Rex Stout - The Father Hunt

As for her background, he knew she had come from Wisconsin, some small town near Milwaukee, and that was all. He didn't know how long she had been hi New York, or where she had gone to school, or how she had got the job with Mrs. Jarrett.

So much for her entrance. Where he flunked worst was on her exit. Since starting with Mrs. Jarrett she had lived there, town and country; and in the early spring of 1944, he thought late in March, she suddenly wasn't there, but she might still have been doing something for Jarrett because she came to the house three or four times in the

next six or seven months. The last time he saw her was in late September or early October 1944, when she spent part of an evening with Jarrett in the library.

Exit. Curtain.

He wasn't much more helpful on relationships. He had liked her and admired her, and he thought she had liked him, but he had been married just the year before, at the age of thirty, and his first son had just been born, so his intimate concerns were elsewhere. He remembered vaguely that he had got the idea that something might be developing between her and Jarrett's son Eugene, who was twenty years old in 1944, but he recalled no specific incidents. On her relations with Jarrett himself, he had an internal tussle that was so apparent that I had one too, to keep from grinning. Of course he knew from Ballou what we expected to get on Jarrett, and he would have loved to help by supplying some good salty evidence, but he had been born either too honest or too shy on invention. He rang the changes on what was obvious, that Jarrett and Carlotta were alone together a lot, but when he tried to remember that he had seen things that had made him suspect that Carlotta's services weren't exclusively secretarial, he couldn't make it.

That's what my memory took home for me. I accompanied him on the short walk back to bis job, for a look at the main office of the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company from the outside, thanked him for the lunch, and spent ten minutes on the toughest job in New York, finding a vacant hack. I finally beat a guy with a limp to one. When it rolled to a stop in front of the old brown-stone at twenty minutes to three, I had arranged in my mind a draft all ready for the typewriter. As follows:

CARLOTTA VAUGHN RESUME

from Bertram McCray, August 24, 1967

Up to May 1942

Not known, but according to her via McCray, somewhere in Wisconsin for most of it.

May 1942, to November 1943

Mrs. Jarrett's secretary. Lived there.

November 1943, to March 1944

Jarrett's home secretary. Lived there. March 1944, to October 1944, which includes the month Amy was conceived.

Living elsewhere, presumably in oar near New York,

since McCray saw her at Jarrett's house three or

four times.

October 1944, to July 2, 1945, which includes April 12,1945, Amy's birthday.

Nothing known. July 2,1945

Elinor Denovo walked in on Raymond Thome.

7

When, at five minutes to six that afternoon, I braked the Heron to a stop at the edge of the gravel in front of the main entrance to the Jarrett mansion, it was dark enough for midnight. Clouds had been making passes as far south as Hawthorne Circle. At Shrub Oak they had closed ranks, and at Millbrook they had cut loose on three fronts: for the ears, noise to scare you; for the eyes, flashes to blind you; and for the skin, water to soak you. It stayed right with me the rest of the way, and having made it to my destination in spite of the big try at stopping me, I turned off the engine and pocketed the key, switched the lights off, reached to the back seat for my raincoat, the spare that is always there, draped it over my head, opened the door, and dashed across the gravel for cover.

My reception was fully down to expectations. It was Oscar who opened the door after I had pushed the button three times. In the circumstances it wasn't only natural, it was compulsory, for any fellow being to say "Quite a storm" or "Are you wet?" or "Nice day for ducks." He barely gave me room enough to enter without brushing him.

I was expected. Often, after I make a report to Wolfe, there is a long discussion, and sometimes an argument which stops just short of me quitting or him firing me, about what comes next, but that time it had been obvious. The discussion had lasted maybe three minutes, then I had pulled the phone around and dialed area code 914 and a number, and got the same male voice I had got the day before. I didn't know if it was Oscar because Oscar in person had said very little in my hearing.

"This is Archie Goodwin," I said. "I was there yesterday. Please tell Mr. Jarrett that I am coming again. I'll be there in about two hours."

"I can't do that, Mr. Goodwin. Mr. Jarrett has given orders that you are not to be admitted. There's a man at the entrance, and he-"

"Yeah. Excuse me for interrupting. I expected that, that's why I'm phoning. Please tell Mr. Jarrett that I want to ask him for some information about Carlotta Vaughn." I repeated the name, distinctly. "Carlotta Vaughn. He'll recognize that name. I'll hold the wire."

"But I assure you, Mr. Goodwin-"

"I assure you, sir. He won't thank you for the message, but he'll see me."

A brief silence; then: "Hold the wire."

The wait was longer than the ones the day before. Wolfe, with his receiver in one hand, was adjusting the spray of Miltonia hellemense in the vase on his desk with the other. Finally the voice came.

"Mr. Goodwin?"

"I'm here."

"You say in two hours?"

"More or less. Maybe a little more."

"Very well. You will be admitted."

As I hung up, Wolfe growled, "That creature has been so reduced to chronic subservience that he was deferential even to you. I would like to deal with Mr. Jarrett. I am almost minded to go along."

Just chatter. Before leaving I typed the resume of the life of Carlotta Vaughn as we knew it, which I had arranged in my mind on the way. You have seen it.

Now, as I put my raincoat on a bench and followed Oscar across a reception hall, along a wide corridor, and around a turn into a narrower hall that took us to an open door at the end, I forgot to observe things because I was too busy looking forward to dealing with Mr. Jarrett. One would have got you ten that this time I would get a reaction. But I did observe the room I entered. It had a fifteen-foot ceiling, a rug twice the size of Lily Rowan's 19-by-34 Kashan, a big desk that was presumably Colonial handiwork, and more books than Wolfe owned, on shelves that reached nearly to the ceiling. Not one of the chairs

was occupied. Oscar turned on some lights and said Mr. Jarrett would come shortly, and this time "shortly" was more like it, only a couple of minutes. As he entered by another and narrower door between two tiers of shelves, a dazzle of lightning darted in through the windows, and as he halted and stood after five or six steps, the boom of thunder shook them. Good staging. He focused the frozen eyes on me and said, "What do you want to know about Carlotta Vaughn?"

"It might be better," I said, "for me to tell you first what I already know, or some of it. She was your wife's secretary from May nineteen forty-two untl your wife died. She lived here-and at your house in town. You kept her on. She stopped living with you in March nineteen forty-four, and I can't prove that you still kept her, with a different meaning for 'kept,' but there's no law against guessing, and we've only been on this five days." I got something from a pocket. "Here are two photographs of her, taken in nineteen forty-six, but she wasn't Carlotta Vaughn then, she was Elinor Denovo, and her daughter Amy was a year old. Take a look."