Leopold's Way (19 page)

“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 that 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.”

“How, then?”

“I wish I knew.” He pushed in the cigarette lighter that rarely worked and reached for his crumpled pack. In the light from passing cars her face was tense and drawn. She looked older than her age.

“You must have some idea.”

“Sure I do, lots of them. Want to hear one? Velma Kelty died somehow at your house, maybe in the swimming pool, and your father the councilman is implicated. To protect him, you and Tom cook up this disappearance, with you using that black wig. How does that sound to you?”

“Fantastic!”

“Maybe.”

They drove the rest of the way in near silence, until they were almost to her house. “By the way,” he asked, “how'd you get out to Sportland tonight?”

“Tom drove me,” she mumbled. “He dropped me off.”

He pulled up in front of her house. “Want me to come in with you, have a few words with your father?”

“N-no.”

“All right. This time.”

He watched till she reached the door and then drove on. He was thinking that if his own marriage had worked out he might have had a daughter just about her age—fifteen or sixteen—but that was a heck of a thing for a cop to have on his mind. Velma Kelty might have been his daughter too, and now she was gone.

He went home to his apartment and turned on the air-conditioner. He fell asleep to its humming, and when the telephone awakened him he wondered for an instant what the sound was.

“Leopold here,” he managed to mumble into the instrument.

“It's Fletcher, Captain. Sorry to disturb you, but I thought you'd want to know. We found her.”

“Who?” he asked through bleary cobwebs.

“The missing girl. Velma Kelty.”

“Is she all right?”

“She's dead, Captain. They just fished her body out of the Sound near Sportland.”

He cursed silently and turned on the bedside lamp. Why did they always have to end like this?

“Any chance of suicide?”

Fletcher cleared his throat. “Pretty doubtful, Captain. Somebody weighted down the body with fifty pounds of scrap iron.”

Leopold went back to the house with the swimming pool, rousing Tom Williams from his bed just as dawn was breaking over the city. “You'll wake my father,” young Williams said. “What do you want?”

“The truth. No more stories about ferris wheels, just the truth.”

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

“They just fished Velma's body from the Sound. Now do you know what I'm talking about?”

“Oh no!” He seemed truly staggered by the news, as if he refused to comprehend the truth of it.

“That trick with your sister was a bit of foolishness. Is that the way you worked it the other night, with a wig?”

“I swear, Captain, Velma Kelty got on that ferris wheel. She got on and she never got off. I can't imagine what happened to her, or how she ended up in the Sound. What killed her?”

“They're doing the autopsy now. Her body was weighted to keep it at the bottom, but not heavily enough apparently. It wasn't any accident.”

“I…I can't imagine what happened to her.”

“You'd better start imagining, because you're in big trouble. You and your sister both. Someone killed the girl and threw her body in the Sound. Maybe she was raped first.”

“You don't know that!”

“I don't know much of anything at this point, but I can speculate. Did you do it, Tom? Or maybe your father? Or maybe some of the hippie crowd she hung around with? Anyway, the body had to be disposed of, and Velma's disappearance had to take place somewhere else. The ferris wheel seemed logical to you, because of the witch stories, so Cindy put on her wig and you pulled it off. Except that the wheel operator was ready to deny everything. That threw you for a loss, and you spent a couple of hours wondering what to do next.”

“No!”

“Then why did you wait all that time before reporting her disappearance? Why, Tom?”

“I…I…”

Leopold turned away. “You'd better think up a good story. You'll need it in court.”

Fletcher looked up from his desk as Leopold entered the squad room and crossed to his private office. “Did you bring the Williams kid in, Captain?”

“Not yet, soon.” His lips were drawn into a tight line.

“Crazy story for him to make up, about that damned ferris wheel.”

“Yeah.” Leopold shuffled the papers on his desk, seeing nothing. “How's the autopsy report?”

“Nothing yet.”

“I'm going down there,” he decided suddenly.

The medical examiner was a tall red-faced man whom Leopold had known for years. He had just finished the autopsy and was sitting at his desk writing the report. “How are you, Captain?” he mumbled.

“Finish with the Kelty girl?”

“Just about. I have to submit the report. Her things are over there.”

Leopold glanced at the clothes, still soggy with water. Dark blue slacks and sweater, sneakers, bra and panties. A heavy piece of cast iron, entwined with damp cord, rested nearby. He looked back at the doctor. “Was she raped, Gus?”

“No. I wish it were that easy. Something like that I could understand.” His face was suddenly old.

“What was it, Gus?”

“Fifteen. Only fifteen years old…”

“Gus…”

The doctor stood up and handed over his report. “There it is, Captain. She died of a massive overdose of heroin, mainlined into a vein near her elbow…”

It was late afternoon when Leopold returned to Sportland. He could see the ferris wheel from a long way off, outlined against the blue of a cloudless sky. For the first time he wondered if Stella Gaze really had been a witch, if she really had put a curse on the place. Maybe that was some sort of an explanation.

“You're back!” Rudy Magee said, strolling over to meet him. “I hear they found the girl.”

“They found her.”

“Not far from here, huh?”

“Close, Rudy. Very close.”

“The kid was lying, then?”

“Let's go for a ride, Rudy, on your ferris wheel. I'll tell you all about it.”

“Huh? All right, if you really want to. I don't usually go on the thing myself.” The kid took over the controls, and he preceded Leopold into one of the wire cages. As the wheel turned and they started their climb, he added, “Great view from up here, huh?”

“I imagine with all this neon lit up at night it's quite a ride.”

Rudy chuckled. “Yeah, the kids like it.”

“I know how Velma disappeared,” Leopold said suddenly.

“You do? Boy, I'd like to know myself. It was a weird thing. The kid played some trick on me, huh?”

“No trick, Rudy. You were the one with the tricks.”

The pale man stiffened in the seat beside him. “What do you mean?” The caged seat swayed gently as it reached the peak of its ascent and started slowly down.

“I mean that you've been selling drugs to these kids—hippies, college kids, fifteen-year-old girls. I suppose it was a big kick to go up on this wheel at night with all the colored neon and stuff while you were high on LSD.”

“You'd have a tough time proving that,” Rudy said.

“Maybe not. Maybe Tom Williams has decided it's time to talk. That was the key question, after all—why he waited so long to report Velma's disappearance to the police. The reason, of course, was that he was high on drugs at the time, probably on an LSD trip. He had to wait till it wore off a little. Maybe you even had him convinced that Velma never did get on your ferris wheel.”

“I told you she got on,” Magee mumbled. “But she never got off.”

“She never got off alive.” Leopold watched the scene shifting beneath them as they reached bottom and started up once more. “LSD had become too tame for Velma and her hippie friends. So you maybe sold her some marijuana. Anyway, before long you had her on heroin.”

“No.”

“I say yes.”

He rubbed his palms together. “Maybe I sold the kids a little LSD, but never anything stronger. Never horse.”

“Some people call it
horse,
Rudy. Others call it
Hazel.
I heard the kid ask you for Hazel the other day, but it didn't register with me then. Velma Kelty bought the heroin from you, and mainlined it into her vein as she was going up in the ferris wheel. It's a pretty safe place, when you consider it. Only she was fairly new at it, or the stuff was a bad batch, or she just took too much. She crumpled off the seat, into this space at our feet—and she rode around on your ferris wheel for the rest of the night, until the park closed and you could weight the body and toss it in the Sound.”

“Somebody would have seen her there.”

“No, not from ground level. This metal sill is a foot high, and I noticed that from the ground you couldn't see below girls' knees. A small fifteen-year-old girl could easily crumple into that space, seen by you on that platform every time the wheel turned, but invisible from the ground. The seat just looked empty and of course you were careful to skip it when loading passengers.”

“The people in the seat above would have seen her there,” Magee argued.

“So you kept that seat empty too. Williams said you weren't busy that night. There were only a few others on the wheel. Besides, Velma was wearing dark blue slacks and sweater, and she had black hair. In the dark no one would have seen her there, especially with all this neon blinding them.”

“So you're going to arrest me for disposing of a body?”

“For more than that, Rudy. The narcotics charge alone will keep you behind bars a good long time. But you know the effects of an overdose as well as I do. Velma Kelty was still alive after she collapsed—physically incapacitated, stuporous, with slow respiration, but still alive. She could probably have been saved with quick treatment, but you were too afraid for your own skin. So you let her slowly die here, crumpled into this little space, until the park closed and you could get rid of the body.”

“The policeman came, he looked.”

“Sure. He came and looked two hours later. Naturally he didn't check each individual seat, because no one would believe she could still be there unseen. Perhaps by that time you had stopped the wheel anyway, with her body near the top. Or maybe you'd even managed to remove it, if business was bad enough to give you a few minutes' break.”

Rudy Magee's hand came out of his pocket. It was holding a hypodermic syringe. “You're a smart cop, but not smart enough. I'm not going back inside on any murder rap, or even manslaughter.”