“It wasn’t. She had him embezzle half a million dollars from his company, then she killed him for the money.”
Roger Stromsby spoke up then. Stromsby was CEO of the company Arden stole from, and he confirmed what Julius said. “We suspected Arden, but we couldn’t prove it,” Stromsby added as straight-faced as he could. The real reason was what Julius had said earlier — that they were in fact covering up the theft so as not to scare off investors — but Stromsby wasn’t about to admit that in a room filled with police officers.
Julius asked Cramer what he had been able to uncover about the business Norma Brewer claimed she had sold.
“We couldn’t find anything,” Cramer said gruffly.
Julius turned to Lawrence Brewer. “She didn’t sell a business, did she?”
Lawrence shifted uneasily in his seat. “No, she didn’t,” he said. “Sometime after Tom disappeared, Norma came to me, telling me she had half a million dollars that she wanted to put into a Swiss bank account. I had no idea where the money came from, she never told me, but I helped her with the transfer. Several years ago, when she took the money out, I set up the fake business sale for her so she could explain the source of the money.”
Something in my neuron network clicked and I could see as clearly as Julius had all along who the murderer was. I studied her then, and could tell that she wanted nothing more than to bolt from the room, and she probably would’ve if she thought she had enough strength in her legs to do so. Slowly other eyes turned towards her. When her mother joined in, it was too much for her and she seemed to shrink under the weight of it all.
“You should’ve told me,” Helen Arden seethed at her mother. “The way you looked at me when you called me by her name, I knew...”
She tried running then. It didn’t do her any good. One of the police officers stopped her and had her quickly cuffed. Emma Brewer started to sob then. Cramer helped her out of her chair. He was going to have a lot more questions for her.
Things went quickly after that.
The police officers, Andrews, and Stromsby cleared out, leaving Julius alone with Henry Zack and Lawrence Brewer, and they quickly reached an agreement whereby Zack transferred guardianship of Brewer’s mother to Zack, as well as agreeing to a new will for Emma Brewer that would leave him with no inheritance. He had no choice; it was either agree to all that or have Julius destroy him, and he knew Julius had the means to do so. As it was, he was facing enough legal problems without having Julius after him. Once the paperwork was done and Julius and I were alone, I asked Julius when he first suspected Helen Arden.
“The question you should be asking, Archie, is when I first became suspicious of Norma Brewer, which was immediately.” Julius stopped to sample one of the finer Rieslings that he kept in his cellar. “Boston has more than its share of excellent facilities, so why move her mother to Vermont?”
“Because she was afraid her mother might give up her secret while in a confused state.”
“Precisely. And then you had her trying to bluff me, claiming how she didn’t want Helen helping out because she didn’t think her sister could handle it. The woman was a fool to hire me. Regardless of how desperate she might’ve been.”
“So that’s it? That’s what tipped you off?”
“There was more.” Julius frowned thinking about it. “It was absolute rubbish about her being afraid her brother would tie up any guardianship challenge in court. She could’ve received an immediate injunction — any competent lawyer would’ve told her that. But her brother obviously had something damning on her. Once I researched the missing brother-in-law, the pieces fell into place.”
“You knew Helen Arden was going to kill her sister.”
Julius shrugged. “You never know with something like that. But it was clear that something clicked with her when her mother reacted to me the way she did, and when she mistook her for Norma I could see the light go on in her eyes.”
“Why the big show?” I asked. “Was it really necessary in order to coax a confession out of her? The woman seemed pretty beaten down as it was.”
Julius made a face. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “I had no direct evidence linking her to the murder. It was all pure conjecture on my part. More importantly, though, I had another task at hand — and that was seeing that Emma Brewer would be properly taken care of. The only way I could force Lawrence Brewer to cooperate was to hang the threat of a murder charge over his head, the same with Willie Andrews.”
I digested all this and decided I had a lot of work still to do on my neuron network.
“Quite a day’s work,” I said. “You solved two murders, one that the police didn’t even know about. And both of your clients turned out to be cold-blooded killers.”
“And one of them found you utterly charming,” Julius said, chuckling.
“I don’t believe she used the adverb utterly. By the way, why the urgency? Why did this need to be done today?”
Julius’s smile turned apologetic. “I’m sorry about this, Archie.”
And blast it! He turned me off!
Julius turned me back on several hours later. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking him why he had shut me off. Instead, I hacked into his phone company’s billing system and saw that he had placed a two-hour call to Lily Rosten.
The next day was business as usual. At six-thirty in the evening, Julius unclipped me from his tie, and without any explanation left me in his desk drawer. At seven, he left the townhouse. I called around and found the restaurant he had made dinner reservations for. They were for two. I settled in, not expecting to see him until morning, but again he surprised me by arriving home at midnight. Even more surprising, he was in a good mood about it. He even had me send Lily Rosten another dozen roses.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “You obviously struck out, so why so chipper?”
“Goodnight, Archie,” he said.
It went on like this for the next three days. When Julius blew off a high-stakes poker game for yet another date with Lily Rosten, I knew something was seriously askew. I’d been trying to uncover this anomaly in his behavior through mathematical models, but I decided to go at it from a different angle and instead search for similar patterns in literature. It was after analyzing the text of a Jane Austen novel that I realized what was going on. Mystery solved. When Julius once again arrived home at midnight, I asked him how his evening went.
“Very well, Archie, thank you for asking.”
“You know, we could double date. Why don’t you ask Lily if she has one of those ultra-slim iPods that she could bring along?”
He chuckled at that. “I just might,” he said.
“While we’re on the subject, I guess I’ll be needing to update your standard press release,” I said. “Should I remove the reference concerning your being a confirmed bachelor now, or should I wait?”
That brought out the barest trace of a guilty smile. “Good night, Archie,” he said.
As I said before, mystery solved.
Copyright © 2009 Dave Zeltserman
London Calling
by Cheryl Rogers
“This story is set in London, where I lived in the early ’80s,” writes Cheryl Rogers. “Fortunately, my family saved letters sent home and I was able to use them to try to create a believable sense of time and place. I’ve also tried to capture the voice of a quintessential ‘innocent abroad’ in the protagonist, Rosie. She and I share a lot of experiences, but she is, of course, a work of fiction.” Ms. Rogers now lives in Western Australia; one of her stories will appear soon in Australian Woman’s Day.