No, Laidlaw said. If I had I wouldnt have gone.
Did she know you would be there?
I dont know, but I doubt it. I think that goes for her too; if she had she wouldnt have gone.
Then it was a remarkable coincidence. In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted. Had you attended any of those affairs previously? Those annual dinners?
No. It was on account of Faith Usher that I accepted the invitation. Not to see heras I said, I wouldnt have gone if I had known she would be therejust some feeling about what had happened. I suppose a psychiatrist would call it a feeling of guilt.
Who invited you?
Mrs Robilotti.
Were you a frequent guest at her house?
Not frequent, no, just occasional. I have known Cecil, her son, since prep school, but we have never been close. Her nephew, Austin Byne, was in my class at Harvard. What are you doing, investigating me?
Wolfe didnt reply. He glanced up at the wall clock: ten minutes past one. He took in a couple of bushels of air through his nose, and let it out through his mouth. He looked at the client, not with enthusiasm.
This will take hours, Mr Laidlaw. Just to get started with youwhat you know about those peoplesince I must proceed, tentatively, on the hypothesis that Mr Goodwin is right and Miss Usher was murdered, and you didnt kill her, and therefore one of the others did. Eleven of them, if we include the butlerno, ten, since I shall arbitrarily eliminate Mr Goodwin. Confound it, an army! Its time for lunch, and I invite you to join us, and then well resume. Clams hashed with eggs, parsley, green peppers, chives, fresh mushrooms, and sherry. Mr Goodwin drinks milk. I drink beer. Would you prefer white wine?
Laidlaw said yes, he would, and Wolfe got up and headed for the kitchen.
Chapter 6
At a quarter past five that afternoon, when Laidlaw left, I had thirty-two pages of shorthand, my private brand, in my book. Of course, Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms at four oclock so for the last hour and a quarter I had been the emcee. When Wolfe came down to the office at six I had typed four pages from my notes and was banging away on the fifth.
Most of it was a waste of time and paper, but there were items that might come in handy. To begin with, there was nothing whatever on the three unmarried mothers who were still alive. Laidlaw had never seen or heard of Helen Yarmis or Ethel Varr or Rose Tuttle before the party. Another blank was Hackett. All I had got on him was that he was a good butler, which I already knew, and that he had been there for years, since before Grantham had died.
Mrs Robilotti . Laidlaw didnt care much for her. He didnt put it that way, but it was obvious. He called her a vulgarian. Her first husband, Albert Grantham, had had genuine philanthropic impulses and knew what to do with them, but she was a phoney. She wasnt actually continuing to support his philanthropies; they had been provided for in his will; she spent a lot of time on them, attending board meetings and so on, only to preserve her standing with her betters. Betters, for Laidlaw, evidently didnt mean people with more money, which I thought was a broad-minded attitude for a man with ten million of his own.
Robert Robilotti . Laidlaw cared for him even less, and said so. Mrs Albert Grantham, widow, had acquired him in Italy and brought him back with her luggage. That alone showed she was a vulgarian, but here, it seemed to me, things got confused, because Robilotti was not a vulgarian. He was polished, civilized, and well informed. In all this Im merely quoting Laidlaw. Of course, he was also a parasite. When I asked if he looked elsewhere for the female refreshments that were in short supply at home, Laidlaw said there were rumours, but there were always rumours.
Celia Grantham . Here I had got a surprisenothing startling, but enough to make me lift a brow. Laidlaw had asked her to marry him six months ago and she had refused. I tell you that, he said, so you will know that I cant be very objective about her. Perhaps I was lucky. That was when I was getting a hold on myself after what had happened with Faith Usher, and perhaps I was just looking for help. Celia could help a man all right if she wanted to. She has character, but she hasnt decided what to do with it. The reason she gave for refusing to marry me was that I didnt dance well enough. It was while we were on Celia that I learned that Laidlaw had an old-fashioned streak. When I asked him what about her relations with men and got a vague answer, and made it more specific by asking if he thought she was a virgin, he said of course, since he had asked her to marry him. An old fogy at thirty-one.
Cecil Grantham . On him it struck me that Laidlaw was being diplomatic, and I thought I guessed why. Cecil was three years younger than Laidlaw, and I gathered that his interests and activities were along the same lines as Laidlaws had been three years ago before the event with Faith Usher had pushed his nose inwith qualifications, one being that whereas Laidlaws pile had been left to him with no strings attached, Cecils was in a trust controlled by his mother and he had to watch his budget. He had been heard to remark that he would like to do something to earn some money but couldnt find any spare time for it. Each year he spent three summer months on a ranch in Montana .
Paul Schuster . He was a prodigy. He had worked his way through college and law school, and when he had graduated with high honours a clerkship had been offered him by a justice of the United States Supreme Court, but he had preferred to go to work for a Wall Street firm with five names at the top, and a dozen at the side, of its letterhead. Probably a hundred and twenty bucks a week. Even more probably, at fifty he would be raking in half a million a year. Laidlaw knew him only fairly well and could furnish no information about the nature and extent of his intimacies with either sex. The owner of one of the five names at the top of the letterhead, now venerable, had been Albert Granthams lawyer, and that was probably the connection that had got Schuster at Mrs Robilottis dinner table.
Beverly Kent . Of the Rhode Island Rents, if that means anything to you. It didnt to me. His family was still hanging on to three thousand acres and a couple of miles of a river named Usquepaugh. He too had been in Laidlaws class at Harvard, and had followed a family tradition when he chose the diplomatic service for a career. In Laidlaws opinion it wasnt likely that he had ever been guilty of an indiscretion, let alone an outrage, with a female.
Edwin Laidlaw . A reformed man, a repentant sinner, and a recovered soul. He said he had more appropriate cliches handy, but I told him those would do. When he had inherited his fathers stack, three years ago, he had gone on as before, horsing around, and had caught up with himself only after the Faith Usher affair. He had not, to the best of his knowledge, ever made any other woman a mother, married or unmarried. It had taken more than half of his assets to buy the Malvin Press, and for four months he had been spending ten hours a day at his office, five days a week, not to mention evenings and weekends. He thought he would be on to the publishing business in five years.
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 hadnt 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 didnt 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 weeks 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.