Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 50, No. 1. Whole No. 284, July 1967

The Impersonation Murder Case by Miriam Allen deFord

Old Josiah Schonfeldt was the retired Chief of the Homicide Squad. A reminiscence for a magazine article? Something special? Well, there was the Issachar Lampert case — you remember Issachar Lampert, the Texas oil-and-cattle multimillionaire? No? Well, it happened 20 years ago, and it was the most exciting case in Schonfeldt’s detective career. And it was a baffler, no question about it...

Oh, come on now, young fellow, what is there in a retired Chief of a Homicide Squad worth a magazine article? Oh, sure, I’ve had interesting things happen in the 37 years I was with the force, but most of it was pure routine. Well, if you put it that way, I guess I’m vain enough to tell you about one or two of them. But you’ll have to let me do it my own way — I never was interviewed before, except in the way of business, you might say, by the newspaper boys. Leave your dog in the garden and come in and make yourself comfortable. Let me have your coat.

Well, I guess the case I’ll never forget was the one I called “The Impersonation Murder Case.” I’ll bet you never heard of it — long before your time. But 20 years ago it was a big story, some of which never got in the papers. And that was a case where I really was of some use — anyway, one man thought so, and thinks so yet. I get a dozen bottles of good bourbon from him every Christmas. That reminds me: have a drink? Later, then.

Here, let me show you. I never was stuck enough on myself to keep a scrapbook, but the Missus did, and I can’t claim I ever went out of my way to stop her. See this clipping? Read the headline. “‘I Only Did My Duty,’ says Schonfeldt.”

This thing started when Issachar Lampert was murdered. Ever hear of him? In his day he was noted for two things — he was the richest man in this state, and the worst-tempered. Everybody kowtowed to him, but everybody hated him — well, maybe not his wife, till she’d been married to him two weeks or so. They had just one child — a son named Gordon — and he never pretended not to hate his father. They were on the outs from the time the kid could walk and talk, and finally when the boy was 20 they had one big bang-up fight and his father ordered him out of the house forever. Yes, like an old melodrama — never darken my door again.

Naturally he was only too glad to go, though he was still at school and had no training to earn a living. He was mad at his mother, too, for not taking his part, so he packed his bags and left, just like that, and vanished into nothingness. She’d have seen that he was well supplied with money if she’d only known where he was: she adored him. But it was 15 years before she knew whether he was alive or dead; and the private detective she hired to try to find him had to give it up as a bad job.

At least that was her story. I have to tell this the way it came to me. Anyway, there was no doubt on earth that her son was the one person she really loved.

Issachar Lampert was found in his study in that big suburban palace they called a house on the morning of November 19th. One of the maids found him — the servants were the only people who got up early in that establishment. She noticed the light under his study door, knocked, got no answer, took a chance on opening it — though all the servants lived in mortal terror of the old man — saw him lying on the floor with his head in a pool of blood, screamed, and fainted.

There was a great hullabaloo, of course, and by the time somebody had wakened Mrs. Lampert and she’d got there, half the staff was at that door, nobody daring to go inside. She did, and knelt down and felt his heart and discovered it was still beating faintly. Somebody’d had the brains to phone their doctor, and he arrived in a few minutes.

Lampert was still alive. He was even conscious, or semi-conscious. For Dr. Harris said that when he asked, “Who did this to you?” the dying man whispered, “It was Gordon.” Nobody else heard him, and right after that Lampert died.

The corner of the steel desk was soaked in blood. There wasn’t a sign of a fingerprint that couldn’t be accounted for. And Gordon Lampert was just as absent from the place as he had been for 15 years. When we got there and I told Mrs. Lampert about the doctor’s statement she said her husband must have been out of his mind, that she hadn’t seen or heard from their son since his father threw him out. I put it to her that perhaps Gordon had come back secretly, seen his father but not her, quarreled with him again, and killed him, but she said it was totally impossible.

“If Gordie had ever thought of coming home,” she said, “and how I’ve wished and praved he would, he’d have got in touch with me first. Besides, I was with Issachar in the study till after midnight, discussing business. I’ve taken an active part in his affairs — it’s all we had in common,” she commented bitterly. “After all, I was head bookkeeper in his first company when we were married, and I’m a substantial stockholder in most of his holdings.

“When I went to bed he said he was going to finish some figures he was working on, and that’s the last I saw or heard of him. We haven’t shared a bedroom for a long time. And that’s all I knew till they woke me around seven in the morning.”

“Well,” I said, “somebody killed him.”

“He had plenty of enemies,” she retorted.

“How could anybody get in? You’ve told me the house is carefully locked up every night, with burglar alarms at every window and door.”

“We’ve got a big staff of servants,” she said.

But though we grilled every one of them to a fare-thee-well, I never figured it was any of them. They all slept in, and they all alibied one another, anyway.

If it wasn’t Gordon, somehow, then it must have been Fern Lam-pert herself, as far as I could see. We kept her under surveillance, but there wasn’t anything else we could do till we could accumulate some direct evidence against her. Multimillionaires don’t get held on suspicion any more than they go to the electric chair.

I was already a Detective Lieutenant then, and I was put in charge of the case. Issachar Lampert was a really big gun locally, and the Commissioner said they needed somebody in command who could be depended on to... well, that’s of no importance. I was given a free hand and every sort of backing, but for almost two weeks we got absolutely nowhere.

Then out of the blue Fern Lampert herself called me up and informed me her son had come home. He was there with her now. He had read of his father’s death in a New York paper and had come right back. Well, that was possible, granting he hadn’t done it himself, because we had kept everything out of the local papers and off the press wires except for the announcement that Lampert had been found dead — which of course he really hadn’t been.

I wasn’t taking any chances. I was out of my office and on my way two seconds after I’d hung up the phone. I took Detective Sergeant Brian Henderson with me — he’s in the department still, and will remember it. I could only hope I’d get to Gordon Lampert before his mother had had time to coach him. If he’d had the nerve to turn up again after murdering his old man, I was sure he’d cook up some kind of alibi with her and claim this was his first appearance in the house in 15 years.

If that was his game, then I was going to tell him outright that it was either him or his mother, and see how that hit him. Maybe he’d let her sacrifice herself to save him — and she’d do it all right, I was sure of that — or maybe he wouldn’t. But that was going to be my first line. Either she was certain he was innocent and could prove it, or they had concocted some story to get him off the hook — or she’d never have told us he was there.

That place sure was a mansion — you could have put my whole house in the room the maid showed us into, and I remember wishing my wife could see it — carpet up to your ankles, all kinds of paintings and statues and silk brocade and whatnot, and big silver and crystal vases of roses that yelled “hothouse” at you. And when the two of them appeared, she was a knockout too. She must have been pushing 60, but she didn’t look an hour over a young 40. As for Gordon, I had pictures of him at 20, but a man of 35 is something else again, and I wondered how even his mother could have recognized him at first sight. All I could say when I saw him was that he and the pictures of him were at best look-alikes.

And you know what? She stared me in the eye and said, “Officer, this is my son. I want you to arrest him for his father’s murder.”

That was the one thing I’d never dreamed of expecting from her! I just stood there with my mouth open, and before I could close it all hell broke loose. First, the guy made a jump for the door, but Henderson tripped him and then got a good hold on him. Then he stopped struggling and yelled, “You can’t do this to me! I’m not her son! Nobody told me the man was murdered!”

“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Lampert, tears running down her face, “that my poor boy is out of his wits. He has to be put in custody for his own good.

“Don’t be frightened, Gordie,” she said to him. “Everything will be all right. I’ll get you the best lawyer in the city — I’ll get you Matthew Van Druhen himself — and he’ll prove you weren’t responsible and see to it you’re sent to the very best private hospital to get the treatment you need.”

Well, I couldn’t make hide nor hair of it, but all at once the guy turned white and sort of collapsed, and there wasn’t another whimper out of him. I decided the only thing we could do was take him down and book him on suspicion, and at least keep hold of him till we could get things straightened out. I’d been so set for the defensive mother-tiger bit that I just didn’t know what to make of this woman handing over her own son that way.

But before we left she had some more to say.

“He came here this morning — just rang the bell and asked for me. I hardly knew him at first, but he proved to me he was Gordon, after all these years. And I said to him right away, ‘But my God, Gordie, don’t you know they’re after you for killing your father? You must go away at once — I’ll give you money and help you hide till everything quiets down.’

“And then I realized my poor boy must be mentally ill. All of a sudden he began saying that he wasn’t Gordon — when he’d just proved to me he was — and he launched into some crazy story I couldn’t make any sense out of.

“I was terribly frightened — not for myself, but for him. I knew he must have help at once. I didn’t know what to do — maybe I was wrong, but all I could think of was to call you.”

At that the guy pulled himself together and said, “Officer, this woman is lying. I am not her son, I am not insane, and I never killed anyone. She told me her husband died suddenly, not one word more. And she never told me she had sent for the police.”

“Oh, Gordie, how can you?” Fern Lampert sobbed. “You know perfectly well — and I even told you how Dr. Harris insisted that Issachar had accused you — and how about all your childhood memories — and the birthmark — and—”

“Officer, please get me out of here,” he begged. “I can explain everything. But get me away from her!”

That part I agreed with, so we took him away.

Well, how’s that for a start, young fellow? Want me to go on? Okay.

He was only too willing to be booked, even for suspicion of murder. He was bursting with stuff he had to tell us, even though it involved confessing to trying to obtain money under false pretenses, which is a felony. He gave us a long, detailed story, and he repeated it — not word for word, but in substance — to Van Druhen when he arrived, retained by Mrs. Lampert as she had promised. He gave every appearance of believing every word he said. And not one of us bought it as we listened. I know I didn’t, and I found out soon that everyone who heard it, including the lawyer, was absolutely certain we were listening either to the ravings of an unbalanced mind or to a tremendous tissue of lies.

Here, wait till I find it in my scrapbook. I copied it from his signed statement that he made later, and if you want you can copy it from me. Here it is, shaped into police journalese:

Well, you can imagine how that struck us. “Most fantastic alibi I ever heard” — “This guy isn’t loony, he’s just a frustrated novelist” — that kind of thing. Even Van Druhen, when he arrived and heard it, couldn’t keep the incredulity out of his voice, though all he said was: “Let’s get Mrs. Lampert down here and question her on why she’s so sure this is her son. Then we can get on with finding out why, son or not, she says he killed her husband.”

She was very shook up, as you may imagine, and inclined to be insulted at even being doubted. But finally she said, “All right, gentlemen; I’ll give you incontrovertible proof that this is my son. Gordon had a birthmark on his left thigh, in the rough shape of a heart. Take him somewhere and undress him and find out.”

So we did, and sure enough, there it was.

But our prisoner had an answer for that too. “It was one of the first things Jones told me,” he said, “and he took me down and had me tattooed. This is a tattoo, not a birthmark.”

Sergeant Henderson, who did the search, told me he laughed his head off over that one. He has a tattoo himself, and he was sure anybody could tell the difference. He found out later that they can’t, not always.

When that didn’t go over, the prisoner just about folded up. He muttered something about wishing to heaven he’d been fingerprinted in the past and that would settle the thing once and for all. But that wouldn’t have settled it, since Gordon Lampert had never been fingerprinted either.

We didn’t feel we had enough to hold him for indictment by the Grand Jury on the murder charge, but he’d confessed to impersonation with a view to extortion, so for the time being that would do. I’m simplifying the police process for you, my boy; what you’re interested in is old Josiah Schonfeldt’s reminiscences, not a technical account of police procedure. The judge set a sizable bail — $10,000, as I recall — but of course Mrs. Lampert came across with that right away. She’d accused the man she believed to be her son of murdering his father, but on the premise that he was insane; so the next thing, she had him shipped into a posh private mental hospital and hired the most expensive psychiatrists she could find to prove her point. Naturally we had our own psychiatrists on the job too.

Here — let me find it in the scrapbook. Our men — and they were good, though they didn’t get the fees hers did — agreed that the man booked as Gordon Lampert was “well oriented, completely reasonable, and entirely sane.” They left it a moot question whether he really was Lampert or one Reid Buxton and an impostor, but they were sure he wasn’t a lunatic. As might be expected, Mrs. Lampert’s experts came to exactly the opposite conclusion; he was Gordon Lampert, and he was definitely psychotic.

Am I boring you? You don’t need to be polite. When you’ve reached my age, young fellow, you’ll find you grow more long-winded with every year. So I’ll cut this short.

Whether we believed him or not, we did all the obvious things, of course. Letters addressed to Adam Smith Jones at General Delivery in New York came back uncalled for. There were no records of Lampert’s death in any tb sanitarium in New York State.

The New York police were cooperating all the way, but the Captain decided to send me to New York to see what I could do at first-hand. Every tattoo artist in the city was interviewed, and every one of them said he had never needled a heart on the left thigh of anyone. The bartenders at the cocktail lounge said they couldn’t keep track of the names of all of their customers, but neither of them recalled any two men who looked so much alike or remembered any particular conversation in a back booth.

There was a Reid Buxton. He was on file with practically every theatrical agency and they all had photographs. But they were taken in makeup in various parts he’d played and they were of no use for identification. I was doing this end myself, and at the fifth place I got a shock. “Sure we know him,” said the agent. “He was in here yesterday.”

I’d put off visiting the apartment that our man had given as his address until I’d checked with the agencies. Now I got there quick. It was an old reconstructed brown-stone in the Chelsea district — one of those places where most of the cards in the slots read “Occupied.” I rang the manager’s bell and it turned out to be a manageress. When I asked for Buxton she got defensive.

“If you’re a bill collector,” she said, “leave the poor man alone. He owes me four months rent right now, but I’m not pressing him. He’ll pay up when he gets a part. He’s been here three years, and he’s had his ups and downs, like any actor who isn’t tops, but he always makes good in the end.” Evidently she was one of those stage-struck landladies that hard-up actors on the fringe dream about but seldom encounter.

I assured her I wasn’t after Buxton’s non-existent money, and implied without saying so that I was in the profession and had a prospect for him. Anybody in their right mind would have spotted me for a dick, but not this dame. She said he usually got home around seven, and she gave me his apartment number. So at seven I rang his bell and the door buzzed. I had a New York cop with me to make it legal in case I had to make an arrest.

It was a walkup and we climbed to the fourth floor. He opened the door when I knocked and looked surprised; I guessed he’d been expecting a girl.

“You Reid Buxton?” I asked.

“Yes. What’s it about?”

One glance showed me that nobody could have taken him for anything like Gordon Lampert’s double. His hair and his eyes were dark, as against Lampert’s light brown hair and blue eyes. He was about the same height, but a lot thinner.

“Mind if we come in?” I flashed my badge. He looked puzzled when he found out I was from the Houston police.

He let us in grudgingly and said, “What do you want to see me for?” He didn’t seem alarmed, the way even innocent people usually do with the police, only wary. I took particular note of his voice — an actor’s voice, I thought, well modulated, but on the bass side; our man’s was much higher.

I told him as much as I wanted him to know, if he really was Reid Buxton — that we were holding a man claiming to be him, arrested on a felony charge. Then he really did look both scared and mad.

“The guy’s nuts!” he said.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “That’s one thing being considered. Did you ever know a man named Gordon Lampert?”

He shook his head, then did a double take. “Lampert?” he said. “Isn’t that the name of the rich man who got murdered down in Texas?”

By this time we had given more to the press — not Issachar Lampert’s dying words, or our arrest, but the fact that murder was suspected and the usual malarkey about the police expecting to make an arrest any minute; and since “the missing son of the deceased” was supposed to be in New York, the papers there had given it a paragraph or two more, so it was logical that Buxton could have seen it.

“His son,” I answered him.

“Never met him.”

“What about a man named Adam Smith Jones?”

He laughed. “Never,” he said. “I wouldn’t forget a name like that.”

I showed him two photographs — one of Gordon Lampert at 20 that I’d got from his mother, and another we took. It was hard to tell if they were of two different people. He didn’t recognize either.

I still had the payoff question to ask. “Where were you and what were you doing on November 19th?”

He got really jittery then.

“I was right here in New York City,” he said, “but what I was doing I couldn’t tell you — how can I remember a day like any other? You mean this nut is claiming he’s me, and that I knocked off his old man? I’ve never been in Houston in my life.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. I decided to give him a little more rope. “This man claimed to be Gordon Lampert, back home after fifteen years of exile. The mother accepted him. Then she turned right around and called the police, and told them this was her son all right, but that he had come back before that, on the 19th, quarreled with his father and killed him, and now she wanted him locked up for his own good. Her line is that he’s crazy and will be acquitted because of insanity and sent to a mental hospital. When the guy heard that, he backed down, admitted he was an impostor, that he’d known old Lampert was dead but not that he had been murdered — and that his real name was Reid Buxton, and he gave your address. So we booked him on a fraud and extortion charge, and he’s out now on $10,000 bail.”

Buxton just stared at me with his mouth open.

“I never heard anything so fantastic in all my born days,” he finally managed to say. “Why did he pick on me? I’m nobody important — just a minor character actor out of work. And I’m absolutely certain I don’t know the man at all. Ask the manager, downstairs; she doesn’t see me often but she knows the apartment hasn’t been vacant for even a day.”

Just then there was a noise behind us. The door was still open and in walked the girl he must have had a date with. She was a real dish — probably in the profession too — dressed in a cute print and a little fur jacket, with a rose corsage pinned to the lapel. She stood stockstill, surprised by the scene confronting her. Buxton waved her out, but she wasn’t having any.

“Why, Reid, what’s wrong?” she cried, going up and putting her arms around him.

“Later, Marilyn — go home and I’ll call you,” he muttered, his face red. “Something’s come up.”

And then he started to sneeze.

He couldn’t stop. He kept on sneezing and tears ran down his face. The girl looked contrite.

“Oh, honey, I forgot!” she said. “Here — I’ll throw it out.” And she undid the corsage and threw it into the hall.

“Get out, Marilyn,” he growled between sneezes.

“Oh, very well,” she said, tossing her head, and left.

Son, never let anyone tell you not to follow hunches. What we call a hunch is a sudden clarification of subconscious ideas we may have had all along. I got one then, and I obeyed it instantly.

“Well, Mr. Buxton,” I said, “this sure is a mix-up. Sorry to have spoiled your date. We’ll be talking to you again when we’ve got it all straightened out.”

“Any time,” he said, still sneezing. “Always glad to help the police. And don’t worry about the girl; I only met her last week.”

I hustled the New York cop out with me, and the minute we got back to headquarters I had them put a tail on Reid Buxton. Then I phoned Henderson in Houston and told him to find out — not from Mrs. Lampert, but from Dr. Harris, the same doctor they’d had for years and the one who was called in after the murder — if Gordon Lampert had ever had an allergy to roses.

You see, I was remembering that the big room in the Lampert house had been full of vases of hothouse roses. And nary a sneeze had ever come out of our suspect.

Henderson called back in an hour, and said yes.

That was the beginning of the end. We picked up the so-called Buxton on a charge of impersonation, and there on his left thigh was the birthmark — a lot more naturallooking than the one tattooed on the real Buxton. The phony Buxton broke down pretty fast after that, and led us to the tattoo artist he’d paid to keep his mouth shut. We got him extradited to Texas, and he was indicted for murder. They found him guilty and sane, and he got life; he’s still in Huntsville.

He was, of course, Gordon Lampert, alias Adam Smith Jones. Every word the real Reid Buxton had told us was true.

The phony Buxton’s dark hair was a wig, the dark eyes were tinted contact lenses, and he’d been dieting like mad to lose weight. He’d deliberately lowered the tone of his voice. The landlady had phoned up to him I was coming, and he was ready for me. Apparently he hadn’t had a chance to warn off Marilyn.

What’s more, when that canary sang, he sang plenty. He said the whole scheme was really his mother’s. She had known from the beginning where he was — they’d always been in communication, and she’d kept him well heeled; he’d never had to work. She kept after old Issachar till she thought she had him softened, and then she’d told Gordon to come home. She was there when he came on November 19th; she was there when he quarreled again with his father, knocked him down, and pounded his head on the corner of the steel desk in the study till his skull was crushed.

She hid him somewhere in that mansion while they worked things out. She persuaded him to go back to New York and try to find a man who could pretend to be him; she’d made out as if she believed it and then turn the impostor in for the murder. It would be a perfect frame-up. She’d go through all the motions — Van Druhen for the defense, the plea of insanity, and the high-priced psychiatrists, and she would go on the stand if necessary and perjure herself about his mental history.

She was certain — and she was probably right — that if the fall guy escaped the chair or a life sentence he would be confined in a maximum-security mental hospital and never be released.

Then she and her son would go away together somewheres out of the country — don’t ask me about passports, but there are plenty of ways to wangle it when you’ve got millions — and live abroad under another name. She’d sell all her property and transfer her money and stocks to an anonymous account in a Swiss bank — you know, an account identified only by a number. And they’d live happily ever after.

She might very well have got away with it, if only Gordon had remembered to warn Buxton to sneeze whenever he got near any roses.

Millions of dollars or not, we’d have had her indicted for conspiracy and as accessory, if she hadn’t taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

Buxton — the real Buxton — got five years. He served it, with time off for good behavior, and disappeared. He changed his name, and as I said, he keeps in touch with me, but I’m not giving him away. You’ve probably seen him on TV — he plays mostly old men’s parts now.

Well, that’s it, my boy — my most exciting case. Long ago and forgotten by now. But here — look in the scrapbook. Oh, I showed you that clipping, didn’t I? They gave me a citation, and that’s when I told them, “I only did my duty.” I never was one to boast.

Hey, tell that dog of yours to go back in the garden. I get hives if I let any dog get near me. That’s how I came to know so much about allergies.