Lively Game of Death

by Marvin Kaye

  “So that’s why everybody else is dressed?” I asked.

  “All except me and Horatio, we’re supposed to be guileless. So we both play everything nude.”

  “But what about Hamlet’s madness? Isn’t that a kind of duplicity for both?”

  “Look,” said Whelan, lowering his voice, “this kid that’s directing knows nothing! I’m surprised he didn’t cast a black Hamlet, to suggest the mourning clothes. I know that Hamlet isn’t all that innocent—he even says so to Ophelia. But it’s a job, and how many actors actually get a chance to play this part, huh?”

  Nodding understandingly, I asked if we could talk about Sid Goetz.

  “Sure,” said Whelan. “This is the only time in the whole show that I get five minutes to myself. Let’s see—mad scene, Claudius and Laertes—uh, there’s three scenes while I’m supposed to be in England. There’s plenty of time.” He laughed briefly. “So old man Goetz plopped over! Best news all week! What was it, heart attack?”

  I told him what it was. That upset him, of course, but I assured him I wasn’t from the police and only wanted some information. When I explained I was with Trim-Tram, he looked very relieved.

  “What I’d like to know, Harry, is why you disappeared right on Toy Fair morning. The timing, you have to admit, looks suspicious.”

  “Christ, I’ll say it does! But I was planning to stick Sid for quite a while. I was rehearsing the play evenings, and it was getting to be a drag for everyone, and, anyway, I figured the hell with it, I wanted to stick that crud and stick him good!”

  I said it still looked fishy, walking out on a man just before his busiest season. Whelan, agitated, rose and paced the dressing room.

  “So it was childish of me! Too goddamned bad! You know what Sid did to me?” He stopped by the door to the room, stuck out his head to see where the rest of the players were, then turned back to face me. “Maybe you’ve heard the word ‘synergism’ used in the toy trade,” he said. “It’s very popular these days—”

  “Means something like ‘more than the sum of the parts,’ right?”

  “Not to Sid!” Whelan said. “He thought it meant stealing the ideas of several products and combining them. It was his new approach to R&D, I guess, because he was getting worried about all the cases in court his direct copies were racking up. Anyway, Sid was working on a new game idea, trying to combine—God knows how, don’t ask!—Scrabble, Twister, and Monopoly.”

  That was interesting. I’d wondered what that Scrabble set was doing in the showroom in the first place.

  “You see,” the actor continued, “Sid knew how to play Monopoly and Twister, but Scrabble? Too intellectual for him. And he couldn’t spell worth a damn, either! Yet he had to understand the game well enough to steal its concept. So I had to play him—and the bastard cheated! Put down incorrectly spelled words and got away with them!”

  “You couldn’t challenge him?”

  “And last another payday?”

  I said I didn’t see anything so terrible about Goetz’s crime. But then Whelan pointed out that they’d been playing penny ante, and I expressed full sympathy, well aware that the loss of a penny or two is a major calamity for a striving actor.

  I brought up the subject of the preceding evening, the night—according to Hilary—of the murder.

  “Well, I wasn’t working too late,” Whelan said, “because it would have involved paying me overtime. I was there till a little after nine-thirty.”

  “Did anything unusual happen during that time?”

  “Not much,” he shrugged, “the usual arguments. Sid never passed a day when he wasn’t yelling or getting screamed at.”

  “Who did he argue with yesterday?”

  “Phone customers, mostly. Oh, once he was out in the hall with the fellow across the hall, what’s-his-name? Bell. Then, late in the day, Pete Jensen came in ready to fight with Sid, but there were customers in our showroom, so nothing came of it.”

  I asked if he knew what the fight was about, and he said Jensen stuck his head in the door and asked him to stay by his phone. “Pete had to go to the John, and he wanted me to watch his office just till he got back. I told Pete OK, and he left after seeing that I was in his showroom. But Sid followed me in there and yelled at me because he wasn’t paying me to wait on the competition, that kind of crap. I told him I was just doing Pete a little favor, and Sid told me to get back to the showroom and he’d watch Jensen’s place.”

  “And he did?”

  “Uh-huh. In a few minutes, he returned, Jensen right behind him, pulling at his jacket. But the whole thing blew over when Pete saw our customers.”

  I asked whether anything else important took place that night.

  “Yeah, about twenty minutes or so before I took off, he got into another big fight, but as I say, that was normal for him. It took place in his office, and he slammed the door, so I couldn’t hear it.”

  “Was he on the phone?”

  “No. He was yelling at his wife.”

  “His wife?! When did she show up?”

  “Around nine o’clock,” he answered.

  “Was she alone?”

  “No. There was a guy with her.”

  “Short? Kind of squat?”

  “That’s the one,” the actor told me. “Crew cut. Liver lips.”

  I pursued the question further, but Whelan couldn’t tell me anything else. I thanked him for his trouble and assured him that the police would hear nothing of his connection with Goetz from me.

  As he showed me a side exit I could use without disturbing the progress of the play, I paused long enough to ask him the one question that had really been bugging me.

  “Is it your director’s idea that dressing the rest of the cast in commedia dell’arte costumes—like a Punch-and-Judy show—makes some kind of vital comment on Hamlet?”

  Whelan, his dressing gown laid aside, slowly shook his head. “Dire necessity, my masters,” he intoned. “Roger just graduated from Hunter College. The department head let him borrow the costumes. Otherwise, we would have had to do it in modern dress.”

  “And pantaloons, I suppose, and the like were the only ‘Shakespearean’ costumes available!”

  He laughed. “Shakespearean! Yes, that’s right.”

  My mouth dropped. “Hey, don’t tell me ... you ...” I indicated his height.

  Whelan nodded vigorously. “Correct! There was no costume to fit me. Or Horatio. That’s how Roger got his directorial concept.”

  Shaking my head, I said good-bye. As I threaded my way down the dark side passage Whelan had indicated, I could hear the Melancholy Dane sneezing behind me.

  22

  FIVE-TEN. HILARY NEVER TOLD me how much initiative to take, but, in spite of the time, I knew I had to make fast stop-offs at three places in the building before reporting back to the boss.

  It was a wise decision. Willie Frost was just locking up when I got off the elevator at his floor. At my request, he turned the key the other way and led me back to his reception room.

  “I’d given up on you,” he said, rubbing his hands briskly. “Now maybe you’ll tell me what Trim-Tram’s angle is.”

  “First,” I said, “I want to know why you haven’t gotten in touch with Sid all day.” It may have been an oblique way to get to the meat of the matter, but it did seem odd that Frost, made suspicious by my earlier interrogation, hadn’t stopped up to the 1111 showroom. I was also thinking about the doorknob of Goetz Sales turning earlier that day.

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Frost asked. “I tried to contact Sid by phone. No answer.”

  “Did you stop by the showroom?”

  “With my schedule? Who’s got time?”

  “Besides,” I suggested, “Sid might not be too happy to see you after last night, would he?”

  Frost’s eyes widened slightly, and he began to say something, then stopped himself. His thick lips compressed as a determined expression set his features in hard lines. “I think,” the lawyer sai
d, “it’s about time you began telling me a few things. Such as who you’re really working for and what you really want.”

  In another three-quarters of an hour, the police were going to know everything, anyway, so I told him practically the whole story—the pertinent parts about Goetz—in highly condensed form.

  When I was finished, he looked pretty grave. It occurred to me that the Frost I’d met earlier was the private man, and I was, for the first time, getting a glimpse of the professional.

  He shook his head. “Now I see the purpose of some your questions this morning. Whether Sid owned a gun, and things like that. Boy, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. Or your boss’s ... or Scott Miranda’s. This Hilary gal had better come up with some good answers.”

  Under the circumstances, I told him, it might be wise for him to cooperate with us and give us some more information.

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” Frost said. “In fact, what I have to do is call the police.”

  “Look,” I said, looking at my watch, “Hilary promised she would call in the cops by no later than five-thirty, and it’s practically that now ... barely fifteen minutes away. Nobody’s going to find out you held back information on a murder that long. At this time of day, you’ll never even get a line through to headquarters that fast!” I kept my fingers crossed as I tripped half an hour off our deadline.

  “Well,” Frost said, grinning wryly, “there’s truth in what you say—everybody and his cousin is on the phone in New York from five to six.” He shuddered, probably thinking of the exasperation he’d suffer if he tried to buck Ma Bell. “All right,” the lawyer said at last, “I’ll dummy up, but I want to be in on the kill.”

  “The kill?”

  “I want to know who’s been spying for Sid.”

  That surprised me. “I thought you knew!”

  “I knew it wasn’t Lasker, but that’s all. And what you suggested is correct—Sid’s silent partner and the spy are one and the same. But beyond that, Sid never told me who the guy was. Which was one hell of a nerve!”

  “Why did Sid have to tell you anything about his partner?”

  “He had to let me in on some of the deals he had working with the guy. For example, the partner-spy was deferring his profits at year-end, and picking them up a little at a time so the drain wouldn’t be too hard on the business. Sid wanted to be sure there wouldn’t be any difficulty in ‘X’ getting his share if Sid ever kicked off. Or vice versa.”

  “All right,” I said, not completely satisfied with the answer, “can we go back to last night? Harry Whelan saw you and Ruth Goetz up in the showroom.”

  “Yeah. We met for dinner to discuss divorce proceedings, as you know, because she told you.”

  “Oh, she called and filled you in on my session with her?”

  “I called her. Where else could you have found out the Goetz stock percentages? But she was pretty cagey on the phone, told me very little.”

  “Last night?” I prompted, impatiently.

  “The divorce,” Frost repeated. “We broached it to Sid, and he hit the roof.”

  “Why? Did he love his wife that much?”

  “No, he was just pissed off that we were bothering him the night before Toy Fair. He wouldn’t discuss it at all.”

  “How much do you like Ruth Goetz?”

  He laughed. “Not enough to murder her husband. I wouldn’t trust her to stick with me that long.”

  “Did Sid have a will?”

  “Yes, but you can forget that direction. Ruth gets a few thousand, that’s all.”

  “Who gets the bulk of the estate?” I asked.

  “Guess.”

  “Suppose you tell me.”

  “If you knew Sid better, you’d figure it out. The only thing he respected was making a buck. He left most of his estate to ‘X’—the silent partner.”

  “The Trim-Tram spy?”

  “Right on!” he nodded vigorously. “There’s your motive. Figure out who the spy is, and you’ve got your murderer.”

  That was all I could think of to ask Frost, so I left, after getting him to promise to stick around his office in case we needed him up at Goetz Sales. As I went out, I thought over what he’d just told me. It sounded queer to me, but the lawyer explained the estate was engineered to pay the spy-partner indirectly, in case he wanted to maintain his “cover” at Trim-Tram. Of course, the spy would have to have a lawyer involved with making contact with Frost. But there was no time to go that route.

  After I left Frost’s, I headed across the FAB/1111 bridge, up the fire stairs and back to the tenth floor of Toy Center North. I stopped in again at Bell’s to see why that individual had been arguing in the halls with Goetz the day before. It turned out to be a case of trampled toes.

  I also looked in on Pete Jensen. He was as glum as ever, though there was a buyer in the room glancing over the line. I asked Jensen about his flap with Goetz.

  The corners of his mouth turned up in a melancholy smile. “It wasn’t anything much,” he told me, “just more nuisance value from Sid. This new item here. ...” He pointed to the little racer I’d admired that morning through his showroom window. “It runs by a little metal dowel about as long as an eraser. I think Sid stole it.”

  I looked at the toy again. It stood next to a brightly lettered advertising board which touted the way the racer worked: drop the metal dowel in the fuel tank, and the program imprinted on the dowel would drive the racer along a tabletop or the floor in unpredictable patterns. Twist the dowel a different way before insertion, and a new program would feed into the tank.

  There was a printed arrow on the board pointing to the dowel, which should have been affixed to the display. But it was gone.

  “When I came back to my showroom, and found not Harry Whelan but Sid, I was sick,” said Jensen. “The first thing I looked for was the racer, my prize item. Sure enough, the dowel was missing.”

  “Could it have dropped on the floor?”

  He nodded. “Yes, although I’ve searched all over on my hands and knees. Naturally, I accused Sid of taking it, and naturally he denied it. Got ugly about it, in fact. Said he’d get out his gun if I took one step into his showroom.”

  The buyer looking over the PeeJayCo. line interrupted Jensen at this point, asking to see the racer in operation. When he tried to explain, Jensen was rebuffed by the businessman.

  “I’ll never understand,” the buyer told Jensen, “why you little guys never come into Toy Fair with anything but mock-ups! You expect us to use our imagination?!” He walked out of the room in righteous indignation.

  “You see what the small manufacturer has to contend with?” Jensen asked mournfully, his hand rubbing his bearded chin in a manner that, taken along with a slow side-to-side shake of the head, suggested surrender. “If we could afford to sink cash into R&D and production, we’d have the actual toys on the shelves for the buyers to look at. As it is, I have to go with hand samples and prototypic mock-ups.” He slumped down in a chair. “God, nothing’s worth it. Nothing.”

  I wished there was something I could do to cheer him up. But if I didn’t get back to Hilary pronto, my future wouldn’t be any too secure, either.

  Sunk in gloom, Jensen didn’t even notice me leaving.

  23

  FIVE-THIRTY-FIVE. HILARY was angry.

  I explained I’d taken the time to recheck Frost and Jensen. That mollified her some, but she was still in no mood to waste words.

  “Tell me everything,” Hilary directed me, “but eclipse the unimportant details.”

  I thought she was giving me a vote of confidence by allowing me to decide what was meaningful or not. But not really. I later learned she had everything pretty well decided by then. During my absence, Hilary had drawn up several alternate charts of probabilities. Once I reported, she simply discarded the inapplicable ones.

  At the end of my narration, she winnowed her notes as stated, then told me she needed a few minutes more to sort things out in
her head.

  “I just want to be sure I’ve got everything clearly in order so I can present the case clearly—”

  “Hold on a minute, Hilary,” I said. “I’ve got to ask you something important.”

  She looked up at the ceiling, her eyes filled with extreme exasperation. “I have precisely seventeen minutes left! Can’t it wait?”

  “No,” I answered. “I’ve got to have a couple of answers from you.”

  “All right, what? Make it quick, though!”

  I imitated the staccato manner she’d used earlier with Saxon. “Okay—one, why did you move Goetz’s hand? Two, why did you put away the Scrabble set? Three, how did you know Goetz was killed last night? Four—”

  “I said make it fast! How many—”

  “Four,” I continued, overriding her, “what were you doing here last night?”

  That stopped her. But her lips didn’t stay parted long: she rearranged them into an angry moue. “How dare you!” Hilary challenged me, her eyes flashing angrily. “You’re on my payroll! And you have the nerve to pry into—”

  “There isn’t time,” I reminded her ungently. “Are you going to answer my questions?”

  “Why the hell should I?”

  I reached into my pocket and finally produced the Scrabble tiles. “This is why you’d better answer,” I told her, holding the three squares of wood right under her eyes.

  If I expected Hilary to be momentarily confused, I was far off base. She merely huffed, “Well, what brought about this change of heart?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I assume,” she said, “those are the tiles that were in Goetz’s hand. Nice of you to decide to show me!”

  That put me out-of-kilter momentarily. Then the unpleasant thought struck me that Hilary indeed knew too much about the murder. But she scotched that notion before it started.

  “To answer your first question,” Hilary told me in no very friendly manner, “I moved Goetz’s hand after I’d seen you’d opened it! You think I’m blind? When I first saw the body, the fist was clenched. After you’d gone out to question Bell, I noticed it had been pried open. It didn’t take a giant intellect to figure there must have been something inside. Nor was it hard to guess what it might have been, with Scrabble parts all over the place—”