Champagne for One

"I don’t really know him at all. I met him somewhere about a year ago, and I wish I could tell you where, but I’ve been trying to remember and I simply can’t. It was a party somewhere, but I can’t remember where. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. But yesterday I was sitting at the window thinking about my daughter. My dear daughter Faith." She stopped to gulp, but it wasn’t very impressive. "And I remembered meeting a man named Byne, Austin Byne, and someone telling me, maybe he told me himself, that he was the nephew of the rich Mrs Robilotti who used to be Mrs Albert Grantham. And my daughter had died at Mrs Robilotti’s house, so maybe he could tell me about her, and maybe he could get Mrs Robilotti to see me so I could ask her about her. I wanted to learn all I could about my daughter." She gulped.

It didn’t look good. In fact, it looked bad. Byne had been smart enough to invent one that she couldn’t be expected to corroborate; he had even warned that she would probably deny it; and what was worse, it was even possible that he hadn’t invented it. He might have been telling the truth, like a gentleman. The meeting of Wolfe’s two bright ideas at Tom’s Joint, which had looked so rosy when Saul told me they were together, might fizzle out entirely. Maybe he wasn’t a genius after all.

If he was sharing my gloom it didn’t show. He asked, "Since your rendezvous with Mr Byne was innocuous, why were you alarmed by his threat to call the police? What were her words, Archie?"

" ‘Not the cops. My God, not the cops.’ "

"Yes. Why, Mrs Usher?"

"I don’t like cops. I never have liked cops."

"Why did you leave your home and go to a hotel and register under another name?"

"Because of how I felt, what my daughter had done. I didn’t want to see people. I knew newspapermen would come. And cops. I wanted to be alone. You would too if-"

The doorbell rang, and I went. Sometimes I let Fritz answer it when I am engaged, but with her there and Byne in the front room I thought I had better see who it was, and besides, I was having a come-down and felt like moving. It was only Orrie Gather. I opened up and greeted him, and he crossed the sill, and I shut the door. When he removed his coat there was disclosed a leather thing, a zippered case, that he had had under it.

"What’s that?" I asked. "Your week-end bag?"

"No," he said. "It’s Mrs Usher’s sec-"