Julius Katz Mysteries by Dave Zeltserman

network, at least by observing Julius’s genius at work.
    That morning we both fell into our recent patterns. Lily Rosten had left a week ago to visit her parents in upstate New York and wouldn’t be returning for another week, and this had sent Julius into a bit of a funk. Since her departure he’d been spending his days performing his usual calisthenics and martial arts routines, then puttering around his Beacon Hill townhouse until four in the afternoon, when he’d open a bottle of wine and sample it along with a platter of cheeses and smoked meats outdoors on his private patio. Later, he would forego dining out to prepare his own meal. The nights that he didn’t go to the track or have a poker game waiting for him, he’d spend quietly reading. As much as ever, prospective clients were calling to try to arrange appointments, but Julius barely bothered listening to me as I’d report on them, so I’d stopped relaying even these to him unless I thought there was a chance that the details would annoy him. But even from these I was getting little reaction. I suspected that until Lily returned, Julius was determined to stay mired in his funk.
    At that moment Julius sat scowling at a novel that a local area Boston author had pestered him to read. He made a face that was nearly identical to one he had made months earlier when he found a bottle of Domaine de Chatenoy pinot noir had turned to vinegar. Wrinkling his nose in disdain, he tossed the book into his wastebasket, the impact making a loud thud.
    “That painful, huh?” I asked.
    “Excruciatingly so,” Julius admitted. “Pedestrian writing at best.” His nose wrinkled even further with disgust. “The author has his hero performing a self-defense technique that in real-life would accomplish little more than getting his dunce of a hero shot.”
    “You gave up on it pretty quickly,” I noted.
    “Usually, Archie, all you need is one bite to know a piece of fruit is bad.” Julius sighed. “It was my fault for letting myself be bullied into reading it.”
    Of course, the idea of Julius being bullied into doing anything was laughable. He had his ulterior motive for agreeing to read the book. By cross-referencing obvious attributes of this author with characters I found from a number of crime novels used to build my personality, I was able to figure it out. Julius viewed this author as a world-class pigeon waiting to be plucked, and he badly wanted to invite him to a high-stakes poker game so that he could do the plucking. This author had three qualities that Julius found appealing for an invitation to his poker game: He was very wealthy, about as equally smugly arrogant, and not nearly as bright as he believed himself to be. So there it was. Julius accepted the book simply to appease this author’s ego, and he picked it up to read so he could further size up the author. It must have only taken Julius twenty or so pages to do this and he saw no reason to waste any more of his time than was necessary.
    I was about to inform Julius about this piece of detective work of mine and then ask whether he wished me to send this author an invitation to Julius’s next private poker game. It would have been a perfect setup, since Julius would first deny having any such mercenary objective, and then he’d have to sheepishly admit that he would like an invitation sent. But as I was about to do this, a news item came across one of the local news Web sites that I monitor, and this story had me instead muttering, “Uh-oh.”
    Julius raised an eyebrow at that. “What is it, Archie?”
    “A Denise Penny, age twenty-seven, was found murdered in her Cambridge apartment.”
    “Of course, it is tragic when any person is murdered, especially one as young as this woman. But why are you telling me this? Do I know her?”
    “No, you don’t know her, but I do.”
    Julius showed a thin smile that reflected his skepticism. “Please explain, Archie.”
    “Sure, I’ve been dating