by Marvin Kaye
“My God,” Scott breathed, shaking his head in sorry realization. “Not even Chuck Saxon! Only Lasker and myself!”
“Yes,” said Hilary, “I seemed to recall that, a long while ago, when you told me about imperfections, you also mentioned they were developed here in strict secrecy between you and the operations chief.”
“Therefore ...?” Harrison asked.
“Therefore,” she continued, “Scott and Lasker were the only ones aware of it, and that means only Lasker could have warned Goetz to avoid copying the bump on the ear of the model car driver.”
We sat for a long moment while Scott pondered the viper in his bosom. No victory showed in his face, and I guessed he’d put a lot of trust and hope in Tom Lasker as executive material.
Scott was the first to speak again. He asked Hilary what we ought to do next.
“Well,” she said, “I’d like to find out if I’m right about those two keys. I suggest we examine the contents of Lasker’s desk.”
Scott wasn’t too enthusiastic about that idea, but it was only what Lasker had done to him, so, in a few minutes, we found ourselves in the office of the operations chief. Scott pushed a key ring into my hands and showed me which one to use.
But as I bent over and steadied the center drawer—in which the keyhole had been placed—prior to unlocking it, my fingers felt something unexpected on the underside of the desk. I detached it and showed it to Scott.
He swore. “What in Christ’s name is happening to our security system? We have a sweep for bugs every quarter!”
“Obviously,” said Hilary, scornfully, “this device was put here since your last checkup.”
“But why?” Harrison wanted to know. “Why would Tom want to listen to himself?”
I yanked open the middle drawer. Nestling in a half-circular compartment, covered with paper clips, were two identical keys. One had the Trim-Tram authorization line on it; the other did not.
“That settles that,” Hilary said. “End of the espionage investigation.”
At that moment, Chuck Saxon, still dressed in a heavy charcoal-gray overcoat, appeared in the office doorway.
“What’s up?” he asked. “I understand you wanted me as soon as I got in, Scott.”
“Hilary wanted to see you.”
“What now?” he groaned. But the funny thing was that, though he addressed Hilary, he was staring at me. His voice, a little strained, sounded as if he couldn’t catch his breath too well. In all, he didn’t much resemble the bluff and burly executive I’d shaken hands with earlier.
The hell with it, I thought, and went back to checking Lasker’s desk.
“Never mind,” Hilary was telling him. “Originally, I wanted you on hand as another witness, while I discussed the Tricky Tires theft. But now it’s not important. Scott can fill you—STOP HIM!”
The last direction was flung at Scott, because I was suddenly too busy to comply. While rooting around the left bottom drawer of Lasker’s desk, I found a brown manila mailing envelope; before I could open it, Saxon, without warning, landed on me like a tank.
I shoved him off, but he grabbed me again, yanking my arm to one side. Scott latched onto Saxon’s shoulder, but the bulky coat Saxon was wearing gave Scott’s hand nothing solid to grip, and the VP pulled free, turning me partly around in the process.
I charged in, threw my arms around him in a wrestler’s clutch. Surprisingly enough, Saxon wasn’t throwing punches or even going out of his way to rough me up. But he clenched his arms tight against his body, then drove them out at me, the weight of his massive bulk behind the thrust. I fell back a few steps, pivoted slightly, lightly slapped an open-palm jab at the side of his face. Saxon, paying no attention, lunged forward, got the manila envelope in his hand, and whirled around, trying to get to the door.
But I blocked him on one side, and Scott barred the other. While Saxon glared at the two of us, trying to decide what to do, Hilary suddenly darted forward and simultaneously chopped at his wrist with the flat of one hand while snatching at the envelope with the other.
The blow was a savage one. Saxon yelped, releasing his hold on the envelope. It fell right into Hilary’s waiting hand. Before he could rally, she quickly withdrew behind Harrison, who’d been shifting nervously from one foot to the other in a neutral corner of the room.
As soon as Saxon saw her rip it open, he sagged, all the fight gone out of him.
“What the hell was that all about, Chuck?” Scott barked, still standing in a defensive crouch. Saxon, paying no further attention, sat down heavily. The mass of the man seemed to collapse in on himself, and he looked like a shapeless sack of flesh thrown on the chair in a heap.
I heard a slight intake of breath from Hilary. Joining Scott and Harrison, I walked over to her to see what the envelope contained. She pushed it at me and turned away, avoiding my stare.
“Oh, my God,” Harrison exclaimed softly, studying the contents of the envelope. “Oh, my God.”
Scott said nothing; his lips were compressed in a tight line.
“Do you know who she is?” I asked him. He nodded, but said nothing.
Nobody said a word for at least a minute.
At last, Hilary—still looking away from us—repeated my question. But still Scott said nothing.
“All right,” she snapped, turning around at last, “the initial shock is over. Now I take it both of you know who the girl is in the photos. Will you tell me, Scott? Abel?”
“They won’t,” Saxon said, his voice a harsh quaver. “They want to spare my feelings. But I’ll tell you ...” His voice broke, and though his mouth trembled, he was unable to speak.
“Who is she?” Hilary asked once more, this time very gently.
Swallowing hard, Saxon said, “My ... my daughter.”
16
“I WANTED TO DESTROY THEM,” Saxon told us, still sitting with his winter overcoat sagging over his lap and knees, “but if Lasker found out I’d rifled his desk, he might have gone ahead with his threats, just to be nasty. What I had really hoped to find were the negatives. ...”
“So,” said Hilary, “that’s what you were doing here that Sunday when everyone thought you were out of town.”
Saxon nodded slowly, then appealed to Scott. “I’m sorry about it, Scotty. You can see why I didn’t want to discuss it this morning, can’t you?”
Not trusting himself to speak, Scott nodded, putting a sympathetic hand on Saxon’s shoulders.
“I didn’t want my wife to know anything about it,” the VP explained. “That’s why I packed her off to Miami. I was afraid there’d be one hell of a scene, and I didn’t want her hearing any of it. Although, as it turned out, the blowup between my daughter Penny and me never took place. I haven’t had the stomach to face her with—”
“Maybe you’d better start over, tell us about it from the beginning,” Hilary interrupted. “How long had your daughter been seeing Lasker?”
“I don’t know. Penny lives with her mother and me in Brooklyn Heights, but she’s of age, and I’ve never pried into her personal life. That’s why I just couldn’t talk to her about this.”
There was a rap at the door. A secretary stuck in her head and told Scott he was wanted on the telephone. He excused himself and left to take the call in his office.
“I never liked Lasker,” Saxon was saying. “Too smooth, too eager to make a good impression. He always struck me as a man out to make good no matter who he hurt.”
“When did he meet your daughter?”
“I think it was spring, a year or so ago, at a company picnic. I know they dated a few times after that, but I had no idea what it had come to. ...”
“When did he approach you with the pictures?” Hilary asked.
“Quite a while ago. Late last year, October or November, I forget exactly when. He took me into this office, closed the door, and took those filthy things out of his desk. Said he’d start mailing them around to the other executives, show them to some of the shop worke
rs—”
“What did he want from you? Money?” I asked.
“Hardly. He knows I’m comfortably off, but you wouldn’t call me a likely target for that kind of blackmail. No, he wanted me to talk him up at executive meetings, persuade Scott to promote him to a vice-presidency. It was idiotic!”
“Why idiotic?” Hilary wondered.
“Because I don’t have that kind of power! When it comes to new product design or deciding whether to break into a new area of technical process, Scott’ll pay serious attention to anything I recommend—although even there I have to work hand-in-hand with the marketing experts. But to think I can go bringing up somebody’s name in board meetings so I can give him a big buildup? You’ve got to remember that, at that time, Lasker was still a blue-collar worker. He must have gotten his notions of top-level management procedure from reruns of Executive Suite on TV!”
“What did you tell him?” asked Hilary.
Saxon clenched his hands tightly, cracking his knuckles. “What could I say? I always mistrusted Tom, and his behavior only confirmed my suspicions. I was afraid he’d do exactly what he threatened. So I promised I’d do what I could with Scotty. I was playing for time.”
“Figuring,” she said, “that you could break into his desk some weekend and steal the photos.”
The executive stood up, began to pace. “That’s the way it was, Hilary. I figured I’d tell my wife I had some last-minute business to take care of, and that I’d join her in Florida. But then something unexpected happened, because Scott took me aside one afternoon and asked for my opinion on Lasker. He was obviously eager for a good recommendation, and, damn it, I just didn’t have the guts to speak my mind, because I was afraid it might get back to the son-of-a-bitch.”
“So you praised him?”
“Faintly. I said he was a capable worker, which he is. That’s all Scott wanted to hear, because he then told me he was going to promote Lasker to vice-president of operations.”
“Did you tell Lasker about it right away?” Hilary asked.
“I certainly did! He’d been leaving him alone for a little while, anyway—figuring, I guess, that it takes time to pull off what he expected from me—so I was plenty relieved to be able to give him exactly what he wanted.”
“How did he act?”
“The little louse thanked me, all smiles. But no pictures! Said he wanted to hold on to them for sentimental reasons! I could have killed him, the little bastard!”
“So you went ahead and broke into his desk.”
“Right,” he said, still pacing “I drove out one Sunday, after I’d got my wife safely on a plane to Florida. I’d planned to confront my daughter with the pictures ... and I carefully checked through his desk. But I couldn’t find the negatives. The photos he’d shown me, of course, were there, and the first impulse I had was to rip them up and toss the pieces all over the room as a kind of warning or threat. But I changed my mind, because I didn’t want to incite him to make up another set and start mailing them around.”
“And what,” Hilary asked quietly, “did you finally decide you were going to do with Lasker?”
He turned to us, a look of baffled rage on his face. “I don’t know, damn it. I honestly don’t know what I can do! I’ve thought and thought about it, made up my mind to smash his face in, then changed my plans. I was going to have it out with him in front of Scott, but I couldn’t bear the idea of having to show anyone those pictures.” He sat back down, put his head in his hands. “So I haven’t done anything but brood. Nothing! That goddamned miserable bastard!”
He was pretty close to tears, and, Harrison, sensing it, went over to him and spoke in a low, soothing voice. I didn’t hear what he said, but knew the content to be generally consolatory.
That was the way Scott found us when he returned a moment later. He and Hilary exchanged glances, then, without speaking, the executive strode to the desk and picked up the offensive photographs. He walked to Saxon and put them in the VP’s hands.
“Here, Chuck, these are yours now. Destroy them, the way you wanted to, in the first place.”
“But,” the other protested, “without the negatives”—he gestured hopelessly—“as soon as Tom finds out ...”
“He won’t.”
The way he said it made us all look at him. Hilary, turning pale, raised an eyebrow; Scott nodded in reply to her voiceless query.
“That was the police on the phone. They want me to come to The Toy Center and identify Tom’s body. Somebody pushed him down a stairwell. His neck is broken.”
Almost involuntarily, I turned toward Saxon. He stared at the four of us. We all looked back at him.
“Sweet Jesus!” he moaned, a ghastly attempt at a smile on his lips, “Sweet Jesus, you can’t all believe that. ...”
17
IT WAS QUITE A contrast—that stairwell—to the clamor and bustle going on obliviously around it. Except for a few gawkers, rigidly held back by a police cordon, buyers and reps passed and repassed the scene of the crime without a single downward glance, intent on their commercial goals at the next destinations on their itineraries.
Saxon and Harrison had gone on to the Trim-Tram showroom on the second floor of FAB. Scott, Hilary, and I were allowed just inside the NYPD barrier by a fat, mustachioed inspector named Betterman, who turned out to be an old friend of Hilary’s, one who used to come to the house, bringing her presents, when she was a little girl and still on good terms with her father.
Most of the stairways in FAB are as heavily trafficked as the elevators. But the one between the second floor and the lobby usually is blocked off during Toy Fair, for no discernible reason, by the building management. Whereas every other stairway in the Center has a platform and a twist in the steps halfway between floors, the one we were looking down was a dizzily straight affair—a single oblique shaft describing an angled line plummeting a long way down to the lobby below.
“It looks like this Lasker got into some kind of fight,” the inspector told Hilary. “There were signs of a struggle, glasses broken, things like that. He must have been pushed backward down the stairwell and hit his head against the bottom.”
The body was still there. Lasker had dropped most of the way down, but not quite into the lobby, which was around the curve of the broad platform step at the bottom of the stairwell. His head was at an impossible angle, and, even from above, I could see the black line of his glasses cord stretched out along the floor next to his face.
The glasses themselves had apparently broken off the cord during the fall. They teetered on the edge of a step several feet above the body; the lenses lay in splinters above and below the spectacle frames.
Scott went through the formality of identifying the body—which had already been done by one of the Trim-Tram salesmen (the stairwell was near the company’s showroom on the second floor). But the police inspector had waited for Scott to arrive to make the identification official. That way, Betterman was able to get in a few questions about Lasker.
“Did he have any enemies that you know of?” the policeman asked Scott. Miranda’s answer was guarded, neither implicating Saxon nor completely avoiding the subject.
On the way over to The Toy Center, Hilary and Scott had rehearsed answers to the probable questions he’d asked. The pair decided on a hush-hush policy concerning the Trim-Tram espionage that Lasker was involved in—at least for the moment. Scott, understandably, had misgivings about further withholding of facts from the police, but Hilary, rather desperately, prevailed.
While he answered questions, Hilary and I—not without a few initial objections from Betterman—were permitted to examine the area around the corpse. (Apparently, the technicians had already gone over everything painstakingly, or we never would have gotten near.)
There wasn’t a hell of a lot to see. Other than the crushed eyeglass lenses and frames on the higher steps, the body looked the same up close as at a distance—neck at a sickening angle in relation to both head and arms; an
agonized expression on the face, mixed with anger, perhaps even hatred; minor abrasions of the skull, arms, and hands.
Hilary called my attention to a particularly ugly gash on the palm of one hand. The quantity of blood around it indicated that it must have been made prior to death.
I wondered what might have caused it. Hilary pointed to a nearby thick, rounded piece of glass with jagged edges ... apparently a fragment of Lasker’s eyeglasses that had fractured and stuck deep in his hand.
Before I’d seen the related damage and the expression on the corpse’s face, I’d wondered how the police could be sure Lasker’s fall wasn’t an accident. Now I knew.
The necessary steps being completed, a team of white-coated attendants put the body on a stretcher, covered it with a sheet, and began to remove it from the building. Hilary and I rejoined Scott, who was just finishing his talk with Inspector Betterman.
The policeman turned to Hilary and addressed her in jovially exaggerated fashion. “Well, little lady, what do you think your father would say about this business?”
She stiffened. “I have no idea. And, as you know quite well, I couldn’t give less of a damn.”
Betterman laughed. “Still sore at him for refusing to give you a job? Well, I don’t give a damn, either. Get me a candidate for this mess and I’ll see you get credit in the papers.”
He wasn’t kidding. I’d heard Hilary mention Betterman before, and I knew two things about him: first of all, he liked her and had unsuccessfully interceded for her with her father when she’d asked the old man to hire her; secondly, the policeman was as lazy as they come. If Hilary could save him time and effort by dumping a solution in his lap, he wouldn’t begrudge her a little publicity—especially if it did her any paternal good.
Scott asked if we could be excused, and Betterman genially waved his hand at us. We followed the executive back up the hall to the Trim-Tram showroom. When we were in front of it, Hilary started to give me instructions, but Scott interrupted.
“You’d better hold off on that,” he said ominously, “and come inside. We have some important things to talk about, you and I.”