The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe

by Josh Pachter

  Julius nodded solemnly. “Proceed, please.”

  “Okay. As you know, one of Allen Luther’s enemies, Thomas Pike, died eighteen years ago, and it makes sense that one of Pike’s family members might have harbored a strong enough grudge to pay for Luther’s murder. His only daughter died ten years ago at the age of eighteen in a car crash in the Bronx, but his widow is still alive. She remarried and is living in Los Angeles, but I struck out finding any unusual money transfers. Same with Pike’s only living sibling, a younger brother named Wayne. Still, though, I think both of them warrant further investigation. Luther’s other business enemy that you know of, Andrew Nevin, is a different story. Twenty-seven months ago, he withdrew ten thousand dollars in cash from a brokerage account, and he did the same thing each of the next three months. Forty grand might be enough to pay for a murder and a bomb.”

  “Nevin must be a patient man if he waited all that time before hiring a hit man,” Julius said with a faint smile.

  If I had shoulders I would’ve shrugged, but since I didn’t I could only imagine myself doing so. “Or a cautious man,” I said. “Or an indecisive one. But Pike and Nevin weren’t the only ones I looked at. Three of the other four suspects also could’ve hired a hit man.”

  “Very good, Archie,” Julius said, approvingly. “It would be an interesting sleight of hand to have the police discount you for hiring a hit man because you were also one of the few at the murder site.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. The only one I was able to rule out right away is the receptionist, Allison Harper. She’s been there eighteen months, has three hundred and twenty-nine dollars and change in her checking account, and after figuring in her taxes, rent, auto payments, utilities, and credit-card charges, I can account for almost every penny she’s earned. But any of the others could’ve done it. Arnold Murz has been pouring as much money into a coin collection over the years as you have into your wine collection. He could’ve found a private buyer to pay him cash for part of his collection. And Sheila Fenn has large gaps in her finances. There’s over fifty-seven thousand dollars she should have that I can’t account for. But the guy I really like for this is Luther’s son-in-law, Michael Beecher. This is the guy Luther fingered as someone who might want to kill him, and it turns out he was right. Beecher has a doozy of a motive. Or I should say five hundred thousand of them. It took some doing, including hacking into his phone records and following a trail of coded text messages, among other things, but I found out Beecher owes Billy Quinn five hundred grand in gambling debts, which would be more than enough reason for him wanting Luther dead so his wife would inherit Luther’s fortune. And making sure he’ll collect the five hundred grand he’s owed would be more than enough reason for Quinn to send you that bomb.”

  Although Julius showed no change in his expression, he knew what I told him was true. Billy Quinn was Boston’s most notorious gangster, and even if only one-tenth of the rumors about him were true, he’d think nothing about sending even the mayor of Boston a bomb if it meant collecting half a million dollars.

  “Quite a theory,” Julius said.

  From Julius’s lack of reaction, I suspected he’d already thought of this. Maybe he’d gotten wind of Beecher owing Quinn that half million in gambling debts, and maybe that was what he had Tom looking into. It would also explain why Julius would want the world to think he was dead, at least until he had enough evidence to put Quinn behind bars. Because otherwise there was little doubt that Quinn would try again, maybe even putting Lily in harm’s way.

  I imagined myself shrugging once more, this time in a more weary fashion. “The only way to prove it is to trace the bomb back to whoever built it,” I said. For effect, I simulated the sound of a heavy sigh. “It’s not going to be easy, but that’s what I’m going to be working on next.”

  “Archie, for now I have a more pressing matter for you to focus on.”

  Julius took out his wallet and removed from it a laminated photo of a very pretty young woman. Even though Julius’s hair is dark brown and his eyes are the same color, while the woman in the photo had long blond hair and blue eyes, I could see enough resemblance around their eyes and noses for me to ask Julius if he was related to this woman.

  He nodded. “My sister, Julia,” he said, his voice weaker and more tired than I’d ever heard it. He attempted a smile. “This photo was taken fourteen years ago. She was nineteen at the time. When she hears the news of my death, she’ll head back to Boston. The problem is that I don’t know where she is now, or what name she’s using. I know this is a monumental task, which will probably be no easier than finding a needle in the proverbial haystack, but I need you to find out what flight she’s on and which airport she’s flying into, so I can have Saul waiting for her. If it’s any help, I suspect Julia is presently somewhere in the Ukraine, but she really could be anywhere.”

  Julius wasn’t kidding about a needle in a haystack. Assuming his sister was flying in from overseas, I was going to have to hack into all the airline reservation systems, looking for any last-minute flights to Boston, New York, Providence or Hartford, and then I’d have to find photos of the passengers so I could compare them to the picture of Julia at nineteen. This was not what I wanted to be doing. I wanted instead to be tracking down the C-4 used in the bomb, but I understood why Julius wanted me to do this, so I didn’t argue with him.

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll look for her, but I think ‘needle in a hay silo’ would be a more accurate analogy.” I paused. There’d been a question prickling at my neuron network like a pin, and I felt I had to ask it. “Could Desmond Grushnier be behind the bomb? Maybe he sent it and warned you at the last minute so you’d owe him a favor?”

  Julius shook his head, his eyelids lowering as if he were struggling to keep his eyes open. “There’s no chance of that,” he said. “Grushnier might know more about the bomb than he was willing to let on, but this was not his doing. He knows I would never feel indebted to him, regardless of what he might do for me. And while I might occasionally be an irritant to him, he knows that I do not go out of my way to interfere with his affairs, only when one of my jobs requires me to do so. He also knows that I will find the person responsible for the bomb, and that, if I discover it was him, he’d have an enemy he would not want. No, Archie. If Grushnier were responsible for that bomb, he would never have warned me about it.”

  This made sense, so I crossed Grushnier off my list, at least for the time being. I had one last question before starting to search for a blond, blue-eyed needle. “How about I arrange for Willie Cather to come here? I know he wasn’t in Luther’s office suite at the time of the murder, but still, he’s been around these people. He might have picked something up from one of them that could help. And if it was Beecher or one of those others responsible for Luther’s murder and your home being blown up, Willie might be able to point you in the right direction.”

  “Now would not be the right time for that, Archie.”

  I expected this response. While Willie could possibly give us something useful, it would be risky letting him know Julius was still alive. It wasn’t that he couldn’t keep a secret, but he got careless sometimes. That was what separated him as a PI from Tom and Saul and was part of what I said earlier about him thinking he’s smarter than he is. Normally it would be okay to let him in on Julius surviving the explosion, but with him still spending time with the cops investigating Luther’s murders and the other suspects at the dog-food company, there was a chance, even if only a minuscule one, that he’d let something slip.

  I had just settled in to search for my needle in the world’s largest virtual haystack when I had a “Eureka!” moment. I needed eighteen milliseconds to verify what I was looking for, and then an additional four seconds to discover something that caused my processing unit to crackle with excitement. It took some effort, and even some reprogramming of my neuron network, but I was able to keep my voice calm as I told J
ulius that the real case of 1990 Château Beauséjour Duffau-Lagarrosse that he had won in auction was still en route and wasn’t scheduled for delivery until tomorrow. “Even more interesting, the guy who delivered it isn’t employed by the delivery company, at least I can’t find his photo in the company’s personnel files. If we can figure out who this guy is, he’ll lead us to the person responsible for blowing up your townhouse and murdering Allen Luther.”

  If what I said surprised Julius, I couldn’t tell. Maybe the part about him still having a chance of collecting his case of Château Beauséjour Duffau-Lagarrosse. I might’ve seen his eyebrows rise fractionally when I told him that part of it. But about the other part, nothing.

  “Interesting, Archie, but I really do need you to focus for now on locating my sister. However, this could turn out to be useful. Perhaps, when the time is right, I’ll see if Willie is available to help me find our counterfeit deliveryman.” He forced a thin smile. “If for nothing else, I’d like to get back the twenty dollars I tipped the man.”

  Interesting was an understatement, but I had my marching orders. As much as I wanted to tie our bogus deliveryman to Billy Quinn and then to the son-in-law, Michael Beecher, I understood why it was necessary for me to find Julius’s sister, and so I started the long, arduous task of hacking into every airline reservation system. I had been doing this for just under ten minutes when I had my second “Eureka!” moment. A hit man masquerading as a deliveryman murdered Allen Luther. A bogus deliveryman brought the bomb into Julius’s wine cellar. They had to be one and the same. If I could show Allison Harper a photo of our bogus deliveryman, I was sure she’d identify him as the same man who brought an empty package to Luther’s office suite. I almost told Julius this, but I decided to file it away for later use.

  I was four hours and twenty-nine minutes into my search when I hit pay dirt. Phil Weinstein had brought Julius a plate of fedelini with roasted tiny clams in a wine and garlic sauce and a bottle of highly rated pinot grigio, and since time wasn’t an issue I waited for Julius to finish his meal before reporting what I’d found. “Your sister boarded a plane in Bucharest two hours and five minutes ago that is scheduled to land at Kennedy Airport at four-forty tomorrow morning,” I said. “She’s using the name Sue Jackson, and she looks very much like she did fourteen years ago. She’s still slender, and her hair’s still blond. Given that her passport’s a fake, I was lucky to find her on the airport’s surveillance video, otherwise I would’ve had a tough time finding a photo of ‘Sue Jackson’ to match against your sister.”

  Julius’s expression grew somber as I reported all this. “Very good, Archie,” he said. “Please send Saul the flight information, as well as the clearest photo of Julia that you can pull from the surveillance video.”

  Earlier Julius had spoken with Saul and filled him in as to what had happened, asking if he’d be available to take on an assignment at short notice, even one as beneath his talents as acting as little more than a taxi service. Of course, Julius needed someone with discretion who he could trust, and Saul was certainly that. It didn’t surprise me when Saul told him he’d be available for whatever Julius needed. What did surprise me was how choked up Saul sounded when he found out Julius was alive. Normally the guy showed as much emotion as a stone.

  Now that I was freed up from searching for Julius’s sister, I worked on identifying the bogus wine deliveryman by starting with all known associates of Billy Quinn’s and branching outward from each of them. My confidence that I’d find the guy this way started to lessen about the time I reached three degrees of separation from Quinn. I knew the problem might’ve been that the deliveryman had disguised himself. He could’ve used cosmetic contact lenses to change his eye color, or dyed his hair black. His mustache and goatee could’ve been glued on, his large, gnarled nose could’ve been constructed out of putty, the scars on his cheeks could’ve been fake, and he could’ve used lifts in his shoes to change his height. So it was very possible I wouldn’t be able to identify him even if I came across his photo. And it didn’t help any how much Julius was distracting me—not that he was trying to, but it was still distracting watching him go from sitting impassively like a slab of carved marble to pacing the apartment like a caged tiger. I’d never seen him like that before, and it worried me.

  A few minutes past midnight, after Weinstein closed up the restaurant, Julius joined him in the kitchen and the two men drank cappuccinos and played cards. This continued until late into the morning, and they were still at it when Saul called at five minutes past five to tell Julius that his sister’s plane had landed and that she had agreed to accompany him to Boston. “Right now she’s in the ladies’ restroom, where I bet she’s checking up on me and making sure I’m really an associate of yours, like I said I was,” Saul said with a chuckle. “She’s a tough one, Julius. I don’t think she bought my story for one second, but she’s playing along for now.”

  “Thank you, Saul. I can’t possibly express how appreciative I am for this.”

  “Forget it.” Given the way Saul’s voice sounded, I could picture the small, wiry man blushing a deep red, which was out of character for him. “It’s the least I could do. What I really want is to find the sonofabitch responsible for the explosion and put a bullet in his ear.”

  After the call, Julius seemed to relax. He clapped Weinstein on the shoulder. “I am grateful for you staying up with me like this, but the worst has passed,” Julius said. “You should get some rest, my friend. I don’t want your clientele suffering tonight because of me.”

  Weinstein looked like he wanted to argue, but a yawn escaped from him and he nodded. “You’re sure you’re going to be okay?”

  Julius nodded and Weinstein got up from his chair, made a face as he stretched, and waved goodbye before stepping out the back entrance. Once the door closed behind him, I told Julius that I hadn’t had any luck identifying the bogus deliveryman who’d brought the bomb into his townhouse.

  “Were any unidentified bodies found in the city last night?” Julius asked.

  It didn’t take me long to find out that there had been. “A male, roughly age forty, was fished out of Boston Harbor at two a.m. His face had been blown off by a high-caliber gunshot. The police don’t yet know who he is. From his approximate age, height, and weight, he could be our bogus deliveryman. You think Billy Quinn is cleaning up loose ends?”

  Julius’s lips compressed into a tight grimace. “Somebody is,” he said.

  By the time Saul arrived at the back entrance of Weinstein’s restaurant with Julius’s sister in tow, Julius had a breakfast of lobster frittata and lemon ricotta hot cakes with a strawberry brandy sauce waiting for them. Julia seemed oblivious to the food as her stare remained fixed on Julius. “You’re alive, after all,” she said.

  “It appears so.”

  “You could’ve had your man tell me, so I wouldn’t have had to imagine you dead for three and a half hours more than I needed to.”

  Julius gave her an apologetic smile. “If he had, you would’ve been on the next plane out to Bucharest.”

  “Sarajevo, actually.” A tremor showed in her lips as her stoic countenance began to crumble. In a softer voice, she said, “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “You almost did.”

  She moved quickly to Julius, and since he wore me as a tiepin and I had no webcam feeds to tie into, my vision was blocked as they hugged each other. I had the sense that Julius wiped tears from his sister’s face, but I couldn’t say for sure. When they separated, I was able to see Saul standing in the doorway looking uncomfortable.

  “Julius, I should leave the two of you—”

  “Nonsense,” Julius said, cutting him off. “You must be hungry after spending the night driving to New York and back, and I’ve made enough breakfast for all of us.”

  Even I had little trouble noticing Saul’s discomfort over the idea of butting into Julius’s reunion wit
h his sister, and when he told Julius that he needed to get home, Julius didn’t fight him on it and instead packed up enough of the frittata and hot cakes to feed Saul, his wife, and their two kids. Once Saul was gone and Julius and his sister were seated at a small table in the kitchen with plates of food in front of them, Julia asked how the bomb had gotten into Julius’s home.

  Julius showed a pained smile. “It was hidden in what I thought was a crate containing a case of wine,” he said. “I had the bomb brought down into my wine cellar. Usually I inspect the wine when it’s delivered. I was fortunate that this time I put it off, since the crate was booby-trapped and would’ve blown up had I done so.”

  Julia put down her fork. Up until then she had shown little appetite, and her eyes burned with intensity as she stared at Julius. “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “The same way I knew about the bomb. I received a phone call warning me about it twenty-three seconds before the detonation.”

  “Did the caller know who was responsible?”

  While his sister had little appetite, Julius’s own had returned in full, and he waited until he finished chewing and swallowing a mouthful of frittata before shrugging. “Possibly, but it doesn’t matter,” he said.

  She nodded slowly, her intense stare still fixed on Julius. “You know who the person is,” she said.