Lively Game of Death (8 page)

“I have no idea where Sid is. Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

It was the critical point in the questioning; there was no further reason for me to stay. But I held my breath, counting on Jensen’s gentility to get me over the hump. “Didn’t you used to be Goetz’s partner?” I asked him.

No problem; he seemed willing, even eager to talk. “That’s why I’m here, drinking, instead of running my showroom.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything I’ve had to do with Sid Goetz and his ... and his company has been bad for me. You heard how he cheated me out of Swing Up, didn’t you?”

“Swing Up? What’s that?”

“Last year’s best damned preschool activity game,” Jensen explained. “I brought it to Sid two years ago, he liked it ... wanted to buy it outright. I wanted to hold onto it, though, so he made me a partner.” He shook his head ruefully. “Made me a partner, what a laugh!”

“Why,” I wondered, “would you take a potentially valuable toy to a bastard like Goetz? Didn’t you know of his reputation?”

Jensen shook his head. “I didn’t know the first thing about him. And I didn’t take it to him first. I had Swing Up around to every principal toymaker in the country. I got a list from one of the toy trade papers of the ‘Ten Top’ toy firms, and I went to all of them. They all turned Swing Up down. Told me I’m not Marvin Glass and—”

“Who?”

“Marvin Glass. They call him Dean of American Toy Inventors. You see,” Jensen remarked bitterly, “an independent hardly stands a chance against the professional inventors in this business.”

I asked him how he’d come to hook up with Goetz.

“Well, I went back to the same toy publication, asked for advice. And the publisher put me on to Goetz.”

“Didn’t
he
know what a thief Goetz is?”

“Maybe he did, but he didn’t say. All he told me is that Goetz Sales takes out a lot of ad space in their book, so they must be a comer.”

“So Goetz made you a partner.”

He nodded. “That’s what he called it, but even that, I have a feeling, was a swindle.”

“Why do you say?”

“I don’t know. There was something fishy about some of the things Sid did—phone calls, after-hours meetings I wasn’t asked to participate in. I had the feeling he was working with somebody else, some kind of silent partner. ...”

Jensen subsided again into brooding silence. I broke the spell by asking him what he was drinking, and he told me he’d been nursing a double Glenfiddich so I promptly ordered one and brought it back. When he was into the drink a quarter of the way, I questioned him again.

“How did Goetz cheat you out of the game?”

He was silent. I didn’t know how to proceed; if I asked a second time, it might sound like cross-examination, and I didn’t want to remind him of the fact that there was no earthly reason to be talking to me.

Jensen slugged down the rest of the Scotch, then stood up, a little unsteadily. “I have to get up to my showroom,” he said. “Care to walk me up?”

“Be glad to.”

I followed him as he threaded his way out into the lobby, jostling through the crowds. A gold-epauletted, admiral’s-capped doorman stood in the center of the lobby; he pointed to an elevator, indicating it was next to ascend. We took it to the ninth floor, crossed the bridge into 1111.

While we were waiting for the 1111 up elevator, Jensen spoke. “I never told anybody what happened,” he said to me. “Don’t know why I want to now, either, except you’re a good listener.” He paused, looked at the elevator floor indicator, then back to me. “Who’d you say you were with?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, that’s all right. Maybe it’s easier to talk with a stranger—”

The elevator came. We took it up one floor, then walked to his showroom, pausing till he fitted a key to the lock. He snapped on the lights, closed the door, and slumped into a chair.

I waited for him to take it at his own speed.

“It started, I guess, at the annual TMA dinner-dance,” Jensen said. “I was supposed to go just to meet some of the rival executives. But something came up and Sid couldn’t make it at the last minute.”

“So?”

“So—I agreed to take Mrs. Goetz.”

He let the thought hang. I pointed out that I didn’t know the lady, so couldn’t catch the significance of the statement or react the way he seemed to expect.

He took a deep breath, let it out through his nose. “I don’t want to talk about her,” he finally decided. “Forget about the whole thing.”

“You sure?” I asked, but Jensen didn’t reply. He just sat there, the way I’d seen him in the bar. Silent, hardly moving, his eyes again turned in on himself. ...

That’s the way I left him.

“Y
OU DIDN’T EVEN FIND
out if he had an alibi for last night?” Hilary asked, incensed.

“Would you like to tell me how I was supposed to manage that?” I retorted. “What kind of capacity have I got for asking questions? Not only are we
not
private detectives, but as far as Jensen knows, there isn’t even an investigation going on. Goetz isn’t even dead.”

“Unless he happens to be the murderer.”

“In which case he’d still pretend he knew nothing about it.”

“All right,” Hilary said, “let me think a moment. Who are the prime suspects in the Goetz killing? Harry Whelan, Tom Lasker, Pete Jensen, Mrs. Goetz—”

“Not counting anybody else who might be the Trim-Tram spy. Also Goetz’s lawyer, of whom we know nothing. And the combined executives of the TMA.”

Hilary paced the showroom, in front of the small office I’d last seen her in. When I returned from my session with Jensen, she was sitting at the vacant desk in the office, staring at several sheets of paper on which she’d constructed parallel lines of action and timetables, apparently all connected with the Trim-Tram testimony she’d heard that morning.

I’d begun to précis my sessions at Bell’s and with Jensen, but she made me stop and go back to the beginning. “I want you to recall both conversations,” Hilary instructed me.

“That’s what I’m doing!”

“No, not recall—
re
call. I want you to reconstruct it the way an actor might ... word for word, gesture for gesture.”

I saw then what she was getting at, and I did my best to recreate the exact inflections and impressions I’d received at both interviews.

She was, as stated, indignant that I’d chosen to leave Jensen before milking him dry of all possible data. But she finally concurred that there wasn’t much more I could have done.

“The trouble is that I couldn’t be there with you. But we couldn’t leave the door to this showroom unlocked, so I had to stay here.” She tightened her lips. “There’s nothing to be done for it. We’ll have to search the body for the keys to the front door.”

I didn’t like that much and told her so, but she tossed it off without consideration. “Here’s the agenda,” she said. “I’ll think up some excuse for talking to Jensen, You go see ...”

She paused. There was a sound at the door. The handle was turning.

“That must be Scott. Let him in.”

But when I peeked around the edge of the brown paper, I could just see somebody hurrying off down the hallway. He was too far away for me to distinguish, so I pushed the paper back in place and turned around.

“Probably a buyer wondering why Goetz isn’t open,” I ventured, but Hilary shook her head.

“A buyer would have knocked.”

We thought about that for a moment, then Hilary beckoned me to come back into the office. As I followed her, she asked me to describe our mysterious visitor, but I had to decline.

That annoyed her. “You know, if you’re afraid to mar your masculine charm, I’ll give you a bonus so you can get contacts.”

“That’s all right,” I said, after a pause. “Nearsightedness saves me from seeing some sights I can well do without—”

It took her a second to catch on, and at first I thought she was going to slap me. But she restrained herself from further comment, decided to ignore it altogether.

“I found this record book in Goetz’s desk. It has some interesting things in it. Cryptic, but interesting.” She handed me a duodecimo-size account book, a black, flexible covered, two-ring notebook with ledger-type paper inside.

I leafed through it. Each page was the same: a divided column on the left for the date, then a wide column for purpose of expenditure or source of income, and two more divided columns—the first for revenues, the second for monies paid out.

Hilary reached over my arm, lightly brushing against me as she did, and flipped with her finger to two adjacent pages.

“These pages, for example ... what do you think of them?”

I glanced down the left-hand page at the neatly inked entries:

1/27 Y DEFPR,12mo

1/28 ADV:F/PG, TTBG $750.00

1/28 AC. REC., #248 $1,066.35

1/31 T4X 500.00

1/31 AC. REC., #713 85.95

1/31 AC. REC., #38A 342.35

1/31 INV: DDOLL FRGHT

(3 doz) P’town/wh 158.27

1/31 MAT: CORRUG. 450.50

2/1 AC. REC., #687WEA 2,555.95

2/1 AC. REC., #44 712.10

2/1 AC. REC., #321AC 945.00

2/1 AC. REC., #436 53.00

2/1 AC. REC., #8DC 19.00

2/2 AC. REC., #304 212.46

2/2 AC. REC., #52B 1,713.56

2/2 PSTG, 1/1-1/31 96.00

2/2 AC. REC., #321CH 817.25

2/3 AC. REC., #95 48.65

2/3 T4X 500.00

2/3 MAT: LAB 78.10

2/4 AC. REC., #26TN 15.30

2/7 INV. DDOLL SHP

#202AC(12doz) 690.48

2/7 MAT: PLST (P’town) 1,330.00

2/7 AC. REC., #44 712.10

The last line on the page had been left blank to avoid crowding, probably another manifestation of Goetz’s neatness syndrome. I started looking over the second, the right-hand page:

2/7 AC. REC., #491RB $14.32

2/7 BTEL $145.75

2/7 RENT 639.41

2/7 HW (from 2/1) 140.00

2/8 AC. REC., #102CGA 91.00

2/8 T4Y 500.00

DEF

2/9 OF SUP 36.17

2/9 INV: DDOLL SHP

#44 (24 doz) 855.06

2/9 AC. REC., #419A 501.00

2/10 AC. REC., #250 10.00

2/10 MAT: PT (P’Town) 373.35

2/10 PYRL: P’Town (for 2/15)

2,509.00

When I was about halfway down the page, I stopped, defeated. “This is a waste of time,” I told Hilary. “Most of this is gibberish to me.”

“God, you must have neglected elementary education. Look—” she pointed to the left-hand columns on both pages. “These are the dates the transactions—”

“I figured
that
out, damn it.”

“So can’t you figure out the key to the abbreviations?” she asked impatiently, then began explaining without waiting. “AC. REC. is obviously accounts receivable—”

“Obviously!” I echoed.

“Look, brightness, accounts receivable means some of Goetz’s customers paid their bills, is that clear enough for you?” She waited for no answer. “So, that makes sense, because there’s a cluster of them early in the month, see? The BTEL must be the phone bill, INV is either inventory, or maybe it’s for invoice. MAT is for materials purchased for the Goetz factory in Phillipstown—”

“Or Provincetown?”

“Brilliant! He’s really going to put his factory on the end of a strip of land that’s going to get cut off every time there’s a storm? If you looked in the Toy Fair directory, you’d see Goetz Sales has its manufacturing plant in Phillipstown and a couple of warehouses stationed along the East Coast.”

“All right,” I said, “so I’m stupid. I suppose ADV is an advertising expense?”

“If you worked with Dean Wallis, you’d know that TTBG is the
Toy Trade Buying Guide,
a twice-yearly directory listing printed by the Garrity-Allen group. Anything else you see now?”

I shook my head. “Unless HW is ‘Harry Whelan,’ I can’t see anything else.”

“That,” said Hilary, “is probably what it does mean. It must be his salary.”

I shrugged. “So? Does that tell us anything?”

“Possibly. But never mind. If nothing else suggests anything, maybe we’d better forget about it for now. Let’s get back to what I was saying a moment ago. Look up Mrs. Goetz in the phone book, go see her, find out, first, where she was last night ... next, what reason she might have to wish her husband dead ... third, what her connection was and/or is with Pete Jensen. And anything else important you can uncover. I’ll stop in next door and see whether I can find out what Jensen was doing last night.”

“How will you manage that?”

“I’ll think of something,” she said confidently.

“I’m sure you will. I thought you might be able to give me an idea of how I’m supposed to approach Mrs. Goetz.”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to use your ingenuity.”

“Really?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you credited me with any.”

“Oh, be still!” she ordered, leaning against the vacant desk, thinking intently. Shaking her head at last, she murmured, “If only
you
had a detective’s license, it’d be so much easier—”

I didn’t comment on that notion. But I could well imagine the bizarre working relationship between Hilary and me under the sort of arrangement she was daydreaming about.

Standing up straight, Hilary patted me on the shoulder a little patronizingly and said, “Well, I’m not going to waste time worrying about it. Play it by ear with Mrs. Goetz. You’ll think of something.”

It irked the hell out of me. One minute Hilary was ready to label me witless; the next, I was reliable enough to send forth on my own native resources.

She continued to speak. “What we’d better do now is get the keys off Goetz, so I can lock up the room while I’m out.” But she didn’t move—and it hit me that Hilary expected
me
to filch them off the body in the other room.

I was touched by it. Was it possible Hilary was a little squeamish? It was the last characteristic I would have expected to find in her, but I’ve learned that differential unpredictability is the only predictable constant of many women, so ...

So I was the one who stooped and rummaged through the dead man’s pockets. As I did, a second thought occurred to me: maybe Hilary wanted me to do it to prevent her own fingerprints from being discovered anywhere on, or near, the corpse.