Free Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 31 by Champagne for One Page A

frequently fumble, but usually they arrive at the truth. Finally.”
    “That’s the trouble. Finally. This time, before they arrive, they might run across the event I spoke of, and if they do, they might charge me with murder. Not they might, they would.”
    “Indeed. It must have been an extraordinary event. If that is what you intend to confide in me, I make two remarks: that you are not yet my client, and that even if you were, disclosures to a private detective by a client are not a privileged communication. It’s an impasse, Mr. Laidlaw. I can’t decide whether to accept your job until I know what the event was; but I will add that if I do accept it I will go far to protect the interest of a client.”
    “I’m desperate, Wolfe,” Laidlaw said. He pushed his hair back, but it needed more than a push. “I admit it. I’m desperate. You’ll accept the job because there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. What I’m going to tell you is known to no one on earth but me, I’m pretty sure of that, but not absolutely sure, and that’s the devil of it.”
    He pushed at his hair again. “I’m not proud of this, what I’m telling you. I’m thirty-one years old. In August, nineteen fifty-six, a year and a half ago, I went into Cordoni’s on Madison Avenue to buy some flowers, and the girl who waited on me was attractive, and that evening I drove her to a place in the country for dinner. Her name was Faith Usher. Her vacation was to start in ten days, and by the time it started I had persuaded her to spend it in Canada with me. I didn’t use my own name; I’m almost certain she never knew what it was. She only had a week, and when we got back she went back to work at Cordoni’s, and I went to Europe and was gone two months. When I returned I had no idea of resuming any relations withher, but I had no reason to avoid her, and I stopped in at Cordoni’s one day. She was there, but she would barely speak to me. She asked me, if I came to Cordoni’s again, to get someone else to wait on me.”
    “I suggest,” Wolfe put in, “that you confine this to the essentials.”
    “I am. I want you to know just how it was. I don’t like to feel that I owe anyone anything, especially a woman, and I phoned her twice to get her to meet me and have a talk, but she wouldn’t. So I dropped it. I also stopped buying flowers at Cordoni’s, but some months later, one rainy day in April, I went there because it was convenient, and she wasn’t there. I didn’t ask about her. I include these details because you ought to know what the chances are that the police are going to dig this up.”
    “First the essentials,” Wolfe muttered.
    “All right, but you ought to know how I found out that she was at Grantham House. Grantham House is an institution started by—”
    “I know what it is.”
    “Then I don’t have to explain it. A few days after I had noticed that she wasn’t at Cordoni’s a friend of mine told me—his name is Austin Byne, and he is Mrs. Robilotti’s nephew—he told me that he had been at Grantham House the day before on an errand for Mrs. Robilotti and had seen a girl there that he recognized. He said I might recognize her too—the girl with the little oval face and green eyes who used to work at Cordoni’s. I told him I doubted it, that I didn’t remember her. But I—”
    “Was Mr. Byne’s tone or manner suggestive?”
    “No. I didn’t think—I’m sure it wasn’t. But I wondered. Naturally. It had been eight months since thetrip to Canada, and I did not believe that she had been promiscuous. I decided that I must see her and talk with her. I prefer to think that my chief reason was my feeling of obligation, but I don’t deny that I also wanted to know if she had found out who I was, and if so whether she had told anyone or was going to. In arranging to see her I took every possible precaution. Shall I tell you exactly how I managed it?”
    “Later, perhaps.”
    “All right, I saw her. She said