NEWINGTON -- Matt Beck called me Thursday. He left a message on my voice mail saying he wanted to talk about lottery-related issues -- either in person or by phone.

I would have called him, except I was out of town, and I didn't check my messages until I got back to the newsroom Friday morning. It was too late.

In our only face-to-face meeting last fall, Beck was intense, bitter and clearly on edge. I remember remarking to a colleague that I was relieved he didn't have a gun.

He had called the newspaper and asked to talk to a reporter about the lottery. He was directed to me because my beat is gambling.

Matthew Beck is carried with self-inflicted wounds to the Life Star helicopter Friday after killing four officials of the Connecticut Lottery Corp. in Newington. Beck, 35, of Ledyard, was pronounced dead at Hartford Hospital.

He was a short, slight man, and when I met with him last November, his eyes were wild. He spoke with the precision of an accountant, enunciating his words sharply. His mouth grew so dry while we talked that frothy white spittle spots appeared at the corners of his mouth.

He said he wasn't working at the time because he was on a medical leave for stress. He was upset over the way he had been treated at work, but mostly he said he wanted to expose flaws in the system that compromised the integrity of the state lottery.

I told him I would take a look at his issues. I also suggested that he ask the state auditors to investigate some of his concerns relating to accounting and internal controls.

Beck was like many tipsters: He had a grudge. So you check out the information very carefully. But he didn't make any threatening remarks to me about anyone at the Connecticut Lottery Corp. And a lot of his information proved true.

I wrote about some of his issues, though his name did not appear in the stories. He said he didn't want his name published because he was worried that it could jeopardize his position with the lottery corporation. And I didn't want to use the name of a disgruntled employee when the information could be independently verified.

One of Beck's issues was the lottery's long-time practice of using inflated jackpot amounts in Lotto advertisements to spur ticket sales. That was actually exposed and ended by the corporation's board of directors a few weeks after I met with Beck.

Another of his concerns was that some lottery clerks had been cheating the system by "fishing" for winning instant tickets. They would randomly punch code numbers into the lottery computers and take the cash when they came up with a winner.

After our meeting at The Courant's Broad Street headquarters in Hartford, Beck and I talked several more times by telephone. He wasn't entirely happy with the stories. He said they could have been more critical of the lottery. Our last conversation was in December.

In the telephone message he left Thursday, there was no anger or anxiety or urgency evident in his voice.

Who knows what would have happened if I had been in the office and if we had met in person, as he suggested.

Would he have brought his knife and his gun?

Would a conversation with a reporter have been enough of an outlet to defuse the bomb that was about to explode? At least for a while?

The only certainty is that four people didn't deserve to die.

I knew one of them quite well, Ott Brown, one of the gentlest, most decent people anywhere. I often had to ask him questions he didn't want to hear, including questions raised by Matt Beck. And Ott answered every one of them -- with class.