Ed McBain - Goldilocks

His elbows were resting on his thighs, his hands were clenched forward of his knees, his head was bent, almost level with the polished top of the captain’s desk. He did not look up as I approached. His eyes remained focused instead on the desk top, where half a dozen Polaroid pictures of a black girl were spread in a row that resembled a lineup of sextuplets. Michael was wearing blood-stained blue jeans and a blood-stained white T-shirt. His sandals were caked with what seemed to be a mixture of dried blood and sand. There was sand in his matted black hair, blood on his cheek, blood caked in the curve of his ear.

“Michael,” I said.

He looked up at me, brown eyes wide in his narrow face, and nodded bleakly, and then went back to studying the pictures of the black girl. I could not believe he was really seeing them. I felt only that he chose not to meet my eyes.

“I have some questions for you, Michael.”

He nodded again.

“Did you kill Maureen and your sisters?”

He nodded.

“Michael, I want you to speak, please. I want you to answer yes or no. Did you kill Maureen?”

“Yes,” he said. His voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat “Yes,” he said again.

“And the girls?”

“Yes.”

“Who’d you tell this to?”

“The cop.”

“Which cop?”

“The one who arrested me.”

“Where was this?”

“Sabal Beach.”

“What time?”

“About ten? I’m not sure. I haven’t got a watch.”

“Is he the only one you told it to?”

“Yes.”

“Michael,” I said, “I want to get a criminal lawyer for you. I’m not equipped to handle something like this myself, I want to call in someone who is. The best criminal lawyer in town is probably Benny Freid, I want to call him, I want to get him in here immediately.”

“No,” Michael said, and shook his head.

“I’m advising you as your attorney—”

“You’re not my attorney, nobody asked for you. I don’t need you, and I don’t need a criminal lawyer, either. I killed them.”

“In this state, the penalty for first-degree murder is—”

“Fine, let them—”

“The electric chair.”

“Fine.”

“Michael, they’re going to start questioning you in just a little while. I want to call Benny before then. He’s a friend of mine, I feel reasonably sure he’ll—”

“I don’t want him. Don’t call him because I don’t want him.”

“What exactly did you say to the patrolman who arrested you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did you say you’d killed somebody?”

“Yes.”

“Did you say who you’d killed? Did you say you’d killed Maureen Purchase and Emily Purchase and Eve Purchase?”

“No, I didn’t say that.”

“What did you say exactly, can you remember?”

“I said I did it.”

“Did what?”

“Killed them.”

“Were those your exact words? Did you say ‘I did it, I killed them’?”

“What difference does it make?” he shouted, and rose suddenly. “I did it, I did it, what more do you want?”

“I want to know what you told that patrolman.”

“He came on me in the woods, okay? I was sleeping in the woods.”

“What woods?”

“Off Sabal Shores. The pine forest going down to the beach. North Sabal.”

“Near your father’s house?”

“Yes. You walk to the end of Jacaranda, and then you climb over the chain across the driveway on West Lane, and you’re in the pine forest. I was sleeping there when he found me.”

“He woke you up?”

“Yes.”

“And you say this was about ten o’clock?”

“I told you I don’t have a watch, I don’t know what time it was.”

“All right, he woke you up. What’d he say?”

“He wanted to know what I was doing there. I told him I was sleeping.”

“Then what?”

“He asked me did I have any identification. I showed him my driver’s license, and he looked at the picture on it — I had a beard when I took the picture, he made some comment about it, I forget what he said... look, what’s the sense of this, would you please tell me? Let’s get it over with, for Christ’s sake!”

“Over with? Michael, they’re going to charge you with murder!”

“I know what they’re going to charge me with, what do you think they’re going to charge me with?”

“Tell me what happened with the patrolman.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know what you said to him. I want to know what gave him the idea you’d killed Maureen and—”

“The idea ?” Michael said, and rolled his eyes, and shook his head in disbelief. “It’s not an idea , it’s a fact . I did kill them. Can’t you understand that? I killed them, and I want to confess to the crime and get it over with. That’s what I want to do, and all you want to do is find out what I told the goddamn patrolman. That’s what I told him. That I killed them. That’s what I’m telling you. I killed them.”

“Were those your exact words?”

“Man, you never quit , do you?” Michael said, and let out his breath in exasperation. “I showed him the license, right? He looked at the beard in the picture, right? He said something about did I shave off the beard, and I said, Yeah, and then he said, Michael Purchase, is that your name? And I said, Yeah, that’s my name. He looked at me and he said, Are you any relation to Dr. James Purchase? And I said, Yes, I’m his son. Then he said, How long’ve you been here in these woods, Michael? And I said I couldn’t remember, I’d just gone in there and I guess I’d fallen asleep. So he asked me when I went in there and I said I guessed it was last night sometime, and he said, When last night? I told him I didn’t remember. He said, Where’d you get that blood on your clothes, Michael? I looked at him, he... he was looking me right in the eye, he said again, Where’d you get that blood on your clothes, Michael? And I just nodded and said, Okay, I did it.”

“Then what?”

“He had a walkie-talkie on his belt, he switched it on and called for somebody to get down there right away, said he had the killer.”

“Did he use that word?”

“Which word? Killer?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. He either said killer or murderer, I don’t know.”

“All right, Michael, now listen to me. If you don’t want me to call in a lawyer who can help you more than I can, then you’ve got to at least listen to me and do what I ask you to do. Ehrenberg’s going to question you about last night. I want you to remain silent, Michael. That’s your privilege. They’ve already read your rights to you once, and I’m sure they’ll read them again before they start questioning you, and they’ll tell you it’s your privilege to remain silent, and that’s what I want you to do. I don’t want you to say another word about any of this. Not another word. Have you got that?”

“I’ve got it,” he said, “but it’s not what I want to do.”

“Michael...”

“I want to tell them.”

Jamie was waiting for me when I came out of the captain’s office. I told him essentially what his son had said, and he nodded and then asked Ehrenberg if it was all right for him to talk to Michael now. Ehrenberg told him to go on in. As soon as the door closed behind him, I said, “Mr. Ehrenberg, the boy’s about to make a statement against my advice. There’s nothing I can do about it, but I want to sit in on the questioning anyway.”

“That’s fine with me,” Ehrenberg said. “Few things I wanted to discuss with you while the father’s in there with him. First off, I checked with some of those people who were at the poker game last night, and it seems the doctor wasn’t losing when he left, way he told it to me, but instead was winning something like sixty, seventy dollars. Told the other players he was tired and wanted to go home, get some sleep. Now that doesn’t sound like a man who later spent an hour and a half drinking at The Innside Out. I don’t know where he went when he left that poker game, but I do know he was lying about being a loser, and my guess is he was lying about The Innside Out, too.