Nice Weekend for a Murder Read Online Free PDF

film program here, and we’re showing three of the best ones... including
Charlie Chan at Treasure Island
.”
    Her face lit up. “Ah! The one about magicians, with Cesar Romero.”
    “Yes! And for the Warner Oland purists we’ll be leading off with
Charlie Chan at the Opera
.”
    “Boris Karloff is wonderful in that,” Jill said.
    Pete gave me a mock reproving look. “I thought you said she wasn’t a mystery fan! She knows more about mysteries than you do.”
    “I now pronounce you man and movie buff,” I said. “You two can go trivially pursue yourself all weekend, for all I care. As far as I’m concerned, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.”
    We had been moving—Pete’s a restless type, and when you talk to him he paces, chain-smoking—and were now at the mouth of the Parlor, the massive capital
P
parlor, which was really a lecture hall and would double as the screening room. Both the dining hall and the Parlor were on the so-called first floor (the real first floor being designated as the ground floor, in the European manner).
    “Are you going to be a suspect or a player?” Peter asked Jill.
    “Neither,” she said.
    “I hope you’re not here for a rest,” he told her, wagging a finger. “This place will be a virtual madhouse for the next forty-eight hours. The Mohonk Mystery Weekenders take their mystery very seriously.”
    “I thought they were here for fun,” she said.
    “You’ll find all sorts of brilliant professional people here,” Pete said. “Intensely competitive types in their work—and in their play. They’re out for blood, my dear.”
    “I hope it doesn’t get unpleasant.”
    “If you’re a student of human nature, you’ll have a fine time. Anyway, I don’t take this as seriously as some do, yet I’ve guessed the murderer seven out of nine times.”
    “How many of these have you attended?”
    “All but one. This is my first time as a suspect.”
    “I’m impressed,” she said.
    “Mal,” Pete said, “sometime this weekend, we must get together. There’s something we need to work on.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I’ve been lobbying to get a Grand Master’s Award for Mickey Spillane.”
    “From the Mystery Writers of America? Is there any hope of that happening?”
    Pete shrugged elaborately, did a little take, put out a cigarette, found another, and got it going. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Spillane’s never joined the MWA, and some of the members feel he’s snubbed them.”
    “Well, a lot of them have snubbed
him
. You can’t deny his influence on the genre, even if you don’t like his work. He deserves that recognition.”
    “I agree, most heartily. I just wondered if you’d help me draft a letter on the subject to the proper committee chairman.”
    “I’d love to.”
    “There
is
a problem with that,” a voice said. Not my voice. Not Pete’s.
    We turned to look at the source of the voice, which was across from us on a bench. A small, thin man in his late twenties in a gray three-piece suit with a dark blue tie snugged tight in the collar of a light blue button-down shirt sat with his legs crossed, ankle on knee, arms crossed, smirking. Handsome inan angular way, he was blue-eyed, pale as milk, with carefully coiffed longish blond hair. He had paid more for that haircut than I had for my last three.
    “And what problem is that?” I asked.
    “Mickey Spillane is a cretin,” Kirk S. Rath said. “He is—if you’ll pardon my crudity—a shitty writer.”
    Jill swallowed and looked at me, knowing I wouldn’t take that well.
    “If you’ll pardon my crudity,” I said, “
you’re
full of shit.”
    And I turned back to Pete, who was, after all, the person I’d been having my private conversation with, and said, “When do you want to draft that letter? Let’s not make it tonight. I’m pretty wasted from two days in NYC, and that bus trip...”
    Rath was standing next to me now; I hadn’t seen him come over. It was like a jump cut in