Lively Game of Death (18 page)

Scott Miranda

Chuck Saxon

Abel Harrison

Dean Wallis

Willie Frost

Pete Jensen

Ruth Goetz

“Try to round up all of them,” Hilary told me. “Get them here as soon as you can. I’ll phone the police, meanwhile, and get Lou Betterman; it’s got to be him, or we’re lost.”

“I might have some trouble getting Ruth Goetz here.”

“Do your best,” Hilary said with unusual affability. “I really need her. Besides, I wouldn’t miss
that
spectacle for anything.”

I started out, told her on the way I was sorry we couldn’t have a little time just to discuss the case.

Her eyebrows raised. “What for?” The tone implied she could see no reason for uncovering her strategy to a mere assistant.

“Because,” I cracked, “if you really want me to apply for a detective’s license some day, you’re going to have to get used to sharing clues with me.”

“You couldn’t qualify for one,” she scoffed. “But all right, I’ll tell you two things, anyway.”

“Which are?”

“First of all, try to think of each problem as a separate entity. Sid Goetz’s murder. The Trim-Tram spy. Tom Lasker’s death. Certainly,” she said, overriding incipient objections, “they are all, to some extent, interrelated. But they’re also distinct problems, and you’ll find them less confusing if you treat them as such.”

“All right,” I agreed, “now what’s the second thing?”

“A little detail we almost missed. A three-dimensional contradiction.”

“What’s that supposed to imply?”

“Objects, not words,” she said, cryptically. I tried to pursue it further, but she wouldn’t discuss it any longer. “It’s after six,” she reminded me, “and Scott doesn’t know where we are. Get to him before he ruins everything by calling in the wrong policeman. Hurry!”

Assuming that I was once more on Hilary’s payroll, I hurried.

“
I DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT
the law, provided I can do my job,” Inspector Betterman told Hilary. “Your story stinks, but put it all in my lap, and the hell with how you dug it out.”

With that, he plopped into a crimson-colored chair and grunted a food order to the nearest policeman.

Betterman and three patrolmen had arrived about half an hour after the rest of the company showed up at the Goetz showroom. Hilary wanted it that way, because she was trying to stick to a story in which everything took place subsequent to viewing Lasker’s body.

According to Hilary, she’d walked into the showroom and found the body late in the afternoon. Her mission: the Trim-Tram spy problem, which, of course, she had to explain to the inspector. She begged to be excused for rooting through Goetz’s office, ostensibly for data on the spy. Other than that, all she’d done was to question the principal suspects just prior to Betterman’s appearance.

Naturally, he didn’t go for it. Glossing over the fact that Hilary’d touched evidence (the account book, the cartridge box), Betterman was hardly naïve enough to believe Hilary had masterminded a solution just by asking a couple of last-minute questions.

But he didn’t care. “Do it your own way,” he told her, “and I won’t say a word, provided you make it stick. Otherwise, baby, your ass isn’t worth a dime.”

I couldn’t figure why his manner didn’t offend her, since she would have detested anyone else who talked to her that way. But Hilary seemed to have a special regard for the inspector, and vice versa. It didn’t stop him from doing his job though. When he first entered, a gang of technicians, photographers, and a medical examiner followed in his wake. They fussed around the body, dusting it, measuring it, snapping its picture. During the festivities, Betterman took Ruth Goetz aside and questioned her. While he did so, Hilary got Frost off in a corner for several minutes. Later, Betterman also had a few brief words with Jensen, followed by a moderately lengthy conclave with the lawyer.

Hilary got two details from the policeman after the lab squad departed and once he’d completed his preliminary questioning. She learned she was right about time of death for Goetz: he’d been shot late the previous night or very early in the morning. Hilary also found out why Tom Lasker visited the attorney’s office.

By the time Betterman allowed her to take over the proceedings, it was already way past nine. The Trim-Tram people were a little worn out, what with the usual Toy Fair mess on top of present difficulties. Scott, with the inspector’s permission, had been running in and out; the second-floor showroom still had buyers in it as late as eight o’clock. Jensen and Frost were patient; the former still sunk in despondency, the latter exhibiting a cool, professional detachment. At first, Ruth Goetz displayed impatience at the plodding progress of the investigation, but somewhere along the line it must have occurred to her that it was bad form to insist on keeping a date during her husband’s murder investigation. So, by the time Hilary rose, the outlandishly garbed widow had resigned herself to relegating the bulk of the evening to an explication of the mysteries in which we were all engulfed.

We were sitting in the shorter leg of the L in which the showroom was shaped, Betterman off to one side, chair tilted against the wall right of the doorway to Goetz’s private office. Left of the door, a foot cop stood, while a second guarded the showroom door. The third cop was out filling sandwich-and-coffee requests.

The rest of the assemblage ringed three circular tables, three to each. Nearest the inspector was Hilary, Scott, and myself, with my employer back-to-wall so she could see the others. The table to our left was being used by the other Trim-Tram people: Saxon, Wallis, and Harrison. At the third table, on a direct line with ours on the way to the front door, were Frost, Jensen, and Ruth Goetz, the men on either side of the widow.

Satisfied that her notes were arranged in easy-to-consult order, Hilary rose. Betterman explained succinctly that he was letting her run the show till further notice. Then, folding his hands over his paunch, the policeman nodded at her amiably and rested his head against the wall.

“Most of us are pretty tired by now,” Hilary began, “so I’ll try to make this concise. But there’s a deal of ground to cover, so please bear with me. The Trim-Tram people, I know, have been filled in on both deaths, Lasker’s and Goetz’s.” She looked at the other table. “But have you people all heard about the knock-off problem? Mr. Frost has. Mrs. Goetz? Mr. Jensen?”

Jensen nodded mutely. Ruth Goetz, uncomfortable in flamingo-feather evening wear, said nothing ... so she was evidently aware of the Tricky Tires theft, too. As competition, it was wiser for her to play dumb.

“Very well,” said Hilary, “to begin with, as I told my associate this afternoon, there are three distinct problems here. I have solved two of them. Together, it seems to me, they furnish the necessary materials for the third.”

“Specifically?” prompted Betterman.

She inclined her head to him. “There’s no evidence at this point directly bearing on the Goetz murder. Unless your men found something I ... that I don’t know about?”

Smiling, the policeman pretended not to figure out the near-slip. Without commenting on the lab technicians’ results, he invited her to continue.

“There are two ways to approach the problem,” she said. “We can identify Lasker’s murderer. Or we can find the Trim-Tram spy, who is also Sid Goetz’s silent partner. Uncover one and you’ve got the other. They’re the same!”

“Then Tom was
not
the spy,” Scott interrupted.

“Wrong.”

“What!” Scott exclaimed. “You just said the spy killed him!”

“You’re not letting me finish. Tom Lasker was
a
spy. He wasn’t
the
spy.”

That remark caused a bit of brouhaha, mostly from Scott and the Trim-Tram trio. When it died down, she went on.

“I should have trusted my first instincts, but Lasker appeared so guilty, I ignored the evidence. But when I heard he was dead, I mulled it over once more, and the inescapable conclusion had to be that Goetz hired Lasker to supply Tricky Tires information, but when Scott made him a vice-president, Lasker dropped Goetz’s project before it was completed.”

She paused briefly, as the third policeman returned with the coffee and edibles and distributed them. After she’d taken a few swallows of black coffee, Hilary resumed.

“To save time,” she said, “let’s take Lasker’s complicity for granted, for the reasons I said before—his memory, possession of Harrison’s key, and the fact that Abel saw him in Scott’s office looking at the plans—”

“Don’t forget the imperfection,” I reminded her, but she shushed me.

“Never mind that for now, I’ll come to it in a minute. The important thing I want to show now is what I based my assumption of two spies upon. First of all, my associate here did a little outside questioning of one of Lasker’s friends.”

I watched Saxon, but his face betrayed no emotion.

“From what I could gather,” said Hilary, “Lasker’s behavior underwent two principal changes in the past several months. He was disappointed, at first, at being put off for a promotion, but he apparently got over it. Assumption—Goetz had begun to pay him for stealing company secrets. Lasker was feeling cocky, defiant, maybe even revenged on Trim-Tram. Then—principal change number two—he was promoted. Now he was grateful, proud of his new position ... he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize it. So he dropped Goetz. But, according to my source, he also seemed worried. Very likely, too—he must have feared exposure by Goetz for his part in filching the racer plans.”

She turned to Frost. “Now, will you repeat what you told the inspector earlier? About your meeting this morning with Lasker?”

“Sure,” Frost said, palms up and outspread. “Lasker was terrified that the success of Goetz in knocking off the Trim-Tram toy would implicate him, even though he had not delivered the final design and paint scheme to Goetz. Anyway, that’s what Tom told me. I said he should talk with Sid, not me, but he wouldn’t leave till he’d had my word I’d keep my mouth shut. I made him give me a dollar, to make it official.” The lawyer looked at me. “That’s why I couldn’t say any more about it when you asked.”

Hilary continued. “I can well imagine what really happened. Lasker rushed over here to talk to Goetz. The door was unlocked when
we
arrived”—I suppressed a smile at the tightrope act she was performing for Betterman—“so it must have been open when Lasker rushed over here, too. He must have dashed in, called for Goetz, and found him dead. Lasker probably panicked, started to worry that he’d be implicated in the murder. So he ran to the second person that knew of his under-the-table dealings—Counselor Frost.”

The counselor gravely inclined his head in agreement.

“Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. But I did remember that Mr. Frost told my man that Lasker was
not
the spy. And Mr. Miranda here backed up Frost’s word. Conclusion—there was a second spy.”

“How does that follow?” Harrison asked, adding his two-cents-worth for the first time that night.

“Abel, pipe down,” Scott growled, but Hilary told him it was perfectly all right to ask questions as she built up her case.

“It’s best you stop me if I’m going too fast. I’m apt to abridge some of my conclusions. I just did, I suppose. What Scott told me was that Mr. Frost’s word may be believed to mean neither more nor less than the precise denotation. Thus, when Frost stated that Tom Lasker was not the spy, all it meant was that Lasker was not an agent
at that time.”

Pausing to finish her coffee, Hilary blotted her lips, then checked off another point on the papers spread on the table in front of her. “Next—when we inspected Lasker’s desk, we found a listening device affixed to it. This also pointed to a second spy, someone keeping tabs on Lasker for Goetz. Who but a silent partner, a person with business ties with Goetz Sales? Our Mr. X probably recommended Lasker to Goetz in the first place.”

“Now,” Hilary continued, picking up the black two-ring account book Betterman had permitted her to remove from Goetz’s desk drawer, “here is the most suggestive single bit of evidence. This book, more than anything else, persuaded me to assume the existence of two Trim-Tram spies.” She opened it to the pages I’d scanned. “It contains a careful rendering on incoming monies and expenditures of Goetz Sales on a day-to-day basis—”

“Get your hands off that!” Ruth Goetz commanded, rising from her seat. “That’s
my
property now!”

Betterman inclined his head an inch, and the patrolman nearest the door put a gentle, but firm hand on Mrs. Goetz’s shoulder and pushed her into her seat. Frost leaned over and whispered to her. She bitched back at first, but after another
sotto voce
exchange, quieted down.

The inspector, biting into a No. 3 Blimpie, said nothing. Hilary waited for everyone to focus on her once more before continuing.

“As I was saying, this book contains some interesting information. Mr. Goetz evidently kept his own private shorthand and abbreviations for transactions done. But the important thing to note is that he apparently made a note of
everything
he spent in some form or another. Of course there are some standard abbreviations—accounts receivable, payroll, postage, materials, inventory, telephone, and rent, just to run down some of the entries on these two pages. And, incidentally, I see, for example, that he made sure to get his payroll for the factory employees deposited in ample time, on February tenth for payment of the fifteenth ... well, never mind, that’s immaterial.”

I smiled to myself, remembering the entry recording Harry Whelan’s salary of February first unpaid until the seventh of that month. Apparently, Hilary stopped herself from bringing up the nice irony of Goetz’s regard for the two classes of employee; I guessed she wanted to keep the actor from getting dragged out of rehearsal to answer a lot of unnecessary questions.

“For our purposes,” Hilary proceeded, “there are four entries—all of them expenditures—that we should note. The first was entered on January twenty-seventh, and it indicates ‘DEF PR, twelve mo’ to someone simply designated as ‘Y.’ Again, Mr. Frost proved helpful. What does January twenty-seven mean to you, counselor?”