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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 u
"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 ru
Carlyle's first appearance, in the short story «Lucky Pe