Lively Game of Death (13 page)

“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 workers—”

“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
. ...”

I
T 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.”

It was the wrong tone to use with her, as he soon found out. But she followed him inside, motioning me to come along.

He took us into a private office opening off the crowded showroom. Shutting the door, Scott began telling off Hilary politely enough—but the gist of it was that we couldn’t keep Goetz’s death a secret any longer.

“I thought,” he said, “that a murder would play hell with the buying activity, but those guys are more callous than I gave them credit for. You see the way most of them walked on past, paying no attention?”

Hilary didn’t answer. Crossing her arms, she stared sullenly out the window overlooking Madison Square Park. Her lips were compressed into a hard, tight line. She refused to speak.

“Damn it, Hilary!” Scott snapped, after he’d repeated himself twice. “We’ve got to tell the police! And will you answer me?”

She said nothing.

“I’m grateful you solved the spy crisis,” he went on, “but, for crissake, Tom Lasker’s death must be linked up with Goetz’s murder, and sooner or later the connection has got to come out. We can’t ignore the situation! Besides, eventually, somebody’s going to wonder where the hell Sid is—”

“Sooner or later?” I laughed hollowly. “You’re forgetting Ruth Goetz is only biding her time.”

“All right, that is enough!” Hilary snapped, finally turning around and deigning to speak. “What do you want me to do, Scott? Forget about the whole thing? All right! There’s a photo session this afternoon I’m supposed to be arranging on the Little Missy Tea Sets, and I’m not crazy about putting it in Dean Wallis’ hands! You want me out of this mess? All right—but don’t drag me into anything like this again!”

She rose, pushed her chair violently against the wall, and started to round the table on her way to the door. Scott intercepted her, took her shoulders in his oversize, bony hands. He pushed her gently back toward a seat.

“Don’t go having a tantrum, Hilary, it’s not worth it! Just tell me where we stand! Do you know who killed Sid? Because if you do, there’s nothing wrong with our calling the police, is there? We could dump the whole thing in their laps, tied up tidily. But what the hell am I supposed to do if you won’t let me in on what you’re thinking?”

She rubbed her fingers against her temples. “Look, I’m sorry, I’ve got a headache. And this whole business is more complicated than I suspected.”

“Then you don’t know—”

She didn’t let him finish. “Please don’t rush me, Scott. If it were anybody but Goetz ... well, anyway, there are too many other factors, and I don’t have all the data that I need. No, don’t interrupt! Let me explain. There are three distinct problems here—Goetz’s murder, but I already know the answer to that one. Second—”

Both Scott and I exclaimed, but we couldn’t persuade Hilary to elaborate on her boast.