Champange for One

“You can go to hell,” Byne said. He stood up. “I’m taking Mrs Usher to her hotel.”

Wolfe shook his head. “I know your mind is in disorder, but surely you must see that that is out of the question. I can’t possibly allow you an opportunity to repair any of the gaps I have made in your fences. If you scoot I shall move at once, and you’ll find you have no fences left at all. Only by my sufferance can you hope to get out of this mess without disfigurement, and you know it. Archie, bring Saul and Mrs Usher—no. First ring Mr Byne’s apartment and tell Orrie to come. Also tell him not to be disappointed at not finding the agreement; it isn’t there. If he has found any items that seem significant he might as well bring them.”

“You goddamn snoop,” Dinky said, merely repeating himself.

I turned to the phone.

Chapter 15

For an hour and a half Sunday morning Fritz and I worked like beavers, setting the stage. The idea was—that is, Wolfe’s idea—to reproduce as nearly as possibly the scene of the crime, and it was a damn silly idea, since you could have put seven or eight of that office into Mrs Robilotti’s drawing-room. Taking the globe and the couch and the television cabinet and a few other items to the dining-room helped a little, but it was still hopeless. I wanted to go up to the plant rooms and tell Wolfe so, and add that if a play-back was essential to his programme he had better break his rule never to leave the house on business and move the whole performance uptown to Mrs Robilotti’s, but Fritz talked me out of it. To get fourteen chairs we had to bring some down from upstairs, and then it developed later that some of them weren’t really necessary. The bar was a table over in the far corner, but it couldn’t be against the wall because there had to be room for Hackett behind it. One small satisfaction I got was that the red leather chair had been taken to the dining-room with the other stuff, and Cramer wouldn’t like that a bit.

Furniture-moving wasn’t all. Mrs Usher kept buzzing on the house phone from the South Room, for more coffee, for more towels, though she had a full supply, for a section she said was missing from the Sunday paper I had taken her, and for an additional list of items I had to get from the drugstore. Then at ten-fifteen here came Austin Byne, escorted by Saul, demanding a private audience with Wolfe immediately, and to get him off my neck I had Saul take him up the three flights to the vestibule of the plant rooms, where they found the door locked, and then Saul had to get physical with him when he wanted to open doors on the upper floors trying to find Mrs Usher.

I expected more turmoil when, at ten-forty, the bell rang and Inspector Cramer was on the stoop, but it wasn’t Wolfe he had come early for. He merely asked if Mrs Robilotti had arrived, and, when I told him no, stayed outside. Theoretically, in a democracy, a police inspector should react just the same to a dame with a Fifth Avenue mansion as to an unmarried mother, but a job is a job, and facts are facts and one fact was that the Commissioner himself had taken the trouble to make a trip to the mansion. So I didn’t chalk it up against Cramer that he waited out on the sidewalk for the Robilotti limousine; and anyway, he was there to greet the three unmarried mothers when Sergeant Purley Stebbins arrived with them in a police car. The three chevaliers, Paul Schuster, Beverly Kent, and Edwin Laidlaw, came singly, on their own.

I had promised myself a certain pleasure, and I didn’t let Cramer’s one-man reception committee interfere with it. When the limousine finally rolled to the curb, a few minutes late, and he convoyed Mrs Robilotti up the stoop steps, followed by her husband, son, daughter, and butler, I held the door for them as they entered and then left them to Fritz. My objective was the last one in, Hackett. When he had crossed the sill I put my hands ready for his coat and hat, in the proper ma

“Good morning, sir,” I said. “A pleasant day. Mr Wolfe will be down shortly.”

It got him. He darted a glance at the others, saw that no eye was on him, handed me his hat, and said, “Quite. Thank you, Goodwin.”

That made the day for me personally, no matter how it turned out professionally. I took him to the office and then went to the kitchen, buzzed the plant rooms on the house phone, and told Wolfe the cast had arrived.

“Mrs Usher?” he asked.

“Okay. In her room. She’ll stay put.”

“Mr Byne?”

“Also okay. In the office with the others, with Saul glued to him.”

“Very well. I’ll be down.”

I went and joined the mob. They were scattered around, some seated and some standing. I permitted myself a private grin when I saw that Cramer, finding the red leather chair gone, had moved one of the yellow ones to its exact position and put Mrs Robilotti in it, and was on his feet beside it, bending down to her. As I threaded my way through to my desk the sound of the elevator came, and in a moment Wolfe entered.

No pronouncing of names was required, since he had met the Robilottis and the Grantham twins at the time of the jewellery hunt. He made it to his desk, sent his eyes around, and sat. He looked at Cramer.

“You have explained the purpose of this gathering, Mr Cramer?”

“Yes. You’re going to prove that Goodwin is either wrong or right.”

“I didn’t say ‘prove’. I said I intend to satisfy myself and deal with him accordingly.” He surveyed the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen. I will not keep you long—at least, not most of you. I have no exhortation for you and no questions to ask. To form an opinion of Mr Goodwin’s competence as an eye-witness, I need to see, not what he saw, since these quarters are too cramped for that, but an approximation of it. You ca

I left my chair to stage-manage. Thinking that Mrs Robilotti and her Robert were the most likely to baulk, I left them till the last. First I put Hackett behind the table, which was the bar, and Laidlaw and Helen Yarmis at one end of it. Then Rose Tuttle and Beverly Kent, on chairs over where the globe had stood. Then Celia Grantham and Paul Schuster by the wall to the right of Wolfe’s desk, with her sitting and him standing. Then I put Saul Panzer on a chair near the door to the hall, and told the audience, “Mr Panzer here is Faith Usher. The distance is wrong and so are the others, but the relative positions are about right.” Then I put an ashtray on a chair to the right of the safe, and told them, “This is Faith Usher’s bag, containing the bottle of poison.” With all that arranged, I didn’t think Mrs Robilotti would protest when I asked her and her husband to take their places in front of the bar, and she didn’t.

That was all, except for Ethel Varr and me, and I got her and stood with her at a corner of my desk, and told Wolfe, “All set.”

“Miss Tuttle and I were much farther away,” Beverly Kent objected.

“Yes, sir,” Wolfe agreed.” It is not presumed that this is identical. Now.” His eyes went to the group at the bar. “Mr Hackett, I understand that when Mr Grantham went to the bar for champagne for himself and Miss Usher, two glasses were there in readiness. You had poured one of them a few minutes previously, and the other just before he arrived. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.” Hackett had fully recovered from our brush in the hall and was back in character.” I have stated to the police that one of the glasses had been standing there three or four minutes.”

“Please pour a glass now and put it in place.”

The bottles in the cooler on the table were champagne, and good champagne 5 Wolfe had insisted on it. Fritz had opened two of them. Pouring champagne is always nice to watch, but I doubt if any pourer ever had as attentive an audience as Hackett had, as he took a bottle from the cooler and filled a glass.