Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. No. 75, April 1959, British Edition

Wenzell Brown Midnight Call

What do you do when a guy with a crazy laugh, a guy with the giggles, calls you up and confesses to a murder? Crank? Crackpot? And why you? Why not the police?

When you work the grave-yard shift for a rag like the Three Palms Gazette, you get used to a bunch of wisenheimers calling you up late at night just for laughs: high school kids with corny jokes; guys with a few drinks under their belts, wanting to settle a bet on who won the World Series in 1948; hysterical dames reporting a “prowler” to the local newspaper instead of the cops. It’s all in the game. But like I said, you get used to it.

This was a Saturday night — past midnight — and I was all alone in the Gazette Building except for Old Bert who acts as watchman, runs the elevator, and holds down the office if I feel like ambling over to Tabby’s for a beer. Nothing was stirring, not even a breeze; so Bert and I were sipping cokes and having a slow game of chess.

Old Bert can really surprise you. He looks like a stumblebum, but he’s plenty shrewd. He drifted into the Gazette office a year or so ago and hung up his hat. He had a big yen to be a reporter but when he saw that was out, he took the watchman post just to be around a newspaper. I hadn’t paid much attention to him until one night he challenged me to a game of chess. I’m pretty good at the game — no Capablanca, you understand — but I learned I had to be on my toes every move or Bert would take me.

Bert had just called “Check,” with checkmate four moves away, when the telephone jangled, I reached over irritatedly and lifted it to my ear. It was a man’s voice, all shrill and excited.

“Is this Bill Chambers?” The voice was a little fuzzy.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

The guy gave a crazy sort of laugh. “You better listen carefully. This is good.”

“What’s good?”

“Oh, ’tis good.”

This guy is a real weirdie, I thought, or else he’s tanked. I almost slammed down the receiver but suddenly the guy was giggling and the giggles sent shivers along my spine.

I repeated clearly, “What’s good?”

“Me. I’m good.”

“Sure. You’re perfect.”

“You don’t understand. That’s my name.” He spelled it out. “G-O-O-D-E, Otis Goode.”

“All right,” I said grudgingly. “You’re Goode. So what, Mr Goode?”

“I want to confess to a murder.”

Silly as it sounds, I was now excited. This guy sounded crazy enough for anything — even murder. I grabbed a pad and pencil and tried to keep my voice casual. “Sure,” I said, “who’d you kill, Goodie-boy?”

The man’s manner turned cagey. “You sure nobody’s listening in up there?”

“Not a soul,” I said truthfully. But just then I saw old Bert’s hand steal over to one of the extensions. I coughed to cover the click. Apparently Goode hadn’t heard because his voice ran on, getting shriller and shriller.

“You remember a dame called Laura Keppel who was murdered on the beach two summers ago? Well, I was the one who knocked her off.”

I remembered the case, all right. So far as I knew, it was Three Palms’ only unsolved murder. Laura Keppel had been a pretty girl, just turned nineteen, when she was killed. She’d been going around steady with a local boy named Ron Packard. Ron got called up for the draft and just before his induction the two of them became officially engaged.

It was a bad time for Laura, so she took to roaming the beach alone. Three Palms is about sixty miles from Miami and the beach can be mighty lonely even in the daytime, especially when the tourist season is over. Laura’s folks had tried to warn her that what she was doing was dangerous, but she wouldn’t listen.

One evening a couple of boys found her body spreadeagled on the sand close to the water’s edge. By the time the cops got to the scene, the water was lapping over one leg and one outstretched arm. Captain Briggs didn’t have any difficulty reconstructing the crime: someone had come up behind the girl, probably moving soundlessly on the damp sand, and struck her a hard blow on the back of the head, fracturing her skull. The police didn’t have to look far for the weapon. It had been tossed into the sand only a few feet away — a strip of board broken off one of the old benches the town had put up in the park that bordered the beach. The board was studded with metal, making it heavy and lethal. Laura hadn’t been molested and her purse was missing, so robbery was the apparent motive, although Captain Briggs admitted that the purse might have been washed out to sea.

The cops had rounded up all the floaters who hung around the beach. Briggs had grilled them until they sizzled, and some of them he’d tossed in pokey for a cooling-off period. But in the end he’d had to let them all go and the slaying of Laura Keppel was still listed as an Open File on the police books.

While I was remembering all this, Goode was growing more and more impatient — I could hear his breath humming over the wire. “What you doing?” he asked nervously. “You calling the cops?”

“No — just recalling the case. Look here Goode, why are you telling me this? Why are you confessing to the Gazette?”

“Because I’m sick of living with this on my mind. I want to die in the chair — but it’s got to be fast. I don’t want to rot in jail. I got to die, and die fast. Will you help me, Chambers?”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said uneasily. It all sounded flukey to me.

“You put in a word with the judge — that’s all I ask. Will you do that for me?”

“Sure — sure I will,” and my voice cracked.

“Then that’s settled.” He actually sounded relieved. “Now come and get me.”

The guy was a hundred per cent crackpot and that was for sure. But was he really a killer or just a psycho leading me on a wild goose chase?

“Where are you?” I asked cautiously.

“I’m calling from the lobby of the Bagby Hotel in Miami — you know where it is. But I don’t want to hang around here. I’ll go down to the all-night drug store on the next corner. I’ll meet you right out in front.”

“That’s sixty miles, Goode. Maybe all you want is a free ride to Three Palms. Besides, how do I know you’ll be there when I arrive?”

“I’ll be there as long as you don’t bring the cops. I can smell cops a mile away and if I get one whiff, I’ll fade so fast you’ll never catch up with me.”

He started that high-pitched giggling again. Murderer or not, the guy wasn’t safe on the loose. “How’ll I know you?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m easy enough to spot. I got a piece of mustache.”

“A piece of mustache? What’s that?”

“Don’t be dense, Chambers. I’m just starting to grow a mustache. I got a piece but not a whole one. See?” There was a sudden click of the receiver and the line went dead.

I looked up at Old Bert’s face, only a foot or so from mine. He was grinning. “Man, it looks like you got a scoop for yourself.”

“What do you think?” I asked. “This guy leveling?”

Old Bert shrugged. “Could be. Or maybe he’s a screwball. You know, the padded-cell type.”

“I’d better check with Briggs,” I said, lifting the phone again. “He’ll probably be mad as a hornet if I wake him up at this hour. But if I don’t, he’ll chew me out later.”

Captain Briggs was grumpy at first but pretty soon he got interested. “I remember Goode,” he said. “We were plenty suspicious of him at the time the Keppel girl was killed. We held on to him for over a week but we couldn’t pin a thing on him. So after a while we had to spring him.”

“How do we handle this?”

“Why not let Goode call the tune? You meet him like he asked. Maybe if he gets the idea you’re playing ball, he’ll really open up and spill everything. But once the cops show, he’s likely to make a run for it or clam up and say nothing. Why don’t you drive down to Miami and get him? Roy and I will be waiting in your office when you come back.”

I hesitated and Briggs added, “If Goode’s telling the truth, you get an exclusive. Anyway, what have you got to lose?”

Plenty, I thought. A sixty mile ride with a psycho who was probably a murderer wasn’t my idea of a pleasant jaunt. But I couldn’t back out — it might be too big a story.

I turned the office over to Old Bert. His eyes were bulging with excitement and he almost begged to go along with me. But I told him no dice — he’d queer the pitch with Goode and besides, someone had to stay with the paper.

I found Goode just where he said he’d be, standing in the neon glare of the drug store entrance. The artificial light made his straggly mustache stand out clearly, giving it a bluish tinge. I spotted him right away and honked my horn. He came over to the car, cool as you please, and hopped in next to me.

“I’m Goode,” he said, “Otis Goode.”

And that was all I could pry out of him until we hit the main highway and he was convinced I hadn’t brought the cops along. Then he began to talk as fast as he could, confessing to the murder of Laura Keppel, giving me all the details.

So far as I could tell, he had everything straight, but he could have picked up most of it from reading the papers. He went through the whole story three times, almost word for word. His voice still had that high eerie pitch and he talked as if he were driven by some inner compulsion. Finally, he eased off and sat back, almost crouching, and chain-smoked until we reached the Gazette office.

I’d thought that maybe Goode would blow his top when he found Captain Briggs waiting for him there, but it didn’t seem to faze him at all. He went straight into his act. Briggs kept nodding and looking over at me, letting me know that all the details were clicking into place.

Briggs was treating Goode with kid gloves. And Roy, his assistant, was getting everything down in shorthand.

Goode’s story was pat enough. He’d had a shack not far from the beach and he’d watched the Keppel girl go by several times. He hadn’t meant to kill her, he said, just to knock her out and steal her purse. As soon as he’d grabbed the purse, he started to run, keeping close to the water’s edge so that the incoming tide would wash away his footprints. He couldn’t remember what was in the purse — just the sort of junk a woman carries around, and some small change and a couple of dollar bills. He’d taken out the money, then stuffed a rock in the purse, and thrown it out to sea as far as he could.

By the time Briggs had put him through the hoops, the sky was streaked with golden light. Briggs nodded to Roy to close his notebook, then turned to Goode and asked him if he’d mind re-enacting the crime.

Goode gave his high-pitch giggle and nodded. “Sure. Why not?”

They started tramping out of the office but I hung back — I was anxious to shoot my story to the wire services. Briggs looked over his shoulder and said, “Aren’t you coming, Bill?”

I hesitated. You never could tell what would happen in a re-enactment, but the story was too hot to hold back. Then my eyes fell on Old Bert. His eyes were pleading like those of a spaniel. The old guy was shrewd enough to pick up anything of value — I’d learned that by playing chess with him. I gave him tire nod and turned to the telephones.

Captain Briggs came back in a couple of hours. He was grinning from ear to ear and I didn’t have to ask him if he’d got his man, but I did anyhow.

“Sure, we got him — dead to rights.”

“Are you sure, Cap? Some guys are screwy enough to confess to anything.”

“I know — we get more phony confessions than real ones. That’s why we always hold back one fact. It’s a gimmick — something the cops know and no one else, except the man who committed the crime.”

“What was the gimmick this time?”

“Those old benches out on the beach. Just before the Keppel girl was killed, the slats had been freshly painted in red, white, and blue. The guy who clobbered Laura pulled the whole bench apart getting the board he wanted — the middle slat because of the iron brace on it. Well, the middle slat was white, and we never let the color of the murder slat leak out.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Goode could have said the white slat just by chance. It’s a one to three gamble.”

“Yeah, but the point is he didn’t. He said it was the back slat — the red one.”

“Proving what?”

“That Goode didn’t kill Laura Keppel."

“But you said—”

“That we got the murderer? Right. You see, one guy started yelling out Goode’s mistake, a guy who had no business knowing the right color of the murder slat. So now we got a confession, a genuine one that’s airtight. We gave Goode a free ride out of town.”

I shook my head. “What are you talking about? Who’s the killer?”

“Lauterbach,” Cap said.

“Lauterbach!” I echoed. “Who the hell is he? I never even heard of him.”

Briggs gave me a scornful glance. “You mean Old Bert’s been puttering around here for more than a year and you never learned his last name? Look, the old goat’s got a screw loose somewhere — he’s a more dangerous psycho than Goode. He’d been floating around the beach all during the summer the Keppel girl was murdered. He watched her for a week or so before he made the kill. He claims all he wanted was the money in her purse, but I think he had something more on his mind and got scared off. The guy was clever and went to ground afterward, then landed himself a job here at the Gazette where he wouldn’t be noticed. But for my money, he’s still crazy as a loon. Because he was genuinely proud of his crime. He was green with envy at Goode’s taking all the credit for it. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Old Bert — maybe he’ll rate the chair, maybe the nuthouse. Either way you better get his name straight because it’s going to be spread all over the headlines just where he wants it. Yeah, pretty soon a lot of people are going to know all about Old Bert Lauterbach.”