Curt was standing looking into the fire, now.
“Then Mary Wright told me how she’d dated Gary for a while, in college, but they couldn’t make a go of it. Seems that first year, Gary had come to a realization: he was gay.”
Just looking into the fire.
“You worshipped your son, your only son, the only son of your first marriage; you loved your wife, your first wife, Joan, very much — and Gary was all you had left of her. You carry one of his paintings around with you, wherever you go. You love him, even now, to the point of obsession. But he was gay. Why, when your beloved son had been gay, did you suddenly begin to hate gays?”
He turned to look at me sharply, and almost answered; but then he looked back at the fire, as if the flames were hypnotizing him.
“Why,” I asked, “would a twenty-six-year-old man die of pneumonia? It’s hard to say; hard even to hazard a guess, why that would happen in this day and age. But add something to the description — a gay twenty-six-year-old man — and another possibility arises: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS — a disease you don’t die from, not exactly... it just destroys your body’s immune systems. So that a healthy young man is suddenly dead of pneumonia.”
Cynthia Crystal had come over to put her arm around Kim, who was weeping openly now, into a handkerchief.
“I’m only guessing,” I said, “but I think, Curt, you blamed your son’s gay lifestyle for his death. That’s your oversimplification, not mine, of course — AIDS is hardly God’s punishment for homosexuality, but it did allow you to focus blame somewhere. Suddenly sophisticated Curt Clark finds Greenwich Village ‘too lavender.’ But blaming gays in general for Gary’s death wasn’t enough. You had to get specific.”
Curt turned to look at me; he was leaning against the hearth — he was sweating, he was so close to the flames. His expression was tortured. He said, “And how did I do that?”
“You blamed the person who introduced your son to the gay lifestyle: his college roommate, Kirk Rath.”
Some gasps came from my little audience; Rath’s homosexuality had indeed been well closeted.
I went on, relentlessly: “You convinced yourself that if it hadn’t been for the unhappy circumstances of Gary drawing a gay roommate who, in your mind anyway, seduced him into that world, he might have led a happy, healthy, straight life. Why, he’d be alive today.”
Curt swallowed. He said, “Wouldn’t he?” Bitterness tinged his words, but it was a question; some doubt was there.
“Who can say? But you didn’t have any right to blame Rath; you can’t know for sure what was in your son’s heart, his mind. You don’t really know that Rath was, in fact, your son’s first brush with homosexuality. Logic and experience would say, probably not. It’s too easy an answer to blame a ‘seducer’ like Rath for the road your son chose to go down. Rath was a pretty rotten guy, but he didn’t deserve that rap; but perhaps his mean-spiritedness makes a little more sense, now that we know that he lived a public lie, a smug facade behind which an unhappy man with a secret hid. If his public political and moral stance is to be at all believed, it’s a secret he was no doubt ashamed of. Did he give you all those good reviews because he knew you knew about his past, knew the truth about him? No matter. It is a little ironic, of course, that he invoked the wrath of a mystery writer like you... like me, like all of us poor schmucks in this business who write about a world where mysteries can be solved and blame can be placed and wrongs can be righted. The real world just isn’t like that. And when you treat the real world like it’s a mystery story, Curt — you’re going to make a mess of things. A real mess.”
Curt smiled; turned to me. He was still near the fire, but he wasn’t leaning against the hearth anymore. He had his composure back, one hundred percent. But his eyes behind the dark-rimmed glasses were still tortured.
He said, “If you expect me to confirm or deny any of what you’ve said, I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment. I applaud your audacious, if convoluted, plotting, but I would suggest that I’m only one of a roomful of suspects, here... and neither you, nor the police, will ever manage to single me successfully out from the pack.”
Then Curt took a sudden step backward, looking past me, startled, and suddenly I was pushed to one side, something, somebody moving past me like a goddamn freight train. The audience I’d assembled was on its feet, now, calling out, crying out, as they and I saw Rick Fahy grab the iron poker and lift it and with one swift stroke, one savage blow, cave in the side of Curt Clark’s head.
Fahy got in another bash before I pulled him back, by both elbows, and he struggled for a moment, but then relaxed, and dropped the bloody poker with a clunk, as he... as I... as we... saw Curt slump to the floor. His brains were showing. Those clever, creative brains; exposed. He flopped forward, and Kim began screaming.
Jack Flint took charge of Fahy, pasty-faced, slack-jawed, limp, just some flesh and bones flung into evening clothes; and Cynthia and Culver were restraining Kim, whose screaming was subsiding into sobs, while I leaned over Curt’s body and touched the side of his face. His glasses had come off. His eyes were open, wide. But they didn’t seem tortured now. That was something, anyway.
“Shit, Curt — damn it all, anyway. I’m sorry— I’m sorry...” He couldn’t hear me, I suppose; but I had to say it. I was as responsible for this as Fahy, in a way; but not as responsible as Curt Clark.
Jill was at my side, pulling me up, helping me, making me stand. “Mal, I’m sorry — so very sorry.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” I said.
“Nothing happens the way it’s supposed to,” she said.
Neither one of us felt much like Nick or Nora.
Part Four
Sunday
19
At ten o’clock the next morning — the time that had been set aside for the solutions to Curt Clark’s Case of the Curious Critic — a haggard Mary Wright in an uncharacteristically wrinkled blue Mohonk blazer stood before the three hundred or so assembled Mystery Weekenders in the Parlor and gave a brief, apologetic explanation about why this morning’s festivities had been cancelled.
“A tragic series of events has eclipsed our make-believe mystery,” she said into the microphone, her amplified voice sounding hollow. “The mystery community has lost two of its most interesting, respected figures: in separate, but related, turns of extreme, unfortunate circumstance, both Kirk Rath and Curt Clark have lost their lives. Out of respect to their memories, our mystery this weekend must go unsolved. If we might have a few moments of silence...”
The old cough-drop boys in the high-framed pictures looked down in their Quaker way on us poor sinners as we each in his or her own fashion said good-bye to two tragically linked men.
Then Mary put on a small, intrepid smile and said, “For those of you interested, we are providing a rain check of sorts to any of you wishing to attend either of next year’s Mystery Weekends. Also, a partial refund will be sent to each and every one of you, as we were not able to deliver our entire package as promised.”
Business considerations. Death was the biggest thing there was in life, except for business; nothing could stand in the way of business considerations.
On the whole, though, I thought Mary Wright had handled the situation tactfully, and nobody among the game-players seemed to be complaining much, though many were clearly disappointed. And Mary’s vague references to the two murders didn’t raise any particular questions among them. The police, who had arrived just after one A.M. last night, had questioned a number of the Weekenders — the Arnolds and the Logans among them. The real story had gotten out, over breakfast; hardly fitting table conversation, even at a Mystery Weekend, but what are you going to do?