Piece Offering

Crime Fiction by Jon Matthew Farber

With one notable exception, the chess players sat at their boards, waiting for the tournament director to announce the start of play.  In retrospect, the missing person would have done far better to stay away.   The bulk of the hall was set up with long rows of chessboards, chess clocks to the side, and opponents opposite each other.   At the far end, there were two rows of unassigned seats, facing a dais with two tables for the top players, and two demonstration boards where spectators could see the moves as they were played.  

The director announced that competitors should begin.  Silence followed, punctuated only by the sounds of pieces being shuffled and chess clocks being punched.  Two minutes after play began, per his routine, Gabriel Winston entered the hall and strode down the center aisle to the dais.  He walked up the stairs, crossed past one board, and stood over his table, refusing the hand his opponent offered him.  He opened the Bible he brought with him, consulted a page for inspiration, placed the book under his chair, kissed the cross that hung from his neck, made his move, hit his clock, and sat down.  For the next several minutes, he would slouch and occasionally glance at the board, moving when it was his turn to do so, but he also let his attention wander, and at one point even left his seat to stroll around some of the other boards and glance at those games.  However, after his opponent’s eighth move, his attitude shifted.  He sat up straight and focused in front of him.  He then reached out mechanically and grabbed his shiny water bottle, unscrewed the cap, raised it to his lips, and started drinking, all without taking his eyes off the board.  After around a minute, though, he suddenly began to cough and sputter.  He next lunged forward, grabbed a chess piece, and immediately after vomited.  Within seconds he was seizing, and after two more minutes he fell across the board, dead.

*****

Several hours earlier, Professor Leonard Simon was meeting with the tournament director, Bill Elder, in a small room elsewhere in the hotel.    Simon was a professor of mathematics and logic at the local university; Elder was a full-time chess administrator.  The two were a study in contrasts. Simon was tall, thin, with black eyes and perfectly cut black hair, expressive eyebrows, and pointed Stahl ears; his movements were fluid and minimal.  He wore a dress shirt with the uppermost button undone, Dockers pants, and loafers.  For his part, the picture Elder presented was one of roundness:  curly brown hair, round face, round (but not fat) body.  He was constantly in motion, with body twitches as well as sweating; since the air conditioning was on the fritz earlier, and was only just now restored, the loose windbreaker he wore didn’t help matters.  Elder was going over Simon’s duties when Ship, the current US champion, opened the door.

“Howdy Bill,” said Ship in his Texas accent. “Just popped in to see how things were goin’.”  He wore a polo shirt with a lariat, jeans, and cowboy boots.

“Good to see you.  Allow me to introduce Dr. Simon. He’s going to be handling the top twelve boards. Simon, this is Beauregard Ship.”  The two shook hands.

“Call me Bo.  You must be a pretty fine player if Bill here allows you to work with the big boys.”

“I don’t play competitively anymore, but I flirted with senior master status back in the day.  Nothing at your level, of course. I’m a great admirer of your skill.”

“Thanks.  I hope to play well enough to entertain you, and earn that admiration.  Anyway, I’ll leave you two to finish up, and then I’ll catch you after the game, Bill.”

Elder finished giving Simon his instructions, and then Simon went back to the main hall to get ready.  Fifteen minutes before the round was to start, two women (still a comparative rarity at a chess event) entered, right on their usual schedule.  Simon recognized them at once.  The younger one, Adina Sloan, Gabriel Winston’s aunt, rail thin as befit her reputation as a ballerina, and wearing a sundress, limped to a chair in the front row of the spectator seats. Winston’s mother, the model known worldwide by the single name Byrd, wearing shorts and a halter top to good effect, walked up the dais, put a dull black water bottle next to where her son would be playing, wiped it down with a sanitizing tissue, and then returned to sit beside her sister. 

After that, Simon busied himself making sure everything was ready, and didn’t have time to notice little details that proved to be important later.

*****

Two hours after Winston’s death, Simon was summoned to the police command center that had been set up in one of the meeting rooms in the hotel.  Along the way, he saw Adina Sloan sitting alone in a corner of the hotel café, clear-eyed, nursing a coffee cup.  At the makeshift headquarters, he met Elder on his way out, still twitchy and sweating as usual, despite having ditched the windbreaker.

Sergeant Tasha Crosby, tall, fit, with blue eyes and a blonde pageboy cut, was sitting behind a table, in uniform except that her jacket was draped over the back of the chair.  Simon nodded to her and said, “Good afternoon, Sergeant.”

“No need to be formal.  We have an unexpected sort of witness which I’ll tell you about in a bit, so you aren’t under suspicion.”

“Good to know.”

“When you left this morning, I didn’t expect to see you again until late this evening.  However, duty called.  I’ve asked you in to get some background on the suspects, since you follow the chess world closely.  I also want to find out if you saw anything useful, and get your thoughts on the dying clue we were left with, especially in view of how valuable you proved to be in that regard previously.   First, please fill me in on the deceased, Gabriel Winston.”

“Gabriel Winston.  Born in South Africa with a South African mother and American father.  He was a chess prodigy, the enfant terrible of chess, who has grown up to become the adulte terrible of chess.  He’s one of the top ten players in the world, as well as an expert in numerous other recreations, all of which can be thought of as puzzle-related:  crosswords, poker, trivia, etc.  He’s also religious, a practicing Roman Catholic.”

“Why do you refer to him as an adulte terrible?”

“Being devout is no guarantee of being pleasant.  He has a reputation for extreme intolerance, and rudeness to the utmost.  He’s almost universally disliked by the other grandmasters.  Of course, disliking someone is not equivalent to having a motive for murdering him.”

“What can you tell me about his family?” asked Crosby.

“His father died several years ago.  His aunt Adina was a world-class ballerina until she was in a car accident and broke her leg in several places; Winston had been the driver.  I know that his mother, Byrd, was formerly a top model in her youth, but as far as current gossip goes, I expect your underlings will be a more fruitful source of information.   As for chess-related activities, the three of them travel to tournaments together, the women to watch while he performs.  They also are in charge of his non-chess preparations.”

“Yes, I’ll come back to his bottle later.  They’re of course major suspects; family always is.  The aunt has an obvious motive inasmuch as Winston wrecked her career, and there may be other motives hidden that we don’t know about.  But, given that Byrd is older and her peak modeling days are behind her, Winston would now appear to be the breadwinner for the family, so killing him would seem to be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

“That may not necessarily be a deterrent.  While top chess players are often thought to be impecunious, that isn’t true for the absolute elite, and Winston was one of them.  This all began to change when Bobby Fischer became world champion back in 1972.  He earned enough from that one event to be able to retire and, apart from an exhibition match twenty years later, never played professionally again.   Nowadays, there’s a great deal of money invested in the game.   For example, this tournament is one of the richest open tournaments in the world, open meaning anyone can enter.  The top prize is $25,000.  Even more impressively, a closed tournament, with only the crème de la crème invited, may offer $60,000 to the winner and several thousand to the last-place finisher.

“Going even further, chess players can augment their income by streaming, collecting money from subscribers, sponsors, and advertisers.  Hikaru Nakamura is the most followed chess player in the world, with a net worth estimated by some at $50 million.  I don’t believe that figure, but I don’t doubt that many chess players now are multimillionaires, and Winston, as the bad boy of chess, was also very popular, and I would expect him to be worth several million.  As such, even if there’s no life insurance policy to augment that, there should be enough saved to enable a family member to live comfortably for the rest of their life.  Thus, with sufficient motivation, a relative could carry out a desire to kill him without suffering undue financial hardship.”

“Thanks.  Let’s move on to Ship and Elder next.  Our eyewitness makes them suspects.  Let’s take Elder first.”

“He began his chess career as one of the top junior players in the country,” said Simon, “but then plateaued in college.  Knowing he would never advance to the highest rungs, he switched course and became a tournament director, and is now the most sought-after one in the country, handling all the major events.”

“Now tell me your thoughts on Ship.  Do you think the $25,000 first prize might be enough of a motive for Ship?  I’ll tell you we also found out he had a charge of aggravated assault in his past.”

“Ship had a rough childhood, including time in foster care and some run-ins with the law as a juvenile, but managed to straighten himself out, and came to chess surprisingly late, as an older teen. He’s also one of the top ten players in the world, so he should be doing well financially.  In addition, although he and Winston were the favorites, there are at least six players here I would credit with a legitimate chance at winning, so eliminating just one of them wouldn’t appear to be an effective strategy.  Even so, Ship and Elder do have a perhaps stronger reason for wanting Winston out of the way.”

“What’s that?”

“At the last US championship, Winston and Ship were tied going into the last round and playing each other.  At one point, Ship took one of Winston’s knights.  When Winston moved to capture back, his sleeve accidentally caught his king, which fell into his hand.  Chess is played as touch move, so under the rules, Winston had to move his king, and subsequently lost.  Ship could have waived the penalty, as the touch was clearly accidental, but didn’t, and Elder, who was the director, sided with Ship when Winston appealed.  Winston had a suit against the two of them coming up next month, and he vowed to reveal a scandal that would ruin them both.”

“Any idea what that might be?”  Crosby asked.

“Cheating is the obvious answer.”

“How does one cheat in chess?”

“Nowadays, a computer on a Smartphone is faster and stronger at chess than any human.  That’s why competitors aren’t allowed electronic devices during games.  Elder, as the tournament director, wouldn’t be subject to this restriction.  Therefore, if, for example, he accessed one, and signaled Ship even a few moves at key moments in a game, at his level that would be a major advantage.  I’m not saying they were doing this, but if they were, and Winston could prove it, they would both be barred from chess for life.”

At this point, Crosby reached down next to her chair and brought up a shiny black water bottle.  “Let’s talk about this next; we assume the poison was in it, and I’ve sent the contents off to be analyzed.  The bottle was apparently a big thing for Winston. From what we’ve reconstructed, he waited today until after his opponent’s eighth move to drink from it, and spectators told us his condition changed abruptly at that time.  Is there any significance to this?”

“Even people who live by logic and calculation can sometimes rely on superstitions, although they may prefer to think of them as rituals.  The bottle was part of his chess routine, similar to his Bible use.  His mother would prepare it for him, and then put it next to his board fifteen minutes before the round started, followed by cleaning it off.  It would then stay there until he needed to think about a game.  Grandmasters have an extensive knowledge of openings, having memorized literally thousands of moves to begin a game.  Sometimes an original one, what we term a novelty, might not show up until fifteen or more moves have been played, before which Winston would play by rote.  Only then would he start to focus, and take his first drink. 

“This tournament was run according to the Swiss system.  In this, competitors are grouped according to their scores, with the highest rated in a group playing the lowest, second highest paired against the second lowest, etc.  This being the first round, everybody had the same score, and so he was playing the second-lowest-rated player.  As such, his much weaker opponent deviated early.  I looked at the game; the move wasn’t a good one, and indeed gave Winston an immediate advantage.  However, it was unexpected, which is why Winston drank when he did. 

“By the way, his drink contains quinine; he said in interviews that the bitterness helps keep him sharp.”

“Unluckily for him, in this case it may also have served to mask the poison,” Crosby noted.  “Obviously his mother and aunt had access to the bottle and could’ve spiked it.  Now it’s time to tell you about our key eyewitness, as it were.  It turns out that Ship was being filmed during the game for a documentary; he had a Butler 1701 camera trained on his seat, and we had a chance to review the footage. There was some potentially useful information on it, but what the Butler didn’t see was the actual murder. From the time his mother dropped off the bottle, there were only five people who went near it.  Two of them were Ship and Winston, of course, being up on the dais; two of them were their opponents, and the last one was Elder.  The two opponents were local middle school children.  I now understand, from your description of the Swiss system, why they were playing the top boards.  Unsurprisingly, they have no apparent connection to Winston, and didn’t even know they would be on the dais until shortly before the round, and we’ve dismissed them from consideration.

“The film was recorded automatically, from a camera on a tripod, so it only shows Ship’s table, but we do see Elder coming by shortly before play begins, his back to the camera.  He touches Ship’s clock, and then leans over the board, presumably to adjust one or two pieces.  He next goes over to Winston’s table, where he’s unfortunately off camera. In theory, he could have added poison to the bottle then, but he’s only gone for seven seconds, and I don’t think that’s enough time to unscrew the cap, inject poison, and rescrew the cap; we tested this ourselves, and were unable to come close to doing that in the time allotted.  Similarly, there are a few times when Ship leans out of the camera line towards Winston’s table before the opponents arrive, but again only briefly each time.”

“Lastly, we come to the dying message I promised you,” and once again Crosby reached down and took something off the floor.  She opened her hand and showed Simon a chess piece.  “He was clutching this when he died.”

“Yes, I thought a bishop was missing from his table.”

“Any ideas?”

“I thought about this before you called for me.  It’s actually somewhat simple to solve, which paradoxically is what makes it so difficult.”

Crosby frowned, but before she could reply, Simon continued.  “Nevertheless, I believe I can name the killer without the dying message, and if we are lucky, we may even find sufficient proof.  Here’s what I suggest you do…”

*****

An hour later, Crosby and Simon met again in her temporary office.  “You were right,” she said.  “We found it just as you predicted, and we even have him on security footage.  But how’d you figure it out?”

“It started with the bottle.  Winston has used that bottle for years.  I saw his mother put it on the table, and noted at the time that it was dull, yet the bottle you showed me was shiny.  This indicated that poison was not added to Winston’s bottle, but rather that the bottle was substituted with one already prepared.   It was a well-known prop of Winston’s, and therefore easy to find a duplicate.  The only suspect we had who could do this was Elder, who, despite the heat, was wearing a windbreaker in order to hide the bottle.  He subsequently ditched the windbreaker by the time you interviewed him.  I also assumed the bottle would be somewhere nearby, since he couldn’t disappear for long with the tournament about to begin.”

“Yes, a search of the trash cans in the hotel uncovered it, along with capturing him on a security camera discarding it.  It just goes to show that a brilliant chess mind doesn’t automatically translate into brilliance elsewhere – if he’d thrown it out in a bathroom, we wouldn’t have recorded him on a camera.  The DA thinks this will be a slam-dunk, except that we have to explain why Winston grabbed the bishop; otherwise, she’s worried the defense will use it to say he was implicating somebody else, and perhaps establish reasonable doubt.  You said the dying message was simple, which made it difficult.  Care to explain this charming paradox, and can you link Elder to it?”

“I will explain, but feel free to interrupt with any questions,” Simon replied, slipping comfortably into his role as an academic lecturer.  “First, I note that, in detective stories, and also, by happenstance, in the two previous murders on which we had worked, the dying message clearly pointed in one direction.  In contradistinction, though, in real life, such a message, due to its cryptic and ambiguous nature, would often be expected to be open to multiple interpretations, as is the case here.

“For example, suppose someone named Bishop was participating in the tournament; they would be an immediate suspect.  I did check the roster, and there was no one with that name entered.  Next, could the piece be connected to Ship?  It could indeed; Ship likes to be called Bo, and Bo Ship is an anagram of bishop, a connection someone with Winston’s mind would easily make.”

“I came up with that interpretation as well, and he was my primary suspect until we found the incriminating bottle.”

Simon resumed his discourse.  “I can also establish a link between the bishop and Winston’s aunt.  For a South African, such as Winston, as well as for most Americans, I suspect that if you ask them to name a famous bishop, they will produce Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  From Tutu it is a short jeté to a tutu, and then a ballerina, such as Adina Sloan.”

“This isn’t helping.  Next, you’re going to tell me the bishop can also point to Winston’s mother, Byrd.”

“That’s an even more direct connection, albeit obscure.  An ornithologist will tell you that a bishop is a type of bird, in the same genus, Euplectes, as a widowbird.  And who is Winston’s mother, if none other than the Widow Byrd?”

“This is beginning to make my head hurt.  Can you please get to Elder so the DA and I can be happy?”

“Don’t worry, I’m coming to him.  I’m only pointing out the difficulties, and why I couldn’t employ the dying message to deduce the killer.  Not that it is relevant, in view of the damning security footage, but I won’t be sharing any of these previous conjectures with the defense.

“For the final link,” Simon continued, “we need to go back to Winston’s religious background, with a bit of the Bible thrown in.  A bishop is a member of the church, and in custom, and in the New Testament in particular, the term is often used interchangeably with-” and here he paused briefly for dramatic effect, “-an elder.”

“Brilliant.  So, Winston was indeed naming Elder as his killer.”

“To be accurate, we cannot be sure of that.  In a traditional dying message case, the victim has been confronted by the murderer, for example, if they have been shot at close range.  Here, though, Winston presumably did not notice the switched bottle, and whoever he meant to implicate, he might very well have been mistaken.  Thus, his action should not be taken as definitive; this has all been conjecture.”

“Fortunately, as I said before, we don’t need to show that he meant to name Elder, only that he could have been doing so; the bottle evidence will handle the rest.  I’ll take this to the DA and we can wrap this up.”

“There’s only one mystery left,” Simon said, “and I don’t think either of us will solve it.  I know I won’t.”

“And that is?”

“Who’s going to run the tournament now?”

---

Bio: Jon Matthew Farber is a mostly retired pediatrician and an active member of the Mystery Writers of America.  He has published over one dozen stories, and one fair play whodunit novel, Do Not Resuscitate (co written with Daniel Reinharth).

Cover photo by:pexels/Sebastian Voortman

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