Leopold's Way

by Edward D. Hoch

  “I didn’t touch anything. I saw her and screamed, and called Dr. Libby. Being a nurse makes you careful.”

  “I suppose so,” he admitted.

  “Have you found the killer?”

  He was staring down at the red of the roses along the path, remembering the blood. So much blood. “What?”

  “I asked if you’d found the killer.”

  “Yes,” he said with a sigh. “Yes, I think we have.”

  Dr. Raymond Libby was staring out the window when Leopold entered his office. He turned, startled, and then relaxed. “Have you completed your investigation, Captain?”

  “Yes, I think I have.”

  “I just can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill that old lady.”

  “I had the same trouble, Doctor. I couldn’t imagine it. There was no motive, no real motive. Just a woman dead, in a blood-splattered room.”

  Libby’s eyes flickered. “Yes.”

  “There was all that blood, Doctor. Too much blood, really.”

  “What are you trying to say, Captain?”

  “That no one killed Helen Peachtree. That there is no murderer.”

  The bearded man frowned. “With a knife in her chest, you say there is no murderer?”

  “You plunged that knife into her chest, doctor, moments after Helen Peachtree died of a quite natural heart attack.”

  “That would be difficult to prove.”

  “Not so difficult, once I started thinking about all that blood. There was only one wound in the body, and the knife was still in that wound. Under those circumstances, there should have been next to no external bleeding, not till the knife was removed. Admittedly, the shape of the blade is important here, but in any event there could never have been blood splattered around the room as we found it. It hardly seemed likely that it was the killer’s blood, since it would have been a difficult wound to conceal. Then I remembered hearing from Mayor Carter that you gave blood transfusions out here. Whole blood, splattered about the room, would give just the effect we found.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re not a medical doctor. Helen Peachtree managed to phone you when she was having her attack. You hurried down and arrived seconds too late. You saw her dead there, the first member of the League ever to die, and in a mad moment you thought you had to hide her death. You hurried to the kitchen and returned with a carving knife, because you needed a wide blade that would do the most damage to the heart and hide the telltale signs of a coronary. You reasoned that a knife in the heart just minutes after death would fool even the medical examiner as to the true cause of death. And you were right, to a point. But when the wound bled very little you panicked. You probably remembered that dead bodies don’t bleed, and you never thought that it was your knife in the wound that was holding back the blood. You got a pint of whole blood and splattered it around, overdoing it. A true doctor would surely have known better.”

  “But the medical examiner did miss it, didn’t he?”

  “He must have been tired that day. A knife in the heart, and no question of anything else. He breezed through it. I’m sure a more careful examination would have revealed the closure of the coronary artery, or its branches. The knife wound couldn’t have destroyed all that. Still, in an elderly person, it wouldn’t have been conclusive. Who could really say, if the knife wound came only minutes later?”

  “Granted this might have happened, why must it be me who did it?”

  “Who else had a motive, or opportunity? Her phone had a direct line to you. The whole blood might be locked up, but you had a key. You, Doctor, you. And later, you would have broken the window in the rear door, to point toward an outside job, because even the horror of a knife murder in the building was a lesser evil than the horror of a natural death. You didn’t want to lose all that money you were living on. Though it does make me wonder what you would have done when the second one died.”

  “It wasn’t the money,” he said, very softly. “Not the money.”

  “What, then?”

  “You’ve seen them, Captain. You’ve talked to the ones like Riley. Can you doubt that I was doing them some good?”

  “With a promise of eternal life?” Leopold asked. “I don’t know. That’s a question for the philosophers. I’m only a cop. What would you have done when the second one died?”

  “The first was the hardest, Captain. Maybe I was starting to believe they’d live forever. Maybe I was starting to believe my own sales talk. I only know that when I found her dead I seemed to go crazy.”

  Leopold sighed and stretched out his hand. “Come along. Dr. Libby. I’ll have to take you downtown and see what we can charge you with.”

  At least, he mused, maybe Fletcher could still have his promotion. For David Riley and the other members of the Athanasia League, he had not even that much hope to offer.

  (1970)

  End of the Day

  SERGEANT FLETCHER POKED HIS head around the corner of Leopold’s office doorway. “Captain, I have Mrs. Fleming here, if you can see her now.”

  “Send her in,” Captain Leopold said. He turned to stare out the window at the warm June rain so that he would not have to see her face as she entered. There were moments when he hated his job, and this was one of them.

  “Captain Leopold—”

  He swiveled in his chair, seeing a blonde young woman of moderate good looks. He’d known Iris Fleming slightly, meeting her at department parties and civic functions. This morning she looked tired, and her finely chiseled face showed the lines of age that usually were hidden. “Yes, Mrs. Fleming, sit right down! Sorry to see you under such tragic circumstances.”

  “Is it true, what they say?”

  “I’m afraid it is, Mrs. Fleming. Your husband shot and killed a man over on the Cross-County Expressway.”

  “Can I see him?”

  Leopold shuffled the papers on his desk. “Certainly. But I wish you’d give me a few minutes first. Roger is a detective sergeant under my command. He has killed a person, apparently without any justification. That’s bad for my department, bad for the entire police force.”

  “I’m sure Roger had a good reason for what he did.”

  “If he did, he hasn’t told us yet. The dead man’s car was parked off the road for some reason we haven’t yet established. Your husband, who was off duty at the time, pulled off the road behind him. He walked over to the driver’s side of the victim’s car and fired two shots from his service revolver, apparently without even speaking to the other man. Several passing motorists saw the whole thing, and turned off the expressway to call the police. A patrol car reached the scene within five minutes and found your husband’s car just pulling away. He offered no resistance, but he refused to talk about the killing.”

  “Are you so sure he did it?”

  “In this case his silence is almost proof enough. His gun had been fired twice, and they’re checking it in ballistics now. Several passing motorists identified him, and his car.”

  “Who’s the man he’s supposed to have killed?”

  Leopold glanced at the report before him. “We don’t have an identification yet. The car had Ohio license plates. Do you know anyone from Ohio?”

  She shook her head. “No one. Perhaps Roger had seen this man committing a crime, and had chased him. Isn’t that possible?”

  “I’d like to think so, although it would hardly excuse his killing the man in cold blood. But there’s been no report of a crime, and the dead man had no weapon on him.”

  “And Roger has said nothing about it?”

  “Nothing, Mrs. Fleming. I’m hoping he’ll talk to you. I’ll go in with you, and then I’ll leave you two alone.”

  He escorted her down the back hall to the little Interrogation Room where Detective Sergeant Roger Fleming, smoking a cigarette, sat at the scarred wooden table. Leopold, Fletcher, and Fleming had conducted a hundred or more interrogations in this room over the past few years, and now for the first time,
facing Fleming across the table, Leopold realized the utter loneliness of the place. The walls were bare except for a framed photograph of the President which concealed a tiny microphone. The table and four chairs were the room’s only furnishings.

  “Hello, Roger,” Leopold said. It was the first time he’d seen the man since his arrest.

  “Hello, Captain. Sorry about all this.” He turned to his wife then, hugging her in silence and sighing softly as he finally released her.

  “Do you want to make a statement, Roger?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why did you do it? Why in hell did you do it?”

  “I have nothing to say, Captain. I’m sorry.”

  “Was there some trouble on the highway? Something that angered you?”

  Fleming merely stared at him in silence. “All right,” Leopold sighed at last. “I’ll leave you two alone. Mrs. Fleming, try and talk some sense into your husband.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  As Leopold reached the door, Roger Fleming motioned toward the picture on the wall. “Is the bug on?” he asked.

  “No,” Leopold answered. “I owe you that much.”

  Sergeant Fletcher was down in the police garage, going over the victim’s car. He glanced up as Leopold approached, turning off the small portable vacuum cleaner he’d been using on the seats.

  “Find anything?” Leopold asked, frowning at the car as if somehow it was the cause of the day’s woes.

  “It’s hot, Captain. It was stolen last night from a salesman staying at the Charles Motel.”

  “Damn!” Leopold kicked a tire in anger. “So why in hell didn’t he just say he shot a car thief?”

  “Beats me, Captain.”

  “You know him better than I do, Fletcher. What makes him tick? What’s behind that bland face of his?”

  “I don’t really know him. I’d have a beer with him once or twice a month, but lately we haven’t even done that.”

  “Did he get along with his wife?”

  “As far as I know. They’ve got a couple of kids, in grammar school.”

  “What about the dead man? Any make on him yet?”

  “His wallet was gone, but we found a tailor’s tag inside his sleeve. Name is Norman Rossiter, a C.P.A. Got an office in the Grant Building.”

  “A C.P.A. and he stole a car?”

  Fletcher shrugged. “They’re human like anyone else. Why not?”

  “The usual motives for car theft are joy riding or simple financial gain. Rossiter wouldn’t seem to fit either one.”

  “But at least he’s a local guy, so maybe Roger knew him after all.”

  “Let’s go up and ask his wife,” Leopold suggested.

  “I’ll be along in a few minutes—soon as I finish vacuuming. The lab boys are short-handed today.”

  Leopold found Iris Fleming sitting in his office, nervously smoking a cigarette. “Did he tell you anything, Mrs. Fleming?”

  “No, and frankly I’ve never seen him quite like this. He just kept telling me not to worry, reassuring me that everything would be all right. I asked him who the man from Ohio was, and he just wouldn’t answer.”

  “The man wasn’t from Ohio,” Leopold told her. “The car was stolen. As near as we can tell, the dead man was a local accountant named Norman Rossiter.”

  That was when Iris Fleming fainted.

  Sergeant Fletcher looked depressed, but not half so depressed as Leopold felt. By noon the temperature outside had climbed back into the eighties, where it had been all week, and the humid warmth of the city seemed to hang like a mist over Leopold’s office.

  “A simple triangle,” Fletcher snorted. “She was having an affair with Rossiter and Roger found out. We have ’em every week of the year, and this one is no different.”

  “That seems to be it,” Leopold agreed. “She admitted as much. The Ohio plates threw her off, so she never gave a thought to Roger having possibly killed Rossiter. She didn’t even realize that Roger knew about it—their affair, I mean.”

  “He knew, all right.”

  Leopold patted the moisture on his brow. “When are they supposed to air condition this place?”

  Fletcher shrugged. “It got cut out of the budget again this year.” He started to take out a cigarette, then changed his mind. “But why didn’t Roger just tell us the whole story?”

  “Who knows?” The Captain looked at the list of duty assignments. “He would have been on duty till midnight, and we know he killed Rossiter just before two this morning. That gave him two hours, almost, to track the man down. Where was Roger just before he went off duty?”

  Fletcher checked through the morning reports. “Investigating a knifing on Alamanda Street. Family trouble.”

  “He had family trouble himself.”

  “He sure did, Captain.”

  The phone on Leopold’s desk buzzed and he answered. “Leopold here.”

  “Captain, this is Doc Hayes over at the Medical Examiner’s office. We’ve finished with the man killed over on the Expressway.”

  “Rossiter. Yes?”

  “That his name? Well, anyway, I wish you’d drop over. A couple of things of interest.”

  Doc Hayes was the acting medical examiner while the regular man was on a well-earned vacation. He was a grim little doctor who did his job well and never joked. Leopold admired his efficiency even while thinking he might have been better off teaching at some medical school.

  He rose from his desk, all business, as Leopold entered. “Do you want to see the deceased, Captain?”

  “Is it necessary?”

  “No. I can summarize my findings.” He cleared his throat. “The deceased was shot twice by Sergeant Fleming’s revolver—ballistics has verified this. One of the bullets entered the left temple, lodging in the brain, while the other shattered the jawbone and passed through the body, lodging in the padded window frame on the right side of the car. I understand that slug was mashed up a bit, but they managed an identification.”

  “What about your findings, Doc?” Leopold asked, growing impatient. He could read the ballistics report later.

  “Well, it’s funny the people on the scene didn’t notice, but of course it was a warm night.”

  “Notice what?”

  Doc Hayes sighed and glanced around the little office—as if he were looking for a blackboard to continue his lecture. “When a person dies, the force of gravity causes the blood to seep to the body’s lowest points. The wounds in Rossiter’s head and jaw bled hardly at all, because there was very little blood left in the upper portion of his body by that time. As I say, if it hadn’t been such a warm night, rigor mortis would have set in faster and the condition would have been more obvious from the outset.”

  “Look, Doc, are you trying to tell me that—”

  “That the man was already dead for at least two hours when Sergeant Fleming shot him. He’d been killed by a wound from a thin-bladed knife that went between his ribs and straight into the heart.”

  Leopold went back to his office and told Sergeant Fletcher what he’d learned. Fletcher simply stared at him with widened eyes. “You mean the guy was murdered twice?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Leopold said. “I don’t know if I should feel elated or depressed. It gets Fleming off the hook, but it gives us an unsolved case.”

  “What now?”

  “Get Fleming up here. Maybe he’ll be willing to talk now.”

  A few minutes later Roger Fleming sat in the chair opposite Leopold’s desk. “Could I have a cigarette?” he asked.

  “Bad for your health,” Leopold said, tossing over a pack. “You ready to talk yet?”

  “No.”

  “Suppose I told you Rossiter was already dead when you pumped two bullets into his head.”

  There was a flicker of something—fear?—across Fleming’s otherwise impassive face. He drew slowly on the cigarette and said finally, “I appreciate your seeing me here in your office rather than in the Interrogation Roo
m, Captain.”

  “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Look, Roger, you may be off the hook on the murder charge, but you’re finished with the police force unless you change your attitude pretty damn quick. The dead man was having an affair with Iris—that much we already know. If you didn’t kill him, who did? Who beat you to it, Roger?”

  “What time was he killed?”

  “A little before midnight, according to Doc Hayes.”

  “I was still on duty then, investigating a knifing.”

  “We know that, Roger. But we want you to tell us what you did after midnight.”

  Roger Fleming sighed and looked at his hands. “I drove out along the expressway until I saw his car parked. Then I went over and shot him twice through the open window.”

  “How’d you know he was there? How’d you know which car? The car was stolen.”

  “God, Captain!” Fleming buried his face in his hands. That was his only answer.

  “All right,” Leopold sighed. “We’ll see how long we can hold you for questioning before your lawyer springs you. When you decide to cooperate and tell a straight story you know how to reach me.”

  After Fleming had been taken back to his cell, Leopold buzzed for Fletcher. “I want you to check out Rossiter’s movements for all of last night. Then I want you to do the same on Iris Fleming.”

  “You think she killed him and Roger’s shielding her?”

  “At this point I don’t know what to think.”

  Fletcher watched him slip into his rumpled suitcoat. “Where can I reach you if I need to, Captain?”

  “I’ll be down on Alamanda Street, investigating Roger Fleming’s last case.”

  “His last case?”

  “Just before midnight he was working on a stabbing. And just before midnight Norman Rossiter was stabbed to death. Funny coincidence—if you believe in coincidences.”

  Alamanda Street wandered across the backside of the downtown area. It was a section of floppy gray houses and tiny yards crisscrossed by well-worn paths. Now, in the early afternoon of a late June day, an assortment of noisy children were playing in the yard of the house that Leopold sought.