Champagne for One

by Rex Stout

  “You said you haven’t told the cops.”

  “Right. It was merely a conclusion I had formed.”

  “Have you told anyone else? My aunt?”

  “No. Certainly not her. I was doing you a favour, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes, and I appreciate it. You know that, Archie, I appreciate it.”

  “Good. We all like to be appreciated. I would appreciate knowing what it is you want to talk over.”

  “Well.” He clasped his hands behind his head, showing how casual it was, just a pair of pals chatting free and easy. “To tell the truth, I’m in a mess too. Or I will be if you’d like to see me squirm. Would you like to see me squirm?”

  “I might if you’re a good squirmer. How do I go about it?”

  “All you have to do is spill it about my faking a cold. No matter who you spill it to it will get to my aunt, and there I am.” He unclasped his hands and leaned forward. “Here’s how it was. I’ve gone to those damn annual dinners on my uncle’s birthday the last three years and I was fed up, and when my aunt asked me again I tried to beg off, but she insisted, and there are reasons why I couldn’t refuse. But Monday night I played poker all night, and yesterday morning I was fuzzy and couldn’t face it. The question was who to tap. For that affair it can’t be just anybody. The first two candidates I picked were out of town, and the next three all had dates. Then I thought of you. I knew you could handle yourself in any situation, and you had met my aunt. So I called you, and you were big-hearted enough to say yes.”

  He sat back. “That’s how it was. Then this morning comes the news of what happened. I said I was sorry I got you into it, and I am, I’m damned sorry, but frankly, I’m damned glad I wasn’t there. It certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience, and I’m just selfish enough to be glad I missed it. You’ll understand that.”

  “Sure. Congratulations. I didn’t enjoy it much myself.”

  “I’ll bet you didn’t. So that’s what I wanted, to explain how it was so you’d see it wouldn’t help matters any for anyone to know about my faking a cold. It certainly wouldn’t help me, because it would get to my aunt sooner or later, and you know how she’d be about a thing like that. She’d be sore as hell.”

  I nodded. “I don’t doubt it. Then it’s an ideal situation. You want something from me, and I want something from you. Perfect. We’ll swap. I don’t broadcast about the phoney cold, and you get me an audience at Grantham House. What’s that woman’s name? Irving?”

  “Irwin. Blanche Irwin.” He scratched the side of his neck with a forefinger. “You want to swap, huh?”

  “I do. What could be fairer?”

  “It’s fair enough,” he conceded. “But I told you on the phone I’m not in a position to do that.”

  “Yeah, but then I was asking a favour. Now I’m making a deal.”

  His neck itched again. “I might stretch a point. I might, if I knew what you want with her. What’s the idea?”

  “Greed. Desire for dough. I’ve been offered five hundred dollars for an eye-witness story on last night, and I want to decorate it with some background. Don’t tell Mrs Irwin that, though. She’s probably down on journalists by now. Just tell her I’m your friend and a good loyal citizen and have only been in jail five times.”

  He laughed. “That’ll do it all right. Wait till you see her.” He sobered. “So that’s it. It’s a funny world, Archie. A girl gets herself in a fix she sees only one way out of, to kill herself, and you’re there to see her do it just because I had had all I wanted of those affairs, and here you’re going to collect five hundred dollars just because you were there. It’s a funny world. So I didn’t do you such a bad turn after all.”

  I had to admit that was one way of looking at it. He said he felt like saluting the funny world with a drink, and wouldn’t I join him, and I said I’d be glad to. When he had gone and brought the requirements, a scotch and water for me and bourbon on the rocks for him, and we had performed the salute, he got at the phone and made a person-to-person call to Mrs Irwin at Grantham House. Apparently there was nothing at all wrong with his position; he merely told her he would appreciate it if she would see a friend of his, and that was all there was to it. She said morning would be better than afternoon. After he hung up we discussed the funny world while finishing the drinks, and when I left one more step had been taken towards the brotherhood of man.

  Back home, the conference was over, the trio had gone, and Wolfe was at his desk with his current book, one he had said I must read, World Peace through World Law, by Grenville Clark and Louis B. Sohn. He finished a paragraph, lowered it, and told me to enter expense advances to Saul and Fred and Orrie, two hundred dollars each. I went to the safe for the book and made the entries, returned the book, locked the safe, and asked him if I needed to know anything about their assignments. He said that could wait, meaning that he wanted to get on with his reading, and asked about mine. I told him it was all set, that he wouldn’t see me in the morning because I would be leaving for Grantham House before nine.

  “I now call Austin Byne ‘Dinky’,” I told him. “I suppose because he’s an inch over six feet, but I didn’t ask. I should report that he balked and I had to apply a little pressure. When he phoned yesterday he tried to sound as if his tubes were dogged, but he boggled it. He had no cold. He now says that he had been to three of those affairs and had had enough, and he rang me only after he had tried five others and they weren’t available. So we made a deal. He gets me in at Grantham House, and I won’t tell his aunt on him. He seems to feel that his aunt might bite.”

  Wolfe grunted. “Nothing is as pitiable as a man afraid of a woman. Is he guileless?”

  “I would reserve it. He is not a dope. He might be capable of knowing that someone was going to kill Faith Usher so that it would pass for suicide, and he wanted somebody there alert and brainy and observant to spot it, so he got me, and he is now counting on me, with your help, to nail him. Or her. Or he may be on the level and merely pitiable.”

  “You and he have not been familiar?”

  “No, sir. Just acquaintances. I have only seen him at parties.”

  “Then his selecting you is suggestive per se.”

  “Certainly. That’s why I took the trouble to go to see him. To observe. There were other ways of getting to Mrs Irwin of Grantham House.”

  “But you have formed no conclusion.”

  “No, sir. Question mark.”

  “Very well. Pfui. Afraid of a woman.” He lifted his book, and I went to the kitchen for a glass of milk.

  At eight-twenty the next morning, Thursday, I was steering the 1957 Heron sedan up the Forty-sixth Street ramp to the West Side Highway. Buying the sedan, the year before, had started an argument that wasn’t finished yet. Wolfe pays for the cars, but I do the driving, and I wanted one I could U-turn when the occasion arose, and that clashed with Wolfe’s notion that anyone in a moving vehicle was in constant deadly peril, and that the peril was in inverse ratio to the size of the vehicle. In a forty-ton truck he might actually have been able to relax. So we got the Heron, and I must say that I had nothing against it but its size.

  I soon had proof of what I had been hearing and reading, that the forty-eight-hour rain in New York had been snow a little to the north. At Hawthorne Circle it was already there at the roadside, and the farther I rolled on the Taconic State Parkway the more there was of it. The sun was on it now, glancing off the slopes of the drifts and banks, and it was very pleasant, fighting the hardships of an old-fashioned winter by sailing along on the concrete at fifty-eight m.p.h. with ridges of white four and five feet high only a step from the hubcaps. When I finally left the parkway and took a secondary road through the hills, the hardships closed in on me some for a few miles, and when I turned in at an entrance between two stone pillars, with “Grantham House” on one of them, and headed up a curving driveway climbing a hill, only a single narrow lane had been cleared, and as I rounded a sharp curve the hubcaps scraped the ridge.
/>   Coming out of another curve, I braked and stopped. I was blocked, though not by snow. There were nine or ten of them standing there facing me, pink-faced and bright-eyed in the sunshine, in an assortment of jackets and coats, no hats, some with gloves and some without. They would have been taken anywhere for a bunch of high-school girls except for one thing: they were all too bulky around the middle. They stood and grinned at me, white teeth flashing.

  I cranked the window down and stuck my head out. “Good morning. What do you suggest?”

  One in front, with so much brown hair that only the middle of her face showed, called out, “What paper are you from?”

  “No paper. I’m sorry if I ought to be. I’m just an errand boy. Can you get by?”

  Another one, a blonde, had advanced to the fender. “The trouble is,” she said, “that you’re right in the centre. If you edge over we can squeeze past.” She turned and commanded, “Back up and give him room.”

  They obeyed. When they were far enough away I eased the car forward and to the right until the fender grazed the snowbank, and stopped. They said that was fine and started down the alley single file. As they passed the front fender they turned sidewise, every darned one, which seemed to me to be faulty tactics, since their spread fore and aft was more than from side to side. Also they should have had their backs to the car so their fronts would be against the soft snow, but no, they all faced me. A couple of them made friendly remarks as they went by, and one with a sharp little chin and dancing dark eyes reached in and pulled my nose. I stuck my head out to see that they were all clear, waved good-bye, and pressed gently on the gas.

  Grantham House, which had once been somebody’s mansion, sprawled over about an acre, surrounded by evergreen trees loaded with snow and other trees still in their winter skeletons. A space had been cleared with enough room to turn around, barely, and I left the car there, followed a path across a terrace to a door, opened it, entered, crossed the vestibule, and was in a hall about the size of Mrs Robilotti’s drawing-room. A man who would never see eighty again came hobbling over, squeaking at me, “What’s your name?”

  I told him. He said Mrs Irwin was expecting me, and led me into a smaller room where a woman was sitting at a desk. As I entered she spoke, with a snap. “I hope to goodness you didn’t run over my girls.”

  “Absolutely not,” I assured her. “I stopped to let them by.”

  “Thank you.” She motioned to a chair. “Sit down. The snow has tried to smother us, but they have to get air and exercise. Are you a newspaperman?”

  I told her no and was going to elaborate, but she had the floor. “Mr Byne said your name is Archie Goodwin and you’re a friend of his. According to the newspaper there was an Archie Goodwin at that party at Mrs Robilotti’s. Was that you?”

  I was at a disadvantage. With her smooth hair, partly grey, her compact little figure, and her quick brown eyes wide apart, she reminded me of Miss Clark, my high-school geometry teacher out in Ohio, and Miss Clark had always had my number. I had waited until I saw her to decide just what line to take. First I had to decide whether to say it was me or it was I.

  “Yes,” I said, “that was me. It also said in the paper that I work for a private detective named Nero Wolfe.”

  “I know it did. Are you here as a detective?”

  She certainly liked to come to the point. So had Miss Clark. But I hoped I was man enough not to be afraid of a woman. “The best way to answer that,” I told her, “is to explain why I came. You know what happened at that party and you know I was there. The idea seems to be that Faith Usher committed suicide. I have got the impression that the police may settle for that. But on account of what I saw, and what I didn’t see, I doubt it. My personal opinion is that she was murdered, and if she was, I would hate to see whoever did it get away with it. But before I start howling about it in public I want to do a little checking, and I thought the best place to check on Faith Usher herself was here with you.”

  “I see.” She sat straight and her eyes were straight. “Then you’re a knight with a plume?”

  “Not at all. I’d feel silly with a plume. My pride is hurt. I’m a professional detective and I try to be a good one, and I believe that someone committed murder right before my eyes, and how do you think I like that?”

  “Why do you believe it was murder?”

  “As I said, on account of what I saw and what I didn’t see. A question of observation. I would prefer to let it go at that if you don’t mind.”

  She nodded. “The professional with his secrets. I have them too; I have a medical degree. Did Mrs Robilotti send you here?”

  That decision wasn’t hard to make. Grantham House wasn’t dependent on Mrs Robilotti, since it had been provided for by Albert Grantham’s will, and it was ten to one that I knew what Mrs Irwin thought of Mrs Robilotti. So I didn’t hesitate.

  “Good heavens, no. To have a suicide in her drawing-room was bad enough. If she knew I was here looking for support for my belief that it was murder she’d have a fit.”

  “Mrs Robilotti doesn’t have fits, Mr Goodwin.”

  “Well, you know her better than I do. If she ever did have a fit this would call for one. Of course, I may be sticking my neck out. If you prefer suicide to murder as much as she does I’ve wasted a lot of gas driving up here.”

  She looked at me, sizing me up. “I don’t,” she said bluntly.

  “Good for you,” I said.

  She lifted her chin. “I see no reason why I shouldn’t tell you what I have told the police. Of course, it’s possible that Faith did kill herself, but I doubt it. I get to know my girls pretty well, and she was here nearly five months, and I doubt it. I knew about the bottle of poison she had-she didn’t tell me, but one of the other girls did-and that was a problem, whether to get it away from her. I decided not to, because it would have been dangerous. As long as she had it and went on showing it and talking about using it, that was her outlet for her nerves, and if I took it away she would have to get some other outlet, and there was no telling what it might be. One reason I doubt if she killed herself is that she still had that bottle of poison.”

  I smiled. “The police would love that.”

  “They didn’t, naturally. Another reason is that if she had finally decided to use the poison she wouldn’t have done it there at that party, with all those people. She would have done it somewhere alone, in the dark, and she would have left a note for me. She knew how I felt about my girls, and she would have known it would hurt me, and she would have left a note. Still another reason is the fact that she was actually pretty tough. That bottle of poison was merely the enemy that she intended to defeat somehow-it was death, and she was going to conquer it. The spirit she had, down deep, showed sometimes in a flash in her eyes. You should have seen that flash.”

  “I did, Tuesday evening when I was dancing with her.”

  “Then she still had it, and she didn’t kill herself. But how are you going to prove it?”

  “I can’t. I can’t prove a negative. I would have to prove an affirmative, or at least open one up. If she didn’t poison her champagne someone else did. Who? That’s the target.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes widened. “Good heavens! That’s obvious, certainly, but if you’ll believe me, Mr Goodwin, it hadn’t occurred to me. My only thought was that Faith had not killed herself. My mind had stopped there.” Her lips tightened. She shook her head. “I can’t help it,” she said emphatically. “I wish you success, anyhow. I would help you if I could.”

  “You already have,” I assured her, “and maybe you can more. If you don’t mind a few questions. Since you’ve read the paper, you know who was there Tuesday evening. About the three girls-Helen Yarmis, Ethel Varr, and Rose Tuttle-they were all here at the time Faith Usher was, weren’t they?”

  “Yes. That is, the times overlapped. Helen and Ethel left a month before Faith did. Rose came six weeks before Faith left.”

  “Had any of them known her before?”
r />   “No. I didn’t ask them-I ask the girls as few questions as possible about their past-but there was no indication that they had, and there isn’t much going on here that I don’t know about.”

  “Did any trouble develop between any of them and her?”

  She smiled. “Now, Mr Goodwin. I said I would help you if I could, but this is ridiculous. My girls have their squabbles and their peeves, naturally, but I assure you that nothing that happened here put murder into the heart of Helen or Ethel or Rose. If it had I would have known it, and I would have dealt with it.”

  “Okay. If it wasn’t one of them I’ll have to look elsewhere. Take the three male guests-Edwin Laidlaw, Paul Schuster, and Beverly Kent. Do you know any of them?”

  “No. I had never heard their names before.”

  “You know nothing about them?”

  “Nothing whatever.”

  “What about Cecil Grantham?”

  “I haven’t seen him for several years. His father brought him twice-no, three times-to our summer picnic, when Cecil was in his middle teens. After his father died he was on our Board of Directors for a year, but he resigned.”

  “You know of no possible connection between him and Faith Usher?”

  “No.”

  “What about Robert Robilotti?”

  “I have seen him only once, more than two years ago, when he came to our Thanksgiving dinner with Mrs Robilotti. He played the piano for the girls and had them singing songs, and when Mrs Robilotti was ready to leave, the girls didn’t want him to go. My feelings were mixed.”

  “I’ll bet they were. Faith Usher wasn’t here then?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’re all out of men. Celia Grantham?”

  “I knew Celia fairly well at one time. For a year or so after she finished college she came here frequently, three or four times a month, to teach the girls things and talk with them; then suddenly she quit. She was a real help and the girls liked her. She has fine qualities, or had, but she is headstrong. I haven’t seen her for four years. I am tempted to add something.”