Leopold's Way

by Edward D. Hoch

  Leopold grunted. “You worked here long? I don’t remember you.”

  “Just since the place opened for the season in May. Why? I gotta be an old-time employee to know people don’t disappear from ferris wheels?”

  Leopold was about to answer, but a third man had joined them—a stocky thirsty-looking fellow who looked vaguely familiar. “Well, Captain Leopold, isn’t it? You working on this Velma Kelty case?”

  Leopold looked him up and down. “I don’t believe I caught the name.”

  “Fane. Walter Fane from the Globe. You’ve seen me around headquarters.” He pulled an afternoon paper from under his arm. “See? We’ve got it on page one.”

  They had indeed. GIRL VANISHES AT AMUSEMENT PARK: COUNCILMAN’S SON QUIZZED.

  “Is that the way it is, Captain? Or have you found the body?”

  “What body?” Leopold asked.

  “You’re a homicide captain, right? If you’re on the case, there’s a body.”

  “Not this time. I’m just helping out.”

  “Give me a break, Captain. I can still phone in a new lead for the late sports edition.”

  Leopold gazed over at the ferris wheel, and at the new parking lot beyond. “Are you superstitious, Fane?”

  “Huh?”

  “Three years ago, a woman named Stella Gaze was accused of witchcraft.”

  “Yeah.” His eyes brightened a bit. “She lived out here somewhere.”

  “Right next to the ferris wheel. The house was torn down after she killed herself. But if a girl really did vanish from that ferris wheel, who’s to say Stella Gaze’s spirit isn’t still around?”

  “You believe that bunk, Captain?”

  “You wanted a new lead. I’m giving you one.”

  The reporter thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “Thanks,” he said, heading off toward a telephone.

  “We can go back to your wheel,” Leopold told Rudy Magee. “I want you to tell me how it happened.”

  “Nothing happened. Nothing at all,” Rudy insisted vehemently.

  “Well then, tell me what didn’t happen.”

  They reached the wheel and Rudy took over from the kid, standing on a raised platform where the cars came to a stop, helping people in and out over the foot-high metal sill. “Watch your step,” he told two teen-age girls as he accepted their tickets and shut the wire cage on them. Though Leopold could see only their knees and upper bodies from the ground, he knew Magee was getting a good view from his position.

  Rudy let a few cars go by with empty seats before he stopped the wheel again to load the next passengers. “When there aren’t many customers, I balance the load,” he explained to Leopold.

  A young hippie type with sideburns and beads came by. “Is Hazel here?” he asked Magee.

  “Not now,” the pale man answered. “Maybe later.”

  Leopold watched the wheel turning against the sky, noting a tree too far away, a lamppost just out of reach. He tried to imagine a fifteen-year-old girl swinging like a monkey against the night sky, trying to reach one of them, and then decided it was impossible. If Velma had gone up—and that was the big if—then she’d surely come down as well.

  “Satisfied?” Rudy asked curtly.

  “Not quite. I understand you’ve got an easy hand with the girls when you’re helping them in and out. You must have seen Velma.”

  “I told you, and I’m telling you. It was busy. I didn’t notice anybody.”

  But his eyes shifted as he spoke. He was a poor liar. “All right,” Leopold said. “Let’s try it another way. Lying to me is one thing, lying before a grand jury is something else. The girl is missing and we want to find her. If she turns up dead and you’ve been lying, that’s big trouble for you.” He took a chance and added, “They know about your record here, Rudy?”

  “What record? A couple of gambling arrests?”

  Leopold shrugged. “Why make more trouble for yourself?”

  The thin man seemed to sag a little. “All right. I was just trying to stay outa trouble. Understand?”

  “Everybody wants to stay outa trouble, Rudy. Now suppose you tell me about it.”

  “Well, the guy shows up just before ten o’clock with his broad. She’s got long black hair and looks about eighteen. They argue for a couple of minutes, because she wants him to go up with her and he doesn’t want to. Finally he buys her a ticket and she goes up alone. All alone—nobody sharing the seat with her—just the girl alone.”

  “And?”

  “And she never comes down. Just like he said. Damnedest thing I ever seen.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure. I was sorta watching for her. You know.”

  “I know, Rudy. What did you think happened?”

  “Hell, I was scared. I thought she opened the cage and jumped. I figured we’d find her body over in the parking lot somewhere.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. Besides, somebody would have seen her, you know. But I just couldn’t figure anything else. Say, do you believe that stuff about the witch and all? Do you think she put a curse on this place before she died?”

  Leopold shrugged. “It’ll make a good story for a few days, keep them off the kid’s back. Maybe by that time we’ll find out what really happened to Velma Kelty.”

  The missing girl had lived with an aunt and uncle in the East Bay region of town, ever since her parents had died in the crash of a private plane some eight years earlier. Captain Leopold drove over to the house, knowing that he was only retracing the steps covered earlier by the missing persons people.

  The uncle was a lawyer named Frank Prosper. He was a bulging, balding man whom Leopold had seen occasionally around City Hall. “You mean you’ve only come to ask more questions?” he challenged, “and not to give us any word of her?”

  “There is no word,” Leopold said. “I wanted to ask you a few things about her. And about Tom Williams. He seems a little mature to have been dating her.”

  “We’ve always had trouble with that girl,” Prosper said, biting off the tip of a cigar. “My wife’s brother was a wild sort and she takes right after him.”

  “What do you think about Williams? Do you think he might have harmed her?”

  “I don’t know. He’s not a bad kid. Only thing wrong with him is that he thinks his father’s God’s gift to politics. Old man Williams is the last of the old cigar chompers.” Leopold thought this last was a somewhat odd comment from a man who himself was smoking a cigar at the moment.

  “You mean he’s crooked?”

  “Nothing of the sort! He’s just a man who believes in political power at the ward level, the way it was practiced a couple of generations ago. The country has passed men like Williams by, but he doesn’t seem to realize it.”

  “I’d like to know more about your niece. Do you have a picture of her? A snapshot would be fine.”

  “I gave one to the missing persons people. Here’s another.” He held out a framed photograph of a shyly smiling girl in a short red dress. She wore her black hair long, half covering a pretty, if unexceptional, face. She seemed several years older than fifteen. Leopold would have taken her for a college girl.

  “She doesn’t look like the wild sort. What was the trouble?”

  “She hung around with a fast crowd. Hippies. That type.”

  “Tom Williams, a hippie?” Somehow the scene didn’t ring true to Leopold.

  “Not Williams. His sister. Talk to his sister.”

  Leopold nodded. “I was thinking of doing just that.”

  She was in the pool when he returned to the Williams house, splashing around in a brief two-piece suit that stopped just short of being a true bikini. When Leopold called to her from the water’s edge, she left the rubber animal to float by itself and kicked out with energy toward where he stood.

  “You’re Cindy Williams?” Leopold asked, stretching out a hand to help her from the water.

  “Just call me Cin,” she replied.<
br />
  He shook the dampness from his cuffs and took a good look at her. Yes, he supposed even in the bathing suit she could have been called a hippie—especially by a paunchy lawyer like Frank Prosper. Her hair was long and stringy, not unlike the missing girl’s except that it was blond. She had the same sort of pretty but unremarkable face. He’d seen her type many times before, downtown, wearing tight jeans and laughing a bit too loudly on a street corner. He wondered what her father, the councilman, thought about it all.

  “Velma Kelty,” Leopold said. “She was your friend.”

  Cin Williams nodded. “A year younger than me, but we’re in the same class at school.”

  “I’m investigating her disappearance. Any idea what might have happened to her?”

  Cin shrugged her loose, bony shoulders. “Maybe it was the witch.” She gestured toward the final edition of the newspaper, where the headline now read: GIRL VANISHES AT AMUSEMENT PARK: WITCHCRAFT HINTED. Walter Fane had phoned in his story on time, and Leopold supposed it was a slight improvement over the earlier headline.

  “Were there any other boys besides your brother?” he asked the girl in the bathing suit. “Someone else she might have dated?”

  “Gee, I don’t know.” She was starting to dry off her long suntanned legs with a towel.

  “I hear she hung around some with hippies.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll find out,” Leopold said.

  A voice called from the terrace at the back of the house. “Cindy, who’s that you’re talking to?”

  “A detective, Daddy. About Velma.”

  Councilman Williams, whose first name was also Tom, came down the flagstone walk. His son looked a great deal like him, as did the daughter to a lesser extent. There was not a cigar in sight, and despite what Prosper had said, Leopold doubted that he smoked them. “You’re Leopold? The chief said he’d put his best man on this thing.”

  “Captain Leopold, yes.”

  “Any clues yet, Captain?”

  “No clues. It’s not the sort of case where you look for clues.”

  “But the girl disappeared from the ferris wheel.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “If there’s any way I can help out, down at City Hall…”

  “Do you know the girl’s uncle? Frank Prosper?”

  “Yes. He’s a lawyer, active in politics. I know him.”

  The tone was one of prompt dismissal. Perhaps they only belonged to different parties. Leopold looked back to where Cin had finished drying herself. “I was asking your daughter about hippies. I understand Velma traveled with a pretty wild crowd.”

  “What gave you that idea?” Williams asked. “She was with my daughter a great deal. And with my son recently, of course.”

  Young Tom Williams came out then, to join them and stand beside his father. He seemed very young, still a boy. “Is there any news about Velma?”

  “No news.”

  “She’ll turn up,” the father decided. “It’s probably just some gag.”

  Leopold didn’t have an answer for that. Standing there with the three of them beside the pool, he didn’t have an answer for anything.

  Fletcher came in with coffee the next morning. “Anything on the girl, Captain?” he asked, settling into his usual chair.

  “Nothing.”

  “You going to turn it back to missing persons?”

  Leopold sighed. “The chief wants me to stay on it another day. He promised Councilman Williams we’d do our best.”

  “What do you think happened to her?”

  Leopold leaned back in his chair. “What do I think happened? I think somebody’s trying to pull a neat trick. I think the ferris wheel was chosen because of Stella Gaze and all that talk of witchcraft. But I don’t know who’s behind it, or what they’re trying to accomplish.”

  “Young Williams?”

  “Yes. He has to be in on it. You see, whatever the plan was, it called for witnesses at the wheel to verify the boy’s story. Unfortunately for him, Rudy Magee wasn’t about to verify anything. That threw him into such confusion that he walked around for an hour or two before even calling the police. That tells us something very interesting, if just a little bit sinister.”

  “Sinister?”

  “Look at it this way. Young Williams and the girl are going to fake a disappearance for some reason—publicity, a joke, anything. She goes up in the ferris wheel, after a big scene with him to draw attention—and then does her vanishing act. Big witchcraft thing, Stella Gaze and all that. Except that it doesn’t work because Magee gets scared and denies everything. So what happens? Williams goes away for a while, but then he comes back and calls the police. Why? There were two other courses open to him. He could have forgotten the whole thing, or the two of them could have tried it again some other night. Why did he call the police with the weak story he had?”

  “You said it was something sinister.”

  “It is.” Leopold swiveled in his chair to stare out the window. The headquarters parking lot was damp and misty, its asphalt surface dark with water from a morning shower. The view wasn’t much.

  “Sinister how? Like witchcraft?”

  “Like murder,” Leopold said.

  There were other crimes that day, the usual assortment of a city’s troubles, and it was not until late in the day that Leopold’s mind went back to the vanishing of the fifteen-year-old girl. It was yanked back suddenly by a telephone call.

  “Captain Leopold?” A girl’s voice, soft.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Velma Kelty.”

  “Who? You’ll have to speak louder.” Already he was signaling Fletcher to trace it.

  “Velma Kelty. The girl on the ferris wheel.”

  “Oh yes. I’m glad to hear from you, Velma. Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Where are you, Velma?”

  “At Sportland. I’d like to meet you here, later, after dark.”

  “Couldn’t I come out now?”

  “No…Not yet. After dark.”

  “All right, Velma. Where should I meet you?”

  “Ten o’clock. By the ferris wheel.”

  “Yes. Of course. I’ll be there, Velma.”

  He hung up and called to Fletcher, but there’d been no time to trace it. There was nothing to do but wait till ten o’clock.

  The rain came again about eight, but it lasted only a few minutes. It left behind a summer dampness, though, and a light mist that clung to the road as Leopold drove. Approaching the Sound, he might have been driving toward the end of the earth, were it not for the bright neon of Sportland that told him some sort of civilization still existed out there at the water’s edge.

  It was five minutes to ten when he reached the ferris wheel. Rudy Magee was on duty again. “You must work all the time,” Leopold observed. “You’re always here.”

  “Every other night, alternating with the afternoons,” Magee said. “What’s up?”

  “I thought I might ask you. Seen anybody familiar tonight?”

  “Yeah. Now that you mention it, that reporter Fane was nosing around.”

  “Oh?” Leopold lit a cigarette. “Anybody else?”

  “Like who?”

  Leopold glanced at his watch. It was just ten o’clock. “Like Velma Kelty, the missing girl.”

  “Never laid eyes on her. I’d know her from the picture the papers published.”

  “She’s not on the wheel now?”

  “I told you I’d know her. There’s nobody but a middle-aged couple and a few strays.”

  He slowed the wheel to a stop and released a young man from his cage. Then he slowed it a few cages on and opened it for a young lady. Leopold saw the hair first, and knew. Rudy Magee saw her too, and let out a muffled gasp.

  Velma Kelty had come back.

  Leopold beckoned to her and they walked away from the shaken Magee.

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me you were riding around on tha
t ferris wheel for the last forty-eight hours,” Leopold said.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  He peered at her in the uncertain light. “All right, young lady. You nearly scared that ferris wheel operator to death. I’m taking you home to your uncle.”

  “I can find my way,” she told him. “I just wanted to see you, to show you I wasn’t really missing.”

  “Sure.” They were in better light now, crossing to the parking lot. He glanced sideways at her and reached out to touch her long black hair. Then he twisted and gave a sudden tug. It came away in his hand.

  “You creep!” Cindy Williams shouted at him, clutching for the wig.

  “Now, now. You’re playing the big girls’ game, Cindy. You have to expect these little setbacks.”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “I guess because it looked like you. That’s a pretty old trick, to start out a blonde and then change to a brunette. You fooled Rudy Magee, anyway. Of course you had the wig hidden in your purse when you got on the wheel a while ago.”

  “I just wanted to show you it could be done,” she said. “Velma could have worked it just the opposite—gotten on the ferris wheel as a brunette and gotten off as a blonde.”

  “But you didn’t show me anything of the sort, because it didn’t work, did it? I recognized you as soon as I got you in the good light, and Tom would have recognized Velma a lot sooner than that, wig or no wig, because he was watching for her.” He sighed with exasperation. “All right, get in the car. I’m still taking you home.”

  She slid into the front seat, pouting for several minutes as he turned the car out of the Sportland parking lot. Presently the garish neon of the amusement park subsided into the background as they drove toward town.

  “You think I’m involved, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I didn’t, until tonight. That was a pretty foolish trick.”

  “Why was it?”

  “I might have told Prosper she was alive, gotten his hopes up.”

  “You think she’s dead?”

  Leopold kept his eyes on the road. “I think Tom was playing a stunt of some sort and it didn’t come off. He waited two hours before calling the police. Why? Because he was trying to decide what he should do. But then he called them after all, even though Magee didn’t back up his story. Why again? Because he couldn’t come back and try his stunt the next night. Because Velma Kelty really had vanished, only not in the way he made it appear.”