Lively Game of Death

by Marvin Kaye

  Brag and bounce, I thought, but I let it go.

  “The real reason she’s trying so hard,” the executive was saying, “is one she’d never tell me, but I know it, just the same, and I can’t stand in her way, I just don’t have the heart to stop her.”

  “What are you talking about? What reason?”

  Scott’s eyebrows rose. “Isn’t it obvious? She wants her old man to hear how brilliantly she solved her first murder case!”

  I thought about it. Maybe he was right. Anyway, I hoped he was.

  Hilary joined us, and Scott suggested we get a table downstairs in the Fifth Avenue Club so we wouldn’t lose precious time at lunch. She agreed for both of us, and we started to leave, but she stopped me at the door.

  “We’ll save you a place,” she told me. “Before you leave here, maybe you’d better get on the phone for a moment and check out Ruth Goetz’s alibi for last night. Here—take the key so you can close up.”

  I said okay, and watched them go, locking the door behind them. I walked into Goetz’s office, found the telephone book listing for La Paradol, and rang up the headwaiter. It was early and I wasn’t sure I’d get anybody in, but I was in luck. It didn’t look as if he was going to be able to help me though. It wasn’t that he was averse to giving me the information I sought; it was the unexpected fact that his restaurant makes it a policy to take no reservations of any kind. Therefore, he had no way of checking to see whether a table had been booked in either Goetz’s or Frost’s name.

  I tried a wild stab at describing the two. My picture of Frost meant nothing to the waiter, but Mrs. Goetz was another story.

  “Ah-ho,” he laughed, “that’s the woman you want to know about?”

  “She sound familiar to you?”

  “Red hair? Tossed around in every direction? A pair ... a bust out to here ...?”

  “That’s the one,” I replied.

  “Pardon? I couldn’t hear. ...”

  “I said, that’s the one. You remember her?”

  “Are you serious? All the waiters remember her! You should have heard some of the things—no, maybe you shouldn’t have!”

  “Do you recall about what time she arrived?”

  “She and her escort came very early, probably to avoid the crowds. They were here about six, maybe six-fifteen.”

  “And when did they leave?” I asked.

  “It was pretty busy by then, I didn’t see just when. Maybe eight o’clock. Eight-thirty.”

  I thanked him and hung up. So, I thought, in one stroke, both Frost’s and Goetz’s alibis were wiped out. And Jensen, Hilary had told me when I returned, was setting up his showroom the night before and had gone home about 10 P.M. He was alone all the time, and he lives by himself. So they were all three unaccounted for. ...

  After talking to the waiter, I stayed seated for a minute or so, trying to figure things out. Why in hell had Hilary picked up that Scrabble set? What earthly reason did she have for monkeying around with the evidence? It bugged the hell out of me.

  An idea came into my mind. Opening up the Toy Fair directory sitting on Goetz’s desk, I searched for a room number, found it, and put a weight on the book to hold it open while I dialed the phone digits listed in the directory.

  I told the switchboard operator I wanted to speak to Jan Astor; after waiting for the PR gal to be tracked down in what sounded like an immense, bustling showroom, I got her on the phone and tried my hunch.

  She didn’t want to talk about it at first, but when I told her Hilary might be in trouble, she opened up.

  “I called Hilary yesterday afternoon,” Jan explained, “because Sid Goetz was reneging again on the money he owed me. Hilary, you know, went to bat for me last week when Goetz said he wouldn’t pay my bill. After she got through with him, he sent me half the money right away. Then I didn’t hear anything further, so I called, and he said that’s all he was going to pay.”

  “And you told that to Hilary?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. She said she would stop over to see him.”

  “When?” I asked, through clenched teeth.

  “Well, she was all tied up with Trim-Tram when I phoned, so she promised she’d look in on Goetz sometime during the evening. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Hilary yet. Did she have any luck?”

  I told her I knew nothing, then got off the line as fast as I could.

  There it was: Hilary was at the Goetz showroom the night the knock-off artist was killed. Come to think of it, I didn’t know that for sure ... it was Hilary who kept insisting that the previous evening was the time of the murder.

  I locked up the showroom and joined Hilary and Scott in the Fifth Avenue Club. But I wasn’t very hungry. Which was just as well, because when I’d caught up with them downstairs, I learned they’d changed their plans.

  “We’ll grab sandwiches-to-go in the coffee shop,” Hilary asserted, “and we can eat them in the car. We’ve got to get back to Trim-Tram.”

  “I take it you’ve thought of something?” I asked.

  Nodding, she said, “I have to see the Tricky Tires prototype again. Something just fell into place a few moments ago, something tied up with an industry practice Scott told me about a long, long time ago. But I want to see for myself. If I’m right—”

  “Yes,” asked Scott, anxiously, “If you’re right, what?”

  “Then I’ll be able to tell you all about the Trim-Tram spy.”

  “And how about Goetz’s murderer?” I added, fingering those damned three Scrabble pieces that were eating through my pocket like so much H2S04.

  “One thing at a time,” Hilary retorted. “Sid’ll stay dead till I get around to him.”

  15

  “I WAS ALREADY NINETY PER cent convinced that Tom Lasker was the spy,” said Hilary, as she once more examined the prototypic model of Tricky Tires. “This, I expect, will prove it beyond a doubt.”

  She was addressing three of us in the boardroom: Scott and me, and Abel Harrison, who’d just returned from lunch. Hilary wanted Saxon in on the session, too, but he was apparently still out to lunch, so we left word with his secretary to send in the burly R&D man as soon as he got back.

  After studying the model racer for a short time, Hilary sat down and arranged her notes on the table in front of her for easy reference.

  The rest of us sat down, too, and Scott spoke. “I’ve got to admit Tom looked pretty suspicious this morning running over to The Toy Center when we told him to stay here for further questioning. And then, on top of that, to be spotted coming out of Willie Frost’s office. ...”

  I picked up the ball. “Then we have to add on the things Hilary and I found out, such as the fact that Lasker got hold of enough money from somewhere to buy twelve hundred shares of stock. Or the fact that, according to Ruth Goetz, Lasker was approached by her with—”

  I didn’t get to finish, because Hilary wanted the show to herself. She spoke. “The fact that the sale of the stock took place after Abel’s key disappeared indicates that Lasker got hold of the money upon divulging the plans to Sid Goetz. But all of these things are only suspicions, not facts. They prove nothing. There were other signs, too. For instance, Lasker’s behavior when he first stormed in here. Didn’t he seem to be overreacting, Scott?”

  “Threatening to kill Sid Goetz? Yes—that kind of impulsive anger is not typical of Tom.”

  Hilary nodded. “He was trying to convince us of his righteously indignant innocence. Another thing that added to my suspicion was the obvious pride he displayed about his executive salary and the way he said he wanted to impress people.”

  “That,” Scott said, “must have to do with the girl he told me he’s been seeing. Something about needing money to treat her right, I don’t remember.”

  “Well, whatever the cause,” Hilary continued, “the main point is that money is extremely important to Lasker.”

  “Aren’t we all in that boat?” Harrison asked in a mumble.

  “Don’t forget Lasker’s
trick memory,” I reminded Hilary.

  “I was coming to that,” she said peevishly, crossing off something on one of the papers in front of her. “The first thing I had to consider was how the information could be relayed to Sid Goetz. Neither the prototype nor the plans have left this room for months. Could they be stolen overnight? No. Lasker himself stated that all packages and briefcases are inspected before being allowed out of the building. So Lasker’s memory is increasingly suspect.”

  Scott wondered how a mnemonic system could be employed in the present instance. “The way I understand it,” he said, “the trick is to associate different numbers with individual mental pictures and then—”

  I shook my head. “That’s the peg system, but in the case of a set of engineering plans—where the parts are related one to another in an interconnected, homogeneous structure—the chain method would be more serviceable.”

  Harrison, lost, murmured, “When you bring it down to basic English, maybe I’ll catch up with you.”

  “This is how it works,” I said. “Imagine you have a list of fifty things you want committed to memory, and the sequence is as important as the components. For instance, you want to learn—in this order—apple, pear, banana, peach, orange, plum, papaya, grape, pineapple, coconut, and so on. So you make a mental association between each two things—in other words, you forge a memory chain. Maybe you imagine the apple in a crash helmet riding a pear with wire wheels and a windshield. Then perhaps you picture this vehicular pear crashing into a banana wearing a monocle and high hat. Next, you might see this dude banana being rushed into a hospital, which is actually an orange fitted out with doors and steps and windows. And so on, until you’ve gone through the entire list of fifty things. The mental pictures are so ridiculous that you only have to think of the first object—in this case, the apple—and the rest of the chain pops into your mind, one after another.”

  Scott looked at Hilary. “And you think that’s how Tom stole the plans and relayed them to Goetz?”

  “Who knows? It’s one explanation. Since I’ve never seen a demonstration of Lasker’s memory, I can’t make an estimate of his retentive abilities. Anyway, this is all still in the realm of guesswork. Let’s proceed to facts. There are three important ones involved in—”

  “Three?” Harrison asked.

  “Yes. It’s not enough to suspect that Lasker could have stolen the plans. First, we have to prove that he had the means to get into the locked desk where they were kept.”

  Scott stared at his brother-in-law, and Harrison looked extremely unhappy. “You mean,” he almost whispered, “Tom stole the key off my desk?”

  “Possibly. But the question is, would Lasker have held on to it? What if you’d given the alarm and the building was searched?”

  “Which is what you should have done!” Scott snapped at Harrison.

  “Instead,” continued Hilary, “Abel chose to borrow a key from somebody and hope his own would turn up eventually. Now note the time sequence ... remember how everything seems to have happened about six weeks ago, give or take a few days? Abel’s key was stolen. What else happened?”

  I answered. “Lasker was promoted.”

  “Right. That meant he suddenly was in possession of at least two keys to Scott’s desk—Abel’s, and the one he was given as a vice-president. But wait a minute—”

  She turned to Harrison and asked him whether he’d made a copy of the key he borrowed from Lasker. He said he hadn’t. “I thought I told you—I wanted to make one, but I was afraid. It’s against company policy. In fact, if you’ll notice, there’s a little line of print on every key—”

  “I know,” said Hilary, “it tells the locksmith not to make copies unless authorized by Trim-Tram. That wouldn’t stop a lot of key-makers. For that matter, you could have made a wax impression of—”

  “I didn’t!” Harrison hotly protested. “It’s against company rules!”

  “So is borrowing one another’s keys,” Scott said quietly. His brother-in-law clammed up.

  Hilary asked to see Harrison’s key again, and without speaking, the nervous little man extracted it from his leatherette case.

  Taking it, Hilary gave it to Scott without comment. He examined it, then passed it on to me ... although I already remembered the manner in which Hilary had run a tapered finger along the metal object earlier; I also recalled the uncharacteristic manner in which she’d later used her nail file along the tip of one finger.

  There was a fine waxy sediment encrusted in the grooves of the key.

  “Lasker probably intended to return your key to you, Abel, as soon as he could do so undetected. So he made a copy for himself by taking a wax impression of your key. Then, the unexpected happened: he was made a vice-president, and he ended up with a third key! So, first opportunity he could grab, he gave your key back to you; the irony was you came to him to borrow your own key! No wonder Lasker never asked you to give it back again.”

  “So,” Scott drawled, “when Tom claimed this morning that he had no key to this desk because Abel had borrowed it—”

  “He was only covering his tracks, in case Abel let slip the story as he understood it. But, in actual fact, Lasker must still possess two keys to your desk, the one he copied from Abel and the one he was given as vice-president.”

  There was a brief silence while Scott digested the evidence. Then he asked Hilary to proceed to the second fact that was supposed to prove Lasker’s guilt.

  Looking at Harrison, she said the little toyman had also supplied her with clue number two.

  “Me?” he yelped. “Now what have I done?”

  Ignoring the question, she continued: “It still isn’t enough to say Lasker had both means and method for smuggling data to Goetz. He might have used the key to gain access to the plans—but was he, in fact, ever in your office for that purpose, Scott?”

  Scott shrugged.

  “Well, fortunately,” Hilary said, “Abel provided me with an eyewitness report. He told me he saw Lasker in here looking at the plans.”

  “I did no such thing!” Harrison started to squeal, but Scott told him to shut up.

  “I’ll tell you exactly what you said, Abel. I asked you why you hadn’t returned Lasker’s key, and you told me you held onto it because—I think this is verbatim—‘He never comes into this office, anyway, except when he has to consult the plans for details.’”

  “So what?” the VP queried, “What does that prove?”

  “It proves Lasker is the person that asked you for the location of the Tricky Tires plans, because only you and Scott knew where they were kept, remember? By a slip of the tongue, you admitted you’d seen Lasker in here. Where else could he have learned where the plans were kept?”

  Harrison looked more miserable than I’d ever seen him. “So how was I supposed to know?” he whined. “I didn’t know the plans were supposed to be in a secret hiding place. After all, they were sitting right out there in the drawer whenever I opened the desk to get something for Scott. I had no idea when Tom asked me about them—”

  “So!” Hilary interrupted. “It was Lasker that you told about them!”

  Harrison nodded. “But I promised I wouldn’t say anything about it.”

  “Promised!” Scott yelled. “To whom?”

  “To Tom.”

  “For the love of God—why?”

  “Tom promised not to say anything about the stock I’d sold him, so I said I wouldn’t mention anything about seeing him in here. He seemed innocently afraid of getting involved. Anyhow, we made a bargain, the two of us, don’t you see?”

  “But Hilary learned about the stock sale, anyway!” Scott reminded him.

  “That wasn’t Lasker’s fault,” Harrison said, amazed. “He kept his word, so I was obliged to do the same.”

  Scott sighed and sat back in his chair, eyes pointed heavenward. He gave up arguing with his brother-in-law.

  “All right,” Hilary said briskly. “We’ve got just one more point to
establish. We now have Lasker procuring a key to Scott’s desk and using it. Now ... did he take the final step and steal the plans?”

  I was surprised, and said so. What else did we need to prove Lasker’s guilt?

  “Well, brightness,” Hilary told me, “in case you forgot, we rushed back here so I could get a second look at the Tricky Tires prototype. ...” So saying, she picked up the toy racer, turning it so that one ear of the miniature driver was easily visible to the rest of us. “Do you see it now?” she asked.

  I did. There was a spot of green paint on that ear. I remembered Hilary attempting to scratch it off earlier.

  She looked at Scott quizzically, and he nodded. “You guessed it, Hilary. That paint dot indicates where the imperfection is.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, and must have looked it, for he turned to me and explained.

  “Imperfections,” he said, “are ways of protecting original designs from idea thieves. Several toy companies use them. Basically, what happens is we engineer a deliberate minimal mistake into the toy. Then, if we get knocked off, the copier probably follows our product right down to the last bump—including the imperfection. That way we have one hell of a handle to hold onto if the case comes up in court.”

  He pointed to the green splash on the tiny ear of “Buzz” Armstrong-Stewart sitting in the model car. “If you look closely,” he continued, “you’ll be able to see an extruded bump underneath the coloration.”

  I fingered the toy. Sure enough, there was a metal blister where a flat ear should have been. It was just barely noticeable to the eye. Hilary reached across the table and took the prototype from me, then swooped up the glossy prints of the Goetz knock-off. She peered at each picture, comparing the racer with every one, angle for angle.

  “I’ve already gone over them,” Scott told her. “You can’t find a hint of our imperfection on the Goetz copy. He didn’t put it in!”

  “Precisely,” Hilary said triumphantly, putting down the photos. “And who knew about the imperfection on Tricky Tires?”