So there you have it. An explanation of sorts why at not even ten o’clock Julius had a client in his office while he appeared to be the picture of amiability and tranquility as he sipped his coffee, took careful bites of his jam-slathered croissant, and, seemingly, engaged Susan Vance in friendly small talk. Although I still had no idea why he was willing to break his routine for her.
Of course, Julius wasn’t simply engaging in small talk, but instead trying get a read on her and discover her tell before he asked her more probing questions. As I observed Julius in action, I couldn’t help feeling a bit conflicted. I might only be an advanced piece of computer technology that Julius wears as a tie clip, but I still have dreams as does anyone with a consciousness, even if my consciousness is simulated by a complex set of software. My biggest dream is beating Julius to the punch in solving a case, and I only have a chance of doing that if Julius takes on new cases. Even if I fail—and so far the closest I’ve come is being two steps behind him—I know if I can study Julius’s genius in action enough times, I’ll be able to make the necessary refinements to my neuron network so that someday I’ll realize my dream. But as much as I wanted Julius to take on new investigations, this case seemed like a dead end that was only going to be wasting his time.
Julius put an end to the small talk as he abruptly changed tack and asked Vance if she was glad her husband was dead. He got the response he was looking for with the way she straightened in her chair and absently pulled on her right index finger for one-tenth of a second. It was a good thing she wasn’t drinking coffee at that moment. If she had, she might have spit it out.
“No, of course not,” she stumbled out, flustered. There was another slight pull on her index finger as she said, “Why would you ask me something like that?”
Julius shrugged. “Your husband’s been murdered. Either you’re glad he’s dead or you’re not. If the newspaper reports have been accurate, then he was cheating on you, possibly even planning to murder you, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that you’re glad he was shot twice in the heart.”
“Philip was cheating on me,” she acknowledged. “But I don’t understand. Why are you saying he might’ve been planning to murder me?”
Julius stared at her coldly for three seconds before answering her. “Because of the five-million-dollar life insurance policy taken out two months ago. Even though it covered both of you, I’ve been under the impression that your husband took out the policy without your knowledge, and that you weren’t aware of it until the police confronted you about it.”
“That’s true. But how did you know the amount of the policy? I haven’t told you it, and the newspapers haven’t reported it.”
The reason Julius knew that was because it was one of the items I discovered through my hacking, but Julius wasn’t about to tell her that. He could’ve simply told her that he had his sources, but he didn’t bother doing that either. Instead he breathed in deeply and let the air out slowly through his nose.
“Mrs. Vance, or have you gone back to using your maiden name?”
“I’m still using Vance, but you can call me Susan.”
“I prefer not to, at least not until I am fully satisfied of your innocence. You and I are not engaged in a fencing match, and I will not parry with you, nor will I tolerate any further evasive answers or outright lies. If you’d like me to stay engaged in finding your husband’s murderer, which is the only way I can see of proving to the police your innocence, then you will have to answer my questions honestly.”
For a moment it looked like she was going to fall apart completely, but somehow she mustered a stiff upper lip and told Julius that she was trying to be honest with him.
“I haven’t been lying to you,” she insisted. “I haven’t been trying to be evasive either. It shocked me when you asked me whether I was glad Philip was killed. Of course I’m angry that he cheated on me, and I’m horrified whenever I think of that insurance policy. I’m not stupid. Since learning of his affair and thinking of how he had treated me, I can’t think of why he would have taken out that policy without telling me about it if he hadn’t been planning to kill me. Ever since his murder I’ve been living in a nightmare, and I’m too numb to know what I truly think or feel. But Mr. Katz, I promise you that I did not murder Philip.”
“Good. Why was your signature on the policy if you knew nothing about it? Was your signature a forgery?”
Her stiff upper lip trembled for a moment, but she was able to keep it together. “The police showed me that. It looked like my signature. It’s possible Philip forged my name. It’s also possible he bullied me into signing the paper without my knowing what I was signing. He often did that, having me sign papers without telling me what they were or letting me read them.”
Julius accepted that, which made sense since she hadn’t pulled on her right index finger since he had read her the riot act. He handed her a sheet of paper and asked her to sign her name. She gave him a puzzled look, but did as he asked. As Julius held up the paper, I compared it to the photo the police had of the insurance form’s signature page.
“The signature on the form is a forgery,” I told Julius. Since I communicate to him through an earpiece he wears, Susan Vance was no wiser to me telling Julius this. “It’s a decent one, and probably very carefully done, but the pen pressure used on the form is too uniform to be her signature.”
Julius grunted softly for my benefit. Of course, this didn’t let her off the hook for murder. She might’ve found out about the insurance policy another way, or she could’ve killed him without knowing about the five-million-dollar jackpot.
“How did you find out about your husband’s affair?” Julius asked. He knew this already since this was one of the items I was able to discover while hacking the Cambridge police department’s computer system, but I guess he wanted to see how she would answer him.
She tried to smile at Julius, but it was a miserable effort. “That woman’s husband called me. This was three days before Philip was murdered. He wanted to know whether I knew about Philip and his wife.” She lowered her eyes from Julius’s as the frozen remnants of her smile grew more miserable. “I was in too much shock at the time to believe him. And I guess too much in denial. Once I had a chance to think it over, the affair explained a lot. Philip was a very handsome man, and he could be utterly charming and witty, but he could also be domineering, bitingly sarcastic, and cruel. I realized after that man’s call the reason I’d been in so much denial about Philip’s absences over the past year was that I was glad he hadn’t been around much.”
“Did Chapin threaten your husband?”
Stewart Chapin was the husband that Vance had cuckolded. Susan Vance nodded weakly. “He was very angry, and I think my telling him that he had to be mistaken made him angrier. He told me that if Philip saw his wife again, he would kill him.”
“Did you believe him?”
A shrug. “I don’t know.”
Julius had earlier finished off his croissant, but was still working on his coffee. He leaned further back in his chair as he considered her. Surprisingly, she didn’t flinch under his harder stare, and instead her eyes shifted upward to meet his.
“Do you believe I didn’t murder Philip?” she asked.
Julius hesitated briefly before not only addressing her as Susan but telling her that he believed her. That was surprising. Even though there had been no further pulling on her right index finger, normally he would’ve answered a question like that noncommittally. All I could think was that he made this concession because of her friendship with Lily. I decided if he could call her Susan, so could I.
“You’re growing soft in your old age,” I said.
Julius used the coffee cup he was holding to shield from Susan the one-finger signal that was meant for me. “Tell me about the night your husband was murdered,” he asked.
She tried offering Julius another smile, this one even bleaker than her earlier one. “Once I had a chance to think more
about what that man had told me, I realized how much of a relief it would be to end my marriage and be free of Philip. I was too much of a coward to confront him directly. I knew if I tried, he’d belittle me and convince me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, and he’d make me back down. Instead I needed to catch him with his girlfriend so that I could demand a divorce and not give him a chance to weasel his way out. That night I followed him to a restaurant outside of Harvard Square called The Blue Parrot. The police already know this. I sat in my car for twenty minutes trying to work up the courage to go in there and confront him. But I chickened out, and like a complete, utter coward, I drove home.”
“Did you see who your husband met there?”
She shook her head. “I was assuming he went there to see his girlfriend, but the police told me he sat at a table by himself for forty-five minutes, so I guess she stood him up.”
Julius knew that part already, or at least that Philip Vance’s waitress had told the police that nobody had joined Vance at his table while he was there.
“Did you see anyone loitering outside the restaurant?” Julius asked.
She shook her head. “I was too preoccupied to have paid any attention to anyone else at that time.”
Julius wasn’t ready to give up on that area of examination. For the next half-hour he tried different techniques to dredge up out of her subconscious memory any person or car she might’ve noticed while either approaching The Blue Parrot, idling her car in front of it, or driving away, but he came up empty with each attempt. He next worked with her to narrow down the time she gave up and drove home to between nine twenty and nine twenty-five, which was worst case twenty minutes before her deceased husband had used a credit card to pay his bill at the restaurant. Julius then questioned her regarding what she did that night after she left, which ended up being nothing more than driving home and worrying about how she was going to confront her husband when he returned—at least that’s what she did until around midnight that night, which was when the police arrived at her door to tell her about her husband’s murder. After Julius was done with that line of questioning, he picked up a box from the floor that he had her bring to his townhouse and placed it on his desk. Inside of it were her dead husband’s laptop computer and three manuscripts.
Julius took the laptop out of the box and connected it to his wireless network so I could access it. He asked Susan whether the police had at any time taken possession of the laptop.
“They did. They had it for almost two and a half weeks, and only returned it last Friday.”
This seemed to be what Julius was expecting, even though I hadn’t found any record of it through my hacking. He told Susan that he had taken up enough of her time that morning, and he hoped to have things resolved quickly. Normally he would’ve left her to find her own way out while I watched the webcam feeds to make sure she didn’t cause any mischief, but he made yet another concession to her being friends with Lily, and after calling a cab for her, he escorted her to his front door once the cab arrived. It was a good thing he did given how shaky she seemed at first, although for my money she appeared to have a more solid footing under her by the time Julius left her.
“I’ve gone through Vance’s email and browsing history,” I told Julius as he walked back to his office. “Thirty-three days before he took out the five-million-dollar insurance policy, he started pricing out some high ticket items. Cars, houses, a vacation home in the Florida Keys, clothing, top shelf cognac, et cetera. No additional suspects jumped out at me, though.”
“Very good, Archie. For now we have enough suspects to deal with. If none of them bear fruit, then I’ll see if I can find anyone you might’ve missed. Knowing that Vance was pricing out expensive items supports a theory I’m working on.”
I could see how that showed Vance might’ve been expecting a five-million-dollar windfall, which supported the idea that he’d been planning to kill his wife, but I didn’t see how knowing that would help find Vance’s murderer. I also didn’t bother asking Julius what his theory was. Most likely he didn’t have one and was only bluffing me. Even if he had a theory, I knew he wouldn’t tell me it—if he was going to he would’ve done so already. I didn’t care. Not much, anyway. Since Julius decided to take on this case, I’d been busy collecting whatever information I could find online about the six suspects so I could build my own simulations and beat Julius to the punch in solving this murder.
Three of the suspects were obvious: Susan, Vance’s girlfriend Amanda Chapin, and the cuckolded husband, Stewart Chapin. The other three might not even be suspects. Last night I had hacked into Vance’s cellphone records and generated a spreadsheet that broke down all the calls and texts Vance had made over the last six months. Julius culled from this three people that he wanted to talk with. Whether he believed any of them were possible murderers, I had no idea. All three of them, though, had been either clients or prospective clients of Vance’s, and for the time being I was considering them suspects.
Julius took a detour to the kitchen to brew himself a fresh pot of French Roast coffee, and once he was back behind his desk, he took a screwdriver from his top desk drawer and proceeded to remove the back panel from Vance’s laptop. It didn’t take him long after that to find a dime-sized device with an attached one-inch wire that had been hidden in it. I’m sure he didn’t need me to do this, but as he held the device between his index finger and thumb and squinted at it, I identified for him the make and model of the eavesdropping device. “The police must’ve planted it,” I said.
Julius nodded a fraction of an inch to confirm that. He left his office briefly to put the bug on ice—literally and figuratively—and when he returned he took three sips of his freshly-brewed coffee, and then picked up one of the manuscripts and began thumbing through it, at times stopping to read pages more thoroughly. While he did this I settled on my own theory, and proceeded to try to prove it. I hadn’t completely dismissed the idea that Susan was the one to shoot her husband dead even if there hadn’t been any index finger pulling when she told Julius she was innocent, but for the time being I decided to focus on the second most obvious candidate, namely Stewart Chapin. My theory was again the simplest one once you excluded Susan from consideration—namely, that Vance was going to meet his girlfriend that night at The Blue Parrot, Chapin found out about it, scared his wife away from the rendezvous, and waited for Chapin to leave the restaurant so he could at gunpoint march Vance eighty-seven yards to the alley where Vance’s body was later found. In order to prove this theory I needed to find a phone or text or email message showing that Amanda Chapin had been planning to meet Vance that night, and so I needed to find other email or phone accounts Vance or his girlfriend might have been using, and I was still attempting to do this when at eleven forty-eight a familiar heavy pounding sounded from Julius’s front door. I had a good idea who was behind it before checking the outdoor webcam feed, and I was right.
“Cramer’s the one trying to put a dent in your front door, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen his face redder or angrier. I’d suggest you answer the door before the poor guy has a stroke.”
Julius grimaced at that news, even though he had to have known Cramer was going to be visiting him. Reluctantly, he pushed himself to his feet. He first secured the laptop and manuscripts in his office safe before opening his front door to the Cambridge homicide detective waiting outside. This delayed him by thirty-nine seconds, and the extra time must’ve been partially responsible for how much hotter under the collar Cramer seemed to have gotten. For one point nine seconds he appeared incapable of speech as he gaped at Julius, and then in a voice that was little more than a hoarse croak, he demanded, “Give me one good reason why I don’t throw you in jail for interfering with a police investigation!”
Julius, his inscrutable poker face intact, said, “You have me at a loss. How did I do that?”
“You know damn well how!” Cramer clamped his mouth shut for the next two point eight seconds while
he glared bullets Julius’s way. “The surveillance bug that we put in Vance’s computer stopped transmitting after it was brought here,” he said when he could. “You purposely interfered with a criminal investigation! And if you damaged that bug, by God, I’ll make sure the department sues you for its cost!”
“Interesting,” Julius said. “Did the court order you were granted allow for my office to be bugged?”
Cramer opened his mouth briefly before clamping it shut again without saying anything.
Julius nodded. “As I thought. If you wait here I will retrieve your listening device. I assure you I did nothing to intentionally damage it.”
Cramer wasn’t about to wait at the door, and he followed Julius to his kitchen. Julius took the surveillance bug from the freezer portion of his refrigerator, where he had placed it earlier, and handed it to Cramer.
“You think you’re a smart guy,” Cramer said in his raspy croak. “I want to know how you knew the amount of the insurance policy!”
So Cramer had heard Julius’s conversation with Susan. No surprise there as Julius had to’ve been expecting that. He shrugged. “There are any number of ways I could’ve learned that.”
“Yeah? What I think is that you had someone in my precinct send you a copy of the insurance policy. That’s why you had Vance sign her name. You wanted to compare signatures. So you must know that it was her signature on that policy. Her husband might’ve taken out the policy, but she knew about it!” He closed his mouth again as he watched Julius carefully for a response. When he didn’t get one, he added, “When I find out who it is in my precinct leaking you evidence, I’ll see that he’s fired and I’ll damn well see that you’re brought up on charges!”
“Detective, I believe your time would be better served trying to discover Philip Vance’s murderer.”
Cramer wasn’t going to say anything. I could see it both in his eyes and the way he tried to keep his mouth clamped shut, but he couldn’t help himself.
More Julius Katz and Archie Page 13