Leopold's Way

by Edward D. Hoch

  At twenty minutes to eleven, Moore said, “I don’t think he’s coming. I’m going down and check on the money again.”

  “Wait a few minutes more. There’s somebody down there now.”

  “You’re sure you can spot this guy?”

  “I know what to look for,” Leopold answered.

  A little man wearing a raincoat and a limp hat came up the stairs. Leopold looked, looked again, and jumped to his feet. Moore was right behind him. “That our guy?”

  The small figure saw them coming and turned suddenly, seeking escape. Moore signalled his men, but Leopold was already covering the ground fast. “No guns!” he called out to Moore, and then he hurled himself forward at the hatted figure.

  The air was suddenly full of money as the raincoat came open, as Leopold pinned his captive’s arms and tore the hat from the struggling head. It was over in an instant. “No case for you, Dain,” Leopold said. “But I’ve still got a murder. Let me introduce Miss Karen Clement, age fifteen, the killer of Thomas Sane….”

  Later, they gathered again in Leopold’s office. There had been far more cheerful endings to cases than this. Fletcher summed it up with a sour grunt. “Hell, they should give her a medal instead of a juvenile sentence.”

  “They might have,” Leopold agreed, “if she hadn’t gotten the crazy idea of going through with this kidnapping scheme.”

  “Run through the whole thing for me, will you?” Moore said. “I’ve got a report to write.”

  “It’s a bit complex until you sort out the pieces,” Leopold said. “Of course I was suspicious of the set-up right away. The kidnapper had no getaway car and no weapon. Sane was killed with a garden tool that was in the garage, and his own car was used for the getaway. Why? Well, the note tipped me off a bit—the first note. Obviously it was written before Sane was killed, because it mentioned not telling the police. It was not only written before he was killed, but placed in the mailbox before then. Otherwise, the killer would certainly have changed the wording. But why wasn’t the note removed after the murder? Simply because its writer was dead.”

  “Sane!”

  Leopold nodded. “Sane. He wrote the note, left it in the mailbox, and planned to transfer Karen to his car back at the garage. I confirmed the fact that he wrote it when I found some of the same ruled paper in his apartment desk. Also, a ransom as low as ten thousand dollars certainly sounded like a one-man operation. Anyway, when he told Karen he was kidnapping her, she put up a bigger struggle than he’d figured on. She picked up the garden tool and killed him there in the garage. And in a moment of blind panic at what she’d done she decided to take his car and go into hiding. Not knowing he’d already left a ransom note in the mailbox, she sent one herself the next morning. She figured to get five thousand from her father and go to California or someplace. She got the man’s clothes from the costume room at her school. She sneaked back there last night.”

  “Crazy kid,” Fletcher mumbled. “But how’d you know for sure it was her and not some partner of Sane’s sending the second and third notes?”

  “Everything pointed to Karen as the one who drove Sane’s car away after the murder. The seat had been moved up for a short person, which she certainly must have been, and I found out from Harry Waygon that she knew how to drive.”

  Fletcher shook his head sadly. “It’s hard to believe that any girl of fifteen could kill a man, even more or less in self-defense, and then go off to carry out this mad scheme.”

  “Karen Clement is a very special sort of girl,” Leopold said. “Let’s hope an understanding judge and the right sort of confinement can do something for her before it’s too late. I imagine she could be quite an actress, even if she couldn’t fool me in her male disguise. After all, a fifteen-year-old girl who can bring off the lead in Macbeth deserves some sort of help. Even if it was the mood of that play which probably infected her conscience. I suppose it was all one big play to her after a while. Murders on-stage and off.”

  “What about the L. M. she signed to the notes?”

  Leopold smiled a bit, in spite of everything. “The final, all-important clue. The clue that finally convinced me my fantastic theory was true. It was, really, the sort of thing only a fifteen-year-old girl would think of doing. What part did she have in the play?”

  “The lead.”

  “And what is the female lead in Macbeth?”

  They looked at each other. Nobody needed to answer.

  (1963)

  Reunion

  CAPTAIN LEOPOLD’S OFFICE WAS tucked away at the rear of the second floor in the dingy, smoke-scarred building that served as police headquarters, and perhaps for this reason he was rarely bothered by social callers. The detectives, like Fletcher, who worked under him would occasionally stop in for a chat or a gripe, and when election time neared, the politicians came out of their holes. But mostly those who occupied the worn straight-backed chair opposite his desk were there on the most specific of business. They were there because they were suspected of murder.

  Harry Tolliver was not a cop or a politician—nor, so far as Leopold knew, was he a murderer. He was, actually, a boiler salesman—and Leopold had not seen him in almost twenty-five years.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” he was saying. “I’d still know you anywhere.”

  Leopold smiled and offered him a cigarette. “Well, my hair is a bit thinner on top. And I’d hate to think that my middle bulged like this in high school.”

  Harry Tolliver waved away the cigarette. “Stopped smoking three years ago, when I turned forty. This stuff you read in the papers scares you after awhile.”

  “In my business, Harry, walking down a dark street at night scares you more.”

  “Yeah. You’re the head of the homicide squad or something, aren’t you?”

  Leopold smiled at the popular misconception of his position. “Not really. There’s no such thing in this city. It’s more of a violent crimes squad, I suppose. But most of the cases do seem to be murders of one sort or another. Let’s not talk about me, though. It’s a dull subject. What about yourself? What brings you around to see me?” He had a half-day’s work waiting, and Harry Tolliver had never been that good a friend, even in high school.

  “Well, it’s been twenty-five years.”

  Leopold looked blank. “Since what?”

  “Since we graduated from high school. Some of us got together and decided we should have a reunion of the whole class, all the guys and gals.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sure. Sounds great, doesn’t it?”

  Leopold tried to think back twenty-five years, to recapture those faces and names so buried now in his memory. He’d traveled in different circles during those intervening years—away to college, and the army, and a job with a police department out west, then back east for ten years of marriage that didn’t work, until finally he’d found himself a middle-aged captain of detectives, back in his old home town. He liked it here, always had. He liked the breeze off the Sound in the summertime, and even the occasional heavy snows of winter. Perhaps, he sometimes thought, being back home made him feel less lonely—at least until moments like this.

  “I don’t know how it sounds,” he answered frankly.

  “We were thinking of a big picnic at Venice Park, just like the old days. Wives and kids and everything.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have any family to bring.”

  “Oh. Well, come anyway. It’ll be great to see the old crowd. Hell, my kids probably won’t even come themselves. They’re all in high school now.”

  “When is this going to be?”

  “First Saturday in June, right close to the actual graduation date—just a few days early.”

  “I’ll think about it, Harry.”

  “Hell, I want you to do more than just think about it. I want you to help us find people, contact them.”

  “Well, I really don’t have much time…”

  “Sure you do. Look, I brought along my old yearbook.”
He bent to a zipped brief-case and produced from it the slick-papered volume with thickly padded covers which had all but vanished from Leopold’s memory. “Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  Harry Tolliver ran his fingers lovingly over the imitation leather with its gold stamping now dulled and blurred by age. “Those were the days, boy! Those really were. So look, what we want you to do is take a few names—just a dozen or so—and contact the people. Hell, if anyone can find them you should be able to! You’re a detective!”

  “Yeah. Well, you see…”

  “Come on! For the old crowd!”

  Leopold looked into those middle-aged eyes and knew it would be useless to refuse. “All right. Maybe I can call a few people for you.”

  “Good, good. Look, why don’t you take everyone whose name starts with F and G? There are only thirteen of them.”

  “Sure. You’d better leave me your book, though. I doubt if I could find mine any more.”

  Tolliver passed over the book a bit regretfully. “Take good care of it, huh? I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.”

  Leopold nodded. “I’ll see if I can get a list of names typed up from it. Then I can give it back to you.”

  “Thanks. You’ll get right on this? We’ve only got about five weeks, you know.”

  “Sure, Harry. Don’t you worry about it.”

  Tolliver stood up and shook hands. “Good to see you again, Leopold, after all these years.”

  “I’ll be in touch with you.”

  The little man nodded. “Say, when they going to give you a new building? This place is getting pretty shabby.”

  “Talk to the city council, Harry. They probably think it’s pretty plush.”

  For a time after Tolliver left, Leopold sat alone at his desk, letting the pages flip through his fingers, stopping now and then at some familiar face, some scrawled greeting addressed to Harry Tolliver. The class of George Washington High School, in that good year just before the coming of war.

  He remembered how it was, and the memory depressed him.

  During the next two days, Leopold ran quickly through eleven of the names on the list he’d made. Eight of them were men whose names were still in the phone book, and a ninth phoneless man was located through the city directory. Two of the women had been tracked down with some help from Tolliver, and Leopold had phoned one of them in New York City to convey the invitation. Each phone call was an adventure of sorts, even when he hardly remembered the people. It made him feel old, but he’d never been one to close his eyes to reality.

  The man without a phone was named Jim Groves, and he lived in an apartment on the west side of town. Leopold stopped to see him one sunny afternoon on his way home, and caught him just as he was leaving for the night trick at a nearby factory. Jim Groves in his day had been the star quarterback of the Washington High football team, and even Leopold remembered him well. The man hadn’t changed much in twenty-five years.

  “Leopold! Sure, I remember you. God, it’s been a long time.”

  They shook hands and Leopold told him quickly about the reunion plans. “Venice Park, the first Saturday in June. And bring the wife and kids if there are any.”

  Jim Groves was suddenly glum. “They’re with her family up in Boston. We’re separated.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “One of those things. After all these years she decided she’d married a failure.”

  “You’ll come to the reunion anyway?” Leopold urged. Somewhere along the line he’d caught the fever of the thing.

  “Sure. It’ll be good to see them all. The team and all. You finding everybody O.K.?”

  Leopold glanced at his list. “Harry Tolliver’s contacting most of them. I’ve got all but two on my list. Maybe you know something about them. It’ll save me another call to Harry.”

  “I see a few of them once in a while. Who you looking for?”

  “Shirley Fazen…”

  “Sure. She married Quain, the class president. Remember? Chuck Quain? They live in town somewhere. He went to college and got an engineering job of some sort. They got a big house out in the suburbs.”

  Leopold made a note. “Thanks. One more—George Fisher.”

  For a moment, Groves didn’t answer. He only looked at Leopold, his face troubled and intent. “Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what happened to George Fisher? He drowned on the senior picnic at Venice Park.”

  “Yes,” Leopold said slowly, wondering how he could ever have forgotten that night, even after so many years. “I never knew him well, and his picture was in the yearbook. I forgot it was him.”

  “Sure,” Groves went on. “The yearbooks were already out by that time. I remember we were all signing them at the picnic. Poor George! You know, I always thought there was something funny about his death. I always thought maybe somebody pushed him out of that boat.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Leopold answered carefully.

  “Yeah. Well, I gotta get to work before that whistle blows. Keep me informed on the plans and I’ll be there.”

  “All right,” Leopold answered.

  “Poor George,” Groves mused as he turned away. Then, as an afterthought, he asked, “What are you doing these days anyway, Leopold? You were always the brains of the class.”

  “I’m with the city, Jim,” Leopold answered, starting down the stairs. “I’m a detective.”

  Chuck and Shirley Quain had made it big. Their house perched on top of a small hill, just a bit higher than the others in the suburban subdivision, and to Leopold’s untrained eye it appeared to be in the fifty-thousand-dollar class. As he climbed out of the car he wished he’d worn a better necktie.

  They remembered him, because he’d “hardly changed at all,” and he remembered them. Shirley Fazen had been the best-looking girl in the senior class, and looking at her in the doorway Leopold could still remember why. Her cheer-leading at the football games had been a major attraction, and even the somewhat dull swimming meets were well attended by boys anxious for a look at Shirley Fazen in a bathing suit.

  Leopold was a bit surprised to find that she’d married Chuck Quain. He’d been elected president of the senior class after a hard-fought, dirty campaign that seemed to mark him as a future politician but little else. The house on the hill showed that he’d made it to something else, but Leopold couldn’t help wondering if he was still using the same tactics.

  “Come in, come in,” Quain urged. “You remember Shirley, surely. Ha, ha!” That must have been his favorite joke. “Drink? Scotch, rye, rum, vodka, anything you name. We live the good life out here.” Behind him, the setting sun was streaking through a window, turning his grey hair momentarily reddish.

  Leopold followed them into a sunken living-room a bit too full of the good life. “You have a nice place here,” he managed to say.

  “We like it.” Quain lit a cigar without offering one to Leopold. “How about that drink, or are you on duty?”

  “I see you’ve kept up on me more than I have on you.”

  “How could I miss? Every time there’s a murder Captain Leopold gets his name in the papers. Isn’t that right, Shirley?”

  She nodded agreement and came over to perch on the arm of Leopold’s chair. She was wearing tight orange pants that did youthful things for her figure, and Leopold had to remind himself that she too must now be forty-three years old. “But I don’t imagine the Captain’s here on business,” she purred. “Are you, Captain? I’ll bet it’s about the big reunion. Harry Tolliver has already talked to Chuck about it.”

  Leopold smiled up at her. “Then my trip was for nothing.”

  “Not if you’ll take a drink.”

  “All right,” he said with a sigh. “Scotch and water—but just one.”

  Chuck Quain produced the drink from a little bar at one end of the living-room. “The good life does have its drawbacks,” he said. “The kids are getting old enough now to sneak a swig of the booze when we’re n
ot around. But I guess that’s the only way to learn about it. I guess I did things like that myself when I was young.”

  “You’re an engineer, aren’t you?” Leopold asked.

  “That’s right. That’s where the money is these days. I could tell you…”

  “Chuck, no shop talk, please. We haven’t seen him for twenty-five years! I want to hear about this reunion, anyway.”

  “You probably know as much as I do, from Tolliver. He’s the one who roped me in on it. Venice Park’s the place, right where we had our senior class picnic.”

  “Yeah,” Chuck muttered. “I remember that.”

  “Funny thing, I’d completely forgotten about George Fisher drowning that day. I stopped by to see Jim Groves this afternoon and he reminded me.”

  “It’s not the sort of thing you like to remember,” Shirley said.

  “But the three of us were right there when it happened,” Leopold said. “I can remember it now as if it were just yesterday. You saw him fall in, didn’t you, Chuck?”

  Quain nodded. “I got there a minute later, anyway. I was taking the canoe back to the boathouse, and I guess he was doing the same thing. He was always ahead of me on the creek, just around the bend, when I heard a yell and a splash. He’d fallen out of the damned canoe and was thrashing around in the water. God, it was awful!”

  “Then why talk about it?” Shirley asked. “It was awful for all of us. I was practically engaged to George at the time.”

  “You helped pull him out, didn’t you?” Leopold asked.

  She nodded. “Some of us had been swimming earlier, and I still had my suit on. We heard Chuck yelling for help and came running. It was pitch dark, of course, but he shouted that George had capsized his canoe and gone under. A bunch of us dived in, and finally we found him. Not in time, though.”

  The details were growing more vivid in Leopold’s memory as she spoke. He’d never been a good swimmer himself, and the black of the water had been too frightening that night. But he remembered running to one of the footpath bridges directly above the tragic spot, remembered looking down with flashlights playing over the water as Shirley and someone else pulled the body onto the grassy bank of the creek. The place was called Venice Park because of these creeks and footbridges, and it was a perfect setting for picnics and canoeing—a bit of Venice in New York State. For the most part, the creeks were barely six or seven feet deep, hardly enough to be very dangerous. That night, though, they’d been dangerous—deadly—to George Fisher. They’d worked over him for an hour before admitting what they all must have known. He was dead, and the senior picnic had been ended by sudden tragedy.