James & Bond excerpt

 

An excerpt from the Morris Brick story James & Bond from Detectives and Spies:

VICTOR Specter had good reason to be nervous given the flash drive that he had earlier tucked away in his wallet. If the authorities were to find that on him he’d be in deep doo doo, to say the least. His most pressing concern at that moment, though, was the silver Mercedes sedan three car lengths behind him. He could’ve sworn he’d spotted that same car when he left Janus Global Enterprises and that must’ve been why instinctively he’d gotten off the 110 and started driving aimlessly through downtown Los Angeles. While he didn’t think it likely that Auric Gold would double-cross him, the guy was a reputed mobster suspected of running half a dozen criminal enterprises, including laundering money for the Russian mob, and since ten million dollars was at stake, the thought had crossed his mind that the Mercedes’s presence was anything but innocent. He knew that Gold wanted the flash drive. Forget that, Gold needed the documents stored on the drive, and while he would pay the agreed upon ten-million-dollar price for it, if the mobster could get it for nothing by having a couple of his hired thugs nabbing him after he left work, why wouldn’t Gold try that? The guy was a killer, after all!

Victor used his rearview mirror to catch another peek of the Mercedes and realized for the first time that while the driver was a man, his passenger was a woman. So Gold must have women muscle on his payroll. Why not? The light ahead had turned yellow. Victor gritted his teeth and without signaling or even glancing over, swung his car hard into the left lane. The car he had cut off blasted its horn, but there was no sound of crunching metal. Luckily, he had avoided an accident. The light turned red and he came to a stop. Once again, he glanced in the rearview mirror. The driver behind him was nearly frothing at the mouth as he energetically gave him the finger. Fine. Victor didn’t care about that. What he cared about was that the Mercedes had also moved into the left lane.

As Victor waited for the light to turn green, he gripped the steering wheel hard enough that his hands began to ache. He no longer had any doubt that Gold had sent those two to rip him off. When the light changed, instead of turning left Victor pushed hard on the gas and shot forward, driving straight on 2nd Street. He risked another look in the rearview mirror and watched as the Mercedes had no choice but to take the left turn. Later, Gold’s muscle would circle back and try to pick him up, but they weren’t going to have any luck with that. Victor would meet up with Gold later that evening, but it would be on his terms. He turned right on South Grand Avenue and then another right. He would find a place to camp out and give the Mercedes time to get hopelessly lost trying to find him. Besides, after releasing the steering wheel and feeling his hand shake, he realized that he badly needed a drink.

Eight minutes later Victor parked half a block away from the Royale Bar. Another nine minutes and he was sitting at the bar and had drunk half of a double Scotch. By happenstance, he looked over his left shoulder and caught the eye of a dark brunette sitting three barstools away. Somehow he hadn’t noticed her until then, but she was quite attractive, and he found himself staring at her longer than he should have. Instead of reacting angrily, she flashed him the type of smile that made him feel weak in the knees. He smiled back at her and watched as she got off her barstool and ambled over to him.

“Eva,” she said.

Up close and seeing her standing, she wasn’t just attractive, she was stunningly gorgeous. Like a movie star. He took the hand she offered. It was a slender, delicate hand, and it felt nice in his own.

“Sean,” he lied, which made no sense. Sometime in the next thirty minutes he would be heading to LAX and once he arrived there he’d be calling Auric Gold and arranging to meet him at his gate. It shouldn’t take more than an hour after that for them to conclude their business. Then at roughly five-forty p.m. he’d be boarding a flight to Vietnam. So why lie about his name? He had no good answer for that. But he did know why he wanted her to take the empty barstool next to him. He wasn’t a bad looking guy, and in the past he had attracted his share of attractive and cute women, but never anyone like her. That should change once he had his ten million dollars, but still, this was a first for him. He glanced past her to notice that she had left behind an empty cocktail glass. Since he had nothing to lose, he decided to be bold. “You just want me to buy you a drink,” he said, flashing her a grin.

She laughed at that and lightly touched his arm. “That’s not the only reason.” She gestured at the empty barstool. “Mind if I sit?” she asked.

“By all means.” Victor signaled the bartender to get the woman another drink. The bartender complied, mixing up a gin martini and bringing it over.

“Whether it’s gin or vodka, I prefer my martinis stirred and not shaken,” she said. Her hand was again lightly touching Victor’s arm and he reciprocated by placing his hand on one of her beautifully shaped legs. The fact that she didn’t seem to mind had him recalculating how much time he had before he’d have to leave for the airport.

“I’m not usually here at—” She gave her watch a quick look. “Two-twenty in the afternoon drinking martinis, but it was just one of those days where I needed to get out of the office.” Her smile turned up a notch. “What’s your excuse?”

“I’m not drinking martinis.”

She laughed at that. An easy, soft laugh, and Victor found himself mesmerized by it. He also tried again to reschedule in his mind his next three hours so he could both deliver the flash drive to Gold and also spend an hour alone with Eva.

“You know what I mean, smart guy,” she said with a wicked smile. She reached for her martini and knocked the glass over, the gin and vermouth that had been stirred together soaking Victor’s pants. He quickly got to his feet so he could inspect the damage.

She burst out laughing, but brought her palm to her mouth to cut it off. “I can’t believe I did that,” she exclaimed, sounding appropriately contrite. She was quickly off her own barstool and crouching in front of him as she futilely attempted to scrub at his wet pant.

There wasn’t much point in what she was doing. He would have to buy a pair of boxer shorts and pants unless he wanted to spend nineteen hours on a plane in wet clothes, which meant he wouldn’t be able to juggle his schedule enough to spend any time alone with her.

“Eva, what are you doing with him!”

 The man who had yelled this had just entered the Royale. He was about Victor’s height, but far more muscular, and he also looked borderline homicidal with thick veins streaking his neck. He was also running straight at them, his hands balled into fists.

Eva turned away from Victor to confront this man. “Craig, we had broken up!”

Victor sized up the situation quickly. Craig was intent on doing serious damage to him and Eva weighing all of 115 pounds would be little more than a speed bump in slowing the guy down. Victor had to get out of there fast, and since Craig was between him and the front door, he took off running toward the back entrance. The adrenaline pumping through him left him nearly breathless as he pushed his way through the door and stepped out into the alley behind the Royale. An arm wrapped around him from behind and he was jabbed in the neck with a needle. He tried yelling for help, but a thick piece of cloth was pushed into his mouth, gagging him. The arms that held him were like steel bands and every second he felt weaker. A minute later he was fully conscious but his body sagged as if he had no control over it.

A Taste of Julius Katz and the Ruined Roast

 

(an excerpt from Detectives and Spies)

THREE sections. Four different types of mystery and crime stories.

Whether it’s the brilliant Boston detective Julius Katz, or his sister Julia, the first three stories in the KATZ section are traditional mysteries. A crime has been committed, the potential suspects are questioned, and the guilty party is exposed. While the fourth story in the KATZ section, Archie’s Been Stolen!, has the same style, tone and humor as all the other Julius Katz and Archie stories, it’s a caper. There’s no mystery to solve, only a heist of sorts to commit.

The three stories in the BRICK section are crime thrillers featuring investigator Morris Brick, his bull terrier Parker, and the rest of the MBI team. These stories and the five Morris Brick novels that I wrote under the Jacob Stone pseudonym for Kensington have similar humor and style, are fast-paced, and are populated by hardened criminals and mobsters. Where they differ is the novels have very bad people committing horrific acts while the stories are lighter. While there’s plenty of danger in these stories, ultimately no one gets badly hurt.

The two stories in the STONE section features Hell’s only operating private eye, Mike Stone, from my novel Everybody Lies in Hell. Even with the unique setting and the fantastic elements, such as souls being tormented by demons and demonic racing horses that bite the heads off of jockeys, these are hardboiled PI stories. These stories are about stripping away the self-deceptions and lies we tell ourselves to expose the ugly truths underneath, and there’s not much more hardboiled than that!

So given that these are all mystery and crime stories, why the title Detectives and Spies? While all the stories have either detectives or spies acting as detectives, three of the stories are a merging of the mystery and spy genres.

JULIUS KATZ AND THE RUINED ROAST

AT ten-fourteen a.m. Julius put down the daily edition of the Boston Globe, got up from behind his desk and perused his bookshelves before selecting a biography of the Word War Two spy, Virginia Hall. He had found excuses to turn down the last five potential clients who were desperate to hire him, so why not spend the rest of the day loafing just like he had the past week? Me, I felt a jangling throughout, which I knew from past experience was a sensation akin to nervousness. The reason? It appeared as if my plans were about to go kaput thanks to a late delivery. My first three text messages all got the same response, and my last one went unanswered. Since all I could do was wait, that’s what I did. Two minutes later I would’ve sighed in relief if I had lungs, but since I don’t, I simply imagined myself doing so. Seven seconds after that the doorbell rang.

Julius ignored the doorbell. He didn’t even bother to ask me to check the outdoor webcam feed to see who it was. I waited until he turned to the next page of his book before telling him that three boxes of pastries had been left outside his door.

Annoyance tightened his lips for all of 110 milliseconds. “Archie, please explain the reason for this,” he said with forced patience.

“Nothing too nefarious,” I said. “I ordered them, although they were supposed to have been delivered an hour and five minutes ago. You really should retrieve them before squirrels, or worse, make a meal out of them.”

If Julius was curious about my motive, he didn’t show it. Instead he took his time reading another page before telling me in a rather curt tone that I should call around to find someone who would pick up the food before it attracts pests to his Beacon Hill townhouse.

“Sure, if that’s what you want, but it would be a shame. The order is from Lenora’s Bakery and it includes six of their famous chocolate pecan roses, which are damned hard to get even though as far as I can tell they’re little more than a fancy brioche roll baked into the shape of a rose.”

That got Julius to put his book down. He wasn’t about to give me the satisfaction of running, but still, he moved at a determined pace to retrieve the pastries, which was what I expected given all the recent hullabaloo about Lenora’s after their roses were proclaimed by the Globe’s food critic to be a regional treasure. Julius would have ordered some himself, except the bakery’s policy was not to take orders for the roses. Instead it was first come first serve, and they only baked a few hundred each morning and would sell out within a half hour of their seven a.m. opening. At that time each morning Julius would be engaged in his two-hour martial arts workout, which was something he wasn’t about to forego even for a morning pastry that the critics called beyond exquisite. I got lucky when I called to wheedle a delivery from them. While Lenora Chapel, the owner of the bakery, kept the recipe for the roses a well-guarded secret, she suspected that a recently fired employee had brought her recipe for something called a peach-hazelnut snail to a rival bakery and wanted to know if this person was working there. A little hacking on my part proved Lenora correct, which was all her lawyer needed to issue a cease and desist letter, and hence the delivery this morning.

Julius waited until he had brought the boxes of pastries safely back to his office and was able to examine them and verify that the prized rolls were indeed included before asking how I had managed this.

“A little wheeling and dealing on my part,” I said. “Nothing for you to be concerned about.”

Julius’s eyelids lowered an eighth of an inch. He asked, “Who did you arrange to come here this morning?”

“Is it impossible to believe that I got you those roses and other treats out of the goodness of my heart, even though I don’t have one?”

“Archie, please, none of this sophistry.”

“Fine. The four main suspects for the Charlie Lacey murder. They want to hire you.”

That brought a thin smile to him. “Archie, I am grateful for these pastries, but if you thought that I would reciprocate by meeting with them, then you need to recalibrate your neuron network.”

Of course, I never thought that even for a microsecond. I fully understand how stubborn Julius is. When the news broke that the comic Charlie Lacey dropped dead of cyanide poisoning during the middle of his roast at a Cambridge comedy club, Julius claimed that the reputed mob boss Billy Quinn was the murderer simply because the news reported that Quinn was in attendance. It didn’t matter that Quinn was there only because Lacey was his godson and that the police had ruled him out as a suspect, Julius wasn’t about to admit he had made a mistake. This was sort of like Schrödinger’s cat—as long as Lacey’s murder wasn’t solved, Quinn could both be the murderer and not the murderer, and Julius could be both right and wrong.

“That’s not what I was thinking,” I told Julius. “I wanted to get you those roses because I knew how much you wanted them, especially since they’ll be a nice surprise for Lily when she gets back from visiting her parents. But I did think the gesture would soften you up enough to listen to reason. Forget the publicity you’d get from this case, the four suspects coming here are willing to put a hundred grand in escrow for you simply agreeing to take the case, which works out to 57,550 dollars after taxes, and that should be enough for you to make the winning bid for a bottle of 1990 Domaine Georges & Christophe Roumier Musigny Grand Cru that goes up for auction this Saturday.”

That got Julius’s attention, as well it should since this was a vintage he’d been trying to acquire for years. He contemplated the matter for all of three point two seconds before telling me that a twenty-five thousand dollar bid should be sufficient.

“That might be true,” I said. “That’s what the wine is supposed to be worth, but the last bottle that went up for auction sold for 52,500 dollars. But whether you’d have to pay twenty-five grand or more for that fermented bottle of grape juice is irrelevant since you can’t pay that much and also cover your next two months’ expenses unless you cut out your expensive dinners at Le Che Cru with Lily and skip the illegal poker game next Friday at Phil Weinstein’s restaurant and its ten grand buy-in.”

Julius’s tone held a petulant note as he said, “You’re assuming I’ll be losing my buy-in instead of walking away from the game with substantial winnings.”

“Yeah, I know, you’re a world-class poker player, and you should clean and fillet the guppies you’ll be playing with, but luck’s a funny thing, especially bad luck, and I remember nights when you’ve done everything right and still busted out. If you’d like I can provide you specifics.”

Julius sat stone-faced while he drummed the fingers on his right hand against his desk’s surface, which was always a clear sign that he was annoyed with me. “Blast it,” he said after five point seven seconds of drumming. “I already told you who the murderer is.”

“Yeah, I know. Billy Quinn. The video recording of the roast that the police took custody of hasn’t helped them make an arrest. Maybe if I were able to find it, you’d pinpoint where it showed Quinn poisoning Lacey’s drink, but I’ve hacked all of the Cambridge Police Department’s computers, and I can’t find the video recording on any of them. So prove the impossible and earn yourself that hundred grand.”

Julius brooded for the next eight point three seconds, but from the way he grimaced he must’ve decided that he wanted the bottle of Grand Cru more than the luxury of spending his time goofing off, and even more than opening up the box with his own version of Schrödinger’s cat and having to admit that his earlier ill-formed opinion was wrong.

He asked, “Archie, when will that mob be descending on my door?”

Four comics were now a mob? I didn’t argue the point and instead told him that they were scheduled to arrive in eight minutes.

He cast a glum look at the box filled with Lenora’s acclaimed roses. “That doesn’t leave me enough time to properly appreciate one of them,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that. As I told you the delivery was late.” I simulated taking a breath and holding it, which for me was pausing my central processing unit for fifty milliseconds, then said, “There’s still time for me to cancel the meeting if you want.”

Julius’s expression turned glummer, but otherwise he didn’t bother to answer me. He got up from his chair and brought the boxes of pastries to his kitchen.

 (continued in Detectives and Spies)

A poem

I'm going through old papers and found a poem I had written many years. I don't know when I wrote it, but since I had used a typewriter, it would either have been in high school or college. In any case, here's my one and only attempt at poetry:

Tilling the Soil

The beast is in the yoke
And I at the harness
For together through muddy fields

of hope and ideas

We Plow

Through the hypocrisy

the stone strewned bureaucracy 

We toil
Turning over old phrases

To reveal implicit mazes

Which dissipate through the

Top soil

Man and beast we work

Scratching the earth

Preparing for next season's harvest

But wait

The beast wheezes and sneezes and

Oh Jesus

Freezes my glands as

Hairy thorns sprout

And tales of Germans flow out

Amidst this beastly transformation

So with a whirling and chirling

And new-born talons churning

The beats-monster is free from my service

To debauch my dreams

With random desire and

Frenzied malice deep in mire

More Julius Katz and Archie On sale now!

 

"The puzzles are clever, and Zeltserman plays fair with readers. Stout devotees will be delighted with this loving homage." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

On sale now for $2.99!

Jury Box review of Detectives and Spies

 

In the March/April issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Steven Steinbock offers the following review of Detectives and Spies in his Jury Box column: Zeltserman, who has garnered multiple EQMM Readers Awards as well as the Derringer and Shamus awards, has brought together nine stories, the first four featuring an artificial-intelligence device called Archie Smith, followed by three stories about former L.A. cop Morris Brick and two hardboiled crime stories featuring Hell’s only private eye, Mike Stone. Most of the stories first appeared in EQMM or in its sister publication Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. My favorites are the stories about Archie, especially relevant with AI constantly in the news. Archie, a “highly-sophisticated neuron network,” serves as Watson to private eye Julius Katz in the first two stories, then is passed on to Katz’s sister, international spy Julia Katz, for the next two. Reading these tales is like playing a lively game of Clue, except with more colorful characters and an AI at your side.