Champagne for One

He got a cigar from a pocket, rolled it in his palms, put it between his teeth, which were white and even, and removed it. "I'll start at the beginning," he said. "Your being there when it happened. I know what you say, and it’s in your statement-the phone call from Austin Byne and the one from Mrs Robilotti. Of course that happened. When you say anything that can be checked it will always check. But did you or Wolfe help it to happen? Knowing Wolfe, and knowing you, I have got to consider the possibility that you wanted to be there, or Wolfe wanted you to, and you made arrangements. Did you?"

I was yawning and had to finish it. "I beg your pardon. I could just say no, but let’s cover it. How and why I was there is fully explained in my statement. Nothing related to it was omitted. Mr Wolfe thought I shouldn’t go because I would demean myself."

"None of the people who were there was or is Wolfe’s client?"

"Mrs Robilotti was a couple of years ago. The job was finished in nine days. Except for that, no."

His eyes went to Wolfe. "You confirm that?"

"Yes. This is gratuitous, Mr Cramer."

"With you and Goodwin it’s hard to tell what is and what isn’t." He came back to me. "I’m going to tell you how it stands up to now. First, it was cyanide. That’s settled. Second, it was in the champagne. It was in what spilled on the floor when she dropped the glass, and anyway it acts so fast it must have been. Third, a two-ounce plastic bottle in her bag was half full of lumps of sodium cyanide. The laboratory calls them amorphous fragments; I call them lumps. Fourth, she had shown that bottle to various people and told them she wanted to kill herself; she had been doing that for more than a year."

He shifted in the chair. He always sat so as to have Wolfe head on, but now he was at me. "Since the bag was on a chair fifteen feet away from her, and the bottle was in it, she couldn’t have taken a lump from it when Grantham brought her the champagne, or just before, but she could have taken it any time during the preceding hour or so and had it concealed in her handkerchief. Testing the handkerchief for traces is out because she dropped it and it fell in the spilled champagne-or rather, it’s not out but it’s no help. So that’s the set-up for suicide. Do you see holes in it?"