Leopold's Way (20 page)

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)

S
AM 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 supermarket 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.

“At the last name he checked off. Rose Sweeney. It's just down the street.”

They left the body in the care of the technical men with their cameras and plastic bags and went in search of Rose Sweeney. She proved to be a buxom woman of forty or so, with graying hair and thick, round glasses that gave her the look of a startled owl. Her apartment was cluttered with the flotsam of a lifetime, piled here and there on tables as if she'd just moved in. Through it all, she seemed to feel her way as she directed them to dusty chairs.

“Yes,” she said in answer to their first question, “that nice Mr. Mercer was here for his money just about an hour ago.”

“Did he seem upset, nervous?”

“No, just quiet. More quiet than usual, I'd say. I gave him the money—four dollars—and he left right away.”

“Did he always come at the same time?”

She blinked her eyes and nodded. “Every other Tuesday morning, first thing. Right after he calls on Mr. Tydings down the street. What's the matter? Is something wrong?” She looked from one to the other, seeming to smell the odor of panic they'd brought with them to her cluttered apartment.

When they left Rose Sweeney, Leopold sent Fletcher to check on the apartment houses across the street while he continued down the block to the little clapboard cottage owned by Mr. Tydings. In its day, when the area had prided itself on horse-drawn carriages and a good view of the river a few miles below, the cottage had probably been a little gem set among the larger homes. Now, with the area racially mixed, with Polish and Irish and Negro and Puerto Rican workers living in what had originally been the Italian section of town, the cottage had taken on a shabby appearance.

And George Tydings himself was no less shabby. He needed a shave, and his pale thin hands shook with the effects of some early-morning drinking. The bottle, cheap vodka, was still visible on the kitchen table. “What is it?” he asked tiredly. “What's all the trouble?”

“There's been a shooting,” Leopold told him, getting directly to it. “The insurance man—James Mercer. I understand he called on you earlier this morning.”

“Sure. He was here. I paid him my money and he left.”

“Nothing unusual?”

“He seemed the same as always.”

“And you saw nothing through your windows?”

“Not a thing.” He wandered back out to the kitchen, seeking his bottle. Leopold watched him weave carefully around a low bookcase that partially blocked the kitchen door. While Tydings poured himself a drink from the bottle, Leopold glanced at the ragged paper-bound books that filled the case. But there was nothing unusual—mysteries, science fiction, a few modern novels by Roth and Bellow and Updike, a book on ventriloquism, and another on bricklaying. In a mystery novel that would have been a clue, and Leopold found his mind concocting strange combinations—a voice from inside a walled-up tomb, with some sort of Poe-esque twist at the end. A ventriloquist kills his wife, then—

“Want a drink?” George Tydings called from the kitchen table.

“Too early in the day,” Leopold said. “You a bricklayer?”

“Huh? Oh, the book. I was going to put a barbecue pit in the back yard. Never got around to it. Neighborhood's going to pot. So why bother?” He came back in, moving again around the awkwardly placed bookcase.

“Live here alone?”

A nod. “Since my wife left me. She fooled around with the milkman—would you believe it, the
milkman?
—and I finally tossed her out. Lost my job last week, too.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Tydings seemed suddenly sad and sober. “Had a good job, too. I went to college for two years. Wouldn't believe it now, would you?”

Leopold let himself out the front door and walked around the back of the cottage, through weeds and grass coming alive with the rains of spring. There was no barbecue pit. He walked farther, to a rear alley, and followed it behind an apartment building to the alley where Mercer's body had been found. Sergeant Fletcher was there waiting for him, but by now the body had been taken away.

“Find anything, Captain?”

“Probably nothing. Check on a man named Tydings, especially on a wife who's supposed to have left him recently. And while you're at it, do a check on Rose Sweeney.” He glanced down at the alley pavement where the body had been lying. “How about you? Anything?”

“Maybe,” Fletcher answered. “You should talk to him.”

“Him? Who?”

“Name's Kansas Johnson—lives across the street. He was next on the collection list, but Mercer never got there.”

Johnson was standing tall and silent in the street with one of the uniformed patrolmen. “You Kansas Johnson?” Leopold asked.

“That's me.”

“What did you see?”

“Nothin'.”

Leopold turned to Fletcher. “Well?”

“He had a fight with Mercer last month when he came to collect. Punched him in the jaw.”

Johnson shifted his feet. “Not hard. I just tapped him. He came up behind me in the street and grabbed my shoulder. I didn't know who it was at first. Hell, I paid him the money and said I was sorry.”

“And you didn't see him today?”

“No, sir.”

Leopold sighed, then turned to Fletcher. “You'd better get a full statement from him about the incident last month. Then see what else you can find around here. I'm going back downtown.”

It was mid-afternoon when James Mercer's widow arrived with her brother to identify the body. She was a handsome woman with faded blonde hair and what was still a good figure. Leopold questioned her briefly. It was a part of the job he never liked.

“Mrs. Mercer, did your husband have any enemies?”

“None. Everyone liked him.”

“Did he say anything about a fight he had with a man named Kansas Johnson a few weeks back?”

“No. He didn't tell me much.”

“Do you have any children?”

“A son away at college.”

The brother cleared his throat. “Mrs. Mercer is highly distraught, Captain. Is all this questioning necessary?”

“I'm sorry,” Leopold agreed. “That will be all. If you will just identify the body—”

Later, when Leopold was alone again, Tommy Gibson strolled into the office. “I guess you're in on the big bandit hunt too, Captain.”

“If the bandit did it.”

“It sure looks like him from where I stand. Fits him like a glove.”

“Except how did he know Mercer was collecting?”

Tommy Gibson dropped into a chair and lit a cigarette. “What the hell! He knew Mercer, or he followed him. I don't know! I just know I'd bet my badge it's the rainy-day bandit.”