Too Many Cooks/Champagne for One (41 page)

“I certainly haven’t,” Ethel Varr declared. “Like I told you, I’m sure Faith didn’t put anything in her champagne, and if she didn’t, who did? I’ve been thinking about it. I know it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Mr. Goodwin, and I’m sure it wasn’t Helen or Rose. How many does that leave?”

“Eight. The three male guests, Laidlaw, Schuster, and Kent. The butler. Mr. Grantham and Miss Grantham. Mr. and Mrs. Robilotti.”

“Well, I certainly don’t want to shield any of
them
.”

“Neither do I,” Rose Tuttle asserted, “if one of them did it.”

“You couldn’t shield them,” Helen Yarmis told them, “if they
didn’t
do it. There wouldn’t be anything to shield them from.”

“You don’t understand, Helen,” Rose told her. “He wants to find out who it was. Now, for instance, what if it was Cecil Grantham, and what if you saw him take the bottle out of Faith’s bag and put it back, or something like that, would you want to shield him? That’s what he wants to know.”

“But that’s just it,” Helen objected. “If Faith did it herself, why would I want to shield him?”

“But Faith didn’t do it. Ethel and Mr. Goodwin were both looking at her.”

“Then why,” Helen demanded, “did she take the bottle to the party when I told her not to?”

Rose shook her head, wiggling the pony tail. “You’d better explain it,” she told Wolfe.

“I fear,” he said, “that it’s beyond my powers. It may clear the air a little if I say that a suspicious word
or action at the party, like Mr. Grantham’s taking the bottle from the bag, was not what I had in mind. I meant, rather, to ask if you know anything about any of those eight people that might suggest the possibility of a reason why one of them might have wanted Miss Usher to die. Do you know of any connection between one of them and Miss Usher—either her or someone associated with her?”

“I don’t,” Rose said positively.

“Neither do I,” Ethel declared.

“There’s so many of them,” Helen complained. “Who are they again?”

Wolfe, patient under stress, pronounced the eight names.

Helen was frowning again. “The only connection I know about,” she said, “is Mrs. Robilotti. When she came to Grantham House to see us. Faith didn’t like her.”

Rose snorted. “Who did?”

Wolfe asked, “Was there something definite, Miss Yarmis? Something between Miss Usher and Mrs. Robilotti?”

“I guess not,” Helen conceded. “I guess it wasn’t any more definite with Faith than it was with the rest of us.”

“Did you have in mind something in particular that Miss Usher and Mrs. Robilotti said to each other?”

“Oh, no. I never heard Faith say anything to her at all. Neither did I. She thought we were harlots.”

“Did she use that word? Did she call you harlots?”

“Of course not. She tried to be nice but didn’t know how. One of the girls said that one day when she
had been there, she said that she thought we were harlots.”

“Well.” Wolfe took in air, in and clear down to his middle, and let it out again. “I thank you again, ladies, for coming.” He pushed his chair back and rose. “We seem to have made little progress, but at least I have seen and talked with you, and I know where to reach you if the occasion arises.”

“One thing I don’t see,” Rose Tuttle said as she left her chair. “Mr. Goodwin said he wasn’t there as a detective, but he
is
a detective, and I had told him about Faith having the poison, and I should think he ought to know exactly what happened. I didn’t think anyone could commit a murder with a detective right there.”

A very superficial and half-baked way to look at it, I thought, as I got up to escort the ladies out.

Paul Schuster, the promising young corporation lawyer with the thin nose and quick dark eyes, sat in the red leather chair at a quarter past eleven Friday morning, with the eyes focused on Wolfe. “We do not claim,” he said, “to have evidence that you have done anything that is actionable. It should be clearly understood that we are not presenting a threat. But it is a fact that we are being injured, and if you are responsible for the injury it may become a question of law.”

Wolfe moved his head to take the others in—Cecil Grantham, Beverly Kent, and Edwin Laidlaw, lined up on yellow chairs—and to include them. “I am not aware,” he said dryly, “of having inflicted an injury on anyone.”

Of course that wasn’t true. What he meant was that he hadn’t inflicted the injury he was trying to inflict. Forty-eight hours had passed since Laidlaw had written his check for twenty thousand dollars and put it on Wolfe’s desk, and we hadn’t earned a dime of it, and the prospect of ever earning it didn’t look a bit brighter. Dinky Byne’s cover, if he had anything to
cover, was intact. The three unmarried mothers had supplied no crack to start a wedge. Orrie Cather, having delivered them at the office for consultation, had been given another assignment, and had come Thursday evening after dinner, with Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin, to report; and all it had added up to was an assortment of blanks. If anyone had had any kind of connection with Faith Usher, it had been buried good and deep, and the trio had been told to keep digging.

When, a little after ten Friday morning, Paul Schuster had phoned to say that he and Grantham and Laidlaw and Kent wanted to see Wolfe, and the sooner the better, I had broken two of the standing rules: that I make no appointments without checking with Wolfe, and that I disturb him in the plant rooms only for emergencies. I had told Schuster to be there at eleven, and I had buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone to tell Wolfe that company was coming. When he growled I told him that I had looked up “emergency” in the dictionary, and it meant an unforeseen combination of circumstances which calls for immediate action, and if he wanted to argue either with the dictionary or with me I was willing to go upstairs and have it out. He had hung up on me.

And was now telling Schuster that he was not aware of having inflicted an injury on anyone.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Cecil Grantham said.

“Facts are facts,” Beverly Kent muttered. Unquestionably a diplomatic way of putting it, suitable for a diplomat. When he got a little higher up the ladder he might refine it by making it “A fact is a fact is a fact.”

“Do you deny,” Schuster demanded, “that we owe it to Goodwin that we are being embarrassed and
harassed by a homicide investigation? And he is your agent, employed by you. No doubt you know the legal axiom,
respondeat superior
. Isn’t that an injury?”

“Not only that,” Cecil charged, “but he goes up to Grantham House, sticking his nose in. And yesterday a man tried to pump my mother’s butler, and he had no credentials, and I want to know if you sent him. And another man with no credentials is asking questions about me among my friends, and I want to know if you sent
him
.”

“To me,” Beverly Kent stated, “the most serious aspect is the scope of the police inquiry. My work on our Mission to the United Nations is in a sensitive field, very sensitive, and already I have been definitely injured. Merely to have been present when a sensational event occurred, the suicide of that young woman, would have been unfortunate. To be involved in an extended police inquiry, a murder investigation, could be disastrous for me. If in addition to that you are sending your private agents among my friends and associates to inquire about me, that is adding insult to injury. I have no information of that, as yet. But you have, Cece?”

Cecil nodded. “I sure have.”

“So have I,” Schuster said.

“Have you, Ed?”

Laidlaw cleared his throat. “No direct information, no. Nothing explicit. But I have reason to suspect it.”

He handled it pretty well, I thought. Naturally he had to be with them, since if he had refused to join in the attack they would have wondered why, but he wanted Wolfe to understand that he was still his client.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Schuster
told Wolfe. “Do you deny that we owe this harassment to Goodwin, and therefore to you, since he is your agent?”

“No,” Wolfe said. “But you owe it to me, through Mr. Goodwin, only secondarily. Primarily you owe it to the man or woman who murdered Faith Usher. So it’s quite possible that one of you owes it to himself.”

“I knew it,” Cecil declared. “I told you, Paul.”

Schuster ignored him. “As I said,” he told Wolfe, “this may become a question of law.”

“I expect it to, Mr. Schuster. A murder trial is commonly regarded as a matter of law.” Wolfe leaned forward, flattened his palms on the desk, and sharpened his tone. “Gentlemen. Let’s get to the point, if there is one. What are you here for? Not, I suppose, merely to grumble at me. To buy me off? To bully me? To dispute my ground? What are you after?”

“Goddammit,” Cecil demanded, “what are
you
after? That’s the point! What are you trying to pull? Why did you send—”

“Shut up, Cece,” Beverly Kent ordered him, not diplomatic at all. “Let Paul tell him.”

The lawyer did so. “Your insinuation,” Schuster said, “that we have entered into a conspiracy to buy you off is totally unwarranted. Or to bully you. We came because we feel, with reason, that our rights of privacy are being violated without provocation or just cause, and that you are responsible. We doubt if you can justify that responsibility, but we thought you should have a chance to do so before we consider what steps may be taken legally in the matter.”

“Pfui,” Wolfe said.

“An expression of contempt is hardly an adequate justification, Mr. Wolfe.”

“I didn’t intend it to be, sir.” Wolfe leaned back and clasped his fingers at the apex of his central mound. “This is futile, gentlemen, both for you and for me. Neither of us can possibly be gratified. You want a stop put to your involvement in a murder inquiry, and my concern is to involve you as deeply as possible—the innocent along with—”

“Why?” Schuster demanded. “Why are you concerned?”

“Because Mr. Goodwin’s professional reputation and competence have been challenged, and by extension my own. You invoked
respondeat superior;
I will not only answer, I will act. That the innocent must be involved along with the guilty is regrettable but unavoidable. So you can’t get what you want, but no more can I. What I want is a path to a fact. I want to know if one of you has buried in his past a fact that will account for his resort to murder to get rid of Faith Usher, and if so, which. Manifestly you are not going to sit here and submit to a day-long inquisition by me, and even if you did, the likelihood that one of you would betray the existence of such a fact is minute. So, as I say, this is futile both for you and for me. I wish you good day only as a matter of form.”

But it wasn’t quite that simple. They had come for a showdown, and they weren’t going to be bowed out with a “good day” as a matter of form—at least, three of them weren’t. They got pretty well worked up before they left. Schuster forgot all about saying that they hadn’t come to present a threat. Kent went far beyond the bounds of what I would call diplomacy. Cecil Grantham blew his top, at one point even pounding the top of Wolfe’s desk with his fist. I was on my feet, to be handy in case one of them lost control and
picked up a chair to throw but my attention was mainly on our client. He was out of luck. For the sake of appearance he sort of tried to join in, but his heart wasn’t in it, and all he could manage was a mumble now and then. He didn’t leave his chair until Cecil headed for the door, followed by Kent, and then, not wanting to be the last one out, he jumped up and went. I stepped to the hall to see that no one took my new hat in the excitement, went and tried the door after they were out, and returned to the office.

I expected to see Wolfe leaning back with his eyes closed, but no. He was sitting up straight, glaring at space. He transferred the glare to me.

“This is grotesque,” he growled.

“It certainly is,” I agreed warmly. “Four of the suspects come to see you uninvited, all set for a good long heart-to-heart talk, and what do they get? Bounced. The trouble is, one of them was our client, and he may think we’re loafing on the job.”

“Bah. When the men phone, tell them to come in at three. No. At two-thirty. No. At two o’clock. We’ll have lunch early. I’ll tell Fritz.” He got up and marched out.

I felt uplifted. That he was calling the men in for new instructions was promising. That he had changed it from three o’clock, when his lunch would have been settled, to two-thirty, when digestion would have barely started, was impressive. That he had advanced it again, to two, with an early lunch, was inspiring. And then to go to tell Fritz instead of ringing for him—all hell was popping.

How many times,” Wolfe asked, “have you heard me confess that I am a witling?”

Fred Durkin grinned. A joke was a joke. Orrie Cather smiled. He was even handsomer when he smiled, but not necessarily braver. Saul Panzer said, “Three times when you meant it, and twice when you didn’t.”

“You never disappoint me, Saul.” Wolfe was doing his best to be sociable. He had just crossed the hall from the dining room. With Fred and Orrie he wouldn’t have strained himself, but Saul had his high regard. “This, then,” he said, “makes four times that I have meant it and this time my fault was so egregious that I made myself pay for it. The only civilized way to spend the hour after lunch is with a book, but I have just swallowed my last bite of cheese cake, and here I am working. You must bear with me. I am paying a deserved penalty.”

“Maybe it’s our fault too,” Saul suggested. “We had an order and we didn’t fill it.”

“No,” Wolfe said emphatically. “I can’t grab for the straw of your charity. I am an ass. If any share of
the fault is yours it lies in this, that when I explained the situation to you Wednesday evening and gave you your assignments none of you reminded me of my maxim that nothing is to be expected of tagging the footsteps of the police. That’s what you’ve been doing, at my direction, and it was folly. There are scores of them, and only three of you. You have been merely looking under stones that they have already turned. I am an ass.”