“He’s stopping!” Connie said. “We’ve got him bottled up!”
“Stay here and keep down. Come on, Fletcher.”
Then they were out of the car and running, their guns drawn. The Ford hesitated between them and the police at the end of the street, and Leopold shouted, “Police, Razenwood! You’re surrounded!”
Suddenly he gunned the engine and veered to the left, over the curb, smashing through a board sign and across the rubble of a vacant lot.
“He’s getting away, Captain!”
Leopold fired two quick shots and started to run. On the next block they were firing, too, and he saw the Ford’s rear window shatter. The car hobbled across the brick-strewn lot and suddenly burst into flames as more bullets found their mark.
“He’s trying to get out,” Leopold shouted, racing forward. But the flames were too hot. The entire car was enveloped in fire, and there was no chance for anyone to get out alive.
Fletcher ran up then, and Connie, and presently Kathy came across the lot to where they stood. “Oh, my God,” Kathy cried, “did you have to do it like that?”
“One way’s as bad as another,” Leopold said grimly.
They went back to Captain Leopold’s office for coffee, and he sat glumly staring at Tommy Razenwood’s file on the desk before him. “I don’t like it to end this way, either, damn it! But the man was a kidnaper of children and a murderer! Maybe he didn’t deserve any better.”
“I didn’t say a word,” Fletcher mumbled. “How do you like your coffee, Connie?”
“Black, thanks.”
Fletcher came back in a moment with her coffee. Then he reached across the desk to pick up the files on Razenwood and Selby. But Leopold reached out to clutch them a moment longer. “What about it? What do you two think?”
“You fired first, Captain. If you hadn’t, maybe the others might have held their fire. But, hell, I’d have done the same thing. You can’t fool around with killers.”
Leopold barely heard the words. He was staring at the file on Pete Selby, seeing the notation under Known Habits:
Nonsmoker, nondrinker, addicted to heroin, frequents race tracks.
He read the words again. They seemed to have some meaning he couldn’t quite comprehend. “You can’t blame yourself,” Connie was saying.
Nonsmoker, nondrinker, addicted to heroin.
“Maybe I could have handled it differently,” he replied, wondering why the words of the report fascinated him so. It wasn’t even Razenwood’s file, but Selby’s. The file belonged to the wrong man.
Wrong man.
“Connie?” Go slow now. Take it easy.
“What is it, Captain?”
“You told me about your visit to Kathy Franklin that first time, when you suspected she was seeing Selby. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“You knew he’d just left because Kathy was tensed up and there were cigar butts in the ashtray and they’d been drinking. But Pete Selby doesn’t smoke or drink, not according to his file.”
“Maybe he just started,” she said with a shrug, but Fletcher was leaning forward, studying the file.
“And you mentioned the shopping bag, too. If a man has just robbed a supermarket and carried the money away in a shopping bag, would he bring the bag home and give it to his roommate?”
“He’d get rid of it as soon as he was finished with it,” Fletcher said.
“Exactly! And if the bag was at Kathy’s apartment it means the money was probably brought there, too.”
“But we know it was Tommy Razenwood who stole the money. The manager identified him, and so did everyone else. You mean he gave the money to Selby to take to Kathy’s apartment?”
Leopold shook his head. “Remember the cigar butts? There’s a much more likely explanation. Razenwood took it there himself. He was probably hiding in the closet when you arrived, Connie. Kathy was willing to admit that Selby had just left because it wasn’t true.”
Fletcher almost spilled his coffee. “Damn it, Captain, if the Franklin girl was in on the robbery with Razenwood, why should she finger him for the police and fly off to Mexico with Selby?”
“Why, indeed?” Leopold asked. He was already on his feet. “If we hurry, we can just about catch that midnight plane before it takes off.”
Kathy Franklin was at the gate, just handing in her tickets, when Leopold reached her. “I came to say goodbye, Kathy.”
She whirled, pale as death. “What—?”
“Where’s your traveling companion?”
Then he saw Tommy Razenwood, standing to one side with a magazine partly obscuring his face. Tommy saw Leopold at the same moment and seized Kathy. In an instant he had his arm at her throat, with a knife in his free hand.
“Tommy!” she screamed.
“Out of the way, cops! Try to take me and she dies!”
Leopold stood his ground. “Kathy’s not some nine-year-old child, Tommy. Kill her if you want, but we’re taking you.”
He moved then, as Fletcher came in from the other side. Razenwood shoved Kathy into Leopold and tried to run, but Fletcher brought him down with a waist-high tackle that sent the knife flying from Razenwood’s grip.
Then they had the handcuffs on him, as Connie grabbed Kathy.
“No Mexico trip after all,” Leopold told her. “You made me kill the wrong man.”
“He would have knifed me!” She turned to spit at Razenwood, who had ceased to struggle in Fletcher’s grip.
“So it was Pete Selby who died in the burning car,” Connie said.
Leopold nodded. “A dark street, a closed car, a man fleeing after she’d fingered him as Razenwood — that’s all it took to start us shooting. She’d already made sure of that by warning us he had a gun and would use it. Of course Pete Selby was fleeing because he was carrying heroin, not because he was a murderer. Razenwood had taken Selby’s place in Kathy’s bed, so they figured it was only right for Selby to take his place in the morgue.”
Two uniformed police officers appeared then, to help them get their prisoners out of the terminal. The scattering of midnight travelers turned to stare at the proceedings. “How’d they know the car would burst into flames like that and prevent easy identification of the body?” Fletcher asked.
“I imagine it was soaked in gasoline, with a few extra cans in the trunk. Selby hesitated as he started the car, remember. He may have smelled the gasoline.”
It was in the police car going downtown, with Razenwood seated between Leopold and Fletcher, that Leopold asked him a question. “What if our bullets had missed, Tommy? What if Selby had stopped the car and tried to surrender before it caught fire?”
He lifted his eyes and stared straight ahead. “That wouldn’t have happened, cop. I was on the roof of the building with a rifle, just to make sure he didn’t. I don’t know if it was you or me who drilled the trunk and set off that gasoline. But I guess it didn’t make any difference to Selby.”
“No,” Leopold agreed, “I guess it didn’t.”
Edward D. Hoch
The Theft of Nick Velvet
Nick Velvet’s 19th caper — and in at least two respects you will find the exploit different from the 18 previous adventures. But as before, Nick is still accepting assignments to steal only the valueless — that is, things valueless to most people and certainly not worth Nick’s fee of $30,000, and Nick is still forced to detect before he can collect...
“It’s for you, Nicky,” Gloria yelled from the telephone, and Nick Velvet put down the beer he’d been savoring. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon in late winter, when the snow had retreated to little lumps beneath the shady bushes and a certain freshness was already apparent in the air. It was a time of year that Nick especially liked, and he was sorry to have his reverie broken.