Lively Game of Death (21 page)

Addressing Jensen once more, Hilary continued. “But
you
didn’t show any surprise when this man asked you some very odd questions. That might have been excusable at first, considering the early morning drinking you’d been doing. But this afternoon, when he saw you a second time, you were equally liberal with your cooperation. The reason you didn’t pry into his motive for interrogating you was that
you already knew ...
even if you didn’t find out whether he was with the police, it was apparent to you that Goetz’s body had been discovered. So you answered his questions with suspicious amenity, already casting yourself in the role of a murder suspect.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” Jensen said.

“There were contributory actions as well. Not opening the showroom for business. Getting looped in the bar. Wallowing in self-deprecation and despair. I could buy the missing dowel episode getting you angry enough to fight with Sid, maybe even scheme to steal it back from his showroom. But its loss wouldn’t throw you into suicidal depression, would it? More likely, the more you’d think about it, the madder you’d become—”

“On the other hand,” I put in, “the consciousness of having killed a man could very well affect a man the way I saw you. Particularly a person who’s been described to me as excruciatingly honest.”

“Yes,”
Jensen admitted, looking at me for the first time without his customary reserve. It was the only chance I got for a direct glimpse of the agony he was rigidly repressing—and I was sorry for the opportunity.

Hilary must have seen it, too, for even she was temporarily quelled. We were all silent for a moment: the only movement was Jensen’s.

He shuddered involuntarily.

“One other suspicious thing,” Hilary resumed at last. “When my assistant told you the door to Goetz Sales was locked, you were surprised enough to ask him whether he was sure he was correct. I imagine you left the door open after you left last night, so when you heard it was locked, you knew somebody must have found the body. But who? And was it really true ...?”

I remembered the way the handle of the door had stealthily turned.

“Yes,” said Jensen, “I suppose you both heard me trying to open the door this morning.”

“It was a foolish thing to do,” Hilary told him, “especially with your showroom right down the hall. It was too soon after my assistant had questioned you. Therefore, you were the first person I thought of when the knob turned.”

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
in about three hours, Jensen rose from his chair. Gripping its back hard enough to blanch his knuckles, he began to speak.

“I doubt,” he began, “that I can explain convincingly what I’ve felt about this business. I never intended to kill Sid. Please accept that as true. Whether what happened was an accident, I don’t know. But the main thing—what I’m trying to say—is I’ve always thought myself above violence. I detest it. So, in my case, the knowledge of possible guilt is more oppressive than the process of punishment.”

Clasping his hands behind his back, he veered from personal exegesis, adopting the tone of a college lecturer. “The dowel story, as I say, was considerably minimized when I first told it. Actually, I was furious to find Sid in my showroom. This bastard who’d cheated and used me—it was the first time I’d stood face-to-face with him since he fired me! Of course, we saw each other in the halls, but
I
always looked away, as though
I
were the guilty party!”

As his voice became more agitated, Jensen began to pace the room in quick, deliberate steps. “The first thing,” he said, “that I noticed on reentering my showroom was the empty space in my racer display. Sid turned and left without a word, but I ran after him, grabbed him by the arm. I said earlier that Sid threatened me, but actually I did most of the intimidating. I warned him I’d get that dowel back if I had to rip his showroom apart. That’s when he swore he’d get out his gun if I set foot inside. I saw customers in here, so I left. But I said I’d be back.”

“What time was that?” asked Hilary.

“Sometime after eight. I didn’t want him to sneak the dowel out of the building, so I closed up my office and waited across the hall from this showroom. I didn’t want to let Sid see me by accident, so I hid behind the fire door and cracked it a bit so I could see.”

“Why would Sid steal the damned dowel in the first place?” Frost interrupted. “What good would it do him?”

Jensen shrugged. “Who knows? He couldn’t copy the toy from it alone. Besides, it’s not a unique item, there are other racers like it on the market. The only thing unusual about mine is the styling, and the multiple programs on one component, instead of the necessity of feeding separate ‘runs’ into the racer through punch cards. Personally, I believe Sid stole it out of gratuitous malevolence. He hated it when I, of all people, moved in next door—”

“What about the shooting?” Hilary reminded him, impatiently.

“Well, while I was waiting, I decided to try reasoning with Sid after all. So I finally walked in. Harry was in the office, I think, so he didn’t see me. But Sid did ... and he immediately ran to his desk to get out the gun, so I turned right around and walked back out.”

“And then?”

“I just waited. Whelan left around nine-thirty, I think. I knew Sid was alone then, but I thought it better to wait until he locked up, even if it took all night. But Sid must have been worrying about me, because all of a sudden, he yanked his door wide open—as if he’d been hiding behind it. I closed the fire door just in time, and he didn’t see me. Then I waited about ten seconds and peeked out again. Sid was standing a few feet away in the hall, looking around. The corridor was deserted. Bell’s had closed maybe half an hour earlier, so we were the only ones still up here on the tenth floor.”

“Do you think Sid was looking to see if you were still around?” Hilary asked.

“Absolutely. He sneaked down the hall and looked into my showroom. But I’d turned the lights off and locked up, so he must have been convinced I was gone. He must really have been shocked when he saw me in his showroom a minute later.”

“You ran across while he was up the hall?”

“That’s right. The first thing I did was duck into his office and grab the gun. I didn’t want any kind of an incident, so I just stuck it my pocket and started rummaging through the drawers of his desk. Of course, Sid caught me a moment later and tried to rush me. So I pulled out the pistol and made him sit down at one of the showroom tables. Then I examined everything in his office—every drawer, every page of his account books, underneath the desk, the cushion of the chairs. No dowel! Then I started in on the showroom, which was easier—”

“Easier?” the lawyer scoffed. “It’s twenty times as big!”

“Yes,” Jensen agreed, “but just look at it! Everything’s out in the open ... no desks, no crevices of any kind—nothing but bare chairs, walls, and worktables. Shelves with boxed toys and games on them. I picked up every one of them just the same, but without any results. I even walked along the walls, checking all the pegboard holes to see whether the dowel might’ve been crammed into one of them ... even though I knew it was too small and probably would have dropped out.”

“What was Goetz doing all this while?” Hilary wanted to know.

“Fuming. Cursing at me. I said I wasn’t going to leave till I found the dowel.”

“Did he admit having it? Or deny it?”

Jensen shook his head, his characteristic semirueful smile upon his lips. “Sid’s way was to pull something rotten, then simply ignore it. He made positively no comment on the dowel. All he kept yelling was for me to get the hell out.”

“What happened when you found out it wasn’t in the showroom?”

“I knew it had to be
somewhere,
so I turned back to his office again. But as I did, it suddenly occurred to me that I’d completely forgotten to search Sid’s pockets. In that split second when I had my back to him, Sid jumped up and tried to rush me. I whirled around—”

“And the gun went off?” asked Hilary.

“No. I jumped away from Sid, and it was the worst thing I could have done. I ran to the far corner of the showroom—just as if I were still the guilty one! Sid instantly guessed that I couldn’t bring myself to fire at him, that I couldn’t kill anybody. My retreat gave him all the confidence he needed, and he advanced on me, backing me behind a table. He lunged for the gun, got it, tried to wrest it from me. But I pulled back, and we struggled back and forth. While we were doing so, it went off, with both of our hands on it.”

“In that case,” Hilary reassured him, “it was certainly an accident.”

“But,” he argued, “it was
my
finger on the trigger. And whether or not I deliberately pulled it ... well, I can’t remember. Nor can I allow myself to make the brighter assumption and excuse myself.” His hands tightened into fists, which he pressed against the sides of his forehead. “I just don’t know whether the shot was deliberate or not! Christ!”

With that, he sat back down and, lowering his bunched hands into his lap, withdrew into his private hell.

After a moment, Hilary rose and walked across the showroom to the shelf where she’d earlier propped the closed Scrabble box. Lifting it down, she plucked off the lid and prodded the pieces until she’d located the three tiles. With the playing board under her arm, Hilary brought them back to our table.

“What happened,” she asked Jensen, “after the gun went off? What did you do?”

“I panicked! I was certain the shot had been heard through the whole building, it was so loud. So I ran!”

“Where to?”

“I slammed the door and dashed back into the fire exit. I took the stairs two at a time to the ninth floor, where I ran across the bridge. There were still people working in the FAB offices, and it’s a wonder nobody noticed me running. I got to the elevators before I realized I still had Goetz’s pistol in my hand! I stuck it into my jacket pocket and walked down to the lobby.
Nine floors.
I needed the time to get my thoughts in order. When I got to the lobby, there was the usual late-hours sign-out book, but the attendant was down the hall sweeping up, so I only pretended to write in it. Then I took a long walk when I got outside.”

“And what did you do with the gun?” Hilary interrupted.

“That’s why I walked,” Jensen said. “I was still confused, didn’t know what to do, whether to report it, or what. But I finally let the sense of self-preservation get the better of me. I could see no way of proving to anyone that I hadn’t planned to kill Sid all along. So I walked all the way across to the East Side—in bitter wind, without a jacket. I’d left it upstairs in my showroom. I dropped the gun in the East River.”

“One thing,” said Frost. “How did you know Goetz was dead? Did you feel his pulse, check his heart?”

“I told you I panicked! I didn’t stop to think!”

“But afterwards? Surely it must have occurred to you that you might not have murdered him?”

Jensen bit a knuckle, averted his eyes from the lawyer. “I never thought of it till now, Willie. Christ, I
know
what it sounds like! But I didn’t think of it! If it had been an accident, I would’ve called a doctor ... but I didn’t! I must have wanted him dead,
because I just assumed he was
from the very instant the gun went off!”

There was a rattling sound. Hilary had tossed the three Scrabble tiles on the tabletop. “Well,” she told Jensen, “Sid wasn’t quite dead when you ran off because he left a message.”

Jensen and Frost stared at the three squares of wood. They both looked puzzled, so I explained the way we’d found the showroom and the body that morning.

“Apparently,” said Hilary, “Goetz was able to struggle to the shelf where he’d stuck the Scrabble set. I presume it was the nearest thing usable to communicate with. The office must have been impossibly far, and he must have known he could never crawl to the telephone or even to a pencil and paper. So he grabbed the set, which spilled all over the place, the way we found it—”

“Wait a minute,” said Frost, “you’re trying to tell us that, with a few seconds left to live, Sid rooted through the box trying to get enough letters to spell Pete’s name? Sid was a lousy speller, but from PJ to QH is a pretty long jump. And what’s the blank supposed to mean?”

I noticed with some amusement that Hilary had taken care to lay the letters out in a different sequence than I had noted that morning.

Jensen started to say that he understood the import of the dying message, but Hilary shushed him. She wasn’t about to be shoved from the limelight at the climactic moment.

She pointed to the three tiles, arranged with the blank at the left and the Q and H in the middle and right-hand positions, respectively.

“The answer,” she said, “is easily observable, but let’s consider the logical alternatives first.” She opened the game board and pointed to the letter distribution column. “Now I took the time earlier, when I was alone, to count up the number of letter tiles in a Scrabble set. According to this table, there should be one hundred of them. Now what would have happened if Goetz, with his last few breaths and waning energy, had attempted to find Pete Jensen’s initials? I’m not even considering the possibility of his trying to spell the whole name, that’s out of the question. Look at this distribution table ... there are just two Ps in the assortment, and a single J! For that matter, there are also only two Hs and one Q.”

“Which means?” the lawyer asked.

“It means that Goetz was trying to implicate Mr. Jensen another way entirely! Look hard at these two letter tiles, what else do you see?”

I cursed myself for a damned fool. For the first time, I understood the meaning of the term “psychological set.”

All along, even though I didn’t play the game, I’d noticed, almost subliminally, that there were numbers on all the Scrabble tiles. But I’d paid no attention to the fact, even when Hilary and Scott were busy tallying their scores that morning.

“You see,” Hilary explained, “there are two letters in the set that are worth ten points—Q and Z—and no fewer than ten tiles worth four points each. Not only that—there are a number of letters worth two points, and a couple of eight-pointers—J and X—as well. So Sid had many available options for completing his message. We were just lucky that he hit upon one of the clearest combinations for doing so. ...”