DiNatale didn’t argue. Cracking the murder of a celebrity, even if it was only a minor celebrity like Kingston, would draw far bigger ratings than finding a missing runaway girl, even one who’d been missing for two years. There wasn’t a chance, though, the case would crack before Burke returned. Julius had earlier promised him that much. That no matter what he’d wait until Burke was back before he’d point out the murderer. If he needed to, he’d stall for time. Burke left then. He and Julius accomplished what they needed to—freeing him up to investigate Stephen Herston without his camera crew or anyone else being any wiser to the fact.
Julius spent most of the next hour reading his top secret book that Saul had finagled out of New York. At one point I found myself alone with him when the camera crew left to take another cigarette break and Cramer and the two cops with him went outside also, presumably to stretch their legs but most likely to consult on a host of matters, including how they were going to handle the search warrants. They were too far away from the outdoor webcam for me to read their lips, but I was guessing that was what they were talking about so heatedly. I used the opportunity to ask Julius if he was enjoying his reading.
“Very enlightening, Archie,” he murmured softly, his eyes glued to the book.
“From the fact that you’re not grimacing like you did when you read his other, I take it you’re enjoying this one more.”
“Yes, Archie, I’d say so. A marked improvement. I might even agree with Ms. Chase that it’s beautifully crafted.”
“What do you know, I wouldn’t have thought Kingston had it in him. I have to give him credit also. He certainly wasn’t exaggerating when he told you these people all wanted to kill him. At least each of these last four had strong motives. What about Mable? Anything other than the obvious, which would be professional jealousy? Because I don’t think a judge is going to issue a search warrant based solely on jealousy as a motive for murder.”
“We’ll see soon enough.”
“Okay.” I paused, then asked, “There never was any wisp, was there?”
He raised an eyebrow at that. “What do you mean, Archie?”
“That so-called wisp you were trying to grasp onto. I’m not going to insult you by asking whether Richardson’s narcissistic personality was that wisp, since in retrospect it was obvious.”
“Thank you, Archie. And yes, his narcissism was no wisp. It came off of him in waves the same as if he’d been doused in cologne.”
“So it was all a bluff,” I said. “Your game plan all along was to create enough reasonable doubt in all these suspects so Cramer can get search warrants for their homes?”
“Is that how it appears to you, Archie?”
“Yeah, that’s how it looks. It’s not a bad ploy. We might find the gun that way. But what if we don’t? Or what if midnight rolls around and Cramer still hasn’t been able to get his search warrants? I admit, it’s a decent bet and everything, but it’s no guarantee. You could still come out looking bad from this.”
“You’re right, Archie,” Julius said with a sigh. “There’s no guarantee that searching their homes will get us that gun. We’ll see. And it’s not midnight yet.”
So there it was. He still wasn’t going to admit straight out that his wisp was a bluff. At that moment it was a quarter past ten. He had an hour and forty-five minutes to produce a murderer or come off as a laughingstock, and I put the odds at no better than fifty-fifty of that happening. Not terrible odds, but not the kind you want to bet your reputation on. As Julius had said before, the gun could easily have been hidden outside the killer’s home, so this ploy could turn out to be completely worthless. I didn’t feel too good about it, but Cramer had reentered the office, so I didn’t bother commenting any further. What would’ve been the point?
Chapter 24
Jonathan Mable was there at ten-thirty as promised. Burke wasn’t. He called Julius to tell him he was being held up and would probably be a half hour late, but for Julius to start without him. That he didn’t want to be responsible for Julius missing his midnight deadline. Julius promised to fill him in on any relevant details on his return.
Unlike with Herbert Richardson, Julius had no problem offering Mable one of the remaining sandwiches, although there were now four less of them as both members of the camera crew took extra ones during their break, as did the two uniformed cops accompanying Cramer. Kingston’s ex-writing partner declined a sandwich but did accept coffee. He was dressed casually in jeans, tee shirt and tennis sneakers, but he didn’t look very casual. He looked worn out and tired. Especially tired. As if he hadn’t slept the last couple of nights. At forty-four, Mable was five years younger than Kingston had been. He was tall; according to his driver’s license, six foot seven inches. He was also thin, almost bean-pole like. I had his weight at a hundred and seventy-three pounds. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, had a long face, long nose, and a sallow complexion, and was mostly balding with only a fringe of close-cropped reddish-brown hair. It looked to me like he tried to make up for the lack of hair on his scalp by wearing a beard and mustache that were trimmed close to his skin. As he sat across from Julius, his long body mostly sagged in his chair. Julius waited until Mable took a few sips of his coffee before he started with his questioning. The coffee didn’t seem to perk the writer up any.
“When you were here two days ago, you claimed your feelings towards your ex-writing partner were mostly indifference. Are you still saying that?”
Mable took off his glasses so he could tiredly rub his eyes. Like the rest of him, his fingers were long and thin. He stared bleary-eyed at Julius for a few seconds before carefully placing his glasses back on the ridge of his nose.
“Why wouldn’t I be saying that?” he asked.
“We’ll get to that soon enough,” Julius said. “You and Kenneth Kingston were writing partners for five years?”
“That’s right. Five years and three books.”
“The two of you had moderate success together.”
Mable smiled wanly at that. “Some,” he agreed.
“Whose decision was it to split up?”
“A mutual decision. We both had different objectives with our writing.”
“And what would those be?”
More of Mable’s wan smile. “Ken had more commercial goals. I wanted to be truer to my artistic vision. Don’t get me wrong, I want to make money at this too, but I want to put out books I can be proud of.”
“I see,” Julius said. He leaned further back in his chair, his fingers interlaced and resting on his stomach. “But still, it would only be human nature for you to feel some jealously towards him and the success he was having, even if his last book sure as hell tanked, as you made a point of telling me during our last talk.”
“That wasn’t very nice of me, was it?” Mable said. “But no, I don’t think there was jealousy involved. Envy, maybe, but not jealousy. While it would’ve been nice to have had some of the money Ken was making, I wouldn’t have wanted my name on the books he was publishing. Especially that last one that tanked so badly. But to be fair, it still did far better in sales than my first book, which tanked even worse.”
“How did you and Kingston get along after your split?”
“No fisticuffs, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“No. I was asking more about what type of relationship you still had with him.”
“We’d run into each other occasionally and were civil to each other. We’d make small talk. Not much more than that.”
A call came in then from Tom Durkin. I told Tom that Julius was in the middle of questioning a suspect. “Don’t worry,” Tom told me. “I’m just relaying a message. Julius won’t have to answer me back.” I patched Tom in, and he told Julius it was set. Hook, line and sinker. Julius scratched at his thumb which was a signal for me to tell Tom that the message was received loud and clear, so I did that. For the next minute Julius’s eyes dulled as he sat completely still, his features hardening as if he were carved ou
t of marble. I felt my processing cycles skip a beat as I knew what that meant. When his eyes came back to life, he considered Mable for another minute. During those two minutes the office had become as quiet as any morgue. Finally, Julius broke the silence.
He said, “You had a fire fourteen months ago. Tell me about that.”
The thought of doing that seemed to exhaust Mable, at least from the way his body sagged even more in his chair. Or maybe it was the oppressive threat of Julius’s silence that he had just endured.
“There’s not much to tell you,” the author said, his voice sounding every bit as exhausted as he looked. “I had a house in Waltham and an electrical fire burnt it down. I lost everything. After that I decided to move back to the city to start over, and am now renting an apartment on Tremont Street in the South End.”
“When you say you lost everything, that includes a book you’d been working on?”
Mable nodded. “Probably not too hard to figure out since my first one without Ken came out seven years ago. Yeah, I was working on my second book for five years.”
“What state was it in?”
Mable showed more of his wan smile. “I had it finished and was letting it sit for a few months before I’d go through one last editing pass. And I lost it in the fire with everything else.”
“Did you show it to anyone? Or maybe tell anyone what it was about?”
“No. I never do that. Not until I send it to my agent. Call it a quirk of mine.”
“Did Kingston know about this quirk?”
“Yep. Ken was the exact opposite. One of the many differences between us that doomed our writing partnership.”
“But you told Kingston about your latest book?”
Mable’s eyes grew cautious behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Not what it was about,” he said. “But yes, a year and a half ago I ran into Ken and told him I was finishing up a book that I thought was going to do very well, both commercially and at a literary level. I guess it was my envy rearing its ugly head that made me tell him.”
Julius opened a desk drawer and pulled from it the manuscript that had been delivered to his home earlier that evening. He tossed it towards Mable, with the thick stack of papers making a thud as it hit the desk.
“You might find that interesting,” Julius told him.
Mable picked it up. If the book title meant anything to him, he didn’t show it by his expression. As he started reading the manuscript, his hands began shaking and he stopped looking exhausted. He was three pages into it when he looked from it to Julius, his facial expression a mix of bewilderment and outrage.
“You wrote that, didn’t you?” Julius said.
Mable nodded. He had a hard time finding his voice. He had to swallow three times before he could. “This is my book that was supposed to have been destroyed in the fire,” he said.
It was ten minutes later that Burke arrived back at Julius’s townhouse. After he took his seat up front near Julius, Julius filled him in on the relevant details. That Kenneth Kingston had broken into Jonathan Mable’s home, stolen the book his ex-partner had been working on so he could pass it off as his own, and set fire to the house. Julius then turned to Mable and asked him when he first learned of this. Mable shook his head, but otherwise didn’t answer him.
“It’s of no matter,” Julius said. He glanced at his watch to see that it was ten minutes past eleven. He told Cramer that he was ready to name Kingston’s murderer.
Chapter 25
Julius might very well have solved the murder with fifty minutes to spare, but he wasn’t going to say anything until everything was arranged the way he wanted it. It took thirty-two minutes before Cramer had all the suspects gathered in the office, as well as four other uniformed police officers, which brought the total to six suspects and seven cops. Julius’s office was a spacious room, but with all those people it was beginning to feel cramped, and it gave DiNatale and Cantrell even less space to be unobtrusive in.
The seating had Burke nearby Julius as he’d been throughout the late afternoon and evening, with the suspects and Cramer taking the front seats, and the other cops lining the back. Julius waited until two more men entered his office before he began. These two stood quietly against the back wall. One of them was thick-bodied and carried an extra thirty pounds of weight more than he should have; the other was five foot five and had a slight build. I knew who these two were since I often talked with them over the phone and wired them funds for services rendered. Tom Durkin and Saul Penzer, two of the best freelance PIs in the business, Saul maybe the best at shadowing a suspect, bar none. Tom was the bigger of the two, while Saul was as lean as a knife blade. I should’ve known Saul was back in Boston. He wouldn’t have trusted the manuscript with a delivery service and would’ve brought it back from New York himself. Julius must’ve arranged with him this morning the exact time for the manuscript to be brought to his door, and Saul must’ve arranged for a local delivery guy to do the job, and probably watched him to make sure there were no screw-ups.
By the time Saul and Tom took their places, Julius had only fourteen minutes left to his deadline, so if search warrants were needed, he wasn’t going to make it. He looked around the room and thanked the gathering in his office for their indulgence, especially given the lateness of the hour.
“All of you except one person here have been inconvenienced, and in some cases, far worse than inconvenienced,” he said, his gaze moving slowly among the front row of suspects. “I apologize for any offense due to my earlier questioning, but it was necessary to catch this culprit, and that is the person your animus should be directed towards.”
Herbert Richardson let out a loud snort. I guess it was meant to be a snort of derision, but with the sheen of sweat glistening along his forehead and the nervousness shining in his eyes, I tried harder to find a connection between that manuscript showing up at Julius’s door and Richardson being the killer, because that manuscript certainly seemed to be the key to this. I couldn’t find one, though, and all my simulations kept coming up with Jonathan Mable as the one who shot Kingston in the heart. Julius ignored Richardson’s rudeness and kept going.
“While I told the police this, I never told any of you why Kenneth Kingston hired me,” he said. “His purported reason was to help him engage in a publicity stunt for his upcoming book. His plan was to arrange for the five of you, plus Paul Burke, to arrive at my office, and then he would accuse one of you of plotting to murder him—”
There was another snort then. This time it came from Cramer, and it wasn’t a snort of derision but of anger. Gritting his teeth, he checked his watch, saw that Julius still had twelve minutes, and swallowed back what he wanted to say. Julius waited five seconds to make sure Cramer would remain quiet, and then his gaze moved back to the suspects. He continued.
“According to Kingston all of you had a motive for wanting to kill him. I was to make a show of questioning each of you and then, after being stumped, Kingston would jump in and solve the case. It possibly could’ve worked, but I found it demeaning and turned him down, at least initially. When he offered me an outrageous amount of money to perform this charade, I grew suspicious that he had a different agenda for wanting to hire me, especially since he already had a relationship with Burke and could’ve hired him for far less money, and the stunt would’ve been equally effective. I had other suspicions for why this wasn’t what he claimed it to be. When Kingston raised his offer to an even more outrageous sum, and then in effect doubled it, it left me in no doubt that he was after something far different from what he was telling me. While I had no interest in any amount of money to play his stooge, I accepted his offer with the expectation of earning the money by keeping him alive and, just as importantly to me, keeping him from committing a serious felony that I suspected him of planning. I miscalculated badly, though. I thought I’d have until my gathering with all of you this past Thursday to bring the real issues to the fore, but either Kingston acted recklessly before then, or his k
iller acted boldly. In either case, Kingston was shot before our meeting, and while I had an idea then who his killer was, I had little hope that I’d be able to do anything about it. In fact, the odds seemed so infinitesimally small for my catching this killer—at least with evidence that could convict him—that I saw it as pointless to even try. That changed when this person shot at me. Three shots, actually. It not only confirmed my suspicions, but it germinated in me a thin wisp of an idea of how to catch this individual, and equally, made me determined to do so. Without that attempt on my life, it is very likely this person would’ve gotten away with murdering Kingston, as well as other crimes, both past ones and future crimes that were planned.”
The doorbell rang. Another freelance detective, Willie Cather, stood there with a large, doughy-looking man of about fifty. Willie was mostly reliable and did reasonable work, but Julius’s preferences would always lean to Tom or Saul, and Willie would be hired either if the other two weren’t available or a third man was needed. He was thirty-seven, and was smartly dressed, as he was every time I’d seen him. That night he wore a tan linen suit and brown dress shoes that matched his chestnut-colored hair. From comparisons with photos of Hollywood stars, I knew he was good-looking, but he wasn’t as good-looking as he thought he was. He wasn’t as good a detective as he thought he was either. I told Julius who was at the door, since I knew the name of the doughy-looking man that Willie Cather had brought. I knew this since I found his mug shot earlier that day. Julius asked Cramer if he could send one of his men to answer the door and bring these new guests back to his office. Cramer growled out an order to one of the uniformed cops. He was still steaming from hearing the details of Kingston’s planned publicity stunt and knowing that Julius kept it from him.
Once Willie and the doughy man were brought into the room, the office was officially crowded. Willie stood against the wall next to Saul. The other man took the last remaining seat, and he didn’t look too comfortable as he sat between two cops. Julius continued then with only ten minutes left in his deadline.
Julius Katz and Archie Page 21