Nice Weekend for a Murder by Max Allan Collins Page B

cornflower blues. “Sure. You can collect right now, back in the room.”
    “Before lunch?”
    “Why not? But you have to promise me one thing.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “You’ll leave the little mustache
on
....”

10
    The Mohonk Hiker’s Map listed Sky Top as a “moderate walk” (as opposed to those walks labelled “short and easy” or “strenuous”). If this was a moderate walk, Mussolini was a benevolent dictator.
    Of course, just on general principles, I hate the Great Out-of-Doors. I grew up on a farm, and from my early childhood swore I would one day live in the city—Port City, as it turned out, but that counts, technically at least. Will Rogers said he never met a man he didn’t like; I never milked a cow I liked.
    The last period of my life during which I spent an inordinate amount of time in the Great Out-of-Doors was a place called Vietnam, where roughing it meant something other than a Winnebago and a six-pack of Bud. Camping trips don’t appeal much to those of us whose boondockers got soggy in a rice paddy. I swore to myself if I ever got back on good old dry American soil I’d spend as much time as possible indoors. Or, as I like to put it, the Great Indoors.
    If this seems irrational and rambling, well, so was my state of mind as I climbed with the lovely Jill Forrest—whose very name suggests a kinship to trees, and she can have them—making our way up a seemingly ever-narrowing path with the mountaintop our goal.
    Why does one climb such a path? To get to the top. And what does one do once one gets there? One hikes back to the bottom. Ask me why I do not want to climb a mountain and I will tell you simply: because it’s there.
    “Quit grumbling,” she said, a few steps ahead of me but not, unfortunately for her, out of earshot. Her rear end looked cute in the black ski pants, which matched her black ski jacket, which matched her black-and-white stocking cap.
    “I hate this,” I said. My jacket wasn’t wintry enough and, even with the sweater on underneath it, I was cold. The path, which had begun deceptively wide, now left barely room for two people; my legs ached from walking on this bed of snow-dusted pine needles and twigs and rocks.
    “No kidding.”
    “Let’s turn back. The snow’s really coming down.”
    And it was. Not a blizzard, but it had been lightly snowing all day, and it did seem to be picking up.
    “Sissy,” she said.
    “No, really,” I said. “There’s some ice in it. If it keeps at it, we could have a rough time getting back down, once we get up. By rough I mean slippery.”
    And, I should point out, that while at our left was a forest not unlike Jill’s last name, at our right were a few rocks and a whole lot of drop-off. Of the plummeting-to-the-earth-flailing-your-arms-and-legs-and-screaming-holy-hell-all-the-way-down variety.
    “Don’t be silly,” she said, stepping on one of the roots that served as a step and slipping just a little, despite her boots. I caught her, even though I was wearing Hush Puppies, and she looked back at me and, with friendly malice, stuck out her tongue. She got snow on it.
    “Let’s go back,” I said.
    “No! We’ll rest a minute.”
    Well, I needed the rest—we were probably halfway up this goddamn glandular-case hill, and I had shin splints and sore calves—but, as I pointed out to her, pausing to rest would only allow the snow to gain on us.
    “Coward,” she said, and veered off from the path to the right—you remember the right: a sheer drop-off to nothingness?—across some boulders to a gazebo, where she plopped her pretty butt down on the rough wooden bench and waited for me to develop the
cojones
to join her.
    I did, finally, even if my
cojones
hadn’t yet developed, and if they hadn’t by my age they were unlikely to, and we sat and squinted down at a cold, gray, but eerily beautiful vista that included the blue-gray expanse of frozen Mohonk Lake and the oversize Victorian dollhouse that was the