Too Many Cooks/Champagne for One (47 page)

I had hold of Byne’s arm, a good hold, and he didn’t even know it. When he realized it he tried to jerk loose but couldn’t, and for a second I thought he was going to swing with the other fist, and so did he.

“Take it easy,” I advised him. “You’re going to need all the breath you’ve got.”

“How did you get it?” Mrs. Usher demanded. “Where is it?” She was still clutching her jaw with both hands.

Wolfe was eyeing her, but not warily. Complacently, I would say. You might think that for a long time he had had a suppressed desire to kick a woman on the chin.

“It’s in my pocket,” he said. He tapped his chest. “I got it just now from the man who took it from your hotel room. You’ll probably get it back in due course; that will depend; it may—”

“That’s burglary,” Byne said. “That’s a felony.”

Wolfe nodded. “By definition, yes. I doubt if Mrs. Usher will care to make the charge if the document is eventually returned to her. It may be an exhibit in evidence in a murder trial. If so—”

“There has been no murder.”

“You are in error, Mr. Byne. Will you please sit down? This will take a while. Thank you. I’ll cover that point decisively with a categorical statement: Faith Usher was murdered.”

“No!” Mrs. Usher said. Her hands left her jaw but remained poised, the fingers curved. “Faith killed herself!”

“I’m not going to debate the point,” Wolfe told her. “I say merely that I will stake my professional reputation on the statement that she was murdered—indeed, I have done so. That’s why I am applying my resources and risking my credit. That’s why I must explore the possibilities suggested by this letter.” He tapped his chest and focused on Byne. “For instance, I shall insist on seeing the agreement between you and
Mr. Grantham. Does it provide that if Faith Usher should die your remittances to her mother are to be materially decreased, or even cease altogether?”

Byne wet his lips. “Since you’ve read the letter to Mrs. Usher you know what the agreement provides. It’s a confidential agreement and you’re not going to see it.”

“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. Cather 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. Cather 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. Cather bringing me a sample of typing from your machine when you know it is innocent, and that you know it is innocent because you know where the guilty machine is? I think that deserves exploration. Unfortunately tomorrow is Sunday; it will have to wait. Monday morning Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Panzer, and Mr. Cather will call at places where a machine might be easily and naturally available to you—for instance,
your club. Another is the bank vault where you have a safe-deposit box. Archie. You go to my box regularly. Would it be remarkable for a vault customer to ask to use a typewriter?”

“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.”

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 had 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 annual income of $27,000 or more, tax exempt, is an alluring prospect. If I were you I would accept almost any alternative to a disclosure of that agreement to the District Attorney.”

“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.”

“But you continued to pay Mrs. Usher her full share?”

“Yes.”

“Is that fund in your possession and control without supervision?”

“Certainly.”

“It has never been audited?”

“Certainly not. Who would audit it?”

“I couldn’t say. Would you object to an audit by an accountant of my selection? Now that I know of the agreement?”

“I certainly would. The fund is my property and I am accountable to no one but myself, as long as I pay Mrs. Usher her share.”

“I must see that agreement.” Wolfe pursed his lips and slowly shook his head. “It is extremely difficult,” he said, “to circumvent the finality of death. Mr. Grantham made a gallant try, but he was hobbled by his vain desire to guard his secret even after he became food for worms. He protected you and Mrs. Usher, each against the frailty or knavery of the other, but what if you joined forces in a threat to his repute? He couldn’t preclude that.” He lifted a hand to brush it aside. “A desire to defeat death makes any man a fool. I must see that agreement. Meanwhile, a few points remain. You told Mr. Goodwin that your selection of Miss Usher to be invited to that party was fortuitous, but now that won’t do. Then why?”

“Of course,” Byne said. “I knew that was coming.”

“Then you’ve had time to devise an answer.”

“I don’t have to devise it. I was a damn fool. When I got the list from Mrs. Irwin and saw Faith’s name on it—well, there it was. The idea of having Faith as a guest at my aunt’s house—it just appealed to me. Mrs. Robilotti is only my aunt by marriage, you know. My mother was Albert Grantham’s sister. You’ve got
to admit there was a kick in the idea of having Faith sitting at my aunt’s table. And then …”

He left it hanging. Wolfe prodded him. “Then?”

“That suggested another idea, to have Laidlaw there too. I know I was a damn fool, but there it was. Laidlaw seeing Faith there, and Faith seeing him. Of course, my aunt could cross Faith off and tell Mrs. Irwin—” He stopped. In a second he went on, “I mean you never knew what Faith would do, she might refuse to go, but Laidlaw wouldn’t know she had been asked, so what the hell. So I suggested that to my aunt, to invite Laidlaw, and she did.”

“Did Miss Usher know that Albert Grantham had fathered her?”

“My God, no. She thought her father had been a man named Usher who had died before she was born.”

“Did she know you were the source of her mother’s income?”

“No. I think— No, I don’t think, I know. She suspected that her mother’s income came from friends. From men she knew. That was why she left. About my picking Faith to be invited to that party and suggesting Laidlaw, after I had done that I got cold feet. I realized something might happen. At least Faith might walk out when she saw him, and it might be something worse, and I didn’t want to be there, so I decided to get someone to go in my place. The first four or five I tried couldn’t make it, and I thought of Archie Goodwin.”

Wolfe leaned back and closed his eyes, and his lips started to work. They pushed out and went back in, out and in, out and in … Sooner or later he always does that, and I really should have a sign made,
GENIUS AT WORK
, and put it on his desk when he starts it. Usually I have some sort of idea as to what genius is working on, but that time not a glimmer. He had cleared away some underbrush, for instance who had sicked the cops on Laidlaw and how Faith and Laidlaw had both got invited to the party, but he had got only one thing to chew on, that he had at last found somebody who had had a healthy motive to kill Faith Usher, and Byne, as he liked to point out himself, hadn’t even been at the party. Of course, that could have been what genius was at, doping out how Byne could have poisoned the champagne by remote control, but I doubted it.

Wolfe opened his eyes and aimed them at Dinky. “I’m not going to wait until Monday,” he said. “If I haven’t enough now, I never will have. One thing you have told me, or at least implied, will have to be my peg. If I asked you about it now, you would only wriggle out with lies, so I won’t bother. The time has come to attack the central question: if someone had decided to kill Faith Usher, how did he manage it?” He turned. “Archie, get Mr. Cramer.”

“No!” Byne was on his feet. “Damn you, after I’ve spilled—”

I had lifted the receiver, but Byne was there, jostling and reaching. Wolfe’s voice, with a snap, turned him. “Mr. Byne! Don’t squeal until you’re hurt. I’ve got you and I intend to keep you. Must I call Mr. Panzer in?”