“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 carved-wood 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.
And 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.