However, it's from the annals of police detective Captain Julius Leopold, solver of six crimes of the Impossible (out of a roster of just over 40) that our selection is taken. The 1985 volume Leopold's Way, with an excellent Introduction and Checklist by Francis Nevins, Jnr, gathered nineteen tales from the Leopold saga. Here's one that—happily for us—wasn't included.
ROBERT ADEY
Automobiles!' Leopold was to remark long after it was over. 'I never had a case involving so many different automobiles! The crime, the clue, the capture, the confession—each involved a different car. There was an auto driven by a dead man, and another that hadn't been driven by anyone in thirty years. It was one hell of a case!'
It began at dusk on a November afternoon when Leopold's own car was in the garage for some minor repair work. Lieutenant Fletcher had offered him a ride home, and they'd chosen the Eastern Avenue route to avoid the rushhour traffic on the expressway. But the usually deserted street was jammed with cars, and as they approached a familiar curve by an embankment Fletcher spotted some trouble ahead.
'Looks like we gotta go to work, Captain. One driver's out of his car. It could be a fight.'
'All right,' Leopold sighed. 'I wasn't hungry anyway. Turn on your flasher.'
They left the car and walked up to the scene of the trouble. A sandy haired young man, standing at the open door of a late model hatchback was gesturing wildly to a motorist in the next car. 'What's the trouble here?' Fletcher asked. 'We're police.' Leopold followed behind him, feeling just a bit like a traffic cop.
The young man turned in obvious agitation. 'I think this driver is dead!'
Fletcher bent inside the car to feel for a pulse. 'What happened?'
'We were caught in this traffic jam for like twenty minutes, just inching along. Finally, when it began to clear up and move, he just sat there ahead of me. I got out of my car after honking a few times, to see what the trouble was. God, I think he's dead!'
Fletcher straightened up and glanced at Leopold. 'I'll radio for an ambulance.'
Leopold lowered his voice. 'Is he—?'
'Dead as he'll ever be, Captain.'
'Heart attack?'
Fletcher shook his head. 'He's got a cord wrapped around his neck. Somebody strangled him.' Leopold's eyes widened. 'In the middle of a traffic jam?'
'You figure it out, Captain.'
The young man's name was Sam Prowdy, and he told a straightforward story. He was a plumber, employed by a building contractor, and he'd been on his way home from work along with everyone else when an accident on the expressway forced them into a traffic jam on Eastern Avenue. He'd noticed nothing unusual about the little green car ahead of him, and certainly hadn't seen anyone leave it in the middle of the traffic jam.
'Sure, I'd have noticed,' he insisted back in Leopold's office. 'Somebody gets out of a car ahead of you, you notice it, don't you?'
'It was just getting dark,' Leopold pointed out. 'You could have missed it.'
'I didn't miss a thing! The guy was alone in the car, and he was driving it. Then we were stuck for about five minutes and he stopped moving. I honked and got out to check on him and that's when you guys came up.'
'Did you know the dead man?' Leopold asked.
'Hell, no! I still don't know him. Who was he?'
'His name was Vincent Conners. Thirty-two years old, with a wife and two children in the suburbs. Worked as a stockbroker with Bland and Burnett.'
'Never heard of him!'
'All right,' Leopold said with a sigh. 'We'll probably be contacting you again, but you can go now.'
When he was alone with Fletcher he said, 'There was nothing to hold him on. A woman in the next car confirmed that he'd just opened the door of Conners' auto when we arrived. He couldn't have done it. Besides, Conners had already been dead anywhere up to half an hour according to the preliminary medical report.'
Fletcher snorted. 'Where does that leave us? With a dead man driving a car around town?'
'I don't know,' Leopold admitted. 'But I guess we have to talk to Mrs. Conners.'
The home was in a suburb touching Long Island Sound, the sort of area in which local stockbrokers were expected to live. Lights burned in every window, and a neighbour opened the door as Leopold and Fletcher approached. 'Mrs. Conners is in the kitchen,' the woman said. 'The children are over at my house.'
Leopold nodded and went into the brightly lit kitchen. A few others, neighbours and relatives, stepped aside to let them pass. It was a gloomy setting for all its brightness, and the heavy atmosphere was one he'd encountered too many times before. Sudden violent death had a way of settling over lives like a sombre fog.
Linda Conners was small and fragile looking, with long dark hair and high cheekbones. Only one man chose to remain in the kitchen while Leopold spoke to her, and that was one of her husband's employers, Frank Bland. He looked like a stockbroker too. He might have been another Conners, ten years older and forty pounds heavier. 'She's had a great shock,' he explained to Leopold. 'They were very close.'
'I'm sure they were. Mrs. Conners, I hate to bother you at a time like this, but I know you want to help in finding your husband's killer.'
She took a sip of coffee and gazed up at him with pale eyes. 'There's nothing I can tell you. No one had a reason for killing Vince. Everyone liked him.'
'It must have been a car thief,' Frank Bland suggested. 'Someone Vince caught in the vehicle, who strangled him from behind.'
'We have a bit of a problem because no one was seen leaving the vehicle,' Leopold said. 'Yet your husband couldn't have driven it after he was strangled.' Even as he spoke the words, he was aware of how incongruous this suburban kitchen setting was with talk of an impossible crime.
'He once told me he'd probably die in his car, the way his father did.'
'You needn't get into all that, Linda,' Frank Bland cautioned. 'The Captain is only investigating this case.'
But Leopold was interested. 'What happened to Vince's father?'
She tried to take another sip of coffee but the cup was empty. Bland refilled it from a nearby pot. 'Well, he was shot in a hunting accident. Thirty years ago.'
'What did that have to do with a car?'
'He bled to death on the back seat, while he was being rushed back to town. The car belonged to one of Vince's aunts, and they never used it again. They've still got it, up on blocks in their garage.'
'You say this happened thirty years ago?'
'Yes.'
'Then your husband would have been around two years old.'
'Yes.'
'Is his mother still living?'
'She remarried, moved out West somewhere. He never sees—saw her.'
'Is this aunt still alive?'
'Oh, yes. There are two of them. They live together in the family homestead.'
'They're his closest kin in this area?'
'I'm his closest kin. And the children.'
'Of course,' Leopold corrected himself. 'I meant besides you.' She nodded. 'Yes, Aunt Gert and Aunt Flag.'
'Aunt Flag?'
'That's what they've always called her.'
'Perhaps you'd better give me their address.'
'Certainly. Frank, could you hand me a piece of paper?'
She wrote out the address and handed it to Leopold. 'I hope you find the killer,' she said quietly.
When they were outside, Fletcher asked, 'We going over to see the aunts now, Captain?'
Leopold looked at his watch. It was already after ten. 'No, it's a bit late to be upsetting a couple of old ladies. We'll see them in the morning.'
Connie Trent was in the office before Leopold, checking out a shooting at an all night restaurant. 'I heard about last evening,' she told Leopold. 'You and Fletcher just manage to drop right into them, don't you?'
Leopold nodded. 'Can't even get home at night without finding a murder on the road. How about it? Any ideas how a man can be strangled to death in a car in the middle of a traffic jam? While he's alo
ne?'
She thought for a moment. 'If the window was open someone could have lassoed him.'
'The window was only open a couple of inches, and none of the other drivers saw anything like a lasso. But thanks anyway.'
'Any time,' she said with a smile, and went back to typing her report.
Leopold and Fletcher reached the Conners homestead just after eleven and went up the crumbling sidewalk to the front door. The woman who answered was not as elderly as they'd expected, but she moved slowly, with a hint of some hidden disability.
'You'd be the police,' she said without looking at Leopold's identification. 'My sister and I have been expecting you, ever since we heard about poor Vincent. Come in—I'm Gert Conners.'
'We're sorry to bother you like this, Miss Conners. But outside of his wife and children you're the closest kin. We don't mind admitting we're baffled as to a possible motive.'
Gert Conners pushed back a stray wisp of grey hair. 'They said on the news he probably surprised a car thief.'
'Well, that's one theory. But it doesn't cover all the facts.'
She'd led them into a musty sitting room with lace curtains on the windows. A second grey haired woman was seated in a rocking chair, busily knitting something long and blue. She smiled as they entered but didn't rise. 'This is Aunt Flag,' Gert Conners said.
Aunt Flag nodded as Leopold and Fletcher introduced themselves. 'I know you'll find out who killed our nephew,' she said. 'He was a good lad. Always came to see us.'
Aunt Flag was perhaps ten years older than Aunt Gert, and obviously feeble. 'You have an unusual name,' Leopold commented.
'It's really Flagula, but that's a terrible name for a person. I've been called Flag all my life. We were always Aunt Flag and Aunt Gert to Vincent.'
Leopold had taken a seat at one end of the claw footed couch, and Fletcher gently lowered himself into position at the other end. 'Do either of you ladies know any reason why Vincent might have been murdered? Any troubles, any enemies? Perhaps a feud from long ago?'
'There was never anything like that,' Aunt Flag assured diem. 'He was always very honest and open, even as a child. We saw a great deal of him as a child, because of course his father died when he was only two.'
'That would be your brother?'
Aunt Gert nodded. 'Our brother George—our only brother.'
'Just how did George die?'
There might have been a look that passed between the sisters before Aunt Gert replied. 'It was a hunting accident, one of those foolish things. They were out shooting pheasants and George dropped his shotgun somehow. It went off and hit him in the stomach. His wife helped him back to the car and put him on the rear seat. They hurried back to town as fast as they could, but poor George was dead by the time they reached the hospital. He'd bled to death on the back seat of the car.'
'It was your car?' Leopold prompted her.
Aunt Gert frowned. 'Who told you that? No, actually it was Aunt Flag's car. It was right after the war and cars were still scarce. George didn't have one of his own, so he borrowed it.'
'We never used it again,' Aunt Flag said. 'It's back in the garage.'
So both father and son had died violent deaths in automobiles, separated in time by 30 years. Leopold wondered about it, wondered what effect the father's death might have had on the son. 'Thank you,' he said. 'You've been very helpful.'
Aunt Gert walked outside with them, kicking a stone from the crumbling walk. 'I really must get this fixed,' she said.
'Is Aunt Flag confined to her chair?' Leopold asked.
'Oh, she gets around but she's very feeble since her stroke. I do all the shopping and I take care of her.'
'That must be hard on you.'
'She's my sister.'
'Of course.' Leopold looked up at the dappled sky, wondering if the sun would break through. 'When did you last see your nephew alive, Miss Conners?'
'Oh, it must have been about a week ago.'
'When he came to visit you, did he ever go out to the garage and look at the car his father died in?'
'Why would you ask a question like that? Of course not! He came to see us, not to stir up memories of the past.'
'Did his wife come with him last week?'
Aunt Gert avoided Leopold's eyes. 'Not last week, no.'
'But she did come sometimes?'
'Not often. She has no use for old people.'
'You're not old,' Leopold reassured her climbing into his car while Fletcher got behind the wheel.
'Thank you. You're very kind.'
'Just one other question. Who was with your brother George the day of the hunting accident?'
'With him? No one was with him, only his wife. There were just the two of them out there when it happened.'
It was Connie who tracked down the information and brought it to Leopold's office later in the day. 'I ran up a small fortune in long ¬distance phone calls for this,' she said. 'I hope it's worth it.'
'If it helps solve this damned case it's worth it. What have you got, Connie?'
'George Conners served in the European Theatre of Operations during World War Two, and took part in the D-day invasion of Normandy. He met and married a British girl named Jean Hemmings. Apparently it was a rush marriage—their only child Vincent was born two months later, near the end of 1944. Conners and his wife returned to America in the spring of '45, when the European war ended. It was the fall of 1946 when he was killed in the hunting accident, just after Vincent's second birthday.'
Leopold interrupted. 'Was there any sort of police investigation at the time?'
'Just routine, apparently. Anyway, the widow Jean remarried soon after—within a year—to a car salesman here in town. I don't think Vincent was ever close to his mother and stepfather. When he was eighteen he went off to college and they moved out West. Except for occasional brief visits he never lived with them again.'
Leopold grunted and stared out of the window. 'What are you thinking, Captain?' Fletcher asked. 'That his wife shot him?'
'Like in that Ernest Hemingway story,' Connie said. 'The one about Macomber.'
'She shot him and married another man,' Leopold said quiedy. 'And thirty years later his son dies in another car. Did his wife kill him too, in order to marry another man?'
Fletcher snapped his fingers. 'That guy Frank Bland! I thought he was being awfully chummy for an employer. Do you think—?'
'Check on him, Fletcher. Talk to Conners' coworkers. See if there was any gossip around the office.'
'But the two crimes are entirely different,' Connie pointed out. ' Knowing about the first one doesn't help us in the least toward solving the second one. How could they possibly be connected?'
'If Vincent suspected his father was murdered all those years ago suspected it through something he overheard or half remembered— he might have mentioned it to his wife. That might have planted the idea in her mind.'
'It's all guesswork,' Connie said.
Leopold agreed. 'But in this case we've got nothing to go on but guesswork.'
Both Connie and Fletcher had duties involving other cases, and after Fletcher's report on Frank Bland the following day the investigation was left pretty much in Leopold's hands. Fletcher hadn't come up with anything concrete about Bland. He was divorced, and he occasionally dined at the Conners' home—but this could have been nothing more suspicious than the time honoured custom of having the boss to dinner.
With the Conners funeral only a day away, the medical examiner still had not ruled on the cause of death. Speaking with Leopold, he was inclined to rule it a suicide, simply because 'It couldn't be murder, could it, Captain?'
To which Leopold replied, 'Doc, did you ever hear of anybody committing suicide by strangling himself with a cord while driving in a traffic jam?'
'I guess not,' the medical examiner agreed.
Leopold picked up the murder weapon and examined it once more. It was a loop of knotted cord that they'd had to cut away from the dead man's neck. I
t fit the most likely newspaper theory of the case that a car thief had been trapped in the back seat by Conners' unexpected return and had strangled Conners from the rear.
But that left one big question mark.
If the thief left the car immediately, how did a dead man drive the automobile for nearly a half hour? And if the killer was still in the car when it was caught in the traffic jam, how did he leave it without being seen?
It was as close to an absolute impossibility as anything Leopold had ever encountered.
So he went back the medical examiner again. 'Doc, can't you be more precise as to the time of death?'
'We're talking about minutes here, Captain. Remember it was nearly an hour after you found him before I saw the body. I'd be inclined to say he died twenty to thirty minutes before you found him, but if you say that's impossible I'll cut it to a shorter period.'
Leopold accepted that and went in search of a new lead. In the police garage where the murder car was impounded he had a mechanic sit in the front seat while he sat in the back and went through the motions of strangling the mechanic. But that didn't satisfy him. It was all wrong. Finally he decided to follow up Fletcher's investigation by calling on the dead man's employer.
Frank Bland greeted him with a wan smile. 'Still at it, Captain?'
'Still at it.' He glanced through the glass wall of the office at the lighted display board of noon stock quotations. 'I imagine this is a profitable business.'
The stout man shifted uneasily. 'We have our good years.'
'I mean, Vincent made a comfortable living here.'
'The salary and commissions are good, and we have a generous life insurance programme which will benefit his widow. He had no reason to complain.'
Leopold chose his words carefully. 'He gave no hint of anything wrong on the day he was killed?'
'Nothing. He left early, right after the market closed. I was surprised he wasn't home long before he was killed. But there was nothing else unusual.'
'And you say his wife would benefit from the insurance?'
Frank Bland half rose from his chair. 'Surely you're not implying that Linda had anything to do with this terrible thing!'
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