  Thursday

  1

  New York is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. And it wasn’t that great a place to visit, either, this time around.

  When you make your living as a writer, at least as a writer of books, whether fiction or nonfiction or both, you must be resigned to the fact that occasional trips to New York City are a necessary evil. New York remains the hub of the publishing world, and if you don’t go in now and then to remind your agent that you are more than a faceless voice attached to a bad phone connection, and to have long lunches with editors who must be similarly reminded, then you might as well have stayed in Iowa.

  I might as well have stayed in Iowa. The two editors of mine I lunched with—for two respective houses—were glad to see me and had a lot of wonderful things to say about how nicely some of their other writers were doing. My books, unfortunately, weren’t doing all that well. Oh, there’d been a flurry of activity when one of them sold to TV—and we even landed a book club sale; but a sale to paperback remained elusive and nobody was very optimistic. Including me.

  And then my agent made my day... in the Clint Eastwood sense, that is. He had just read the four-hundred-page change-of-pace manuscript I’d sent him a few weeks before—the book that would change my career, my “breakthrough book.”

  “Mallory, in good conscience,” he said, “I can’t even advise reworking this. It’d be a waste of bond paper. Put it in the drawer and try again.”

  My agent and I went way back—almost ten years. One of my teachers at a summer writers’ conference had liked my first suspense novel well enough to write me a letter of introduction to this well-thought-of, if hard-nosed, agent, who had a stable of top-flight mystery writers. A hard, round ball of a man, Jake Kreiger was renowned for his lack of tact. As Curt Clark once said, “Jake Kreiger thinks tact is something you put on the teacher’s chair.”

  I’d never run into this side of Jake Kreiger, not full-blast anyway; he always treated me kindly, if patronizingly. He had taken me on as a client based upon the manuscript I submitted to him way back when, thinking I was a promising kid. Trouble was, ten years later, at thirty-five years of age, I was still a promising kid to him. If I was still a kid, why were my temples turning gray?

  So I fired him. He seemed surprised. He was a guy who landed million-dollar contracts for people, after all (not for me). He sat at his big desk in his little walk-down office on West End Avenue and looked, for a moment, like someone had punched him in his considerable stomach.

  But he got over it quickly, handing me my thick manuscript with one hand and extending the other, offering it in a handshake, without standing, though he seemed sincere when he wished me the best of luck.

  Now I was sitting on a bus, feeling like I was on my way to my draft physical. Anyway, that was the last bus ride I could remember being this depressed on. Of course, on that trip I hadn’t been sitting next to a beautiful young woman, which was certainly an improvement over the naive Iowa farm boy I’d been sitting by then, a redheaded hick who was excited about getting a chance to “shoot some gooks.” He had pronounced it “gucks,” actually, but I didn’t bother correcting him. Somebody else no doubt would. A gook, maybe.

  But all of that was years ago. We’d both been to Vietnam, that naive farm boy and me—an only slightly less naive Iowa farm boy myself, come to think of it. I, at least, had made it back. And after several years of bumming around, in this job and that one, and the requisite bout with drugs, Haight-Ashbury style, I’d ended up going home again, to Iowa, Thomas Wolfe’s advice notwithstanding, where I took in some G.I.-Bill college and pursued my life’s dream of being a writer. Specifically, a mystery writer.

  And the dream had come true. Half a dozen books later, and here I was—a published, publishing writer, who had moved out of his house trailer in a questionable neighborhood into a house in an unquestionable neighborhood and even got to go to the Big Apple now and then to spruce up his career.

  Which at the moment seemed to be over.

  “This is only a setback,” the beautiful woman sitting next to me said. Her name was Jill Forrest, and she was about the only positive part of my life I could think of at the moment. Well, my health was pretty good. Jill Forrest and my health. The rest you can have.

  “That’s what General Custer said,” I replied. “Only a setback.”

  Jill pursed her lips in a wry little smile. She was a dark woman about my age, with short, black, spiky hair and cornflower-blue eyes and wardrobe by Kamali. She’d grown up in Port City, Iowa, like me, but had gone off to the big city, specifically NYC, and become a success. She’d landed back in Port City recently for a tour of duty at the local cable station. That’s what she was doing these days: she set up new cable TV systems in cities and towns across the Great Plains, got ’em rolling, then mounted up and moved on to the next gunfight, like John Wayne. Her Port City mission was nearing its end, which was a sore point between us; this New York getaway together was a truce of sorts.

  She pressed her hand against my sleeve. “Put those dreadful two days behind you,” she said. “We’ve got a lovely weekend up ahead. We’re just going to forget all about agents and editors and mystery writing.”

  “Jill,” I said. “We’re on our way to Mohonk, remember? Going to a mystery weekend to forget about ag
ents and editors and mystery writing is like going to Disneyland to forget mice.”

  “We’re going to have a good time, Mal, dammit. You promised.”

  “I know I did.”

  “Besides, maybe being around some other writers will be good for you.”

  “I’ll find out I’m not the only one having problems, you mean? Because it’s a tough business?”

  “Yes. But more than just ‘misery loves company’—you can get some advice about finding a new agent.”

  I was worried about that. Working out of Iowa meant I had to have an agent; without somebody looking after my interests in New York, my career would be just another Iowa crop that failed. But I’d had Kreiger from the very beginning. I knew no other agents, had no idea how to go about acquiring one.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I can talk to Curt, at least. He might have some ideas. And Tom.”

  “Sure. This really is just a setback. In fact, I’d say it’s for the better.”

  “For the better?”

  “Yeah. Kreiger hasn’t been doing much for you lately, has he?”

  “No. He’s been paying attention to his successful clients.”

  “I saw how he treats you. Like a kid. You need somebody who respects what you’re doing. That new book of yours needs an agent who’ll get excited about it.”

  “As opposed to one who suggests putting it in a drawer.”

  “Right. And as for your editors, they seem to like you and your work well enough. So your last couple of books haven’t set the world on fire. So what? I’m sure they’ll be open to new things from you. In fact, if you can’t find an agent right away, you could show the new book directly to your editors.”

  “Yeah! Why not?”

  She smiled again. “Why not indeed,” she said.

  Well, I felt a little better now. All I needed was a pep talk like that from her every ten minutes or so and I’d be fine.

  In the meantime, the bus was moving along the New York State Thruway at a moderate pace; snow was coming down, traffic was slow, and the highway slippery. Me, I was homesick. Wishing I’d never agreed when my friend and, well, mentor Curt Clark invited me to be part of this mystery weekend. I’m not much for game-playing, after all. But the Mohonk people had paid for my plane ticket, in and out of New York City, meaning I could come in a few days early and squeeze in my business trip at their expense, as far as airfare was concerned. Which had made Mohonk seem like a great idea at the time.

  I just hadn’t counted on getting so bummed out (once a hippie, always a hippie) in New York. Visions of my agent being excited over my “breakthrough book,” dreams of editors eagerly asking me to do even more books for them, for lots and lots of money, were replaced by the wet, gray sludge of reality that had settled in the space where my brain used to be.

  So much for Jill’s pep talk cheering me up.

  I wished I was back in my little house with the river view in Port City, Iowa; sitting in front of the fireplace with Jill and me and no clothes at all, wrapped up in a blanket while the Iowa winter whistled outside and didn’t get in, except through the occasional crack or cranny, and we didn’t give a damn because we had the fire and the blanket and each other.

  But I was still in New York—albeit not New York City. Jill and I—and I did have Jill, if not the fire and the blanket—were on our way to Mohonk Mountain House, a resort near New Paltz, upstate. I didn’t know much about Mohonk, except that it was supposed to be a big, rambling old place, much in demand in the nicer months, and in the off-season it had been throwing some very successful, much imitated “mystery weekends.”

  A mystery weekend is a gathering at which mystery buffs and puzzle fanatics converge and, forming into teams, try to solve a mystery. At Mohonk, the plots were always concocted by a famous mystery writer, acted out by invited guests who are themselves nationally known mystery writers (the latter a category I barely fit, if my ex-agent and current editors were to be polled on the subject). On this very bus were a gaggle of mystery fans, chattering and flying high, almost giddy, on the idea of the weekend to come. Most of these people seemed fairly normal, although there were more Sherlock Holmes–style deerstalker caps than I’d ever encountered on one bus before.

  None of my fellow mystery-writer guests seemed to be on this bus, which had departed New York late this afternoon, Thursday. Some of them were going by car, and others had taken an earlier bus. Both buses had left from Casablanca—an Italian restaurant on Twenty-second Street in Manhattan with a Bogart/mystery theme. Its owners, Carl and Millie Arnold, were among the most diehard Mohonk players, I’d heard. They were on the bus, already planning strategies. Apparently the two of them had been on the winning team for three years in a row.

  Everybody on the bus was having a great time. It was a party atmosphere—except for yours truly, party-pooper extraordinaire. I sat looking out a frosty window at the New York State countryside whizzing by; it didn’t look much different than the Midwest to me—more like Illinois than Iowa, maybe, but otherwise just generic winter countryside. Nor did New Paltz itself, as we moved down its main street of shops and restaurants, seem like anything other than the small college town it was. New York, strangely, seemed to be a part of America, once you got out of New York City, that is.

  It was dark now, and we went over a bridge, took a right at the Mohonk sign, and started up the narrow blacktop road that climbed the mountain. The resemblance to the Midwest had come to an end. This was not a hill, which we have a few of in Iowa. This was a mountain. The real thing—rocky, big, and up. We stopped at a little rustic house, where the bus driver got out and checked in with a guard in a green blazer, who logged us in on a clipboard before allowing us on. Then the denseness of the snow-covered trees around us and the steepness of the climb settled in on us, as the bus finally began its upwardly mobile way through the darkness, creating an unreal mood. Almost a surreal mood.

  “Agatha Christie, here we come,” Jill said.

  “More like Stephen King,” I said.

  Because suddenly the hotel was looming up before us like a monstrous movie set, a sprawling Victorian affair with towers and spires and gables and windows and windows and windows and balconies and balconies and balconies, wooden wings alternating with stone ones, a man-made cliff rising into the night sky.

  Many of the players on the bus seemed unimpressed; they had been here before—they weren’t naive Iowa farm boys, either. They were imperturbable Easterners, scurrying toward the entrance as bellboys in winter coats began transferring luggage from the underbelly of the bus onto carts.

  I, on the other hand, stumbled off the bus with my mouth open and my eyes open and my mind reeling and just stood there.

  “What the hell planet is this?” I asked nobody in particular.

  “The planet Mohonk,” nobody in particular responded, nobody in particular being Jill.

  Some snow was falling, lightly, and the air was bitter cold. Everybody’s breath was visible as we moved into the hotel and into warmth and another era. A Victorian era, where the woodwork was dark and polished, the halls were wide and carpeted, off of which were little parlors—sitting rooms—where the furniture was antique and plush, the lighting soft-focus and yellow. Wonders never ceased: frondy plants and fresh-cut flowers were everywhere; wide wooden stairways rose like a challenge to ignore those newfangled elevators; here, a carvedwood and stone fireplace; there, a Chinese vase as tall as an eight-year-old child.

  Which was fitting, because it was like being a child again, in your grandparents’ house, where everything seemed to belong to yesterday, and where the rooms went on forever, and where the air was musty and fresh at the same time.

  Jill saw it a different way; she cuddled to me and said, “It’s like a huge haunted house... only we’re the ghosts.”

  “Yeah,” I said, grinning.

  Because suddenly I wasn’t depressed anymore.

  Why? Hey, I’m a mystery writer, after all.

  A
nd this was a great place for a murder.

  2

  The lines at the check-in counter were long, but in their vicinity we ran into Tom Sardini, an old writer pal of mine, who was already checked in. He stood with us while we waited, so we at least could talk (or, as they say in New York, schmooze).

  Old pal Tom wasn’t all that old, really—in his early thirties—but we went back seven or eight years. Tom had written me my first fan letter, and I’d given him some help with some of his early manuscripts. He had gone on to be a successful writer himself—more successful than I actually, which is an excellent argument for not helping out aspiring writers.

  Except that I liked both Tom and his stuff, anyway that which I’d been able to keep up with. He was widely known as the “fastest typewriter in the East,” books flying out of his word processor from his Brooklyn home in a blur of typescript, the royalty checks flying in the same way. He was making a small fortune (maybe not so small) by churning out adult westerns—his “Shootist” series of paperbacks was among the top three in the field; but his love was private-eye fiction: He was the founder of the Private-Eye Writers of America, and more important, his latest novel about ex-boxer-turned-P.I. Jacob Miles was so good I hated him.

  Which is exactly what I told him, as I gave him a hug.

  “This is Jill Forrest,” I said, and Jill smiled at him and they shook hands. What kind of world is it, when two men hug, and a man and woman shake hands?

  Tom, by the way, was five-ten, bearded, bespectacled, and a tad overweight, as befits a successful writer. I was leaner and taller and better-looking. Well, leaner and taller, anyway. He wore an off-white long-sleeved shirt and slacks; I was wearing jeans and a dark green sweatshirt that said “THE BUTLER DID IT,” if it matters, winter coat slung over my arm.

  “I’ve heard all about you,” Tom said to Jill, taking in her slim figure with an appreciative smile. That figure was ensconced in a white and gray vertical-striped top and snug, black leather trousers, ball of white fur winter coat draped around her. She was a slightly snazzier dresser than me, as you have already gathered.