Leopold's Way (46 page)

A
BBY TENYON WAS HAVING
a nightmare. She was struggling against the softness of the sheets, fighting to come awake, while a masked man was beating her about the face with a huge padded fist. She could feel the blows, feel the jarring pain as they landed, and she tried to cry out. She wondered what had happened to Ron who had always rescued her in the past.

Then a final blow landed and she stopped caring, drifting back into the sleep that was deeper than sleep, the land that was almost beyond recall. She remembered wondering if she was dying, if this was what that final mystery was all about.

Presently she came awake, aware without opening her eyes that it was daylight. She stirred in the bed and felt a great throbbing pain centered about her face and head. She touched her cheek, winced, and immediately withdrew her hand. She tried to open her left eye and found that she couldn't.

What was wrong with her?

Opening her right eye with difficulty she could make out her husband still asleep in the other bed. “Ron,” she called out. “Ron!”

He stirred but didn't wake up. The digital clock between the beds showed 8:14. He'd never slept this late since the campaign began.

“Ron!” she called louder, trying to move, trying to reach him across the gulf between the beds. Something was terribly wrong with her.

He came awake slowly, his eyes opening and then widening as he saw her. He sat up suddenly in the bed. “My God, Abby! Your face!”

“I…I've been hurt, Ron. Something hurt me terribly.”

“Abby!” He was out of the bed, holding her.

“I dreamed a man was beating me.” Ron Tenyon reached for the telephone.

Ordinarily the case would have been handled by one of Captain Leopold's staff—Fletcher, perhaps, or more likely Connie Trent. But Ron Tenyon was three days away from the special election for Congress, and that added an important aspect to whatever misadventure had befallen his wife Abby.

Leopold arrived at the hotel room shortly after nine o'clock, having been summoned a half hour earlier by a call from Connie, who'd taken the original report. He found the house physician just finishing his ministrations to Ron Tenyon's wife, who nestled like an ill child in one of the wide twin beds of the room.

“Whatever happened to her has been very upsetting,” the doctor said as he headed for the door. “I've given her a tranquilizer. She'll be relaxed and she may doze off.”

“What was it, doctor?” Leopold asked.

“She's been beaten about the face. She has two black eyes and some bruises and swelling. But nothing that won't go away in a few weeks' time.” He spoke in a calm, low voice as if he'd seen it all before.

“Did she say who did it?”

Ron Tenyon interrupted with the answer. “A masked man with a big padded fist. She thought it was a dream.”

“She didn't cry out? You heard nothing?”

“Not a thing,” Tenyon admitted. “And I don't usually sleep that heavily.”

Leopold nodded to the doctor, indicating he had no further need of him at the moment. Then he sat down on the bed opposite Mrs. Tenyon. The room was large and tastefully furnished, with a view overlooking the river. It was the city's best hotel, the sort a man like Tenyon would choose for his campaign stop. Leopold knew little about him, except what the papers had printed. He was a thirty-nine-year-old financial expert who'd parlayed a successful business career and an attractive wife into a try at the United States Congress in a special election called because of the incumbent's death.

But right now Abby Tenyon wasn't looking very attractive. She sat propped up in bed, swaddled in blankets, her battered face only just beginning to show the swelling and discoloration that the bruises had caused. “Can you tell me what happened?” Leopold asked.

“N—no, I'm afraid I can't.” She had to speak out of the side of her mouth, and it added to her bizarre, trampled-upon look.

“She thought it was a dream,” her husband explained. “A nightmare. She wasn't fully conscious.”

“Not even while you were being beaten?” Leopold found that difficult to understand.

“I think we were both drugged,” Ron Tenyon said. “I didn't hear a thing, and I slept later than usual this morning. After last night's speech we came back here and ordered room service. I think the food was drugged.”

Leopold made some notes. “Was anything stolen from the room?”

“No.”

“Was Mrs. Tenyon sexually molested?”

“No.”

“You're claiming that the two of you were drugged simply to allow your wife to be beaten up like this?”

“That appears to be the case.”

“Do you have any enemies who might have done such a thing?”

“In politics everyone makes enemies. But I can't think of anyone perverse enough to attack me through Abby.”

“And you, Mrs. Tenyon?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. I don't know anything. This whole thing is a nightmare.” The swelling had almost closed both her eyes, and she searched in her purse for some dark glasses to cover them.

“This is the last weekend before the special election,” Tenyon pointed out. “Abby was scheduled to make several public appearances with me. Do you think the beating could be linked to that in some manner?”

“I don't know,” Leopold said, “Mrs. Tenyon, suppose you tell me everything you can about this dream of the man beating you.”

He listened as she spoke, making notes, nodding from time to time. “The huge padded fist would have been a boxing glove. They wanted to mark you but not seriously injure you.”

“But why?”

“And why go to the trouble of drugging us and sneaking into our hotel room?” Tenyon wondered. “They could have assaulted her on the street a lot easier.”

Leopold considered that. “They may have chosen this method because no one would believe it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Weren't you aware of the house physician's blasé attitude? It was nothing new or strange to him. He viewed it as a simple wife-beating.”

“You mean—”

“A large segment of the public is going to think you beat your wife, Mr. Tenyon, and that the two of you made up this story of a masked intruder and drugged food because the election is so close.”

Ron Tenyon began to pace the floor, his indignation growing. “My opponent would never do a thing like that. Crystal is an honorable man.”

“It wouldn't have to be Crystal. Some of his supporters could be acting without his knowledge.”

“Then at all costs we must keep this story out of the papers.”

“That may be difficult.”

“We'll say she has the flu.”

But even as he spoke the phone between the beds rang. He answered it and spoke quickly with growing indignation. When he finally hung up his face was tense. “That was my campaign manager. The reporters are already onto it. They've been calling him for the story.”

“Someone tipped them off,” Leopold suggested.

“It seems so,” Tenyon agreed. “The man who beat her up.”

“Or perhaps a hotel employee. Maybe even the doctor.”

“Well, there's no keeping it secret now.”

And there wasn't. It was front-page news on Sunday morning.

Two days later Ron Tenyon lost the special Congressional election by about 1100 votes.

On the morning after the election Leopold called Lieutenant Fletcher into his office. “Get us a couple cups of coffee from the machine,” he suggested. “I want to talk.”

“About that Tenyon thing, Captain?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“He lost the election.”

Leopold nodded. “Eleven hundred votes. If five hundred and fifty or so people changed their minds he would have won.”

“You think the bad publicity influenced the election?”

“Yes, I do. And since when is it bad publicity when a man's wife gets beaten up in a hotel room? Why is the press and public so quick to disbelieve his story, and his wife's story?”

“The room was locked, Captain. The idea of somebody drugging them both and getting past those locks, and then not even stealing anything, is just too far-fetched.”

“Of course it's far-fetched! The person who did it deliberately made it seem far-fetched so the public would think Tenyon was a wife beater.”

“You think George Crystal was involved?” Fletcher asked, stirring some sugar into his coffee.

“He seems decent enough. But there were other interests at work. It was well known that Tenyon opposed casino gambling in the state while Crystal supports it. The gambling interests are working hard to pass that bill, and they wanted Tenyon defeated. Of course, a Congressman doesn't vote directly on state measures, but his influence carries a lot of weight. That's especially true of Tenyon, who'd promised to stump the state in opposition to the casino bill if he was elected to Congress.”

“So the casino people hired someone to do the job? They could get a hit man from organized crime easily enough.”

“Yes,” Leopold agreed, sipping his coffee. “But this whole thing is a bit too subtle for organized crime. They'd be more likely to run Tenyon's car off the road and make a sure thing of it. The idea of drugging them both, breaking into the hotel room, and beating his wife, then leaking the story to the papers, is an almost baroque scheme. Mobsters don't think in those terms.”

“Are you giving me the case, Captain?” Fletcher asked.

“Nose around and see what you can find out.”

“Any suggestions?” He knew Leopold always had suggestions.

“The hotel. If they were drugged, it was in the food that room service delivered. And if the room was entered in the night it had to be by someone who had a key and knew how to get past the night bolt. Run a check on any ex-convicts who might be employed there.”

“I'll get right on it,” Fletcher said.

Sometimes in an investigation the police get lucky. Fletcher got lucky on the Tenyon case. By the end of the week he'd discovered that a man named Carl Forsyth, employed in the hotel kitchen, had a record of two convictions—for breaking and entering and simple assault.

Then Fletcher got lucky a second time. As he approached Forsyth in the hallway of his apartment building on a cool May evening, identifying himself as a police officer, the burly man reacted instinctively. He drew a small automatic pistol from an inside pocket and pointed it at Fletcher's chest, squeezing the trigger as Fletcher went for his own weapon. The pistol jammed, and Fletcher smashed the barrel of his revolver down on the man's gun hand before he could try again.

Later, in the interrogation room at headquarters, Leopold faced the man. “You're a two-time loser, Carl. Assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, resisting arrest—any way you look at it, you're going back to prison for a good long stay.”

“I thought he was a mugger,” Forsyth insisted. He held up his bandaged hand. “Hell, I try to defend myself and I get a broken hand!”

“Who paid you to drug the Tenyons' food and beat her up?”

“I don't know what you're talking about!”

“Come on, Carl. You work in the kitchen. Someone tampered with their food and we think it was you. After they were drugged you picked the lock, or used a passkey. Once inside the room you put on a mask and a boxing glove and punched Abby Tenyon about the face. Then you or someone else phoned the papers, trying to make it look as if Tenyon beat his wife and the story she gave was a coverup.”

“You know a lot, don't you?”

“Who hired you, Carl? All we want is the name.”

“I'm not saying a word till my lawyer gets here.”

And so they waited.

Carl Forsyth's lawyer proved to be Samuel Judge. He was well known in local legal circles, and every time his name was mentioned as a possibility for a judgeship the newsmen had a field day speculating about “Judge Judge.” But so far he'd been passed over by the governor—possibly because of his eagerness to defend even the most disreputable criminals, or possibly because he so often got them off. His specialty was plea bargaining, that oddity of the modern legal system, and he was not a welcome figure around headquarters. Too many of the men felt the way Leopold did—that weeks of work in building a case should not be bargained away so easily by the District Attorney's office.

But Samuel Judge it was, and he emerged from a meeting with his client to confront a testy Captain Leopold. “When are you going to release him, Captain? You don't have a case.”

“Don't I?” Leopold stormed. “He fired a pistol point-blank at Fletcher!”

“The pistol didn't fire,” the lawyer replied quietly.

“It would have!”

“That's a matter of conjecture. My client drew a pistol when he was suddenly accosted in a hallway. He immediately surrendered it when Fletcher identified himself.”

“Cut out the bull! The gun's not licensed and Forsyth is on parole. That alone is enough to put him back behind bars.”

The lawyer thought about it, weighing the possibilities. “What do you want?” he asked at last.

“You plea bargain with the District Attorney's office, not with me.”

“Look, your man Fletcher is the one pressing the gun charge.”

“The attempted murder charge,” Leopold corrected.

“You're onto this Tenyon thing, aren't you?”

“We want him for that. And we want the name of the person who hired him.”

Samuel Judge shook his head. “Impossible. My client is too frightened to talk. That's why he drew on Fletcher so fast. He's been afraid of being silenced ever since the Tenyon thing.”

“That's his problem.”

“He could never testify in court. All the witness-protection programs in the world wouldn't protect him.”

“Suppose,” Leopold said, speaking slowly, “he didn't have to testify. Suppose he just wrote the name on a piece of paper and we took it from there. It would all be off the record.”