Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018
- Автор: Ловси Питер, Зельцерман Дэйв
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018». Краткое содержание книги:
At five past twelve Stan called to report that Haisley had tried going back to work, but Stan stopped him before he could make his way inside, and now had him at a coffee shop for “additional” questioning. I told Julius this, and he acknowledged me with a grunt between bites of his sandwich.
The next suspect was four minutes early and Julius showed yet another sour look from having the last mouthful of his lunch interrupted. My heart bled for him over the hardships he had to face, or at least my virtual heart did.
“The nerve of some people,” I told Julius. “Do you want me to call her and tell her to come back in four minutes?”
Julius ignored my sarcasm and, after chasing the last bite of sandwich with a sip of coffee, simply said, “No need, Archie.” He got up and headed to the front door so he could greet Irene Doyle, Boston Premiere Wines’ cashier and bookkeeper. I knew she was fifty-six from her driver’s license, but in person I would’ve guessed she was ten years younger. Medium height and slender, she resembled photos I’d seen of Rita Hayworth from a movie database. The fact that Jim Duncan was half a foot taller than her and outweighed her by ninety pounds didn’t mean she couldn’t have killed him. I’d found the coroner’s report earlier this morning through some hacking, and learned that Duncan was hit seven times on the back of the head with a tire iron, the blows being struck at a downward angle. Another tidbit I found from my hacking was that the tire iron came from Prescott’s car. My guess about what happened was that the killer pulled a gun on Duncan, marched him into the bedroom, made him get on his knees, and then beat him to death. Any one of the four suspects could’ve done it.
Julius didn’t like to feed murderers, but I decided not to read too much into the fact that he offered Doyle coffee and refreshments — after all, he must’ve been planning to head back to the kitchen to pour himself another cup of French roast and nab a piece or two of biscotti he had gotten from the North End. Doyle declined the refreshments, but accepted the coffee. Once they were settled in Julius’s office (and as I had predicted, he had taken two pieces of biscotti), Doyle claimed that she couldn’t believe anyone at Boston Premiere Wines had stolen the missing Lafite Rothschild.
“There has to be some sort of mistake,” she insisted. “Honestly, we’re like family there.”
“There are all sorts in a family,” Julius said, “including thieves and cutthroats. If you had to pick one of your coworkers to be a thief, who would you pick?”
“None of them!”
“How about Smiley?”
She looked surprised at that. “You know Jim’s nickname?”
“I was told he was given the name because of his dour personality.”
“Jim’s a very sweet man who likes to make people think he’s a curmudgeon. We all have our nicknames at work. It’s just a fun thing we do.” She smiled secretively at Julius. “I bet you can’t guess mine.”
“Red?” Julius said, hazarding a guess.
She considered that. “Not a bad guess since my hair’s red and I work in a wine shop selling plenty of red,” she said. “But no. Mr. Prescott gave me the nickname Bunny a few weeks after I started working at the wine shop because of how fast I work.”
“Yeah, right,” I told Julius. “For the hell of it, I created an image of what Irene Doyle must’ve looked like at twenty-four, which was how old she was when she started working for Prescott. Ten to one he gave her that name because she had the looks back then to be a Playboy Bunny.”
Julius signaled me that I was no doubt right. He asked Doyle about George Easter, the shop’s buyer, and whether he could be trusted. Doyle insisted that she’d trust her life with Buggy, that he’d been working at the store almost as long as she had.
“Buggy?” Julius asked. “Did he get that nickname for being mentally unstable?”
“No, of course not,” she insisted. “When George started working at the store he liked to call a shopping cart a buggy, and the name stuck.”
“Quaint,” Julius offered.
“Did you notice that she blushed just now?” I said. “That’s her tell to show she’s fibbing. Easter resembles a large beetle, at least from his driver’s license, and that’s got to be the real reason for his unfortunate nickname.”
Julius hadn’t seen any of their driver’s-license photos yet so he didn’t bother agreeing or disagreeing with my assessment. Instead he pressed on, asking whether Easter could be a thief, and Doyle insisted that wasn’t a possibility. She also insisted the same was true about Gary Parker, whose nickname turned out to be Crabby, but she claimed that was because of his love for crab-meat and not because of a bad-tempered personality. When Julius asked her whether Bill Haisley could be a thief, she took a sip of coffee as a delaying tactic before blushing slightly and answering no. I didn’t bother to mention to Julius that she was lying.
“His nickname?” Julius asked.
Her eyes dulled as she told Julius that Haisley had been given the moniker Joker. She must’ve believed Haisley had been behind the theft — or at least that he could’ve been.
Julius asked with a wisp of a smile, “Is that nickname because of his sense of humor or that he could be a Batman supervillain?”
She shrugged in a way that used more of her eyebrows than her shoulders. “The name just seemed to fit,” she said.
What happened next caught me off guard. For the next 8.3 seconds Julius’s facial muscles hardened so that he looked almost as if he were carved out of marble. My processing cycles sped up a beat because I knew what this meant. Something had clicked and the great detective’s brain was going into overdrive to solve the murder.
During those 8.3 seconds Doyle looked at him with concern, as if she thought he was having a stroke. When Julius snapped out of his trance, he excused himself and wrote on a notepad a set of instructions for me. For as much as thirty-two milliseconds, I thought he was nuts, and then the same thing that clicked with him clicked with me.
Julius next proceeded to step Irene Doyle through what she did the days the Lafite Rothschild went missing and Jim Duncan was murdered. I knew this was only a delaying tactic to see if I had any luck with his instructions. Twenty-two minutes and eighteen seconds later, I told Julius, “Bingo,” and e-mailed him my findings. He once again excused himself, this time so he could check his e-mail. He quickly read through the newspaper article and other information I had sent him, and then thanked Doyle for her time.
“I believe I have inconvenienced you more than enough,” he said with a polite nod.
What I found had left Julius in good enough spirits to escort Irene Doyle to his front door. Or maybe it was because she looked like she could’ve been Rita Hayworth at age forty-six. I asked Julius whether I should call Alvin Stubbs and tell him it wasn’t necessary to tail Doyle.
“Yes, Archie, please do so.”
Again, he was in good spirits, so he added more emphasis than normally to the please.
“What about Saul? Do you want me to call him and tell him you don’t need his services?”
“Archie, instead, please get Saul on the line. I have a new assignment for him.”