Lively Game of Death (11 page)

“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.”

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.”

“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.”