Рекс Стаут: The Father Hunt

I was interested, naturally, in Elinor Denovo’s apartment. We were probably going to need to know everything about her that was knowable, and a woman’s home can have a hundred hints, two or three of which you may get if you have any savvy at all and are lucky. So before settling down with Amy and my notebook in the living room I took a tour, with Amy along. There was a small foyer, a medium-sized living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. If the foyer or kitchen or bathroom had any hints they weren’t for me; for instance, there was nothing in the bathroom to indicate that it had ever been used by a man, but of course Elinor hadn’t been there for nearly three months.

I gave Amy’s bedroom just a glance; for her I had a better source of hints, herself. She said she hadn’t changed anything in her mother’s bedroom. It might have told a woman, especially a Lily Rowan, a lot, but all I got was that she had liked pale green for drapes and the bed cover, she used three different scents, all expensive, and she didn’t mind if the rug had a big spot near the bathroom door. The living room did have a few hints which might help or might not. There were five pictures on the walls, and they were all color reproductions of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe — data supplied by Amy. I would have to check on O’Keeffe. The only piece of furniture that was upholstered was the couch, and there were only two cushions on it. I have seen couches with a dozen. The four chairs didn’t match one another, and none of them matched the couch. The books, seven whole shelves of them, were such a mixture, all kinds, fiction and non-fiction, that after I had looked at twenty or thirty titles I quit.

The one really good hint, if someone would tell me what it meant, was that there were no photographs. Except for those in Amy’s room, which belonged to her, there wasn’t a single photograph in the place, not one, of anyone or anything. That was hard to believe, but Amy said that as far as she knew there had never been any, and she had none of her mother, not even a snapshot, which was a setback, since we would certainly want to know what Elinor Denovo had looked like. I would probably have had to look long and far to find another middle-aged women who had died, or would die, absolutely photographless.

There were papers, letters, and paid bills and miscellaneous items, including the stuff from her room at the office, but there was no diary or anything resembling one, and there was nothing that seemed likely to be of any help. If it got too tough I might have to have another go at it or put Saul Panzer on it. I did use a few of the items, in Elinor’s handwriting, to check the writing on the letter that was in the box with the money. It geed.

When I finally sat on the couch with my notebook, with Amy on one side and the box on the other, it was getting on toward noon. Amy looked two years younger; she hadn’t bunched her hair and it was dancing around when she moved her head. I got a piece of folded paper from my breast pocket.

“Here’s a receipt,” I said, “signed by Mr. Wolfe, which he told me to give you if the box and its contents checked, and I admit they do. You are now a client in good standing.” I handed it to her. “Now a suggestion. We discussed you after dinner last evening. You have been damned lucky; a closet shelf is no place for a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of skins. If you get the thought that what we’re concerned about is the fact that some of it may be needed for the job if it drags on, that’s all right, but it’s also a fact that we’re concerned with a client’s interests from every angle, not just the job. So we have a suggestion. Banks are closed today and tomorrow. When I leave I’ll take the box along and put it in the safe in our office. Monday morning I’ll take it to your bank and meet you there. Which bank is it?”

“The Continental. The Eighty-sixth Street branch.”

“That’s fine. Mr. Wolfe’s is the Thirty-fourth Street branch and so is mine. We’ll get twelve bank checks for twenty grand each, payable to you, and I’ll have with me letters to twelve different savings banks in New York, ready for your signature, opening savings accounts. You’ll endorse the bank checks and we’ll enclose them in the letters. The interest will come to a thousand dollars a month, which is a nice coincidence. You’ll deposit the remaining four grand in your account at the Continental.”

She was frowning. “But... what will happen? How will I explain...?”

“You won’t have to explain anything. If at some time in the future the Internal Revenue Service gets nosy and tries to hook you, you owe them nothing because it was gifts from your father, stretched out over twenty-two years, and Mr. Wolfe is sure that they’ll have to lump it, and so am I. They couldn’t claim it was used for your support because it wasn’t, not a cent of it. If you stash it in a safe-deposit box and peel off twelve grand a year, it will last twenty years. If you do what we suggest, you’ll get twelve grand a year and there will be no peeling off. And of course you could withdraw it any time and buy race horses or something.”

She gave me a smile. “I’d like to think about it a little. I knew I could trust you. I’ll decide before you go.”

“Good. A question. Have there been any bank checks in the mail for your mother since she died? Either here or at the office?”

“No, not here. If there had been any at the office of course Mr. Thorne would have told me.”

“Okay. I should mention that I no longer think it may take a year. A week may do it, or even less. Your mother made a mistake in that letter. If she didn’t want you to find out who your father was, and obviously she didn’t, she shouldn’t have mentioned that it came in bank checks. There was and is a trail, there has to be, between those checks and the sender, and she probably cashed them at a bank, since they’re centuries. Ten centuries every month. It must have been a bank, and probably her bank. We’ll find out Monday.” I opened my notebook. “Now for questions, and some of them will be very personal.”

That took a full hour, and I barely made it home by lunchtime. Wolfe was standing in the doorway to the dining room when I entered. By standing there he was asking me, without putting it into words, why I hadn’t phoned that I might be late, but since I was only three minutes late I ignored it and merely asked him if he wanted to take a glance inside the box before lunch. He said no, and I took it to the office and put it on his-desk and then went and joined him at the table. As I sat I said it wouldn’t hurt his appetite to know that she had taken our suggestion and would meet me at her bank Monday morning, so if more than the retainer was needed it would be available.

As a rule we stay at the table for coffee at lunch, though not at dinner, but sometimes, when I have or may have something to report about a job he is committed to, he tells Fritz to bring it to the office, and my bringing the box showed that he was committed. So when we had put away the diced watermelon, which had been sprinkled with granulated sugar and refrigerated in a cup of sherry for an hour, we moved across the hall and Fritz brought coffee. I opened the box, but he merely gave it a brief glance and sat, and I went to my desk, swung my chair around, and got my notebook from my pocket.

“I was there nearly three hours,” I said. “Do you want the crop?”

“No.” He was pouring coffee. “Only what may be useful.”

“Then you should be back at your book in about ten minutes. To simplify it I’ll make it Elinor and Amy. The most interesting item is the fact that Elinor had no photographs anywhere, not even at the bottom of a drawer. Not one. That’s extremely significant, so please tell me what it signifies.”