Champagne for One

He stopped again. Then he went on, "I didn’t kill her, but you can see where I’ll be if the police go on investigating and dig this up somehow-though I don’t know how. They would have me. I was standing at the bar when Cecil Grantham came and got the champagne and took it to her. Even if I wasn’t convicted of murder, even if I was never put on trial, this would all come out and that would be nearly as bad. And evidently, if it weren’t for Goodwin, for what he has told them, they would almost certainly call it suicide and close it. Can you wonder that I want to know what he told them? At any price?"

"No," Wolfe conceded. "Accepting your account as candid, no. But you have shifted your ground. You wanted to hire me to tell you what Mr Goodwin has told the police, though you didn’t put it that way, and I declined. What do you want to hire me to do now?"

"To manage this for me. You said you manage things. To manage that this is not dug up, that my connection with Faith Usher does not become known, that I am not suspected of killing her."

"You’re already suspected. You were there."

"That’s nonsense. You’re quibbling. I wouldn’t be suspected if it weren’t for Goodwin. Nobody would be."

I permitted myself an inside grin. "Quibble" was one of Wolfe’s pet words. Dozens of people, sitting in the red leather chair, had been told by him that they were quibbling, and now he was getting it back, and he didn’t like it.

He said testily, "But you are suspected, and you’d be a ninny to hire me to prevent something that has already happened. You have admitted you’re desperate, and desperate men can’t think straight, so I should make allowances, and I do. That the police will not discover your connection with Faith Usher is a forlorn hope. Surely she knew your real name. Weren’t you known at Cordoni’s? Didn’t you have a charge account?"

"No. I have charge accounts, of course, but not at any florist’s. I always paid cash for flowers-in those days. Now it doesn’t matter, but then it was more-uh-it was wiser. I don’t think she ever knew my name, and even if she did I’m almost certain she never told anyone about me-about the trip to Canada."