Leopold suggested the other possibilities to the man. “It might have been a double.”
“We’ve got the fingers on one hand. We can check it soon enough.”
“Any chance it could be suicide?”
The bomb squad man shrugged. “Hell of a way to kill yourself, but we’ve seen it happen.”
“He had admitted some criminal activities to me during a prior meeting. He might have feared arrest.”
Sergeant Phillips grunted. He was working a portion of scorched clothing from the remains of the deadman. Finally he abandoned the gruesome task and stood up to survey the scene. “Couldn’t have been set off by a trip-wire,” he decided. “Too many kids playing in the area. Probably a radio signal, which means the killer had to be nearby.”
Leopold’s thoughts went back again to Ron Tenyon and his wife. He could see them across the street, being questioned by detectives. Leopold himself had undergone questioning too, but they’d accepted his credentials and allowed him to remain on the scene. “Wait a minute,” he said suddenly. “There’s something wrong here. Dermain’s house is across the street, in mid-block. When he started over here to meet us, he had a choice of either entrance. How could the killer possibly know which one he’d use?”
Phillips shrugged again. “Habit.”
“No, I saw Dermain hesitate before coming the way he did. Would a killer this clever risk spoiling his plot because his victim turned right instead of left?”
The sergeant was suddenly interested. “You’re saying—?”
“I’m saying let’s take a look at the trash barrel at the west entrance.”
Leopold reached it first and gingerly removed a crumpled newspaper and assorted litter. Underneath, resting in the bottom of the barrel, was a large package wrapped in plain brown paper. “Good hunch,” Phillips said. “That’s it.”
The bomb experts carefully transported it to a truck with a covered-wagon look, made of woven steel cables that had the appearance of wicker from a distance. Later, when the package had been opened and the detonator removed from the mound of plastic explosives inside, Phillips came back to Leopold holding it in his hand.
“What do you make of it, Sergeant?”
“Radio-activated, as I suspected, but very short range.” He turned the metal part over in his hand.
“A hundred feet?”
“No, no—more like ten feet.”
“But the killer couldn’t have been that close!” Leopold protested. “Even Abby Tenyon wasn’t that close!”
One of Phillips’s men came up to them. “We found it, Sergeant,” he said, holding out a little plastic evidence bag containing a round metal disc about the size of a dime.
“Good.” Phillips took the bag and showed it to Leopold. “The latest thing in electronic detonating devices. One of these was used in a recent Middle East assassination. It was attached magnetically to the victim’s car fender, and when the car passed a second vehicle loaded with plastic explosives both of them were blown up.”
“Where did you find it?” Leopold asked the man.
“Breast pocket of the victim’s coat, inside a badly scorched envelope.”
“Of course! The letter!” Leopold remembered Dermain’s puzzlement at the letter in the mailbox. “Can you read any of it?”
“Seems to be an order for games.”
“From a fictitious address, no doubt.”
Sergeant Phillips nodded. “Have the lab work on it.”
“That’s why Dermain seemed puzzled—because he wasn’t expecting a mail delivery at that time. No doubt the postman had been there earlier. But the bomber couldn’t risk the uncertainties of the mail service. The letter must have been put in the box by the killer himself, who knew Dermain would see it and remove it as he left the house to meet me in the park.”
“A clever man to anticipate Dermain’s movements like that.”
Leopold nodded. “A puzzle master—as good as Jules Dermain himself.”
“Are we back to the suicide theory?”
“No, no. If Dermain had committed suicide we wouldn’t have found explosives in that second barrel. He’d have known which way to walk.”
It was later in the day, after the fingerprints had finally confirmed Dermain’s death, that Leopold found a chance to speak with Abby Tenyon on the train back to Connecticut. “Why did you try to kill Jules Dermain this morning, Abby? Your face is healed now. Your husband is talking of running in the next election. What could you hope to accomplish? Was revenge that important to you?”
“Revenge? No, not revenge.” She was staring out the window. “I had to do it for Ron. I had to kill that man before Ron did it and ruined his life forever.”
“A self-sacrificing motive for murder! A noble intent, though I can hardly approve of it. In any event, someone else did the job for you.”
She took a deep breath and said, “God, I hope so,” and in that instant Leopold knew she suspected her husband of the murder.
The killing of Jules Dermain was a three-day wonder in the New York press before it was supplanted by a brutal subway slaying. Since the investigation was not the responsibility of Captain Leopold he lost track of it within a week. Of more local concern was the indictment of Carl Forsyth by the county grand jury on charges of felonious assault. The arraignment was held at ten o’clock on the first Monday morning in June, and Leopold was there with Lieutenant Fletcher. They sat in the back of the courtroom watching while Forsyth stood next to his lawyer, Samuel Judge, and pleaded guilty to the charge. The judge ordered sentencing for June 24th and court was adjourned.
“That was fast,” Fletcher said.
Leopold, whose mind had wandered during the court session, was surprised it was over. “What happened?”
“He pleaded guilty. Were you taking a little nap, Captain?”
“No, I was thinking of the most amazing thing.”
“What was that?”
“Remember how this all began, Fletcher? Remember that day you arrested Forsyth and he tried to take a shot at you?”
“How could I forget?”
“You knocked the gun from his hand and broke a bone doing it.”
“Sure. It was all bandaged up while we were questioning him.”
Leopold was on his feet. “There might be a few people in this world who are ambidextrous, but most of us are either right or left-handed, aren’t we?”
Fletcher looked puzzled. “Is this some sort of quiz show, Captain?”
But Leopold was hurrying on, speaking quickly as he moved down the row of seats to the aisle. “It’s one of the oddities of our modern civilization, Fletcher, that a person generally uses the same hand to fire a gun and hold a pencil. If you broke Forsyth’s gun hand you also broke his writing hand.”
“So?”
“So he couldn’t have written Jules Dermain’s name and address so neatly on that piece of paper Samuel Judge gave me.”
He’d reached the aisle now, just in time to intercept the portly lawyer.
“Well, Captain Leopold! Good to see you again!”
“Good to see you too, Mr. Judge. I think the New York police might be even more pleased to see you—and to arrest you for the murder of Jules Dermain.”
Samuel Judge stood quietly while Leopold informed him of his rights. Then he walked between Leopold and Fletcher along the covered passageway that connected the county courthouse with police headquarters.
“He’s not saying a word,” Fletcher said when he came back from booking the lawyer.
“He’s a smart attorney. If the people we pick up on the streets ever learn to keep their mouths shut we’ll be in big trouble.”
“You really think he arranged that bombing?”
“I know it, Fletcher. Look at it this way. The bomber had to possess an important piece of information—the fact that Dermain had agreed to meet us at the fountain at noon on the day in question. Otherwise the twin bombs in the trash baskets and the ideally timed letter in the mailbox would
make no sense. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
“The only ones who knew of that meeting were myself and Ron Tenyon—who unfortunately also told his wife about it. Three people. You and Connie knew about the meeting, but not the details of time and place. I could certainly eliminate myself, and I could also eliminate Abby Tenyon. There was no need for the scene with the gun if she’d already arranged to kill him. Ron Tenyon was another matter, but I quickly eliminated him. He might have slipped down to the city the previous night to plant those bombs, but the letter had to have been left in the mailbox that morning—shortly before our arrival.”
“Why’s that?”
“If the letter was there at, say, nine o’clock, Dermain might have found it earlier and brought it inside. Once opened, it was no good. He certainly wouldn’t carry the miniature radio transmitter with him to the park, even if he thought it was only a metal disc. No, we must assume a clever and thoughtful murderer. Thus we must assume the letter was left in the box late that morning. And Ron Tenyon was never out of my sight.”
“So who does that leave?”
“No one. I asked myself next if Dermain’s phone could have been tapped, but here again the answer was no. He told me on the day of our meeting that his phone and office were constantly checked against listening devices.”
“Then the thing’s impossible!”
“No, it isn’t. One possibility remains—that Jules Dermain himself informed his killer of the time and place of the meeting.”
“Why would he do that?”
“It would be the most natural thing in the world, if the killer was the person who engaged Dermain’s services originally—the nameless casino interests who were behind this whole thing. And that brings us back up here. The note that gave me Dermain’s name and address was written here—not by Carl Forsyth, as I’ve shown, but by the person who was alone with Forsyth at the time. His lawyer, Samuel Judge. It was Judge who wrote the note, and I suspect it was Judge who hired Forsyth in the first place. Who’d have a better knowledge of ex-convicts working in local hotels—a puzzle maker in Manhattan or a criminal lawyer here in town?”
“Then what did Dermain have to do with the scheme?”
“Judge came to him for the idea, but it was Judge who hired Forsyth to carry it out. When we arrested Forsyth, he must have been close to breaking and implicating Judge. We had to be given a name, any name, so he gave us Jules Dermain. He figured Dermain was beyond reach and beyond arrest. He didn’t realize the Frenchman was at a stage of life where he’d begin to brag about past triumphs to the first person who’d listen. When he phoned Judge to say I was coming down again, this time with Ron Tenyon, and that Tenyon had a deal for him, Judge decided Jules Dermain had to die. And he put his mind to it as cleverly as Dermain might have. Who knows—maybe one day when they were together Dermain looked out the window and suggested to Judge the very method of his own murder. He did something of the sort with me regarding a bomb attached to a videotape machine.”
“Judge did it himself?”
“Or else found another ex-convict willing to carry out his plan. Start checking local people with records for bombings. Meanwhile I’m going to talk with Forsyth. He hasn’t been sentenced yet and now that we know about Judge he might be willing to talk in return for a lighter jail term. We want to hit Samuel Judge with enough evidence so he’ll be crying to the New York District Attorney for plea bargaining.”
In the end they had more than they needed, including Dermain’s carefully coded records of payments made to him by Samuel Judge and others. And Leopold, remembering his sole meeting with the little Frenchman, could feel in a special way that he’d solved the puzzle master’s final challenge.
(1980)
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Introduction” and “A Captain Leopold Checklist” copyright © 1985 by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.
Copyright © 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1980 by Edward D. Hoch.
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
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Leopold's Way Page 38
