Curt’s smile seemed nervous now; twitching, just a little. “How,” he asked, rather archly, “did all of this lead Kirk Rath to Sky Top and his grisly fate?”
“You asked him to meet you there. He was like the rest of us — he’d received his instructions by mail and needed some on-the-spot final instruction, final coaching. You told him to drive up to Sky Top after the ‘stunt,’ where you could speak privately, without giving away the joke you and he’d pulled on the Mystery Weekenders. And, in return for his cooperation, you killed him.”
Curt was smiling, shaking his head.
“He trusted you — you’d been friends for years. Some friend. You slashed him, you stabbed him; it was very brutal. You hated him. Enough to kill him that savage way, enough to plot it like one of your mystery stories — intricately, cleverly.”
He ignored that, saying, “How did you come up with this theory? You have no proof whatsoever; it’s the purest of speculation, based on almost nothing.”
“Not really. One of the couples here — the Arnolds, I mentioned them before — said they saw Kirk Rath skulking around out in the snow, after what I’d seen out my window. That’s what got me thinking about the possibility of the so-called prank being a for-real prank.”
He wasn’t smiling now; his expression was blank, though he held his head back, rather patricianly, I thought.
“Also,” I said, gesturing over to the expressionless Fahy, “this gentleman was a good friend of Rath’s. His name is Rick Fahy, as some of you know, and he writes for The Mystery Chronicler. He is here at Mohonk as a game-player, as a matter of fact — to write about the Mystery Weekend from the perspective of a participant. Kirk Rath told Mr. Fahy, here, that they’d be spending a good deal of time together this weekend. I take this to mean Rath intended to stay around.”
“That doesn’t mean he didn’t storm out on impulse,” Tim Culver said. He was still standing over by Cynthia, but he was challenging me with hard eyes that crossed the distance easily. I was putting his brother on trial, after all.
I said, “Mr. Fahy insists that he would have at least had a phone call from Rath, in the aftermath of that; and he didn’t.”
Pete, who was smoking and pacing along the right wall, stopped to ask: “Why didn’t Rath tell his friend Fahy about the prank, if that’s what it was? That he’d be pretending to leave and all?”
“Rath and Mr. Fahy were very close,” I said. “So close that I believe Rath would have told his friend all about it — under any circumstances but one: Rath had assigned Mr. Fahy to a story for the Chronicler — and the dictates of that story were that Mr. Fahy play the game like everybody else. Rath would’ve been breaking the rules — and spoiling the story for his magazine — if he shared his role-playing secrets with Mr. Fahy.”
“It wasn’t even my idea to invite Kirk Rath,” Curt said, openly defensive now.
“No,” I admitted. “It was Mary Wright’s. And she told me she had great difficulty talking you into coming to Mohonk to stage the mystery... that is, until she mentioned her idea about inviting Kirk Rath. And that’s when you said yes to Mary Wright. Because that’s when your mystery-writer mind started whirring. Only a mystery writer could commit a murder like this. Only Curt Clark could commit a murder so convoluted, so nasty, so... cute.”
“I’d take that as a compliment,” Curt said, “had I really done all this.”
“Then convince me that you didn’t,” I said, meaning it. “I don’t want you to be guilty. You’re my friend. You gave me my first career break. I learned half of what I know about writing from you. I look up to you. Goddammit, Curt — tell me I’m wrong. Convince me I’m wrong.”
Curt studied me and something human flickered in his eyes, behind the glass, or maybe it was just the shadows of the flames.
But all he could find to say was, “It’s your show. Try to make it play. See if you can.”
“Damn you, anyway. You know me too well. You knew how I’d react. That I’d buy what I saw out that window as real, and then you were right there, weren’t you, telling me it was a prank. But you knew me better than that — you knew I’d ask around. That I’d have to look into this.”
“Why would any ‘murderer’ invite that?”
“It was partly arrogance. But it was mostly a very clever way of clouding what really happened. You made me your alibi... and what an alibi! Through me, you’d sell the cops that the murder had been committed Thursday night, outside my window. From my description of the killer, and because we’d just been talking on the phone, you’d be clear. No one would be asking questions about what you were doing an hour after I saw the ‘murder’ — when you were really killing Rath, up on the mountain, your goddamn knife flashing in the moonlight.”
“How writerly,” Curt said.
“Shut up,” I said. “You did it. You even sucked your poor wife in.”
Kim was covering her face with her hand; she was weeping, probably. The room was dim enough, you couldn’t tell.
“She was in my room,” Curt said. “You heard me talking to her, when you came to our room, moments after what you saw—”
“I heard you talk to her,” I said. “I didn’t hear her reply, and I certainly didn’t see her. No, she was your accomplice — unwitting in my opinion. Like Rath, she thought the prank was a part of the Mystery Weekend. She’s an actress, and a good one. She has the know-how to do the makeup, to stage the stunt; bundled up, in a ski mask, she made a convincing ‘killer.’ But she wasn’t in on it, not the real murder. I saw how shattered she was today, having found out Rath was really dead. You told her about it now, so you could manipulate her public behavior later. What, did you assure her you didn’t do it, but that if anybody ever found out about the ‘murder’ prank you’d both been involved in with Rath, no one would understand, and you could both be innocently dragged down? Something like that. Anyway, Kim doesn’t have it in her to have gone along with your loony plan. She may stand behind you — cover for you. She may do that. There isn’t much she wouldn’t do for you — from dressing to please you, to putting her career on hold so she could try to give you a second family, a second chance, which you should’ve taken. She loves you. Love makes people do deranged things. Like it made you do.”
“Love?” Curt said.
“Love for your son. He died six months ago, just twenty-six, of pneumonia. That struck me as strange, when Kim mentioned it. She said something else that threw me, though I didn’t think much about it at the time — that you were moving out of Greenwich Village because it was getting too ‘lavender’ for your tastes, Curt. That hit me funny, because for one thing, Greenwich Village didn’t just suddenly go lavender; even somebody from Iowa knows gays have been a part of the Village scene since around the dawn of time. But I also didn’t take you for somebody who’d be bigoted toward gays; I never saw it in you before, and in fact you’ve always been liberal in every way, the epitome of the hip New Yorker.”