Francis M. Nevins, Jr.

      The Scrabble Clue

      Introducing Fred Buford, retired cop and former instructor at the Police Academy, in, paradoxically, his last case.. .We all like detective stories that end with a whiplash of revelation. Here's one that ends with a double whiplash. . .

      When Fred Buford swung the coupe into his home street he found a police car blocking the entrance to the parking area. Two more official cars stood in the paved crescent in front of the apartment building, their red roof globes whirling in the five o'clock twilight.

      Fred made a K-turn and pulled into a vacant space on the street) hefted the armful of sporting periodicals he had checked out of the library, and entered the high-rise. The brown- uniformed doorman sat in an alcove off the foyer, being questioned by two hard-eyed men in shapeless gray suits. Fred punched the elevator button for 22. Even out in the hall, as he fumbled the key into the front door, he could smell the aroma of Bunny's meatloaf. Finest cook an old man ever had, he reflected, and the finest daughter too, turning the biggest bedroom in the apartment over to him, buying him that earphone attachment so he could listen to the radio late into the night without disturbing her.

      He shambled into the large airy apartment and Bunny Buford, tall and slender in green blouse and slacks, came into the front room from the kitchen to greet him. Fred lowered his bulk onto the sofa and unlaced his shoes with a sigh, replacing them with soft-soled slippers. When he was comfortable he looked up at his daughter and asked in his cracked rumble, "What's all the ex- citement downstairs?"

      "There's been a murder in the building, Daddy." Bunny's calm tone was the product of 28 years lived in the shadow of violent crime. She took off her glasses and wiped the steam of cooking from their lenses with the edge of her apron. "The Umber woman down in 16-C, the blonde who liked purple miniskirts. Someone cut her up with a carving knife. A Detective-Sergeant Duffy came by two hours ago looking for you and I told him I expected you back about this time."

      Where else can a widower ex-cop past the mandatory retire- ment age spend his days but at the library, Fred wondered. He cupped his chins in a liver-spotted hand and shook his fringe of sparse white hair in disapproval. "Duffy, hub? There was a Duffy in my course on Techniques of Crime Detection at the Academy year before last. Flaming idiot if you ask me. If he's in charge five will get you ten the case goes into the Unsolved basket." "He looked upset when I saw him." The girl's brown eyes brightened and her button nose twitched in sudden excitement so that for a moment she almost looked like a real rabbit. "Daddy, you don't think he wants you to help with the case?" Fred tried to suppress his own soaring hope of relief from the stagnation of eleven months' retirement. '"Who the hell would he ask for help if not me?" he demanded. "If he doesn't come back here with hat in hand he's a bigger fool than" At which point the door chime sounded and the veteran Police Academy instructor jumped to his feet in expectation. "Great meatloaf, Miss Buford, best I've had since my mother passed away," mumbled tall gawky Sergeant Duffy around his final mouthful of meat and baked potato. "She's a great cook," Fred agreed heartily, "and a fine freelance commercial artist too, I'll have you know. You should have her show you the sketches in her workroom sometime when you're not on a case. You won't believe this, Duffy, but when she was born I was very disappointed I didn't have a son. Now I wouldn't trade her for all the sons in the world." He threw a fatherly arm around Bunny's shoulders and she smiled up at him proudly. The young sergeant neatly laid his knife and fork on the edge of his plate. "Gosh, sir, I'm so glad I noticed that F. BUFORD on the apartment-house directory downstairs and figured it must be you. And I'm even gladder," he went on, inadvertently cutting off something Fred had begun to say, "that you don't mind helping out on this one, Captain, ah, I guess it's Mr. Buford now, isn't it?" "Let's take our coffee over to the couch while my daughter is clearing the table," Fred suggested, "and you can tell me the de- tails."

      "Well, Cap, ah, sir," the rookie sergeant began, "as you know, the victim's name was Trudy Umber. She used to be married to Will Umber of Craven and Umber, the ad agency downtown, but they separated two years ago and she moved in here and has been living off a separation allowance. Off that and a little sideline she had. The old badger game. She'd let herself be picked up by a well-to-do older mana married man, of courseand jump into the sack with him a few times while her accomplice made like Cecil B. DeMille with a camera hidden in the bedroom closet of her apartment. Then a few weeks later she'd put the bite on the guymoney in return for the negatives. "The only unusual thing about the way she played it is that she'd put the bite on the guys herself; most of the time, as you know, it's the male accomplice, the cameraman, who makes the approach to the sucker. She had six guys paying off regularly until today, when it seems one of them got fed up." "If you know so much about her activities," Fred rumbled, "why didn't you go after her while she was still alive?" He swallowed black coffee from a tall thick mug. "Oh, we just found all this out today, sir, from her diary and the victims. We found a, well, a sex diary hidden inside a stereo speaker on a wall mount. Names all her marks, gives them report cards, tells how much she collected from eachthe whole works, except there's no mention of who her partner is, but we'll get him soon enough."

      Fred crossed his slippered feet and folded his hands on his bulg- ing abdomen. "The dubious pleasure of wading through the tramp's diary is all yours," he grunted. "Who found her body?" "Today's the day the window washers come around to do the outside of the building. One of the crew happened to look in from the outside of 16-C and saw her lying in a pool of blood and wooden chips in the dining room and gave the alarm. She was stabbed seven times with a long-bladed knife which the killer took away with him. Very messy. Medical examiner gives the time of death as between twelve thirty and two o'clock." "Wooden chips?" Fred's gruff tone suggested annoyance. "Yessir. She must have been a brainy sort of tramp. Instead of watching soap operas or game shows on TV during the day she played Scrabble with herself. You know, the game where you make words out of little wood blocks with letters of the alphabet printed on one side?" "~ "I've played the game, Sergeant," Fred remarked drily. "Well, sir, she had the board set up on the dining-room table and was in the middle of a game with herself when the killer rang the bell. Apparently he brought his own knifenone seems to be missing from her apartment. Anyway, he stabbed her seven times, wiped the knife on a bathroom towel, and took the knife away with him.

      "But she wasn't quite dead yet. Mass of blood that she was, she dragged herself over to the table and pulled down the Scrabble box with all the letters in it and rooted around among those scat- tered little letters on the floor and palmed two of them before she died. When we found her, her other hand was clawed among the letters like she was looking for more of them." "What two letters did she pick up?" "An R and an F," Duffy said. "No way of telling which letter was meant to come first, of course." "It's still a damned good clue," his old instructor pointed out, "if you know how to use it."

      "Sir, I learned from you." Duffy's voice rang with pride. "The woman's diary gives the full names of all six men she was blackmailing. And it happens that two of them have initials that match."

      "Who are they?"

      "One of them is Roger Farris, a vice-president at the United Electronics main office. Tall, good-looking, fiftyish, standard executive-type complete with a society wife and two kids in col- lege that hate his guts and a big fancy house out in Spruceknoll. In other words, one hell of a lot of respectability to preserve and a strong motive for killing the tramp who threatened his respecta- bility. The other one is Franklin Roosevelt Quist. You've heard of him, I guess. The big civil rights lawyer?" "I've heard," Fred replied laconically. "Had a run-in with him the year before I retired over something one of his clients had de- cided in his infinite wisdom was a case of police brutality. Of course, as you pointed out, Duffy, there's no way of telling which of the two letters was meant to be read first." "There's a bigger problem than that, sir," Duffy said. "The boys have already talked to both suspects and both of them claim to have alibis. Between twelve thirty and two o'clock this afternoon Roger Farris says he was sitting at the head table at the Sheraton Central campaign luncheon for Senator Huggins, and our friend the defender of the oppressed was downtown in Superior Court arguing a civil rights case."

      "Political lunches are organized chaos," Fred reminded the younger man. "Courts take recesses. If you can't crack one of those two alibis, you'd better find another line of work." "Oh, we're working on them, sir," Duffy assured his former in- structor hastily. "But of course we have no positive proof that the killer is one of those two. Maybe the girl's partner was named Roy Fox or Frank Rush or something and maybe he killed her in a dispute over sharing the payoff money. Maybe a homicidal ma- niac did it. Anyway, just as a matter of routine we've been check- ing out every person in this building whose initials are RF or FR or whose first or last name begins with one of those combina- tions." The young sergeant lowered his eyes for a moment in em- barrassment. "Uhhwere you in the library all day today, sir?" he asked Fred Buford.

      In the sudden silence they could hear the friendly clink of dishes from the kitchen.

      Fred glared at the hapless rookie. "Don't you think you should read me your damn Miranda warning before you ask a question like that, Sergeant?" Then he spread his cracked lips in a feeble attempt at a grin. "I went for a bite to eat at Leo's Luncheonette around the corner from the library sometime after noon. I always eat there when I spend the day browsing in the Reading Room. Leo's is jammed at lunchtime, I don't remember my waitress and didn't see anyone there I knew." He held out his wrists as if for the handcuffs.

      Duffy raised his hands almost in horror. "Oh, no, sir, that was just a routine question. I was just being thorough like you taught us at the Academy. You were the last FR in the building that I hadn't covered, but, my gosh, you're no more a suspect than well, than I am!"

      "Glad to hear it, Duffy. You're showing good cop sense." The thought crossed Fred's mind that the sergeant had not been quite as thorough as he stated he had been, but residual resentment of the rookie's line of questioning led him to give Duffy no more than the subtlest hint. "Actually, I never talked to the Umber woman more than' to say hello in the elevator. I only knew her name because an old man with no job gets curious about his neighbors, but I doubt she even knew my name or my daugh- ter's."

      "Uhhhbut you will come down to headquarters tomorrow and help me work on those alibis?" Duffy requested awkwardly. "Oh, hell, sure I'll help. Nothing better to do." Fred carefully kept all his joy at being asked out of his voice. "Gee, thanks a million, sir, I sure appreciate it!" Duffy rose fumblingly from his armchair. "Would ten o'clock be too early for you?"

      Fred frowned as he hoisted his thick-bellied bulk to his feet. "Old folks don't need much sleep. I'll see you at eight." "Yessir."

      "Just one thought before you go," he said at the door. "Husband and wife are separated, husband has to lay out cash to live up to their separation agreement. If husband finds out wife is also get- ting goodies from lovers, he might be tempted to cut off his pay- ments the fast way, with a knife. And he might be even more tempted to stick a couple of Scrabble letters in her hand so as to make things hot for a couple of her lovers, assuming of course that he first took a peek into her diary like you did and found out who they were, or learned some other way. If I were you I'd look into what Mr. Will Umber was doing early this afternoon." "Yes, sir! I'll do that. And thanks again for all your help. And for dinner. See you tomorrow, sir!" They shook hands in the cor- ridor by the elevator and Fred shuffled back into the apartment and into the kitchen where Bunny was finishing the dishes. "I heard most of what you two were saying," his daughter said, handing him the meat platter to dry. "You haven't had that light of excitement in your eyes since the day you retired." Fred picked up a dishtowel and wiped the water from the din- nerware with vigorous strokes. "Yes, indeed," he crowed, "when the kids get stuck they got to call in the old man. And with a lump like that Duffy in charge you can be damn sure it won't be solved without me! Why, throughout this entire day and evening he's believed that F. BUFORD on the board downstairs meant me, and never even wondered how an old man on a cop's retirement pension could afford the rent on a big apartment like this. I threw him enough hints, too, like when I mentioned that a long time ago I'd wanted a son. Just like I said before he camea flaming idiot."

      Bunny almost dropped a plate laughing. "Oh, Daddy! Were you seriously going to suggest me as a suspect?" Fred chuckled back at his daughter, enjoying the joke hugely. "Well, as a point of routine he should have covered it. After all, look at the case a really good cop could build against you. When can't a woman working the badger game do the usual thing and have her male accomplice make the approach to the marks? When the accomplice is a female, too. What's the most convenient way for the accomplice to operate the hidden camera in the other girl's apartment? Live in the same building herself and use the fire stairs. When someone's dying and using her last breath to spell out her murderer's name, is she going to reach for the killer's ini- tials or try to spell out the name? Spell out the name, of course. It's an open-and-shut casea dispute between the partners over the payoff money like Duffy suggested." "Oh, Daddy, you're beautiful." Bunny blew a playful kiss at her father in appreciation of the jest. "But I think you've been hitting too many whodunits down in that Reading Room. For the sake of my reputation you'd better switch to some nice safe biographies! Seriously, Daddy, who do you think did it?" "My money's on Franklin Roosevelt Quist." The old policeman savored every syllable of the civil-rights lawyer's name. "That last point I made about the Umber woman going for the name instead of the initials makes a lot of sense, you see. And even if she was going for the initials, if she was trying to name Roger Farris she wouldn't have been clawing out for more letters at the moment she died, the way Duffy said she was, because she already had Farris' initials. In the 'game of Scrabble, daughter, there is only one Qand she couldn't find it. That's what she was hunting around for, desperately trying to add it to the F and R in her hand before the curtain came down. We'll crack his alibi tomor- row."

      "Be careful drying that meat knife," cautioned Frederika Buford, known to her father as Bunny. "It's very sharp."