Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018

As it turned out, Julius would’ve been better off flying with Lily Rosten to Paris for the weekend and staying in a suite at the Four Seasons than going to his Saturday night poker game. It wasn’t a DEFCON level-one disaster — he still had the deed for his townhouse by the time the game broke up Sunday morning — but he left the game $8,300 poorer, which almost emptied out his bank account. I record everything I “see,” and I went back and carefully studied the poker game and there was no bottom dealing, deck stacking, or other card mechanics at work. Likewise, no noticeable tell had crept into Julius’s game, nor did he misread the other players’ tells. I further analyzed the way Julius played and I couldn’t find a single mistake. It was just one of those nights when the other players filled in their inside straights against his three of a kinds, or took three cards and would show a king-high flush against his jack-high flush. When you looked at the probabilities, Julius should’ve ended up the big winner, but every dog has their day, and that night the five other players in the game had theirs.

I didn’t say a word about the poker game the rest of Sunday. I even resisted the temptation to ask Julius whether I should change his Sunday dinner reservation with Lily from Le Che Cru to The Happy Pig Whistle. I waited Monday morning until after Julius had his morning coffee and finished reading the newspaper before e-mailing him a list of wines.

“If I have these put up for auction today, the money should be in your account by the end of the week,” I said.

He made a face as if he’d just tasted a fine Cabernet that had gone bad and deleted the e-mail without reading it.

“I don’t see what choice you’ve got,” I said. “There are no imminent cases offering a big payday, and with the way you’ve been turning down every well-heeled potential client over the last six months they’ve gotten used to going elsewhere and it might take me weeks or longer to find you a client, which won’t help with the property-tax bill that’s due next week.”

Julius didn’t bother answering me. So he was going to be that way. Fine. I still spent the next hour making calls and trying to drum up business, but the problem was, everyone had gotten used to thinking of Julius in the past tense. He might’ve once been Boston’s most brilliant detective, but thanks to the Philip Vance murder case paying off as much as it did, it had been over six months since he had taken a case and he’d become yesterday’s news. I didn’t mention any of this to Julius, but after he had lunch and was back in his office, I asked him whether I should scare up some publicity.

“I could see if one of the local papers wants to do an interview,” I suggested.

At this point, Julius picked up a biography about the writer Shirley Jackson. Without bothering to look away from the book, he muttered, “Not necessary.”

I gave up. What was the point?

For the rest of the afternoon Julius appeared immersed in his book while I spent the time trying to figure out Hodge’s conjecture, which was one of the Millennium Prize problems and paid a million bucks to anyone who came up with a solution. By five, I’d gotten nowhere with it. Julius, though, surprised me by marking his place in the book. He got up and searched a bookcase before removing from a bottom shelf a leather-bound Boston city atlas. He brought this back to his desk and searched through the atlas until he found the neighborhood he was looking for, and then gave me a list of addresses.

“Archie, please find the owners of these buildings.”

One of the addresses was for Donald Prescott’s wine shop, and I knew Prescott owned the building. The other addresses were for the rest of the buildings within the same block. This task turned out to be a lot tougher than I would’ve thought, and it wasn’t until after Julius had eaten dinner and was back in his office drinking cappuccino that I told him that with the exception of Prescott’s building, the rest appeared to be owned by shell companies.

“I’ve hacked into hundreds of different databases and unraveled their ownerships as much as I believe is possible, and I can’t tell you if any of these shell companies are owned by the same person,” I said. “I’m guessing you’re thinking Grushnier owns these buildings. What else are you thinking? That he wants Prescott’s building and the missing wine is somehow tied to that?”

Julius grunted as he took another sip of cappuccino and leaned further back in his chair. “Archie, I was only satisfying a curiosity, that’s all. Please call Prescott and tell him I wish to speak to him.”

What a load of bunk! He must’ve had something more concrete in mind, otherwise he wouldn’t have been asking me to call Prescott for him. But I would’ve had better luck solving Hodge’s conjecture that night than getting anything else out of him, so I did as he asked, and told Julius I had to leave a message. I spent the next two hours wasting my time, first trying to connect Desmond Grushnier to the shell companies I had uncovered and then trying to figure out how stealing a case of wine — albeit expensive wine — could pressure Prescott to sell his building, if in fact that was what was behind the pilfered wine. It made no sense. Prescott had insurance for his store, and while he would’ve had to take a three-grand loss because of the deductible, he’d be able to absorb that. In fact, the fee I had worked out with him earlier was that three-grand deductible if I was successful, since his main concern was finding out which of his employees was a thief.