The Oxford Book of American Det (102 page)

Leopold stepped over to the microphone, adjusting it upward from the position Herb Clarke had used. Then he looked out at the sea of familiar faces. Carol Fletcher and the other wives hovered in the rear, out of the way, while their husbands and the others crowded around. Fletcher himself stood with Sergeant Riker, an old friend, and Leopold noticed that Lieutenant Williams had moved over near Tommy Gibson. He couldn’t see Jim Turner at the moment.

“Men, I’m going to make this worth listening to for all that. You hear a lot at this time of the year about Christmas being the season for kids, but I want to add something to that. Christmas is for kids, sure—but Christmas is for cops, too. Know what I mean by that? I’ll tell you. Christmas is perhaps the one time of the year when the cop on the beat, or the detective on assignment, has a chance to undo some of the ill will generated during the other eleven months. This has been a bad year for cops around the country—most years are bad ones, it seems. We take a hell of a lot of abuse, some deserved, but most of it not. And this is the season to maybe right some of those wrongs. Don’t be afraid to get out on a corner with the Salvation Army to ring a few bells, or help some lady through a puddle of slush. Most of all, don’t be afraid to smile and talk to young people.”

He paused and glanced down at Tommy Gibson. “There have always been some bad cops, and I guess there always will be. That just means the rest of us have to work a lot harder. Maybe we can just pretend the whole year is Christmas, and go about righting those wrongs. Anyway, I’ve talked so long already I’ve grown a bit thirsty.

Let’s get back to the beer and the singing, and make it good and loud!” Leopold jumped off the platform and shook more hands. He’d meant to speak longer, to give them something a bit meatier to chew on, but far at the back of the crowd some of the younger cops were already growing restless. And, after all, they’d come here to enjoy themselves, not to listen to a lecture. He couldn’t really blame them.

Herb Clarke was gathering everyone around the piano for songs, but Leopold noticed that Tommy Gibson had suddenly disappeared. The Captain threaded his way through the crowd, searching the familiar faces for the man he wanted. “Great talk, Captain,” Fletcher said, coming up by his side.

“Did he tell you any more?”

“Only that he had to hide the tape near the Christmas tree. He said the other guy was here.”

“Who do you make it, Captain?”

Leopold bit his lower lip. “I make it that Tommy Gibson is one smart cookie. I think he’s playing for time, maybe waiting for Freese to get him off the hook somehow.”

“You don’t think there’s another crooked cop in the Detective Bureau?”

“I don’t know, Fletcher. I guess I don’t want to think so.” The door to the Men’s Room sprang open with a suddenness that surprised them both.

Sergeant Riker, his usually placid face full of alarm, stood motioning to them. Leopold quickly covered the ground to his side. “What is it, Riker?”

“In there! My God, Captain—in there! It’s Gibson!”

“What?”

“Tommy Gibson. He’s been stabbed. I think he’s dead.” Leopold pushed past him, into the tiled Men’s Room with its scrubbed look and disinfectant odour. Tommy Gibson was there, all right, crumpled between two of the wash basins, his eyes glazed and open. A long pair of scissors protruded from his chest.

“Lock all the outside doors, Fletcher,” Leopold barked. “Don’t let anyone leave.”

“Is he dead, Captain?”

“As dead as he’ll ever be. What a mess!”

“You think one of our men did it?”

“Who else? Call in and report it, and get the squad on duty over here. Everyone else is a suspect.” He stood up from examining the body and turned to Riker. “Now tell me everything you know, Sergeant.”

Riker was a Vice Squad detective, a middle-aged man with a placid disposition and a friendly manner. There were those who said he could even make a street-walker like him while he was arresting her. Just now he looked sick and pale. “I walked in and there he was, Captain. My God! I couldn’t believe my eyes at first. I thought he was faking, playing some sort of a trick.”

“Notice anyone leaving before you went in?”

“No, nobody.”

“But he’s only been dead a few minutes. That makes you a suspect, Sergeant.” Riker’s pale complexion seemed to shade into green at Leopold’s words. “You can’t think I killed him! He was a friend of mine! Why in hell would I kill Tommy Gibson?”

“We’ll see,” Leopold said, motioning him out of the Men’s Room. The other detectives and officers were clustered around, trying to see. There was a low sombre hum of conversation. “All right, everyone!” the Captain ordered. “Keep down at the other end of the room, away from the tree! That’s right, move away from it.”

“Captain!” It was little Herb Clarke, pushing his way through. “Captain, what’s happened?”

“Someone killed Tommy Gibson.”

“Tommy!”

“One of us. That’s why nobody leaves here.”

“You can’t be serious, Captain. Murder at the police Christmas party—the newspapers will crucify us.”

“Probably,” Leopold pushed past him. “Nobody enters the Men’s Room,” he bellowed.

“Fletcher, Williams—come with me.” They were the only two lieutenants present, and he had to trust them. Fletcher he’d trust with his life. He only hoped he could rely on Williams too.

“I can’t believe it,” the bony young Narcotics lieutenant said. “Why would anyone kill Tommy?”

Leopold cleared his throat. “I’ll tell you why, though you may not want to believe it.

Gibson was implicated in the District Attorney’s investigation of Carl Freese’s gambling empire. He had a tape recording of a conversation between Freese, himself, and another detective, apparently concerning bribery. The other detective had a dandy motive for killing him.”

“Did he say who it was?” Williams asked.

“No. Only that it was someone who got here fairly early today. Who was here before Fletcher and I arrived?”

Williams creased his brow in thought. “Riker was here, and Jim Turner. And a few uniformed men.”

“No, just detectives.”

“Well, I guess Riker and Tuner were the only ones. And Herb Clarke, of course. He was here all day with the ladies, arranging for the food and the beer.”

“Those three,” Leopold mused. “And you, of course.” Lieutenant Williams grinned. “Yeah, and me.”

Leopold turned toward the big Christmas tree. “Gibson told me he hid the tape recording near the tree. Start looking, and don’t miss anything. It might even be in the branches.”

The investigating officers were arriving now, and Leopold turned his attention to them.

There was something decidedly bizarre in the entire situation, a fact which was emphasised as the doctor and morgue attendants and police photographers exchanged muted greetings with the milling party guests. One of the young investigating detectives who’d known Tommy Gibson turned pale at the sight of the body and had to go outside.

When the photographers had finished, one of the morgue men started to lift the body.

He paused and called to Leopold. “Captain, here’s something. A cigarette lighter on the floor under him.”

Leopold bent close to examine it without disturbing possible prints. “Initials. C. F.” Lieutenant Williams had come in behind him, standing at the door of the Men’s Room.

“Carl Freese?” he suggested.

Leopold used a handkerchief to pick it up carefully by the corners. “Are we supposed to believe that Freese entered this place in the midst of sixty cops and killed Gibson without anybody seeing him?”

“There’s a window in the wall over there.”

Leopold walked to the frosted pane and examined it. “Locked from the inside. Gibson might have been stabbed from outside, but he couldn’t have locked the window and gotten across this room without leaving a trail of blood.” Fletcher had come in while they were talking. “No dice on that, Captain. My wife just identified the scissors as a pair she was using earlier with the decorations. It’s an inside job, all right.”

Leopold showed the lighter. “C. F. Could be Carl Freese.” Fletcher frowned and licked his lips. “Yeah.” He turned away.

“Nothing,” Williams reported.

“Nothing in the tree? It could be a fairly small reel.”

“Nothing.”

Leopold sighed and motioned Fletcher and Williams to one side. He didn’t want the others to hear. “Look, I think Gibson was probably lying, too. But he’s dead, and that very fact indicates he might have been telling the truth. I have to figure all the angles.

Now that you two have searched the tree I want you to go into the kitchen, close the door, and search each other. Carefully.”

“But—“ Williams began. “All right, Captain.”

“Then line everybody up and do a search of them. You know what you’re looking for—a reel of recording tape.”

“What about the wives, Captain?”

“Get a matron down for them. I’m sorry to have to do it, but if that tape is here we have to find it.”

He walked to the centre of the hall and stood looking at the tree. Lights and tinsel, holiday wreaths and sprigs of mistletoe. All the trappings. He tried to imagine Tommy Gibson helping to decorate the place, helping with the tree. Where would he have hidden the tape?

Herb Clarke came over and said, “They’re searching everybody.”

“Yes. I’m sorry to spoil the party this way, but I guess it was spoiled for Gibson already.”

“Captain, do you have to go on with this? Isn’t one dishonest man in the Bureau enough?”

“One is too many, Herb. But the man we’re looking for is more than a dishonest cop now. He’s a murderer.”

Fletcher came over to them. “We’ve searched all the detectives, Captain. They’re clean. We’re working on the uniformed men now.”

Leopold grunted unhappily. He was sure they’d find nothing. “Suppose,” he said slowly. “Suppose Gibson unreeled the tape. Suppose he strung it on the tree like tinsel.”

“You see any brown tinsel hanging anywhere, Captain? See any tinsel of any colour long enough to be a taped message?”

“No, I don’t,” Leopold said.

Two of the sergeants, Riker and Turner, came over to join them. “Could he have done it to himself?” Turner asked. “The word is you were going to link him with the Freese investigation.”

“Stabbing yourself in the chest with a pair of scissors isn’t exactly common as a suicide method,” Leopold pointed out. “Besides, it would be out of character for a man like Gibson.”

One of the investigating officers came over with the lighter. “Only smudges on it, Captain. Nothing we could identify.”

“Thanks.” Leopold took it, turning it over between his fingers.

C. F. Carl Freese.

He flicked the lever a couple of times but it didn’t light. Finally, on the fourth try, a flame appeared. “All right,” he said quietly. Now he knew.

“Captain—“ Fletcher began.

“Damn it, Fletcher, it’s your wife’s lighter and you know it! C. F. Not Carl Freese but Carol Fletcher!”

“Captain, I—“ Fletcher stopped.

Leopold felt suddenly very tired. The coloured lights of the tree seemed to blur, and he wished he was far away, in a land where all cops were honest and everyone died of old age.

Sergeant Riker moved in. “Captain, are you trying to say that Fletcher’s
wife
stabbed Tommy Gibson?”

“Of course not, Riker. That would have been quite a trick for her to follow him into the Men’s Room unnoticed. Besides, I had to give her a match at one point this evening, because she didn’t have this lighter.”

“Then who?”

“When I first arrived, you were helping Carol Fletcher with a balky lighter. Yes, you, Riker! You dropped it into your pocket, unthinking, and that’s why she didn’t have it later. It fell out while you were struggling with Gibson. While you were killing him, Riker.”

Riker muttered a single obscenity and his hand went for the service revolver on his belt. Leopold had expected it. He moved in fast and threw two quick punches, one to the stomach and one to the jaw. Riker went down and it was over.

Carol Fletcher heard what had happened and she came over to Leopold. “Thanks for recovering my lighter,” she said. “I hope you didn’t suspect me.” He shook his head, eyeing Fletcher. “Of course not. But I sure as hell wish your husband had told me it was yours.”

“I had to find out what it was doing there,” Fletcher mumbled. “God, it’s not every day your wife’s lighter, that you gave her two Christmases ago, turns up as a clue in a murder.”

Leopold handed it back to her. “Maybe this’ll teach you to stop smoking.”

“You knew it was Riker anyway?”

“I was pretty sure. With sixty men drinking beer all around here, no murderer could take a chance of walking out of that Men’s Room unseen. His best bet was to pretend finding the body, which is just what he did. Besides that, of the four detectives on the scene early, Riker’s Vice Squad position was the most logical for Freese’s bribery.”

“Was there a tape recording?” Fletcher asked.

Leopold was staring at the Christmas tree. “I think Gibson was telling the truth on that one. Except that he never called it a tape. I did that. I jumped to a conclusion. He simply told me it was an old machine, purchased after the war. In those early days tape recorders weren’t the only kind. For a while wire recorders were almost as popular.”

“Wire!”

Leopold nodded and started toward the Christmas tree. “We know that Gibson helped you put up the tree, Carol. I’m betting that one of those wires holding it in place is none other than the recorded conversation of Carl Freese, Tommy Gibson, and Sergeant Riker.”

LINDA BARNES (b. 1949)

Before Detroit native and longtime Boston resident Linda Barnes created her semi-tough female private eye Carlotta Carlyle, she worked as a theatre instructor and director in Massachusetts high schools and wrote two one-act plays and four whodunits featuring the actor-sleuth Michael Spraggue. While her first four mysteries were successful, it was the 6-foot-1, red-haired, taxi-driving Carlyle who really put Barnes on the map.

The Spraggue books were written in the British tradition of the dilettante sleuth who has the money, and thus the free time, to help a group of friends who are being threatened or done in at a statistically improbable rate. Spraggue, while identified with Boston, also travels to the California wine country in
Bitter Finish
and to New Orleans in
Cities of the Dead,
thereby indulging his creator’s passions for wine and Cajun cooking, respectively. Perhaps his most memorable Boston appearance entails running down a killer during the Boston Marathon. Like the other Spraggue books, the action and solutions to the crimes depend more on the situation than on character.