Nice Weekend for a Murder

“You just aren’t the Cindy type, are you?”

“Sometimes I wish I were.”

I laughed, and held her a little closer. “No you don’t. You’re exactly who you want to be.”

She pulled away, appraising me, her smile cunning. “And who is that?”

“The smartest, prettiest, bitchiest gal around; the queen of the mystery writers.”

She sighed, pleasantly. “That sounds vaguely sexist.”

“What, ‘bitchiest’ or ‘gal’?”

“No — ‘queen.’”

“Ellery didn’t mind,” I reminded her.

She pretended to be irritated. “Did you bring me out here to flirt with me or tease me or what?”

“I brought you out here to dance.”

“I doubt that. You always have an ulterior motive. And we were at a dance together, at that Bouchercon, once upon a time. You sat out the whole bloody thing.”

“I only dance when they play Bobby Darin records.”

She rolled her eyes. “Spare me the Darin rap — I know all about your eccentric tastes.”

“Such as you being my favorite female mystery writer?”

She pursed her lips in a nasty smile. “You’re being sexist again.”

“Did I say ‘female’?”

“You most certainly did.”

“I meant to say ‘lady.’”

“Oh, that’s so much better.”

Darin was replaced on the turntable by that upstart Sinatra — “Strangers In The Night,” of all things. You wouldn’t catch Bobby singing scoobie doobie doo.

We kept dancing anyway. I sprung my ulterior-motive question: “What’s the deal with Tim and Pete Christian?”

“Pardon?”

“He and Pete seem to be getting along great.”

And they did: they were both sitting at our table now, chatting, although Pete was doing most of the talking.

“Why shouldn’t they be?” she asked.

“Well, Pete’s very bitter about what Rath did to his friend C.J. Beaufort; blames him for his death. And it was Tim’s interview in the Chronicler that supposedly put Beaufort over the edge...”

“Oh that,” she said, dismissively. “Tim smoothed that over with Pete right after Beaufort’s suicide.”

“How?”

She shrugged; it made her blonde hair shimmer in the dim lighting. “Tim’s known Pete for years,” she said. “He was well aware that Beaufort was Pete’s mentor. So he immediately called Pete and expressed his sympathy and said he’d never forgive himself for that interview. That ‘goddamn interview,’ to be exact.”

“And Pete understood?”

“Sure. Pete was burned by an interview in the Chronicler, too.”

“How so?”

“Same sort of thing as Tim — he was encouraged to be freewheeling in front of a tape recorder, and at the same time was promised that he’d get to edit the transcript before publication. Dear little Kirk didn’t send Pete the transcript, of course, and the published version embarrassed Pete royally — or so he says. I read the interview and didn’t see anything Pete needed to be sorry for having said.”

“Still,” I said, “that’s infuriating, being betrayed like that.”

“I hear the Chronicler’s cleaned up its act,” she said, “in that regard at least. It got to the point where nobody in the business would grant them an interview till they started offering their various interviewees certain assurances in writing.”

After Sinatra scoobied his last doobie, we walked over to the table, and Cynthia moved on, and I sat next to Jill. She was a vision in a black-and-white sequined square-shouldered gown. A smirking vision.

“You two were pretty cozy,” she said.

“Old friends.”

“As opposed to strangers in the night.”

“Let’s dance,” I said.

“It isn’t a Bobby Darin song.”

It was Sinatra again, from a better period: “Summer Wind.”

“I’ll make an exception,” I said.

We danced, and I asked her why she seemed so jealous this weekend; it really wasn’t like her.

“I told you why,” she said.

“You mean because we’re going to be going our separate ways before long.”

She bit her lip and nodded.

“We don’t have to,” I said.

“I know. But it would mean we’d have to compromise — or at least one of us would.”

“You mean, you’d have to agree to stay in Port City, or I’d have to agree to pull up stakes and head out on the prairie with you, rounding up cable rustlers or whatever it is you do.”

“You know exactly what it is I do.”

“Yeah, and you’re good at it.”

“I’m— I’m not so good at compromise, though.”

“Compromise isn’t something either of us does too well,” I said.

“I know.”

Sinatra sang.

“It’s a few months away,” I said. “Let’s not talk about it.”

“I love you, Nick.”