In New York State: Who Poisoned the Pudding?

By Gregory Jaynes

I'm just a regular Joe, see, just a working stiff with a missus who likes her fiction cheap. She doesn't have her nose stuck in a thriller, she's not happy. So one day she sees an ad for a mystery weekend. You go to some dive and they fake a murder and you try to solve the case. A snap, she says to me, a downhill roll. She should live so long.

Six hundred simoleons and change, that's what they tapped me for -- not to mention transportation even. "Holy Moses!" I opines to the little woman. "That's kind of steep."

"Steep, schmeep," she retorts. "Why can't we have some fun for once?" As usual, she nails me with her logic.

The place she drags me to turns out not to be no dump but more like a castle. Couple of Quaker brothers name of Smiley started it in 1869. Goes by the moniker of Mohonk Mountain House. It's 80 or 90 miles north of the city (I say the city because we all say the city, but if it's not your city I should say New York City). The place and the grounds are a real knockout, and the folks are nuts about plants, which grow in the ground, instead of in pots, where everybody knows God intended them. Andrew Carnegie and guys like that used to come up here and hang around thinking. Right off, without knowing nothing about the weekend, I say to myself this spent nickel is going to go a long ways toward what you might call gorgeous relations with my better half.

Anyhow, the joint has tone, if you catch my drift.

And the plot had more twists than a Slinky.

We're there maybe two hours max, just long enough to run a quick case and find there's no bar and no smoking in the dining room or parlor, for crying out loud, when a writer name of Donald E. Westlake gets us all together to give us the story line. For openers, we ain't in the Mohonk Mountain House no more; we're in something called the Hotel Kuckkuckuhr, in Switzerland, and it's 1938. Then Westlake shows us this black-and-white flick that's more black than white, which is to say I'm talking poor quality, of some dumpity guy, a real lard bucket, being bothered at the dinner table. The guy's name is Kurt Krauss and he's a critic and a producer that everybody hates. We watch about a dozen enemies stop at his table, old Kurt getting madder by the minute, and at the end he tumps over into his rice pudding, poisoned. Whodunit?

They split us up into teams of 20, 16 teams in all, and the next day we get to interrogate the suspects. They are played by a bunch of writers like Westlake and some people on the hotel staff. In between the interrogations, the writers talk to us. Now a guy like myself didn't just fall off the turnip truck. I mean, I caught on right away they were hawking their books. I liked some of it, though. For instance, Martin Cruz Smith, the guy that wrote Gorky Park, was asked whether the movie Gorky Park followed the book, and Smith said, "Yeah, like a mugger follows a victim." I liked that.

Another time, somebody asked Smith about the plot we were all working on, and he said, "The answer to this mystery is a little bit more complicated than the Talmud." Well, that set them off. You see, not everybody in the gang was familiar with the Talmud. A lot of these people came because the weekend was in a Neiman-Marcus catalog and they're from places like Texas and stuff. "What's the Talmud?" one of the Texans inquired.

"Hebrew Bible," another Texan answered.

"I thought that was the Koran," another one says.

"The Koran is Islam," says another.

"The Talmud," says a lady from Scarsdale, and you know by the thunder gathering in her voice that she is not amused, "is the Law."

But I ramble. The next day, when it came time to question the suspects, things got kind of ugly. Were you raped? Are you pregnant? Shut up and let her answer! These people were awful serious about winning and I for one thought they were working so hard they were taking all the fun out of things. Even Westlake spoke to everybody that afternoon and said he had observed there was "far too much Type A behavior going on" and that one of the purposes for our being where we were this weekend was amusement. Amen, I says to myself, and so I go look for the missus, who hadn't heard this and needed to.

I find the missus in a meeting with our team, which is in danger -- just one guy's opinion here -- of meeting its life away. I tell them all what Westlake said about Type A behavior, and the Texans in the group agree but the ones from around New York are all still pretty much business. Anyway, I steal off with the little woman and we climb a mountain where you can look down on the brown, dead stalks of last summer's corn and the apple orchards that are going to be so lovely any day now and I don't care nothing about no mystery and the little woman gives me a hug like it's the first time.

The third day is the day your team has to crack this thing and then work up a five-minute presentation. This ain't easy when you got 20 egos involved. Just one sorehead can hang you up all day. I've always said I'd rather have a migraine than a wise guy so what do I get? In spades.

Plus some people had hangovers because they put on a little circus for us the night before, I forgot to say, and then they set up a bar and there was a few hitting the liquor pretty good. They had a combo and a lot of people cut a rug too. Then on the third morning you got to wake up and be sharp. It's like I always say: some days you eat the bear; some days the bear eats you. The missus and me got swallowed whole.

What happened was some strong personalities clashed and it looked like nothing was getting nowhere and the peace-loving citizens among us withdrew, figuring the meek are going to inherit their day in court by and by, like they say. Every time somebody thought they were coming up on the true skinny, somebody else in the mob would blow them out of the water. There was one teammate wouldn't let you get a full idea in edgewise. One of the Texans just stomped off, saying, "Jesus Christ couldn't please that woman!" Me, I just snuck off like a fox.

Speaking of foxes, does anybody know what those fox pieces old-timey women wear around their shoulders are called? The reason I ask is there was a costume party on the third night and a lot of the women wore those things. You know how they snake around the shoulders and then the little heads wind up biting each other? Couldn't be a stole, couldn't be a shawl. My little cupcake / suggests I show my lack of education by calling them neckettes. Plus she says this part ain't pertinent.

Sunday morning is when you have to drop your drawers, so to speak. You might say the teams that got on friendlywise were good at their presentation and the teams that didn't weren't. You can win for accuracy or you can win for creativity. That let us out. I thought some of the skits were very creative, though, like when somebody said snow blanketed the ground and somebody else on that team threw one of the hotel's white blankets off a stepladder. I'm a sucker for humor.

The prize for winning was guaranteed reservations to come back and do the same thing next year. It's a big prize, these reservations, because this thing has been going on for nine years and every year on the day when the switchboard opens to accept reservations, they sell out in a flash.

When we found out we lost, I says to my personal doll, "So my heart is breaking." She winked, wench of my dreams.