Lively Game of Death (17 page)

“Why did Sid have to tell you anything about his partner?”

“He had to let me in on some of the deals he had working with the guy. For example, the partner-spy was deferring his profits at year-end, and picking them up a little at a time so the drain wouldn’t be too hard on the business. Sid wanted to be sure there wouldn’t be any difficulty in ‘X’ getting his share if Sid ever kicked off. Or vice versa.”

“All right,” I said, not completely satisfied with the answer, “can we go back to last night? Harry Whelan saw you and Ruth Goetz up in the showroom.”

“Yeah. We met for dinner to discuss divorce proceedings, as you know, because she told you.”

“Oh, she called and filled you in on my session with her?”

“
I
called
her.
Where else could you have found out the Goetz stock percentages? But she was pretty cagey on the phone, told me very little.”

“Last night?” I prompted, impatiently.

“The divorce,” Frost repeated. “We broached it to Sid, and he hit the roof.”

“Why? Did he love his wife that much?”

“No, he was just pissed off that we were bothering him the night before Toy Fair. He wouldn’t discuss it at all.”

“How much do
you
like Ruth Goetz?”

He laughed. “Not enough to murder her husband. I wouldn’t trust her to stick with me that long.”

“Did Sid have a will?”

“Yes, but you can forget that direction. Ruth gets a few thousand, that’s all.”

“Who gets the bulk of the estate?” I asked.

“Guess.”

“Suppose you tell me.”

“If you knew Sid better, you’d figure it out. The only thing he respected was making a buck. He left most of his estate to ‘X’—the silent partner.”

“The Trim-Tram spy?”

“Right on!” he nodded vigorously. “There’s your motive. Figure out who the spy is, and you’ve got your murderer.”

That was all I could think of to ask Frost, so I left, after getting him to promise to stick around his office in case we needed him up at Goetz Sales. As I went out, I thought over what he’d just told me. It sounded queer to me, but the lawyer explained the estate was engineered to pay the spy-partner indirectly, in case he wanted to maintain his “cover” at Trim-Tram. Of course, the spy would have to have a lawyer involved with making contact with Frost. But there was no time to go that route.

After I left Frost’s, I headed across the FAB/1111 bridge, up the fire stairs and back to the tenth floor of Toy Center North. I stopped in again at Bell’s to see why that individual had been arguing in the halls with Goetz the day before. It turned out to be a case of trampled toes.

I also looked in on Pete Jensen. He was as glum as ever, though there was a buyer in the room glancing over the line. I asked Jensen about his flap with Goetz.

The corners of his mouth turned up in a melancholy smile. “It wasn’t anything much,” he told me, “just more nuisance value from Sid. This new item here. ...” He pointed to the little racer I’d admired that morning through his showroom window. “It runs by a little metal dowel about as long as an eraser. I think Sid stole it.”

I looked at the toy again. It stood next to a brightly lettered advertising board which touted the way the racer worked: drop the metal dowel in the fuel tank, and the program imprinted on the dowel would drive the racer along a tabletop or the floor in unpredictable patterns. Twist the dowel a different way before insertion, and a new program would feed into the tank.

There was a printed arrow on the board pointing to the dowel, which should have been affixed to the display. But it was gone.

“When I came back to my showroom, and found not Harry Whelan but Sid, I was sick,” said Jensen. “The first thing I looked for was the racer, my prize item. Sure enough, the dowel was missing.”

“Could it have dropped on the floor?”

He nodded. “Yes, although I’ve searched all over on my hands and knees. Naturally, I accused Sid of taking it, and naturally he denied it. Got ugly about it, in fact. Said he’d get out his gun if I took one step into his showroom.”

The buyer looking over the PeeJayCo. line interrupted Jensen at this point, asking to see the racer in operation. When he tried to explain, Jensen was rebuffed by the businessman.

“I’ll never understand,” the buyer told Jensen, “why you little guys never come into Toy Fair with anything but mock-ups! You expect us to use our imagination?!” He walked out of the room in righteous indignation.

“You see what the small manufacturer has to contend with?” Jensen asked mournfully, his hand rubbing his bearded chin in a manner that, taken along with a slow side-to-side shake of the head, suggested surrender. “If we could afford to sink cash into R&D and production, we’d have the actual toys on the shelves for the buyers to look at. As it is, I have to go with hand samples and prototypic mock-ups.” He slumped down in a chair. “God, nothing’s worth it. Nothing.”

I wished there was something I could do to cheer him up. But if I didn’t get back to Hilary pronto, my future wouldn’t be any too secure, either.

Sunk in gloom, Jensen didn’t even notice me leaving.

F
IVE-THIRTY-FIVE. HILARY
was angry.

I explained I’d taken the time to recheck Frost and Jensen. That mollified her some, but she was still in no mood to waste words.

“Tell me everything,” Hilary directed me, “but eclipse the unimportant details.”

I thought she was giving me a vote of confidence by allowing me to decide what was meaningful or not. But not really. I later learned she had everything pretty well decided by then. During my absence, Hilary had drawn up several alternate charts of probabilities. Once I reported, she simply discarded the inapplicable ones.

At the end of my narration, she winnowed her notes as stated, then told me she needed a few minutes more to sort things out in her head.

“I just want to be sure I’ve got everything clearly in order so I can present the case clearly—”

“Hold on a minute, Hilary,” I said. “I’ve got to ask you something important.”

She looked up at the ceiling, her eyes filled with extreme exasperation. “I have precisely seventeen minutes left! Can’t it wait?”

“No,” I answered. “I’ve got to have a couple of answers from you.”

“All right, what? Make it quick, though!”

I imitated the staccato manner she’d used earlier with Saxon. “Okay—one, why did you move Goetz’s hand? Two, why did you put away the Scrabble set? Three, how did you know Goetz was killed last night? Four—”

“I said make it fast! How many—”

“Four,” I continued, overriding her, “what were you doing here last night?”

That stopped her. But her lips didn’t stay parted long: she rearranged them into an angry moue. “How
dare
you!” Hilary challenged me, her eyes flashing angrily. “You’re on
my
payroll! And you have the
nerve
to pry into—”

“There isn’t time,” I reminded her ungently. “Are you going to answer my questions?”

“Why the hell should I?”

I reached into my pocket and finally produced the Scrabble tiles. “This is why you’d better answer,” I told her, holding the three squares of wood right under her eyes.

If I expected Hilary to be momentarily confused, I was far off base. She merely huffed, “Well, what brought about
this
change of heart?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I assume,” she said, “those are the tiles that were in Goetz’s hand. Nice of you to decide to show me!”

That put me out-of-kilter momentarily. Then the unpleasant thought struck me that Hilary indeed knew too much about the murder. But she scotched that notion before it started.

“To answer your first question,” Hilary told me in no very friendly manner, “I moved Goetz’s hand after I’d seen you’d opened it! You think I’m blind? When I first saw the body, the fist was clenched. After you’d gone out to question Bell, I noticed it had been pried open. It didn’t take a giant intellect to figure there must have been something inside. Nor was it hard to guess what it might have been, with Scrabble parts all over the place—”

“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: