Lively Game of Death by Marvin Kaye

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