Champagne for One

As for Faith Usher, his thinking that she had not been promiscuous, and his not raising the question, at his last meeting with her, whether there was any doubt about his being the father of the baby she was carrying, had been based entirely on the impression he had got of her. He knew nothing whatever about her family or background. He hadn’t even known where she lived; she had refused to tell him. She had given him a phone number and he had called her at it, but he didn’t remember what it was, and he had made a little private ceremony of destroying his phone-number book when he had reformed. When I said that on a week’s vacation trip there is time for a lot of talk, he said they had done plenty of talking, but she had shied away from anything about her. His guess was that she had probably graduated from high school.

We had spent a solid hour with him on the party before Wolfe went up to the plant rooms. Wolfe took him through every minute of it, trying to get some faint glimmer of a hint. Laidlaw was sure that neither he nor Faith Usher had said or done anything that could have made anyone suspect they had ever met before, except her refusing to dance with him, and no one had heard that but me. He had asked her to dance because he thought it would be noticed if he didn’t.

Of course the main point was when Cecil Grantham came to the bar to get the champagne. Laidlaw had been standing there with Helen Yarmis, with whom he had just been dancing, and Mr and Mrs Robilotti. As he and Helen Yarmis approached the bar, Beverly Kent and Celia Grantham were moving away, and Mr and Mrs Robilotti were there, and of course Hackett. Laidlaw thought he and Helen Yarmis had been there more than a minute, but not more than two, when Cecil Grantham came; that was what he had told the police. He couldn’t say whether, when he had taken two glasses of champagne for Helen Yarmis and himself, there had been other glasses on the bar with champagne in them; he simply hadn’t noticed. The police had got him to try to recall the picture, but he couldn’t. All he was sure of was that he hadn’t poisoned any champagne, but he was almost as sure that Helen Yarmis hadn’t either. She had been right at his elbow.