Leopold's Way (17 page)

Fletcher brought Tom McBern out to the campus in handcuffs, and Captain Leopold was waiting for them in the oblong room on the fourth floor. “All right, Fletcher,” Leopold said. “You can leave us alone. Wait outside.”

McBern had lost a good deal of his previous composure, and now he faced Leopold with red-ringed eyes and a lip that trembled when he spoke. “What…what did you want to ask me?”

“A great many things, son. All the questions in the world.” Leopold sighed and offered the boy a cigarette. “You and Rollings were taking LSD, weren't you?”

“We took it, yes.”

“Why? For kicks?”

“Not for kicks. You don't understand about Ralph.”

“I understand that you killed him. What more is there to understand? You stabbed him to death right over there on that bed.”

Tom McBern took a deep breath. “We didn't take LSD for kicks,” he repeated. “It was more to heighten the sense of religious experience—a sort of mystical involvement that is the whole meaning of life.”

Leopold frowned down at the boy. “I'm only a detective, son. You and Rollings were strangers to me until yesterday, and I guess now he'll always be a stranger to me. That's one of the troubles with my job. I don't get to meet people until it's too late, until the damage,” he gestured toward the empty bed, “is already done. But I want to know what happened in this room, between you two. I don't want to hear about mysticism or religious experience. I want to hear what happened—why you killed him and why you sat here with the body for twenty-two hours.”

Tom McBern looked up at the walls, seeing them perhaps for the first and thousandth time. “Did you ever think about this room? About the shape of it? Ralph used to say it reminded him of a story by Poe,
The Oblong Box.
Remember that story? The box was aboard a ship, and of course it contained a body. Like Queequeg's coffin which rose from the sea to rescue Ishmael.”

“And this room was Ralph's coffin?” Leopold asked quietly.

“Yes.” McBern stared down at his handcuffed wrists. “His tomb.”

“You killed him, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

Leopold looked away. “Do you want your lawyer?”

“No. Nothing.”

“My God! Twenty-two hours!”

“I was…”

“I know what you were doing. But I don't think you'll ever tell it to a judge and jury.”

“I'll tell you, because maybe you can understand.” And he began to talk in a slow, quiet voice, and Leopold listened because that was his job.

Toward evening, when Tom McBern had been returned to his cell and Fletcher sat alone with Leopold, he said, “I've called the District Attorney, Captain. What are you going to tell him?”

“The facts, I suppose. McBern will sign a confession of just how it happened. The rest is out of our hands.”

“Do you want to tell me about it, Captain?”

“I don't think I want to tell anyone about it. But I suppose I have to. I guess it was all that talk of religious experience and coffins rising from the ocean that tipped me off. You know, that Rollings pictured their room as a sort of tomb.”

“For him it was.”

“I wish I'd known him, Fletcher. I only wish I'd known him in time.”

“What would you have done?”

“Perhaps only listened and tried to understand him.”

“McBern admitted killing him?”

Leopold nodded. “It seems that Rollings asked him to, and Tom McBern trusted him more than life itself.”

“Rollings asked to be stabbed through the heart?”

“Yes.”

“Then why did McBern stay with the body so long? For a whole day and night?”

“He was waiting,” Leopold said quietly, looking at nothing at all. “He was waiting for Rollings to rise from the dead.”

(1967)

“R
EMEMBER STELLA GAZE?” SERGEANT
Fletcher asked, coming into Captain Leopold's office with the morning coffee. “Stella Gaze? How could I forget her?” It had been one of Leopold's oddest cases, some three years back, involving a middle-aged woman who'd committed suicide after having been accused of practicing witchcraft. He thought of Stella Gaze often, wondering what he could have done to handle things differently. “What about her?” he asked Fletcher.

The sergeant slipped into his favorite chair opposite Leopold's desk and carefully worked the plastic top off his cup of coffee. “Well, you remember that her house was directly adjacent to Sportland Amusement Park—in fact, when they couldn't buy her land they built the ferris wheel right next to the house, with only a wire fence separating them.”

“I remember,” Leopold said. Stella Gaze—no witch, certainly—but only a neurotic woman whom no one understood. She'd tried suicide before, and in the end had been successful.

“Well, listen to this! Last night about ten o'clock, a girl vanished from the top of that same ferris wheel! What do you think the newspapers will do with that when they get it?”

“Vanished?” Leopold scratched his head. “How could she vanish from the top of a ferris wheel?”

“She couldn't, but she did. It wasn't reported to the police till later—too late for the morning editions, but the papers will be on to it any minute.”

As if in answer to Fletcher's prediction, the telephone buzzed, but it was not a curious newsman. It was Leopold's direct superior, the chief of detectives. “Captain, I hate to ask you this, because it doesn't involve a homicide—not yet, anyway. But you worked on the Stella Gaze case out at Sportland three years back, didn't you?”

“That's right,” Leopold answered with a sigh, already sure of what was coming.

“We've got a disappearance out there. A girl missing from the ferris wheel. I know you're not working on anything right now, and I thought you might help us out by handling the case with Sergeant Fletcher. The papers are already trying to tie it in with the Gaze thing, and you'll know what to tell them.”

“I always know what to tell them,” Leopold said. “What's the girl's name?”

“Velma Kelty. She was there with a boyfriend, and he's pretty shook about it.”

“I'll talk to him,” Leopold said. “Any special reason for your interest?” He'd known the chief of detectives long enough to ask.

“Not really. The boy is Tom Williams, the councilman's son.”

“And?”

A long sigh over the phone. “It might turn out to be sort of messy, Captain, if anything's happened to her. She's only fifteen years old.”

So Leopold drove out to visit Tom Williams at his home. He'd never met the boy, and knew his father only slightly, in the vague manner that detectives knew councilmen. The house was large and expensive, with a gently curving driveway and a swimming pool barely visible in the back area.

“You must be the police,” the boy said, answering the door himself. “Come in.”

“Captain Leopold. You're Tom Williams?”

“That's right, sir.” He was about twenty, with sandy hair cropped short and a lanky look that was typical of college boys these days. “Have they found her yet?”

“No, I guess not. Suppose you tell me about it.” Leopold had followed him onto a rear terrace that overlooked the pool. It was empty now, with only a rubber animal of some sort floating near the far corner.

“She went up in the ferris wheel and she didn't come down,” the young man said simply. “That's all there is to it.”

“Not quite all,” Leopold corrected. “Why don't you start at the beginning. How old are you, Tom?”

The young man hesitated, running a nervous hand through his sandy close-cropped hair. “I'll be twenty-one in two weeks. What's that got to do with anything?”

“I understand Velma Kelty is only fifteen. I was just wondering how you two happened to get together, that's all.”

“I met her through my kid sister,” he mumbled. “The thing wasn't really a date. I just took her to Sportland, that's all.”

“How many times had you been out with her this summer?”

He shrugged. “Two or three. I took her to a movie, a ball game. Anything wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Leopold said. “Now suppose you tell it like it was, in detail this time.”

He sighed and settled a bit deeper into the canvas deck chair. “I took her out for a pizza earlier, and she suggested we play some miniature golf. Sportland was the closest place, so we went there. I parked my car in the lot by the golf course and driving range, but when we'd finished she suggested going on some of the rides. We went on a couple, but the rides right after the pizza upset my stomach a bit. When she suggested the ferris wheel I told her I'd watch.”

“And you did watch?”

“Sure. I paid for her ticket and watched her get into one of those little wire cages they have. It was dark by that time, around ten o'clock. You know how they light the wheel at night?”

“I haven't seen it in a few years,” Leopold admitted.

“Well, they have colored neon running out on the spokes of the wheel. It looks great from a distance, but close up it's a little overwhelming. Anyway, I didn't remember exactly which of the colored cages she was in, and by the time it had reached the top of the wheel, I'd lost it in the lights.”

“Was she alone in her cage?”

“Yeah. The guy tried to get me in at the last minute, but my stomach wasn't up to it. The wheel was almost empty by that time.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, I waited for her to come down, and she didn't.”

“Didn't?”

“That's right. I watched each cage being unloaded. She wasn't in any of them. After a while I got sorta frantic and had the operator empty them all out. But she wasn't in any of them.”

“Who did get out while you were standing there?”

“Let's see—the ones I remember were a father and two little kids, a fellow and girl who'd been necking—they were right ahead of us in line—and a couple of college girls who seemed to be alone. I suppose there were others, but I don't remember them.”

“Could she have gotten off on the other side of the wheel?”

“No. I was watching each car when it was unloaded. I was interested in the way the guy was doing it, giving the good-looking girls a quick feel as he helped them to the ground.”

“Why did you wait a couple hours before calling the police?”

“I didn't believe my eyes, that's why! She couldn't have just vanished like that, not while I was watching. The guy operating it told me I was nuts.”

“Didn't he remember her?”

“No.”

“Even though he wanted you to join her?”

“He said he was busy. He couldn't remember everybody.”

Leopold glanced at the official report of the patrolman who'd been summoned. “That would be Rudy Magee?”

“I guess that's his name. Anyway, he dismissed the whole thing and I guess for a minute I just thought I was cracking up. I walked around for a half hour, just looking for her, and then went back to the car and waited. When she didn't come, I walked over to the ferris wheel again and told the guy—Magee—I was going to call the police.”

“I see,” Leopold said, but he didn't really see very much.

“So I called them. That's it.”

Leopold lit a cigarette. “Was she pregnant, Tom?”

“What?”

“You understand it's my job to ask all the questions, and that's one of them. You wouldn't be the first boy who wanted a fifteen-year-old pregnant girlfriend to disappear.”

“I never touched her. I told you she was a friend of my sister's.”

“All right.” He stood up. “Is your sister around now?” he persisted.

“She's out.”

“For how long?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? She's sorta loose.”

“I'll be back,” Leopold told him. “What's your sister's name?”

“Cindy. They call her Cin.”

“Who does?”

“Her crowd.”

“Is she fifteen, too?”

“Sixteen.”

Leopold nodded. As he walked around the side of the house, he looked a bit longingly at the swimming pool. The day was warming up, and a dip in the clear blue water would have felt good.

He got back in the car and drove out to Sportland.

Sportland was still big, but it had perhaps retreated a little into itself since Leopold's last visit. The lower portion, once given over to kiddies' rides, had been sold off to a drive-in movie, and the rides in the upper part now seemed a little closer together. The ferris wheel was still in the same place, of course, but Stella Gaze's house had been torn down for parking.

“You Rudy Magee?” Leopold asked a kid at the ferris wheel.

“He's on his break. Over there at the hot-dog stand.”

Magee was a type—the sport-shirted racetrack tout, the smalltime gambler, the part-time pimp. Leopold had known them through all of his professional life. “I want to talk about last night,” he told the thin pale man, showing his identification.

“You mean that kid—the one who lost his girl?”

“That's right.”

“Hell, I don't know a thing about it. I think he dreamed the whole bit.”

Leopold grunted. “You worked here long? I don't remember you.”

“Just since the place opened for the season in May. Why? I gotta be an old-time employee to know people don't disappear from ferris wheels?”

Leopold was about to answer, but a third man had joined them—a stocky thirsty-looking fellow who looked vaguely familiar. “Well, Captain Leopold, isn't it? You working on this Velma Kelty case?”

Leopold looked him up and down. “I don't believe I caught the name.”

“Fane. Walter Fane from the
Globe.
You've seen me around headquarters.” He pulled an afternoon paper from under his arm. “See? We've got it on page one.”