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

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.