The Father Hunt (13 page)

He poured beer, leaned back and closed his eyes, and pushed his lips out. He pulled them in and pushed them out again. That was a new one; it had never happened before. The lip act, leaning back and closing his eyes and working his lips out and in, was routine; that meant he was working, working hard, and interruptions were not allowed. But that was the first time he had ever started it with beer just poured, and how would he handle it'How would he know when the bead was down to the right level with his eyes shut'By God, he did. When it was down to where it would just cover his lips as he drank, he opened his eyes, reached for the glass, drank, put the glass down, leaned back, closed his eyes, licked the foam off, and sent Ms lips out and in. I decided he must have practiced it when I wasn’t around.

I usually time the lip act, since there’s nothing else to do except try to guess what he’ll come up with. That time it was three minutes and ten seconds. He opened his eyes, straightened up, and asked, “They’re coming at nine o’clock?”

I said yes.

“I suppose a public-relations person has an address'An office?”

I got the Manhattan book and found the page. “Four-. ninety Lexington Avenue. Not the best. It should be Madison.”

“Tell them to trace him back and cover nineteen forty-four thoroughly, but not to risk prompting him. That will

be no problem with Saul and Fred, but with Orrie make it emphatic as usual.”

“Right.” I had emptied the snifter during the lip act, and as he pushed his chair back I went to pour another swallow. It might put me to sleep a few seconds quicker.

Not a fly. Flies don’t buzz. Mosquito. No. Too loud. What the& Oh. House phone, for God’s sake. I opened an eye, stretched an arm and got it, said, “Well?”

Fritz’s voice said, “Good morning, Archie. He wants you.”

I glared at the clock on the bedstand, realized that it actually said twenty-five minutes past eight, and swung my feet around. Figuring out whether I had failed to turn the alarm on, or it had tried to stir me and it had failed, would have to wait. I called for will power, gave it time to deliver, made it to my feet, concentrated on locating the door, and stepped.

The door of Wolfe’s room, which is above the kitchen, at the rear of the house where he gets the sun in winter, stood open. When I entered, with my bare feet making no sound, he was seated at the table, with the Times propped on the rack, dropping a bit of toast into the sauce of eggs au beurre noir. When I cleared my throat he got the toast to and into his mouth before he turned his head.

“The time is out of joint,” I said.

He frowned. “I don’t talk in quotations, even Shakespeare, and neither do you.”

“Miss Rowan does sometimes and she likes that one. As you see, I am no longer on daylight saving. Apparently you are.” He was fully dressed: a nice clean yellow shirt with narrow maroon stripes, a maroon tie, and a brown summerweight self-striped suit. Up in the plant rooms he would shed the jacket and put on a smock.

He swallowed a bite of egg and said, “It’s nearly nine o’clock.”

“By daylight saving, yes, sir. I’ll brief them while I’m eating breakfast.”

“Only Saul. We won’t risk it with Fred and Orrie. Tell them to be on call. You and Saul will decide on your approach and you may need them later. First, is he involved'If yes, merely as the murderer, with a motive that doesn’t concern us, or also as the father'We can’t waste our time and the client’s money just on finding a culprit for Mr. Cramer.” He dropped toast in the sauce.

“I’m waking up,” I said. “Or I got ideas in my sleep. Last night I said we don’t have to answer the question how he knew we were on it, but if he’s the father it may be important. If he’s the father there’s some connection between him and Cyrus Jarrett, or why did Jarrett send the checks'And if Jarrett told him that Nero Wolfe is out to find the father, and if he is also the murderer, what about Miss Denovo'We might lose a client. I doubt if you want another casualty like Simon Jacobs on the record, and I certainly don’t. I suggest that we’d better get her out of circulation.”

He made a face. “Fritz.”

That was what he calls flummery. It was true that when, for security reasons, it had been necessary to have a female guest sleeping and eating in the South Room, which is above Wolfe’s, Fritz hadn’t been able to hide how he felt about it, but Wolfe hadn’t even tried to hide how he felt.

“I’m aware,” I said, “that if we did it again Fritz might leave and you might too. I don’t mean here. She spends most of her days at Miss Rowan’s, and she could spend her nights there too until we get him or drop him. Miss Rowan has two spare rooms. I’ll suggest it. Anything else?”

He said no and I went back up a flight to do in ten minutes what usually takes me thirty. By the time I got down to the kitchen, having stopped in the office to tell Fred and Orrie that Saul and I were going to pick up a trail and might need them later, my fog was starting to clear.

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.

In the office after lunch I told Wolfe what Saul and I had decided about the approach, including my phone calls to Nathaniel Parker and Lily, and then reported. “I did one thing,” I said, “and learned one thing. I arranged for the client to stay put in Miss Rowan’s penthouse until further notice, and I learned that in nineteen forty-four Floyd Vance had a telephone at an office at Ten East Thirty-ninth Street. There wasn’t time to go and have a look, but I know that the wreckers haven’t got to that block and the old buildings on the south side are still there. Unless Saul got something hotter we’ll go and surround it.”

Wolfe looked at Saul.

“Nothing even warm,” Saul said. “It always helps to see a subject, but Archie had already seen him, so it’s no

news that he’s a middle-aged slouch who may have been quite a fine figure twenty-three years ago. He has two little rooms, with him in one and a blonde with too much lipstick in the other, and when I asked about his past and present clients he either had very little to show or he wasn’t showing me. Of course he wanted to know who Parker’s client was, that was natural, but he pressed me on it more than he should have. I was getting so little that I almost made a mistake. I thought of asking him if he had ever had a television producer for a client, but of course I didn’t. I was thinking on my way there that it might be possible to g&t something with a nice collection of his fingerprints on it, but he was right there with me in that little room. If he locks the door when he leaves that would be no problem. The lock’s an ordinary Wingate. Archie or I could open it with our eyes shut.”

Wolfe shook his head. “We have no use for fingerprints now. Possibly later.”

“I know, but I thought it would be nice to have them. I mention it only because I can’t match what Archie got -that nineteen forty-four address.” Saul looked at me. “It’s still August and the weekend starts in a couple of hours.” He got up. “Let’s go, you can plan it on the way.”

For two able-bodied, quick-witted, well-trained men Saul and I accomplished a lot in the next two days. He got a haircut, which is quite a feat on a Saturday or Sunday in summer for a man who lives in midtown Manhattan. I detected it when I met him Monday morning. As for me, I frittered away $23.85 of the client’s money on taxi fares and tips between ten a.m. and seven p.m. Saturday, which is also quite a feat. Just three doors away from Ten East Thirty-ninth Street was a lunchroom, Dwyer’s, with a long fountain counter, and the manager told me it had been there for thirty years. He had himself been there nineteen years, and that meant only since 1948, but he knew the name of the man who had preceded him and he had an address in the Bronx where he had lived. The name was Herman Gottschalk, and I spent nine hours trying to track him down so I could show him photographs of seven young women.

That wasn’t dumb; it was merely desperate. Of course the obvious place to look for someone to ask about the

tenants and frequenters of that building in 1944 was the building itself, but Saul and I had pretty well covered that Friday afternoon. There was no elevator man or other service man who had been there more than four years except the building superintendent. He had got the job in 1961, soon after the building had been acquired by its present owner, and he told Saul his predecessor had been there only five years. He didn’t even know the name of the former owner or agent. He did know that none of the present tenants had been there as long as twenty-three years. At the Third Avenue office of the East and West Realty Corporation, the current agent, the only personnel on duty Saturday morning were a girl whose mother should have made her wear teeth braces and an old man with a glass eye who didn’t even know the name of the previous owner or agent.