Lively Game of Death (6 page)

Anyway, she just sat there, running the tip of the nail file between the finger and nail of one digit. Scott tried to stay patient for a while, but at length, he lost control.

“Damn it, Hilary,” he finally said, exasperated, “don’t just sit there! Say something!”

She stared at him as if he were a mosquito disturbing her sleep. “What are you waiting for me to say?”

“Whether Tom is the spy or not.”

She shrugged. “Possibly. I have to think about it some more.”

“He knew he was supposed to stick around for further questioning. Why did he run off like that?”

“Any of a number of reasons, not all of them sinister,” Hilary said. “He may have forgotten to turn off the stove.”

“Well, you’d better chase over to FAB and see if you can track him down. I’ll bet he’s headed for Goetz Sales.”

That’s what I thought, too, but it failed to spark Hilary’s interest.

“What if he is, Scott? If he’s the spy, he’s given himself away, because you can always find out from Harry Whelan whether Lasker showed up this morning. Or if he’s just on his way to beat up Goetz, then he’s performing a service. So why rush over there?” She put the nail file away and stood up. “Right now, if I can sit by myself for a few minutes with a pencil and paper, I want to draw those charts; I’ve got a notion of what happened here, but I want to see it on paper before I make any accusations.”

Scott shook his head. “Not now, Hilary. I definitely want you to get on over to Goetz Sales.”

“I just told you—” she began testily, but he waved his hand slightly to cut her off.

“No, not just to check on Tom Lasker. I’ve got another important job I want done.”

She looked at him for a few seconds, then shook her head energetically.

“No, Scott! No way—absolutely not!”

“But, Hilary, you’ve already stood up to Goetz! You can probably work out a better deal than any Trim-Tram executive, and that includes our lawyers. You understand Sid’s psychology.”

She chose to ignore the dubious compliment, merely pointing out that she was supposed to be handling PR for Trim-Tram. “I don’t mind taking some time out for a little ratiocination, but I am
not
a one-woman arbitration committee!”

Scott pleaded with her, explaining that any deal between Goetz and Trim-Tram would have to be formally concluded via contracts, attorneys, the whole
schmeer.
“All I’m asking is that you give Sid an initial scare, and get the crook to agree to the lowest percentage you can manage. Start insultingly low, but don’t go above, say, nine or ten per cent. You can do it, Hilary, I know it! Besides,” he turned to me, “you have a certain amount of muscular persuasion on your side.”

I thanked him rather drily for the compliment. Hilary just grimaced.

W
HEN I PICKED THOSE
Scrabble tiles out of Sid Goetz’s dead fist, I started to worry. But when Hilary instructed me not to phone the police, I really began to ask myself just what I actually knew about her.

The background I could fill in well enough, because I make it a point to find out such things. In PR work, you’re only as valuable as the cordial contacts you can make with the members of the press; so, shortly after she hired me, Hilary suggested I take our various reporters and editors to lunch, just to get acquainted.

I used such occasions to dig for data on my employer. And one bit of information proved interesting: it seems Hilary Quayle’s father is a fairly well-known private investigator in Manhattan.

Now I said earlier that Hilary has a frustrated desire to be a detective, God knows why! But she’s not likely to realize her ambition, at least not in New York State, and she blames her father for it. There’s a three-year apprenticeship requirement in the state licensing code for private investigators, and—according to Dave Barr, Hilary’s favorite trade editor—no one was willing to hire her, when she was younger, as a distaff operative. So she turned to her old man, asking him to let her work under him. And he refused.

I tried to bring up the subject once, but I didn’t get far. As far as Hilary’s concerned, her father said no because he was jealous of her “promising” detective abilities. But I met him once, under circumstances not connected with his daughter, and I doubt whether he’d be capable of such pettiness. To me, it’s hardly a mystery that a man might want to keep his little girl—as he might think of Hilary—out of a potentially seamy profession.

Anyway, Hilary “got back” at him by entering the public relations field, an industry her old man regards with deepest loathing. He’s fairly well known, as I said, and I understand she occasionally sends clients to him asking for endorsements of various products-tissue, cheese dip, pest sprays—possibly on the theory that if she annoys him sufficiently, he may finally relent and take her into the business.

Knowing what I do about Hilary’s past, I could understand her eagerness to pitch into the Trim-Tram spy case. Perhaps the same motive was behind her refusal to let me report Sid Goetz’s murder to the cops. With two mysteries to solve, I could well imagine the cerebral ecstasy she was experiencing. Of course, she claimed that she didn’t want to notify the police until we called Scott. “It’s our obligation,” she explained virtuously, but unconvincingly.

“But Goetz is dead!” I unnecessarily reminded her.

“And the
client
is still alive! That’s who we call.”

Which was her attempt to sound like a PR lady.

But despite these two apparent reasons for delaying the call to the officials, I was still disturbed. I kept asking myself what I really knew about Hilary, and the answer was: not much more than what was on the surface ... that slightly superior (hell,
extremely
superior) image she chooses to project.

But underneath that? A central tension, coiled at her core, preventing her from being at ease with any man. But what was its
raison d’être?
I could guess, but I really didn’t know.

More prosaically, but more to the point, I also didn’t know where Hilary had been the night before. She’d come home very late, long after I’d gone to bed. Another thing I knew: she sleeps with a pistol by her pillow. Does she keep it in her handbag when she’s awake? Would she really have used it on me that morning?

Next point: Hilary recognized Goetz’s body. I recalled that she’d had a run-in with him, a hassle on behalf of a friend. What took place at that session? Did Goetz say anything especially inflammatory?

Also: she hadn’t wanted to visit the Goetz showroom. But once there, Hilary evinced no surprise or shock at the sight of the corpse.

Three smooth bits of wood in the clutch of a dead man. A trio of polished letter tiles from a popular word game, all of them hidden in the murdered man’s fist, evidently a desperate final message. ...

Two of the wooden rectangles each bore letters of the alphabet stamped in black on one surface.

On one tile was the letter H. The other held a Q.

H ... Q ...

I felt a little ill.

I examined the third of the game pieces. It was a blank.

Maybe Goetz had grabbed for another letter as he fell, but got hold of the blank by mistake. But I had a hunch the explanation wasn’t all that simple.

“What are you doing out there? Come on in here a minute!”

Hilary Quayle was standing in Goetz’s private office. I nodded that I would join her, then began walking across the room.

The blank tile was a real puzzle. Until I could riddle its meaning, I decided to hold off a decision on the significance of the other two tiles as well.

I made up my mind quickly. As I reached the small office, I stuck my hand inside my trousers pocket and left the three Scrabble pieces inside.

In the office, Hilary had something to show me, but first I phoned Scott to ask him to meet us at the Goetz showroom as fast as possible. It was an annoying little task, because I didn’t want to tell him anything specific over the telephone. To make things worse, we had a lousy connection, and Scott found it a little hard to make out what I was telling him. But at last he caught the urgency of the appeal and promised to come immediately.

I hung up in time to catch Hilary peering cautiously out of the main showroom door. Satisfied, she pulled it tightly shut and locked it.

Rejoining me in the office, Hilary took the only available swivel seat and slumped wearily back. Her eyes sought mine.

“Well,” she asked, “is he coming?”

I nodded. “Now what do we do?”

“Look around the room. What do you see?”

I did as she said. It was a tiny chamber, hardly more than a convenient cubicle for maintaining essential business records; it seemed even smaller in contrast to the rest of the showroom. Oddly enough, the cramped office had two scratched rolltop desks jammed into it, back to back, though the one opposite Hilary’s chair was not in use—a thick cover of dust lay over it like a gray woolen comforter. Goetz’s desk should have been meticulously neat, but in spite of its late owner’s reputation for orderliness, the top was up, the drawers stuck partly out, and papers and memo books, order blanks and catalog sheets slopped from the drawers onto the ink-stained tan blotter below.

I described it all to Hilary. She nodded, then called my attention to a box of cartridge shells sitting on the bottom of one of the jutting drawers. It, too, was partially ajar, and I could see the brassy ends of a few small shells inside.

“He must have been shot with his own gun,” Hilary remarked.

“Why?”

“Do you see a gun anywhere in this room?”

I said I didn’t.

“Or outside in the showroom?”

The answer was also negative.

“Then the murderer must have taken Goetz’s gun,” she opined. “Certainly it’s impossible to tell whether it was actually the murder weapon at this juncture ... but it’s a reasonable assumption. So, unless something better presents itself, I’ll begin with that theory.”

I pointed out that we could not even assume that there
was
a gun belonging to Goetz in the showroom. All we could be sure of was a box of shells; the gun could be at his home, or maybe Goetz had never gotten around to buying one; maybe he only collected cartridge shells.

She paid no attention, other than to order me to shut up. Hilary thought out loud: “Now, if we assume that some person or persons unknown did away with Sid Goetz with his own weapon, then either it was done by someone intimately acquainted with him, or else the murder resulted from some kind of a struggle and might have been accidental.”

“I don’t follow.”

“If the murderer sneaked into Goetz’s office and grabbed his gun, then it had to be somebody who knew where he kept the weapon. Figuring that it was in the same drawer as the ammunition, the pistol was in an out-of-the-way place where a chance thief would be unlikely to find it. But, on the other hand, if Goetz knew he was in danger, then he may have extracted the firearm at an earlier time last night. In that case, the restriction doesn’t hold, and the murderer could have been just about anybody.”

She sat there, brow knitted, for about ten seconds. Then she nodded her head. “All right, assuming Goetz had the gun out, our second hypothesis—”

I interrupted to ask why she had opted in favor of the second possibility, but she gestured impatiently, and I turned it off again.

“Our second hypothesis, then, is that Goetz had the gun out for—what? Self-protection? Probably. Then we have to guess that he’d been threatened earlier, maybe even the same day. Anyway, he must have expected some kind of trouble to take place last night, or ...”

She paused. Then a startled look crossed her face. She looked up at me again. “Do you notice,” she asked, “anything wrong? Right now?”

I’ve heard of understatements, but that was the first time I’d ever been asked an underquestion. “Anything wrong?” I snapped. “Where do you want me to start, for chrissake? With Goetz with a bullet in his middle in the other room? Or the fact that we’re breaking the law by not notifying the law ... ? Or am I supposed to pick holes in your reasoning when I can’t follow it worth a damn?”

For once, Hilary treated me like some kind of vaguely human species. “Look, you’ll just have to be patient with me,” she explained. “This is just more than I ever expected, getting two cases in one day. Or maybe it’s one, we’ll see. But, anyway, here I am on the spot with the chance to clear up a crime and—well ...” She shrugged, her candor—never a rich lode—petering out. “Damn it, I’m no good at apologies. Just let me muddle through this in my own way, all right?”

It wasn’t all right, of course, but she managed some kind of a smile which enticed me into agreeing, at least for the time being. Then—because she hated asking for permission to do anything—Hilary snapped back to her old self.

“All right,” she stated crisply, “since you’re too slow to notice, I’ll tell you what’s wrong—we’re alone. Why is the showroom empty?”

“Because, in case you forgot, Goetz is dead.”

“And what about his salesman?”

That
was what had been bothering me subliminally for the past several minutes! Where was Harry Whelan, the crack entertainer-cum-demonstrator who had once worked for Trim-Tram and was now a salesman for Goetz Sales? According to Scott Miranda, he’d talked with Whelan on the telephone only the night before, when he’d pumped him on particulars of the Goetz racer knock-off.

“You’d better scout around,” Hilary advised me, “and see whether you can find him somewhere in the building.”

“I’d
better scout around? What are you going to be doing?”

Hilary counted to herself for a few seconds. “In case it slipped your little mind, you are the employee and I give the orders. It’s none of your damn business, but I’m going to wait here for Scott. And make some charts, as long as I’m waiting. I want to clear up the spy problem fast, so I can—”

“What makes you think the two situations are different?” I interrupted. “Tom Lasker—”

“I already admitted that possibility. Since I have no hard-and-fast proof of when Goetz was shot, I can’t totally ignore the possibility that Lasker rushed over here and squelched him, to protect himself from being identified as the Trim-Tram spy.”