there were always rumours.
Celia Grantham. Here I had got a surprise-nothing 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 can’t 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 hasn’t decided what to do with it. The reason she gave for refusing to marry me was that I didn’t 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 Laidlaw’s had been three years ago before the event with Faith Usher had pushed his nose in-with qualifications, one being that whereas Laidlaw’s pile had been left to him with no strings attached, Cecil’s 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 couldn’t 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 Grantham’s lawyer, and that was probably the connection that had got Schuster at Mrs Robilotti’s dinner table.
Beverly Kent. Of the Rhode Island Kents, if that means anything to you. It didn’t 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 Laidlaw’s class at Harvard, and had followed a family tradition when he chose the diplomatic service for a career. In Laidlaw’s opinion it wasn’t 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 father’s 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 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.
There was more, a lot more, but that’s enough for here. You can see why I said that most of it was a waste of time and paper. I might mention that Wolfe had dictated the memorandum, and I had typed it, and Laidlaw had signed it. Also, as instructed by Wolfe, as soon as Laidlaw had gone I phoned Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Gather, and asked them to drop in at nine o’clock.
At six, on the dot as always, Wolfe entered and crossed to his desk. I collated the originals of the four finished pages, took them to him, and went back to the typewriter. I was rolling out the fifth page when he spoke.
'Archie.'
I twisted my neck. 'Yes, sir?'
'Your attention, please.'
I swivelled. 'Yes, sir.'
'You will agree that this is a devil of a problem, with monstrous difficulties in a disagreeable context.'
'Yes, sir.'
'I have asked you three times regarding your contention that Miss Usher did not commit suicide. The first time it was merely civil curiosity. The second time, in the presence of Mr Cramer, it was merely rhetorical, to give you an opportunity to voice your resolution. The third time, in the presence of Mr Laidlaw, it was merely by the way, since I knew you wouldn’t pull back with him here. Now I ask you again. You know how it stands. If I undertake this job, on the assumption that she was murdered, an assumption based solely on your testimony, you know what it will entail in time, energy, wit, and vexation. The expense will be on Mr Laidlaw, but the rest will be on me. I don’t care to risk, in addition, the chance that I am burrowing in an empty hole. So I ask you again.'
