Free Julius Katz Mysteries by Dave Zeltserman Page A

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 his mother 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 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 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