Leopold's Way (15 page)

“Captain Leopold! What are you…?”

“Quickly, man! Are the others safe?”

“Others?”

“Your partners—Quenton and O'Brian.”

“Why…I don't know.”

Leopold left him and ran on, now in the direction of the great ferris wheel standing silent in the night, bathed in the flickering glow from the flames behind him. Beyond the ferris, the house of Stella Gaze slept dark and peaceful in the night.

He paused and turned, hearing someone shouting his name. It was Fletcher, looking as if he'd been dragged out of bed. “They found him, Captain.”

“Which one?” Leopold asked.

“O'Brian, the one we met out here the other day. Looks like a beam fell on him and trapped him in there.”

Leopold watched the firemen gradually advancing with high pressure hoses against the dying fury of the flames. “Dead?”

“He didn't have a chance. What do we do now, Captain?”

Leopold gazed back toward the ferris wheel, and the shabby little house. “I don't know,” he answered. “I just don't know.”

George Quenton was quite obviously the brains of the Four Kings Sportland. He spoke and acted like a businessman who knew how the game was played. Now, in the early morning hours of a dawning Labor Day, he paced his little office with a long cigar unlit in one hand, glancing now and then at Leopold from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

“What are you going to do, Captain?” he demanded. “Wait until that woman kills Walter and me too?”

“There's no basis for an investigation,” Leopold told him quietly. “Both deaths have been apparent accidents.”

Walter Smith grunted. “Hell, yes! And we'll be accidents too.”

“Very well,” Leopold sighed. “Tell me everything you know. When was the last time you two saw Felix O'Brian alive?”

“I was in town,” George Quenton said. “At the funeral parlor with Mrs. Held. Walter saw him about midnight, didn't you?”

Smith nodded his squat head. “He told me to go home and he'd close up. I didn't see him any more after that.”

It was daylight outside, and George Quenton was gazing through the blinds at the smoking shambles. “Nothing left but the ferris wheel and the bowling alley! And this is one of the biggest crowd days of the whole summer!”

“Did O'Brian have a wife?”

“No. His share goes to some sister out west.”

Sergeant Fletcher had been sent for Mrs. Held, and now he returned, ushering her into the office. “Are you satisfied now?” she asked Leopold, her eyes puffed from either sleep or sadness.

“I'm doing what I can, Mrs. Held. It's an unusual case.”

“What's unusual about it?” Walter Smith rasped. “We're even telling you who killed them.”

“Yes,” Leopold said, walking over to stand beside Quenton at the window. “It all gets back to Stella Gaze, doesn't it?”

“That damned witch!” Mrs. Held sat down and took out a cigarette.

“We still need evidence,” Leopold said. “All we have are two accidental deaths.”

“Earth, air, fire and water,” George Quenton mumbled, half to himself. “That leaves earth and air for the two of us, Walter.”

They were scared; Leopold could see that much. He asked them some more questions and then at last turned to Fletcher. “How about checking with the arson squad? See if they've come up with anything.”

Off in the distance, over near Stella Gaze's cottage, someone had started the ferris wheel. After a time they left the little office and drifted over under the cloudy morning sky to watch its turnings toward heaven. From somewhere inside it, music was playing, like on a merry-go-round. Leopold felt somehow saddened.

“It's the end of summer,” Mrs. Held said.

Sergeant Fletcher came back from his mission. His face was grim, but it was an expression Leopold knew and respected. “We've got it, Captain. Arson. Found a can that had held kerosene. And some fuses. The fire was set.”

Leopold nodded. Suddenly the country was familiar, the scenery was remembered. “And that makes it murder,” he said.

This time Leopold went alone to see Stella Gaze. He sat on a straight-backed chair facing her across the dimly cluttered living room, drinking green tea from a china cup.

“You are a strange man,” she told him. “Not like the other detectives.”

“You've known many?”

“Many. Sometimes I think I do not even belong in this century. In another century…”

“In another century you might have been burned at the stake, or hanged from a tree in Salem.”

“You think I'm a witch?”

“There are three possible solutions to the deaths of Otto Held and Felix O'Brian—assuming that we've passed the point of mere coincidence. One—you're a witch; two—you murdered them, plain and simple; three—someone else murdered them and is trying to frame you for the crimes. Do you have any choice among those theories?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and he noticed again those scarred wrists that rested on her lap. “My choice is the truth, of course. I know nothing of their deaths.”

“And yet you knew how they would die.”

Her eyes studied his, seeming almost to bore their way through his skull. “Did you ever gaze out of a window, Captain Leopold, on a day when the air was clear and sparkling in the early morning, from a hilltop when the whole world was laid out before you? Did you ever see something far, far off in the distance, something naked and very real, like the truth? You see it, not as in a dream at all, but as perhaps in a motion picture unfolding at a distance.”

“And that's how you saw those four dying?”

“Yes. I would never have told them if I hadn't been angry about the land. But that is how I saw them. Call it witchcraft if you want, or extrasensory perception, or any of the other names they have for it.”

“Has this ever happened to you before, Miss Gaze?”

“It's been happening all my life.” She tried to laugh, but it came out a sob. “I saw my mother lying dead before me. I saw a battlefield with my lover's body.” And then she held up her wrists. “You see this? You see these scars? Sometimes you get so you can't stand it any longer. You lock yourself in this old house and never see anybody any more, but that doesn't help—they only call you a witch then. And sometimes when it gets really bad you take a razor and slit your wrists and try to change the life that you've seen before you. Try to say,
Look, I cheated you after all! I'm dead ahead of my time!”

“Say it to whom?”

“To God, to Satan. Does it matter? Can you tell me if this thing is a gift or a curse? Can you?”

“I'm sorry, Miss Gaze,” he said quietly, because there was nothing else to say.

“Be sorry,” she told him, turning tearfully away. “Be sorry! Maybe that's a beginning! Nobody's ever been sorry before.”

“Goodbye, Miss Gaze,” he said, rising from his chair. “I'll come to see you again.”

Outside, it was beginning to rain. The ferris wheel was still turning, but there was no one on it.

“Funny thing,” Fletcher said the following morning. “I've been talking to the firemen, and I've found one who thinks he caught a glimpse of O'Brian just before the roof fell in on him.”

Leopold put down the paper he was reading. “What?”

“This fireman, Captain. He says O'Brian was just standing there, not trying to escape at all. He looked as if he was waiting for a bus, the fireman said. And then the flimsy roof started to give, and he never had a chance.”

“As if he were waiting for a bus….”

“Or under a spell, huh, Captain?”

“Yes,” Leopold said. “Or under a spell.”

He sat for a long time alone in his office, gazing out the window and trying to fit the pieces together. Two men were dead, two others were threatened.

Did it have to be Stella Gaze? Was there no other answer?

“I'm going back out there, Fletcher,” he called into the intercom.

“What for, Captain?”

“Maybe I'll take a ride on the ferris wheel. Who knows?”

The place was deserted when he reached it, and he stepped carefully over the blackened pieces of wood that littered the area. Here and there puddles remained, from yesterday's rain or the firemen's hoses. It might have been a battlefield, after the army had moved on.

“Captain Leopold!”

He turned at the sound of his name and saw George Quenton strolling toward him with another unlit cigar between his fingers. “You don't even have any customers for your ferris wheel,” Leopold observed.

“In this county the schools reopen the day after Labor Day. Down in New York they get another week of business. But what the hell—how much money could I make with a rusty ferris wheel?”

“Could you take me up in it?”

“What?”

“The wheel,” Leopold said. “Could you take me up in it?”

“Someone has to stay on the ground to operate it. But we could sit in one of the cars on the ground.”

They did that, and Leopold felt the metal armrests under his hands, with their layers of paint chipped and worn. “It's pleasant here today,” he said.

“What about her?” Quenton asked, gesturing toward the little cottage with his unlit cigar. “Will you arrest her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Until that moment, Leopold couldn't have put it into words. It was more of a feeling than anything else. He was almost surprised when he heard his voice say, “Because it rained yesterday.”

“Rained?” The seat was rocking gently in the breeze. “What does the rain have to do with it?”

“Everything,” Leopold said. “You see, this was never a case for me. There was never any murder. The deaths of Held and O'Brian were both accidents.”

“That would be quite a coincidence, wouldn't it?”

“Not as much so as it might seem. I didn't say no crime had been committed.”

“But what crime was there, other than the deaths?”

Leopold watched a cloud pass hesitantly over the sun. “Arson,” he replied. “I think you three plotted to burn this place for the insurance.”

“You couldn't prove that.”

“Otto Held's death was an accident. But it fit the pattern of Stella Gaze's prediction. Business had been bad all summer, so you three decided to make another prediction come true. Felix O'Brian set fire to the place after closing on Sunday night. The scheme was that he'd remain in the burning building, to be rescued or dash to freedom at the very last moment. That way, it would look as if the witch's second prediction had almost come true. If arson was suspected, people would think of Stella Gaze, not of an insurance fraud. Only O'Brian waited a moment too long, and the roof fell in.”

“Your visions are almost as vivid as that woman's, Captain.”

“A fireman saw O'Brian a moment before he died, just standing in there. And we have plenty of proof of arson. As well as proof that your business was bad.”

“Would we burn down the place before our biggest day?” Quenton asked.

“You might if the weatherman was predicting rain. Which he was. You figured you had nothing to lose but a thin rainy day crowd. And you had all that insurance money to gain.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“Not at all,” Leopold said. “I'll turn over my ideas to the Arson Squad and let them take it from there. We can build up a pretty good case against O'Brian, but it might be tougher to prove that you and Smith had knowledge of it. I hardly think he'd have been acting on his own, though. Maybe you two were even supposed to rescue him and decided to let him burn, to fulfill the prophecy. When I met Smith at the fire, he claimed he didn't know where O'Brian was. Later, he told us O'Brian had sent him home and was closing up the place. I just think Smith might tell us something if we confront him with that bit.”

“All right,” Quenton said. He got to his feet and hopped to the ground.

“Don't go running off after Smith,” Leopold advised with a slight smile. “They're already questioning him.”

“Whatever you say, whatever theories you have, the fact remains that they died the way she predicted.”

“Yes,” Leopold admitted. “Yes.”

“Doesn't that prove she's a witch?”

“We will need more evidence. But I will be interested in you and Smith. In how you die.”

He left Quenton standing by the ferris wheel and walked away, down toward the house of Stella Gaze.

He found her in bed, wrapped with blankets despite the warmth of the day. There was an empty bottle of sleeping pills by her side, and he knew he had come too late to help Stella Gaze.

There was a letter by the empty bottle, addressed to him. He opened it and read it through twice. Then he crumpled it into a ball and stuffed it into his pocket. It would do nobody any good, least of all Stella Gaze. Later he would burn it, and perhaps that was what she had expected, anyway.

There was a noise from outside the window, and Leopold saw that Quenton had started the ferris wheel turning. The man lit his cigar and stood for a time watching it turn.

And from the window of Stella Gaze's house, Leopold watched him watching it.

(1966)

I
T WAS FLETCHER'S CASE
from the beginning, but Captain Leopold rode along with him when the original call came in. The thing seemed open and shut, with the only suspect found literally standing over his victim, and on a dull day Leopold thought that a ride out to the University might be pleasant.

Here, along the river, the October color was already in the trees, and through the park a slight haze of burning leaves clouded the road in spots. It was a warm day for autumn, a sunny day. Not really a day for murder.

“The University hasn't changed much,” Leopold commented, as they turned into the narrow street that led past the fraternity houses to the library tower. “A few new dorms, and a new stadium. That's about all.”