Lively Game of Death Page 6

  “He just wanted some information on Sid Goetz, Mr. Bell.”

  “Goetz! That does it!” Bell barked, pushing at me again. “If that’s who you’re with—that bastard Goetz!—I’ll ...” He didn’t finish his thought, because he was too busy trying to hustle me out.

  I didn’t budge. When he tired of the strong-arm tactics, I explained that I was only thinking about working for the infamous toyman, but was already having second thoughts.

  “You’d better,” Bell puffed. “Worst crook you’ll ever meet. Son-of-a-bitch knocked us off a couple of years ago, and the case is still dragging through the courts. ...”

  “I understand he has a lot of enemies.”

  “How many members are there in the TMA? Better you should ask if he’s got any friends, that’d be easier to count. Go to a TMA meeting sometime, see whether anybody sits next to him. I’ve seen knock-off artists before. Most of them have no interest in industry associations. In fact, they’re usually afraid of them, figure they don’t want the people they’re stealing from to see what they look like. Not Goetz, though! He’s at every single TMA session, just sitting there, listening to any tips that another member might let slip. All the time in the TMA, people are pleading for franker dialogue between members, but it’s lice like Goetz that prevent the honest executives from opening up!”

  The TMA, in case you haven’t figured it out, stands for the Toy Manufacturers of America. I asked Bell whether there were any members unusually antagonistic to Goetz. He shook his head.

  “Everybody hates Sid about as much as anyone else. Except maybe Pete Jensen, you might make a case for some additional malice on his part.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Used to be Goetz’s partner. He’s in business for himself now. The way I understand it, Jensen had a cute little preschool game, showed it to Sid,” Bell said.

  “What was he, an inventor?”

  “Right. Now, Pete was green and Sid knew it, but all the same, he wasn’t totally ignorant. The way I heard it, Sid tried to buy the game outright, but couldn’t. So he offered to make Jensen a ‘partner’ and had him sign all the rights to the game over to the partnership—then Sid managed to squeeze him out.”

  “How’d he do that?” I asked.

  “That I don’t know. But he swindled him somehow.”

  “A sweet guy!”

  “Isn’t that what I’ve been telling you?” Bell exclaimed. “If you’ve got any brains, you’ll keep away from him. And,” he added, screwing up his face into an expression of what, to him, probably was intended to be menace, “if I find out you’re working with him after all and just came in to spy on our new line, I’ll work you over myself.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “Nothing to worry about, Mr. Bell, you’re safe from me.” I started to go, turned back again. “By the way, where can I find this Pete Jensen?”

  “Go on over to the Fifth Avenue Club, you’ll catch him half-sloshed. That’s the way I saw him going in there this morning.”

  I thanked him and exited, then thought better of it and stuck my head back in the door.

  “What now?” Bell grumbled.

  “Just wanted to know if you have any idea when the room down the hall will be opening up this morning.”

  “What! Goetz Sales?”

  “No,” I reassured him, “the other one—PeeJayCo.”

  “Why don’t you ask Pete Jensen?” Bell replied. “It’s his company!”

  10

  AT TEN O’CLOCK any other morning, the bar of the Fifth Avenue Club—just off the main FAB lobby—would be deserted, while the coffee shop down the corridor would be packed. But the influx of nearly ten thousand toy, hobby, and decorations wholesalers and retailers to the Manhattan market that morning provided enough extra bar business to make the club a little less than secluded.

  The bar itself overlooks one of the club’s main dining rooms. It was that time of day when the staff begins luncheon preparations, yet several of the tables were already occupied by businessmen with drinks in front of them—much to the annoyance of the waiters working around them. Several toymen had their heads close together, sharing between themselves fat little booklets issued by the TMA to Fair visitors. I guessed them to be out-of-town buyers planning itineraries for the week; the booklets supplied them with the correct showroom numbers for their merchandise sources.

  In a far corner, one man sat alone. A wide-mouthed old fashioned glass half-filled with pale amber liquid rested on the blanched table-cover in front of him. The bartender—a freelance toy inventor who mixes drinks in the club as a convenient way to meet prospective customers for his ideas—prided himself on knowing the names and faces of all the tenants in FAB and 1111; he identified the solitary figure as Pete Jensen.

  I studied Jensen from a distance, and I liked the first impression I got: a youthful man of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four, with deep-set eyes that seemed turned in on their possessor; his face, boyish and open in expression, was framed by a trim little college-professor beardlet. He was unobtrusively dapper, quietly polite and soft-spoken—or so I assessed him, and I turned out to be right.

  But the crinkles around the edges of his eyes, which I would have judged to be smile lines, were unaccompanied then by mirth or contentment. He looked hopelessly glum, at the nadir of some personal misfortune.

  I approached him and asked whether I could sit down. He nodded mutely.

  “You’re Pete Jensen, aren’t you?”

  He nodded a second time, then took a hearty swallow from the glass. I expected him to set down the drink and ask me who I was. But he showed no curiosity at all. Instead, he subsided within himself, taking no further notice of me.

  We sat there a long time. Somehow, I didn’t want to cut into his thoughts. There was something about Jensen so mannerly that it would have been brutal rudeness to disturb him.

  At last, he focused on me, still saying nothing. Then he drank again, set the glass down, and spoke in a mellow, apologetic manner, explaining that he was not feeling well and begged to be excused for ignoring me.

  I said it was all right, then explained that I had been trying to get hold of Sid Goetz, but had found his showroom locked; I thought maybe Jensen, being a next-door neighbor, might be able to help me.

  “Locked? On Toy Fair morning?” he asked, showing his first sign of interest. “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. I was just up there. Do you have any idea where Goetz could be?”

  “None at all.” He finished the drink in one long gulp. “Are you sure he’s not there? Did you try knocking?”

  I nodded. Jensen sat for a moment, saying nothing. Then he shrugged.

  “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.

  11

  “YOU 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—recall. 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., #687
WEA 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—”