Julius Katz Mysteries

by Dave Zeltserman

  The two man sat staring at each other, Brewer bug-eyed and Julius as still as if he’d been carved out of marble. Finally, Brewer broke off the staring contest and got to his feet.

  “You better be careful what you say in public, Katz, or I’ll be suing you for slander,” Brewer said, a notable quaver in his voice. “This is a nice townhouse; I wouldn’t mind having the courts award it to me.” He left the office, and seconds later the sound of the front door opening and slamming could be heard.

  “Bravo,” I said.

  Julius didn’t bother responding.

  “That accomplished a lot,” I said after giving him suitable time to answer me. “You chased a murderer out of your office without trying to get a single bit of information from him. You could’ve asked him about his current relationship with Thomas Arden, or where he was when your client was having the life choked out of her, or any number of other things of interest, but no, you had to have the satisfaction of telling him off. Again, Bravo.”

  That brought a thin smile to Julius’s lips.

  “Patience, Archie,” he said. “I accomplished exactly what I had hoped.”

  I didn’t believe him for one second. What he’d done was indulge in a childish impulse instead of focusing on the job at hand. I realized I was feeling something that must’ve been akin to annoyance—I was so close to having a draw with Julius, and his actions put the actual proving of it in jeopardy.

  I was in no mood after that to continue with my scenario simulations, and instead spent the afternoon analyzing classic chess games and trying to find flaws in the winning player’s moves. I found a few. Julius, after pouring the Syrah down the kitchen drain, spent his time mostly puttering around, at times reading, at other times distracted and staring off into space. Neither of us saw any reason to talk to the other, so we didn’t. At five-thirty-eight the doorbell rang. Julius checked the webcam feed that covered the front entrance. Willie Andrews was standing outside the door rocking softly back and forth on his heels, his hands behind his back. Standing on either side of the door were what looked like hired muscle. One of them was grim-faced, the other showed a wide smirk, obviously thinking he couldn’t be seen when Julius opened the door.

  “Should I call the police?” I asked.

  Julius shook his head. “Not necessary,” he said. He took off his shoes and socks so that he was barefoot, then he headed to answer the door, moving with a catlike grace. When he opened the door, Willie Andrews pushed his way in and tried to back Julius up by poking him hard in the chest with his index finger, all the while yelling that he was going to teach Julius a lesson for interfering with his business. Andrews was seven years younger than Julius, narrower in the shoulders and several inches taller and with a longer reach. He never had a chance, not even with his two hired hands rushing in behind him to help. A fact that Julius keeps out of his press releases is that he’s a fifth-degree black belt in Shaolin Kung Fu, as well as a long-time practitioner of Chen Style Tai Chi. In the blink of an eye, Julius deftly stepped aside and broke Andrews’s finger, and in the same motion sent the gangster tumbling headfirst so that his chin cracked against the hardwood floor. Even though both of Andrews’s hired goons outweighed Julius by a good forty pounds, it took him less than five seconds to leave them crumpled and bleeding outside his front door. He gave me a signal and I called an associate of his to pick up the rubbish that had been left outside.

  Willie Andrews sat up, his eyes dazed as he clutched his broken finger and wiped his wrist against his bruised chin to see if he was bleeding. He wasn’t.

  “You broke my finger,” he said to Julius, his lips contorting into the classic Hollywood bad-boy sneer. I found dozens of photos on the Internet that matched it exactly.

  “You’re lucky that’s all I did. I could have you arrested for home invasion and battery.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll take my chances.”

  Still clutching his injured fingered, Andrews pushed himself to his feet and started for the door.

  “I could also see that you’re tried and found guilty of murder,” Julius said. “Norma Brewer’s death means a larger inheritance for Lawrence, and you’re the only person that would benefit from that.”

  That stopped Andrews. He turned around to face Julius, his sneer mostly gone. “What do you want?” he asked.

  Julius told him. Andrews thought about it, realized he had no choice in the matter, and agreed.

  Over the next hour Henry Zack arrived first, then Lawrence Brewer, followed by his sister Helen, next a mystery man who I knew from his conversations with Julius was one Roger Stromsby, although no one else in the room other than Julius had any idea who he was, and at last, Cramer, with four uniformed police officers, escorting a frail-looking but lucid Emma Brewer. It was clear from her eyes that she was having one of her good days. Julius waited until she was seated before he bowed his head to her and introduced himself.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry I have to bring you here under these circumstances. Unfortunately I have disturbing news to tell you, some of which I’m sure you’re already aware of.”

  Emma Brewer’s mouth weakened a bit, but her eyes remained dry. “I know you came by my house several days ago,” she said, her voice stronger than I would’ve expected. “I wasn’t having a good day then. I am now.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Julius said.

  He took a deep breath and held it, his eyes fixed on Emma Brewer as she sat across from him. The rest of the setup had Helen and Lawrence sitting next to each other on a sofa to Julius’s left, Willie Andrews holding an ice bag to his injured finger as he sat in a chair to Julius’s right, Henry Zack standing behind Andrews, Roger Stromsby sitting in a corner trying to look inconspicuous, and Cramer and the other police officers standing in the background. Lawrence Brewer sat motionless in a bug-eyed stare, Helen looked mostly out of it as if she didn’t understand what she was doing there, and Andrews’s face was frozen in a half-grimace and half-smirk.

  I asked Julius when Thomas Arden was going to be showing up. He ignored me and let the air slowly out of his lungs. “Ma’am,” he said, still addressing Emma Brewer, “if you’d like I could offer you refreshments. Coffee, maybe? A sandwich?”

  “No, thank you. Please just get on with it.”

  “Very well,” he said more to himself than to her. “You’re aware that your daughter, Norma, was murdered two days ago?”

  Still dry-eyed, she nodded.

  Julius continued, “Unfortunately there’s far more that I have to tell you. That man sitting to your left is named Willie Andrews. He’s a well-known gangster and your son owes him a great deal of money.”

  Julius leveled his stare at Andrews. Without looking up, Andrews told the room that Brewer owed him six hundred thousand dollars. “He promised his ma’s money and house to cover it. If he killed his sister for the money I know nothing about it.”

  All eyes turned to Brewer, but he didn’t say a word. He just sat looking as if he had an upset stomach.

  “Ma’am,” Julius said, again addressing the mother, “when you saw me the other day, I had the sense that you mistook me for your son-in-law, Thomas Arden.”

  “I don’t know. I might’ve.”

  “I do look somewhat like him.”

  “You’re older than he was when I last saw him,” she said with a weak smile. “But yes, you do resemble him.”

  “Twelve years ago he abandoned your daughter, Helen.”

  She nodded, some wetness appearing around her eyes.

  “Do you know what happened to him?”

  Emma Brewer looked like she was trying to fight back tears. She didn’t say anything.

  “Ma’am, this is no longer a matter of protecting your daughter, Norma. She’s beyond protection. After twelve years it’s time for the truth. From the way you reacted when you thought I was Thomas Arden, it was as if you’d seen a ghost. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Emma Brewer squeezed her eyes shut and nodded.

&n
bsp; “Norma had an affair with him. She murdered him, didn’t she.”

  Helen Arden’s jaw dropped as she stared at her mother. I was dumbfounded—yet another new emotion for me to experience. “How in the world…?” I heard myself asking Julius.

  As if to answer me, Julius explained it to Emma Brewer.

  “After you confused me for Arden, you confused your daughter Helen for Norma. They look nothing alike. I already had my suspicions regarding Norma, but this along with other facts that I uncovered all but told me about the affair.”

  Tears leaked from Emma Brewer’s eyes. “I saw them together once. Norma later confided in me about the affair. Much later, she also told me about what happened to him. According to her it was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t. She had him embezzle half a million dollars from his company, then she killed him for the money.”

  Roger Stromsby spoke up then. Stromsby was CEO of the company Arden stole from, and he confirmed what Julius said. “We suspected Arden, but we couldn’t prove it,” Stromsby added as straight-faced as he could. The real reason was what Julius had said earlier—that they were in fact covering up the theft so as not to scare off investors, but Stromsby wasn’t about to admit that in a room filled with police officers.

  Julius asked Cramer what he had been able to uncover about the business Norma Brewer claimed she had sold.

  “We couldn’t find anything,” Cramer said gruffly.

  Julius turned to Lawrence Brewer. “She didn’t sell a business, did she?”

  Lawrence shifted uneasily in his seat. “No, she didn’t,” he said. “Sometime after Tom disappeared, Norma came to me, telling me she had half a million dollars that she wanted to put into a Swiss bank account. I had no idea where the money came from, she never told me, but I helped her with the transfer. Several years ago, when she took the money out, I set up the fake business sale for her so she could explain the source of the money.”

  Something in my neuron network clicked and I could see as clearly as Julius had all along who the murderer was. I studied her then, and could tell that she wanted nothing more than to bolt from the room, and she probably would’ve if she thought she had enough strength in her legs to do so. Slowly other eyes turned towards her. When her mother joined in, it was too much for her and she seemed to shrink under the weight of it all.

  “You should’ve told me,” Helen Arden seethed at her mother. “The way you looked at me when you called me her name, I knew…”

  She tried running then. It didn’t do her any good. One of the police officers stopped her and had her quickly cuffed. Emma Brewer started to sob then. Cramer helped her out of her chair. He was going to have a lot more questions for her.

  Things went quickly after that.

  The police officers, Andrews and Stromsby cleared out, leaving Julius alone with Henry Zack and Lawrence Brewer, and they quickly reached an agreement whereby Zack transferred guardianship of Brewer’s mother to Zack, as well as agreeing to a new will for his mother that would leave him with no inheritance. He had no choice; it was either agree to all that or have Julius destroy him, and he knew Julius had the means to do so. As it was, he was facing enough legal problems without having Julius after him. Once the paperwork was done and Julius and I were alone, I asked Julius when he suspected Helen Arden.

  “The question you should be asking, Archie, is when I first became suspicious of Norma Brewer, which was immediately.” Julius stopped to sample one of the finer Rieslings that he kept in his cellar. “Boston has more than its share of excellent facilities, so why move her mother to Vermont?”

  “Because she was afraid her mother might give up her secret while in a confused state.”

  “Precisely. And then you had her trying to bluff me, claiming how she didn’t want Helen helping out because she didn’t think her sister could handle it. The woman was a fool to hire me. Regardless of how desperate she might’ve been.”

  “So that’s it. That’s what tipped you off.”

  “There was more.” Julius frowned thinking about it. “It was absolute rubbish about her being afraid her brother would tie up any guardianship challenge in court. She could’ve received an immediate injunction—any competent lawyer would’ve told her that. But her brother obviously had something damning on her. Once I researched the missing brother-in-law, the pieces fell into place.”

  “You knew Helen Arden was going to kill her sister.”

  Julius shrugged. “You never know with something like that. But it was clear that something clicked with her when her mother reacted to me the way she did, and when she mistook her for Norma I could see the light go on in her eyes.”

  “Why the big show?” I asked. “Was it really necessary in order to coax a confession out of her? The woman seemed pretty beaten down as it was.”

  Julius made a face. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “I had no direct evidence linking her to the murder. It was all pure conjecture on my part. More importantly, though, I had another task at hand—and that was seeing that Emma Brewer would be properly taken care of. The only way I could force Lawrence Brewer to cooperate was to hang the threat of a murder charge over his head, the same with Willie Andrews.”

  I digested all this and decided I had a lot of work still to do on my neuron network.

  “Quite a day’s work,” I said. “You solved two murders, one that the police didn’t even know about. And both your clients turned out to be cold-blooded killers.”

  “And one of them found you utterly charming,” Julius said, chuckling.

  “I don’t believe she used the adverb utterly. By the way, why the urgency? Why did this need to be done today?”

  Julius’s smile turned apologetic. “I’m sorry about this, Archie.”

  And blast it! He turned me off!

  Julius turned me back on several hours later. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking him why he had shut me off. Instead, I hacked into his phone company’s billing system and saw that he had placed a two-hour call to Lily Rosten.

  The next day was business as usual. At six-thirty in the evening, Julius unclipped me from his tie, and without any explanation left me in his desk drawer. At seven, he left the townhouse. I called around and found the restaurant he had made dinner reservations for. They were for two. I settled in, not expecting to see him until morning, but again he surprised me by arriving home at midnight. Even more surprising, he was in a good mood about it. He even had me send Lily Rosten another dozen roses.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You obviously struck out, so why so chipper?”

  “Goodnight, Archie,” he said.

  It went on like this for the next three days. When Julius blew off a high-stakes poker game for yet another date with Lily Rosten, I knew something was seriously askew. I’d been trying to uncover this anomaly in his behavior through mathematical models, but I decided to go at it from a different angle and instead search for similar patterns in literature. It was after analyzing the text of a Jane Austen novel that I realized what was going on. Mystery solved. When Julius once again arrived home at midnight, I asked him how his evening went.

  “Very well, Archie, thank you for asking.”

  “You know, we could double date. Why don’t you ask Lily if she has one of those ultra-slim iPods that she could bring along?”

  He chuckled at that. “I just might,” he said.

  “While we’re on the subject, I guess I’ll be needing to update your standard press release,” I said. “Should I remove the reference concerning your being a confirmed bachelor now, or should I wait?”

  That brought out the barest trace of a guilty smile. “Good night, Archie,” he said.

  As I said before, mystery solved.

  ARCHIE’S BEEN FRAMED

  Originally published in the Sept/Oct 2010 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Won 1st place in Ellery Queen’s Readers Choice Awards.

  By itself solving the PanzerCo corporate espionage case had left Juli
us flush with cash, but after following that up with a few very good weeks at the track and an even more exceptional night at a high-stakes poker game, Julius currently had over six months in reserves in his bank account. There was little chance I would be able to talk him into taking another case until his reserves reached a more anemic level, so unless Julius bought Lily Rosten the antique pearl and sapphire necklace he’d been eyeing or was successful in his bid for a case of 1945 Château Petrus or hit a rough patch with his gambling, it was doubtful that I would have another chance to refine the deductive reasoning module for my neuron network for at least another four months.

  Let me explain. While Julius refers to me as Archie, and I act as his private secretary, research assistant, unofficial biographer, and all around man Friday, I am in actuality a two-inch rectangular piece of advanced technology that Julius wears as a tie clip. When I say that I’m made up of advanced technology, I’m not kidding. Any laboratory outside of the one that created me would be amazed at what they discovered if they were allowed to open me up. Not only would they find computer technology that they wouldn’t think possible for at least another twenty years but also a fully functional self-adapting neuron network that simulates intelligence and consciousness, as well as many all-too-human emotions. I don’t think the emotion element was expected, but it’s what has happened, and one of the emotions that I find myself more and more experiencing is desire, specifically the desire to beat my boss, the great detective Julius Katz, at solving a case. So far it hasn’t happened; in fact I haven’t come close yet, but I know if I can keep refining my neuron network eventually, I’ll accomplish this.