Leopold's Way

by Edward D. Hoch

  “Why call me in either case?” Leopold asked. He dealt only in murder.

  “Well, it’s a funny one. Captain. The beat patrolman rang me as soon as he talked to the wife.”

  “Mrs. Held?”

  Fletcher nodded. “She says her husband was killed by a witch. She says there’ll be other murders, too.”

  “A witch?”

  “A witch.”

  Leopold sighed. The night was shot anyway. “We’d better speak to Mrs. Held.”

  She was a tearful blonde in her early thirties, worth a second look but not a third one. The tears were real enough, though Leopold thought perhaps they were a trifle overdone. She stopped crying long enough to face them across a plain-looking living room that reflected nothing of the people who lived there.

  “You’re detectives,” she said, making it some sort of accusation.

  “Captain Leopold, and this is Sergeant Fletcher. We’re sorry to bother you at a time like this, Mrs. Held.”

  “It’s as good a time as any.”

  “You expressed the opinion that your husband was murdered.”

  “He was killed by that damned witch! They’ll all be dead before she’s through!” The woman was clearly alarmed, but the flash of her eyes was not quite as rational as Leopold might have wished.

  “Suppose you tell me about it,” he said quietly.

  “They bought the amusement park—my husband and three other men. They expanded it and tried to force her to move out of her house. She put a curse on them—all four of them. She said they’d die by earth, air, fire and water.”

  “Your husband was the first to die?”

  She nodded and a tear rolled down her cheek. “By water, just as she said.”

  “How long ago was this curse put on them?”

  “It would have been almost a month. Of course they laughed it off, but maybe they’ve stopped laughing now.”

  “What’s her name? This witch.”

  “Stella Gaze. She lives in an old house by the ferris wheel.”

  “They built a ferris wheel next to her house? She might have reason to be disturbed by that,” Leopold observed. “Give us the names of the other men, please.”

  “They were all equal partners with my husband. There was George Quenton, and Walter Smith, and Felix O’Brian.”

  “And I suppose they now share equally in your husband’s share of the business?”

  “No, it comes to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “What there is of it! The park has been losing money all summer. People don’t seem to want that sort of amusement any more. Otto could never figure out what they wanted.”

  “It’s a world of overrated pleasures at best, Mrs. Held. Thank you for your help. We’ll talk to Stella Gaze and the others.”

  Leopold and Fletcher left the house and drove back toward downtown. There was a chill in the air and summer was almost ended. “Should we go see this witch?” Fletcher asked.

  “She’ll keep till morning. It’s not really a case for Homicide.”

  “Think she’s real, Captain?”

  “A real witch? I’ll tell you after I see her.”

  In the morning, Leopold was tempted to forget all about it. There was, after all, no suspicion of foul play in the death of Otto Held, and no reason for questioning Stella Gaze. He was glancing over the morning report, his mind far away, when the call came in from Walter Smith.

  “The man who was killed last night—Otto Held—was my partner. I have reason to believe he was murdered, and I’m requesting a police investigation.” The voice was harsh and rasping and Leopold didn’t like it.

  “We’ve already spoken to Mrs. Held. Do you have any concrete suspicions, sir?”

  “A woman named Stella Gaze. She has a house near our amusement park.”

  Leopold covered his sigh. “Yes. We’re going to speak to Stella Gaze. And I may want to talk to you and your other partners.”

  “We’ll be at the park. Labor Day weekend coming up, you know.”

  “Thank you for calling, Mr. Smith.”

  Leopold hung up and sat staring at the telephone for some time. Well, it was a quiet morning anyway, and there seemed no way out of a visit to Stella Gaze’s house. He flipped the intercom switch and told Sergeant Fletcher the news.

  They drove out to the Four Kings Sportland, a rambling sort of place which seemed to stretch in all directions under the fluffy white clouds of an early September sky. It had started life, a generation earlier, as a miniature golf course and a scattering of kiddy rides, frequented by neighborhood children during the day and teen-agers by night. Gradually it had built upon itself, adding the constant trappings of an amusement park—the fun house and ghost train and roller coaster and ferris wheel. Now in the Sixties, the place had acquired four partners and a certain sporting air evidenced by a bowling alley and billiard parlor.

  They sought out Walter Smith first, and found him to be as harsh in appearance as his voice had indicated. He wore a pale blue sport shirt open at the neck, revealing hairy arms and a chest that might have belonged to a gorilla.

  “Yeah, you’re the detectives, huh?”

  “We’re the detectives, Mr. Smith.”

  “Felix! Come here and meet the detectives!” He was calling to a slight, well-dressed man with a very British look about him. “This is Felix O’Brian, another of my partners. George is off somewhere right now.”

  O’Brian eyed them with interest. “You’re here about this witch? And her threats?”

  “We’ll talk to her, sir. That’s all we can do at this point.”

  “All?”

  Leopold was watching a mother pulling her small child away from the roller coaster. “Our reports show the car had defective brakes. Otto Held’s death was accidental.”

  “His wife doesn’t think so,” Smith said. “I don’t think so.”

  Leopold shrugged. “We’ll talk to Stella Gaze. Where’s her house?”

  “I’ll take you,” O’Brian offered. He led them over toward the far end of the place, where only the ferris wheel seemed to rise.

  “You English?” Leopold asked, making conversation.

  “Irish, educated in London, sent over here twenty-five years ago to escape the bombings. I just never went back.”

  “The four of you were equal partners in this place?”

  “Equal partners in nothing. Don’t let the crowds fool you. The money isn’t in this nickel and dime stuff any more. It’s in the bowling and big-ticket items. Look over there—next season we’ll have indoor fishing in that new building. It’s very popular in Japan right now.”

  “Indoor fishing?” Leopold puckered his lips and decided he had nothing more to say on the subject. “And Stella Gaze?”

  “She’s lived in that old house all her life. Mother died, you know the sort. Never married. Maybe a man could have done something for her. Anyway, she wouldn’t sell us her land so we built around her.”

  And they had certainly built around her. The ferris wheel, as tall as a five-story building, seemed to tower over the little cottage with its weathered shingles and crooked chimney. The park itself was fenced with chain-link steel, but it skirted dangerously near the little house of Stella Gaze.

  “Why wouldn’t she move?” Fletcher wanted to know.

  “Ask her. You’ll see the kind of answer you get.”

  Felix O’Brian left them then, hurrying back the way he had come as if pursued by some noonday demon. They mounted the shabby, sagging steps of the house and pushed the bell. After a moment the door was opened by a pale woman who must have been in her mid-forties.

  “I am Stella Gaze,” she said simply. “Do you wish to enter?”

  Leopold introduced them and followed her into a sort of sitting room that was almost a relic of another century. A cut-glass lamp burned in one corner of the room, casting a yellowish glow that partly relieved—or perhaps added to—the forbidding gloom of the place.

  “We’ve come about the death of
Otto Held,” he said quietly, because it was the sort of place where everything was said quietly.

  “Oh?” Her eyes held them, big brown eyes that were the remains of some past beauty now submerged beneath thin hands and a lined, aging face. She pushed back a strand of coal-black hair and then returned the hand to her lap. “I read about it in the newspapers.”

  “Several people have stated that you made threats against Otto Held’s life.”

  “Oh, no! Heavens, no! I wouldn’t do a thing like that!”

  “What did you say, then?”

  “I merely told them how they would die—all four of them.”

  “I see,” Leopold said, staring at her wrists. “Just how was that?”

  “Four of them—earth, air, fire and water.”

  “Did you say Held would die in the water?”

  “It was not clear which death would claim each of them. I only saw that they would die.”

  Leopold blinked. “You resented the amusement park, didn’t you?”

  “I did, and I still do. I look out my window at night and I see that ferris wheel turning, turning. Even with my shade down the lights still come through. And sometimes the ticket seller shouts See the witch’s house! Ride over the witch’s house!, and that’s when it’s the worst.”

  “Do you consider yourself a witch, Miss Gaze?” Leopold asked.

  She stared off at the cut-glass lamp for a moment before replying. Then she said, “There are no such things as witches, are there, Captain Leopold? Is there a witch law on your books, still?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Then why do you question me like this?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Come on, Fletcher,” Leopold said. “We’d better be going.” But at the door he turned and asked, “Have you ever considered moving from here, Miss Gaze?”

  “No, never. I will be in this house long after that ferris wheel has ceased its turning.”

  She stood at the door for a long time, watching them walk away. It was Friday afternoon, and already the crowds were beginning to gather for the Labor Day weekend.

  “Now what?” Fletcher asked.

  “Nothing. There’s nothing here for us. I’m going fishing, Fletcher. It’s the last weekend of the summer.”

  “Do you think she’s a witch?”

  “No,” Leopold said.

  “Why not?”

  “Did you notice the old scars on both wrists, Fletcher? Ever hear of a witch trying to commit suicide?”

  Leopold had no family, and his friends were usually occupied with theirs on long weekends. He fished alone, renting a little boat at one of the large island lakes north of the city. But this weekend his mind was not geared to the relaxation of fishing, and he came in after only two hours on the silvery surface of the water.

  He phoned headquarters and talked to the detective on duty, but all was quiet. Perhaps he’d almost been wishing for a murder, something to call him back from the holiday boredom. But there was nothing.

  It was cloudy on Sunday, and all day long the weatherman was predicting rain for Labor Day. Toward evening, Leopold went out for a ride, driving through the muggy streets in the general direction of the Four Kings Sportland. He could see the lights from far off, dotting the sky as they competed with the cloud-strewn sunset.

  He stopped in a bar not far from the place and drank a beer, thinking about Stella Gaze and tempted almost to visit her again. Then he met a man he knew, a small-time political leader who’d done him a favor once. They chatted over another beer, and evening passed unnoticed into night.

  At a little after one, while the bartender was cashing up and eyeing the clock, somebody shouted, “Look! The amusement park’s on fire!”

  Leopold was on his feet, the logy effects of the beer shaken off in an instant. “Call the police,” he shouted at the bartender. “Sergeant Fletcher at Homicide.” Then he was out the door, running toward his car.

  The flames had started somewhere near the back of the fun house, and spread with lightning like speed through the dry timbers of the old buildings. Driven by a slight breeze, the tongues of fire had only to lick at the next building in line before it too was a crackling mass of spark and cinder.

  The park had been closed already for the night, and Leopold had no idea if anyone still remained inside. He pinned his badge to his coat and ran aimlessly among struggling firemen, searching for the thing he feared to find. He located the park office, safely removed from the flames, but it was empty. The bowling alley likewise was deserted. Heading back toward the fire, he came upon a sweating and soot-streaked Walter Smith.

  “Captain Leopold! What are you…?”

  “Quickly, man! Are the others safe?”

  “Others?”

  “Your partners—Quenton and O’Brian.”

  “Why…I don’t know.”

  Leopold left him and ran on, now in the direction of the great ferris wheel standing silent in the night, bathed in the flickering glow from the flames behind him. Beyond the ferris, the house of Stella Gaze slept dark and peaceful in the night.

  He paused and turned, hearing someone shouting his name. It was Fletcher, looking as if he’d been dragged out of bed. “They found him, Captain.”

  “Which one?” Leopold asked.

  “O’Brian, the one we met out here the other day. Looks like a beam fell on him and trapped him in there.”

  Leopold watched the firemen gradually advancing with high pressure hoses against the dying fury of the flames. “Dead?”

  “He didn’t have a chance. What do we do now, Captain?”

  Leopold gazed back toward the ferris wheel, and the shabby little house. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I just don’t know.”

  George Quenton was quite obviously the brains of the Four Kings Sportland. He spoke and acted like a businessman who knew how the game was played. Now, in the early morning hours of a dawning Labor Day, he paced his little office with a long cigar unlit in one hand, glancing now and then at Leopold from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

  “What are you going to do, Captain?” he demanded. “Wait until that woman kills Walter and me too?”

  “There’s no basis for an investigation,” Leopold told him quietly. “Both deaths have been apparent accidents.”

  Walter Smith grunted. “Hell, yes! And we’ll be accidents too.”

  “Very well,” Leopold sighed. “Tell me everything you know. When was the last time you two saw Felix O’Brian alive?”

  “I was in town,” George Quenton said. “At the funeral parlor with Mrs. Held. Walter saw him about midnight, didn’t you?”

  Smith nodded his squat head. “He told me to go home and he’d close up. I didn’t see him any more after that.”

  It was daylight outside, and George Quenton was gazing through the blinds at the smoking shambles. “Nothing left but the ferris wheel and the bowling alley! And this is one of the biggest crowd days of the whole summer!”

  “Did O’Brian have a wife?”

  “No. His share goes to some sister out west.”

  Sergeant Fletcher had been sent for Mrs. Held, and now he returned, ushering her into the office. “Are you satisfied now?” she asked Leopold, her eyes puffed from either sleep or sadness.

  “I’m doing what I can, Mrs. Held. It’s an unusual case.”

  “What’s unusual about it?” Walter Smith rasped. “We’re even telling you who killed them.”

  “Yes,” Leopold said, walking over to stand beside Quenton at the window. “It all gets back to Stella Gaze, doesn’t it?”

  “That damned witch!” Mrs. Held sat down and took out a cigarette.

  “We still need evidence,” Leopold said. “All we have are two accidental deaths.”

  “Earth, air, fire and water,” George Quenton mumbled, half to himself. “That leaves earth and air for the two of us, Walter.”

  They were scared; Leopold could see that much. He asked them some more questions and then at last turned to Fletcher. “Ho
w about checking with the arson squad? See if they’ve come up with anything.”

  Off in the distance, over near Stella Gaze’s cottage, someone had started the ferris wheel. After a time they left the little office and drifted over under the cloudy morning sky to watch its turnings toward heaven. From somewhere inside it, music was playing, like on a merry-go-round. Leopold felt somehow saddened.

  “It’s the end of summer,” Mrs. Held said.

  Sergeant Fletcher came back from his mission. His face was grim, but it was an expression Leopold knew and respected. “We’ve got it, Captain. Arson. Found a can that had held kerosene. And some fuses. The fire was set.”

  Leopold nodded. Suddenly the country was familiar, the scenery was remembered. “And that makes it murder,” he said.

  This time Leopold went alone to see Stella Gaze. He sat on a straight-backed chair facing her across the dimly cluttered living room, drinking green tea from a china cup.

  “You are a strange man,” she told him. “Not like the other detectives.”

  “You’ve known many?”

  “Many. Sometimes I think I do not even belong in this century. In another century…”

  “In another century you might have been burned at the stake, or hanged from a tree in Salem.”

  “You think I’m a witch?”

  “There are three possible solutions to the deaths of Otto Held and Felix O’Brian—assuming that we’ve passed the point of mere coincidence. One—you’re a witch; two—you murdered them, plain and simple; three—someone else murdered them and is trying to frame you for the crimes. Do you have any choice among those theories?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and he noticed again those scarred wrists that rested on her lap. “My choice is the truth, of course. I know nothing of their deaths.”

  “And yet you knew how they would die.”

  Her eyes studied his, seeming almost to bore their way through his skull. “Did you ever gaze out of a window, Captain Leopold, on a day when the air was clear and sparkling in the early morning, from a hilltop when the whole world was laid out before you? Did you ever see something far, far off in the distance, something naked and very real, like the truth? You see it, not as in a dream at all, but as perhaps in a motion picture unfolding at a distance.”