Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 31 by Champagne for One

sharp gray eyes at me. “I don’t intend to go all over it again, Goodwin. I’ve questioned you twice myself, and I’ve read your statement. I’m only after one point, the big point. To begin with, I’ll tell you something that is not to be repeated. There is not a thing, not a word, in what any of the others have said that rules out suicide. Not a single damn thing. And there’s a lot that makes suicide plausible, even probable. I’m saying that if it wasn’t for you suicide would be a reasonable assumption, and it seems likely, I only say likely, that that would be the final verdict. You see what that means.”
    I nodded. “Yeah. I’m the fly in the soup. I don’t like it any better than you do. Flies don’t like being swamped in soup, especially when it’s hot.”
    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 orWolfe 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 herhandkerchief. 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?”
    I killed a yawn. “Certainly not. It’s perfect. I don’t say she mightn’t have committed suicide, I only say she didn’t. As you know, I have good eyes, and she was only twenty feet from me. When she took the champagne from Grantham with her right hand her left hand was on her lap, and she didn’t lift it. She took the glass by the stem, and when Grantham raised his glass and said something she raised hers a little higher than her mouth and then lowered it and drank. Are you by any chance hiding an ace? Does Grantham say that when he handed her the glass she dropped something in it before she took hold of it?”
    “No. He only says she might have put something in it before she drank; he doesn’t know.”
    “Well, I do. She didn’t.”
    “Yeah. You signed your statement.” He pointed the cigar at