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."