Leopold's Way (22 page)

“I should have killed you yesterday.”

“You tried hard enough. But you also helped give yourself away. You recognized my car and broke into a run. Very few people would have recognized my private car, Sam. But of course you knew it well.”

“So that's what the rainy-day bandit did on sunny days,” Fletcher said as they nudged Sam into the car for the trip downtown. “The car wash was closed when it rained, but you always had to be here working when the weather was good.”

Leopold tossed his coat into the back seat. “I'm soaked to the skin, and I still didn't get my car washed. Robbery detail is too wet a business, Tommy. From now on I stick to homicides.”

(1970)

I
N THE BEGINNING IT
seemed like only another murder case. Captain Leopold slid into the front seat next to Fletcher and asked, “You know where the Athanasia League is?” Sergeant Fletcher scratched his head. “The old Seaview Rest Home down by the Sound?”

Leopold nodded. “That's the place. Let's get out there fast. It sounds like a homicide.”

Once under motion, he relaxed a little, allowing himself the luxury of one of the cigarettes he'd been trying to give up. “The talk is you're up for promotion, Fletcher.”

“I took the civil service exam for lieutenant last week. I guess it's between me and Tommy Gibson. We're the only ones who took the test.”

Leopold could see that Fletcher was both proud and hopeful. He hoped for his sake, and the department's, that he made it. Fletcher was a good detective—a bit plodding at times, and unimaginative—but good. Tommy Gibson, on the other hand, was a tough cop of the old school, not above taking a bit of graft or pushing a suspect down a flight of stairs. He didn't deserve to make lieutenant.

The whole thing had started with a decision higher up that Homicide and Armed Robbery Divisions were to be combined under the general heading of Violent Crimes. Captain Leopold was to be in charge of the entire show, with a newly-appointed lieutenant to assist him. Fletcher of Homicide and Gibson of Armed Robbery were the logical contenders for the promotion, since both had held the rank of sergeant for something like eight years.

“Well, good luck anyway,” Leopold said. “I wish I could put in a word for you.”

“Thanks, Captain.” Fletcher turned the car onto the North Shore Road and slowed a bit. “That's it up ahead, isn't it?”

Leopold nodded. “That's it, yes.”

The last time he'd visited the stark, rambling mansion among the trees had been when the aunt of a close friend had been dying there. It was still a rest home in those days, a bit grim but with a certain sterile efficiency about the operation. A little more than a year ago, Seaview had bowed to rising costs and increased state regulation by closing its doors. The place and much of its equipment had been purchased by a group called the Athanasia League.

Very little was known about the Athanasia League, and for a time neighbors speculated about what went on behind the high picket fence that surrounded the place. Finally a reporter had gained admittance and written a story about the League and its half-charlatan leader, Dr. Raymond Libby. Looking in news photographs like a cross between a hippie and a hypnotist, the bearded, sharp-eyed Dr. Libby explained it all quite simply. The Athanasia League was a group of people striving for deathlessness, for immortality. With the help of some secret medical treatment by Dr. Libby, they proposed to live forever.

“Live forever!” Fletcher snorted as he turned in the gate.

“Apparently one of them didn't,” Leopold said.

The one who didn't was an elderly woman named Mrs. Peachtree, whose wrinkled face and gnarled hands seemed peacefully ignorant of the violence which had taken her life. She was sprawled across her narrow, unmade bed, a wide-bladed carving knife plunged deep into her heart. There seemed to be blood everywhere, on her nightgown, on the walls, on the dirty white rug that covered the floor. It was a messy killing, and Leopold had never liked messy ones.

“Tell me about it,” he said to Dr. Libby. The doctor looked exactly like his pictures. Leopold was aware of the beard and the eyes and little else. He could imagine this man on a speaker's platform somewhere, molding audiences with the force of his words. That was why the doctor's first words startled him so much. The voice was cracked and rasping, like an old and worn record, and it carried a hint of accent that Leopold couldn't identify.

“What is there to tell?” he replied to the question. “She went to bed at her usual hour last evening. This morning, when she didn't come down to breakfast, Nurse Morgan checked her room and found her like this.”

“Nurse Morgan?” Leopold turned to a slim young girl with pink cheeks. Her uniform was starched and spotless, and she was the first person under forty he'd seen since entering the place. “Can you add anything?”

“No. I…I found her like that and I screamed. Then I called Dr. Libby on the phone.”

Others were arriving with cameras and equipment, beginning the familiar routines of homicide investigation. Leopold stepped aside to give them room, and asked, “Did she have any enemies here?”

Dr. Libby spread his palms. “Does a sweet old lady of seventy-eight have any enemies?”

“Perhaps she does if she's going to live forever.”

The doctor smiled behind his beard. “Ah, you know about us, then?”

“Not as much as I want to.” He glanced sideways at the body on the bed. “Where can we talk?”

“My office. This way.”

“Fletcher, take charge of things here.”

“Right, Captain.”

Leopold followed the bearded doctor down a long white hallway, past a sunlit recreation room where some two dozen elderly people huddled together in whispered confusion. One of them called to Dr. Libby as he passed, and he paused long enough to say a few words of consolation.

“It's a terrible thing,” he told Leopold, once they'd gained the privacy of his office. “These people came here to escape death, and it pursues them as surely as Poe's masked specter of the plague.”

Leopold glanced around, taking in the framed hunting prints and the filing cabinet and the multicolored wall charts. There was something missing, and it took him only a moment to realize what it was. “Dr. Libby, I don't see your medical degree hanging on the wall.”

“No, I am not a medical doctor. I am a doctor of metaphysics, with a degree obtained in Austria just prior to the war. However, I have a great knowledge of the body's ills. My studies led me long ago to conclude that immortality on earth is the body's natural condition, that death in all its guises is an obscenity which can no longer be tolerated.”

“How many people do you have here, Doctor?”

“The League has twenty-seven members at present, counting the late Mrs. Peachtree.”

“By members you mean patients.”

“Here they are members.”

“Meaning they pay dues?”

Dr. Libby sighed, showing a bit of Germanic impatience. “When a person enters the Athanasia League, he signs over all his worldly possessions to the League, for the period of his stay here. It's not an uncommon practice in this country, you know. A number of rest homes—especially those operated by the county or by various charities—do the same thing. Of course if a person chooses to leave us, his possessions are returned, with only a nominal fee withheld to cover the period of the stay.”

“How many have left you?”

“Three, always because of family pressures. Most of our members are quite happy here. The amount of money that they give is a small price to pay for everlasting life.”

“You've had no deaths?”

“None.” He glanced at the door, remembering. “Until today. My treatment does not insure against the violent death.”

“Let's get back to Mrs. Peachtree, shall we? Were there any enemies?”

“Certainly not! In a community where life is everlasting, one cannot afford the luxury of enemies.”

“Then you think someone broke in and killed her?”

“I…” He hesitated, stroking his beard. “Frankly, Captain, the crime baffles me. No one here would have done it, and yet I cannot believe the killer was an outsider, unknown to Mrs. Peachtree.”

“Why is that?”

“The telephone by her bed has a special button that rings in my room. Something to give the members confidence, really. They like to know I'm on call, day or night. Mrs. Peachtree did not press that button.”

“At least,” Leopold said, “it would seem that she knew her assailant. Her face shows no signs of fright.” He thought about it. “Did she have a family?”

“No. Her husband is dead, and I understand there were no children.”

“Who was her closest friend here? Among the other patients?”

“Members,” Dr. Libby corrected.

“Members, then.”

“She was friendly with a Mr. Riley. They sometimes sat together in the garden.”

“No one else?”

“Not really. We are all a family here, and so we know everyone.”

“All right. I want to see Riley. And the nurse who found her, Nurse Morgan.”

Dr. Libby rose from behind his desk. “There won't be any trouble about this, will there?”

“Just the usual amount of trouble in a murder case.”

Leopold went back down the hall to the room where he'd left Fletcher. The body was gone now, but the blood remained, so much of it.

“Anything, Fletcher?”

“I was looking for you, Captain.”

“What about?”

“This Mrs. Peachtree. Know who she was?”

“Who?”

“The widow of Augustus M. Peachtree, former mayor of this fine city.”

Leopold grunted. “That was a long time ago.”

“Twenty years, but still I think it might be an angle.”

“Check it out. Old political rivals, things like that. Seems to me I remember a bit of scandal about old Peachtree.”

“Right, Captain.”

Leopold stared down at the bed, at the blood. It took a lot of hatred to kill an old woman like that; a lot of hatred—or fear.

David Riley was a slim, white-haired man who carried himself with a youthful vigor that didn't fit the lined face and cloudy eyes. He was not the sort to be sitting down, not now, and so Leopold walked with him in the garden.

“You knew her well, Mr. Riley?”

“Yes, I suppose you could say I did.”

“Could I ask your age?”

“I'm seventy-one. Younger than Helen, but then we weren't planning marriage.”

“That was her name—Helen?”

The old man stared at him. “Is death so impersonal these days that we even lose our identities?”

“I just hadn't heard her name,” Leopold said, feeling like a fool to be put suddenly on the defensive by this man. “If death were impersonal I wouldn't be here, trying to find out who killed her.”

“I'm sorry. Go ahead with your questions.”

“Dr. Libby says you were her closest friend here. What sort of woman was she?”

“She was a charming woman, with not an enemy in the world. No one would want to kill her.”

“Did she keep money in her room?”

“A little change for candy and an occasional treat when we went into town. The League takes care of our other needs.”

“Is the hope for immortality worth it?”

David Riley smiled. “I'll tell you a secret. I don't believe that quack Libby for one minute.”

“Then why do you stay?”

“I came on a visit and liked the place. Maybe now I don't like it so much anymore. Maybe now I'll leave.”

“What sort of treatment does Dr. Libby give?”

“A shot of vitamins every afternoon, and a little exercise. Spiritual readings at night. He's got them all conned.”

“The people here are wealthy?”

“The poor don't usually want to live forever, Captain. It's an upper-class idea, sort of like making yourself into a god.”

“He's been here a year and no one has died.”

David Riley shrugged. “Libby's been lucky. Oh, I'm not saying there's nothing to his treatment, but he plays the odds. He only accepts people who seem in reasonably good health. He gets control of their money, and lives off the interest.”

“How much money?”

Another shrug. “Twenty thousand dollars each would be better than half a million, and some bring much more than that. Immortality is expensive these days.”

“The ones who leave get it back?”

“Yes.”

“What about the ones who die?”

“Nobody dies.”

“Of course. I forgot.” Leopold stared bleakly at the drooping roses as they rounded a bend in the path. He didn't like this case. He didn't like it at all. “Where'd he get the name, Athanasia?”

“Out of the dictionary. It's not for St. Athanasius.”

“Who killed Helen Peachtree, Mr. Riley?”

“Do you think I know?”

“I think you might have an idea.”

He bent to pluck a dead leaf from a low bush by the path. “No, no, I don't. I understand she was stabbed with a kitchen knife. If it's from our kitchen, it would seem to indicate that a member of the League killed her.”

“Did she have any regular visitors?”

“One man, a friend of her late husband. He came sometimes on Sundays.”

“You don't recall his name?”

Riley hesitated. “No, I don't.”

“Did she go out much, into town?”

“No.”

“Didn't you find that odd?”

Riley thought about it. “Not really. You have to understand what it means to be the widow of a mayor, or a governor, or a president. I imagine even a walk along Main Street reminded her of her late husband. I think that's why she joined the League—not so much for immortality as for escape.”

They'd circled the gardens twice, and Leopold saw no point in taking the route again. “Thank you, Mr. Riley. I'm sure I'll have more questions later, but that should do it for now.”