The Father Hunt

Chapter 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 was 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 women who had died, or would die, absolutely photographless.

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 find out Monday.” I opened my notebook. “Now for questions, and some of them will be very personal.”

That took a full hour, and I barely made it home by lunchtime. Wolfe was standing in the doorway to the dining room when I entered. By standing there he was asking me, without putting it into words, why I hadn’t phoned that I might be late, but since I was only three minutes late I ignored it and merely asked him if he wanted to take a glance inside the box before lunch. He said no, and I took it to the office and put it on his-desk and then went and joined him at the table. As I sat I said it wouldn’t hurt his appetite to know that she had taken our suggestion and would meet me at her bank Monday morning, so if more than the retainer was needed it would be available.

As a rule we stay at the table for coffee at lunch, though not at dinner, but sometimes, when I have or may have something to report about a job he is committed to, he tells Fritz to bring it to the office, and my bringing the box showed that he was committed. So when we had put away the diced watermelon, which had been sprinkled with granulated sugar and refrigerated in a cup of sherry for an hour, we moved across the hall and Fritz brought coffee. I opened the box, but he merely gave it a brief glance and sat, and I went to my desk, swung my chair around, and got my notebook from my pocket.

“I was there nearly three hours,” I said. “Do you want the crop?”

“No.” He was pouring coffee. “Only what may be useful.”

“Then you should be back at your book in about ten minutes. To simplify it I’ll make it Elinor and Amy. The most interesting item is the fact that Elinor had no photographs anywhere, not even at the bottom of a drawer. Not one. That’s extremely significant, so please tell me what it signifies.”

He made a noise, not enough of one to be called a grunt. “Did you get nothing at all?” He sipped coffee.

“Close to it. The trouble is, Amy doesn’t know anything. I doubt if there’s another girl anywhere who had a mother for twenty-two years and knows so little about her. One thing she knows, or thinks she does, is that her mother hated her and tried hard to hide it. She says that Amy means ‘beloved,’ and that Elinor probably wasn’t aware that she was being sarcastic when she named her that.”

I went to the pot of coffee on Wolfe’s desk, poured a full cup, returned to my chair, and took a couple of sips. “Did Elinor have any close friends, men or women? Amy doesn’t know. Of course she has been away at college for most of the last four years. What was Elinor’s basic character? Careful, correct, and cold about covers it, according to Amy. One of the words she used was ‘introvert,’ which I would have supposed was moth-eaten for a girl just out of Smith.”

I flipped a page of my notebook. “Elinor must have dropped some hints without thinking, at least one little one in twenty years, about her background, her childhood, but Amy says no. She doesn’t know what Elinor did for a living before she went to work for Raymond Thorne Productions, the firm she was with when she died. She doesn’t even know what Elinor did, specifically, at Thorne’s; she only knows it must have been an important job.”

I flipped another page and took some coffee. “Believe it or not, Amy doesn’t know where she was born. She thinks it might have been Mount Sinai Hospital, because that’s where Elinor went for an appendectomy about ten years ago, but that’s just a guess. Anyway it probably wouldn’t help much, since Elinor certainly wasn’t letting things she didn’t want known get into the record. Amy does know one thing, and of course it’s essential, the date. She was born April twelfth, nineteen forty-five. About five years ago she decided to see the doctor who signed her birth certificate but found he was dead. So she was conceived around the middle of July nineteen forty-four, so that’s the time to place Elinor, but Amy doesn’t know where she was living. The first home Amy remembers was a walkup, two flights, on West Ninety-second Street, when she was three. When she was seven they moved to a better one on West Seventy-eighth Street, and when she was thirteen they jumped the park to the East Side, to the one I inspected this morning.”

I emptied my cup and decided it was enough. “I’ll skip the details of the inspection unless you insist. As I said, no photographs, which is fantastic. The letters and other papers, a washout. If we fed them to a computer I would expect it to come up with something like so WHAT OR TELL IT TO THE MARINES. It would have been a pleasure to find for instance a newspaper clipping about a man, no matter what it said, but nothing doing. Did I mention that Amy has no photograph of her mother? We’ll have to snare one somehow.” I shut the notebook and tossed it on the desk. “Questions?”

He said, “Grrrhh.”

“I agree. Oh, you asked me last evening if Amy is interested not so much in genes but in gold. Does she think that a father who could be so free with bank checks must have a barrel of it and she would like to dip in? I passed, and I still do. After spending three hours with her I doubt it, and anyway, does it matter? To us?”

“No.” He put his cup down and pushed it back. “Monday should be more fruitful. You’re off, I suppose.”

I nodded. “I was expected last evening, as you know.” I rose. “Shall I put that in the safe?”

He said no, he would, and I gave him the key to the box, put the notebook in a drawer, whirled my chair and pushed it against my desk as always, and went — out and up to my room to change and pack a bag. I had phoned Lily that I would make it in time for dinner.

It was a quarter to three when I left the house, walked around the corner to the garage, got the Heron, and headed up Tenth Avenue. At Thirty-sixth Street I turned right. The direct route would have been left on Forty-fifth Street for the West Side Highway, but I don’t like to have something itching me when I’m stretched out at the edge of Lily’s swimming pool and flowers are smelling and birds are flying, and so on. On East Forty-third Street parking was no problem on Saturday afternoon.

Entering the Gazette building, I took the elevator to the twentieth floor. For the file I could have gone to the morgue instead, but Lon Cohen might know of some recent development that the Gazette hadn’t had room for. When I entered his room, two doors down from the publisher’s corner room, he was talking to one of the three phones on his desk and I sat on the one other chair, at the end of the desk, and waited. When he hung up he swung around and said, “After what happened Thursday night how did you get here? Walk? You sure didn’t have taxi fare.”

I answered suitably, and when personal comments were, in my opinion, even, I said I knew I shouldn’t bother an assistant to a publisher about something trivial; I only wanted to get the details of a hit-and-run that had killed a woman named Elinor Denovo, the last week in May, and would he ring the morgue and tell them to oblige me. He got at a phone and did what he knew I expected him to, told someone to bring the file up to him. When a boy came with it, in about six minutes, no more, he was at another phone and I had moved my chair about a foot back to be discreet. The boy put the file on his desk and I reached and got it.

There were only seven items: four clippings and three typed reports. It hadn’t made the front page, but was for Saturday, May 27, and the first thing I noticed was that there was no picture of her, so even the Gazette hadn’t dug one up. I went through everything. Mrs. Elinor Denovo (so she was Mrs. to the world) had returned her car to the garage where she kept it, on Second Avenue near Eighty-third Street, Friday night after midnight, and told the attendant she would want it around noon the next day. Three minutes later, as she was crossing Eighty-third Street in the middle of the block, presumably bound for her apartment on Eighty-second Street, a car had hit her, tossed her straight ahead, and run over her with two wheels. Only four people had seen it happen: a man on the sidewalk walking east, a hundred feet or more away, a man and woman on the sidewalk going west, the same direction as the car, about the same distance away, and a taxi driver who had just turned his cab into Eighty-third Street from Second Avenue. They all said that the car that hit her hadn’t even slowed down, but were unanimous on nothing else. The hackie thought the driver, alone in the car, was a woman. The man coming east said it was a man, alone. The man and woman thought it was two men, both in the front seat. The hackie thought the car was a Dodge Coronet but wasn’t sure; the man coming east said it was a Chevvy; the man and woman didn’t know. Two of them said the car was dark green, one said it was dark blue, and one said it was black. So much for eyewitnesses. Actually, it was a dark-gray Ford. It was hot. Mrs. David A. Ernst of Scarsdale, who owned it, had gone for it at ten o’clock Friday evening where she had parked it on West Eleventh Street, and it wasn’t there. A cop had spotted it Saturday afternoon parked on East 123rd Street, and by Monday the scientists had cinched it that it was the one that had got Elinor Denovo.

By the time the Gazette went to press on Thursday, June first, the date of the last clipping, the police had got nowhere. They didn’t even claim that anyone had been invited in for questioning, let alone name a suspect; they only said that the investigation was being vigorously pursued, which was probably true, since they hate a hit-and-run and don’t quit until it’s absolutely hopeless, and even then they don’t forget it.

There was nothing about Elinor Denovo that I didn’t already know, except that she was vice-president of Raymond Thorne Productions, Inc. Miss Amy Denovo had been interviewed but hadn’t said much. Raymond Thorne had said that Mrs. Denovo had made valuable contributions to the art of television production and her death was a great loss not only for his company but for the whole television industry and therefore for the country. I thought he should make up his mind whether television was an art or an industry.

I put the file on Lon’s desk, waited until he had finished at a phone, and said, “Many thanks. I was curious about a detail. The latest item is June first. Would you know if there has been any progress since?”

He got at a phone, the green one this time, pressed a button, and in a moment talked, and then waited. While he waited another phone buzzed, and stopped when he pushed a button. In a couple of minutes he told the green phone, “Yeah, sure.” In another couple of minutes he cradled it, turned to me and said, “Apparently it’s dead. Our last word, more than a month ago, was that we might as well cross it off. They had only one man still on it. But now of course, with Nero Wolfe horning in, it’s far from dead. So it was murder. I don’t expect you to name him, even off the record, but I want enough for a box.”

I was on my feet. “Journalists,” I said, “are the salt and pepper of the earth. I would enjoy discussing that with you, but I’m on my way to a rustic swimming pool in the middle of a tailor-made glade in the Westchester woods, and I’m twenty hours late. I said it was something trivial, but have it your way. Yes, it was murder, and the driver of the car was the skunk who topped my three aces with four deuces Thursday night. I hope they get him.”

I turned and went.

But down in the lobby I went to a phone booth, dialed a number I didn’t have to look up, gave my name, asked if Sergeant Stebbins was around, and after a long wait got his voice:

“Stebbins. Something up, Archie?”

He must have just won a bet or got a raise. He called me Archie only about once in two years, and sometimes he wouldn’t even say Goodwin but made it just you. I returned the compliment, “Nothing with a bite, Purley, just a routine question, but to answer it you may have to look at a file. You may have forgotten it, it was nearly three months ago — a hit-and-run on East Eighty-third Street, a woman named Elinor Denovo—”

“We haven’t forgotten it. We don’t forget a hit-and-run.”

“I know you don’t, I was just being impolite for practice. Someone asked me if you’ve dug up a lead on it, and of course I didn’t know. Have you?”

“Who asked you?”

“Oh, Mr. Wolfe and I were discussing crime and whether cops are as good as they ought to be, and he mentioned this Elinor Denovo. As you know, he misses nothing in the papers. I said you would probably get that one, and I was curious. Of course I’m not asking for any inside dope...”

“There isn’t any dope, inside or outside. It’s hanging. But we’re not forgetting it.”

“Right. I hope you get him. Nobody likes a hit-and-run.”

Walking to Forty-third Street for the car, I had to concede that I had got no relief at all for the itch.