Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 31

by Champagne for One

  “No,” I said. “Now that we can name the figure I admit it’s a temptation, but I’m committed. No.”

  “Committed to what?” Laidlaw demanded.

  “To my statement that Faith Usher didn’t kill herself.”

  “Why? For God’s sake, why?”

  Wolfe took over. “No, sir. That is still reserved, even if I accept your retainer. If I do, I’ll proceed on the hypothesis that your account of your relations with Faith Usher is bona fide, but only as a hypothesis. Over the years I have found many hypotheses untenable. It is quite possible that you did kill Faith Usher and your coming to me is a step in some devious and crafty stratagem. Then—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Very well. That’s an item of the hypothesis. Then the situation is this: since Mr. Goodwin is unyielding, and since if the police persist they will surely bare your secret and then harass you, I can do your job only (a) by proving that Faith Usher committed suicide and Mr. Goodwin is wrong, or (b) by identifying and exposing the murderer. That would be a laborious and expensive undertaking, and I’ll ask you to sign a memorandum stating that, no matter who the murderer is, if I expose him you’ll pay my bill.”

  Laidlaw didn’t hesitate. “I’ll sign it.”

  “With, as I said, no guarantee.”

  “As I said, I don’t expect any.”

  “Then that’s understood.” Wolfe reached to pick up the check. “Archie. You may deposit this as a retainer and advance for expenses.”

  I got up and took it and dropped it in a drawer of my desk.

  “I want to ask a question,” Laidlaw said. He was looking at me. “Evidently you didn’t tell the police what happened when I asked Faith Usher to dance with me, and she refused. If you had told them they would certainly have asked me about it. Why didn’t you?”

  I sat down. “That’s about the only thing I left out. For a reason. From the beginning they were on my neck about my thinking it was murder, and if I had told them about her refusing to dance with you they would have thought I was also trying to pick the murderer, and they already had certain feelings about me on account of former collisions. And if you denied it when they asked you about it, they might think I was playing hopscotch. I could always remember it and report it later, if developments called for it.”

  Wolfe was frowning. “You didn’t report this to me.”

  “No, sir. Why should I? You weren’t interested.”

  “I am now. But now, conveniently, her refusal is already explained.” He turned to the client. “Did you know Miss Usher would be there before you went?”

  “No,” Laidlaw said. “If I had I wouldn’t have gone.”

  “Did she know you would be there?”

  “I don’t know, but I doubt it. I think that goes for her too; if she had she wouldn’t have gone.”

  “Then it was a remarkable coincidence. In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted. Had you attended any of those affairs previously? Those annual dinners?”

  “No. It was on account of Faith Usher that I accepted the invitation. Not to see her—as I said, I wouldn’t have gone if I had known she would be there—just some feeling about what had happened. I suppose a psychiatrist would call it a feeling of guilt.”

  “Who invited you?”

  “Mrs. Robilotti.”

  “Were you a frequent guest at her house?”

  “Not frequent, no, just occasional. I have known Cecil, her son, since prep school, but we have never been close. Her nephew, Austin Byne, was in my class at Harvard. What are you doing, investigating me?”

  Wolfe didn’t reply. He glanced up at the wall clock: ten minutes past one. He took in a couple of bushels of air through his nose, and let it out through his mouth. He looked at the client, not with enthusiasm.

  “This will take hours, Mr. Laidlaw. Just to get started with you—what you know about those people—since I must proceed, tentatively, on the hypothesis that Mr. Goodwin is right and Miss Usher was murdered, and you didn’t kill her, and therefore one of the others did. Eleven of them, if we include the butler—no, ten, since I shall arbitrarily eliminate Mr. Goodwin. Confound it, an army! It’s time for lunch, and I invite you to join us, and then we’ll resume. Clams hashed with eggs, parsley, green peppers, chives, fresh mushrooms, and sherry. Mr. Goodwin drinks milk. I drink beer. Would you prefer white wine?”

  Laidlaw said yes, he would, and Wolfe got up and headed for the kitchen.

  Chapter 6

  At a quarter past five that afternoon, when Laidlaw left, I had thirty-two pages of shorthand, my private brand, in my book. Of course, Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms at four o’clock so for the last hour and a quarter I had been the emcee. When Wolfe came down to the office at six I had typed four pages from my notes and was banging away on the fifth.

  Most of it was a waste of time and paper, but there were items that might come in handy. To begin with, there was nothing whatever on the three unmarried mothers who were still alive. Laidlaw had never seen or heard of Helen Yarmis or Ethel Varr or Rose Tuttle before the party. Another blank was Hackett. All I had got on him was that he was a good butler, which I already knew, and that he had been there for years, since before Grantham had died.

  Mrs. Robilotti. Laidlaw didn’t care much for her. He didn’t put it that way, but it was obvious. He called her a vulgarian. Her first husband, Albert Grantham, had had genuine philanthropic impulses and knew what to do with them, but she was a phony. She wasn’t actually continuing to support his philanthropies; they had been provided for in his will; she spent a lot of time on them, attending board meetings and so on, only to preserve her standing with her betters. “Betters,” for Laidlaw, evidently didn’t mean people with more money, which I thought was a broad-minded attitude for a man with ten million of his own.

  Robert Robilotti. Laidlaw cared for him even less, and said so. Mrs. Albert Grantham, widow, had acquired him in Italy and brought him back with her luggage. That alone showed she was a vulgarian, but here, it seemed to me, things got confused, because Robilotti was not a vulgarian. He was polished, civilized, and well informed. In all this I’m merely quoting Laidlaw. Of course, he was also a parasite. When I asked if he looked elsewhere for the female refreshments that were in short supply at home, Laidlaw said there were rumors, but there were always rumors.

  Celia Grantham. Here I had got a surprise—nothing startling, but enough to make me lift a brow. Laidlaw had asked her to marry him six months ago and she had refused. “I tell you that,” he said, “so you will know that I can’t be very objective about her. Perhaps I was lucky. That was when I was getting a hold on myself after what had happened with Faith Usher, and perhaps I was just looking for help. Celia could help a man all right if she wanted to. She has character, but she hasn’t decided what to do with it. The reason she gave for refusing to marry me was that I didn’t dance well enough.” It was while we were on Celia that I learned that Laidlaw had an oldfashioned streak. When I asked him what about her relations with men and got a vague answer, and made it more specific by asking if he thought she was a virgin, he said of course, since he had asked her to marry him. An old fogy at thirty-one.

  Cecil Grantham. On him it struck me that Laidlaw was being diplomatic, and I thought I guessed why. Cecil was three years younger than Laidlaw, and I gathered that his interests and activities were along the same lines as Laidlaw’s had been three years ago before the event with Faith Usher had pushed his nose in—with qualifications, one being that whereas Laidlaw’s pile had been left to him with no strings attached, Cecil’s was in a trust controlled by his mother and he had to watch his budget. He had been heard to remark that he would like to do something to earn some money but couldn’t find any spare time for it. Each year he spent three summer months on a ranch in Montana.

  Paul Schuster. He was a prodigy. He had worked his way through college and law school, and when he had graduated with high
honors a clerkship had been offered him by a justice of the United States Supreme Court, but he had preferred to go to work for a Wall Street firm with five names at the top, and a dozen at the side, of its letterhead. Probably a hundred and twenty bucks a week. Even more probably, at fifty he would be raking in half a million a year. Laidlaw knew him only fairly well and could furnish no information about the nature and extent of his intimacies with either sex. The owner of one of the five names at the top of the letterhead, now venerable, had been Albert Grantham’s lawyer, and that was probably the connection that had got Schuster at Mrs. Robilotti’s dinner table.

  Beverly Kent. Of the Rhode Island Kents, if that means anything to you. It didn’t to me. His family was still hanging on to three thousand acres and a couple of miles of a river named Usquepaugh. He too had been in Laidlaw’s class at Harvard, and had followed a family tradition when he chose the diplomatic service for a career. In Laidlaw’s opinion it wasn’t likely that he had ever been guilty of an indiscretion, let alone an outrage, with a female.

  Edwin Laidlaw. A reformed man, a repentant sinner, and a recovered soul. He said he had more appropriate clichés handy, but I told him those would do. When he had inherited his father’s stack, three years ago, he had gone on as before, horsing around, and had caught up with himself only after the Faith Usher affair. He had not, to the best of his knowledge, ever made any other woman a mother, married or unmarried. It had taken more than half of his assets to buy the Malvin Press, and for four months he had been spending ten hours a day at his office, five days a week, not to mention evenings and weekends. He thought he would be on to the publishing business in five years.

  As for Faith Usher, his thinking that she had not been promiscuous, and his not raising the question, at his last meeting with her, whether there was any doubt about his being the father of the baby she was carrying, had been based entirely on the impression he had got of her. He knew nothing whatever about her family or background. He hadn’t even known where she lived; she had refused to tell him. She had given him a phone number and he had called her at it, but he didn’t remember what it was, and he had made a little private ceremony of destroying his phone number book when he had reformed. When I said that on a week’s vacation trip there is time for a lot of talk, he said they had done plenty of talking, but she had shied away from anything about her. His guess was that she had probably graduated from high school.

  We had spent a solid hour with him on the party before Wolfe went up to the plant rooms. Wolfe took him through every minute of it, trying to get some faint glimmer of a hint. Laidlaw was sure that neither he nor Faith Usher had said or done anything that could have made anyone suspect they had ever met before, except her refusing to dance with him, and no one had heard that but me. He had asked her to dance because he thought it would be noticed if he didn’t.

  Of course the main point was when Cecil Grantham came to the bar to get the champagne. Laidlaw had been standing there with Helen Yarmis, with whom he had just been dancing, and Mr. and Mrs. Robilotti. As he and Helen Yarmis approached the bar, Beverly Kent and Celia Grantham were moving away, and Mr. and Mrs. Robilotti were there, and of course Hackett. Laidlaw thought he and Helen Yarmis had been there more than a minute, but not more than two, when Cecil Grantham came; that was what he had told the police. He couldn’t say whether, when he had taken two glasses of champagne for Helen Yarmis and himself, there had been other glasses on the bar with champagne in them; he simply hadn’t noticed. The police had got him to try to recall the picture, but he couldn’t. All he was sure of was that he hadn’t poisoned any champagne, but he was almost as sure that Helen Yarmis hadn’t either. She had been right at his elbow.

  There was more, a lot more, but that’s enough for here. You can see why I said that most of it was a waste of time and paper. I might mention that Wolfe had dictated the memorandum, and I had typed it, and Laidlaw had signed it. Also, as instructed by Wolfe, as soon as Laidlaw had gone I phoned Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather, and asked them to drop in at nine o’clock.

  At six, on the dot as always, Wolfe entered and crossed to his desk. I collated the originals of the four finished pages, took them to him, and went back to the typewriter. I was rolling out the fifth page when he spoke.

  “Archie.”

  I twisted my neck. “Yes, sir?”

  “Your attention, please.”

  I swiveled. “Yes, sir.”

  “You will agree that this is a devil of a problem, with monstrous difficulties in a disagreeable context.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I have asked you three times regarding your contention that Miss Usher did not commit suicide. The first time it was merely civil curiosity. The second time, in the presence of Mr. Cramer, it was merely rhetorical, to give you an opportunity to voice your resolution. The third time, in the presence of Mr. Laidlaw, it was merely by, the way, since I knew you wouldn’t pull back with him here. Now I ask you again. You know how it stands. If I undertake this job, on the assumption that she was murdered, an assumption based solely on your testimony, you know what it will entail in time, energy, wit, and vexation. The expense will be on Mr. Laidlaw, but the rest will be on me. I don’t care to risk, in addition, the chance that I am burrowing in an empty hole. So I ask you again.”

  I nodded. “I knew this would come. Naturally. I stand pat. I can make a speech if you want one.”

  “No. You have already explained your ground. I will only remind you that the circumstances as described by Mr. Cramer indicate that it would have been impossible for anyone to poison that glass of champagne with any assurance that it would get to Miss Usher.”

  “I heard him.”

  “Yes. There is the same objection to supposing that it was intended for any other particular person, and its getting to Miss Usher was a mishap.”

  “Right.”

  “There is also the fact that she was the most likely target, since the poison was in her bag, making it highly probable that the conclusion would be that she had killed herself. But for you, that would be the conclusion. Therefore it was almost certainly intended for her.”

  “Right.”

  “But, for the reasons given by Mr. Cramer, it couldn’t possibly have been intended for her.”

  I grinned at him. “What the hell,” I said. “I know it’s a lulu. I admit I wouldn’t know where to start, but I’m not supposed to. That’s your part. Speaking of starting, Saul and Fred and Orrie will be here at nine o’clock.”

  He made a face. He had to cook up chores for them, nine o’clock was less than three hours away, for one of the hours he would be dining, and he would not work his brain at the table.

  “I have,” he growled, “only this moment committed myself, after consulting you. Mr. Laidlaw’s check could have been returned.” He flattened his palms on the chair arms. “Then I’m in for it, and so are you. You will go tomorrow morning to that institution, Grantham House, and learn about Faith Usher. How she got there, when she came and when she left, what happened to her infant—everything. Cover it.”

  “I will if I can get in. I mention as a fact, not an objection, that that place has certainly had a lot of visitors today. At least a dozen assorted journalists, not to mention cops. Have you any suggestions?”

  “Yes. You told me yesterday morning that a man you know named Austin Byne had phoned to ask you to take his place at that gathering. Today Mr. Laidlaw said that a man named Austin Byne, Mrs. Robilotti’s nephew, had once gone to Grantham House on an errand for his aunt. I suppose the same man?”

  “You suppose.” I crossed my legs. “It wouldn’t hurt you any, and would be good for my morale, if you let me take a trick now and then. Austin Byne had already occurred to me, and I asked for suggestions only to be polite. I already know what your powers of observation and memory are and you didn’t have to demonstrate them by remembering that I had mentioned his name on the fly and—Why the snort?”

  “At the notion that your morale
needs any encouragement. Do you know where to reach Mr. Byne?”

  I said I did and, before resuming at the typewriter, dialed his number. No answer. During the next hour and a half I interrupted my typing four times to dial the number, and still no answer. By then it was dinnertime. For himself, Wolfe will permit nothing and no one to interfere with the course of a meal, and, since we dine together in the dining room, my leaving the table is a sort of interference and he doesn’t like it, but that time I had to. Three times during dinner I went to the office to dial Byne’s number, with no luck, and I tried again when, having finished the baked pears, we transferred to the office and Fritz brought coffee. I accept a “no answer” verdict only after counting thirteen rings, and had got nine when the doorbell rang and Fritz announced Saul Panzer. The other two came a minute later.

  That trio, the three that Wolfe always called on when we needed more eyes and ears and legs, were as good as you could get in the metropolitan area. In fact, Saul Panzer, a little guy with a big nose who never wore a hat, compromising on a cap when the weather was rough, was better. With an office and a staff he could have cleaned up, but that wouldn’t have left him enough time for playing the piano or playing pinochle or keeping up with his reading, so he preferred to freelance at seventy bucks a day. Fred Durkin, bulky and bald-headed, had his weak points, but he was worth at least half as much as Saul, which was his price, if you gave him the right kind of errands. If Orrie Cather had been as smart as he was brave and handsome he would have been hiring people instead of being hired, and Wolfe would have had to find someone else, which wouldn’t have been easy because good operatives are scarce.

  They were on yellow chairs in a row facing Wolfe’s desk. We hadn’t seen any of them for two months, and civilities had been exchanged, including handshakes. They are three of the nine or ten people to whom Wolfe willingly offers a hand. Saul and Orrie had accepted offers of coffee; Fred had preferred beer.