Rex Stout - The Father Hunt

teenth of what a father had paid for the privilege, or something similar.

I said, to him, "So it wasn't a loan or a gift and she didn't sell anything, but we'll have to concede that it's legally in her possession. Of course the Internal Revenue Service and the New York State Income Tax Bureau would like to take a whack at it, but that's not our lookout and what they don't know won't hurt her. What else shall I ask her?"

He grunted and turned to her. "Is the money still in the box?"

"Yes, all but that." She gestured toward his desk. "The box is in my apartment-on Eighty-second Street. And the letter. But I don't want… Mr. Goodwin mentioned the Internal Revenue Service."

"We are not government agents, Miss Denovo, and are not obliged to disclose information received in confidence." He swiveled his head to look at the clock. "It is ten minutes to our dinnertime. May Mr. Goodwin call on you at your apartment at ten tomorrow morning?"

"Yes. I don't go to Miss Rowan on Saturday."

"Then expect him around ten o'clock. He will want to see the box and its contents, and the letter, and he will want all the information you can give him. What you told him yesterday is a mere prologue." He turned. "Archie. Give her a receipt for this money. Not as a retainer; that can wait until you have seen the box and the letter, and you will verify the handwriting of the letter. Just a receipt for the amount, her property, entrusted to me for safekeeping."

I turned my chair, pulled the typewriter around, and opened a drawer for paper and carbon.

3

I was interested, naturally, in Elinor Denovo's apartment. We were probably going to need to know everything about her that was knowable, and a woman's home can have a hundred hints, two or three of which you may get if you have any savvy at all and are lucky. So before settling down with Amy and my notebook in the living room I took a tour, with Amy along. There were a small foyer, a medium-sized living room, two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. If the foyer or kitchen or bathroom had any hints they weren't for me; for instance, there was nothing in the bathroom to indicate that it had ever been used by a man, but of course Elinor hadn't been there for nearly three months.

I gave Amy's bedroom just a glance; for her I had a better source of hints, herself. She said she hadn't changed anything in her mother's bedroom. It might have told a woman, especially a Lily Rowan, a lot, but all I got was that she had liked pale green for drapes and the bed cover, she used three different scents, all expensive, and she didn't mind if the rug had a big spot near the bathroom door. The living room did have a few hints which might help or might not. There were five pictures on the walls, and they were all color reproductions of paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe-data supplied by Amy. I would have to check on O'Keeffe. The only piece of furniture that was upholstered was the couch, and there were only two cushions on it. I have seen couches with a dozen. The four chairs didn't match one another, and none of them matched the couch. The books, seven whole shelves

of them, were such a mixture, all kinds, fiction and non-fiction, that after I had looked at twenty or thirty titles I quit.

The one really good hint, if someone would tell me what it meant, was that there were no photographs. Except for those in Amy's room, which belonged to her, there wasn't a single photograph in the place, not one, of anyone or anything. That was hard to believe, but Amy said that as far as she knew there had never been any, and she had none of her mother, not even a snapshot, which was a setback, since we would certainly want to know what Elinor Denovo had looked like. I would probably have had to look long and far to find another middle-aged woman who had died, or would die, absolutely photo-graphless.

There were papers, letters, and paid bills and miscellaneous items, including the stuff from her room at the office, but there was no diary or anything resembling one, and there was nothing that seemed likely to be of any help. If it got too tough I might have to have another go at it or put Saul Panzer on it. I did use a few of the items, in Elinor's handwriting, to check the writing on the letter that was in the box with the money. It geed.

When I finally sat on the couch with my notebook, with Amy on one side and the box on the other, it was getting on toward noon. Amy looked two years younger; she hadn't bunched her hair and it was dancing around when she moved her head. I got a piece of folded paper from my breast pocket.

"Here's a receipt," I said, "signed by Mr. Wolfe, which he told me to give you if the box and its contents checked, and I admit they do. You are now a client in good standing." I handed it to her. "Now a suggestion. We discussed you after dinner last evening. You have been damned lucky; a closet shelf is no place for a quarter of a million dollars' worth of skins. If you get the thought that what we're concerned about is the fact that some of it may be needed for the job if it drags on, that's all right, but it's also a fact that we're concerned with a client's interests from every angle, not just the job. So we have a suggestion. Banks are closed today and tomorrow. When I leave I'll take the box along and put it in the safe in our

office. Monday morning I'll take it to your bank and meet you there. Which bank is it?"

"The Continental. The Eighty-sixth Street branch."

"That's fine. Mr. Wolfe's is the Thirty-fourth Street branch and so is mine. We'll get twelve bank checks for twenty grand each, payable to you, and I'll have with me letters to twelve different savings banks in New York, ready for your signature, opening savings accounts. You'll endorse the bank checks and we'll enclose them in the letters. The interest will come to a thousand dollars a month, which is a nice coincidence. You'll deposit the remaining four grand in your account at the Continental."

She was frowning. "But… what will happen? How will I explain…?"

"You won't have to explain anything. If at some time in the future the Internal Revenue Service gets nosy and tries to hook you, you owe them nothing because it was gifts from your father, stretched out over twenty-two years, and Mr. Wolfe is sure that they'll have to lump it, and so am I. They couldn't claim it was used for your support because it wasn't, not a cent of it. If you stash it in a safe-deposit box and peel off twelve grand a year, it will last twenty years. If you do what we suggest, you'll get twelve grand a year and there will be no peeling off. And of course you could withdraw it any time and buy race horses or something."

She gave me a smile. "I'd like to think about it a little. I knew I could trust you. I'll decide before you go."

"Good. A question. Have there been any bank checks in the mail for your mother since she died? Either here or at the office?"

"No, not here. If there had been any at the office of course Mr. Thorne would have told me."

"Okay. I should mention that I no longer think it may take a year. A week may do it, or even less. Your mother made a mistake in that letter. If she didn't want you to find out who your father was, and obviously she didn't, she shouldn't have mentioned that it came in bank checks. There was and is a trail, there has to be, between those checks and the sender, and she probably cashed them at a bank, since they're centuries. Ten centuries every month. It must have been a bank, and probably her bank. We'll