Rex Stout - The Father Hunt

A detective is supposed to get onto things and people,

but I gave up long ago trying to get onto Fritz all the way, so I didn't bother to try to guess how he had known Fred and Orrie would be leaving and Saul would be staying. He knows Saul loves his eggs au beurre noir, and there were two chairs and two places ready at my breakfast table. Saul went to the range to watch him baste, and said he had tried it a hundred times but it never tasted the same. As we ate I told Saul about Floyd Vance and the various angles, and we took our second cups of coffee to the office to consider ways and means. Wolfe had said that the first question was, Is he involved? but Saul agreed with me that it couldn't do any harm to regard that as answered and proceed accordingly. He also agreed that it would help if he had a look at him, and I got at the phone and dialed the number of Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer.

"Yes, Archie?" I like the way Parker says yes, Archie. He knows that handling something for Wolfe can be interesting but that it may be tough and ticklish, so the yes, Archie is half glad and half sad.

I told him it was nothing much this time. "Just a little chore. A man named Floyd Vance has an office at Four-ninety Lexington Avenue. He's a counselor, but not at law, at public relations, which as you know is a much newer profession. The chore is to ring him and tell him you have a client who is thinking of engaging his services, and you would like to send a man to discuss it with him. The name of the man is Saul Panzer, whose qualifications you know about. He can go any time, the sooner the better. I'm going out, but Saul will be here to take your call. You have the name? Floyd Vance."

"I have it. What if he wants particulars?"

"You're not prepared to give him any."

"That's a good way to put it. I am certainly not prepared. Give the genius my regards."

He meant it, but he knew I knew exactly what he would put in a long footnote. I dialed another familiar number to make another request and then went up to my room for a quick shave and change. The ten minutes before breakfast hadn't been enough.

It was too hot to walk the more than two miles to East Sixty-third Street, and anyway I had told Lily I

wouid be there by eleven-thirty. It was five minutes short of that when I pushed the button at the penthouse door and got a mild surprise when Mimi opened it. When I am expected at a certain hour it's nearly always Lily who comes, I think on account of some kind of a notion she has about a maid admitting a man who has a key. I have never tried to dope it. Other people's notions are none of my business unless they get in the way. Then I got a second mild surprise. I had told Lily on the phone that I wanted to see both her and Miss Denovo, but even so, why were they out on the terrace at that hour with a pitcher of iced tea when they should have been inside working? The penthouse was air-conditioned. Was Lily actually still… To hell with it. / was working. I moved another chair over, between them, sat, accepted an offer of tea with lime and mint, and said, "Don't mind my manners, I have a busy day ahead." I turned to Lily. "We're working on a problem for Miss Denovo. We've been on it-" "Archie! No."

That was an example of a client's notion getting in the way. "I'm talking," I told her distinctly and returned to Lily. "It's very personal and she doesn't want anyone to know about it, not even you, and I'm proud and happy that she trusts me so much that she calls me Archie, so about her problem I'll only say that she is not responsible for it. Other people created it; she merely wants to solve it. She came to see Nero Wolfe two weeks ago today." "Why do you-" Amy started, and stopped. Lily was smiling at me. "Ole, Escamillo," she said, and put a kiss on a fingertip and flipped it to me.

"Last night," I told Amy, "there was a development. With Miss Rowan here I can't give you the details, and I wouldn't anyhow at this stage. But it is now more than a wild guess that your mother's death wasn't just an accidental hit-and-run, that it was deliberate murder, and _ if so it's possible that he has ideas about you. We don't know-" "He? Who?"

"You have probably never heard the name we're interested in, and you won't hear it now. We don't know what motive he might have had for your mother, or if

he has one for you, but once in a situation like this we made a bad mistake and once is enough." I turned to Lily. "Can she stay here? I mean stay. Not even go out in the hall. This terrace is okay; I doubt if he has a helicopter. Until we know more than we do now. Perhaps just a couple of days, but it could be a couple of weeks. You could get a lot of work done on the book." "Why not?" Lily said. "Certainly." Amy was squinting at me, squinting and frowning. "But you can't expect me… You can't just tell me…" She looked at Lily. "If you don't mind, Miss Rowan, I want to ask him something. I mean alone."

"I don't mind," Lily said, "but I know him better than you do. He's working. When he's playing he's wonderful s-usually-but when he's working he's impossible. He said he wouldn't give you any details, but if you want to try I don't mind."

"I do," I told Amy. "I've got things to do, and anyway there's nothing I could or would teU you. This development may be a dud, and I've got to find out." I stood up. "You'll want to go to your apartment to bring things, but don't take all day." To Lily: "The standard rate for bodyguarding is six dollars an hour, but you shouldn't count the hours you're working on the book." "May I take her to the country for the weekend?" "No. It's barely possible we'll need her." "You didn't drink the tea."

"And I'm thirsty." I picked up the glass, took a couple of swallows, kissed the top of her head, and went.

Before long the day will come, maybe in a year or two, possibly as many as five, when I won't be able to write any more of these reports for publication. There will be nothing to report because it will be so close to impossible to move around in the city of New York that doing detective work will be restricted to phone calls and distances you can walk, and what could anyone detect? It took a taxi forty-nine minutes that Friday to cover the four miles from East Sixty-third Street to the building where the New York Telephone Company keeps a file of old directories available for researchers, but once there, I needed only nine minutes to learn that Vance, Floyd, was listed in the 1944 Manhattan directory and his address had been Tea

East Thirty-ninth Street. It had to be a business address, because there were no residential buildings in that block. That was satisfactory on two counts: one, that he had been around in 1944, and two, that his office had been in walking distance of Tufitti's restaurant on East Forty-sixth Street for lunch or dinner. The next step, naturally, was to have a look at Ten East Thirty-ninth Street, but it had to wait because Saul was expected for lunch and a conference. When my taxi turned into Thirty-fifth Street from Ninth Avenue, Saul was just getting out of one double-parked in front of the old brownstone.'

The next hour, at the lunch table, provided nourishment for both my stomach and brain. For the stomach, sweetbreads amandine in patty shells and cold green-corn pudding. For the brain, a debate on the question whether music, any music, has, or can have, any intellectual content. Wolfe said no and Saul said yes. I backed Saul because he weighs only about half as much as Wolfe, but I thought he made some very good points, which impressed me because one recent Thursday evening at his apartment he had been playing a piece by Debussy, I think it was, on the piano for Lon Cohen and me while we waited for the others to come for poker, and Lon had said something about the piece's intellectual force, and Saul had said no music could possibly have intellectual force. As the woman said to the parrot, it depends on who you're talking to.