“How, then?”
“I wish I knew.” He pushed in the cigarette lighter that rarely worked and reached for his crumpled pack. In the light from passing cars her face was tense and drawn. She looked older than her age.
“You must have some idea.”
“Sure I do, lots of them. Want to hear one? Velma Kelty died somehow at your house, maybe in the swimming pool, and your father the councilman is implicated. To protect him, you and Tom cook up this disappearance, with you using that black wig. How does that sound to you?”
“Fantastic!”
“Maybe.”
They drove the rest of the way in near silence, until they were almost to her house. “By the way,” he asked, “how’d you get out to Sportland tonight?”
“Tom drove me,” she mumbled. “He dropped me off.”
He pulled up in front of her house. “Want me to come in with you, have a few words with your father?”
“N-no.”
“All right. This time.”
He watched till she reached the door and then drove on. He was thinking that if his own marriage had worked out he might have had a daughter just about her age—fifteen or sixteen—but that was a heck of a thing for a cop to have on his mind. Velma Kelty might have been his daughter too, and now she was gone.
He went home to his apartment and turned on the air-conditioner. He fell asleep to its humming, and when the telephone awakened him he wondered for an instant what the sound was.
“Leopold here,” he managed to mumble into the instrument.
“It’s Fletcher, Captain. Sorry to disturb you, but I thought you’d want to know. We found her.”
“Who?” he asked through bleary cobwebs.
“The missing girl. Velma Kelty.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s dead, Captain. They just fished her body out of the Sound near Sportland.”
He cursed silently and turned on the bedside lamp. Why did they always have to end like this?
“Any chance of suicide?”
Fletcher cleared his throat. “Pretty doubtful, Captain. Somebody weighted down the body with fifty pounds of scrap iron.”
Leopold went back to the house with the swimming pool, rousing Tom Williams from his bed just as dawn was breaking over the city. “You’ll wake my father,” young Williams said. “What do you want?”
“The truth. No more stories about ferris wheels, just the truth.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“They just fished Velma’s body from the Sound. Now do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Oh no!” He seemed truly staggered by the news, as if he refused to comprehend the truth of it.
“That trick with your sister was a bit of foolishness. Is that the way you worked it the other night, with a wig?”
“I swear, Captain, Velma Kelty got on that ferris wheel. She got on and she never got off. I can’t imagine what happened to her, or how she ended up in the Sound. What killed her?”
“They’re doing the autopsy now. Her body was weighted to keep it at the bottom, but not heavily enough apparently. It wasn’t any accident.”
“I…I can’t imagine what happened to her.”
“You’d better start imagining, because you’re in big trouble. You and your sister both. Someone killed the girl and threw her body in the Sound. Maybe she was raped first.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I don’t know much of anything at this point, but I can speculate. Did you do it, Tom? Or maybe your father? Or maybe some of the hippie crowd she hung around with? Anyway, the body had to be disposed of, and Velma’s disappearance had to take place somewhere else. The ferris wheel seemed logical to you, because of the witch stories, so Cindy put on her wig and you pulled it off. Except that the wheel operator was ready to deny everything. That threw you for a loss, and you spent a couple of hours wondering what to do next.”
“No!”
“Then why did you wait all that time before reporting her disappearance? Why, Tom?”
“I…I…”
Leopold turned away. “You’d better think up a good story. You’ll need it in court.”
Fletcher looked up from his desk as Leopold entered the squad room and crossed to his private office. “Did you bring the Williams kid in, Captain?”
“Not yet, soon.” His lips were drawn into a tight line.
“Crazy story for him to make up, about that damned ferris wheel.”
“Yeah.” Leopold shuffled the papers on his desk, seeing nothing. “How’s the autopsy report?”
“Nothing yet.”
“I’m going down there,” he decided suddenly.
The medical examiner was a tall red-faced man whom Leopold had known for years. He had just finished the autopsy and was sitting at his desk writing the report. “How are you, Captain?” he mumbled.
“Finish with the Kelty girl?”
“Just about. I have to submit the report. Her things are over there.”
Leopold glanced at the clothes, still soggy with water. Dark blue slacks and sweater, sneakers, bra and panties. A heavy piece of cast iron, entwined with damp cord, rested nearby. He looked back at the doctor. “Was she raped, Gus?”
“No. I wish it were that easy. Something like that I could understand.” His face was suddenly old.
“What was it, Gus?”
“Fifteen. Only fifteen years old…”
“Gus…”
The doctor stood up and handed over his report. “There it is, Captain. She died of a massive overdose of heroin, mainlined into a vein near her elbow…”
It was late afternoon when Leopold returned to Sportland. He could see the ferris wheel from a long way off, outlined against the blue of a cloudless sky. For the first time he wondered if Stella Gaze really had been a witch, if she really had put a curse on the place. Maybe that was some sort of an explanation.
“You’re back!” Rudy Magee said, strolling over to meet him. “I hear they found the girl.”
“They found her.”
“Not far from here, huh?”
“Close, Rudy. Very close.”
“The kid was lying, then?”
“Let’s go for a ride, Rudy, on your ferris wheel. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Huh? All right, if you really want to. I don’t usually go on the thing myself.” The kid took over the controls, and he preceded Leopold into one of the wire cages. As the wheel turned and they started their climb, he added, “Great view from up here, huh?”
“I imagine with all this neon lit up at night it’s quite a ride.”
Rudy chuckled. “Yeah, the kids like it.”
“I know how Velma disappeared,” Leopold said suddenly.
“You do? Boy, I’d like to know myself. It was a weird thing. The kid played some trick on me, huh?”
“No trick, Rudy. You were the one with the tricks.”
The pale man stiffened in the seat beside him. “What do you mean?” The caged seat swayed gently as it reached the peak of its ascent and started slowly down.
“I mean that you’ve been selling drugs to these kids—hippies, college kids, fifteen-year-old girls. I suppose it was a big kick to go up on this wheel at night with all the colored neon and stuff while you were high on LSD.”
“You’d have a tough time proving that,” Rudy said.
“Maybe not. Maybe Tom Williams has decided it’s time to talk. That was the key question, after all—why he waited so long to report Velma’s disappearance to the police. The reason, of course, was that he was high on drugs at the time, probably on an LSD trip. He had to wait till it wore off a little. Maybe you even had him convinced that Velma never did get on your ferris wheel.”
“I told you she got on,” Magee mumbled. “But she never got off.”
“She never got off alive.” Leopold watched the scene shifting beneath them as they reached bottom and started up once more. “LSD had become too ta
me for Velma and her hippie friends. So you maybe sold her some marijuana. Anyway, before long you had her on heroin.”
“No.”
“I say yes.”
He rubbed his palms together. “Maybe I sold the kids a little LSD, but never anything stronger. Never horse.”
“Some people call it horse, Rudy. Others call it Hazel. I heard the kid ask you for Hazel the other day, but it didn’t register with me then. Velma Kelty bought the heroin from you, and mainlined it into her vein as she was going up in the ferris wheel. It’s a pretty safe place, when you consider it. Only she was fairly new at it, or the stuff was a bad batch, or she just took too much. She crumpled off the seat, into this space at our feet—and she rode around on your ferris wheel for the rest of the night, until the park closed and you could weight the body and toss it in the Sound.”
“Somebody would have seen her there.”
“No, not from ground level. This metal sill is a foot high, and I noticed that from the ground you couldn’t see below girls’ knees. A small fifteen-year-old girl could easily crumple into that space, seen by you on that platform every time the wheel turned, but invisible from the ground. The seat just looked empty and of course you were careful to skip it when loading passengers.”
“The people in the seat above would have seen her there,” Magee argued.
“So you kept that seat empty too. Williams said you weren’t busy that night. There were only a few others on the wheel. Besides, Velma was wearing dark blue slacks and sweater, and she had black hair. In the dark no one would have seen her there, especially with all this neon blinding them.”
“So you’re going to arrest me for disposing of a body?”
“For more than that, Rudy. The narcotics charge alone will keep you behind bars a good long time. But you know the effects of an overdose as well as I do. Velma Kelty was still alive after she collapsed—physically incapacitated, stuporous, with slow respiration, but still alive. She could probably have been saved with quick treatment, but you were too afraid for your own skin. So you let her slowly die here, crumpled into this little space, until the park closed and you could get rid of the body.”
“The policeman came, he looked.”
“Sure. He came and looked two hours later. Naturally he didn’t check each individual seat, because no one would believe she could still be there unseen. Perhaps by that time you had stopped the wheel anyway, with her body near the top. Or maybe you’d even managed to remove it, if business was bad enough to give you a few minutes’ break.”
Rudy Magee’s hand came out of his pocket. It was holding a hypodermic syringe. “You’re a smart cop, but not smart enough. I’m not going back inside on any murder rap, or even manslaughter.”
Leopold sighed. The wire cage was nearing the ground again. “Do you see that man watching us from the ground? His name is Sergeant Fletcher, and he’s awfully good with a gun. I wouldn’t try to jab me with that, or yourself either.”
As he spoke, Leopold’s hand closed around the syringe, taking it from Rudy’s uncertain fingers.
“How did you know it all?” he asked quietly, staring into Leopold’s eyes.
“I didn’t, until I saw the autopsy report. Velma died of an overdose of heroin, and she was last seen alive getting onto your ferris wheel. I put those two facts together and tried to determine if she could have died on your wheel, and just kept going around, without being seen. I decided she could have, and that she did.”
The wheel stopped finally, and they got off. There was a bit of a breeze blowing in off the Sound, and it reminded Leopold somehow of Velma Kelty—the living girl, not the body in the morgue. He wished that he had known her. Maybe, just maybe, he could have saved her from Rudy Magee—and from herself.
(1969)
The Rainy-Day Bandit
SAM THE CLEAN-UP MAN took Captain Leopold’s car and anchored it firmly to the endless chain that would carry it through the steaming, splashing suds of the car wash. “How are you today, Captain?” Sam shouted above the roar of machinery.
“Good as could be expected on a Monday morning,” Leopold shouted back. “Don’t know why I’m getting it washed. Looks like it’s going to rain any minute.”
Sam squinted at the leaden sky and walked over to Leopold’s side. “Sure hope not. I need a full week’s work to pay my taxes.”
Leopold nodded sympathetically. The 15th of April was only a week away, and with the extra surtax this year it was hurting everybody. He found himself reluctant even to pay out the cost of the car wash, wondering why he didn’t sometimes chisel a bit like everyone else and have it cleaned at the city garage along with the official detective cars.
It was that sort of day, and it lasted even after he’d waved goodbye to Sam and the other workmen and wheeled out onto the street, heading downtown. In the other lane he noticed an unmarked police car with a detective from Robbery at the wheel. Tommy Gibson. A nice guy, someone everybody liked, but who was not above taking a little graft on the side. There were a few others like him in the department, but they were not really Leopold’s concern as head of Homicide. Tommy Gibson could take his petty graft. As for Leopold, he’d still pay for his own car wash.
Sergeant Fletcher was already in the office with Leopold’s coffee, and that made him feel a bit better. “You’re late, Captain.”
“Stopped to get my car washed. Saw Tommy Gibson on the way in. What’s he up to these days?”
Fletcher sipped his own coffee from the paper cup. “Robbery, same as always. He’s in charge of this holdup investigation right now. Probably hoping it won’t rain today.”
“The rainy-day bandit?” Although robbery was not directly in Leopold’s province, he was aware of the crimes, as was everyone else in the city. Perhaps that was why Tommy Gibson was out cruising on a threatening Monday morning in April.
The first robbery had been a small-time affair—the stickup of a parking-meter collector during a chilling rainstorm back in January. It was followed three weeks later by one a little more daring—a gas-station holdup. Then came an insurance office, and the branch of a bank, and most recently a wealthy gambler on his way to the bank with a deposit. The crimes were identical in their execution. The day—for they were always daylight crimes—was dark and overcast, with a heavy rain falling. The bandit wore a cloth mask that covered his entire face, and he carried a shiny nickel-plated revolver. Not one of the five victims doubted he would have shot any one of them dead at the first indication of resistance. In the case of the bank robbery—the bandit’s most profitable venture to date—he’d actually knocked two people to the floor as he dashed for the street.
“The Commissioner’s pushing Tommy for an arrest,” Fletcher said. “This is the sort of thing the newspapers love. Since he robbed that gambler last week, they’re almost beginning to treat him like a modern Robin Hood.”
“He’s getting more active with the spring rains,” Leopold observed. “Two holdups so far this month, and it’s only the eighth.”
There’d been an early Easter this year, and an early spring. Somehow the whole year seemed hurried, as if racing toward summer. Fletcher put down his coffee. “Well, at least it’s no concern of ours.”
“No,” Leopold agreed. “Not unless he kills someone.”
The rain started in mid-afternoon, driving hard out of the west. It sent pedestrians scattering and slowed traffic to a crawl. Captain Leopold looked up once from the autopsy report on his desk to watch it beating on his windows, but then he went back to work and paid no more attention to the downpour. After five o’clock it settled into a steady drizzle that promised to last the night.
It was nearly six when Sergeant Fletcher poked his head around the corner of the door. “You still here, Captain?”
“Going home soon.”
“Tommy Gibson’s rainy-day bandit hit again.”
“Oh? Where?”
“A shopping center on Milrose. Around an hour ago. Cleaned out six cash registers in a su
permarket while fifty people watched. The guy’s got guts, you have to say that!”
“He takes too many chances,” Leopold said sourly. “Some day an eager citizen’s going to jump him, and then we’ll either have a captured bandit or a dead hero.”
The rain lasted through the night as expected. It was still coming down in the morning, although it had tapered off to a damp drizzle that was more annoying than anything else. Leopold was at his desk early, before eight, and he was just beginning to think about his morning coffee when the call came in to Fletcher’s desk.
“We’ve got a killing, Captain,” Fletcher said, already reaching for his raincoat. “Want to come along? The cop who called in thinks it might have been the rainy-day bandit.”
Leopold nodded. “Let’s go.”
The dead man was sprawled in an alley on Carter Street, his body wet from rain, his eyes staring unseeing at the leaden sky. He’d been shot once in the left temple, and there was no sign of the gun. Leopold glanced at the body and then looked around at the little group of men. He saw Tommy Gibson at once.
“This a rainy-day bandit caper, Tommy?”
“Looks like it, Captain. Victim’s name is James Mercer. He was an insurance agent making collections in the neighborhood. The money’s gone, though.”
“Anybody see it happen?”
Gibson glanced up at the empty windows. “Not in this neighborhood. They’re mostly first-generation Americans, a lot of them on welfare. They never see a thing.”
Leopold nodded. “It could be your bandit. But it could be anybody. Does he have a list of his collection stops?”
Sergeant Fletcher had been going quickly through the pockets of the dead man’s soggy topcoat. “This might be what you want, Captain.”
There were twenty-one names and addresses in the little notebook, each with an amount and a series of dates written after it. Eleven of them had been checked off. “He didn’t collect much,” Leopold observed, adding quickly, “About fifty bucks.”
“Where do we start?” Fletcher wanted to know.
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