Too Many Cooks/Champagne for One (16 page)

“I’m sorry to disturb you so late, but—may I see Mr. Wolfe?”

I told her to wait and returned to the inner chamber.

“Not men with dark skin, but a woman. Mrs. Phillip Laszio wants to see you.”

“What? Her?”

“Yes, sir. In a dark cloak and no hat.”

Wolfe grimaced. “Confound that woman! Bring her in here.”

I sat and watched and listened and felt cynical. Wolfe rubbed his cheek with the tip of his forefinger, slowly and rhythmically, which meant he was irritated but attentive. Dina Laszio was on a chair facing him, with her cloak thrown back, her smooth neck showing above a plain black dress with no collar, her body at ease, her eyes dark in shadow.

Wolfe said, “No apology is needed, madam. Just tell me about it. I’m expecting callers and am pressed for time.”

“It’s about Marko,” she said.

“Indeed. What about Marko?”

“You’re so brusque.” She smiled a little, and the smile clung to the corners of her mouth. “You should know that you can’t expect a woman to be direct like that. We don’t take the road, we wind around. You know that. Only I wonder how much you know about women like me.”

“I couldn’t say. Are you a special kind?”

She nodded. “I think I am. Yes, I know I am. Not because I want to be or try to be, but …” She made a little gesture. “It has made my life exciting, but not very comfortable. It will end … I don’t know how it will end. Right now I am worried about Marko, because he thinks you suspect him of killing my husband.”

Wolfe stopped rubbing his cheek. He told her, “Nonsense.”

“No, it isn’t. He thinks that.”

“Why? Did you tell him so?”

“No. And I resent—” She stopped herself. She leaned forward, her head a little on one side, her lips not quite meeting, and looked at him. I watched her with pleasure. I suppose she was telling the truth when she said she didn’t try to be a special kind of woman, but she didn’t have to try. There was something in her—not only in her face, it came right out through her clothes—that gave you an instinctive impulse to start in that direction. I kept on being cynical, but it was easy to appreciate that there might be a time when cynicism wouldn’t be enough.

She asked with a soft breath, “Mr. Wolfe, why do you
always jab at me? What have you got against me? Yesterday, when I told you what Phillip told me about the arsenic … and now when I tell you about Marko …”

She leaned back. “Marko told me once, long ago, that you don’t like women.”

Wolfe shook his head. “I can only say, nonsense again. I couldn’t rise to that impudence. Not like women? They are astounding and successful animals. For reasons of convenience, I merely preserve an appearance of immunity which I developed some years ago under the pressure of necessity. I confess to a specific animus toward you. Marko Vukcic is my friend; you were his wife; and you deserted him. I don’t like you.”

“So long ago!” She fluttered a hand. Then she shrugged. “Anyway, I am here now in Markos behalf.”

“You mean he sent you?”

“No. But I came, for him. It is known, of course, that you have engaged to free Berin of the charge of killing my husband. How can you do that except by accusing Marko? Berin says Phillip was in the dining room, alive, when he left. Marko says Phillip was not there when he entered. So if not Berin, it must have been Marko. And then, you asked Marko to-day if he asked me to dance or suggested that I turn on the radio. There could be only one reason why you asked him that: because you suspected that he wanted the radio going so that no noise would be heard from the dining room when he … if anything happened in there.”

“So Marko told you that I asked about the radio.”

“Yes.” She smiled faintly. “He thought I should know. You see, he has forgiven what you will not forgive—”

I missed the rest of that on account of a knock on the door. I went to the foyer, closing the door of Wolfe’s room behind me, and opened up. The sight in the hall gave me a shock, even though I had been warned. It looked like half of Harlem. Four or five were greenjackets who a couple of hours back had been serving the dean’s dinner to us, and the others, the cooks and helpers, were in their own clothes. The light brown middle-aged one in front with the bottom of one ear chopped off was the head waiter in charge at Pocahontas, and I felt friendly to him because it was he who had left the cognac bottle smack in front of me at the table. I told them to come on in and stepped aside not to get trampled, and directed them through to my room and followed them in.

“You’ll have to wait in here, boys, Mr. Wolfe has a visitor. Sit on something. Sit on the bed, it’s mine and it looks like I won’t be using it anyway. If you go to sleep, snore a couple of good ones for me.”

I left them there and went back to see how Wolfe was getting along with the woman he didn’t like. Neither of them bothered with a glance at me as I sat down. She was saying:

“… but I know nothing about it beyond what I told you yesterday. Certainly I know there are other possibilities besides Berin and Marko. As you say, someone could have entered the dining room from the terrace. That’s what you’re thinking of, isn’t it?”

“It’s a possibility. But go back a little, Mrs. Laszio. Do you mean to say that Marko Vukcic told you of my asking him about the radio, and expressed the fear that I suspected him of having the radio turned on to give him an opportunity for killing your husband?”

“Well …” She hesitated. “Not exactly like that. Marko would not express a fear. But the way he told me about it—that was obviously in his mind. So I’ve come to you to find out if you do suspect him.”

“You’ve come to defend him? Or to make sure that my clumsiness hasn’t missed
that
inference from the timeliness of the radio?”

“Neither.” She smiled at him. “You can’t make me angry, Mr. Wolfe. Why, do you make other inferences? Many of them?”

Wolfe shook his head impatiently. “You can’t do that, madam. Give it up. I mean your affected insouciance. I don’t mind fencing when there’s time for it, but it’s midnight and there are men in that other room waiting to see me.—Please let me finish. Let me clear away some fog. I have admitted an animus toward you. I knew Marko Vukcic both before and after he married you. I saw the change in him. Then why was I not grateful whey you suddenly selected a new field for your activities? Because you left débris behind you. It is not decent to induce the cocaine habit in a man, but it is monstrous to do so and then suddenly withdraw his supply of the drug. Nature plainly intends that a man should nourish a woman, and a woman a man, physically and spiritually, but there is no nourishment in you for anybody; the vapor that comes from you, from your eyes, your lips, your soft skin, your contours, your movements, is not beneficent but malignant.

I’ll grant you everything: you were alive, with your instincts and appetites, and you saw Marko and wanted him. You enveloped him with your miasma—you made that the only air he wanted to breathe—and then by caprice, without warning, you deprived him of it and left him gasping.”

She didn’t bat an eyelash. “But I told you I was a special kind—”

“Permit me. I haven’t finished. I am seizing an opportunity to articulate a grudge. I was wrong to say caprice, it was cold calculation. You went to Laszio, a man twice your age, because it was a step up, not emotionally but materially. Probably you had also found that Marko had too much character for you. The devil only knows why you went no higher than Laszio, in so broad a field as New York, who after all—from your standpoint—was only a salaried chef; but of course you were young, in your twenties—how old are you now?”

She smiled at him.

He shrugged. “I suppose, too, it was a matter of intelligence. You can’t have much. Essentially, in fact, you are a lunatic, if a lunatic is an individual dangerously maladjusted to the natural and healthy environment of its species—since the human equipment includes, for instance, a capacity for personal affection and a willingness to strangle selfish and predatory impulse with the rope of social decency. That’s why I say you’re a lunatic.” He sat up and wiggled a finger at her. “Now look here. I haven’t time for fencing. I do not suspect Marko of killing your husband, though I admit it is possible he did it. I have considered all the plausible inferences from the coincidence of the radio, am still considering them, and have reached no conclusion. What else do you want to know?”

“All that you said.…” Her hand fluttered and rested again on the arm of her chair. “Did Marko tell you all that about me?”

“Marko hasn’t mentioned your name for five years. What else do you want to know?”

She stirred. I saw her breast go up and down, but there was no sound of the soft sigh. “It wouldn’t do any good, since I’m a lunatic. But I thought I would ask you if Malfi had told you about Zelota.”

“No. What about him? Who is he?”

I horned in. “He told me.” Their eyes moved to me and I
went on, “I hadn’t had a chance to report it. Malfi told me in the parlor after dinner that Laszio stole something a long time ago from a guy named Zelota, and Zelota had sworn to kill him, and about a month ago he showed up in New York and went to Malfi to ask for a job. Malfi wouldn’t give him one, but Vukcic did, at Rusterman’s, and Zelota only lasted a week and then disappeared. Malfi said he told Liggett and Mrs. Laszio about it and they thought he ought to tell you.”

“Thanks.—Anything else, madam?”

She sat and looked at him. Her lids were so low that I couldn’t see what her eyes were like, and I doubted if he could. Then without saying anything she pulled a hot one. She got up, taking her time, leaving her cloak there on the back of the chair, and stepped over to Wolfe and put her hand on his shoulder and patted it. He moved and twisted his big neck to look up at her, but she stepped away again with a smile at the corners of her mouth, and reached for the cloak. I hopped across to hold it for her, thinking I might as well get a pat too, but apparently she didn’t believe in spoiling the help. She told Wolfe good-night, neither sweet nor sour, just good-night, and started off. I went to the foyer to let her out.

I returned and grinned down at Wolfe. “Well, how do you feel? Was she marking you for slaughter? Or putting a curse on you? Or is that how she starts the miasma going?” I peered at the shoulder she had patted. “About this Zelota business, I was going to tell you when she interrupted us. You noticed that Malfi said she told him to tell you about it. It seems that Malfi and Liggett were with her during the afternoon to offer consolation.”

Wolfe nodded. “But, as you see, she is inconsolable. Bring those men in.”

It looked hopeless to me. I would have made it at least ten to one that Wolfe’s unlimited conceit was going to cost us most of a night’s sleep with nothing to chalk up against it. It struck me as plain silly, and I might have gone so far as to say that his tackling that array of Africans in a body showed a dangerous
maladjustment to the natural and healthy environment of a detective. Picture it: Lio Coyne had caught a glimpse of a greenjacket she couldn’t recognize standing by the end of the screen with his finger on his lips, and another servant’s face—chiefly his eyes, and she couldn’t recognize him either—peeking through a crack in the door that led to the pantry hall and on to the kitchen. That was our crop of facts. And the servants had already told the sheriff that they had seen and heard nothing. Fat chance. There might have been a slim one if they had been taken singly, but in a bunch like that, not for my money.

The chair problem was solved by letting them sit on the floor. Fourteen altogether. Wolfe, using his man-to-man tone, apologized for that. Then he wanted to know their names, and made sure that he got everyone; that used up ten minutes. I was curious to see how he would start the ball rolling, but there were other preliminaries to attend to; he asked what they would like to drink. They mumbled that they didn’t want anything, but he said nonsense, we would probably be there most of the night, which seemed to startle them and caused some murmuring. It ended by my being sent to the phone to order an assortment of beer, bourbon, ginger ale, charged water, glasses, lemons, mint and ice. An expenditure like that meant that Wolfe was in dead earnest. When I rejoined the gathering he was telling a plump little runt, not a greenjacket, with a ravine in his chin:

“I’m glad of this opportunity to express my admiration, Mr. Crabtree. Mr. Servan tells me that the shad roe mousse was handled entirely by you. Any chef would have been proud of it. I noticed that Mr. Mondor asked for more. In Europe they don’t have shad roe.”

The runt nodded solemnly, with reserve. They were all using plenty of reserve, not to mention constraint, suspicion and reticence. Most of them weren’t looking at Wolfe or at much of anything else. He sat facing them, running his eyes over them. Finally he sighed and began:

“You know, gentlemen, I have had very little experience in dealing with black men. That may strike you as a tactless remark, but it really isn’t. It is certainly true that you can’t deal with all men alike. It is popularly supposed that in this part of the country whites adopt a well-defined attitude in dealing with the blacks, and blacks do the same in dealing with whites. That is no doubt true up to a point, but it is
subject to enormous variation, as your own experience will show you. For instance, say you wish to ask a favor here at Kanawha Spa, and you approach either Mr. Ashley, the manager, or Mr. Servan. Ashley is bourgeois, irritable, conventional, and rather pompous, Servan is gentle, generous, sentimental, and an artist—and also Latin. Your approach to Mr. Ashley would be quite different from your approach to Mr. Servan.

“But even more fundamental than the individual differences are the racial and national and tribal differences. That’s what I mean when I say I’ve had limited experience in dealing with black men. I mean black Americans. Many years ago I handled some affairs with dark-skinned people in Egypt and Arabia and Algiers, but of course that has nothing to do with you. You gentlemen are Americans, must more completely Americans than I am, for I wasn’t born here. This is your native country. It was you and your brothers, black and white, who let me come here to live, and I hope you’ll let me say, without getting maudlin, that I’m grateful to you for it.”