Rex Stout - The Father Hunt

selves. At least two minutes before. I'd offer my word of honor too, only I'm not sure you think I have one. Questions."

He picked up a phone transmitter, in a moment told it, "Coffee," replaced it, and swiveled his chair to face me without twisting his thick neck. "We haven't bothered with Amy Denovo," he said. "After that ad of course we knew she was Wolfe's client, but we had pumped her good in June. The father angle didn't help us any unless she found him and maybe not then. You say you haven't? Found him?"

"We haven't got even a smell. But you came to see me and you phoned Mr. Wolfe."

"You had phoned Stebbins. You know damned well that when I find Wolfe within a mile I smell a rat. I thought-"

"Do I tell him you called him a rat?"

"You do not. He's a lot of things I can name, but he's not a rat. I thought he might be able to name a man who smokes a certain kind of cigar."

"I know one who smokes Monte Cristos. He gets them from a purser on a ship."

"Yeah. You'll clown while they're embalming you. If you want an interesting fact off the record, we've got one we've been saving, but hell, we might as well put it on television. We've got nine fingerprints of that hit-and-run driver, and six of them are as good as you could want."

The door opened and a uniformed city employee entered, came, and put an old scarred wooden tray on Cramer's desk blotter. As Cramer nodded thanks and picked up the pot to pour, I asked, "Didn't the damn fool ever hear of gloves?"

He put the pot down. "They weren't on the car. On the floor, in front, was a leather cigar case. He got it out to light one while he was parked on Second Avenue waiting for her, and there she came, and he dropped it on the seat…"

My brows were up. "You're saying it was first-degree."

He took a healthy swallow of coffee. I have to sip when it's that hot. "Wolfe is," he said, "not me. I was doing him a favor, reconstructing it for him. I don't give a damn how he happened to leave it; we've got it. But we can't

match the prints-here, Washington, London-nowhere. There were two cigars in the case. Gold Label Bonitas. Knowing, as I do, the kind of stunts Wolfe is capable of, it was possible he was getting set to ask me if I would care to meet a man who smoked Gold Label Bonitas and was shy a case to carry them in." He drank coffee.

"If the case is handy," I said, "I would enjoy looking at it. So I could describe it to Mr. Wolfe."

"It's at the laboratory. It's polished black calfskin, not new but not worn much, stamped on the inside 'Corwin Deluxe.' No other marks. Nothing special about it to trace."

"I suppose the woman who owned the car-"

The door was opening and a cop stepped in. Cramer asked him, "Yes?" and he said Sergeant So-and-so had arrived with What's-his-name, and I stood up. It would have been a dumb remark anyway. They have some darned smart dicks at Homicide South, and one of them had certainly asked the owner of the car if the cigar case was hers.

11

Raymond Thome was more than half an hour late. It was 9:40 when the doorbell rang and I went and admitted him, took him to the office, introduced him, nodded him to the red leather chair, asked him what he would like to drink, and went to the kitchen to fill his order for brandy and a glass of water.

Mien the three 'teers had phoned in with their usual reports, nothing, they had been told to call at nine in the morning. They were the three 'teers because once at a conference Orrie had said they were the three musketeers and we had tried to change it to fit. We tried snoopeteers, privateers (for private eyes), dicketeers, wolf steers, hawk-eteers, and others, and ended up by deciding that none of them was good enough and settling for the three 'teers. They had not been told that we were now looking for a murderer, not just a father; I saved that for morning so they would get a good night's sleep.

On the way back from Twentieth Street I had found a cigar counter with a box of Gold Label Bonitas, the third counter I tried, and had bought a couple-two for sixty-five cents-and Wolfe and I had given them a good look. A Gold Label Bonita is four and three-quarters inches long, medium thick, and medium blunt at both ends. It comes in a cellophane tube, and its label says Gold Label but not Bonita. The Bonita is only on the box. I lit one and took a few puffs, but neither Wolfe nor I would claim that if we entered a room where a man had recently smoked a cigar we could testify under oath that it had been a Gold Label Bonita. It did taste and smell like tobacco smoke, which is more than I can say for the-

but he may read this. I dropped the other one in a drawer and gave Wolfe a full account of my conversation with Raymond Thorne ten days earlier, which I had never reported verbatim.

Thome's first remark after a sip of brandy was that a close-up of Wolfe there in his chair, with sprays of orchids scattered over the desk, would make a marvelous shot for a one-minute commercial. He said that of course he didn't make many commercials, but a friend of his did, and what a picture! Wolfe had to rub his lips with a knuckle to stop the words that wanted out. Thorne was going to help him find a murderer, or he hoped he was.

"My friend would be glad to come and discuss it with you," Thorne said.

"That can wait," Wolfe said. "I'm fully occupied with the job I'm on. On behalf of Miss Denovo, I thank you for coming. I know you told Mr. Goodwin that you could supply no information that would help, but it is a common occurrence for a man to have knowledge of a fact and to be quite unaware of its significance. I once questioned a young woman for three days on what she regarded as irrelevant trivialities, and finally got a fact that exposed a murderer."

"I'm afraid I can't spare three days." Thorne took a sip of brandy and stirred it in his mouth with his tongue. "This cognac is marvelous. Speaking of facts, evidently you knew one I didn't, from that ad… I suppose that ad in the Times was yours?"

"Yes."

"Alias Elinor Denovo. Carlotta something alias Elinor Denovo. Why the 'alias' if Denovo was her married name? Her daughter's name is Amy Denovo."

"That's one of the complications, Mr. Thorne. A client's communications with a detective she has hired are not legally privileged, but they are often confidential."

"Goodwin said on the phone that you're blocked."

"We're stumped."

"But you still think it was premeditated murder?"

"Miss Denovo does, as Mr. Goodwin told you ten days ago. Do I? Yes, for reasons you might think deficient. But getting you here is not merely stumbling around in the dark. It isn't fatuous to assume that some recent event

induced the murder and that something connected with that event, however remotely, was seen or heard by you. In conversation with her, how did you address her? Mrs. Denovo, or Elinor?"

"Elinor."

"Then I shall. How many others there called her Elinor?"

"Why… Let's see… three. No, four."

"Their names?"

"Now listen." Thome flipped a hand. "That wouldn't be just irrelevant trivialities, it would be drivel. It would take three weeks, not just three days. Goodwin said someone at my place might be involved in it, and I told him there wasn't the slightest chance. Simply impossible. Nobody there had any personal relations with her. Even I didn't, actually. We often had meals together, lunch and dinner and even breakfast sometimes, but only to talk business." He turned to me. "I told you I soon saw she had lines she didn't want crossed." Back to Wolfe: "I can give you the names, sure, but I'm telling you, that will get you nowhere."