Rex Stout - The Father Hunt

At the Times there was another reply, also impossible, and nothing in the morgue about Eugene Jarrett except such routine facts as that he graduated from Harvard in 1945 and he had been a sponsor of a dinner to honor somebody in 1963. The biggest blank was the New York public library, where I got stubborn and spent a full hour. You wouldn't believe that after all that expert research I didn't even know whether that vice-president of the third largest bank in New York had any children or not, when I returned to the old brownstone a little before six o'clock. But I didn't. I had supposed, when I left, that I would have to get back in time to go up to the plant rooms to brief Wolfe on him before he came, but it wasn't even worth buzzing him on the house phone. When he came down I told him that we would learn more about Eugene Jarrett in one glance at him than I had learned all afternoon, and the doorbell rang.

I was right, too. What I learned looking at him, as I let him in and escorted him to the office and got him seated in the red leather chair, may have been irrelevant and immaterial, but at least it was definite. If a vice-president of a big bank is supposed to do any work, he didn't belong there. There was no resemblance to his father at all, especially the eyes. His were gray-blue too, but even when they were aimed straight at you, you had the feeling that they were seeing something else, maybe a ship he wanted to be on or a pretty girl sitting on a cloud. I don't often have fancy ideas, so that shows you the effect those eyes had. It would be dumb to expect a man like that to do any work. The rest of him was normal enough-about my height, square-shouldered, an ordinary face. Seated, he

ignored Wolfe and me while Ms eyes took their time 'fa go around the room. Apparently they liked the rug, but they stayed longest on the globe over by the bookshelves. Not many people coming there have seen a globe as big as that one, 35Vi inches in diameter.

He finally turned the eyes on Wolfe and said, "A fascinating occupation, yours, Mr. Wolfe. People come to you for answers as they did to the Pythia at Delphi or the Clarian prophet. But of course you make no claim to mantic divination. That is now only for charlatans. What are you, a scientist, or an artist?"

Wolfe was frowning at him. "If you please, Mr. Jarrett, no labels. Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled. Do you have one?"

"No. But I can label any man whose faculties are concentrated on a single purpose. I can label Charles de Gaulle or Robert Welch or Stokely Carmichael."

"If you do, don't glue them on, and have replacements handy."

Jarrett nodded. "Nothing is unalterable, not even a label. I have altered mine for my father several times. I mention him because it is apropos. The only reference to him in your letter was that Carlotta Vaughn was in his employ, but Bert McCray has told me about your poke at him and how he met it. He has also told me of your intention to transfer the poke to me. I would enjoy discussing my father with you-we might get a better label for him than the one I have-but your letter asks about Carlotta Vaughn. First we should dispose of me. You thought my father was the father of a child she bore, were confronted with evidence that he wasn't, and decided that I was. Is that correct?"

"Not 'decided.' Conjectured or surmised-or even inferred."

"No matter. You're in for another disappointment. When Bert McCray told me about it Saturday, and then when your letter came, I decided to save you time and expense -and of course avoid annoyance for myself-by telling you something that many people conjecture or surmise but only a few really know. But I realized that my telling you

wouldn't settle it for you, so this morning I phoned my doctor."

He turned to me. "You're Archie Goodwin?"

I told him yes. He got a leather case from his pocket, fingered a card out, and extended his hand, and I went and took the card. The "James Odell Worthington, M.D." might actually have been engraved.

"Dr. Worthington will see you at nine tomorrow morning," Jarrett said. "Be on time; he's a very busy man. He will tell you that I am incapable of impregnating a woman and always have been. He has a reputation and would on no account risk it by telling you that if there was any remote possibility that you would ever prove him wrong."

He turned to Wolfe. "Your letter said that you want information about Carlotta Vaughn."

I would have told him to go climb a tree. Wolfe probably would have liked to, but the only visible sign was the tip of his forefinger making a little circle on the desk blotter. He asked, "Did Dr. Worthington know you in nineteen forty-four?"

"Yes, he was one of the doctors who had tried to save my mother. He's an internist and the cancer specialists had taken charge, but my mother depended on him. Don't ask me, ask him." He brushed it aside. "Ask me anything you want to about Carlotta Vaughn, but I doubt if I know anything that will help. She changed her name to Elinor Denovo, and she had a daughter now twenty-two years old, and during those twenty-two years my father sent her a check for a thousand dollars every month. Is that the situation?"

"Yes."

"Then I need a new label for him. This is fantastic. It doesn't fit anything I thought I knew about him. Not that he would ignore a responsibility; he fulfills any and all responsibilities; but he decides when he is responsible and when he isn't. He certainly wouldn't have felt responsible if I had impregnated Carlotta Vaughn or any other woman, or a dozen. Bert McCray thinks it was blackmail, but it wasn't. It's inconceivable that he has ever, submitted to blackmail by anybody for anything. It's fascinating. I understand from Avery Ballou that this Elinor Denovo is

dead, but didn't she ever tell anyone what the money was for?"

"While alive, no. But a letter opened by her daughter after her death said this money is from your father. And again, this money came from your father. Mr. Goodwin and I see no reason to question it."

"Fantastic. Unbelievable." Jarrett narrowed his eyes to slits, put his elbows on the chair arms, and rubbed his left palm with his right. Then he came up and was on his feet. "I'm no good sitting down." He moved, across to the bookshelves and looked at titles, then to the globe and rotated it, slowly, twice around. He came and stood in the center of the room, looking down at me as if I were a pretty girl on a cloud, then turned to Wolfe. "I don't do anything at the bank, you know. I know nothing about banking. But they don't keep me and pay me only because my father owns stock that he won't sell. They say I have insight. I don't know what to call it, I can't label that, but I do sometimes see -things that they have not seen. I have never tried to force it, and I'm not going to try to force this, but I want to see it more than I have ever wanted to see anything. My father!"

He went to the red leather chair and sat. "It would be pointless to ask me anything about Carlotta Vaughn. Bert McCray told me that her child was conceived in the summer of nineteen forty-four. I had been rejected by the army and spent that summer working in a war-materials plant in California. I know nothing that could possibly help you." He got up again. "Come and have dinner with me." He looked at me. "You too. Sometimes it helps to have people around, I don't know why."