Lively Game of Death

by Marvin Kaye

  Yet she was youthful, at least fifteen years junior to her late spouse. With an organized hairdo and clothes that suggested her contours—instead of shouting them—Ruth Goetz might have been reasonably attractive. But the way she looked that morning, she might as well have stood next to a circus billboard with arrows and ornate hands on it pointing to the outstanding phantasmagoria of her sideshow.

  I decided to throw caution overboard and start off with the news of her husband’s death ... and if her emotions were structured on the same lines as her appearance, I probably would have been engulfed in a flood of brine.

  But she didn’t scream, howl, or weep. Instead, she uttered a sound halfway between a laugh and a snort and said, “You’re putting me on!”

  I assured her I was telling the truth. She shook her head and, half-smiling, mumbled something to herself.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, ‘talk about serendipity.’”

  The stare I returned must have been pretty odd, for she rocked back in her chair and laughed at me, showing a set of lustrous white canines.

  “Don’t seem so surprised,” she told me, “my husband and I haven’t been any too chummy these days. I’ve been going to a lawyer, in fact, about getting a divorce.”

  That was news—and it was pretty obvious who the lawyer must be. But I was finding Ruth Goetz’s act hard to buy: after all, even if she hated her husband, like everybody else, it was unlikely that she could receive the news of his murder with such equanimity. I figured it ought to be a little more of a shock to her.

  Up to then, I hadn’t revealed my connection with Trim-Tram, and I guessed she might assume I was with the police, though I’d shown no credentials. But as soon as I tried to question her, she started getting cagey.

  “Who are you with, anyway?” she wanted to know. I saw it was no use, so I told her of my relationship to the rival toy firm.

  “Uh-huh,” she nodded, smiling at me in a manner I suppose she considered sultry. “And now that Sid’s dead, I may well be in charge of the business, so why should I talk to you? Not that I’m not enjoying it, but you are the competition ... and now I think of it, how come you’re here, and not the cops, if Sid’s been shot?”

  “My boss and I discovered your husband’s body. The police haven’t been notified yet.”

  “What?” she yelped, showing her first hint of shock. “You mean he’s just lying there?”

  Well, there was nothing else to do but open up the whole bag—Hilary’s ambitions, Trim-Tram’s quest to root out the spy in its midst, Tom Lasker’s suspicious behavior ... everything except the three Scrabble pieces.

  When I was done, she was thoughtful for a moment, then she gazed at me craftily. “This may surprise you,” she told me, “but I’m going to go along with you for a while and answer your questions.”

  It surprised me all right. I asked her why.

  “First of all,” she said, “the sooner the cops are called in, the sooner they treat me like a suspect, and I have a date for tonight. Second, I hope it isn’t suicide, because I have a lot of insurance wrapped up in Sid. So if your boss can pin his death on somebody, tant mieux. ...”

  I could have pointed out that the police would be just as eager as Hilary to find the killer—maybe more so—but I kept my mouth shut. I started to ask a question, but she interrupted.

  “Now I’m assuming you’re not going to let Sid rot there forever, because sooner or later, the faithful wife would have to wonder why he hadn’t come home. And, if you want me to keep quiet for a while, you have to do something for me.”

  “Which is?”

  “If you find out who’s been spying at Trim-Tram, I want to be told.”

  That really threw me. I could have sworn she would know a sordid bit of data like that, but—without showing her my surprise—I agreed to the condition.

  “Now,” I said, “when was the last time you saw your husband?”

  “Last night after supper. He called to tell me he’d be working late—”

  “No, when did you see him? In person.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I don’t know. Maybe six in the morning yesterday, when he left to go to work. But I was still in bed and only half-heard him leave.”

  I asked whether he was agitated or angry, but pleading sleepiness, she could supply no details. I passed on to the topic of Pete Jensen.

  “Pete?” she murmured. “Well, he had every reason to hate Sid, because Sid stole his brainchild.”

  “Yes, so I heard. I understand you helped.” She made no reply, so I repeated myself.

  “I heard what you said,” she answered with some annoyance. “Look, if you’re asking whether I had a thing with Pete, sure I did, but he’s over it by now. It was all Sid’s idea, which is nothing new, but I didn’t mind, because Pete is kind of sexy in a quiet way.”

  “What did your husband hope to accomplish?”

  “With me? It’s this way. When Peter became a ‘partner,’ Sid told me he was going to hand him a big chunk of Goetz Sales stock.”

  “You’ve got stock? As small a company as—”

  “Yes, yes, don’t ask me why—it’s strictly a private arrangement, but it’s legal. Sid wanted to set the firm up like a stock company, with voting majority and all, I guess because he didn’t trust me. Anyhow, as far as I knew, almost three-quarters of the stock was in his name. To be precise, I owned thirty per cent of the total shares.”

  “All right,” I said, “what about Jensen?”

  “Sid said he was giving him a large cut out of his personal holdings and asked me to contribute five per cent from my pile. Which I did. It was only temporary, see, because Sid planned to crowd out Pete right from the first.”

  I asked her how she fitted into the scheme, and she explained that she was supposed to get Jensen interested in her to the point where he’d willingly sign over his shares to her.

  “Why,” I asked, “would Jensen want to do a thing like that?”

  “So he and I together could gain control and force Sid out of the business. Not that Pete was any too eager to go through with the plan. He was only going to do it for me ... which I think is sweet. He’s normally a very decent guy, Pete is—he really hates dishonesty.”

  “So you planned all along to ‘take him’ for Sid?”

  “Like hell!” she snapped. “I wanted to force Sid out, but the bastard screwed us both! To the five per cent of stock I’d originally ceded to Pete, Sid added only ten per cent from his holdings! So it looked like Sid still had control—sixty per cent to my forty per cent, counting the fifteen per cent Pete signed over to me.”

  I figured then that when she saw the way things shaped up, she’d dropped Jensen out of self-interest.

  “You’re damned right,” she concurred, “and what choice did I have? Sid still held the reins, and Pete couldn’t offer me anything to live on!”

  I refrained from suggesting alternatives to her. So that’s the Jensen story, I thought: swindled out of his stock and his invention, given a fake partnership and cheated of that. He was “had,” figuratively and literally, by the Goetzes.

  I asked Ruth Goetz whether she thought Jensen might have done the deed on her hubby, but she shook her head, reiterating that the ex-partner had certainly gotten over her and the swindle a long time ago, and had even rallied enough to go into business for himself. She also reminded me how honest and virtuous Jensen was—far beyond the reach of murderous intent.

  Next, I wanted to know about her husband’s gun. She admitted knowing that he kept a pistol in the 1111 office, and went so far as to suggest that perhaps two other people might know of its existence, but she wouldn’t say who.

  That didn’t bother me. I deduced that anyone spending eight or nine hours a day in a showroom might well know everything there was about it and in it. My nominations for the other pair were Jensen and the salesman, Harry Whelan. I asked her about the latter individual, but she had nothing to contribute on that score.

/>   Nor could she fill in much under the Tom Lasker column in my imaginary notebook. Yes, her husband had approached him for some underhanded reasons that she couldn’t specify. But whether Goetz had succeeded with him or not, she couldn’t say. Yes, she had been asked to repeat her femme fatale act with the Trim-Tram employee, but hadn’t gotten very far with him. Her personal opinion of Lasker? A little too lean and hungry for her taste.

  “Why have you been seeing Willie Frost?” I asked. It was another frontal assault, unprepared for by the previous conversation. But she wasn’t at all fazed.

  “I told you,” she said, “that I’ve been seeing a lawyer about getting a divorce. That’s the one.”

  “Were the two of you discussing the divorce last night?”

  “Why? What did Willie say?”

  “He said you were out together,” I replied, stretching the truth in a manner Ī thought Frost could hardly protest.

  “Well, we went to the Paradol, had dinner, and we talked about the divorce.”

  “All night?”

  “You ever been to the Paradol?” she countered. “With the crowds they get, it always takes all night!”

  “So you had dinner together, you and Mr. Frost, while your husband was safely occupied at the office.”

  “You’re putting it that way, not me!”

  “When did you get back home?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe eleven-thirty.”

  “And your husband wasn’t home yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t you start getting worried,” I asked, “when he didn’t show up later?”

  “Are you kidding? The night before Toy Fair, he’s never home at all. Almost never. I didn’t expect to see him till about nine o’clock tonight.”

  There was one thing wrong with Mrs. Goetz’s story, and I told her. If she was so anxious to stay on her husband’s breadline at the time of the Jensen swindle, how come all of a sudden she was thinking of cutting loose via Frost?

  “It’s the stock again,” she answered. “Willie let me in on something I didn’t know about the company.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sid doesn’t ... didn’t ... own the majority of shares I thought he held. When I thought he owned seventy per cent of the shares, he actually only had forty-five per cent. Do you see what that means?”

  “Not really. What?”

  “It means that when Pete signed over his measly fifteen per cent, it gave me forty per cent to Sid’s thirty-five per cent—because Sid ceded ten per cent to Pete, figuring it was safe in my hands. But only thirty-five per cent! Imagine! It gives me a bigger vote in the firm! He has ... had—”

  “Wait a minute!” I told her. “Your arithmetic leaves twenty-five per cent unaccounted for. Who owns that?”

  “Damned if I know,” she said. “Willie is trying to crack the identity of whoever owns it. But no matter who it is, he or she has always been willing to vote Sid’s way, I guess.”

  That was the last thing of importance she had to contribute, and it gave me a very good hunch as to why she wanted the identity of the Trim-Tram spy. As soon as I could manage it, I thanked her, promised to call her later in the day—to let her know when we were going to inform the police of our secret—and left.

  The first thing I did upon quitting her apartment was to phone Frost. “Look,” I told him, “Goetz owned thirty-five per cent of the stock in his company. His wife has forty per cent. Who holds the remaining twenty-five per cent?”

  “You want to play Twenty Questions, or should I just tell you whether it’s animal, vegetable, or masculine?” the lawyer asked jauntily.

  “Come on, come on!”

  “Look, you can yammer all you want, but you’re not getting any names from me—”

  “Because,” I snapped, “the guy who owns the stock is also the Trim-Tram spy, right?!”

  There was a pause at the other end. “I suppose,” said Frost, in an altered tone, “that Ruth has been doing some blabbing.”

  “Maybe,” I said, noncommittally. “Would you like to talk about it now?”

  “Not really,” he stated, “but I’ve got one important thing to ask you.”

  “Which is?”

  “Can you steal me the transmitter disc from the phone you’re using?”

  I hung up, not very gently.

  14

  SCOTT HAD ARRIVED AT the Goetz showroom by the time I returned. I found him sitting at one of the circular, white-topped tables with Mary. They were playing Scrabble.

  I’m not a hypersensitive type, but I was a little shocked at the bizarre scene, the two of them building words on the board and totting up scores while a mouldering body lay a little way off in the far corner of the room. It might have made a good cover illustration for an old EC horror comic—although, to be fair to Scott, it looked like he was only going along with another of Hilary’s whims.

  Then it hit me: they were playing Scrabble!

  I rushed over to the table where Goetz lay. Sure enough—the floor and table were bare; all the Scrabble tiles, the box, the cover to the box, everything had been picked up off the floor and was now in use.

  I’m sure Hilary knew what was going on in my mind, but she ignored it, as usual, noticing me only long enough to tell me I’d taken too long. Then she returned her attention to the Scrabble board.

  Scott removed three tiles from the wooden holder sitting in front of him and put them on the end of a word already on the board: SHUDDER. (Hilary boasted she’d scored over sixty points for putting it down; the rules of Scrabble provide a fifty-point bonus for using all the letters on the rack—seven of them—in any one turn.) Scott’s three additions were an I, an N, and a G. Result: SHUDDERING, worth thirty-two points (twelve for the existing word he’d built on; one apiece for the I and N; two for the G; and another sixteen points for landing the N on a pink “double word score” square). “Let’s see,” said Scott, beginning to add up the tally, “one for the S—”

  “Count to yourself,” Hilary snapped, annoyed at the prospect of being beaten by a man. When he was done, she played an uninspired word, fished out some letters to replace the ones she used in her turn. Then Scott racked up a high-tally noun, and Hilary started to play again.

  I couldn’t take any more of it, and I told them so. Scott looked at me gratefully, relieved.

  “Well,” Hilary grumbled, “I guess you’re right. I won’t make my word, anyway.”

  There were only four letters left in the refill pool. Scott turned them over, one by one: they were two A’s and a pair of I’s. Hilary shook her head. “How do you like that? This is an incomplete set!”

  “What were you trying to build?” Scott asked.

  She pointed to the R in SHUDDERING, then turned her letters around. Two letters—a T and a D—were shoved to one side; then there was a cluster of one-point letters: UEE ER.

  “You were trying for queerer?” he asked.

  Hilary nodded. “It would have been worth sixteen points. Or—wait a minute—I could have put down queered, seventeen ... except for one thing. There’s no Q in this set!”

  She looked frostily at me as she said it.

  The next several minutes were spent hearing my report of the interviews with Willie Frost and Ruth Goetz. Except for a brief exclamation when I told that I’d spotted Tom Lasker emerging from the attorney’s office, Scott was silent during the recounting. Hilary, however, broke in from time to time to question certain points or to get me to repeat something one of the pair had said.

  “There are just two things I want to know,” she stated when I was done. “Whether the two of them were really at the restaurant last night, and if so, how late they actually stayed. Also, how far can Willie Frost be trusted?”

  “I can answer that,” Scott volunteered. “Frost is a pretty reputable lawyer.”

  “That,” said Hilary, making a face, “is meaningless. Can he be believed or not?”

  “He can. Basically, he’s honest.”

/>   “Basically?”

  Scott nodded. “What I mean is, I don’t think Willie told your man a deliberate lie at any time. On the other hand, I wouldn’t assume any meanings beyond Willie’s exact wordings. He’s very shrewd, and when he says something, it’ll mean neither more nor less than the precise denotation of the terms employed.”

  Hilary thought about it for a moment. Then, in a burst of frustrating irrelevance, she announced that she was ready for lunch. Scott and I wanted to hear some of her opinions, but we ended up waiting patiently while she went into Goetz’s office and gathered up the charts she’d made.

  When she was out of earshot, I asked Scott how he felt about keeping the murder a secret from the police.

  He wasn’t any too happy about it, but was willing to defer to Hilary for an hour or two longer. “I’d just as soon the story didn’t break at least until the first day of the Fair is over,” he explained. “Word of mouth’ll spread it around like a tornado, and pretty soon everybody’ll be gawking, instead of buying.”

  “But they’ll still buy the rest of the week, won’t they? So what?”

  He shook his head. “You never make it up. I don’t know why, but give them an excuse to watch a fire or a nut standing on a ledge, and buyers’ll forget all about their open-to-buy. And you don’t pick that business up again. I don’t know why, as I say, but it’s lost for good!”

  “So you’re going to continue letting Hilary play sleuth, right?”

  “Don’t get uptight about it.”

  “I’m not! I just don’t want to spend the night at precinct headquarters. Do you know how many laws we’ve broken already?”

  “I know, I know,” Scott said, “but if you knew Hilary as well as I, you’d trust her further. Besides, just before you walked in, she said she’d clear this whole business up by tonight.”