The Father Hunt (11 page)

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.”

“I doubt,” Wolfe said, “if it would help to have Mr. Goodwin and me around. We’re in a pickle. I wrote you that I would appreciate it if you would call at my office. I retract that. I don’t appreciate it at all.”

“I suppose not.” He turned and sort of wandered toward the hall, but stopped and swung around. “The pickle you’re in is nothing to mine. I thought I had my father plain and clear, and now this! I’m going to see it-I don’t know when, but I will. I have to.”

I had circled around him and was in the hall, but he didn’t see me as he came to the front, where I had the

door open. I shut the door after him, returned to the office, and stood looking down at Wolfe. With his chin down he had to have his eyes wide open to glare at the globe. After ten seconds of that he raised his head to growl at me. “Sit down. Confound it, you know I like eyes at a level.”

“Yeah. Shall I get the darts out?”

“No. How much have we spent?”

That was dangerous. That question meant, If I return the retainer and drop it, how much am I out'That hadn’t happened often, but it wasn’t unthinkable. I went to my chair and sat. “I admit,” I said, “that we’ve never had a tougher one, and it may be too tough even for you, but why can’t we just hang on until Eugene sees it'He’ll tell us, and we’ll check it and hand it to the client, and she’ll think-“

“Shut up!”

That was better. There wasn’t going to be a battle about

quitting. He scowled at me and demanded, “Do we aban

don that wretch?” ”

I thought that was hitting below the belt, to call a vice-president a wretch just because he couldn’t impregnate a woman. “Yes,” I said, “any odds you want. Of course I’ll see that doctor, but we might as well cross him off now.”

“Do we also abandon Mr. McCray?”

I grinned at him. Even in that pickle, that called for a grin. “I’m right with you,” I said. “We have never considered McCray; we were considering only Jarretts. You were considering McCray for the first time when I went to let that wretch out, and so was I. He is our only source for the fact that the checks were charged to Cyrus M. Jarrett. We have had no corroboration of it. Might they have been actually charged to McCray'Certainly. Might he have had opportunities to impregnate Carlotta Vaughn during the summer of nineteen forty-four'Certainly. But in that case, Jarrett knew nothing about the checks, and why didn’t he just kick me out?”

I waved a hand. “I reported it verbatim. Jarrett said, “Those checks are in the files of the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company. Who told you about them?’ The next day, Thursday, why did the name Carlotta Vaughn, just the name, get me to him'Why was he ready with those

places and dates for that summer'His whole reaction, everything he said.” I shook my head. “The checks came from Cyrus M. Jarrett. Since you had a good two minutes to consider McCray I’m surprised that you bothered to mention him.”

“You saw Mr. Jarrett and I didn’t.”

“And I have no desire to see him again. Forget McCray.”

“Then we’re left with nothing.”

“We have Saul and Fred and Orrie. And me. And, oh, yes, excuse me, we have you.”

He looked at his current book, always there on the desk, picked it up, dropped it, and glared at me.

Sixty-eight hours later, at three o’clock Thursday afternoon, Wolfe and I sat in the office with nothing more to say. We still had exactly what we had had Monday at dinnertime, five detectives, counting us.

First, to finish off Eugene Jarrett. At 8:50 Tuesday morning I had got off the elevator at the tenth floor of a building on Park Avenue in the Eighties, given my name to a woman at a desk, and been sent to a big old-fashioned room with twenty chairs distributed around the walls and tables, eight or nine of them occupied by people who didn’t look very gay, which wasn’t too discouraging because the names of four M.D.s had been on the plaque. At 9:20 another woman had come and ushered me down a hall to a door which she opened. When I entered, a gray-haired man with shaggy black eyebrows and a tired wide mouth, at a desk, writing on a pad, nodded and pointed to a chair, went on writing for a couple of minutes, and then put the pen down and turned to me. He asked if my name was Archie Goodwin and I said yes, and he said that since the information he was to give me was confidential he would like to be sure&

I got my wallet out and showed him things, and he nodded and looked at his wristwatch. “We squeezed you in,” he said, “because Mr. Jarrett said it was urgent. He asked me to confirm his statement to you that he is sterile and has been sterile all his adult life. Very well, I do. That is true.”

“If you don’t mind,” I said, “we want it airtight. That’s of your personal knowledge'Not hearsay?”

“I wouldn’t make such a statement from hearsay. My professional knowledge, yes. Four examinations and analyses, at intervals, in seventeen years. Not only is the sperm count per se too low, but also the percentage of abnormal forms is too high. It is conclusive.”

“Thank you. Seventeen years ago was nineteen fifty. What about earlier'Say nineteen forty-four.”

He shook his head. “Extremely unlikely. I would accept it as a possibility only on incontrovertible evidence, and even then with reluctance. I have known the family for nearly thirty years, since nineteen forty. If Eugene Jarrett was fertile hi nineteen forty-four only certain infections-mumps is the commonest one-could have caused his present condition, and he has had none of them.” He looked at his watch. “Mr. Jarrett didn’t tell me what this is about. If it’s a paternity suit it’s ridiculous. I would be glad to testify.”

I thanked him again and went. So much for Eugene Jarrett. But on the way home I stopped in at Doc Vollmer’s office, in a house he owns on the same block as the old brownstone, and asked him about the reputation of James Odell Worthington, M.D., and sperm counts and abnormal forms and mumps; and that did finish off Eugene Jarrett.

Cyrus M. Jarrett was finished too, on Wednesday, when Orrie came back from Washington with three notebooks full of details from official records. The places and dates as Jarrett had rattled them off to me all checked, and if he had taken a day off to fly across the Atlantic on a personal errand off the record, where did he get an airplane in wartime'

After dinner Monday evening I had made a trip uptown and spent a couple of hours with the client. The news that her mother’s real name was Carlotta Vaughn and that she had come from Wisconsin didn’t impress her much; as she had said, she had known her mother all her life. Also, she wasn’t too impressed by the news that we had eliminated the Jarretts; she wasn’t interested in men who were not her father; what she was after was the man who was her father. I made it plain that we were no longer turning over stones, we were trying to find a stone to turn, and it was anybody’s guess how long it would take. She said she should have taken my bet a week ago when

I offered her even money that we would spot her father within three days.

Saul and Fred had kept at their hunt for stones until Tuesday noon, but had been called in when I got seven more replies to the ad and three of them were worth a look. Saul took one, from a shoe-repair man on West Fifty-fourth Street who wrote that Carlotta Vaughn had been a customer of his for several months in 1944. I got his letter at the News. When Saul went to see him, he took along photographs of six other young women, and the shoeman picked Carlotta Vaughn at the first look. He knew nothing of any Elinor Denovo, but he remembered it was during the summer of 1944 that Carlotta Vaughn had been a regular customer for both repairs and shines, because it was that August that his son had been killed in action in France. He couldn’t say when he had seen her last, but thought it had been late summer or early fall. He didn’t think he had ever had her address, but if so it was gone now. Of course she had probably lived nearby, and after shelling out five hundred dollars to the shoeman, Saul had gone to work on the neighborhood.

A reply I got at the Times was from a woman who had been a clerk at Altaian’s in 1944 and was now at a nursing home in Fairfield County. Fred took her, and found her so vague that after twenty-four hours he was still trying to find out how she knew that a customer she had waited on several times was named Carlotta Vaughn, since there was no record of any deliveries ever made to her. But she, too, had picked Carlotta Vaughn out of seven pictures, so she got her five centuries.

The third reply that seemed possible, which I got at the Gazette, was from a man named Salvatore Manzoni. I took him. He had been a waiter at Sardi’s for fifteen years and still was. In 1944 he had been a waiter at Tufitti’s, a restaurant on East Forty-sixth Street which had folded in 1949, and Carlotta Vaughn had dined at one of his tables two or three times a week for several months in 1944, He spotted her picture instantly, and he knew her name was Carlotta Vaughn because she had often reserved a table. What made Salvatore Manzoni a real find was that he had probably actually seen Amy’s father hi the flesh, not once but many times, for Carlotta Vaughn

bad always had a male companion, and always the same one. When I heard that, I had a tingle at the bottom of my spine; by God, I was going to get the name, then and there. But I didn’t. It wasn’t that Salvatore Manzoni couldn’t remember it; he had never known it. As far as he knew, a reservation had never been made under the man’s name. Possibly it might have been known to someone else at the restaurant, perhaps the owner and manager, Giuseppe Tufitti, who might or might not be still alive.

A description by anyone of a man he saw last week will never make you really see him, and 1944 was twenty-three years ago, and this subject had been mostly sitting at a table when he was under Salvatore Manzoni’s eyes, which makes a difference. What I got was: age, early thirties. Height, around six feet. Weight, around a hundred and seventy. Shoulders, maybe square, maybe rounded a little. Head, a little bigger than average. Face, not round, maybe rattier long; not pale, maybe a little tanned. Hair, dark brown. Eyes, brown (just a guess). Nose and mouth and ears and chin, yes, he had them.

If that really shows him to you, you have better sight than I have. It did exclude the Jarretts and Bertram Mc-Cray, but they were already out. I wish I knew if you would really be interested in what we did during the next forty-eight hours. I doubt it, because it was all negative. Wednesday morning Saul and Fred had been put on it too, and also Orrie when he returned from Washington. If we could name and place Carlotta Vaughn’s dinner partner for those months of 1944 it was 20 to 1 that we would have Amy’s father, which was the job, and we gave it all we had. Detecting can be fun, but it can be a pain not only in the neck but also in the head, the guts, the back, the legs, the feet, and the ass. And often is. It was that time.

So at three o’clock Thursday afternoon Wolfe and I sat in the office with nothing more to say. Saul and Fred and Qrrie were still out pecking at it, but when they called in_ we wouldn’t be disappointed because we were expecting nothing. Wolfe had started his second bottle of beer since lunch, which exceeded his quota, and I had just returned from the kitchen with a slug of Irish, which made me a lush trying to drown it. I looked at Wolfe, who had his

eyes closed and Ms jaw clamped, and said, “If you’re trying to figure how much you’re out, it’s three grand plus, not counting me.”

He shook his head but didn’t open his eyes. “I am making assumptions. I am assuming that Miss Denovo’s father murdered her mother; that it is more feasible to find him as a murderer than as a father, since he became a father twenty-two years ago and became a murderer only three months ago; that some recent event supplied the motive for the murder; and that the most likely person to have knowledge of that event is Raymond Thome or someone in his employ who was closely associated with Elinor Denovo.” His eyes opened. “I’ll start with Mr. Thome.”

I put the glass with what was left of the Irish on my desk. “Holy heaven. That’s the wildest goose you ever chased.”

“Perhaps. Sitting here hour after hour and day after day getting futile reports from you and Saul and Fred and Orrie is affecting my appetite and my palate. This morning I had to read a page twice. Intolerable. Can you have Mr. Thorne here at six o’clock?”

“I can try. Is this just a spasm or do you mean it?”

“I don’t have spasms.”

“We can discuss that some other time. I have a suggestion. You may remember my saying Monday afternoon that Cramer wouldn’t be bothering about a three-months-old hit-and-run unless it had some special kink. It might help to know what it is. I request permission to go and ask him.”

“Why should he tell you?”

“Leave that, quoting you, to my intelligence guided by experience.”

“You can’t give him the client’s name.”

“Certainly not. But he probably knows it, after that ad.”

“Very well. First, Mr. Thorne.”

It took nearly an hour to get Raymond Thorne because he was somewhere watching TV cameras make a Raymond Thome production, and when I finally had him he said he couldn’t possibly make it at six o’clock. I reminded him that he had told me he would like to help Amy any way he could, and he said he would come at nine. Getting Inspector Cramer was easier and quicker. He was at his

office and would see me. Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms and I went to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was leaving.

The cop at the top of Homicide South could surely have had a bigger room and a bigger desk and better chairs for visitors than the setup on West Twentieth Street, but Cramer liked to stick to things he was used to, including that old felt hat, which was always there on a corner of his desk when it wasn’t on his head, although there was a rack only a step away. I sat on the wooden chair at the end of his desk while he finished with a folder he was going through. When he closed it and turned to me, I said, “I bring hot news. We’re working on that hit-and-run. Mr. Wolfe thought we should tell you because we said we weren’t.”

He put on an act. He demanded, “What hit-and-run?”

“On May twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-seven, a woman named Elinor Denovo was crossing Eighty-second Street and-“

“Oh, yes. So you’re working on it. So Wolfe wants to know something, so he sends you. He can go to hell.”

I nodded. “So you would like to know what he wants to know, so you let me in when you’re busy. I’ll make it brief and answer questions within reason. What we told you was the truth and the whole truth: our only client was and is a woman who wants us to find her father, whom she has never seen. She doesn’t know who or what he was or is, and she wants to. We have smoked out three different Grade A leads, but they have all fizzled. Two full weeks, and we have a load of nothing, either for the client or for you. So an hour ago Mr. Wolfe decided that it’s easier to find a murderer than a father, therefore the father was the murderer. As you know, that isn’t how his mind usually works, but this isn’t his mind working, it’s a spasm, though he says he doesn’t have spasms. It’s just that his appetite is letting him down and he’s desperate, and he pays me and I have to humor him when he sends me on a sappy errand. I would like to buy a fact. If there is any interesting fact about that hit-and-run that hasn’t been published and you’ll tell me what it is, off the record, I am authorized to give you Mr. Wolfe’s word of honor that if we get anything you might be able to use we’ll pass it on to you before we make any use of it our-

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