Champagne for One

"You never disappoint me, Saul." Wolfe was doing his best to be sociable. He had just crossed the hall from the dining-room. With Fred and Orrie he wouldn’t have strained himself, but Saul had his high regard. "This, then," he said, "makes four times that I have meant it and this time my fault was so egregious that I made myself pay for it. The only civilized way to spend the hour after lunch is with a book, but I have just swallowed my last bite of cheese cake, and here I am working. You must bear with me. I am paying a deserved penalty."

"Maybe it’s our fault too." Saul suggested. "We had an order and we didn’t fill it."

"No," Wolfe said emphatically. "I can’t grab for the straw of your charity. I am an ass. If any share of the fault is yours it lies in this, that when I explained the situation to you Wednesday evening and gave you your assignments none of you reminded me of my maxim that nothing is to be expected of tagging the footsteps of the police. That’s what you’ve been doing, at my direction, and it was folly. There are scores of them, and only three of you. You have been merely looking under stones that they have already turned. I am an ass."

"Maybe there’s no other stones to try," Orrie observed.

"Of course there are. There always are." Wolfe took time to breathe. More oxygen was always needed after a meal unless he relaxed with a book. "I have an excuse, naturally, that one approach was closed to my ingenuity. By Mr Cramer’s account, and Archie didn’t challenge it, no one could possibly have poisoned that glass of champagne with any assurance that it would get to Miss Usher. I could have tackled that problem only by a minute examination of everyone who was there, and most of them were not available to me. Sooner or later it must be solved, but only after disclosure of a motive. That was the only feasible approach open to me, to find the motive, and you know what I did. I sent you men to flounder around on ground that the police had already covered, or were covering. Pfui."

"I saw four people," Fred protested, "that the cops hadn’t got to."

"And learned?"

"Well-nothing."