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

“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.”

I did as Julius asked, and his new assignment sounded as unnecessary as his previous one had become. But Julius was going to make a bundle on this case, and if he wanted to share some of the wealth with Saul, who was I to complain?

The next appointment, George “Buggy” Easter, knocked on Julius’s door twenty-eight minutes later, putting him right on time. Julius brought Easter back to his office, and as the man sat hunched over in his chair, he looked more like a beetle than he did in his driver’s-license photo. Or maybe I thought so partly because I knew his nickname, but it was also because of his thick body, mostly bald scalp, grayish complexion, and thick tangle of eyebrows that almost completely hid his eyes.

Julius proceeded to ask him a series of mundane questions, and Easter gave Julius the same answers I’d given him earlier when I briefed him this morning. Easter was forty-six, grew up in South Boston, went to public schools in the city, didn’t go to college and instead worked odd jobs until he was hired at Boston Premiere Wines when he was twenty-five, first working in the stockroom, then moving on to handle purchases for the wine shop.

Julius gave Easter a puzzled look. “You must’ve spent some time in Alabama?” he asked.

“Never been there,” Easter said without missing a beat.

“That’s odd. I was told about your nickname and how you got it. Buggy. Nobody calls a shopping cart a buggy here. But they do in Alabama.”

“I must’ve heard someone call it that when I was younger, and the name stuck.”

Easter said this without any hint that he was lying. He was good, I had to give him credit for that. He’d probably even hold his own with Julius in a poker game.

Julius agreed with Easter that was probably it. “I don’t know why I even chose Alabama,” he said. “Buggy is a term used throughout the South. There must be something about you that makes me think you’re from Alabama. It’s not your accent. If you were born and raised in a small town in Alabama, say Thorsby, you’ve done a fine job of ridding yourself of your accent, even adopting an acceptable Boston one. Interesting. In any case, we’re done.”

Easter again impressed me by showing nothing in his expression. He simply got up out of his chair and headed toward the door. Before he left the office, Julius called out to him, telling him that he wasn’t investigating a wine theft. Easter looked back at him but didn’t bother asking him what he was investigating. I followed him over the webcam feeds, half expecting the man going by the name of George Easter to head to Julius’s kitchen to grab a knife. It wouldn’t have helped him any if he had tried that. Something that Julius kept out of the press was that he held a fifth-degree black belt in Shaolin kung fu. He would’ve been able to handle Easter if it came to that. I waited until Easter was out of the townhouse before asking Julius if it was really necessary to let Easter leave.

“Archie, we can use all the circumstantial evidence we can get. Besides, it can’t hurt to give the man some additional time to ponder his situation.”

Twenty-eight minutes later, Tom Durkin called to report that Easter had gone straight to the bus station and bought a one-way ticket to Dearborn, Michigan. “I gave him a choice whether he wanted us to bring him to your office or the police, and he chose your office.”

Tom had said us because he was referring to himself and Saul. I had no doubt Tom could’ve handled Easter himself, or really Virgil Huddleston, because that was Easter’s real name. But the man did bludgeon Jim Duncan to death, so I couldn’t fault Julius for taking the precaution of having Saul accompany Tom.

When they brought Huddleston to Julius’s office, the man looked grayer than before and he sat more slumped over than hunched. Julius told Tom and Saul they could wait outside the office. Once Julius was alone with Huddleston, he showed the man copies of the twenty-two-year-old newspaper article I had found about his outstanding arrest warrant. The article included a picture of a much younger Virgil Huddleston, who back then had long hair and a thick moustache, and it described how Huddleston had murdered a man in cold blood. Huddleston gave both a brief look before placing them back on Julius’s desk.

“Unless the police find forensic evidence linking you to Duncan’s murder, it’s doubtful I’ll ever be able to prove that you committed the crime,” Julius admitted. “But your attempting to flee the state after meeting with me should be enough for them to hold you until the Alabama authorities can pick you up, and they will convict you there. You have a decision to make, Mr. Huddleston. Whether you’d rather be convicted of murder in Alabama or Massachusetts. Alabama has the death penalty, Massachusetts doesn’t. Decide now.”

Huddleston looked surprised by that. “You won’t reveal my real identity if I confess to killing Duncan?” he asked.

“No. I was hired to solve Jim Duncan’s murder, and besides, I can only see you convicted of one murder, so I’ll let you pick which one it will be. If you choose Duncan’s, and the police figure out your true identity, that’s outside of my control, but I don’t believe it’s likely.”

If the Alabama police had been able to get fingerprints or DNA samples from Virgil Huddleston twenty-two years ago, they’d be able to connect George “Buggy” Easter to their wanted fugitive, but they didn’t have either. Huddleston had been careful not to leave any behind at the murder site, and he was prescient enough to set fire to the small home he was renting before fleeing so they’d have none to collect. Julius was right. The chances of anyone in Alabama realizing Easter was the same fugitive from their twenty-two-year-old cold case was slim. There was the possibility of Grushnier, or more precisely one of his underlings, alerting the Alabama authorities to Easter’s true identity, but that would only risk exposing Grushnier’s role.