Free Lively Game of Death by Marvin Kaye

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
    “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,”