Lively Game of Death (2 page)

“There you are!” he beamed, patting me on the back. “You’re perfect for PR!”

The following day, I found myself walking up West End Avenue to an address in the high Eighties. My friend’s PR gal, a lady named Hilary who handled him on contingency (and still does), needed a new assistant. Experience not essential.

The only thing he would tell me about her was her name. But I had a clear mental picture—and Hefner wouldn’t hang it in his bedroom—of the kind of independent PR woman who would put nothing but “Hilary Ultd.” on her letterhead.

I was way off base. She turned out to be quite striking, with a long, curved neck; light golden hair that might look silky if it weren’t tied severely in back, and a pair of sky-blue orbs capable of a large repertoire of moods. I guessed her to be in her early thirties.

Hilary is not a pneumatic nightmare, and some men would probably dismiss her as “small” ... which would be their loss. “Petite” is
le mot juste;
within that frame of reference, any mature male ought to find her in excellent proportion—subtly, but amply curved. And she has a knack for dressing in a businesslike fashion that somehow simultaneously manages to be tantalizing ... no mean sartorial trick. The day I met her, she was wearing a sedate blue wool suit that might have hung depressingly straight on another woman. But on Hilary, it clung.

During the interview, I found her manner enigmatic. I think she wanted to appear quietly, perhaps cautiously, charming. But I sensed an internal tightness, a kind of coiled tension, which I’ve since learned is the quintessence of the woman.

That session was extremely unorthodox. Oh, it included the usual literacy test and typing run, as well as the expected serving up of a few polite fictions from my past. But I didn’t expect her to include martini mixing as one of her requirements. ...

There were a few other odd trials in store, but I’ll skip directly to the capper. She rose from her chair and motioned me to follow her into a back hallway.

Pointing to a door, she said, “It’s more convenient for me if my secretary lives in. This is where he usually sleeps, next to the library.” She smiled at me. “That’s handy, in case of insomnia.”

Her eyebrows arched knowingly, Hilary asked me if the “live-in” arrangement would be suitable. I stammered my acquiescence to the condition, rather staggered by her apparent directness. Not shocked ... just stunned, as if I’d walked into the Smithsonian and the curator awarded me the Hope Diamond as a door prize.

But I was completely misreading her. The lady pushed open a second door, farther down the same hall. Saying, “This is my bedroom. I may want you to bring me something from it sometime,” she stood by the threshold, apparently expecting me to look inside.

So I did. Through the open portal I was able to view a queen-sized bed, an unfrilly dresser with attendant mirror, and a small night table next to the bed. On top of the table lay a pile of books ... and one wicked-looking revolver.

Hilary shut the door and walked away.

I was hired.

Soon I learned why Hilary prefers to have her assistant living on the premises. She generally has to stay out till all A.M.’s chaperoning reporters at late press suppers, sitting in on corporate conferences, sometimes pitching last-minute promotional campaigns to network execs.

Consequently, Hilary rolls into bed most nights at erratic, entertainer’s hours and is seldom up again before noon. So one of my prime duties is to answer the telephone in the early morning, take messages, and when possible, carry on routine business. Most important, I have to constantly remind clients of Hilary’s first commandment: “No interruptions before twelve noon”—a dictum that enables her to avoid accruing a burdensome number of accounts.

Now Hilary’s oldest and biggest client, as I mentioned, is Trim-Tram Toys, a company headed by one of her closest college friends, Scott Miranda. Well acquainted with Hilary’s idiosyncrasies, Scott knows and respects the lady’s don’t-call-in-the-morning rule.

So it was surprising to pick up the receiver Toy Fair morning and hear Scott pleading with me to wake Hilary and get her to the phone.

It wasn’t even seven o’clock, and I was barely awake myself. As usual, Hilary had been out late the night before. I hadn’t even heard her come in. If it had been anybody else calling, I would have refused point-blank to embark on what promised to be a suicide mission. I’d rather goose a tiger than enter Hilary’s boudoir and peer down her pistol barrel.

But Scott, who knew the score, was still asking me to get her to the phone, so I figured it was a first-class emergency. I screwed up my courage, crossed my fingers, turned the knob to her bedroom, and walked in.

My instincts weren’t far wrong. As soon as I tapped her on the shoulder, Hilary woke, whirled, and grabbed the gun. She pointed it at my chest.

“I was wondering when this would happen,” she rasped, flint-hard.

I thought of a few things I wanted to snap back at her, but I restricted myself to a brief, factual bulletin on the phone call.

It surprised her as much as it did me. Kicking off the covers, Hilary slid out of bed. I blinked. She was completely naked.

There are four major curves to the spinal column, and Hilary wore them all well. I only got a glimpse of the rest, for she quickly pulled on a robe as soon as she realized what she’d done. She wasted no time on false modesty, but shot me a single look which seemed to tell me that any flip comment would prove terminal.

The conversation didn’t last long. Sitting by her desk in the office, Hilary spoke to the president of Trim-Tram in throaty monosyllables. After half a dozen question-and-answer exchanges, she cradled the phone on its hook and her head in her hands.

Her hair was hanging down, and it was indeed silky.

A long, silent moment passed. When Hilary finally spoke, it was without moving from her attitude of suffering.

“Get out the car keys,” she groaned. “We have to rush over to Trim-Tram.”

“Why?”

“Somebody stole Tricky Tires and sold it to Sid Goetz.”

That explained why she’d personally agreed to come to the toy firm, even though she was still three-quarters asleep. Hilary has a not-so-secret ambition—or, rather, a frustrated desire—to be a private detective, of which, as the Bard says, more anon. Her friend, Scott Miranda, must have asked her to find out the identity of the spy at Trim-Tram. It was the only kind of appeal that could have gotten her moving so early.

Normally, I would have been left behind like a good little boy to mind the office, but I was included because she wanted me to drive. Hilary would never trust herself behind a wheel in what was, to her, still the middle of the night.

T
HE TRIM-TRAM HEADQUARTERS IS
situated on a trash-littered plain just east of Queens. The place is literally a fortress: a dreary pile with three sets of locks on each door, armed guards patrolling the halls, and hidden TV cameras positioned in all the chilly corridors and over every entranceway.

Scott Miranda has the locks changed on the doors every week or so, and he allows only two other executives to own full sets of keys. I’ve even heard him boast that Trim-Tram has better security than Fort Knox.

The hush-hush gimmickry is understandable, of course. The company plows hundreds of thousands of dollars annually into R&D, construction of prototypes, package design, test marketing, and promotion; it’s not about to serve it all up on a platter to the first knock-off artist brazen enough to walk through the front door.

The irony was that the elaborate protective system hadn’t saved the firm from internal attack. Goetz apparently had gathered enough confidential data to copy the firm’s latest Toy Fair entry in the miniature auto-racing line: a flashy little scaled-down speed vehicle called Tricky Tires.

When I braked to a stop in a parking space, the Trim-Tram lot was practically empty. Hilary, who’d been reclining in the back seat, hadn’t said a word during the ride. But as I turned off the ignition, she spoke, and I couldn’t believe what she said.

Turning around to her, I pretended not to have heard, asked her to repeat what she’d just said.

She mumbled, “I said I’m sorry,” and looked out the window, away from me.

“Sorry? For what?”

She wouldn’t turn around. “For the way I acted this morning. I made a mistake.” She paused, then added, in a lower tone, “I was wrong about you.”

What the hell
do
you say to a naked lady? I could cope with the sarcasms of Hilary the Dominant, but this temporary abdication of authority confused me. I murmured something inept about her being justified in wanting to protect herself, considering her “attractive femininity.” The last phrase was uninspired flattery, and I fully expected it to bring on a healthy caustic sally.

So I was surprised to see her turn back to me with a little humorous uptilt creasing the corner of her mouth. She said, a little sheepishly, “I guess, after this morning, you can’t help but consider my femininity.”

She put a hand briefly, too briefly, on my arm.

“Y
OU MEAN THEY’RE NOT
the same?” I asked.

Dean Wallis, Trim-Tram’s advertising manager, retrieved the set of eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white product shots he’d given me to examine and shook his head. “These pictures,” he said, fishing a few of the photos from the pile and separating them from the rest, “are the ones that I took. All the rest are of the Goetz knock-off.”

I looked across the table at Hilary, who shrugged, saying, “I thought they were all pictures of Tricky Tires, too.”

“And there you are,” Wallis said, spreading his hands and smiling. “If this young man cannot tell the difference between the two toys, what hope is there for us when the consumer sees our car on the same retail counter as the Goetz knock-off? Not to mention the buyers who are going to walk into the two showrooms this week!”

There were four of us in the combination office/boardroom, a place shaped something like a thermometer on its side. The conference table where we sat ran the length of the long, narrow room, at the far end of which opened a spacious office belonging to the company president, Scott Miranda. The latter cavity contained a few leatherette chairs, several filing cabinets, and a polished teakwood desk holding a phone, blotter and pen stand, and a gold replica of Trim-Tram’s first toy.

The lanky chief executive—a haggard look on his angular face—was resting against the high-backed chair positioned at the short end of the table nearest the office. To his right and left, respectively, along the long sides of the table, sat Hilary and I.

Wallis stood between Scott and Hilary at the right angle of the tabletop. My position across from my boss enabled me to watch her attempt to stifle the dislike she felt for the adman, whose pomposity of manner was the perfect match for his short, blubbery frame.

Scott had said almost nothing so far, choosing to let the other brief us on the problem. So it was Wallis’ show, and he was clearly enjoying his chance to be the center of attention. Pointing a pudgy finger at a colorful chrome-and-plastic toy auto on the table in front of him, he informed us that we were looking at the prototype of Tricky Tires.

“This handmade model,” he wheezed, “has never left this room in the past seven months. And the master engineering plans are always returned to the office at the end of the day. Unless, of course, they have not been out of the office in the first place, which is the more usual occurrence.”

“And where are the plans put?” Hilary asked.

“I was, of course, coming to that next. Mr. Miranda locks them up each night in his desk.”

“And I’m the only one with a key to the desk,” Scott said, cracking his knuckles in a kind of percussive punctuation.

Hilary put out a gloved hand and took the proffered prototype from Wallis. She examined the model, turning it over and over, comparing it with the two sets of glossies.

It was a one-thirty-second scale model of “Buzz” Armstrong-Stewart’s so-called Funny Car, which he named, of course Tricky Tires. The original of the racer was the hottest thing going, for it seemed to defy physics and come in ahead of more logically styled vehicles at various competitions. The Trim-Tram version was miniscule but identical, complete even to the inclusion of a miniature head-and-shoulders of Armstrong-Stewart protruding from the driver’s seat.

I looked at the photos of the Goetz knock-off. Although I had to mentally transfer the prototype into two dimensions, as well as monochrome, it was obvious to me that both playthings were derived from a common design. (In fact, Wallis had earlier boasted that Tricky Tires followed the precise engineering specs of the life-sized original down to the inch. Since Armstrong-Stewart’s licensor had granted an exclusive permit to Trim-Tram to make a toy version of the car, Goetz could not have achieved the accuracy of his toy in any other way but by copying his competitor’s design.)

Hilary, removing her gloves, asked Wallis when the photos of the Trim-Tram toy had been taken.

“Oh, I shot the series about six weeks ago, if I remember correctly.”

“Where?”

“In this office, of course! I told you—the prototype has not been out of here ever since it was built.”

“But what about the film itself?” she asked. “Maybe the lab—”

Wallis was already shaking his head ponderously, a condescending little smirk on his lips. “No, no, Hilary dear, you’ll have to do better than that. I developed the film myself and personally took the prints to the trade magazines. That’s how we found out just last night that Goetz is knocking us off. Gorman Clancy, the publisher of
Buying Toys and Hobbies
saw the similarity in the pictures of Tricky Tires and the Goetz knock-off, and he gave me a call. That’s how I got these photos of Goetz’s car.”

Hilary mumbled something about professional ethics in trade journalism circles, then began to ask Wallis why he’d quit Goetz Sales three years ago to work for Trim-Tram, but Scott cut her short.

“Dean had better get over to the FAB showroom, Hilary. He’ll have to cover for you today, or at least till we can crack this thing.”