Nice Weekend for a Murder Read Free

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.
    “I’d imagine you
have
heard about me,” she said. “I’ve seen Mal’s phone bills.”
    Tom and I shared long and expensive phone conversations into the wee hours; friendships in the writing game often require long-distance maintenance.
    “And,” Jill went on, showing Tom the ironic smile that was among the laundry list of reasons why I fell in love with her, “I’ve heard about you, too. Is it true you’ve written more books in your short life than Mal’s read in his longer one?”
    “Probably,” Tom said.
    Jill turned to me and squeezed my arm. “Look, I’ll get in line here, Mal, and get us checked in. You two go sit over there and insult each other for a while.”
    We took her advice, settling down on a velvet-cushioned settee. Various game-players were milling about expectantly, but here and there people sat and quietly talked—Tom and I, forinstance, basking in the soft yellow lighting and warm, homey atmosphere of the old resort.
    “Where’s Anna?” I asked.
    “She couldn’t make it this trip,” he said with a regretful little shrug.
    “I haven’t seen Anna since Bouchercon,” I said. Anna was Tom’s lovely,
zoftig
, Oriental spouse, who’d accompanied him to the annual mystery convention, held last year in San Francisco. “Hey! Wasn’t she pregnant?”
    “You really are the king of amateur detectives,” he said. “She was only six months along, and you figured that out.”
    “My powers of observation are legend,” I said. “Meaning, greatly exaggerated. So, what? She’s home nursing a two-month-old?”
    “Literally,” Tom said, nodding. “Normally, I wouldn’t do one of these things without her—but being invited to be part of Mystery Weekend at Mohonk is kind of an honor.”
    And it was. If I wasn’t a friend of Curt Clark’s, I wouldn’t have been invited; I was just too small a fry in the mystery world to qualify. Curt, who was the latest of several top-rank mystery writers to head up the Mohonk Mystery Weekend, was “an acknowledged master of the comedy caper,” as
The Mystery Chronicler
had put it.
    “I see you’re going to be speaking tomorrow afternoon,” he said, referring to a program he held in one hand. “On ‘Translating True Crime into Mystery Fiction.’ ”
    “I haven’t seen that yet,” I said, meaning the program. “All I got in the mail from Curt was the suggested topic for my speech, and a cast list and description of my character in the mystery. Which I assume each of us playing a role got, so we could put together an appropriate wardrobe.”
    “Right,” Tom said. “I play a tough private eye.”
    “Typecasting,” I said.
    “I guess. All I had to do was pack a trenchcoat and fedora and .38. Well, it’s a full-scale replica of a .38, anyway. How about you?”
    “I play a nerd,” I said. “Sort of Pee-Wee Herman on the Orient Express. And no further comments on typecasting are necessary.”
    “All I can say is,
some
of us are
obviously
typecast. Did you get a load of who the murder victim is?”
    “No. I mean, from the write-up Curt sent me about my character, I gather it’s a critic.”
    “It sure is a critic,” Tom grinned.
    “Can I infer, then, that the role of critic is being played by some
real
critic?”
    “You can. Care to guess who?”
    “I don’t remember seeing a critic on the guest list....”
    “Clark left that name off the list. He likes to play things cute, you know. That’s what he’s famous for, in those books of his—his wicked sense of humor.”
    “Who, then? The only critic
I
can think of that anybody might want to murder is that weasel Kirk Rath.”
    Tom beamed. “The very weasel in question.”
    Kirk S. Rath was, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, easily the most famous and controversial critic in mystery circles. A smug, pedantic critic (his professed