Champange for One

“Did she ever have any visitors here?”

“No. Not one.”

“You say she was here five months, so she left in August. Did someone come for her?”

“No. Usually the girls don’t stay so long after the baby comes, but Faith had rather a bad time and had to get her strength back. Actually someone did come for her—Mrs James Robbins, one of our directors, drove her to New York . Mrs Robbins had got a job for her at Berwick’s, the furniture store, and had arranged for her to share a room with another girl, Helen Yarmis. As you know, Helen was there Tuesday evening. Helen might know if anything—Yes, Dora?”

I turned my head. The woman who had opened the door—middle-aged and a little too plump for her blue uniform—stood holding the knob. She spoke. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Doctor, but Katherine may be going to rush things a bit. Four times since nine o’clock, and the last one was only twenty minutes.”

Mrs Irwin was out of her chair and moving. By the time she reached me I was up too, to take the hand she offered.

“It may be only a prelude,” she said, “but I’d better go and see. I repeat, Mr Goodwin, I wish you success, in spite of what success would mean. I don’t envy you your job, but I wish you success. You’ll forgive me for rushing off.”

I told her I would, and I could have added that I’d rather have my job than hers, or Katherine’s either. As I got my coat from a chair and put it on I figured that if she had been there fifteen years and had averaged one a week Katherine’s would be the 34-th, or even at two a month it would be the 36-th… On my way out to the car I had a worry. If I met the girls on their way back the manoeuvre would have to be repeated with me headed downhill and them up, and I didn’t like the idea of them rubbing their fronts along the side of the car again, with the door handles. But luckily, as I started the engine, here they came, straggling from the tu

Chapter 8

When we have company in the office I like to be there when they arrive, even if the matter being discussed isn’t very important or lucrative, but that time I missed it by five minutes. When I got there at five past six that afternoon Wolfe was behind his desk, Orrie Gather was in my chair, and Helen Yarmis, Ethel Varr, and Rose Turtle were there in three of the yellow chairs facing Wolfe. As I entered, Orrie got up and moved to the couch. He has not entirely given up the idea that some day my desk and chair will be his for good, and he liked to practise sitting there when I am not present.

Not that it had taken me six hours to drive back from Grantham House. I had got back in time to eat my share of lunch, kept warm by Fritz, and then had given Wolfe a verbatim report of my talk with Mrs Irwin. He was sceptical of my opinion that her mind was sound and her heart was pure, since he is convinced that every woman alive has a screw loose somewhere, but he had to agree that she had talked to the point, she had furnished a few hints that might be useful about some of our cast of characters, and she had fed the possibility that Austin Byne might not be guileless. Further discourse with Dinky was plainly indicated. I dialled his number and got no answer, and, since he might be giving his phone a recess, I took a walk through the sunshine, first to the bank to deposit Laidlaw’s cheque and then down to 87 Bowdoin Street.

Pushing Byne’s button in the vestibule got no response. I had suggested to Wolfe that I might take along an assortment of keys so that if Byne wasn’t home I could go on in and pass the time by looking around, but Wolfe had vetoed it, saying that Byne had not yet aroused our interest quite to that point. So I spent a long hour and a quarter in a doorway across the street. That’s one of the most tiresome chores in the business, waiting for someone to show when you have no idea how long it will be and you haven’t much more idea whether he has anything that will help.

It was twelve minutes past five when a taxi rolled to a stop at the curb in front of 87 and Byne climbed out. When he turned after paying the hackie, I was there.

“We must share a beam,” I told him. “I feel a desire to see you, and come, and here you are.”

Something had happened to the brotherhood of man. His eye was cold. “What the hell—” he began, and stopped. “Not here,” he said. ”Come on up.”

Even his ma

“That word ‘crap’ bothers me,” I said. “The way we used it when I was a boy out in Ohio , we knew exactly what it meant. But I looked it up in the dictionary once, and there’s no—”

“Nuts.” He sat. “My aunt says that you’re saying that Faith Usher was murdered, and that on account of you the police won’t accept the fact that it was suicide. You know damn well it was suicide. What are you trying to pull?”

“No pull.” I clasped my hands behind my head, showing it was just a pair of pals chatting free and easy, or ought to be. “Look, Dinky. You are neither a cop nor a district attorney. I have given them a statement of what I saw and heard at that party Tuesday evening, and if you want to know why that makes them go slow on their verdict you’ll have to ask them. If I told them any lies they’ll catch up with me and I’ll be hooked. I’m not going to start an argument with you about it.”

“What did you say in your statement?”

I shook my head. “Get the cops to tell you. I won’t. I’ll tell you this: if my statement is all that keeps them from calling it suicide, I’m the goat. I’ll be responsible for a lot of trouble for that whole bunch, and I don’t like it but can’t help it. So I’m doing a little checking on my own. That’s why I wanted to see Mrs Irwin at Grantham House. I told you I had been offered five hundred bucks for a story on Faith Usher, and I had, but what I was really after was information on whether anyone at that party might have had any reason to kill her. For example, if someone intended to kill her at that party he had to know she would be there. So I wanted to ask Mrs Irwin how she had been picked to be invited and who had picked her.”

I gave him a friendly grin. “And I asked her and she told me, and that was certainly no help, since it was you, and you weren’t at the party. You even faked a cold to get out of going—and by the way, I said I wouldn’t broadcast that, and I haven’t.” I thought it wouldn’t hurt to remind him that there was still a basis for brotherhood.

“I know,” he said, “you’ve got that to shake at me. About my picking Faith Usher to be invited, I suppose Mrs Irwin told you how it was done. I know she told the police. She gave me a list of names with comments, and I merely picked four of the names. I’ve just been down at the District Attorney’s office telling them about it. As I explained to them, I had no personal knowledge of any of those girls. From Mrs Irwin’s comments I just picked the ones that seemed to be the most desirable.”

“Did you keep the list? Have you got it?”

“I had it, but an assistant district attorney took it. One named Mandelbaum. No doubt he’ll show it to you if you ask him.”