EQMM, September-October 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  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.

  "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 with 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 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 by 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 Emma Brewer 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 first 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 of 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 uncl
ipped 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.

  Copyright © 2009 Dave Zeltserman

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  Fiction: LONDON CALLING by Cheryl Rogers

  "This story is set in London, where I lived in the early ‘80s,” writes Cheryl Rogers. “Fortunately, my family saved letters sent home and I was able to use them to try to create a believable sense of time and place. I've also tried to capture the voice of a quintessential ‘innocent abroad’ in the protagonist, Rosie. She and I share a lot of experiences, but she is, of course, a work of fiction.” Ms. Rogers now lives in Western Australia; one of her stories will appear soon in Australian Woman's Day.

  Hyde Park's a paradise, with trees turning golden and squirrels ferreting around for nuts. One of the vege sellers down the Portobello Road, the one who sells those sweet fen carrots, reckons it's a sign of a hard winter...

  * * * *

  Snow came early in London that year, just before Harley moved in. A pilot, or so he claimed. With his brash smile and distressed lea-ther bomber jacket, complete with lamb's-wool trim, he certainly looked the part.

  The house was in a leafy garden terrace between Notting Hill and Kensington High Street. A four-storey, white stucco wedding cake. On a wide and quiet street where lines of prunus marked the seasons. Footpaths generous enough to take the whole cast of My Fair Lady. I read somewhere that it sold recently for a cool 3.5 million pounds. Phillip always said one day it'd be worth squillions.

  The dear old girl had been carved up into bedsits when Phillip and I lived there, in separate rooms. This was in the early eighties. The Prince and Princess of Wales were newlyweds, ensconced in Kensington Palace, just a stone's throw away. My first-floor room measured two paces by six paces and cost twenty-five quid a week. A bargain. Dissection had not robbed that house of any of her dignity and I considered it a privilege to nestle in her bosom.

  I was among a group of young overseas travelers squirreling up for winter. On honeymoon too, in a sense. We'd qualified in our chosen professions, spent a few years building careers, then taken off to spend a gap year around Europe. A few months of freedom sandwiched between the trammels of parental love and the burden of other kinds of love that had yet to claim us.

  We were the quintessential innocents abroad. We'd come from all parts of the globe and met through that summer in cheap hotels and hostels, swapping our brief and brilliant histories over bitter coffees in rooms we dared not describe in calls home to Mother.

  This place is an absolute bargain. 4.50 pounds per night includes a full English breakfast, so that saves on lunch. Brilliant value and it's self-catering. Best of all, it's walking distance for the girls working at Fenwick's, a really classy department store, in Mayfair. Caris (the English teacher I told you about, from Jo'burg) was vacuuming in the lingerie section yesterday and accidentally sucked up a silk camisole!

  We didn't mention that the “absolute bargain” was 110 steps up from the ground floor. That we were jammed in four to a room and there was a patch of soggy carpet by the hand basin. Nor that the fire alarm went off whenever someone cooked toast, so we ignored it.

  Friendships between total strangers forged fast in these environments. Survive a week in a four-bed room in any cheap hotel and you melded at the hip. Loyalties sprang up to buffer us against the end of summer when, inevitably, we'd go our separate ways.

  We did things we'd never dream of doing back home. My ambitions in journalism were put on hold for the convenience and flexibility of temporary secretarial work. I worked as I wanted, where I was needed, filling gaps created by glandular fevers, appendectomies, personality clashes, company mergers, and relocations.

  My shorthand and typing speeds were nippy enough to land jobs where I earned enough to satisfy my appetite for West End theatre, poking about in antiquarian bookshops, modest shopping trips to Harrods, that sort of thing. By watching the pence and walking virtually everywhere, I could afford to live the dream. For a bit.

  With the optimism and confidence of youth, it didn't worry me a jot that I was constantly the new girl doing battle with typewriters that had seen service when the Ark was a dinghy.

  ...private secretary to the Energy Conservation Executive. Spent the day typing “Please turn off after use” signs and sticking them next to the light switches in all the toilets. On an elderly, manual Remington—he says it saves power.

  ...now working in Customer Relations, another way of saying Complaints. Had a letter from a customer who found a spider's leg in their fresh-cream apple tart. Have sent leg off to the laboratory for analysis...

  I met Phillip there. We shared a laugh by the drinks vending machine over the spider's leg. He was a winsome, pale New Zealander, working in Accounts. Gran always said you had to watch the quiet ones, but there was an innocence about Phillip that made me feel protective of him, even though I was a year younger. His girlfriend was flying over the next spring and they were planning to Eurail down to the Greek Islands. He was living in “a fab house” in Kensington and rode a yellow, ten-speed racer to work.

  I saw Phillip, occasionally, after that. As I strode out in my one good pair of boots along Praed Street, he'd brrring his bell and whiz past.

  "Hiya, Rosie,” he'd yell, the wind rippling his wheat-colored hair as he dodged the traffic.

  "Red bikes go faster, Phillip,” I'd holler after him.

  ...lab results came back on that spider's leg. Turns out it was a sliver of apple core. Have sent complainant a copy of results and a dozen fresh-cream apple tarts as goodwill. Hope they don't choke.

  When the leaves began to yellow in the royal parks I traipsed through regularly en route to any one of those temp jobs, I knew I had to find digs. And some longer-term employment to finance winter.

  The pack I'd been traveling with was making plans to scatter. Bridget was going to work as a nanny in Devon, saving hard for a ski trip to Austria. Vonnie and Christina decided to flat-share in Oxford. Gym-junkie Mitch scored a live-in job as a bouncer somewhere in the Midlands. Ever-theatrical Caris won a position in Bristol after replying to an ad in The Lady: “Responsible person required to look after nine small dogs while owner in hospital."

  All that walking through summer had sharpened my appetite for London and its charms. Samuel Johnson's words suddenly made sense: “...if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but m
ust survey the innumerable little lanes and courts..."

  I had my one pair of walking boots resoled and reheeled—yet again—and registered my intentions with the secretarial agency. They gave me the address of a firm near Victoria Station. Industrial chemists, producing agrichemicals. The pay was 85 pounds per week, immediate start. If both parties were satisfied after a week, the job was mine until Christmas.

  The office was compact, as befitted the London base of a company whose headquarters were tucked away in the Home Counties. It was adjacent to a small laboratory where new products were put through the final stages of testing before registration. One look at those chilling skull-and-crossbones symbols and my stomach churned.

  "Killing juice.” The staff member introduced as the sales manager picked up on my mood. A dapper little man, he reminded me of a sharply dressed bookie. “Potent on weeds."

  I suppressed a shiver. “And people?"

  "Just the stuff to knock off an obsolete boyfriend.” He nudged me and winked. “He'll think he's coming down with flu, then...” At this point he raised his right hand and pretended to strangle himself, gagging, eyes round as ping-pong balls.

  The chief executive shot him a filthy look, then picked up a vial of liquid that looked as benign as water.

  "Before this is released, it's infused with a brightly coloured dye, a strong odour, and an emetic.” He smiled at me kindly. “Last thing we need is an unhappy accident."

  I shuddered. Then I glanced at the work station. Warmth suffused my soul. The typewriter was a brand spanking new IBM electric with cassette ribbon and auto-correction tape. My fingers caressed its keys. I was smitten.

  Caris and Bridget are catching the train west tomorrow. We all had dinner at The Three Lanterns, a brilliant-value Greek restaurant near Haymarket. They do the best moussaka. Then we walked to The Waldorf for a gin squash before heading to The Strand Theatre. No Sex Please, We're British. None of us felt like laughing.