More Julius Katz and Archie

by Dave Zeltserman

  Julius suggested to Griff that he handcuff Casper, and when Griff asked why, Julius told him. It took only eight seconds after that for the cuffs to be slapped on and for Casper to be escorted away. When Griff told Julius that he needed him to come to the station to make a full statement, Julius balked.

  “As you can probably guess, an afternoon that I’d been anticipating for weeks has been ruined by, among other things, murder and skullduggery. I’m not going to allow my evening, or more specifically, Lilly’s evening, to be ruined by this mess. Within an hour I will have my assistant Archie email you a signed statement that will include verbatim my conversation with Stuart Casper, which includes him confessing to hiring Dancer to kill Thomas Pierpont. That’s the best I can offer you.”

  “Dancer?”

  “The dead hit man in the main lounge.”

  Griff didn’t like it, but he knew Julius well enough to know that Julius wasn’t about to budge on this, and besides, Julius was handing him a homicide and a murder-for-hire plot wrapped up with a bow, so he grudgingly allowed him to leave. Since I record everything I see, it took me all of three milliseconds to generate the email message, complete with every word spoken between Julius and Casper, but I decided to wait an appropriate amount of time before sending it. I also waited until Julius was outside and was walking briskly toward his Beacon Hill townhouse before commenting that he had had quite an afternoon at the Belvedere Club.

  “Quite,” he agreed. “About the other matter. The theft at Coolidge’s gallery. Find out what other paintings were recently sold there, especially if one is similar in dimension to Zukov’s Canary. Discreetly, if possible.”

  Discreetly. Which meant hacking into their computer system as opposed to calling the gallery. I imagined my virtual hand slapping my virtual forehead as I realized what Julius was after. He wanted to know whether the painting could’ve been stolen by performing a switcheroo—namely, fitting a similarly sized painting over the stolen one, so that when the much cheaper painting sold the canary would fly the coop with it. I got my answer three minutes and twenty-four seconds later after I was able to hack into the gallery’s computer system. I’d like to say this time I was only a step behind Julius, but I’d be lying. I’d assumed that if one of Coolidge’s employees was behind the theft, he or she would’ve had to be in league with someone at Stone Surveillance. Yeah, I was going to have to do more work refining my neuron network.

  “A week ago last Thursday a painting titled Orange Tabby was sold for seventeen thousand dollars, and its dimensions are an inch wider and two inches longer than Zukov’s yellow bird, so yeah, it was an inside job like you thought, and the canary left the gallery in the belly of that cat.”

  “Very good, Archie. When Coolidge calls Monday morning, tell him I’ll be charging him a flat fee of twenty thousand dollars to find his thief.”

  “Even though you already know that it’s one of his employees?”

  “But I don’t know which one,” Julius argued somewhat petulantly. “I’ll still have to question each one to trip up the guilty party. And then there’s the matter of finding the thief’s partner—the one who posed as the buyer for the other painting.”

  I could see Julius’s point, although I didn’t think he would be working all that hard, and certainly not twenty grand’s worth. But I didn’t argue, and instead I set about trying to discover myself which employee stole that bird. It wasn’t easy and it took some serendipity to stumble on an email account that I was sure the thief thought nobody would ever find, and even more serendipity to guess the password so I could get to the encrypted messages, but forty-seven minutes and thirty-one seconds later while Julius was adjusting his tie for his evening wear, I had the whole sordid business figured out.

  Julius never brought me along on his dates with Lily, and besides, I would’ve looked out of place clipped onto a bowtie, and so he had already placed me on his dresser bureau and removed the receiver from his ear. I didn’t want this to wait, so I called him on his cell phone.

  “Yes, Archie?” he inquired with strained patience.

  “I know which of Coolidge’s employees stole the bird,” I said, and I gave him the name of the guilty party and her accomplice. “She’s still dickering with the buyer, trying to squeeze more money out of him than their agreed upon price.”

  “No honor among thieves,” Julius said with a hard smirk.

  “Apparently not. In any case, the painting is still in Boston, and won’t be shipped overseas until after the money transfer, which isn’t scheduled to happen until next Thursday, assuming they reach an agreement.”

  “Very good, Archie. Given this development, when Coolidge calls Monday, tell him I’ll be charging a flat fee of thirty thousand dollars to both expose the thief and to return the painting.”

  If I had a jaw it would’ve dropped. At least I imagined my virtual jaw dropping. Thirty grand for what couldn’t have been more than a few minutes of brain power on his part, if even that much? But then I understood what was happening.

  “I get it,” I said. “You’re in a lousy mood right now. Not only did you find out that one of your oldest friends was a sociopath, but he tried playing you like a fool. The Maltese Falcon was one of the books used to build my knowledge base, so I understand about not playing a sap for anyone. And I further get that your cognac tasting today was ruined, and this wasn’t just any cognac tasting, but a precious elixir. But you’re going to take it out on Coolidge simply because he had the audacity to approach you about business at your sacred Belvedere Club?”

  The muscles around Julius’s mouth hardened for the next one point seven seconds. His eyes appeared to do the same.

  “Precisely,” he said.

  Of course.

  LIKE A LIGHTNING BOLT

  At first blush, this story might seem out of place in this collection. First of all, it’s not narrated by Archie, but instead by a ne’er-do-well. It’s also not a mystery, but a crime noir tale. The story, however, takes places in Boston, and if the reader perseveres, I believe that the reader will find that it intersects with the Julius Katz universe in a most satisfying way.

  A walking cautionary tale for steroid abuse was working behind the bar and he yelled for us to all pipe down, that they were about to announce the winning lottery number. Just like that the crowd pushed forward so everyone could get a look at the TV, and the raucous noise rocking the joint dropped to a hushed silence. Why wouldn’t it? This was the biggest lottery drawing ever in Massachusetts and we were all dreaming about what we would do if we won the 241 million at stake. Me, my dreams went back and forth. One moment I would be fantasizing about buying a swanky nightclub in LA and only letting in the most gorgeous ladies, and the next about buying the carrier company at the docks where I work just so I can kick my current boss in his fat behind every single day until he croaks. I’d make it part of his job description. Hell, I’d even pay him a monthly bonus if I needed to keep him from quitting.

  A skinny blonde with a dazzling smile, big poofy hair, and a nice rack came on the TV to stand next to a glass box filled with bouncing ping-pong balls, each emblazoned with a number between one and fifty. She flipped a switch and read out in turn the numbers on each of the seven ping-pong balls that were spat out. I didn’t get a single one, which wasn’t all that big a surprise given my luck, or general lack of such.

  All of us then stood in stony silence commiserating as our dreams of riches shriveled up and died. Easy come, easy go, right? Escaping the rat race and living the good life was a nice fantasy while it lasted. Computers being what they are, the same blonde, less than a minute later, reported that they already knew there was a winner. She was even able to tell us where the lucky bastard had bought the winning ticket—and it was at the very same liquor store on Cambridge Street where I bought my tickets each week.

  For some reason that I couldn’t quite articulate it made me angry thinking about that. Kind of crazy, since what difference did it make where the guy bought th
e ticket? But still, it bugged me, realizing how close I was to winning that money myself, even though that made no sense. But logic didn’t stop me from brooding. And that was when a lightning bolt struck. Figuratively, not literally. The idea that came to me was how I could steal the 241 million dollars from the rightful winner. And all I had to do was kill my Uncle Eddie.

  The idea stunned me. I mulled it over while I sipped the remaining beer in my glass, and an excitement quickly buzzed inside me as I realized it could actually work. More than that, that it seemed like a sure thing, and all because of where the winning lottery ticket was bought. If that ticket had been bought anywhere else, my plan would’ve crumbled apart like a fistful of dried mud. Maybe I wouldn’t get the whole 241 million, but I’d at least get a good part of it. The only way I could see for this plan to blow up in my face would be if a nun had bought the winning ticket, and even then I saw a way I could wiggle out of any legal problems caused by knocking off my Uncle Eddie.

  I would’ve liked more time to noodle around all the angles, but my plan needed me to act right away. Besides, up until the moment I actually bumped off Eddie, I could walk away without any harm or foul, which gave me more than an hour to give it additional brain power, if needed.

  The time to act was now, and so I did.

  “My Uncle Eddie won the lottery,” I uttered as if I were in shock. Jonesy, a guy from the neighborhood whom I’d known since my beleaguered school days, was standing next to me, and he turned to give me a dumb smile, a dull sheen glazing his eyes from all the shots he’d drunk that night.

  I repeated myself, this time speaking louder.

  Jonesy’s dumb grin only grew dumber. “That’s a good one,” he said as if I were pulling his leg.

  “No joke,” I insisted with as much gravity as I could muster. “Since Eddie had his stroke, I’ve been buying his tickets each week, and for months he’s been drumming it into me his reason for picking each of his numbers.”

  Other bar customers were quickly gathering around me, and now that I had an audience I went into a big song and dance explaining the reason for each of the numbers my uncle supposedly wanted me to play. Eight was for the number of bank heists he had pulled, at least that was what I claimed, and that got some smirks from the crowd because of the stories circulating for years around the neighborhood about my uncle, Eddie Gilroy. Maybe none of them actually believed the rumors about Eddie robbing banks for Billy Quinn, who was Boston’s top crime boss, but I knew they were true. That was the only reason I’d been taking care of the rotten sonofabitch since his stroke. He had bank-robbery money stashed somewhere, but finding it no longer mattered. Whatever he had, it would be chickenfeed compared to what I’d be getting from the winning lottery ticket.

  Just as I had coaxed some smiles from the crowd when I told them why Eddie had picked the number eight, I got even more smiles after telling them that he had picked forty-two, thirty-three, and forty-six because he claimed those were the vital statistics for the perfectly shaped dame. Before his stroke Eddie was known to be a hound who liked his women with a good deal of meat on the bones, and anyone who spent time around him knew he talked like he came out of a Damon Runyan story except with more four-letter expletives mixed in and his words dripping with a heavy Boston accent. The last three numbers from the winning ticket—nineteen, twenty-two, and twenty-eight, I claimed were Eddie’s lucky numbers. I pulled all of this out of thin air, but I knew it sounded legit, and I knew I had them convinced.

  “Wow,” Jack Haggerty said with a mix of awe and envy. “Matt, my boy, you’re a rich man also now.”

  “Uh uh. Uncle Eddie won the lottery, not me.”

  “Yeah, but you’re his only surviving kin. You’re gonna get a nice slice of it.”

  “You never know with Eddie.”

  That got some nods from Haggerty and a few others. Because that was the one true thing I said that night. Even if Eddie had won the lottery, there was no telling whether he’d let me see a dime of it.

  “A round on the house!

  That pronouncement came from the muscle-headed bartender who’d been listening in. A loud cheer erupted. After that round, I volunteered to buy the next, which got an even bigger cheer. You got to spend money to make money, right? I needed every sap in that bar to believe what I was saying was the God’s honest truth, and just as importantly, I needed a reason to be there for at least another hour, longer if possible, and celebrating a family windfall of 241 million dollars was as good a reason as any. So after that round I bought another, and another after that. All on credit.

  “I know you’re good for it,” the bartender told me with a big grin.

  There was a lot of backslapping and congratulations, and soon more than a few bums in the place began hitting me up for loans. Craig Wolhford was first, offering for sixty grand to make me partners in a sure thing he had in the works: a topless gym.

  “How would that work?” I asked, honestly confused by the idea. “The employees would have to go topless?”

  “Nah, the club members who go there to work out.”

  “Yeah? How would you enforce that? And what if your clientele was only straight guys, and no women?”

  Wolhford scrunched up his fat face causing his thick, bushy brows to knit together as he considered my questions before telling me he still had a few kinks to work out. After he walked away, others took his place. Brendan Hannity wanted me to invest in a combination donut and marijuana dispensary to take advantage of Massachusetts’ changing laws. “Munchies and weed at the same business establishment. A can’t miss opportunity,” he insisted. Tom Dennis actually had a halfway decent idea of buying people’s old computers. “We’ll donate them to schools when we’re done with them, but that’s not the reason for the business,” he told me confidentially, leaning in close and being careful to talk low enough so no one nearby could overhear him. “What we do is scour the computers for bank records, credit card numbers, and blackmail material.”

  After Dennis, others in the bar, even jokers I didn’t know, came over to propose their schemes, most of which were half-baked, and in a few cases simply laughable attempts to rip me off. I didn’t mind one bit. I was accomplishing what was needed: namely, making sure that word of Eddie’s supposed good fortune spread throughout the neighborhood, and further, spending enough time in the bar after the lottery drawing so I could watch at least a dozen lowlifes come and go.

  I ended up staying at the bar until last call, which was longer than necessary, although it neither hurt nor helped my plan being there that late. The reason I hung around as long as I did was partly because of all the people who had lined up to talk to me and not wanting to be rude, but mostly because it became very real that when I left I’d be killing my uncle and I’d never done anything like that before. I might’ve been fantasizing for months, perhaps even longer, about bashing in that miserable, rotten bastard’s skull, but those were only harmless daydreams, a natural reaction to spending time with him. Now that my plan had been put in motion and seemed to be moving inevitably to its conclusion, I began to feel some nerves, even a touch of regret, which made no sense at all. On the one hand there was 241 million at stake, or at least a good portion of it, and on the other was my uncle Eddie; a guy I wouldn’t hit the brakes for if I saw him lying unconscious in the middle of the street, at least if it meant losing any tire tread.

  ◆◆◆

  It was a quarter to three in the morning before I unlocked the apartment door. I found a pair of leather gloves in the coat closet. They were tight on my hands. Must’ve been Eddie’s. That was okay. His bedroom was in the back, and I headed there, not bothering to be quiet about it. He was in bed where I had left him earlier, sleeping fitfully on his back, an uneasy rattling noise wheezing out of his chest. I turned on the lights and watched as he blinked himself awake.

  “You better have a good reason for waking me,” he croaked out once he made sense of what had happened, his stroke leaving him sounding like a broken-
down garbage disposal, albeit one with a heavy Boston accent. Suspicion shone in his blood-rimmed eyes as he watched me take one of the pillows from under his head, but that was just his nature. I doubted that he had any idea what I’d be using it for. Even though he saw that I had put gloves on, he would’ve thought I was only going to fluff up the pillow so he’d sleep more comfortably. It never would’ve occurred to him that I would have the guts to smother him with it.

  “They had the big lottery drawing tonight,” I told him, keeping my voice low so his upstairs neighbor wouldn’t be able to hear me. “Two-hundred-and-forty-one-million-dollar jackpot. And there was a winner. They don’t know who it is yet, but they know the lucky stiff bought the ticket at Scollay’s Liquors.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  My voice sounded icy and weird to my own ears as I told him that was where I bought my tickets each week and that I announced to the crowd at Donnegan’s I had bought the winning ticket for him. “And me, your only heir.”

  I had to give my uncle credit. The stroke might’ve physically devastated him, but mentally he was still as sharp as a tack. He had always been better than just about anyone at sniffing out scams, and he figured out right away what I was planning to do. Not a drop a fear showed in his eyes, though. Instead, his face twisted into an angry animal snarl. But he was no longer the alpha dog he believed himself to be. He was only a feeble old man, and his attempts to fight me off were pathetic. Before he could croak out another word, I pushed the pillow down into his face, and put all my weight into it.