Lively Game of Death
Read Lively Game of Death Online
Authors: Marvin Kaye
A Hilary Quayle Mystery
Marvin Kaye
To my
father
and the memory of my
mother
1
S
ECOND OF ALL, HILARY
and I drove over to The Toy Center, where I got a pair of unpleasant shocks.
The first thing? I guess that’d be the phone call from Scott Miranda, followed by the browbeating of three Trim-Tram VPs ... but those details will have to wait a while. Hilary thinks I’m pretty stupid starting partway into the story, but I don’t give a damn about my blue-eyed boss’s opinion; her sense of literary structure is, as far as I’m concerned, in inverse proportion to her personal structure. With a pair of stiffs to work in, an industrial spy, a sheaf of obscene photographs, a missing toy dowel, and a nude production of
Hamlet,
I’ll be lucky to sort things out in
any
kind of order. I have to simplify, which is almost a contradiction in terms.
So, in the second place, Hilary and I took a trip to The Toy Center, which sounds like one building, but is actually a pair of skyscrapers playing Eng and Chang in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. Situated at the juncture of Twenty-third Street and the convergence of Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the Center is composed of two edifices linked at the ninth-floor level by a bridge across Twenty-fourth Street.
In the old days, before a zealous building management rechristened the sister structures Toy Center North and South, they were simply referred to by their respective addresses: 1111 Broadway and (the larger of the two) 200 Fifth Avenue—sometimes just called FAB for “Fifth Avenue Building.” And just as die-hard New Yorkers persist in calling the Avenue of the Americas by its less colorful, but more informative title, Sixth Avenue, veteran toymen still know The Toy Center as “1111” or “FAB,” depending on which half they maintain a showroom in.
Within the complex are headquarters and showrooms of just about every major (and secondary) toy, hobby, craft, and decorations manufacturer in the U.S.—including Trim-Tram Toys, Hilary’s biggest account.
Once a year, in early March, a kind of corporate frenzy sweeps the halls of The Toy Center. It’s known as the American Toy Fair. For more than two weeks, buyers from all over America and abroad flock to 1111 and FAB to view new lines of playthings designed for the coming Christmas season. Manufacturers trot out their latest items, show current TV commercials, shower visiting buyers with presents, prizes, and free lunches, then whip out order pads and hope to sell enough merchandise to get an early reading on which numbers are likely to be in greatest demand.
There is no more crucial market in the toymaker’s year than Toy Fair, and many concerns have thrived or dived solely on the strength or weakness of their performance during one or two consecutive Marches.
Now when Hilary and I showed up at the Center, it was very early in the morning of the opening day of the eighty-ninth annual Fair. Corridors were packed with out-of-town buyers and sales reps, while knots of toymen—God knows why they like to be called that—milled in front of showroom doors. At a desk in the FAB lobby, new arrivals queued up to receive their lapel identification badges (just
try
to get into a showroom without one) while nearby, toothsome models in micro-miniskirts smiled vacuously and touted the wares of one of the more promotion-minded suppliers.
We stepped on the express elevator to the ninth floor, then walked across the bridge into 1111, making poor time because of the thick pedestrian traffic. At the far edge of the bridge, I noticed a cluster of businessmen gathered about a card table, all of them staring downward. I peeped over some shoulders to see what the attraction was, and I could have saved myself the effort. The table held a stack of trade newspapers bearing banner headlines that pompously proclaimed the “hot” news that Toy Fair had officially opened.
Our quarry, Sid Goetz, had his showroom on the tenth floor. Since 1111 elevators are few and slow, we decided to walk up.
As soon as I pushed open the fire door to the tenth floor, I knew something was wrong. The first thing I saw, directly opposite the exit stairwell, was the entrance to room 1006 of 1111 Broadway: Goetz Sales Co. Across the glass portion of the showroom door was plastered a large sheet of brown paper, the kind that butchers use to wrap chunks of raw meat.
The paper concealed the room’s interior from view. I didn’t like what I couldn’t see.
Let me explain one thing: the mere presence of the wrapping paper was not, in itself, sinister. Goetz was only following a common toy-industry practice of blocking off from view all showroom doors and windows for several weeks prior to the Fair. The purpose of this procedure is to prevent competitors from glimpsing new merchandise and possibly stealing design ideas. (In Goetz’s case, the use of brown paper was ironic. For twenty years, Goetz was the most unscrupulous industrial thief in the business. In trade parlance, he was king of the knock-off artists.)
So it wasn’t the paper that bothered me; it was the timing. Goetz Sales was the only silent spot in the whole brouhaha of the trade show. Something had to be out of kilter; it was unthinkable that the monarch of the fast-buck merchants would not be open for business on the biggest single market day of the entire commercial year.
Hilary strode across the crowded corridor and, as usual, a sea of men parted to let her pass. I managed to stay close behind, not without some toe-trampling, suffered and inflicted.
The door was unlocked, another disquieting omen. Hilary shoved it open and walked inside. I followed, noting that all the showroom lights were on.
It was a big place. Most of it was devoted to a sales-display area filled with circular, white-topped tables and crimson-tinted plastic chairs. Fluorescent lighting shed an eye-wearying glare throughout the suite ... a glare that was aggravated by the stark white of the pegboard walls.
But those walls were also offset with plenty of color. A riot of brightly hued toys dangled from hooks or perched upon shelves. There was everything from scarlet firemen’s hats and lemon-yellow sandpails to action hockey games in Day-Glo boxes. There were also mod-toned automobile models, pastel-tint preschool activity sets, and one platinum-tressed, buxom, walking-talking-dancing fashion doll. Even to our hurried glance, it was apparent that the items in Goetz’s line shared little in common, mute testimony to the knock-off artist’s eclectic approach to R&D (research and development).
Off to one side, an open door led into a small, unoccupied office, presumably Goetz’s.
On first glance, the showroom seemed to be empty and nothing appeared to be out of place. (The latter was understandable: Goetz had a reputation for being so fanatically neat that he’d once fired a salesman for habitually dog-earing order blanks.) I turned out to be wrong on both counts.
Hilary nudged me. I looked where she was pointing and saw something untidy in a far corner of the room, near one of the circular tables. It was a group of small objects, spilled carelessly about. I squinted, but the harsh glare made further detail impossible to discern. I walked across the room for a better look.
If you’ve ever played Scrabble you know that there are small polished blocks of wood used in the game to form words with. Each tile, made of close-grained wood from the Black Forest, bears a letter of the alphabet on its face, together with the scoring value of that letter. These letter tiles were the small objects that I had seen scattered on the top of the round table and across the floor. As I drew near, I also noticed the game box on the tabletop, while the lid was tossed aside, several feet away.
I walked a few steps, stooped to pick up the lid, and froze.
Behind the table, partially hidden by it, a heavyset man was sprawled facedown upon the rug. I rolled him over partway, saw that the front of his shirt and jacket were badly rumpled.
Then I noticed the bullet hole in his gut.
Hilary joined me, saw the remains. Her composure was unruffled by the sight.
“Goetz?” I asked.
She nodded. Then she walked off in the direction of Goetz’s office.
I searched the area around the body. Except for the helter-skelter letter tiles, which made the tan carpet resemble a sea of alphabet soup, nothing else seemed to be out of place.
But something was bothering me, something I’d seen from the corner of my eye. I returned to the table and carefully scrutinized the immediate vicinity again.
And then I saw it clearly: a small corner of wood protruding from the clenched right fist of the dead man.
I pried open the fingers, and got my second shock.
The lifeless hand clutched three of the glossy-faced wooden letter tiles, a desperate terminal message from the victim.
B
EFORE I TELL YOU
what was on those Scrabble tiles and why they figuratively socked me in the gut, I have to backtrack and set Hilary in perspective.
Hilary Quayle heads her own PR—public relations—agency, a one-woman operation called “Hilary Ultd.” Though she does most of the work herself, she tries to keep a man handy to answer the phone, sort the mail, pound out routine releases, and run errands. She will hire only men, even though the pressure of working for her apparently used to keep the turnover fairly high. But she never minded the time she had to invest in the past training new secretaries. Just the opposite, in fact. Until I took the job, breaking in new lackeys—or just breaking them—was the lady’s hobby.
The day before I got the job I returned to New York, a little to the lee side of being hopelessly broke. It was late afternoon; I was unsuccessfully attempting to fight off a bout of depression in one of those overpriced bistros off Shubert Alley that hang celebrities’ pictures in the windows, yet rarely draw any business from working thespians.
I was downing a Bushmill’s-on-the-rocks when a resort comic I knew poked my shoulder and exchanged banalities with me. I was prodigal enough to stand him to a drink. Midway through the libation, I asked him where I could find work.
He mumbled something about the job market being pretty tight and eyed the door. But he asked me what I could do.
“Not a hell of a lot,” I shrugged. “Back in Ohio, I used to knock out a couple of news stories for the local paper, strictly relief-shift crap. Otherwise? Well, I don’t have any other qualifications in particular.”