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said Mr. Lubinski. ”I witnessed an outright act of theft.” He unloosened his bow tie with a sigh of relief.
    ”No kidding?” Annie said. ”What was stolen?”
    ”Two red carnations,” said Aaron Lubinski severely, winking at Evonne.
    ”So take a buck off my bill,” I said. ”Let me ask you this, Mr. Wise Guy. How do you pay for the booze?”
    ”Meaning what?” said Mr. Lubinski, looking slightly baffled.
    ”I mean do you pay the caterers a flat rate per head, or do you pay them a flat rate per head just for the food and then, on top, pay for whatever booze was drunk?”
    He shrugged. ”Who’d pay for undrunk booze?” he wondered. ”Also, what caterer in his right mind would give you a flat rate for food and drink ahead of time, anyway, is he suddenly Bet-A-Million Bates? So he wins if he’s catering the Pasadena Grandmother’s Bridge Club, but what if the party’s for the twentieth anniversary of the Private Investigator’s Social Club? You pay by the empty bottle—my wife’s out there now counting them up with the barman.”
    ”Yeah,” I said. ”That’s what I thought.”
    ”So?” said Mr. Lubinski.
    ”So this,” I said. ”I knew a barman once.”
    ”No!” exclaimed my darling. ”Did you ever!” She and Annie shook their heads in disbelief.
    ”The owner of the bar where he worked personally supervised the delivery of all booze, that was like once a week. So then all he’s got to do, at the end of the week before reordering, is count the number of empty bottles, multiply by the number of shots in a bottle, and multiply that by the price per shot, and that’s how much money he wants in the till. OK, roughly. The barman can’t sell a bottle of his boss’s booze and then chuck out the empty in the garbage because the boss is going to say, Where’s the empty that belongs in this case of empty Johnny Walkers?”
    ”Good question,” said Mr. Lubinski.
    ”Gee, it just slipped out of my hands and got broke,” said Evonne. ”I always been a butterfingers.”
    ”I gave it to an old lady who wanted to make a lamp out of it,” said the other comedienne, who then hiccupped delicately behind one palm.
    ”You two probably finished it off yourselves,” I observed. The ladies giggled.
    ”So what the guy does,” I went on, ”is bring in his own bottle of booze, bought at Cut-Rate Charley’s Cheap Booze Emporium, and pours the customers’ drinks out of it. He chucks out the empty and pockets the difference between his cost at Charley’s and what he nets selling it at a buck and a half a shot, and unless the owner’s got a permanent spotter in the place making sure that every drink sold gets rung up in the till, there’s not much he can do about it.”
    ”Aw,” said Annie. ”The heart bleeds.”
    ”So?” said Mr. Lubinski again.
    ”At a gala soiree like this,” I said, ”there’s no percentage in the barman bringing in his own booze, because he’s not the one who gets paid for it. But when we were parking outside, I spied with my little eye something curious. I spied two guys, a little guy and a big guy. Each was carrying a case of champagne. Guess which one was having the most trouble?”
    ”The big guy,” said my beloved. ”I saw him, too.” ‘And the little guy wasn’t a secret weight lifter, either,” I said, ”because all he was wearing was a T-shirt and Mr. Universe he wasn’t.”
    ”So what if what he was carrying was a case of empty champagne bottles, right?” said Mr. Lubinski. ”Which my good wife is out there counting and which will be charged to Nathan at forty bucks a bottle, right?”
    ”It could be,” I said. ”There’s no way we can prove it now one way or the other, but next time tell your good wife to count the bottles on the way in, too.”
    ”You better believe it,” said Mr. Lubinski grimly. ”You better believe it’s the last time we use that caterer, too. So what else did anyone notice although I hate to ask, a pickpocket maybe, a