Leopold's Way

by Edward D. Hoch

  But right now Abby Tenyon wasn’t looking very attractive. She sat propped up in bed, swaddled in blankets, her battered face only just beginning to show the swelling and discoloration that the bruises had caused. “Can you tell me what happened?” Leopold asked.

  “N—no, I’m afraid I can’t.” She had to speak out of the side of her mouth, and it added to her bizarre, trampled-upon look.

  “She thought it was a dream,” her husband explained. “A nightmare. She wasn’t fully conscious.”

  “Not even while you were being beaten?” Leopold found that difficult to understand.

  “I think we were both drugged,” Ron Tenyon said. “I didn’t hear a thing, and I slept later than usual this morning. After last night’s speech we came back here and ordered room service. I think the food was drugged.”

  Leopold made some notes. “Was anything stolen from the room?”

  “No.”

  “Was Mrs. Tenyon sexually molested?”

  “No.”

  “You’re claiming that the two of you were drugged simply to allow your wife to be beaten up like this?”

  “That appears to be the case.”

  “Do you have any enemies who might have done such a thing?”

  “In politics everyone makes enemies. But I can’t think of anyone perverse enough to attack me through Abby.”

  “And you, Mrs. Tenyon?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. This whole thing is a nightmare.” The swelling had almost closed both her eyes, and she searched in her purse for some dark glasses to cover them.

  “This is the last weekend before the special election,” Tenyon pointed out. “Abby was scheduled to make several public appearances with me. Do you think the beating could be linked to that in some manner?”

  “I don’t know,” Leopold said, “Mrs. Tenyon, suppose you tell me everything you can about this dream of the man beating you.”

  He listened as she spoke, making notes, nodding from time to time. “The huge padded fist would have been a boxing glove. They wanted to mark you but not seriously injure you.”

  “But why?”

  “And why go to the trouble of drugging us and sneaking into our hotel room?” Tenyon wondered. “They could have assaulted her on the street a lot easier.”

  Leopold considered that. “They may have chosen this method because no one would believe it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Weren’t you aware of the house physician’s blasé attitude? It was nothing new or strange to him. He viewed it as a simple wife-beating.”

  “You mean—”

  “A large segment of the public is going to think you beat your wife, Mr. Tenyon, and that the two of you made up this story of a masked intruder and drugged food because the election is so close.”

  Ron Tenyon began to pace the floor, his indignation growing. “My opponent would never do a thing like that. Crystal is an honorable man.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be Crystal. Some of his supporters could be acting without his knowledge.”

  “Then at all costs we must keep this story out of the papers.”

  “That may be difficult.”

  “We’ll say she has the flu.”

  But even as he spoke the phone between the beds rang. He answered it and spoke quickly with growing indignation. When he finally hung up his face was tense. “That was my campaign manager. The reporters are already onto it. They’ve been calling him for the story.”

  “Someone tipped them off,” Leopold suggested.

  “It seems so,” Tenyon agreed. “The man who beat her up.”

  “Or perhaps a hotel employee. Maybe even the doctor.”

  “Well, there’s no keeping it secret now.”

  And there wasn’t. It was front-page news on Sunday morning.

  Two days later Ron Tenyon lost the special Congressional election by about 1100 votes.

  On the morning after the election Leopold called Lieutenant Fletcher into his office. “Get us a couple cups of coffee from the machine,” he suggested. “I want to talk.”

  “About that Tenyon thing, Captain?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “He lost the election.”

  Leopold nodded. “Eleven hundred votes. If five hundred and fifty or so people changed their minds he would have won.”

  “You think the bad publicity influenced the election?”

  “Yes, I do. And since when is it bad publicity when a man’s wife gets beaten up in a hotel room? Why is the press and public so quick to disbelieve his story, and his wife’s story?”

  “The room was locked, Captain. The idea of somebody drugging them both and getting past those locks, and then not even stealing anything, is just too far-fetched.”

  “Of course it’s far-fetched! The person who did it deliberately made it seem far-fetched so the public would think Tenyon was a wife beater.”

  “You think George Crystal was involved?” Fletcher asked, stirring some sugar into his coffee.

  “He seems decent enough. But there were other interests at work. It was well known that Tenyon opposed casino gambling in the state while Crystal supports it. The gambling interests are working hard to pass that bill, and they wanted Tenyon defeated. Of course, a Congressman doesn’t vote directly on state measures, but his influence carries a lot of weight. That’s especially true of Tenyon, who’d promised to stump the state in opposition to the casino bill if he was elected to Congress.”

  “So the casino people hired someone to do the job? They could get a hit man from organized crime easily enough.”

  “Yes,” Leopold agreed, sipping his coffee. “But this whole thing is a bit too subtle for organized crime. They’d be more likely to run Tenyon’s car off the road and make a sure thing of it. The idea of drugging them both, breaking into the hotel room, and beating his wife, then leaking the story to the papers, is an almost baroque scheme. Mobsters don’t think in those terms.”

  “Are you giving me the case, Captain?” Fletcher asked.

  “Nose around and see what you can find out.”

  “Any suggestions?” He knew Leopold always had suggestions.

  “The hotel. If they were drugged, it was in the food that room service delivered. And if the room was entered in the night it had to be by someone who had a key and knew how to get past the night bolt. Run a check on any ex-convicts who might be employed there.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” Fletcher said.

  Sometimes in an investigation the police get lucky. Fletcher got lucky on the Tenyon case. By the end of the week he’d discovered that a man named Carl Forsyth, employed in the hotel kitchen, had a record of two convictions—for breaking and entering and simple assault.

  Then Fletcher got lucky a second time. As he approached Forsyth in the hallway of his apartment building on a cool May evening, identifying himself as a police officer, the burly man reacted instinctively. He drew a small automatic pistol from an inside pocket and pointed it at Fletcher’s chest, squeezing the trigger as Fletcher went for his own weapon. The pistol jammed, and Fletcher smashed the barrel of his revolver down on the man’s gun hand before he could try again.

  Later, in the interrogation room at headquarters, Leopold faced the man. “You’re a two-time loser, Carl. Assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder, resisting arrest—any way you look at it, you’re going back to prison for a good long stay.”

  “I thought he was a mugger,” Forsyth insisted. He held up his bandaged hand. “Hell, I try to defend myself and I get a broken hand!”

  “Who paid you to drug the Tenyons’ food and beat her up?”

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

  “Come on, Carl. You work in the kitchen. Someone tampered with their food and we think it was you. After they were drugged you picked the lock, or used a passkey. Once inside the room you put on a mask and a boxing glove and punched Abby Tenyon about the face. Then you or someone
else phoned the papers, trying to make it look as if Tenyon beat his wife and the story she gave was a coverup.”

  “You know a lot, don’t you?”

  “Who hired you, Carl? All we want is the name.”

  “I’m not saying a word till my lawyer gets here.”

  And so they waited.

  Carl Forsyth’s lawyer proved to be Samuel Judge. He was well known in local legal circles, and every time his name was mentioned as a possibility for a judgeship the newsmen had a field day speculating about “Judge Judge.” But so far he’d been passed over by the governor—possibly because of his eagerness to defend even the most disreputable criminals, or possibly because he so often got them off. His specialty was plea bargaining, that oddity of the modern legal system, and he was not a welcome figure around headquarters. Too many of the men felt the way Leopold did—that weeks of work in building a case should not be bargained away so easily by the District Attorney’s office.

  But Samuel Judge it was, and he emerged from a meeting with his client to confront a testy Captain Leopold. “When are you going to release him, Captain? You don’t have a case.”

  “Don’t I?” Leopold stormed. “He fired a pistol point-blank at Fletcher!”

  “The pistol didn’t fire,” the lawyer replied quietly.

  “It would have!”

  “That’s a matter of conjecture. My client drew a pistol when he was suddenly accosted in a hallway. He immediately surrendered it when Fletcher identified himself.”

  “Cut out the bull! The gun’s not licensed and Forsyth is on parole. That alone is enough to put him back behind bars.”

  The lawyer thought about it, weighing the possibilities. “What do you want?” he asked at last.

  “You plea bargain with the District Attorney’s office, not with me.”

  “Look, your man Fletcher is the one pressing the gun charge.”

  “The attempted murder charge,” Leopold corrected.

  “You’re onto this Tenyon thing, aren’t you?”

  “We want him for that. And we want the name of the person who hired him.”

  Samuel Judge shook his head. “Impossible. My client is too frightened to talk. That’s why he drew on Fletcher so fast. He’s been afraid of being silenced ever since the Tenyon thing.”

  “That’s his problem.”

  “He could never testify in court. All the witness-protection programs in the world wouldn’t protect him.”

  “Suppose,” Leopold said, speaking slowly, “he didn’t have to testify. Suppose he just wrote the name on a piece of paper and we took it from there. It would all be off the record.”

  Judge considered that. He stood up and began to pace. “I don’t think he’d go for that. What would he get in return?”

  “Fletcher might forget what happened in that hallway.”

  “And the Tenyon thing?”

  Leopold shook his head. “No, he’d have to be charged with that.”

  “No deal.”

  “Why not ask him? The gun charge is more serious. That could put him away for life, with his record.”

  Judge shrugged and went back to speak with his client. Leopold had gone through this sort of thing before and he knew it would be a long session. It was.

  Two hours later Samuel Judge took a folded piece of paper from his vest pocket and slid it across the table to Leopold. “That’s all you get,” he said. “I didn’t even look at it myself. If you bring it into court I’ll deny my client ever wrote it.”

  Leopold unfolded the paper and read the name that was neatly written on it.

  Jules Dermain, with a New York City address.

  “All right.” Leopold turned to Fletcher. “Is this deal agreeable with you?”

  “Sure. What the hell, the gun didn’t fire.”

  “Good. Book Forsyth for the Tenyon thing and we’ll forget the other.” He turned back to the lawyer. “You’ll plead him guilty to our charges?”

  “I’ll plead him guilty to something. That’s for me to work out with the D.A.”

  “Still the plea bargainer! You amaze me, Judge.”

  “Just looking after my client’s interests. Whose interests do you look after, Captain?”

  “The victim’s.”

  It took Leopold and Fletcher the better part of two weeks to assemble a file on Mr. Jules Dermain of New York City. When they’d completed their task, Leopold looked over the typewritten sheets and wondered just what it was they had.

  Jules Dermain was 63 years old, a native of France who’d come to America after World War II and achieved a somewhat surprising success as a creator and manufacturer of games and puzzles. One of them, Melrose, had captured the public fancy in the mid-1960s and made Dermain a millionaire. As far as could be determined the man had no link with organized crime, and he certainly didn’t need the money.

  Had Forsyth lied to them?

  That was what Leopold intended to find out.

  New York was familiar territory to him. He’d spent his first years as a police officer and detective there, before returning home. He knew Manhattan especially well, and the little East Side neighborhoods like Gramercy Park brought back fond memories of younger days. Stuyvesant Park was one of these, a few blocks south of Gramercy. It was surrounded by brownstone townhouses dating back to the mid-19th century, and it was in one of these that Jules Dermain resided.

  Dermain saw Leopold in an upstairs office lined with books and samples of the games he’d manufactured. There were a dozen different versions of Melrose alone, including foreign language and Braille editions and even a magnetized game to play while traveling. Dermain was slender and white-haired, with the appearance of a professor. A tiny smile played about his lips as he spoke, but his eyes seemed always alert and serious.

  “What can I do for you, Captain Leopold? As I understand it, you’re not connected with the New York Police Department?”

  “That’s correct. I spent some years in New York, but at present I’m up in Connecticut. I’m head of our Violent Crimes Squad, and I’m down here investigating a recent crime.” Briefly he outlined the circumstances of Abby Tenyon’s mysterious beating, omitting the fact that Carl Forsyth was in custody and had supplied Jules Dermain’s name.

  The Frenchman listened to all this with the slight smile still on his lips, as if awaiting the punch line of a lengthy shaggy-dog story. When Leopold finished he asked, “But how could this possibly concern me? I have never heard of Mr. Ron Tenyon or his wife Abby.”

  “You must understand that I’m here unofficially, Mr. Dermain. But your name has been mentioned in the course of the investigation. I felt a personal interview with you might be the best way to clear the air.”

  “So? My name has been mentioned. By whom, may I ask?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Dermain leaned back in his chair, unconcerned. “Oh, I suppose it was that fool who was hired to do the job.”

  Leopold sat as if stunned by an ax. He would have been less startled if the Frenchman had drawn a pistol from his desk drawer and started shooting. “You’re admitting it?”

  “Why not? You’re here unofficially, out of your jurisdiction. You have not advised me of my rights or given me a chance to call a lawyer. Nothing I tell you could be used against me.”

  Leopold began to think it had been a mistake to visit this man. But now that he was here he had to make the best of it. “You admit you hired Carl Forsyth to drug Abby Tenyon and her husband, enter their hotel room and beat her up?”

  “Of course! You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t know that much already. You must realize that I offer a service, Captain Leopold. Just as you are employed to solve crimes, I am sometimes employed to invent them. We are two sides of the same coin—the puzzle maker and the puzzle solver. As a matter of fact I take some pleasure in meeting you like this. Just as an author sometimes enjoys meeting his readers, I enjoy meeting one of those who is called upon to solve my little plots. You are the first, I must te
ll you, who has ever come this far.”

  “Who hired you to construct this particular puzzle?”

  He shrugged. “The casino interests in your state. Their names are unimportant. I was presented with a challenge—to be certain that Ron Tenyon lost the election. Anything short of murder was allowed. Of course I considered the usual blind items planted in the newspapers, but the voting public becomes more sophisticated each year. The little game I devised was designed for indirection. The press would report the facts, and I would leave it to the public to draw a conclusion. I learned their schedule in advance and found that there was a man available who was employed at one of the hotels. In the kitchen, no less! And he was also an expert on locks.

  “The pieces almost came together by themselves. He drugged their food, obtained a passkey, tampered with the night bolt in advance, and entered while they slept. Tenyon’s wife was beaten enough to mark her face, but not to do permanent injury. I assumed, correctly I think, that a certain number of people reading that story on the weekend before the special election would be skeptical enough to believe the man beat his wife. It was a close election. I didn’t need to change many minds.”

  Leopold had sat in the company of thieves and murderers on many occasions, but nothing had prepared him for this. The man across the desk was bragging of his crime, spreading the details for Leopold’s admiration. “I’m speechless at your audacity,” he admitted. “We’ll see what you have to say in court when Carl Forsyth testifies against you.”

  The amused smile remained. “Oh, he wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a certain reputation in underworld circles. Even in prison Mr. Forsyth would not feel entirely safe. The reputation is unearned, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Still, the plotting of a perfect murder is even more of a challenge than a game like the Tenyon affair. Many years ago, when I first came to this country, I was offered an assignment which might amuse you. There was a certain wealthy man, hunted by many nations, who took refuge in Ireland, buying a large country manor house and surrounding it with an exasperating maze made of brick walls overgrown with dense hedges.” As he spoke he took down a maze game from the bookshelf behind him and opened it on the desk. “The incident inspired me to create this puzzle.”