Leopold's Way

by Edward D. Hoch

  Leopold blinked. He hadn’t really thought of that.

  In the afternoon he called again at the candy counter where Marge Alguard worked. He waited patiently while she conducted business with three tiny children, then stepped into her line of vision.

  “You again?” she said between tight lips. “I don’t want any coffee today, thanks.”

  “I just wanted to ask you a question.”

  “Didn’t you ask enough already?”

  “Maybe not the right ones. That day in the park—did you have a fight with Fisher for any reasons?”

  She stepped very close to him, so no one else could hear her words. “Look, get out of here. Get out of here with your dirty little questions! What’s the trouble—trying to get your kicks this way? You were never much with the girls back in school, were you?”

  “Marge…”

  “No, I didn’t have a fight with George that day. That day was about the happiest in my life, until he died, and your questions aren’t going to turn it into something dirty. I don’t have much to remember any more, at my age, but I remember George Fisher.”

  There was nothing more for Leopold to say, except, “I’m sorry. I won’t bother you again.” He went away, wondering if he’d already bothered too many lives with his needless prying. Perhaps it didn’t really make any difference, after all these years.

  That night, under a clear but moonless sky, a brick fell from the roof of Leopold’s apartment building as he was entering, just missing his head. It might have been toppled by the wind, except that there was no wind. He hurried to the roof with his revolver drawn, but there was nothing to be seen. Down in the back alley, at the foot of the fire escape, he caught a split-second glimpse of a running man, who vanished around a corner. Leopold slept the rest of the night with the gun under his pillow, something he’d never done before.

  Fletcher turned the unmarked police car into Venice Park, narrowly avoiding a group of bicycling teenagers on a day’s outing. “A Saturday in May,” he said, not unkindly. “Brings ’em all out.”

  Leopold was smoking an old pipe he’d resurrected that morning from his dresser drawer. He watched the kids on their bicycles until they were out of sight around a curve, then said, “I guess that’s what parks are for.”

  “That, and lovers after dark, and maybe sometimes a killing or two.”

  They crossed a stone bridge over one of the creeks and Leopold asked him to stop. “It was in this area somewhere, I’m sure. The swimming pool’s still just over there.”

  “I thought you said it was a footbridge.”

  “It was, then. But times change.” He opened the door on his side and slid out. “Let’s walk awhile, Fletcher. It’s a nice day.”

  The detective fell into step at his side. “You really think one of them tried to kill you last night, Captain?”

  “It’s hard to say. I’ve acquired a good many enemies in my life. But this is the only thing I’ve really been working on all week.” And even that thought troubled him. Would he have devoted so much time to the drowning of George Fisher in a week when a major murder or two had occurred? Weren’t they all mere victims of time and circumstance, ultimately?

  Fletcher lit a cigarette. “I had a couple of the boys check the roof this morning like you suggested, but they didn’t come up with anything. Not even an old butt.”

  Leopold felt a sudden surge of excitement. They’d crossed a graveled path which led from the direction of the pool to a narrow stone bridge over the creek. “This is it, Fletcher. I’m sure!”

  He remembered it now as if the events had happened only yesterday. There was the bridge, with its engraved metal plaque in tribute to the W.P.A., its carefully placed stones now showing the wear of some thirty years’ travel by foot and cycle. Leopold stood in the very center and looked down once more into the dark waters below.

  Fletcher climbed down the grassy bank to the water’s edge and took out a twelve-foot tape measure. He tossed one end to Leopold and watched the point where the other end, weighted by its round metal case, cut the water. “O.K., Captain. Nine feet from the top of the bridge to the water.”

  “How far from the bottom? How much clearance is there?”

  Fletcher stretched his long body out over the water, clinging to a jutting stone with one precarious handhold. “I make it just under six feet. Maybe about five-ten.”

  Leopold nodded. “So if he’d been standing in the canoe he might have hit his head going under.”

  “Who stands in canoes?”

  “People who get drowned. Did you check on the detective who wrote that original report?”

  Fletcher nodded. “He retired seven years ago and moved to Florida. Died a couple years back.”

  “He probably wouldn’t have remembered it anyway,” Leopold decided. “Just a drowning. Toss your measure into the water and see how deep we are at this point, Fletcher.”

  The detective joined Leopold on the bridge and they played out the full twelve feet. By leaning far over the edge Fletcher was able to touch bottom. “It’s around six feet,” he said finally, after some quick mathematics. “Deep enough to drown in.”

  “Fisher was tall. Just about that tall. Why didn’t he just walk to shore? It’s only a few feet.”

  “He panicked in the dark. People do, you know. Maybe it was deeper then.”

  Leopold shook his head. “These creeks rise in the spring, but by June it would be lower than it is now.”

  “Maybe he hit his head, like you suggested. Knocked himself out.”

  “But the autopsy showed no marks on his head. And Chuck Quain’s story had him struggling in the water, obviously conscious.”

  “Well, what then?”

  Leopold was running his hand over the smooth dry stone of the bridge, remembering something from long ago. “Fletcher, what do we have back in the car that’s big enough to make a splash?”

  “Huh?”

  “Something…the spare tire! Get the spare tire, will you?”

  Moments later, Fletcher returned with a puzzled frown, rolling the tire before him. “You’re sure this is what you want, Captain?”

  “It’ll have to do,” Leopold answered with a smile, “unless you’d like to jump in.”

  “No thanks, Captain. Say, what are you up to, anyway?”

  Leopold was lifting the tire to the stone ledge. “Just trying something, Fletcher.” He let the tire fall, then watched as the water splashed up in return. “See if you can fish it out for me and we’ll try once more.”

  Fletcher broke a thin branch off a nearby tree and used it to coax the floating tire in to shore. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Leopold tapped his pipe against the stone while he waited. “I suppose it will be good to see them all again at the reunion,” he mused. “Funny how the years separate us so much, by occupation and economics. Back in those days I don’t think we were so different. But now I’m a detective, and Harry Tolliver is a salesman, and Marge Alguard is a clerk. Shirley married Chuck Quain, and he’s a successful engineer. Groves is a factory worker.”

  “And Fisher’s dead.”

  “Yes, and Fisher’s dead. I guess that’s life. Some of us get happy and some of us get dead.” He let the tire fall again, but the splash was no greater than the first time.

  “Satisfied, Captain?”

  “Satisfied. I wanted to see if the water could splash up to the top of this railing. It can’t.”

  “What does that prove?”

  Leopold shrugged and said nothing. It was too soon for answers, even after twenty-five years.

  Later in the day, he had still another phone call from the increasingly distraught Mr. Harry Tolliver. “Look, Leopold,” he began without preamble. “Some of us are having a meeting tonight about the reunion. We’d like you to come.”

  “Where?”

  “Chuck Quain’s place. We want to get things out in the open, find out just what you’re up to.”

  Leopold sighed into the
mouthpiece. “All right, I’ll be there. What time?”

  “A little after eight.”

  At eight-thirty that evening, Leopold turned his car into the Quain driveway once more, and was surprised to see only one other vehicle ahead of him. The meeting, he soon discovered, had so petered out that only the Quains and Tolliver and Marge Alguard were present, all looking quite unhappy.

  Shirley Quain, wearing the same orange slacks, served him a martini that he didn’t really need, and he settled down into an uncomfortable purple chair opposite Marge. He wondered if it was a sign of the new sophistication to serve martinis this late in the evening. “This all that’s coming?” he asked.

  “I asked Jim Groves, but he’s working,” Tolliver mumbled.

  Reminded of Groves’ night job, Leopold wondered if he had been there the previous evening. He didn’t really need to check, though. He thought he knew who’d tried to kill him. “Well, what seems to be the problem?”

  “You, I guess,” Chuck Quain answered, not quite managing a laugh. “Marge here says she won’t come to the reunion because of the questions you’ve been asking, and some of the others feel the same way.”

  “Oh?”

  “I told you to lay off,” Tolliver said.

  “I was going to, but something changed my mind.”

  “You really think George Fisher was…killed?” This question came from Shirley Quain, who’d just returned from the kitchen with another tray full of cocktails.

  “I think he was killed, yes. I think the police were suspicious at the time, but they were unable to prove anything.”

  “You can prove something?” Tolliver asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you intend to continue this foolish investigation?” Quain had left his chair to begin pacing the floor. He reminded Leopold of a caged tiger waiting to be fed.

  “I intend to continue,” he said. “In fact, I’m going out to Venice Park when I leave here, just to refresh my memory of things.”

  “At night?” Shirley Quain questioned, somewhat startled.

  “It happened at night,” he answered. The thing had occurred to him on the spur of the moment, then the words were out almost before he realized it. All right, he was saying to one of them, come and get me.

  If he was wrong, if it was Jim Groves after all, then there was no harm done. He downed his drink and made motions towards leaving.

  “Wait a minute!” Harry Tolliver insisted. “We haven’t settled anything. What about the reunion?”

  “Count me out,” Marge said. “I’ve had enough questions and prying about the past.”

  “See what I’m up against?” Tolliver pleaded. “Nobody’ll come, the way things are.”

  “I’m sorry,” Leopold told him. And he was sorry. Not for the reunion, but for Harry Tolliver.

  Leopold waited for an hour at the edge of the creek, lounging up against the stone coldness of the bridge as he smoked his pipe and waited for death to visit him, to brush up against his flesh. He had no doubt that the man would try again, but somehow as the hour grew into two his supreme confidence began to fade. Perhaps he couldn’t get away from the meeting, or perhaps Leopold had been wrong. What if it had been Jim Groves after all, or someone else?

  As the second hour neared its end, he knocked the glowing embers of his pipe into the muddy creek and started to leave. It was then that he became aware of the dark figure standing near a tree some twenty feet away. A chill of anticipation ran down his spine. “Hello, there,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Chuck Quain stepped out of the shadows, letting the pale lights of night fall full across his face. “You knew I’d come?”

  “I knew.”

  “I’ve got a gun this time,” Quain said, and Leopold saw the weapon flash in the moonlight.

  “It’s better than a brick, but I don’t think you’ll use it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re not a murderer. Because killing me won’t keep your wife’s secret. It was Shirley who killed George Fisher, all those years ago. Wasn’t it?”

  Chuck Quain never even noticed when Leopold signaled Fletcher to come out of his hiding place. He was suddenly like a man with the life crushed from his body, and he offered no resistance when they took the gun from his hand.

  “Let’s go back to the car,” Leopold suggested. “We can talk there.”

  “How did you know about Shirley? How?”

  When they reached the car, Leopold signaled Fletcher to switch on the tape recorder. They could get Quain’s signature on a statement later. “Memories, I think. Memories and a lot of guessing. It was fantastic that Fisher could have drowned so quickly in that shallow creek, unless he was unconscious. And yet there was no bump on his head and we had your own statement that he’d been struggling in the water. Was there another possibility? Yes. Someone could have held him under the water.”

  Chuck Quain shivered with a sudden chill, or perhaps a memory. “After all these years,” he said simply.

  “Now, was there any confirming evidence of this theory?” Leopold went on. “There was. Fisher’s hair—some of it had been pulled out. He’d spent the whole evening with Marge Alguard and she hadn’t done it, so who had? It might have happened when they pulled him from the water, but I doubted if they’d use that violence in the act of rescuing a man. It seemed more likely to me that a murderer had held Fisher under the water by the hair, until he drowned. The next question was who? And I remembered that Shirley Fazen had been Fisher’s girl, although he spent the day of the picnic with Marge. It could have been a motive.”

  Fletcher stirred in the back seat and lit a cigarette. Outside, the night was very quiet.

  “When I began piecing together Shirley’s movements for that evening in my own mind, I came up with something a bit odd. She’d been swimming with Jim Groves, and he’d left her in the pool. Apparently no one saw her leave it, but next thing we know she’s in the creek with Fisher’s body. And you, Chuck, were the only one who claimed to have seen her dive in after him. If someone did hold Fisher underwater by the hair until he drowned, it almost had to be one of his would-be rescuers. Either Shirley Fazen or Jim Groves.”

  “Why?” That was all. Just why.

  “Because the murderer must have gotten soaked through to the skin, and nobody else would have been wet. They’d all gotten dressed except Shirley. And then somewhere along the line I remembered something from that evening, something buried in my own memory. When I stood on that stone bridge and watched them pulling Fisher from the water, the railing of the bridge was wet—not damp but actually wet. It hadn’t rained, there was a moon that night and only a few clouds. And Fisher’s struggles couldn’t have splashed water up that far. No, it was wet because the killer had perched there before leaping down onto George Fisher’s unsuspecting head as he passed under the bridge in his canoe. But Jim Groves had just put on dry clothes. Everyone else had on dry clothes. Only Shirley was still in her bathing suit, and just out of the pool. Only Shirley could have left wet stones behind on the bridge when she dropped onto Fisher’s canoe.”

  “It wasn’t really like that,” Chuck Quain said, and his words were almost a moan. “She didn’t plan it. She saw him taking the canoe back and ran to the bridge in the darkness. She was sitting there, with her feet dangling over the edge, when he paddled along. They said a few words. She asked about Marge Alguard and he made a statement that infuriated her—something about Marge being better at necking. Shirley just…just jumped on him. I don’t think she ever meant to kill him.”

  Leopold sighed into the darkness. It might have been twenty-five years ago. This, right now, was their reunion. “And you came along and saw it. And kept her secret all these years. Is that why she married you, Chuck? Did you blackmail her into marriage?”

  But that question would never be answered. His mind and memory were still back there by the creek. “She didn’t know her own strength,” he said, almost to himself now. “
She was so at home in the water, on the swimming team, that she didn’t realize Fisher was almost helpless in her hands. She was a strong girl. She still is.”

  “We’ll have to go see her,” Leopold said quietly.

  “Yes.” Then, “What do you intend to do?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  He knew too well that it would be an impossible case to prove. How many could remember Shirley in the water that night? How many could have said even then, in the confusion of darkened events, whether she was rescuer or murderer? All Leopold had was Chuck Quain’s statement, and the fact that their guilty secret had nearly turned Chuck into a killer himself.

  In a book, they would have found her a suicide when they returned to the house on the hill. But instead there was only a haggard woman of forty-three coming down the stairs, looking suddenly old—as if the mere sight of Leopold had told her all she needed to know.

  “One of the children was crying,” she said simply to them both. “He was having a nightmare.”

  (1964)

  The House by the Ferris

  BY THE TIME CAPTAIN Leopold arrived on the scene, the tow truck was already in position, poised in the glare of a half-dozen fire department spotlights. He peered over the edge of the dock, toward the silver ripples where skindivers worked in murky black waters.

  “Have they located the car?” he asked Sergeant Fletcher, seeing him standing to one side while the first of the divers clambered out of the water.

  “They’ve got a cable on the rear bumper, if it holds,” Fletcher said.

  When the last of the rubber-skinned divers stood on the dock, black and wet and glistening, the signal was given and the tow truck’s winch began to hum. Leopold watched the cable tighten and strain almost to the breaking point, and then finally begin to move. After another moment the gray underside of the car broke through the water. It might have been some giant beetle surfacing after a storm, or the flotsam of a forgotten war. The newspapers would call it the death car, and perhaps that was all it was, now.

  His body was still behind the wheel, hunched in death, spewing water from a dozen cavities of clothing and flesh. “Otto Held,” Fletcher said as Leopold bent to examine the dead man. “Thirty-eight, married, two children. Looks like his brakes failed as he got to the pier, but it might have been suicide.”