The Mother Hunt (9 page)

So I didn’t poke and he didn’t work—anyhow I assumed he didn’t. But when he closed the book and put it down at five minutes to four, and pushed his chair back
and rose, to go to the elevator for his afternoon date with the orchids, he spoke.

“Can Mrs. Valdon be here at six o’clock?”

He must have decided on it hours ago, possibly before lunch, because he doesn’t decide things while he’s reading. But he had put off committing himself until the last minute. Not only would he have to work; he would have to converse with a woman.

“I can find out,” I said.

“Please do so. If not at six, then at nine. Since our door may be under surveillance, she should enter at the back.” He marched out, and I turned to the phone.

E
ntering the old brownstone by the back door is a little more complicated than by the front door, but not much. You come in from 34th Street through a narrow passage between two buildings and end up at a solid wooden gate seven feet high. There is no knob or latch or button to push, and if you have no key for the Hotchkiss lock and haven’t been invited you’ll need a tool, say a heavy ax. But if you’re expected and you knock on the gate it will open, as it did for Lucy Valdon at ten minutes past six that Monday afternoon, and you will be led along a brick walk between rows of herbs, down four steps and on in, and up a stair with twelve steps. At the top, you turn right for the kitchen or left for the office or the front.

I took Lucy to the office. When we entered, Wolfe nodded, barely, tightened his lips, and eyed her with no enthusiasm as she took the red leather chair, put her bag on the stand, and tossed her stole back, sable or something.

“I told Archie I’m sorry I’m a little late,” she said. “I didn’t realize he would have to wait there for me.”

It was a bad start. Since no client has ever called him
Nero or ever will, the “Archie” meant, to him, either that she was taking liberties or that I already had. He darted a glance at me, turned to her, and took a breath. “I don’t like this,” he said. “This is not a customary procedure with me, appealing to a client for help. When I take a job it’s
my
job. But I am compelled by circumstance. Mr. Goodwin described the situation to you yesterday morning.”

She nodded.

Having settled that point, having got her to acknowledge, by nodding, that my name was Mr. Goodwin, he leaned back. “But he may not have made the position sufficiently clear. We’re in a pickle. It was obvious that the simplest way to do the job was to learn where the baby had come from; once we knew that, the rest would be easy. Very well, we did that; we know where the baby came from; and we are stumped. Ellen Tenzer is dead, and that line of inquiry is completely blocked. You realize that?”

“Why—yes.”

“If you have a reservation about that, dismiss it. To try to learn how, from where, and by whom the baby got to Ellen Tenzer would be inept. Such a job is for the police, with their army of trained men, some of them competent, and their official standing; not for Mr. Good- win and me; and presumably they are working at it as relevant to their investigation of the murder. So for the present we shall leave Ellen Tenzer to the police, because we must, with this observation: we know that she didn’t put the baby in your vestibule. But we—”

“How do we know that?” Lucy was frowning.

“By inference. She did not attach a piece of paper to a blanket with a bare pin and wrap the blanket around the baby. Mr. Goodwin found a tray half full of safety
pins in her house. But he found no rubber-stamp kit and no stamp pad, and one was used for the message on the paper. The inference is not conclusive, but it is valid. I am satisfied that on May twentieth Ellen Tenzer delivered the baby to someone, either at her house or, more likely, at a rendezvous elsewhere. She may or may not have known that its destination was your vestibule. I doubt it; but she knew too much about its history, its origin, so she was killed.”

“Then you know that?” Lucy’s hands were clasped, the fingers twisted. “That that’s why she was killed?”

“No. But it would be vacuous not to assume it. Another assumption: Ellen Tenzer not only did not leave the baby in your vestibule or know that was its destination; she didn’t even know that it was to be so disposed of that its source would be unknown and undiscoverable. For if she had known that, she would not have dressed it in those overalls. She knew those buttons were unique and that inquiry might trace their origin. Whatever she—”

“Wait a minute.” Lucy was frowning, concentrating. Wolfe waited. In a moment she went on. “Maybe she
wanted
them to be traced.”

Wolfe shook his head. “No. In that case her reception of Mr. Goodwin, when she found that they had been traced, would have been quite different. No. Whatever she knew of the baby’s past, she knew nothing of its intended future. And whoever left it in your vestibule must have satisfied himself that none of its garments held any clue to its origin, so he didn’t know enough about infants’ clothing to realize that the buttons were unusual, even extraordinary, and might be traced. But Mr. Goodwin realized it, and so did I.”

“I didn’t.”

He glared at her. “That is informative merely about you, madam, not about the problem. My concern is the problem, and now I not only have to do a job I have undertaken, I must also avoid being charged, along with Mr. Goodwin, with commission of a felony. If Ellen Tenzer was killed to prevent her from revealing facts about the baby that was left in your vestibule, and almost certainly she was, Mr. Goodwin and I are both withholding evidence regarding a homicide, and as I said, we’re in a pickle. I do not want to give the police your name and the information you have entrusted to me in confidence. You would be disturbed and pestered, and probably badgered, and you are my client; so my self-esteem would suffer. It is my conceit to expose myself to reproach only from others, never from myself. But if Mr. Goodwin and I withhold your name and what you have told us, it won’t do merely to meet our commitment to you and leave the homicide to the police; in addition to finding the mother, we must either also find the murderer or establish that there was no connection between Ellen Tenzer’s death and her association with the baby that was left in your vestibule. Since it’s highly probable that there was a connection, I shall be tracking a murderer on your behalf and at your expense. Is that clear?”

Lucy’s eyes came to me. “I told you I
hate
it.”

I nodded. “The trouble is, you can’t just bow out. If you drop it, if you’re no longer his client, we’ll have to open up, at least I will. I’m a VIP, I’m the one who last saw Ellen Tenzer alive. Then you’ll have the cops. Now you have us. You’ll just have to take your pick, Mrs. Valdon.”

She opened her mouth and closed it again. She turned, got her bag from the stand, opened it, took out
a slip of paper, rose, stepped to me, and handed me the paper. I took it and read, handwritten in ink:

Picture it. In Wolfe’s office, in his presence, his client hands me a note which she must know I would prefer not to show him. It took handling. I raised one brow high, which always annoys him because he can’t do it, put the paper in my pocket, and cocked my head at her, back in the red leather chair. “Not if you’re no longer a client,” I told her.

“But I am. I hate it, the way it is now, but of course I am.”

I looked at Wolfe and met his eye. “Mrs. Valdon prefers us to the cops. Good for our self-esteem.”

She spoke, to him. “It was the way you said it, tracking a murderer on my behalf. Do you mean—must you do that first?”

“No,” he snapped. She was not only a woman, she was a creature who had passed me a private note before his eyes. “That will be incidental but it must be done. So I proceed?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have to help. For the present we leave Ellen Tenzer to the police and start at the other end— the birth of the baby, and its conception. On Tuesday you gave Mr. Goodwin, with reluctance, the names of four women. We must have more. We want the names of all women who were or might have been in contact
with your husband, however briefly, in the spring of last year. All of them.”

“But that’s impossible. I couldn’t name all of them.” She gestured with the wedding-ring hand. “My husband met hundreds of people that I didn’t meet—for instance, I almost never went to literary cocktail parties with him. They bored me, and anyway he had a better time if I wasn’t there.”

Wolfe grunted. “No doubt. You will give Mr. Good- win all the names you do know, reserving none. Their owners will not suffer any annoyance, since inquiry about them can be restricted to one point, their whereabouts at the time the baby was born. It is an advantage that a woman can’t carry a baby, and bear it, without interruption of her routine. Very few of them will have to be approached directly, possibly none. You will omit no one.”

“All right. I won’t.”

“You also gave Mr. Goodwin some names of men, and we shall now make use of them, at least some, but for that we need your help. We can start with only a few of them, say three or four, and go on to others if we must. I shall want to see them, and they will come here, since I never leave my house on business. I need not see them separately; in a group will do. You will arrange that, after they have been selected.”

“You mean I’ll ask them to come to see you?”

“Yes.”

“But what will I tell them?”

“That you have hired me to make an investigation for you, and I wish to talk with them.”

“But then …” She was frowning. “Archie told me to tell no one, not even my best friend.”

“Mr. Goodwin was following instructions. On further
consideration I have concluded that the risk must be taken. You say that your husband knew hundreds of people you have never met. I trust that the ‘hundreds’ was an overestimate, but if there are dozens I must have every name. You say you hate it the way it is now. Confound it, madam, so do I. If I had known the job would develop thus—a murder, and my involvement, and routine fishing in a boundless sea—I wouldn’t have taken it. I must see the three or four men who are best qualified to complete the list of your husband’s acquaintances, and to give me information about him which you do not have. After you and Mr. Goodwin select them, will you get them here?”

She was hating it even more. “What do I say when they ask what you’re investigating for me?”

“Say I’ll explain to them. Of course that will be ticklish. Certainly there will be no mention by me of the baby left in your vestibule with that message. That there is a baby in your house is probably more widely known than you suspect, but if one or more of them asks about it I shall say that is immaterial. When I decide precisely what I’ll tell them you will be informed, before I see them, and if you have objections they will be considered.” He swiveled to look at the clock. Half an hour till dinner. He swiveled back. “You and Mr. Goodwin will decide this evening on the three or four men to be chosen from among your husband’s familiars. I would like to see them either at eleven tomorrow morning or at nine tomorrow evening. You will also compile the list of women’s names. But one question now: will you please tell me where you were last Friday evening? From eight o’clock on?”

Her eyes widened. “Friday?”

He nodded. “I have no ground whatever, madam, to
doubt your good faith. But I now have to deal with someone who doesn’t flinch from murder, and it isn’t wholly inconceivable that you are a Jezebel. Ellen Tenzer was killed Friday around midnight. Where were you?”

Lucy stared. “But you don’t … you couldn’t think …”

“Wildly improbable but conceivable. You should be gratified that I consider it imaginable that you have gulled me by a superb display of wile and guile.”

She tried to smile. “You have a strange idea of what gratifies people.” She looked at me. “Why didn’t you ask me this yesterday?”

“I meant to but forgot.”

“Do you mean that?”

“No, but he’s right, it’s a compliment. Think how good you would have to be to make monkeys of him
and
me. Where were you Friday night?”

“All right. Friday.” She took a moment. “I went out for dinner, to a friend’s apartment, Lena Guthrie, but I got home in time for the ten-o’clock feeding—the baby. The nurse was there, but I usually like to be there too. Then I went downstairs and played the piano awhile, and then I went to bed.” She turned to Wolfe. “This is absolute nonsense!”

“No,” he growled. “Nothing is nonsense that is concerned with the vagaries of human conduct. If the nurse is there this evening, Mr. Goodwin will ask her about Friday.”

T
here were three men with us in the office at noon the next day, Tuesday, but they were not ex-familiars of the late Richard Valdon. Saul Panzer was in the red leather chair. On two of the yellow chairs fronting Wolfe’s desk were Fred Durkin, five feet ten, 190 pounds, bald and burly, and Orrie Cather, six feet flat, 180 pounds, good design from tip to toe. Each had in his hand some three-by-five cards on which I had typed information which had been furnished by the dient, and in his wallet some used fives and tens which I had got from the drawer in the safe.

Wolfe’s eyes were at Fred and Orrie, as always when briefing that trio. He knew Saul was getting it. “There should be no difficulties or complications,” he said. “It’s quite simple. Early this year, or possibly late last year, a woman gave birth to a baby. I want to find her. But your present mission is restricted to elimination. Regarding each of the women whose names are on those cards, you are merely to answer the question, could she have borne a baby at that time? When you find one who is not easily eliminated, whose whereabouts and movements
during that period need more elaborate inquiry, go no further without consulting me. Is that clear?”

“Not very,” Orrie said. “How easy is ‘easily’?”

“That’s inherent in the approach I suggest, devised by Archie and me. You will address the woman herself only if you must. In most cases, perhaps all, you can get enough information from others—apartment-house staffs, tradesmen, mailmen—you know the routines. You will use your own names, and your inquiries are on behalf of the Dolphin Corporation, owner and operator of Dolphin Cottages, Clearwater, Florida. A woman is suing the corporation for a large sum in damages, half a million dollars, for injuries she suffered on Saturday, January sixth, this year, as she was stepping from a dock into a boat. She claims that the employee of the corporation who was handling the boat allowed it to move and her injuries resulted from his negligence. The case will come to trial soon, and the corporation wants the testimony of one Jane Doe (a name from one of your cards). Jane Doe was a tenant of one of the corporation’s cottages from December tenth to February tenth; she was on the dock when the incident occurred, and she told the manager of the cottages that the boat did not move and the boatman was not at fault. Am I too circumstantial?”