Champagne for One

"Correction. You suppose he has been here."

"All right, I do." He took another step, towards Wolfe. "Have you seen Edwin Laidlaw in the last three hours?"

"This is quite beyond belief," Wolfe declared. "You know how rigidly I maintain my personal schedule. You know that I resent any attempt to interfere with these two hours of relaxation. But you get into my house by duplicity and then come charging up here to ask me a question to which you have no right to an answer. So you don’t get one. Indeed, in these circumstances, I doubt if you could put a question about anything whatever that I would answer." He turned, giving us the broad expanse of his rear, and picked up a seedling.

"I guess," I told Cramer sympathetically, "your best bet would be to get a search warrant and send a gang to look for evidence, like cigarette ashes from the kind he smokes. I know where it hurts. You’ve never forgotten the day you did come with a warrant and a crew to look for a woman named Clara Fox and searched the whole house, including here, and didn’t find her, and later you learned she had been in this room in a packing case, covered with osmundine that Wolfe was spraying water on. So you thought if you rushed up before I could give the alarm you’d find Laidlaw here, and now that he isn’t you’re stuck. You can’t very well demand to know why Laidlaw rushed here to discuss something with Wolfe that he wouldn’t discuss downtown. You ought to take your coat off when you’re in the house or you’ll catch cold when you leave. I’m just talking to be sociable while you collect yourself. Of course Laidlaw was here this morning with the others, but apparently you know that. Whoever told you should-"

He turned and was going. I followed.

Chapter Eleven

At five minutes past six Saul Panzer phoned. That was routine; when one or more of them are out on a chore they call at noon, and again shortly after six, to report progress or lack of it and to learn if there are new instructions. He said he was talking from a booth in a bar and grill on Broadway near Eighty-sixth Street. Wolfe, who had just come down from the plant rooms, did him the honour of reaching for the phone on his desk to listen in.