Lively Game of Death

by Marvin Kaye

  “But you didn’t know which letters, of course.”

  “Wrong,” she snapped. “If you played the game, you’d know. Look ...” She walked over to a shelf, took down the Scrabble game, and opened the box. Extracting the board, she pointed to a column of print stamped directly on the playing surface, but a little off to the side of the usable squares.

  It was a chart of letter distribution, and it told exactly how many of each alphabetic component was contained in the set.

  “That’s for the benefit of the player who wants to know whether the material is left in the pool for building a certain word,” Hilary explained. “If you remember our game this afternoon, I couldn’t construct a word with Q in it. That’s because I knew you’d already taken it.”

  “Then you sorted out all the letters?”

  “Of course. That’s how I found out which three were missing. There’s supposed to be one Q in the set, two blanks and a pair of H’s. I guessed that you’d found something in Goetz’s hand, and what it was must have been those three tiles.” Her voice took on an ironical edge as she added, “I want to thank you for withholding my most vital clue.”

  “For withholding a clue!” I shouted. I could have choked her.

  “Don’t act indignant with me!” Hilary rejoined. “What else am I supposed to imagine?”

  “What do you mean, what else?!”

  “You couldn’t stand it that I was asked to solve everything! That I was trusted to figure out the spy’s identity! That I might have uncovered the murderer! Which I can do anyway, even though you tried to conceal—”

  That was all I could possibly stand. I shouted a lot of things back at her, mostly personal. I ended by telling her to go to hell, a feeble finale, except for the vehemence with which it was uttered.

  “Are you finished?” she asked at last. I said nothing. “Good,” Hilary purred sweetly, “because, as far as this job is concerned, you are finished.”

  “That,” I answered, carefully putting the Scrabble tiles on the top of the round showroom table nearest her, “is fine with me. You can do what you want with these—including explaining to the police why your initials were in Sid Goetz’s hand. Because if you don’t tell them, I will!”

  I pivoted on my heel and started for the door. Hilary called to me to stop, but I reminded her that I no longer worked for her.

  “Close the door,” she barked, “and get back here.” I hesitated, hand on knob, waiting.

  “Please,” she added. Her tone of voice wasn’t exactly conciliatory, but how much could I expect? Locking the door, I returned to her side. She was having considerable difficulty climbing down from the pinnacle of anger she’d just scaled, so I let her alone until she was able to reorder her “face” for my benefit.

  Hilary sat down, motioning me to join her. “So you hid them to protect me,” she said in a much more subdued manner.

  “Let’s just say I wanted to think it over, weigh the rest of the case before doing anything.”

  “It’s colossal nerve, suspecting me for a minute, but I guess I’ll have to apologize. I just never even considered that angle. I didn’t!” The latter assertion was defiant, but she didn’t dwell on it. Instead, Hilary stared at me intently and asked why I really hid the tiles.

  I started getting mad again, but she hushed me. “I know what you said, and I believe you. But why would you want to protect me? Especially when I’ve been acting so bitchy?”

  I didn’t know how to answer, and there wasn’t enough time to think about trying, either.

  She repeated the question. I looked deep into her blue eyes and told her I didn’t know. “Maybe,” I said, “we’ll talk about it another time. But we can’t get sidetracked now. It’s literally too late in the day.”

  “You’re right,” Hilary agreed, reverting to her more usual abrupt manner. “Then let’s make this fast.”

  “What?”

  “You deserve some explanation. I imagine you phoned Jan and found out about last night. All right, I was here briefly. It was after nine, and Goetz was here alone. We argued about Jan’s money, and I got him to agree again to send the rest. He was agitated, more so than the occasion warranted. There was an Interpol thirty-eight sitting out on his desk. He didn’t mention anything about it, but the drawer was open, and I could see the box of shells inside—the same ones I showed you this morning.”

  “Then that’s why you figured he’d been shot last night?”

  “Or early this morning. When I say last night, I mean it could’ve been one A.M., midnight, twelve-fifteen, who knows? I’m no ballistics expert, and I’m not a medical examiner, so I can only use common sense. Goetz was upset when I saw him, and he had his gun out. Add to that the fact that he never returned home, though at Toy Fair that may or may not be significant. But there was another thing, too—what kind of morning was it? Bright and sunny?”

  It had been too plain, that’s why I hadn’t seen it earlier. “The showroom lights were on!”

  “Exactly. If Goetz had just been shot this morning, why would all the lights be burning? We arrived very early, remember, and he was already dead. So I just assumed he’d been murdered last night or very early morning, and had lain there all that time.”

  “Another question, Hilary. What does the blank mean?”

  “In Scrabble? It stands for nothing. The only thing it’s used for is to fill in for some other letter. Say you want to put down the word DOG and you have D, the blank, and a G. You can do it that way, but the blank doesn’t increase your score.”

  “So,” I said, “when you say it stands for nothing, actually you could also say it stands for anything. Any letter, right?”

  She said I was correct.

  I rose. “I guess that clears the air. What do you want me to do next?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost six.”

  “Great!” she groaned. “All right, just a minute.” She took a sheet of paper, made some pencil marks on it, pushed it over to me. “I’ll just have to get my thoughts in order before everybody arrives.”

  The list had the following names checked off:

  Scott Miranda

  Chuck Saxon

  Abel Harrison

  Dean Wallis

  Willie Frost

  Pete Jensen

  Ruth Goetz

  “Try to round up all of them,” Hilary told me. “Get them here as soon as you can. I’ll phone the police, meanwhile, and get Lou Betterman; it’s got to be him, or we’re lost.”

  “I might have some trouble getting Ruth Goetz here.”

  “Do your best,” Hilary said with unusual affability. “I really need her. Besides, I wouldn’t miss that spectacle for anything.”

  I started out, told her on the way I was sorry we couldn’t have a little time just to discuss the case.

  Her eyebrows raised. “What for?” The tone implied she could see no reason for uncovering her strategy to a mere assistant.

  “Because,” I cracked, “if you really want me to apply for a detective’s license some day, you’re going to have to get used to sharing clues with me.”

  “You couldn’t qualify for one,” she scoffed. “But all right, I’ll tell you two things, anyway.”

  “Which are?”

  “First of all, try to think of each problem as a separate entity. Sid Goetz’s murder. The Trim-Tram spy. Tom Lasker’s death. Certainly,” she said, overriding incipient objections, “they are all, to some extent, interrelated. But they’re also distinct problems, and you’ll find them less confusing if you treat them as such.”

  “All right,” I agreed, “now what’s the second thing?”

  “A little detail we almost missed. A three-dimensional contradiction.”

  “What’s that supposed to imply?”

  “Objects, not words,” she said, cryptically. I tried to pursue it further, but she wouldn’t discuss it any longer. “It’s after six,” she reminded me, “and Scott doesn’t know where we are. Get to
him before he ruins everything by calling in the wrong policeman. Hurry!”

  Assuming that I was once more on Hilary’s payroll, I hurried.

  24

  “I DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT the law, provided I can do my job,” Inspector Betterman told Hilary. “Your story stinks, but put it all in my lap, and the hell with how you dug it out.”

  With that, he plopped into a crimson-colored chair and grunted a food order to the nearest policeman.

  Betterman and three patrolmen had arrived about half an hour after the rest of the company showed up at the Goetz showroom. Hilary wanted it that way, because she was trying to stick to a story in which everything took place subsequent to viewing Lasker’s body.

  According to Hilary, she’d walked into the showroom and found the body late in the afternoon. Her mission: the Trim-Tram spy problem, which, of course, she had to explain to the inspector. She begged to be excused for rooting through Goetz’s office, ostensibly for data on the spy. Other than that, all she’d done was to question the principal suspects just prior to Betterman’s appearance.

  Naturally, he didn’t go for it. Glossing over the fact that Hilary’d touched evidence (the account book, the cartridge box), Betterman was hardly naïve enough to believe Hilary had masterminded a solution just by asking a couple of last-minute questions.

  But he didn’t care. “Do it your own way,” he told her, “and I won’t say a word, provided you make it stick. Otherwise, baby, your ass isn’t worth a dime.”

  I couldn’t figure why his manner didn’t offend her, since she would have detested anyone else who talked to her that way. But Hilary seemed to have a special regard for the inspector, and vice versa. It didn’t stop him from doing his job though. When he first entered, a gang of technicians, photographers, and a medical examiner followed in his wake. They fussed around the body, dusting it, measuring it, snapping its picture. During the festivities, Betterman took Ruth Goetz aside and questioned her. While he did so, Hilary got Frost off in a corner for several minutes. Later, Betterman also had a few brief words with Jensen, followed by a moderately lengthy conclave with the lawyer.

  Hilary got two details from the policeman after the lab squad departed and once he’d completed his preliminary questioning. She learned she was right about time of death for Goetz: he’d been shot late the previous night or very early in the morning. Hilary also found out why Tom Lasker visited the attorney’s office.

  By the time Betterman allowed her to take over the proceedings, it was already way past nine. The Trim-Tram people were a little worn out, what with the usual Toy Fair mess on top of present difficulties. Scott, with the inspector’s permission, had been running in and out; the second-floor showroom still had buyers in it as late as eight o’clock. Jensen and Frost were patient; the former still sunk in despondency, the latter exhibiting a cool, professional detachment. At first, Ruth Goetz displayed impatience at the plodding progress of the investigation, but somewhere along the line it must have occurred to her that it was bad form to insist on keeping a date during her husband’s murder investigation. So, by the time Hilary rose, the outlandishly garbed widow had resigned herself to relegating the bulk of the evening to an explication of the mysteries in which we were all engulfed.

  We were sitting in the shorter leg of the L in which the showroom was shaped, Betterman off to one side, chair tilted against the wall right of the doorway to Goetz’s private office. Left of the door, a foot cop stood, while a second guarded the showroom door. The third cop was out filling sandwich-and-coffee requests.

  The rest of the assemblage ringed three circular tables, three to each. Nearest the inspector was Hilary, Scott, and myself, with my employer back-to-wall so she could see the others. The table to our left was being used by the other Trim-Tram people: Saxon, Wallis, and Harrison. At the third table, on a direct line with ours on the way to the front door, were Frost, Jensen, and Ruth Goetz, the men on either side of the widow.

  Satisfied that her notes were arranged in easy-to-consult order, Hilary rose. Betterman explained succinctly that he was letting her run the show till further notice. Then, folding his hands over his paunch, the policeman nodded at her amiably and rested his head against the wall.

  “Most of us are pretty tired by now,” Hilary began, “so I’ll try to make this concise. But there’s a deal of ground to cover, so please bear with me. The Trim-Tram people, I know, have been filled in on both deaths, Lasker’s and Goetz’s.” She looked at the other table. “But have you people all heard about the knock-off problem? Mr. Frost has. Mrs. Goetz? Mr. Jensen?”

  Jensen nodded mutely. Ruth Goetz, uncomfortable in flamingo-feather evening wear, said nothing ... so she was evidently aware of the Tricky Tires theft, too. As competition, it was wiser for her to play dumb.

  “Very well,” said Hilary, “to begin with, as I told my associate this afternoon, there are three distinct problems here. I have solved two of them. Together, it seems to me, they furnish the necessary materials for the third.”

  “Specifically?” prompted Betterman.

  She inclined her head to him. “There’s no evidence at this point directly bearing on the Goetz murder. Unless your men found something I ... that I don’t know about?”

  Smiling, the policeman pretended not to figure out the near-slip. Without commenting on the lab technicians’ results, he invited her to continue.

  “There are two ways to approach the problem,” she said. “We can identify Lasker’s murderer. Or we can find the Trim-Tram spy, who is also Sid Goetz’s silent partner. Uncover one and you’ve got the other. They’re the same!”

  “Then Tom was not the spy,” Scott interrupted.

  “Wrong.”

  “What!” Scott exclaimed. “You just said the spy killed him!”

  “You’re not letting me finish. Tom Lasker was a spy. He wasn’t the spy.”

  That remark caused a bit of brouhaha, mostly from Scott and the Trim-Tram trio. When it died down, she went on.

  “I should have trusted my first instincts, but Lasker appeared so guilty, I ignored the evidence. But when I heard he was dead, I mulled it over once more, and the inescapable conclusion had to be that Goetz hired Lasker to supply Tricky Tires information, but when Scott made him a vice-president, Lasker dropped Goetz’s project before it was completed.”

  She paused briefly, as the third policeman returned with the coffee and edibles and distributed them. After she’d taken a few swallows of black coffee, Hilary resumed.

  “To save time,” she said, “let’s take Lasker’s complicity for granted, for the reasons I said before—his memory, possession of Harrison’s key, and the fact that Abel saw him in Scott’s office looking at the plans—”

  “Don’t forget the imperfection,” I reminded her, but she shushed me.

  “Never mind that for now, I’ll come to it in a minute. The important thing I want to show now is what I based my assumption of two spies upon. First of all, my associate here did a little outside questioning of one of Lasker’s friends.”

  I watched Saxon, but his face betrayed no emotion.

  “From what I could gather,” said Hilary, “Lasker’s behavior underwent two principal changes in the past several months. He was disappointed, at first, at being put off for a promotion, but he apparently got over it. Assumption—Goetz had begun to pay him for stealing company secrets. Lasker was feeling cocky, defiant, maybe even revenged on Trim-Tram. Then—principal change number two—he was promoted. Now he was grateful, proud of his new position ... he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize it. So he dropped Goetz. But, according to my source, he also seemed worried. Very likely, too—he must have feared exposure by Goetz for his part in filching the racer plans.”

  She turned to Frost. “Now, will you repeat what you told the inspector earlier? About your meeting this morning with Lasker?”

  “Sure,” Frost said, palms up and outspread. “Lasker was terrified that the success of Goetz in knocking off the Trim
-Tram toy would implicate him, even though he had not delivered the final design and paint scheme to Goetz. Anyway, that’s what Tom told me. I said he should talk with Sid, not me, but he wouldn’t leave till he’d had my word I’d keep my mouth shut. I made him give me a dollar, to make it official.” The lawyer looked at me. “That’s why I couldn’t say any more about it when you asked.”

  Hilary continued. “I can well imagine what really happened. Lasker rushed over here to talk to Goetz. The door was unlocked when we arrived”—I suppressed a smile at the tightrope act she was performing for Betterman—“so it must have been open when Lasker rushed over here, too. He must have dashed in, called for Goetz, and found him dead. Lasker probably panicked, started to worry that he’d be implicated in the murder. So he ran to the second person that knew of his under-the-table dealings—Counselor Frost.”

  The counselor gravely inclined his head in agreement.

  “Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. But I did remember that Mr. Frost told my man that Lasker was not the spy. And Mr. Miranda here backed up Frost’s word. Conclusion—there was a second spy.”

  “How does that follow?” Harrison asked, adding his two-cents-worth for the first time that night.

  “Abel, pipe down,” Scott growled, but Hilary told him it was perfectly all right to ask questions as she built up her case.

  “It’s best you stop me if I’m going too fast. I’m apt to abridge some of my conclusions. I just did, I suppose. What Scott told me was that Mr. Frost’s word may be believed to mean neither more nor less than the precise denotation. Thus, when Frost stated that Tom Lasker was not the spy, all it meant was that Lasker was not an agent at that time.”

  Pausing to finish her coffee, Hilary blotted her lips, then checked off another point on the papers spread on the table in front of her. “Next—when we inspected Lasker’s desk, we found a listening device affixed to it. This also pointed to a second spy, someone keeping tabs on Lasker for Goetz. Who but a silent partner, a person with business ties with Goetz Sales? Our Mr. X probably recommended Lasker to Goetz in the first place.”