Julius Katz and Archie

by Dave Zeltserman

  “I apologize for having had all of you come here like this,” Julius added with a tone that genuinely sounded apologetic, “but I’m afraid we’ll have to reschedule after I’ve had a chance to consult with my client.”

  Richardson was livid once these words sunk in. “This was nothing but a stunt!” he insisted. “That horse’s ass never had any intention of coming here today! And you were in on it, Katz!”

  “I assure you, Sir, that I fully expected my client to join us here at two thirty.”

  If Kingston’s wife was additionally worried over her husband’s lack of punctuality, she didn’t show it. Her expression revealed the same mix of anger and annoyance as when I first saw her. Richardson on the other hand was fuming as he glared hotly at Julius.

  “We all gave up valuable hours of our day to come here,” he bitterly complained. “Only to sit here and be asked inane questions by you. I insist that you tell us why we were brought here!”

  Of course, Richardson did more than just sit there. He failed to mention the half pound of hors d’oeuvres that he had consumed or the four glasses of wine that he had drunk. The Riesling that Julius served was a fine vintage, and it went for eighty dollars a bottle. Richardson got his money’s worth.

  Julius shrugged and simply told him that his hands were tied. “Without my client’s approval, I can’t discuss this any further, but I do apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”

  Richardson answered this with what only could be described as a loud and angry harrumph. Julius ignored him and ushered him and the rest of them out of his office. While Richardson left his chair reluctantly, none of the others seemed to mind much that this gathering was being brought to a close without Kingston ever making an appearance, and Zoe Chase for the first time stopped looking scared and instead looked relieved, although she still made me think of a wounded sparrow. Paul Burke was shaking his head, grinning, his eyes once again sparkling with amusement.

  “Very educational, Julius,” he said. “I always wanted to see you in action. I guess even the great ones can sometimes stumble out of the gate. Don’t feel bad, I have my bad days too.”

  “Thank you for your kind encouragement,” Julius offered stiffly.

  Burke laughed at that and allowed himself to be herded out of the office with the others. Once Julius had them out his front door and the door closed with them on the other side of it, I asked him the obvious, which was if he thought Kingston didn’t show up because he was dead.

  “I don’t know what to think, Archie.”

  “But you suspect that. That’s why you acted so differently after Tom called. You no longer cared after that about questioning them. You couldn’t have with the questions you were asking. You were just playing for time so you could send them away, but you had to make it look like you were doing so because Kingston wasn’t showing up and not because you suspected that he had been murdered. The same reason you asked them such useless questions after Tom’s call. You didn’t want any of them saying anything to the police that would suggest that you knew Kingston’s life was in danger.”

  Julius had gone back to his office to fill up one of the service trays with plates and empty or partially empty glasses, and he was now bringing the tray to his kitchen.

  “I still don’t know that he’s been murdered,” Julius said, grim-faced. “That’s only conjecture on both our parts.”

  “But you suspect that’s what happened,” I said. “Just as you suspected that his life was in danger. That’s why you had Saul and Tom watching him.”

  Julius was rinsing and carefully placing the used wine glasses in the dishwasher.

  “If that’s what I thought, then I bungled things badly,” he said. He finished with the wine glasses, and after placing the empty bottles into the recycling bin, headed back to his office to finish cleaning up after the small mob that had been there. “Because, Archie,” he continued, “if that’s what I truly believed and my brain was operating properly, then I would’ve had more people watching him and I would’ve had listening devices and spy cameras planted in his home. I guess maybe you do need to update my press release after all and replace ‘brilliant’ with ‘at times merely competent’.”

  “I won’t be doing that,” I said. “You’ve been distracted. With Lily in London and your poker game Friday night. And as you said, we don’t know yet what happened to Kingston.”

  Julius didn’t respond to that. I waited until he finished his clean-up job and was back behind his desk before asking him what made him suspicious in the first place that Kingston’s real motive for hiring him wasn’t the publicity stunt that he stated, but that he instead believed someone wanted to kill him.

  “I’m not sure that that was Kingston’s real motive. He may have had a far different motive for hiring me than that he was fearing for his life. But you are right, Archie. While he probably wanted to take full advantage of his proposed publicity stunt, I don’t believe that that was his driving reason for any of this.”

  “Why’d you think that?”

  “Several reasons,” Julius said. “One of them being how quick he was to up the fee he was willing to pay. He went from ten thousand dollars to fifty thousand dollars with little argument, and this represented a significant portion of his net worth. And if he was primarily concerned with staging a publicity stunt, he could’ve hired Burke for a fraction of what he paid me. They already have a relationship, and Burke has a certain celebrity status. He would’ve been able to generate an equally effective publicity stunt. Kingston could’ve called his own shots with Burke, instead of having to do what he considered groveling in order to hire me, which I can assure you was very painful for someone of Kingston’s nature.”

  I gave this some thought. “So why didn’t he hire Burke instead?” I asked. “Did he believe Burke could’ve been one of his possible killers? Or was it that he didn’t believe Burke was up to the job?”

  “Either of those, or other possibilities.” Julius breathed in fully and let out the air in a tired sigh. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Archie, I’d like to ask you to monitor the Cambridge police department for any homicide calls.”

  So that was it. Kingston’s townhouse was located in Cambridge. Julius believed Kingston’s death was a forgone conclusion. I did as Julius asked, and hacked into the Cambridge police department’s computer system. If Kingston’s murder was reported, I’d know it. While I did this, I found myself puzzling over several things, one in particular.

  “Burke was right about what you were asking them before Tom called you,” I said. “About how useless it would be to ask these people whether they liked or disliked Kingston. You wouldn’t be able to trust any of their answers.”

  “That’s true,” Julius admitted. “But I wasn’t concerned with what they said as much as how they said it, as well as other physical clues.”

  So he used that question in order to size them up and maybe figure out their tells. I was going to have to study their answers more closely, see what I’d be able to determine from their body language and reactions.

  “What next?” I asked.

  “We wait,” Julius said. “If Kingston’s still alive, then I have a job to do.”

  He had already given up on that possibility, but I didn’t argue with him. I tried studying the way these people had acted in Julius’s office, hoping to be able to figure out if any of them could’ve been a recent murderer. Zoe Chase was an obvious choice with how scared she acted, but the more I studied Marriston and Mable, the more I wondered if what I took as boredom was really shock, maybe the kind of shock someone might suffer after committing a violent crime. And even Richardson had me confused. His outward belligerence towards Kingston could’ve been an act to cover up that he had possibly hours before killed the man. I couldn’t exclude Kingston’s wife either from her body language. What I thought was anger and annoyance—and what she claimed was her being worried—could’ve been simply her being terrified of Julius discovering her as a murdere
r. After all, she did leave their condo hours before the arranged gathering with Julius, while Tom spotted none of the others entering or leaving Kingston’s building.

  While I did this, I found myself only getting more confused. Julius, as if nothing had happened, picked up a hefty volume of selected writings from Thomas Jefferson. He’d been reading this before his first appointment with Kingston, and I was amazed that he was able to concentrate on this book, but from his expression he seemed to have no problem doing just that. My own mind or neuron network or whatever you’d like to call it was spinning with different thoughts on who could’ve killed Kingston, if he had indeed been killed.

  At three-fifteen that question was still up in the air. I mentioned to Julius that I was surprised he wasn’t heading off to the Belvedere Club for their cognac sampling. “You’ve missed it three straight days now,” I said. “With your bank account flush with cash and your seeming lack of concern for what happened to your missing client, I thought you’d be going there today.”

  Julius didn’t bother looking up from his book as he told me that it would probably be best that he skipped it today also.

  It was twenty minutes later when I had my answer regarding Kingston. That was when I picked up an emergency call being logged at the Cambridge police department about a dead body being found. The address given was Kingston’s address. I informed Julius of this. He looked up from his book then.

  “Did the report mention an apartment number or the identity of the dead body?” he asked.

  “No, just the building address. No identification, not even yet whether it’s a male or female.”

  “Then it’s still only an assumption that it is Kingston’s body,” he murmured, and was back to reading Thomas Jefferson’s writings.

  Seven minutes later it was no longer only an assumption. I reported to Julius that they were now reporting the dead body as a homicide. “Caucasian male, around fifty, five foot eight, one hundred and sixty pounds. He was shot once through the heart. I don’t know the caliber yet. Oh, and this just came in. His name was Kenneth J. Kingston, well-known Boston-area crime writer.”

  “My assignment with him is over then,” Julius said with a grunt, but he didn’t bother looking up from his book, and within seconds he was as completely absorbed in it as he was before I gave him this latest news. I let him read undisturbed for several minutes before reminding him that his client had been murdered.

  “Kingston paid you twenty-five thousand dollars plus a twenty-four grand bottle of wine,” I said.

  “He paid me for a publicity stunt,” Julius said, his eyes still focused on his book. “And I believe he got his money’s worth. His murder should do wonders in helping to promote his upcoming book.”

  “You don’t feel an obligation to earn any of the money he paid you?”

  “I fulfilled the obligation I owed the man.”

  “You’re kidding, right? Regardless of the excuse he used to hire you, he came to you because he feared for his life. You don’t feel a sense of obligation to catch his murderer?”

  Julius sighed. He used a bookmark to mark the page he had read to, then placed the book onto his desk. “Archie, you don’t know if that’s why he hired me. Maybe that was his reason, maybe he had an entirely different reason. It doesn’t matter. I accepted the assignment because I believed his life to be in danger—”

  “You accepted the job for a bottle of ’78 Montrachet.”

  “True,” Julius admitted. “If the fee wasn’t sufficient I wouldn’t have put up with his shenanigans. And in this case, the only fee that would’ve been sufficient would’ve needed to include a bottle of ’78 Montrachet. But Archie, while I took this assignment because I thought his life might be in danger, no matter how I might’ve bungled the job it was still a fool’s errand to try to save the life of a man who is determined to jump into a vipers’ pit. After receiving Tom’s call, I fully considered my obligations to my client and decided I owe him nothing, not after the puerile lies he told me. Whatever his true motives were for hiring me, he did nothing but try to deceive and manipulate me. I have washed my hands of him.”

  “Don’t you at least feel like you should be calling the police with what you know?”

  “I don’t know anything,” he said with a tired smile. “I have no evidence of any kind. All I have are suspicions and half thought out ideas. Kingston hired me for a publicity stunt. At this point that’s all I know, and that’s all I care to know. I have nothing to give them.”

  So there you had it. The reason Julius demanded that the fee be nonrefundable wasn’t because he thought Kingston might change his mind about his publicity stunt but because he was afraid Kingston might be killed before the stunt could happen. As far as Julius was concerned, he was now justified in keeping the fee as well as not doing anything further to earn it. The thing was, I couldn’t argue with him so I didn’t bother. Still, Julius sat patiently for half a minute as if he were waiting for me to do exactly that. When I didn’t, he asked, “Well, Archie, aren’t you going to pester me more on this?”

  As I mentioned I couldn’t disagree with what Julius had said. Still, though, I did see a big reason why he needed to be the one to catch Kingston’s murderer—something far more important than to give me the opportunity to refine my programming and logic models, but I didn’t bring that up then. I figured that could wait. Instead I told Julius I saw no reason to pester him because what he was saying made sense.

  “Good,” he grunted. He started to reach for his book, but hesitated. “Archie,” he said. “I’ve been curious about something. Before I, um, had to give you a timeout two days ago, you were in rare form. Very vociferous, to put it lightly. Why was that?”

  “I didn’t realize it right away, but it was because I was angry. That was a new sensation for me. I wasn’t prepared to handle it properly.”

  Julius arched an eyebrow. “What were you so angry about?” he asked.

  “That Kingston would be making you look like a fool to the rest of the world.”

  Julius smiled as he considered that. “Your reason was loyalty,” he said. “Very admirable, Archie. Very human also.”

  With that he picked up his book and continued reading.

  Chapter 5

  While Julius might’ve had nothing to give to the police, I expected a visit from them regardless, and I was pretty sure Julius did too. That had to be the reason why he skipped the Belvedere Club that afternoon. He wanted to get this unpleasantness over with, and he also didn’t want them thinking he was purposely avoiding them. If they thought that they’d come back sometime over the next couple of days and make their visit even more unpleasant, maybe even upset his plans for his upcoming poker game. So I was pretty sure that was the reason Julius stuck around. Not so he could help the police with a murder case, but to help ensure his poker game wouldn’t be interfered with.

  It was ten minutes to five when I saw from the outdoor webcam feed a familiar face walking up Julius’s pathway, although stomping might’ve been a more accurate description. When I told Julius that Detective Mark Cramer was approaching his front door and didn’t look too happy doing so, Julius grimaced just the same as if he’d poured scalding water on himself, or worse, drank a disappointing glass of wine. Of course, it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise to Julius that Cramer would be the one to come knocking at his door, not when considering where the murder took place.

  Cramer was a detective with the Cambridge police force. According to his records he was fifty-five, six-foot two and two hundred and twenty pounds, although I would’ve put his weight closer to two hundred and forty-six pounds. He also had less hair than the photo in his file. Every time I’ve seen him he’s looked tired and cranky and with his suit badly needing pressing. Now as I watched him with his large pasty face set in an angry scowl, he looked even more tired and cranky than at any of those other times, and his suit looked slept in. When he reached the door, he pounded on it, his voice hoarse as he yelled for Julius
to answer his damn door.

  Julius pushed himself to his feet and grimaced more severely. The first time Julius had anything to do with Cramer was a year and a half ago when Cramer brought a mob of police officers to wait outside of Julius’s home so he could arrest Julius as a material witness, his reasons absolutely ridiculous. That did not endear the man to Julius. He didn’t care much for bullies. The second time that Julius and Cramer’s paths crossed was seven months ago when I was framed for a murder and Cramer arrived at Julius’s door with a healthy contingent of police officers to tear Julius’s home apart searching for me. Of course, they were looking for a short, pudgy balding man who looked a little like how you’d imagine the Continental Op. and not a rectangular-shaped two-inch piece of space-aged computer technology, so they didn’t find me and Cramer wasn’t particularly happy about that. This was going to be the third time that a murder brought them together. To say that Julius tolerated Cramer would be an understatement, and to say that Cramer had to struggle to barely tolerate Julius—and only did so by grinding his teeth and clenching his fists—would be an even greater one. Being as impartial as I possibly could, I had to put the blame fully on Cramer for this. His bullying tactics were most likely because of his paranoid beliefs that Julius was actively trying to upstage him by making a big show of solving these murders and grabbing the media attention. While Julius did have a bit of a showman in him, if Cramer understood how lazy Julius really was, he’d realize how off base these fears of his were. The fact was Julius would’ve been more than happy if the police had solved both of these murders so he wouldn’t have had to make the effort, but circumstances didn’t allow for that.