I’m the wife of Lieutenant Deviled Yeggs, Trinity Naomi Tesla, that’s TNT, Yeggs, but most people call me Glyce, pronounced “Gliss,” since it is short for Nitroglycerin. I explode when shaken. My husband works homicide in the big city of Tracy. He works with his old partner, Jim Wednesday and his nephew Poached Yeggs. But this time I am being drawn into one of my husband’s investigations.
My sleep had been interrupted for three consecutive nights. At precisely midnight each night, my cellphone rang. Each night it was this crazy frog-voiced man saying sick things. I should have said something from the beginning, but I was afraid that Dev would make a major investigation out of it. I am a big girl. What was said was not threatening. In fact, it was pretty stupid.
As I walked into the squad room, Poached announced me. “Everyone, be on your best behavior. Two ladies are in the room: Dr. Naomi Yeggs and my cutest cousin, Gigi Yeggs.” Poached was loud enough for Dev to hear the announcement in his office, and he came out to greet me in the squad room.
“Dev, Sweetie, I have something to report. I should have reported it when it started, but I have gotten three phone calls precisely at midnight, each of the last three nights. It’s a stupid crank call. I block the number, but this guy uses a different number each time. Impossible to block if he does that.” I reported.
Dev scratched his head. “I know what you are going to say. You have patients that need you and you keep your phone on at night to be available to them, but you can turn it off during normal sleep time. If they don’t get you and they really need help, they will go to the ER. Now what does the crank say?”
I shrugged, “Even in the first call, he said, ‘It’s me again, Naomi.’ Then he laughs this goofy laugh. He sounds like a frog talking. Then he asks if it’s me. Once he asked if I was naked. Other than that, it’s just stupid.”
Jim stuck his tongue out and grabbed the phone on his desk, “It’s me again, Margaret. Hello, is this Margaret? You don’t know me, Margaret But I know you’ Hee-hee-hee-haw-haw”
“That’s it! That’s the voice and the words he said. Jim Wednesday, why are you calling me at midnight?”
Dev said, “No, Glyce, he is quoting a song by Ray Stevens about an obscene phone caller. What is the second phone call, Jim?”
Jim made the pose again, looking stupid or drunk or both, “”It’s me again, Margaret. Hello, is this Margaret? Margaret, I know it’s you, Margaret. Are you naked?”
“That’s it!” I shouted.
Dev, Poached, and Jim laughed. Then Dev said, “Someone is pranking you, dear. Please, turn off the phone, and the guy will lose interest and quit, just while you sleep. I don’t think you have gotten a legitimate call at that time of night except once, and that was a year ago. We can try to trace it, but a different burner every night. Probably a different part of town if the guy is smart about it. The song was from the time when there were pay phones and the call was easy to trace, but then it was a fictional story. We can triangulate a cellphone, but since the calls are short and the perp is probably on the move…” Dev shrugged.
I heard a familiar noise. “Oh, good grief, my husband is no help and now Gigi has a dirty diaper.” I put her down on Jim’s desk and before I took off the soiled diaper, I reached for wipes and a clean diaper from the diaper bag. You have to be quick in case she isn’t quite finished. I saw a diaper that was not my usual brand. I was confused in that no one would have put a strange diaper into the bag. As I opened the diaper, I saw a note inside. The note started, “It’s me again, Naomi. …”
I screamed, “Dev, look in the diaper!”
There was a flurry of activity that I had not seen from the homicide guys. Dev ran around to give me a bear hug. He saw the explosion about to happen. Jim jumped up and continued what I had started. And Poached pulled out tweezers to grab the diaper, almost from mid-air.
Dev gave me his most intense bear hug. The hug reminded me of our first time meeting, when I had already lost it. I just went with the hug. Everything else was unreal at that moment.
Dev softly spoke while hugging me. “Guys, I have my hands full. Jim, take care of Gigi. Poached, try to open the diaper without leaving prints. I can see you fumbling with the elastic wanting to close it back up. When I saw the diaper, I thought it might have come from Lily the Pink, since it has pink hearts all over it. We buy the basic white variety at the wholesale store. Maybe use a stapler to hold down one side while you use the tweezers to unfold the diaper.”
By this point, Polly and Gisele were in the squad room. In my lostness of time and space within my husband’s grasp, I wondered why Polly wasn’t out on patrol, but it did not matter. They must have heard me scream and Polly is the officer in charge of dealing with a woman’s touch. They saw Jim had not lost the touch of putting on diapers, but they nearly wrestled each other to see who got to play with Gigi. At one point, Gisele suggested “I’ll take Gloria. You take Grace.” Since those two names formed ‘Gigi’, G. G., I started to protest, but while Polly was laughing, Gisele scooped up the baby.
Poached finally had the diaper opened, and Dev soon knew there would be no fingerprints.
Poached read, “It’s me again, Naomi. They don’t have me, Naomi. I thought the codebreakers were good at what they do, but they have failed. You missed me when I placed this note in your diaper bag. I will keep my eyes on you while those dullards at the precinct try to find me. And if they don’t, I will visit you with an eggbeater, a live chicken, and some peach preserves. We’ll have a good ole time, Naomi. As for your husband, the clock is still ticking. But since he has gotten nowhere, he must not be the smart guy everyone talks about. I’m thinking you are the smart one, Naomi. Hee-hee-hee!” Poached also said, “Lieutenant, the font is the same font, the one that looks like letters cut out of a newspaper.”
Dev whispered in my ear, “Pay no attention to the eggbeater, live chicken and peach preserves. That is all part of the lyrics of the song. I have you, Sweetie. I am not letting go.”
Dev then spoke just a little louder, not shouting. “Jim, get crime scene up here to get the diaper. Poached, update the file on our world traveler. Give him a possible alias. We’ll call him ‘Willard McBain.’ That is the guy in the song. If this guy is crazy enough to act out this song about an obscene phone call, he might use Willard McBain as an alias. Run it. Put the guesses we have so far up on the screen. And call the head of the codebreaker team. We need them on this ASAP.”
Poached stammered, “But, but. Sophie is your daughter. She is the head of the codebreakers. She is in class right now. If Aunt Glyce is here, it usually means Pauline is teaching class. And GrandPa is probably taking a nap.”
Dev calmly said, “Poached, quit telling me things I already know. This weird case of cat and mouse where we did not have any proof that a crime has been committed has changed. We might have a dozen murders around the world, but now we have stalking of a police lieutenant’s wife with threat of aggravated assault. And that is right here in Tracy. Got it?”
Poached asked, “With an eggbeater and a live chicken?”
Dev said, “I would not need an eggbeater and a live chicken to kill a detective who does not do as I tell him. We treat this case like a cop killer. We drop everything and track this man down like the dog that he is. Polly, crime scene is just coming in. Go with them. Make sure they know that my wife touched the diaper. Sadly, those may be the only prints. Take the diaper, the note, and the diaper bag. The guy had to have unzipped the bag to put the diaper in it. If that was in public, gloved hands might look suspicious. I want to know immediately, one way or the other. With the issues we have had in the past, Glyce has her prints on file for exclusion.”
I had seen my husband in action before, but never when he was giving me such an intense bear hug. And this is the first time after his promotion for me to observe him. The case had leaped from a prankster to a possible serial killer who was stalking me, but as long as Dev kept me in his bear hug, I felt safe. And all these orders to everyone, my man was a man of action, not just great bear hugs.
Captain Hart came in. “Dev, Gisele and I will take Gigi to Lily the Pink, and we’ll pick up Millennium while we are there. I have called dispatch, and we have patrolmen going to Vitamin Flintheart High School and T.R.U.S.T. as we speak. They’ll wait outside, Poached, no lights, no sirens. Have Sophie and Pauline look for the cruiser. They’ll get a front row seat. If anyone sees them leave, they won’t think it is an arrest. Once they get the team into the cruiser, they’ll use the lights and siren to get here.” With that, Gisele grabbed the baby carrier that doubled as a car seat. And then they were gone. As they left, Polly and the crime scene techs were leaving in the opposite direction.
Dev asked, “Now, Sweetie, can you talk?”
I said, “I think so, but don’t let go of me. Not yet.”
Dev asked, “When have you left your bag unattended, other than at home?”
I replied, “I have been thinking while you have been getting things organized. Monday, I went to the pediatrician for Gigi’s six-month appointment. Six months? She’s seven months old! But when they called us in, I left the bag in the waiting room. While the nurse took Gigi to weigh her, she asked me if I had a diaper bag. I ran back to the waiting room and got it. It was less than a minute, two minutes at most. He had to have been following just for that kind of moment. And, Dev, the phone calls started that night. Oh, I am so scared.” I started to cry.
“I have you, Sweetie. No explosions today.” Dev squeezed a little harder. “Jim, call our pediatrician, same one you and Tuesday use. See if they have a security camera in the waiting room. Most do just to see if a patient is in the room. If so, do they record the footage? If so, we need Monday, especially Monday morning around 10:00am. I remember the time. We had to call Pauline to attend the department head meeting. Poached, I want what we’ve got on the screen.”
Poached groaned, “Lieutenant, I am typing in a new line of code breaking that GrandPa is looking into. I doubt if he has gotten very far, but you said you want all our guesses. Let me get this updated before I put it on the live screen.”
Within ten more minutes, I finally asked to take a breather from the hug. We went into Dev’s office to set up chairs for everyone, but we got more than we bargained for. Captain Hart brought Gwen, GrandPa, and Anahera (Angel). Jim and Poached went out to get their desk chairs. Dev had the Poached list of guesses on the board.
Dev thanked everyone for coming on short notice. Pauline quipped that it did not sound like she had a choice. Sophie giggled. She said she was not missing a test, so no harm done.
Dev brought everyone up to date including the perpetrator placing a diaper with a message in Gigi’s diaper bag. He talked about how the phone calls and the message mirrored the lyrics of an old Ray Stevens song about obscene phone calls.
He spoke of how this was an offense to his wife, a legal matter of the city of Tracy. It was no longer an intellectual study that may or may not have legal implications outside the USA. He said that the police commissioner agrees with him that the intimidation of a college professor and wife of a police lieutenant is a serious offense. Although the perpetrator quoted a song, bodily violence was implicated.
But then, he said that the codebreakers only had a working hypothesis. They think that a confidence man was taking advantage of older women around the world. When his scheme was found out, he began to kill off all the women he had scammed. Possibly the event that is represented by the tickets was the next date for the couple, tickets probably purchased by the woman who then was killed, thus no need for the tickets. With no idea who the women might be, the codebreakers set up fake identifications on social media, casually mentioning various events over the past year. As a result, they had two possibles. A woman who was front row at the Australian Open every year fell from a party boat, partially eaten by sharks, found dead on the beach. And near Dalhalla, an angel of the ballet died of food poisoning. Dev opened the meeting for new updates.
Pauline suggested, “My tennis expert who has been working the false identity on social media has heard from people who say they saw their friend who died with a silver-haired American, but he seemed to be in the middle of the party, or so they thought, when the woman went overboard. My friend is trying to get candid photos of groups on the party boat, but she has not found one with the silver-haired American yet.”
Then Anahera (Angel) spoke up. “I came here to tell you in person what Gordie and I have learned about an All Blacks rugby fan. The tickets were for the match between Argentina and New Zealand on the 20th of October. We had three ways of looking at the tickets using the working hypothesis. The killed woman could be an Argentina fan, an All Blacks fan (for you who do not know that is the New Zealand national team), or a fan of rugby. But was the killing done in France where the games were played? In my social media conversations with All Blacks fans, I talked about the narrow victory of the All Blacks on October 14th over Ireland. This sparked some discussion about crazy fans after the game. One particular older woman died of food poisoning on the 16th of October. She had been seen with a silver-haired American during the game. I am trying to get photos through social media of this woman and her American friend. Rather than tell Sophie, I heard Millennium was coming here, so I decided to tell you in person.”
Dev smiled, “Thank you, both. It would be very good to get a photo. We might know who we are dealing with. He has to be a world traveler, but his means of income can be from his scams. He does not need a big bankroll from his previous or present employment. If we can get the photo to various police departments around the world with what we have so far, they might cooperate. But a photo here in Tracy will be a means of surveilling this guy until he makes a mistake. GrandPa, what is this that Poached tried to summarize for our board?”
GrandPa laughed, “I knew Poached did not really understand. We looked at everything on the tickets to find a pattern, but we found nothing. The perpetrator hinted there was a code, and he wanted the three of us to solve it. So far, we have no ‘code’ that can be used as a crazy person confession. So, we canned that idea, until I dreamed up a new idea. What if the ticket number, not the seats, but the transaction number that is printed on the ticket contained part of the victim’s passport number?”
Captain Hart scoffed, “That’s ridiculous. The transaction number is something this crazy guy cannot control.”
GrandPa laughed, “I have known people who would buy tickets then cancel them just to find out what the transaction code was. They would then keep buying when they thought the transaction code would be close to the number sequence that they wanted, or letter sequence. Buy, cancel, buy, cancel, until they were really close. Then they might buy ten tickets, cancelling all others except for the palindrome or the consecutive numbers or their lucky number, something the person thought was good luck. Otherwise, they would avoid going to the game or the theater all together.”
Captain Hart said, “That’s crazy!”
GrandPa said, “Yes, and I think the guy we are after is just as you said. Paralyzed by his superstitions, then something, as Sophie thinks a woman found out the man was cheating, lying, or something, and then the killing started. On the edge of insanity with his phobias and superstitions, and then something pushed him over the edge. And I want this guy caught. He has threatened to go after my grandson’s wife with an eggbeater and a live chicken. Now, I personally have wanted to slather her with peach preserves, but that is something entirely different.”
Gwen poked him, “Millie! Behave yourself! As it is, you are going to be on oxygen when we get home, at least for a little while.”
Since he brought up me in this investigation, “May I speak? Angel has let us know why she is here, but why are you here, Gwen?”
Gwen winked at Poached, “I will let Poached bring up his idea, and then I will add to it, maybe.”
Poached cleared his throat. “Lily the Pink has started a little club of sorts. It’s a think tank.”
Jim quipped, “If you are a member, they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Poached groaned, “And that coming from my partner, but this is an unusual group of people. Mashie Niblick spoke last night about how to be invisible. You know, be confident in your role as a servant, and they won’t ever notice you. That got me to thinking about our perpetrator. He knows Pauline and Mashie do things for the government. He knows about GrandPa, too. He knows about Granddad’s overall family. He knows personal things. We have talked about security leaks, but we have not investigated who is picking up on the leaks. So, who is a servant that might come and go and never be noticed?”
Dev said, “Utility meter readers, door-to-door salesmen or cult evangelists, who do you have in mind, Poached?”
Poached said, “The mail man or woman. With the working hypothesis, the mail man. But maybe not him. I am sure the mail carriers get together and gossip around the coffee maker just like other groups of people do. The postmaster would narrow our deep search down to just a few. There is one for each post office in the city and the big boss at the central post office. And seeing one at an odd time is not unusual. There is the regular mail carrier and then the parcel delivery.”
Gwen suggested, “And I have heard two references to silver-haired American. What about a recently retired postmaster? Silver-haired, enough time on his hands to travel the world. May have been scamming women before he retired, building up enough money to travel the world. And once you establish a base somewhere else, airline tickets are a lot cheaper there than in the US, like ten cents on the dollar. I should know. When Hugh wasn’t picking us up, that’s how we got from one place to the next on our world tour.”
Dev said, “This idea of Poached has merit. I like what Gwen added. And by the way, Gwen, are you the boss of this think tank?”
Gwen groaned, “As if I did not have enough on my plate. I have four children and only one is potty trained. And I am not used to running Lily the Pink’s day to day yet. But last night they proclaimed me the Chief Rogue. I suggested after a few meetings that we have a true election and nominate those that have the best thoughts for the think tank.”
I asked, “And does this think tank have a name?”
Gwen rolled her eyes, “Thanks to my darling husband sitting next to me, we are the Rogue Scholars from the Rogue’s Gallery. We have our rogues working on a logo. But we are not trying to think of doing anything illegal. We are rogues in that we think outside the box. We wanted to take on cases that were completed to see if there was a better way of rescuing people, avoiding hostage situations, that kind of thing. But we can call our rogues together and help with doing a reverse of the Mashie Niblick invisible man, maybe make the man more visible?”
Dev said, “No active investigative work, but as a think tank, you might help Poached from getting tunnel vision. And I assume that Sophie and Blaise were not working late in the lab. Is Aunt Hortense a rogue also?”
Gwen smiled, “Emeritus status only. We don’t want to tire her. She is over one hundred, but her mind is still sharp. And yes, I do not like that two of our teen members lied to their parents about not coming home at the usual hour, but then again, we do not want to advertise that we are a team until we are better established. And no, Pink Lady, a rogue among rogues, has bowed out. She just thought up the idea and made the initial invitations.”
Dev said, “I thank everyone for coming. Without Gwen being here, I have a feeling a few people that are here are in the think tank. GrandPa, if you have not already done so, you could request a little help from Hugh McAdoo to get those passport numbers. We now have three possible victims. If your idea bears fruit, you can figure out the pattern and we can ask the other countries for deceased victims that have a certain passport number.”
GrandPa chuckled, “I knew you would figure out where I was going.”
Dev continued, “Angel and Pauline, do not sound too eager, but we need a photograph. And Poached, do not focus only on postal carriers, present or retired, but stick to the idea of service personnel. Lawn care, snow removal, meter readers, anything.”
As everyone started filing out, Sophie asked if she had to go back to school since she’d get there with only two periods left. The growl that she got from me answered her question. Captain Hart suggested that Polly become my shadow. I growled again, but then he laughed and said, “Nice try. Polly, stick to her like glue, and park a cruiser in their front lawn at night.”
Credits
The following is what is said to be the lyrics of the song, but I have heard weed-eater instead of eggbeater and Kool Whip instead of peach preserves.
Well, there once was a feller named Willard McBane
And he only had just one thought on his brain
Every evening about midnight he’d slip off alone
And call the same lady on a pay telephone
“It’s me again, Margaret
Hello, is this Margaret?
You don’t know me, Margaret
But I know you”
Well, this upset the lady and it gave her the blues
So she called up the police, said “What shall I do?”
Well, the chief of detectives came ’round to her home
And eavesdropped upon them on her upstairs phone
“It’s me again, Margaret
Hello, is this Margaret?
Margaret, I know it’s you, Margaret
Are you naked?”
Well, they called up Ma Bell and they traced him on down
To a funky old phone booth on the outskirts of town
It was there that the vice squad with their field glasses read
The lips of that amorous man as he said
“It’s me again, Margaret
Hello? Is this… is this Margaret?
I know it’s you, Margaret
I bet you can’t guess what I’m doing”
Well, they cuffed him and dragged him to the station downtown
And they allowed him one phone call ‘fore the jailer came round
He wet his chapped lips and he cleared his young throat
Then he dialed the telephone and softly he spoke
“It’s me again, Margaret
They got me, Margaret
You ain’t going to miss me, Margaret, I know that
But I’ll miss you
And when I get out, Margaret
I’m going to come over there with an egg beater
And a live chicken, and some peach preserves
We’ll have a good old time, Margaret!”
- Paul Craft, It’s Me Again, Margaret
My wife received obscene phone calls, back before the days of caller ID. The police suggested simply not answering the phone late at night, just as Dev suggests. When I answered the phone, they hung up, but was it the same caller? I bought an airhorn in case they called, and my wife answered, but they never called again.
I have known people to buy and then cancel tickets until they got a certain number in the transaction, highly superstitious, and willing to buy, cancel until they got what they wanted. And these people had normal, everyday jobs. And I am sure they did not sleep in a room with padded walls.
Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley 
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