Free Julius Katz Mysteries by Dave Zeltserman

money.”
    Julius leveled his stare at Andrews. Without looking up, Andrews told the room that Brewer owed him six hundred thousand dollars. “He promised his ma’s money and house to cover it. If he killed his sister for the money I know nothing about it.”
    All eyes turned to Brewer, but he didn’t say a word. He just sat looking as if he had an upset stomach.
    “Ma’am,” Julius said, again addressing the mother, “when you saw me the other day, I had the sense that you mistook me for your son-in-law, Thomas Arden.”
    “I don’t know. I might’ve.”
    “I do look somewhat like him.”
    “You’re older than he was when I last saw him,” she said with a weak smile. “But yes, you do resemble him.”
    “Twelve years ago he abandoned your daughter, Helen.”
    She nodded, some wetness appearing around her eyes.
    “Do you know what happened to him?”
    Emma Brewer looked like she was trying to fight back tears. She didn’t say anything.
    “Ma’am, this is no longer a matter of protecting your daughter, Norma. She’s beyond protection. After twelve years it’s time for the truth. From the way you reacted when you thought I was Thomas Arden, it was as if you’d seen a ghost. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
    Emma Brewer squeezed her eyes shut and nodded.
    “Norma had an affair with him. She murdered him, didn’t she.”
    Helen Arden’s jaw dropped as she stared at her mother. I was dumbfounded—yet another new emotion for me to experience. “How in the world…?” I heard myself asking Julius.
    As if to answer me, Julius explained it to Emma Brewer.
    “After you confused me for Arden, you confused your daughter Helen for Norma. They look nothing alike. I already had my suspicions regarding Norma, but this along with other facts that I uncovered all but told me about the affair.”
    Tears leaked from Emma Brewer’s eyes. “I saw them together once. Norma later confided in me about the affair. Much later, she also told me about what happened to him. According to her it was an accident.”
    “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 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