Champange for One

“Oh, but I am.” Wolfe was assured. “When you came here my threat was only to tell the police of your rendezvous. Now my threat is more imperative and may even be mortal. Observe Mrs Usher. Note her expression as she regards you. Have you seen the agreement, madam?”

“Yes,” she said, ”I have.”

“Does it contain such a provision as I suggested?”

“Yes,” she said, “it does. It says that if Faith dies he can pay me only half as much or even less. Are you telling the truth, that she was murdered?”

“Nuts,” Byne said. “It’s not the truth he’s after. Anyhow, I wasn’t even there. Don’t look at me, Elaine, look at him .”

“I thought,” Wolfe said, “that it might save time to see the agreement now, so I sent Mr Gather to your apartment to look for it. It will expedite matters if you phone him and tell him where it is. He is good with locks and should be inside by this time.”

Byne was staring. “By God,” he said.

“Do you want to phone him?”

“Not him. By God. You’ve been threatening to call the police. I’ll call them myself. I’ll tell them a man has broken into my apartment, and he’s there now, and they’ll get him.”

I left my chair.” Here, Dinky, use my phone.”

He ignored me. “It’s not the agreement,” he told Wolfe. “It’s your goddamn nerve. He won’t find the agreement because it’s not there. It’s in a safe-deposit box and it’s going to stay there.”

“Then it must wait until Monday.” Wolfe’s shoulders went up an eighth of an inch and down again. “However, Mr Gather will not have his trouble for nothing. Aside from the chance that he may turn up other interesting items, he will use your typewriter, if you have one. I told him if he found one there to write something with it. I even told him what to write. This: ‘Have you found out yet that Edwin Laidlaw is the father of Faith Usher’s baby? Ask him about his trip to Canada in August 1956.’ He will type that and bring it to me. You smile. You are amused? Because you don’t have a typewriter?”

“Sure I have a typewriter. Did I smile?” He smiled again, a poker smile. “At you dragging Laidlaw in all of a sudden. I don’t get it, but I suppose you do.”

“I didn’t drag him in,” Wolfe asserted. “Someone else did. The police received an unsigned typewritten communication which I have just quoted. And you were wrong to smile; that was a mistake. You couldn’t possibly have been amused, so you must have been pleased, and by what? Not that you don’t have a typewriter, because you have. I’ll try a guess. Might it not have been that you were enjoying the idea of Mr Gather bringing me a sample of typing from your machine when you know it is i

“Remarkable?” I shook my head.” No.”

“Then that is one possibility. Actually,” he told Byne,” I am not sorry that this must wait until Monday, for it does have a drawback. The samples collected from the machines must be compared with the communication received by the police, and it is in their hands. I don’t like that, but there’s no other way. At least, if my guess is good, I will have exposed the sender of the communication, and that will be helpful. On this point, sir, I do not threaten to go to the police; I am forced to.”

“You goddamn snoop,” Byne said through his teeth.

Wolfe’s brows went up. “I must have made a lucky guess. It’s the machine at the vault?”

Byne’s head jerked to Mrs Usher.” Beat it, Elaine. I want to talk to him.”

Chapter 14

Austin Byne sat straight and stiff. When Saul had escorted Mrs Usher to the front room, staying there with her, I had told Dinky he would be more comfortable in the red leather chair, but from the way he looked at me I suspected that he had forgotten what “comfortable“ meant.

“You win,” he told Wolfe. “So I spill my guts. Where do you want me to start?”

Wolfe was leaning back with his elbows on the chair arms and his palms together. “First, let’s clear up a point or two. Why did you send that thing about Laidlaw to the police?”

“I haven’t said I sent it.”

“Pfui.” Wolfe was disgusted. “Either you’ve submitted or you haven’t. I don’t intend to squeeze it out drop by drop. Why did you send it?”

Byne did have to squeeze it out. His lips didn’t want to part. “Because,” he finally managed, “they were going on with the investigation and there was no telling what they might dig up. They might find out that I knew Faith’s mother, and about my—about the arrangement. I still thought Faith had killed herself, and I still do, but if she had been murdered I thought Laidlaw must have done it and I wanted them to know about him and Faith.”

“Why must he have done it? You invented that, didn’t you? About him and Miss Usher?”

“I did not. I sort of kept an eye on Faith, naturally. I don’t mean I was with her, I just kept an eye on her. I saw her with Laidlaw twice, and the day he left for Canada I saw her in his car. I knew he went to Canada because a friend got a card from him. I didn’t have to invent it.”

Wolfe grunted. “You realize, Mr Byne, that everything you say is now suspect. Assuming that you knew that Laidlaw and Miss Usher had in fact been intimate, why did you surmise that he had killed her? Was she menacing him?”

“Not that I know of. If he had a reason for killing her I didn’t know what it was. But he was the only one of the people there that night who had had anything to do with her.”

“No. You had.”

“Damn it, I wasn’t there!”

“That’s true, but those who were there can also plead lack of opportunity. In the circumstances as I have heard them described, no one could have poisoned Miss Usher’s champagne with any assurance that it would get to her. And you alone, of all those involved, had a motive, and not a puny one. An increase in a

“I am. I’m sitting here while you pile it on.”

“So you are.” Wolfe looked at his palms and put them on the chair arms. “Now. Did you know that Miss Usher kept a bottle of poison on her person?”

No hesitation.” I knew that she said she did. I never saw it. Her mother told me, and Mrs Irwin at Grantham House mentioned it to me once.”

“Did you know what kind of poison it was?”

“No.”

“Was it Mrs Usher’s own idea to seclude herself in a hotel under another name, or did you suggest it?”

“Neither one. I mean I don’t remember. She phoned me Thursday—no, Wednesday—and we decided she ought to do that. I don’t remember who suggested it.”

“Who suggested your meeting this evening?”

“She did. She phoned me this morning. I told you that,”

“What did she want?”

“She wanted to know what I was going to do about payments, with Faith dead. She knew that by the agreement it was left to my discretion. I told her that for the present I would continue to send her half.”

“Had she been using any of the money you sent her to support her daughter?”

“I don’t think so. Not for the last four or five years, but it wasn’t her fault. Faith wouldn’t take anything from her. Faith wouldn’t live with her. They couldn’t get along. Mrs Usher is very—unconventional. Faith left when she was sixteen, and for over a year we didn’t know where she was. When I found her she was working in a restaurant. A waitress.”