In the kitchen Mrs. Hogan and the children faced him, beaming. “Guess what some young man’s going on?”
“What?” asked Mr. Hogan.
“Radio,” said John. “Monday night. Eight o’clock.”
“I guess we got a celebrity in the family,” said Mr. Hogan.
Mrs. Hogan said, “I just hope some young lady hasn’t got her nose out of joint.”
Mr. Hogan pulled up to the table and stretched his legs. “Mama, I guess I got a fine family,” he said. He reached in his pocket and took out two five-dollar bills. He handed one to John. “That’s for winning,” he said. He poked the other bill at Joan. “And that’s for being a good sport. One celebrity and one good sport. What a fine family!” He rubbed his hands together and lifted the lid of the covered dish. “Kidneys,” he said. “Fine.”
And that’s how Mr. Hogan did it.
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?”