The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe

by Josh Pachter

  From the way Luther’s face darkened right then with anger, I understood perfectly why Julius had sighed only seconds earlier. He already knew what the dog-food king’s response was going to be.

  “The hell with that! I’m not having bodyguards following me around and getting in my way. Whoever this bastard is, he might end up killing me, but he’s not going to make me live in fear. But I want to make damn sure that, if he does kill me, he pays for it!”

  Julius tried halfheartedly to change Luther’s mind, but he must’ve known from the start it was a losing fight. As far as Allen Luther was concerned, he wasn’t going to cower for anyone. Besides, it would be a waste of time and money for Julius to look into this, since no evidence was left behind. He was probably right. If someone three weeks ago had slipped a mickey into his drink, it was doubtful Julius would get anywhere trying to identify the person. In the end, Julius accepted the twenty-thousand-dollar retainer with the agreement that, if Luther died in any sort of suspicious manner, Julius would investigate his death, and, if he uncovered the murderer, Luther’s estate would pay Julius a hundred grand. The only concession Julius was able to get from Luther was to allow the police one week to solve his hypothetical murder themselves, assuming that it was a homicide. The reason Julius gave for this was so he wouldn’t unreasonably interfere with the police. Of course that was pure poppycock. Julius had never been bothered about that in the past. I knew his real reason for insisting on this condition was laziness. As I mentioned before, the fee Pritchard of London had paid him got him used to the idea of not doing any work for six more months, and he’d just as soon make twenty grand doing nothing as have to turn his brain back on for any additional sum of money, even a hundred grand.

  That’s what happened ninety-two days ago. Thanks to Julius’s recommendation, Allen Luther ended up hiring Willie Cather full-time to track down threats against his prizewinning bulldog, which was a task that Willie was more than capable of. Willie’s a smart guy. Not as smart as he thinks he is, but still, a smart guy, and whenever Julius needs an investigator to do some legwork for him he’ll usually hire Willie if Tom Durkin and Saul Penzer aren’t available. While it seemed crazy to me that Luther was willing to spend money to protect his bulldog and not himself, it also seemed doubtful that anyone was actually trying to kill him. Slipping cyanide into a drink? Trying to run him down in the street? I didn’t buy it. Given the limited data I had, I put the odds at roughly 0.04 percent that he was in danger.

  It turned out my algorithm wasn’t as good as I thought it was, because, seven days and three and a half hours ago, Allen Luther was found dead in his office. And there was nothing mysterious about it: he was beaten to death with a can of his own dog food.

  Given two factors—the layout of the penthouse suite where Allen Luther’s office was located and the fact that all elevator access to the penthouse was monitored—there were only five possible people who could’ve murdered him: his son-in-law, Michael Beecher; his vice president of marketing, Sheila Fenn; his vice president of sales, Arnold Murz; his receptionist, Allison Harper; and a mysterious and currently unidentified deliveryman. Also, it turned out there was a witness to the murder: Brutus. When Sheila Fenn discovered the body, she found the dog tied up in the office in a highly agitated state. Given that the office was soundproofed and the dog was so strangled by his leash in his attempt to break free that he could barely let out a whimper, it was understandable that no one had heard him.

  With all the chaos and confusion at the time of the murder, the police had the dog removed from the crime scene without realizing they had a witness. It wasn’t until the following day that they thought of using Brutus to identify the murderer. But when Willie, who was charged with Brutus’s protection, brought the bulldog back to the office, the dog didn’t so much as growl at any of the four known murder suspects, which was one of the reasons the police were convinced the murderer must be the fifth suspect, the mysterious deliveryman. They had other reasons, too. The package that had been delivered was empty, and the surveillance cameras outside the building as well as inside the lobby didn’t pick up any deliverymen, making the police think the killer might have changed into and out of his delivery uniform while inside the elevator.

  The day after the murder, Luther’s lawyer announced to the media that the police would have one week to find the killer before Julius would be brought in, which went over as you’d expect with the police. Ten minutes after the announcement, Detective Cramer called the office, sputtering out a tirade of threats and accusations. While I doubted Julius cared about Cramer’s hurt feelings, I knew he would’ve preferred the lawyer to hold off on this announcement, as it gave the murderer additional incentive to spend the week cleaning up any loose ends. It was an unfortunate event, but one Julius couldn’t do anything about.

  When news of the murder first broke, I gave Julius a full report on what I was able to find from hacking into the Cambridge Police Department’s computer system, and I was surprised to see his facial features hardening as if he were carved out of marble. This meant his brain was working at full force on the case, and it lasted for thirty-four seconds. I didn’t expect Julius to be willing to mentally exert himself until the police had used up their full week. Likewise when I told him how Brutus had failed to pick out any of the four known suspects as the murderer, although this time his deep thinking lasted only twenty-two seconds. Outside of those fifty-six seconds, Julius spent the rest of the week as if he didn’t have a client who had just been murdered. I couldn’t blame him, since the deal he’d made with Luther required him to wait a week, which was why I kept my needling to a minimum. I still reported relevant information as I discovered it, such as how the mysterious deliveryman/killer could’ve made his way unnoticed to Luther’s office: Allison Harper had gotten a call from Michael Beecher to bring him coffee while the deliveryman was having her sign for the package. While she waited until the man returned to the elevator before leaving her desk, the killer could’ve held the elevator for half a minute or so before reentering the now empty reception area. When I told Julius my theory that, if Harper hadn’t gotten the call from Beecher when she did, the killer might very well have murdered her, too, so he could get to Luther, Julius grudgingly agreed that it was possible.

  Now for the reason I’m so peeved right now. Or miffed. Or deeply insulted. There have been a few occasions where I’ve pestered Julius to the point where he has turned me off. While I might believe I was well within my rights during those times, I can also understand Julius’s point of view, where he might’ve thought I’d pushed things too far. This time, though, I had simply told Julius that it was exactly one week since Luther’s murder was discovered, and that the police were holding Brutus in the hoosegow as a material witness. “If you’d like, I’ll give Cramer a call and see if he’ll let you question the witness.”

  It was a joke. Maybe I was slightly annoyed that, outside of those fifty-six seconds, Julius had done nothing to look into Luther’s murder, and maybe I was needling him a little bit, but still, it was mostly a joke. So you can understand how surprised I was when Julius said, “I’m sorry about this, Archie,” and my world went black.

  It’s always disorienting when I’m turned back on after having been shut off, and this time it took me four-tenths of a second to get my bearings. Once I did, I realized I was feeling an overwhelming sense of being flabbergasted. This was a feeling I had experienced before, so I had no trouble recognizing it. Julius had turned me off for three minutes and forty-seven seconds, and, when I hacked into his phone records, I found that he had placed a call to Tom Durkin during that time. At first, I was too flabbergasted to ask about it, but as the feeling faded and was replaced by feelings of being peeved or miffed or injured, I didn’t want to give Julius the satisfaction of asking him anything. And over the following three and a half hours, nothing changed.

  Julius had finished assembling a prosciutto, mozzarella, and basil sa
ndwich on a ciabatta roll, and I waited until he drizzled virgin olive oil on the contents and had the sandwich lifted to take a bite of it before saying, “You never answered me earlier about whether I should check to see if Cramer is willing to let you question their star witness.”

  I almost didn’t recognize my own voice. It had an unusual stilted and cold quality to it, and, when I compared it to samples from a movie database, I understood which of the three emotions I’d been feeling since being turned off. Injured. Julius smiled thinly at my question—either he was surprised that I’d finally resumed talking to him, or he understood that I’d timed my question to interfere with his enjoyment of his caprese prosciutto sandwich. “An excellent suggestion, Archie,” he said. “Please do call him.”

  I had no idea whether Julius was joking or simply humoring me. Whichever it was, I didn’t care. I was going to teach him a lesson by calling Cramer and making that request, but another call came in that stopped me, and, as I realized who was calling, a chill ran through me—or at least that was what I imagined. Whatever feeling of injury I’d had disappeared immediately. I answered the call and told Julius that the one whose name should not be mentioned was on the line. From the way his body stiffened in his chair, he knew who I was referring to. Desmond Grushnier. Possibly the most powerful and dangerous man alive. Without waiting for Julius to ask me to do so, I patched the call to Julius’s earpiece.

  “You’re interrupting my lunch,” Julius said.

  Grushnier chuckled at that. “I could be doing a lot more than that. But first, the 1990 Château Beauséjour Duffau-Lagarrosse that you won on auction. Was the case delivered to you this morning?”

  “I’m sure you already know the answer to that,” Julius said, stiffly.

  “Once again, Katz, you’re right.” There was a hesitation from Grushnier, then: “And the fact that you’re able to speak to me now on the phone tells me that you haven’t opened the crate yet. I’d like you to know up front that I had nothing to do with this, nor do I know who’s behind it, and I only learned of it an hour ago. The reason I didn’t call you sooner was that I’ve been trying to decide whether it’s more to my advantage for you to live or die. You should be happy to know that, for now, I’d rather have you alive.”

  “The crate contains a bomb?”

  “Yes. A crude but effective one, with enough C-4 and accelerant to incinerate everything within your townhouse.” There was another pause, then: “If the information I’ve received is correct, you have, hmm, twenty-three seconds before the bomb detonates.”

  Grushnier disconnected the call from his end, and Julius moved quickly. He left his sandwich and decanting Malbec on the countertop, and hurried to the hall closet for a coat, scarf, and wool cap, and then he raced back to the kitchen and the back door that led to his private garden. As he did this, he asked me to back up all the data I keep on a hard drive in his office to an offsite location and save the outdoor webcam feeds. “Also originate a phone call from the office line to Detective Cramer,” he further instructed.

  I did what he asked, but I wasn’t convinced there was a bomb waiting to go off in his wine cellar. From what I knew about Desmond Grushnier, it didn’t seem either in his nature or in his interest to warn Julius about a bomb if he really had found out about one. But I couldn’t figure out what other motive he might’ve had for calling. Of course, that didn’t mean he didn’t have one.

  A case of wine had been delivered in a crate at nine forty-five this morning. If Julius had carried the crate down to his wine cellar himself, maybe he would’ve detected something if it truly contained a bomb, but, since the crate was strapped onto a two-wheel hand truck, he’d paid the deliveryman twenty dollars to bring it down to the cellar for him. As I examined the video I’d recorded, I couldn’t detect anything to confirm or contradict the existence of a bomb.

  According to Grushnier’s warning, there were still seven seconds left when Julius exited the back door of his townhouse and stepped into his snow-covered garden. I started the countdown then, and Julius quickened his pace. By the time I reached one, he had gotten to the far end of the garden and ducked behind an elm tree.

  When I reached zero, nothing happened.

  I waited five more seconds before telling Julius he was clearly the victim of a hoax. “I don’t know what Grushnier’s motive was. Maybe he was just trying to see if he could make you dance on command,” I said.

  A deafening explosion rocked the ground. The windows in the back of Julius’s townhouse shattered, and a large fireball burst through the kitchen floor. I tried looking at the indoor webcam feeds to better understand the damage being done, but the feeds were dead. Most likely the webcams had been melted by the heat. If we had been anywhere inside the townhouse, I would’ve survived the explosion due to my titanium outer shell, but Julius would’ve died.

  “Wow.” That was the only word I could get out. Wow. For the next three hundred milliseconds, I felt an odd dull prickly sensation within my neuron network that could best be described as numbness. I forced myself to shake it away. “I was able to examine the outdoor webcam feeds up to the moment of the explosion,” I said. “There was no one passing by the building who could’ve been injured by the blast. I was also unable to find anyone out front watching for this, so either the bomber was watching from outside the range of the webcams or he felt confident that you’d be inside and hence had no reason to watch for your escape. From my preliminary calculations, there might be some structural damage to the neighboring townhouses, but the firewalls between yours and theirs should keep the fire contained to your property only.”

  Julius stood grimly watching his home and everything he owned go up in flames. After several seconds, he turned away. “Archie, call Lily for me, but make it look as if the call is originating from another state and from a number other than my cell phone. When she answers, patch me through.”

  “Sure. I can do that. What state and what phone number?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Up until then, Julius must’ve forgotten that he was carrying his coat, scarf and cap. He slipped this outerwear on and jumped up high enough to grab the top of a seven-foot-high fence that provided privacy for his garden. After pulling himself over the fence, he landed in the alley below.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Julius sat in an apartment above the downtown Boston restaurant that his childhood friend Phil Weinstein owned and took a sip of the brandy that Weinstein had poured for him. By this time, it was all over the news that Julius’s home had been bombed, and the early reports had Julius perishing in the fire. Of course, that was why Julius had me place a call to Cramer—he wanted the police to think that he was in his office at the time of the explosion. With the intensity of the fire and all three levels of his townhouse collapsing to the basement, it was going to take the police days to sift through the rubble as they searched for Julius’s body, which meant that, for the next few days, the bomber was going to believe that he had succeeded in his task. Which was precisely what Julius wanted.

  As Julius walked swiftly past forty-seven other pedestrians, making his way from the alley behind his bombed-out Beacon Hill townhouse to the back entrance of Weinstein’s restaurant, he had his scarf covering his mouth, his cap pulled down almost to his eyes, and his head lowered, so it was doubtful anyone recognized him; at least I didn’t spot as much as a gleam of recognition in any of the people who walked by him. So, at that moment, only three people knew he was still alive: Weinstein, Tom Durkin, and Lily.

  Lily knew because I had called her as Julius had asked. Since she’s the only person who knows what I really am—outside of Julius and the scientists who created me—it didn’t take Julius long to explain why the call appeared to come from her parents’ home in Rochester, New York. I had also analyzed enough voice samples to recognize that she was struggling stoically to keep from crying when Julius told her what had happened and why he needed
the world—or, more specifically, his attempted murderer—to believe that he was dead for the next several days. From the way the muscles along Julius’s mouth and jaw tightened, I was pretty sure he too recognized that Lily was on the verge of crying, but I made no attempt to confirm this.

  Tom knew that Julius had survived the bombing since Julius had me pull the same trick with him that I had with Lily. Once Tom was on the phone, Julius explained to him what had happened. “Your assignment has become even more imperative,” Julius said.

  “This same person is responsible for the bomb?” Tom asked, his voice strained with an emotion I easily recognized as anger.

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  “Whatever it takes, Julius. I’ll work this day and night if I have to.”

  Any sense of injury or peevishness or insult that I had felt earlier over discovering that Julius had turned me off so he could put Tom on the case without my knowing the particulars disappeared entirely the moment the bomb exploded. I didn’t ask Julius at that time what he had put Tom on—I figured he had enough on his mind without having to deal with any perceived pestering from me, but I also found it difficult doing as little as I was doing towards finding the man who had tried to murder my boss. If Julius had a lead on the mysterious fifth suspect, I wanted to know what it was, and it wasn’t so I could beat Julius in finding Luther’s murderer, but only because I badly wanted to see the person brought to justice. I waited, though, until after Phil Weinstein left to return to the restaurant’s kitchen before telling Julius what I had discovered since the explosion.

  “If the mysterious fifth suspect was a hired hit man like the police think, then whoever paid him probably had time to siphon off cash so the transaction could be kept hidden,” I said. “But that’s not going to be the case with this bombing. Our Mr. X must’ve panicked when he found out that you were going to be looking into Luther’s murder starting today, and most likely he had to move faster than he would’ve liked in arranging for you to be bumped off. And yeah, I know, I’m using Mr. and he in a gender-neutral way, and we could be looking for a Ms. X, but that doesn’t change the fact that that type of bombing wouldn’t have come cheap, especially if it was outsourced to a hit man. There’s a good chance that we’ll be able to find a financial trail leading back to the person responsible for this, and so I’ve been hacking into recent banking records of suspects from a list I’ve compiled, and I’ve found some interesting stuff.”