Leopold's Way

by Edward D. Hoch

  “I know,” Leopold said, feeling suddenly old. He walked to the telephone and dialed headquarters.

  Fletcher found him in his office, staring glumly at the wall. “I came as soon as I could, Captain. What happened?”

  “I bungled, that’s what happened, Fletcher. I was trying to pull off a neat trick, and I got a guy killed.”

  Fletcher sat down in his usual chair, opposite the desk. “Tell me about it.”

  Leopold ran quickly over the events of the evening, from his visit to the hospital, through the shooting of Freddy Doyle. “I didn’t think our man was desperate enough to commit murder,” he admitted.

  “Why would he kill Doyle?”

  “Because he saw it was a trap. Maybe the bullets were aimed at me, too, but Doyle was in the way. I suppose he suspected something when Freddy called to say the diamonds were missing, because he knew he hadn’t taken them.”

  “But where were they?” Fletcher asked. “You said you saw them.”

  Leopold nodded. “They’re right here—my one accomplishment for the night.” He took the can of coffee from its paper bag. “I had only a couple of minutes alone in that kitchen, but I got the idea that Freddy could lead me to Hoffman’s accomplice if he thought the accomplice had returned and stolen the diamonds back again. So I used a can opener to open the bottom of this coffee can part way. I emptied just enough coffee into the sink so there’d be room in the can for this pouch of diamonds. Then I bent the bottom shut the best I could, and capped it with this plastic lid they give you, just so no coffee would run out. When Freddy was searching for the diamonds, he actually lifted the can out of its bag, but the top was still sealed and he never thought to examine the bottom.”

  Fletcher opened the pouch and spilled a few of the gems onto the desk top. “A clever trick, Captain.”

  “Clever—except that now Freddy is dead and we’ve got a murder on our hands. Our man isn’t one to stand still for games.”

  The lieutenant was frowning down at the gems. “If Hoffman used an accomplice, it had to be somebody who came in contact with him during those few minutes after the robbery. He couldn’t have hidden the diamonds anywhere, because the street was searched, and there’s only one person he had physical contact with—only one person he could have slipped the jewels to.”

  Leopold nodded. “I’ve been thinking the same thing, Fletcher. Put out a pickup order on Neil Quart.”

  The young man sat uncomfortably in the interrogation room chair, looking from one to the other of them. “What is this, anyway? You drag me down here at midnight like a common criminal? Just this morning I was a hero!”

  “That was this morning,” Fletcher said.

  Leopold sat on the edge of the desk, close to the man in the chair. “Look, Neil, I think it’s time you told us the whole story. It’s not just robbery now—it’s murder.”

  “Murder! I don’t…” He started to rise and Fletcher pushed him back in the chair.

  “Hoffman passed those diamonds to someone, who delivered them to a fence and later killed the fence. You’re the only one who had physical contact with Hoffman after the robbery.”

  “But I ran after him! I wrestled with him! I held him till the police got there! You know I did!”

  “And while you were conveniently holding him, he slipped you the diamonds.”

  “No! You’re crazy! I didn’t…”

  Leopold began pacing the room. “There’s no other way it could have been. You have to be the accomplice, Quart.”

  “Look, it doesn’t make sense! He was getting away! Why should there be this elaborate scheme to pass me the diamonds when he was getting away with them? If I hadn’t grabbed him, he’d have made good his escape.”

  Leopold thought about that, trying to sort out the facts in his mind. What Neil Quart said made sense, too much sense. “Where were you tonight around seven o’clock?”

  “Working in Bambaum’s shipping department, like every night. You can ask them.”

  “All right,” Leopold said with a sigh. “Get out of here. Go on home. We’ll check it in the morning.”

  Fletcher looked surprised. “But Captain…”

  “It’s all right, Fletcher. I was wrong—again. This is my night for being wrong.”

  Fletcher followed him back into his office. “Let me fix you some coffee, Captain.”

  Leopold handed over the can. “I’ve lost it, Fletcher. I can’t even think straight anymore. I jump on some poor kid and try to make a murderer out of him. I get some guy killed for nothing.”

  “You recovered the diamonds, Captain.”

  “Yeah.”

  Fletcher was filling the coffee pot. “Well, Hoffman sure did something with those diamonds. He had them when he hit Officer Begler, and he didn’t have them when they grabbed him a few minutes later.”

  Leopold sat up straight. “How do we know that, Fletcher?”

  “What? Well, hell, he sure didn’t crack Begler’s skull because he wasn’t carrying the diamonds.”

  “Fletcher,” Leopold said very slowly, “I think that’s exactly what he did.”

  They were waiting for Peter Arnold in the morning, when he unlocked the door of the Midtown Diamond Exchange. He glanced up, surprised, and said, “Captain Leopold! You look as if you’ve been up all night.”

  “I have,” Leopold said, following him inside the store. Fletcher came too, but stayed by the door. “I’ve been getting people out of bed, checking on your finances, Arnold. I didn’t want to make another mistake.”

  “What?”

  “It was a damned clever plan, I have to say that. I suppose Rudy Hoffman thought it up, and then got friendly with some jewelers around town till he found one who needed the money.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do, Arnold. You closed the shop at nine o’clock the other night, and quickly removed the diamonds from the window. Rudy Hoffman came by as scheduled, broke the window and ran. You pocketed the diamonds and called the police. Then you took the diamonds to Freddy Doyle, who was supposed to sell them. The plan had a great advantage—Hoffman didn’t have to spend precious seconds scooping up the loot in the window, and if he were arrested a block or two away, he’d be clean. No diamonds, no evidence. He probably planned to dump the cane and topcoat and keep on going. Only Officer Begler wasn’t where he was supposed to be, directing traffic. Hoffman knew it was too soon to be arrested—right by the window. He didn’t have the diamonds and the whole plot would be obvious, so he hit Begler with the cane and ran. That’s when he had more bad luck—a young fellow named Neil Quart chased after him. You had the diamonds all the time, but unfortunately Hoffman didn’t even have a chance to pretend he’d dumped them. We had an impossible crime on our hands, even though you didn’t plan it that way.”

  Peter Arnold continued staring at them. He ran a damp tongue over his lips and said, “I assume you have some proof for all this?”

  “Plenty of proof. You’re in bad financial trouble, and aiding in the theft of your company’s diamonds was an easy way out for you. We’ve got the gems back, and with you in jail I’m sure Hoffman can be persuaded to tell it like it was.”

  “There were witnesses who saw Hoffman at the window, though.”

  “Yes, but they only saw him reach inside. He would hardly have had time to scoop up all those loose diamonds, and only you, Arnold, actually said you saw him do that. You said you saw it while you were locking the door, even though there’s a velvet drape at the rear of the window that keeps you from seeing anything from inside the store. You didn’t see him take the diamonds because he never took them. They were already in your pocket when he broke the window and started running.”

  “I don??

  “You panicked when Freddy called you, and especially when you saw me in the doorway with him. You recognized me, of course, and started shooting. That alone told me the killer was someone I’d questioned in connection with the case.”

 
; Peter Arnold moved then, as Leopold knew he would. It was only a matter of guessing whether the murder gun was in his coat pocket or behind the counter. His hand went for his pocket, and Fletcher shot him from the doorway. It was a neat shot, in the shoulder—the sort Fletcher was good at.

  Arnold toppled against a showcase, crying and clutching his shoulder, as Leopold slipped the gun from his pocket. “You should have dumped this in the river,” he said. “We could never have made the murder charge stick without it.”

  Fletcher locked the front door and called for an ambulance. They had to get Arnold patched up, and booked for murder and robbery, and then they could both go home to bed.

  (1972)

  Captain Leopold Plays a Hunch

  THE DAY WAS SUNNY, with an August warmth that hung in the air like an unseen cloud. It was the sort of day when children’s voices carried far in the muggy atmosphere, when the slamming of a screen door or the barking of a dog could be heard throughout the quiet suburban neighborhood surrounding Maple Street.

  Out back, beyond the trees that marked the boundary of developed land, a group of boys barely into their teens stood watching while one of them fired a .22 rifle at a row of beer cans they had set up on a log. Presently the mother of the boy with the rifle appeared at the line of trees and shouted for him to stop. He did so, reluctantly, and the other youths drifted away. The boy with the rifle walked slowly back to his mother, his head hanging.

  The afternoon settled into a routine of humid stillness, broken only by the rumble of an occasional delivery truck or the crying of a baby. It was nearly an hour later that the screaming started in a house on the next street, beyond the trees and across the open field.

  Though the houses were some distance away, the screaming was heard quite clearly on Maple Street.

  Lieutenant Fletcher took the call on Captain Leopold’s phone, interrupting a department meeting on a recent wave of midtown muggings. Leopold, watching Fletcher’s face from the corner of one eye, saw the blood drain from it.

  “I’ll be right home,” Fletcher said and hung up. He turned to Leopold and explained. “I’ve got to get home, Captain. They think my kid might have killed somebody with his rifle.”

  “Go ahead,” Leopold said. “Call me when you find out what happened.”

  He went on with the meeting, accepting suggestions from the other detectives and from policewoman Connie Trent, but his mind was on Fletcher. He hoped the news wasn’t quite as bad as it had sounded on the phone. He and Fletcher had worked together for so many years that the troubles of one often became the worries of the other.

  As soon as the meeting broke up he motioned Connie aside. “Try to find out what happened with Fletcher’s son, will you? Let me know as soon as you hear anything.”

  “Right, Captain.” Connie was tall and dark-haired, the brightest addition to Leopold’s squad since Fletcher had joined it eleven years earlier. She had beauty and brains, along with a superior arrest record that she had achieved while acting as an undercover narcotics agent. Leopold enjoyed talking to her, enjoyed looking at her deep green eyes and easy smile.

  Within fifteen minutes Connie was back in his office. “It’s not good, Captain. A man named Chester Vogel, a high-school teacher, was found shot to death in his living room. He was killed by a single .22 bullet that came through a back window of his house. The window faces a vacant lot where Fletcher’s son was firing a .22 rifle at just about the time Vogel was killed.”

  “Damn!” Leopold frowned at his desk. “All right,” he said finally. “I’d better get out there.”

  “Want me to come along?”

  “No, Connie. I’m going as a friend, not as a detective.” But he smiled and added, “Thanks for offering.”

  “I’ll be here if you need me.”

  A police car was parked in front of Fletcher’s white ranch home on Maple Street. Captain Leopold had been there a few times before—once for a summer cookout in the backyard when he’d felt oddly out of place as the only outsider in a close-knit family group. But he’d always liked Fletcher’s wife Carol, a charming intelligent woman whose only fault was her heavy smoking.

  Carol saw him coming up the walk now and opened the screen door to greet him. She was short and small-boned, looking far younger than her 37 years. At that moment she might have been someone’s kid sister rather than the mother of a 14-year-old boy. “Thank you for coming, Captain,” she said simply.

  “How are you, Carol? Is it young Mike?” He knew it was, because their other child was eight-year-old Lisa.

  She nodded and pointed to the family room. Leopold went in, edging by the patrolman who stood in the doorway. Young Mike Fletcher was slumped in an armchair, staring at the floor. He did not look up as Leopold entered.

  “Hello, Captain,” Lieutenant Fletcher said quietly.

  “What’s the story?”

  “I got Mike a .22 rifle last Christmas. I think I told you about it. He wasn’t supposed to use it around here. This afternoon Carol caught him out in back with some other kids, shooting at beer cans. She made him come in, and then a while later she heard this screaming. Woman over on Oak Street came home to find her husband shot dead. Some of the neighbors remembered hearing the kids shooting, and the patrolman came over to find out about it.”

  Leopold looked questioningly at the officer in charge. “What do you think?”

  “We’ll run a check on the rifle, Captain, but there’s not much doubt. Discharging a firearm out here is a violation. We’ll have to book him for something or the guy’s widow will be on our necks.”

  Leopold grunted. The man was a deputy sheriff, independent of the city police. He knew Leopold, of course, but there outside the city limits he wasn’t impressed by detective captains. Leopold wished Fletcher had kept his family in the city, where he’d been obliged to live until the regulations for municipal employees were relaxed a few years back.

  “It was an accident,” Leopold pointed out. “And there were other boys involved.”

  “I did all the shooting,” Mike said without looking up. “They were just watching. Don’t bring them into it.”

  Leopold glanced at Lieutenant Fletcher’s face and saw the torment in it. “Come on,” he said to the boy. “Let’s go for a walk out back. You can show me where it happened.”

  Mike nodded reluctantly and stood up. He was a good-looking boy with fashionably long hair and sideburns, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Leopold knew him only casually, but had always liked him. They went out through the kitchen, walking across the wide back yard like casual strollers on a summer afternoon. Leopold admired the close-cropped lawn and blooming rosebushes as only an apartment dweller could. He’d never owned a home of his own, even during his brief years of marriage. Now, passing uncomfortably through middle age, he often contemplated the simple joys of life that he had missed.

  “Where were you standing when you shot at the cans, Mike?”

  “Beyond those trees, Captain Leopold. Our yard ends at the trees, but we all go into the empty lots to shoot and stuff.”

  “Didn’t you know discharging a firearm out here is against the law?”

  “Yeah, I guess I knew it.”

  Leopold followed him between trees and found himself in a great open field overgrown with weeds and scrub brush. Had it not been for the line of houses some 300 yards away on the next street, he might have imagined himself suddenly transported to the countryside.

  “Some day they’ll build all this up,” Mike said, “put a couple of streets through, build lots of houses. It won’t be the same.”

  “Nothing stays the same, Mike.” He stooped to pick up a punctured beer can. “Was this where the cans were?”

  Mike nodded. “On the log.”

  Leopold turned and saw Fletcher walking out to join them. In that moment he was not a detective lieutenant or even a close friend. He was only a troubled father. “Find anything?” he asked.

  “Beer cans. Bullet holes. What sort of rifle was
it?”

  “A pump-action .22. He wasn’t supposed to fire it around here. I told him, his mother told him.”

  Leopold stared at the distant line of houses. “That’s a long way for a .22 to carry and still have the impact to kill a man.” Something was gnawing at him. It was only a hunch, but it was growing. He turned to the boy. “Did you fire toward that house, Mike?”

  “No. I didn’t even know which was Mr. Vogel’s house till the policeman pointed it out.”

  “You can see the patrol car in the driveway,” Fletcher said, pointing out a white ranch home in the middle of the row of houses.

  “Did you fire in that direction, Mike?” Leopold asked again.

  “No. At least, I don’t think so.”

  “If you were standing here, you would have had to fire a good two feet to the left of your row of cans, and above them, to come anywhere near that house.”

  “I might have been wide on a few shots. I don’t know.”

  “Let’s just walk over there.”

  “I don’t want to,” Mike said.

  “All of us do things we don’t want to do. Come on.”

  Mike looked up at his father who nodded. But Fletcher stood back as the two started across the field. Perhaps he felt that his place was with his wife.

  “Nice house,” Leopold commented when they were almost there.

  “Yeah. Oak Street is classier than Maple. I guess that’s why they like that big empty lot separating us.”

  Leopold nodded to the pair of detectives in the living room of the sprawling home. His eyes went to the single hole where the bullet had passed through the window at the rear of the house. “A thousand-to-one chance,” a detective said. “It was just bad luck, Captain.”

  “Seems so. Is Mrs. Vogel home?”

  “I’m right here,” a hoarse-voiced woman said from the kitchen. She was pale, a little overweight, and perhaps 50 years old. Once she might have been pretty, but today she was only sad-looking and alone.

  “I’m Captain Leopold, Lieutenant Fletcher’s superior in the city police. This is Mike Fletcher.”