Рекс Стаут: The Father Hunt

He made a noise, not enough of one to be called a grunt. “Did you get nothing at all?” He sipped coffee.

“Close to it. The trouble is, Amy doesn’t know anything. I doubt if there’s another girl anywhere who had a mother for twenty-two years and knows so little about her. One thing she knows, or thinks she does, is that her mother hated her and tried hard to hide it. She says that Amy means ‘beloved,’ and that Elinor probably wasn’t aware that she was being sarcastic when she named her that.”

I went to the pot of coffee on Wolfe’s desk, poured a full cup, returned to my chair, and took a couple of sips. “Did Elinor have any close friends, men or women? Amy doesn’t know. Of course she has been away at college for most of the last four years. What was Elinor’s basic character? Careful, correct, and cold about covers it, according to Amy. One of the words she used was ‘introvert,’ which I would have supposed was moth-eaten for a girl just out of Smith.”

I flipped a page of my notebook. “Elinor must have dropped some hints without thinking, at least one little one in twenty years, about her background, her childhood, but Amy says no. She doesn’t know what Elinor did for a living before she went to work for Raymond Thorne Productions, the firm she was with when she died. She doesn’t even know what Elinor did, specifically, at Thorne’s; she only knows it must have been an important job.”

I flipped another page and took some coffee. “Believe it or not, Amy doesn’t know where she was born. She thinks it might have been Mount Sinai Hospital, because that’s where Elinor went for an appendectomy about ten years ago, but that’s just a guess. Anyway it probably wouldn’t help much, since Elinor certainly wasn’t letting things she didn’t want known get into the record. Amy does know one thing, and of course it’s essential, the date. She was born April twelfth, nineteen forty-five. About five years ago she decided to see the doctor who signed her birth certificate but found he was dead. So she was conceived around the middle of July nineteen forty-four, so that’s the time to place Elinor, but Amy doesn’t know where she was living. The first home Amy remembers was a walkup, two flights, on West Ninety-second Street, when she was three. When she was seven they moved to a better one on West Seventy-eighth Street, and when she was thirteen they jumped the park to the East Side, to the one I inspected this morning.”

I emptied my cup and decided it was enough. “I’ll skip the details of the inspection unless you insist. As I said, no photographs, which is fantastic. The letters and other papers, a washout. If we fed them to a computer I would expect it to come up with something like so WHAT OR TELL IT TO THE MARINES. It would have been a pleasure to find for instance a newspaper clipping about a man, no matter what it said, but nothing doing. Did I mention that Amy has no photograph of her mother? We’ll have to snare one somehow.” I shut the notebook and tossed it on the desk. “Questions?”

He said, “Grrrhh.”

“I agree. Oh, you asked me last evening if Amy is interested not so much in genes but in gold. Does she think that a father who could be so free with bank checks must have a barrel of it and she would like to dip in? I passed, and I still do. After spending three hours with her I doubt it, and anyway, does it matter? To us?”

“No.” He put his cup down and pushed it back. “Monday should be more fruitful. You’re off, I suppose.”

I nodded. “I was expected last evening, as you know.” I rose. “Shall I put that in the safe?”

He said no, he would, and I gave him the key to the box, put the notebook in a drawer, whirled my chair and pushed it against my desk as always, and went — out and up to my room to change and pack a bag. I had phoned Lily that I would make it in time for dinner.

It was a quarter to three when I left the house, walked around the corner to the garage, got the Heron, and headed up Tenth Avenue. At Thirty-sixth Street I turned right. The direct route would have been left on Forty-fifth Street for the West Side Highway, but I don’t like to have something itching me when I’m stretched out at the edge of Lily’s swimming pool and flowers are smelling and birds are flying, and so on. On East Forty-third Street parking was no problem on Saturday afternoon.

Entering the Gazette building, I took the elevator to the twentieth floor. For the file I could have gone to the morgue instead, but Lon Cohen might know of some recent development that the Gazette hadn’t had room for. When I entered his room, two doors down from the publisher’s corner room, he was talking to one of the three phones on his desk and I sat on the one other chair, at the end of the desk, and waited. When he hung up he swung around and said, “After what happened Thursday night how did you get here? Walk? You sure didn’t have taxi fare.”

I answered suitably, and when personal comments were, in my opinion, even, I said I knew I shouldn’t bother an assistant to a publisher about something trivial; I only wanted to get the details of a hit-and-run that had killed a woman named Elinor Denovo, the last week in May, and would he ring the morgue and tell them to oblige me. He got at a phone and did what he knew I expected him to, told someone to bring the file up to him. When a boy came with it, in about six minutes, no more, he was at another phone and I had moved my chair about a foot back to be discreet. The boy put the file on his desk and I reached and got it.

There were only seven items: four clippings and three typed reports. It hadn’t made the front page, but was for Saturday, May 27, and the first thing I noticed was that there was no picture of her, so even the Gazette hadn’t dug one up. I went through everything. Mrs. Elinor Denovo (so she was Mrs. to the world) had returned her car to the garage where she kept it, on Second Avenue near Eighty-third Street, Friday night after midnight, and told the attendant she would want it around noon the next day. Three minutes later, as she was crossing Eighty-third Street in the middle of the block, presumably bound for her apartment on Eighty-second Street, a car had hit her, tossed her straight ahead, and run over her with two wheels. Only four people had seen it happen: a man on the sidewalk walking east, a hundred feet or more away, a man and woman on the sidewalk going west, the same direction as the car, about the same distance away, and a taxi driver who had just turned his cab into Eighty-third Street from Second Avenue. They all said that the car that hit her hadn’t even slowed down, but were unanimous on nothing else. The hackie thought the driver, alone in the car, was a woman. The man coming east said it was a man, alone. The man and woman thought it was two men, both in the front seat. The hackie thought the car was a Dodge Coronet but wasn’t sure; the man coming east said it was a Chevvy; the man and woman didn’t know. Two of them said the car was dark green, one said it was dark blue, and one said it was black. So much for eyewitnesses. Actually, it was a dark-gray Ford. It was hot. Mrs. David A. Ernst of Scarsdale, who owned it, had gone for it at ten o’clock Friday evening where she had parked it on West Eleventh Street, and it wasn’t there. A cop had spotted it Saturday afternoon parked on East 123rd Street, and by Monday the scientists had cinched it that it was the one that had got Elinor Denovo.

By the time the Gazette went to press on Thursday, June first, the date of the last clipping, the police had got nowhere. They didn’t even claim that anyone had been invited in for questioning, let alone name a suspect; they only said that the investigation was being vigorously pursued, which was probably true, since they hate a hit-and-run and don’t quit until it’s absolutely hopeless, and even then they don’t forget it.