Leopold's Way (24 page)

“You think the old lady decided to tell the truth now, and Carter killed her? We're back to him sneaking around at night with a knife, and somehow I don't buy that.”

“How about Bingham, then?” Fletcher suggested. “He does all the mayor's other dirty work.”

Leopold shook his head. “I'd like it for your sake, Fletcher. It would get you off the hook. But I still don't buy it. Why would she decide to talk now, after all these years?”

“She was getting old, thinking about dying.”

“Not in a place like the Athanasia League, she wasn't.”

The telephone rang, and Leopold knew before he answered that it would be trouble. “Yes?”

“This is Mayor Carter, Captain.”

“Oh, yes, Mayor.”

“In the event you haven't heard the news, your Sergeant Fletcher assaulted Jim Bingham in my office this afternoon, only a few hours after you offered me your assurances that—”

“I offered you no assurances, Mayor, except perhaps that I'd solve this case.”

“Are you going to bring departmental charges against Fletcher?”

“I understand it was only a shoving match, and that Bingham shoved first. You have my personal apologies, Mayor, but there will be no charges against Fletcher.”

The line was silent for the space of several heartbeats. Then Carter said, “He's up for promotion, isn't he?”

“Yes.”

“You can tell him to forget about that.”

“A civil service test, Mayor? If his score is higher than Tommy Gibson's—”

“Personal conduct affects the choice, as you well know, Captain.”

Leopold stared bleakly across the desk at Fletcher. Somehow he couldn't imagine feeling the same close companionship toward Gibson and his two-bit chiseling. “What about the trucking scandal, Mayor?”

“That's old hat. Helen's brother was fully responsible. I was only a silent partner and had no management responsibilities. Someone tried to bring it up when I ran for mayor the first time, and he was laughed out of the newspapers. My hands are clean, Captain.”

“Still, you wouldn't want the talk revived.”

“Why should it be revived?”

“Look,” Leopold said, dropping his voice a notch, “keep Bingham under control and give me another twenty-four hours on the case. If I crack it, and everyone's happy, then we'll talk about Fletcher's promotion.”

Carter hesitated, then answered, “Fair enough—but keep him the hell away from here or I'll have him back pounding a beat!”

Leopold hung up and faced Fletcher. “I've got you off the hook for the moment at any rate.”

“Thanks, Captain.”

“Now, all I have to do is find Helen Peachtree's killer by tomorrow.”

Leopold went back to the Athanasia League in the morning, strolling along the sunlit walks among the residents and the nurses. He had to admit there was a hopefulness here, a sense of joy he'd never seen in a rest home or the county hospital. Perhaps they really did think they'd live forever. If so, Dr. Libby had accomplished something after all.

Leopold paused beside the bench where David Riley sat reading the morning newspaper. “May I join you?”

The old eyes came up to meet his. “Certainly, Captain. Good to see you again. How's the investigation progressing?”

“I'm wrapping it up today.”

“You know who killed Helen?”

Leopold didn't answer at once. He let the gentle morning breeze play across his face. It was almost enough to make any man feel young again, feel the terrible longings of immortality. “It was the motive that had me stumped, and it still has me stumped to some extent. But I got to thinking about a story I read once, along time ago. It was called
The Suicide Club,
and it was written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Have you ever read it?”

David Riley smiled, brushing back his thin white hair. “You think we came here to commit suicide? You think we meet by midnight and draw straws, or have a lottery like in that Shirley Jackson story? Helen Peachtree lost, so she was the first to die?”

Stated in the cold light of morning, the idea was foolish, and Leopold looked away. “We have to consider everything,” he said.

“There is no suicide club, Captain, nor any midnight lottery of old people. The Athanasia League was founded for life, not death. I told you the other day that I thought Libby was a quack, but he's a sincere quack. He lives off the interest from the money people bring, and in return we get a little joy, a little hope. I like it here. I hope you won't try to change it.”

“Mr. Riley, I asked you a question the other day. I'll ask it again. Who killed Helen Peachtree?”

A shadow crossed the old man's face. Some of the vigor seemed to drain from his shoulders. “I don't know,” he answered finally. “But I miss her.”

Leopold walked along a bit further, until he found Nurse Morgan playing chess with an elderly man. She saw him coming and excused herself to join him. “I thought you might have more questions,” she said.

“Only one, really.”

She eyed him shyly. “What's that?”

“When we arrived the other day, your uniform was spotless, yet the room was covered with blood. There was blood everywhere. Why wasn't there any on your uniform?”

“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)

S
ERGEANT 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.”