The Mother Hunt

Chapter 4

The house rules in the old brownstone on West 35th Street are of course set by Wolfe, since he owns the house, but any variation in the morning routine usually comes from me. Wolfe sticks to his personal schedule: at 8:15 breakfast in his room on the second floor, on a tray taken up by Fritz, at nine o’clock to the elevator and up to the plant rooms, and down to the office at eleven. My schedule depends on what is stirring and on what time I turned in. I need to be flat a full eight hours, and at night I adjust the clock on my bedstand accordingly; and since I spent that Wednesday evening at a theater, and then at the Flamingo, with a friend, and it was after one when I got home, I set the pointer at 9:30.

But it wasn’t the radio, nudged by the clock, that roused me Thursday morning. When it happened I squeezed my eyes tighter shut to try to figure out what the hell it was. It wasn’t the phone, because I had switched my extension off, and anyway it wasn’t loud enough. It was a bumblebee, and why the hell was a bumblebee buzzing around 35th Street in the middle of the night? Or maybe the sun was up. I forced my eyes open and focused on the clock. Six minutes to nine. And it was the house phone, of course, I should have known. I rolled over and reached for it.

“Archie Goodwin’s room, Mr. Goodwin speaking.”

“I’m sorry, Archie.” Fritz. “But she insists—”

“Who?”

“A woman on the phone. Something about buttons. She says—”

“Okay, I’ll take it.” I flipped the switch of the extension and got the receiver. “Yes? Archie Goodwin speak—”

“I want Nero Wolfe and I’m in a hurry!”

“He’s not available. If it’s about the ad—”

“It is. I saw it in the News. I know about some buttons like that and I want to be first—”

“You are. Your name, please?”

“Beatrice Epps. E-P-P-S. Am I first?”

“You are if it fits. Mrs. Epps, or Miss?”

“Miss Beatrice Epps. I can’t tell you now—”

“Where are you, Miss Epps?”

“I’m in a phone booth at Grand Central. I’m on my way to work and I have to be there at nine o’clock, so I can’t tell you now, but I wanted to be first.”

“Sure. Very sensible. Where do you work?”

“At Quinn and Collins in the Chanin Building. Real estate. But don’t come there, they wouldn’t like it. Ill phone again on my lunch hour.”

“What time?”

“Half past twelve.”

“Okay, I’ll be at the newsstand in the Chanin Building at twelve-thirty and I’ll buy you a lunch. I’ll have an orchid in my buttonhole, a small one, white and green, and I’ll have a hundred—”

“I’m late, I have to go. I’ll be there.” The connection went. I flopped back onto the pillow, found that I was too near awake for another half-hour to be any good, swung around, and got my feet on the floor.

At ten o’clock I was in the kitchen at my breakfast table, sprinkling brown sugar on a buttered sour-milk griddle cake, with the Times before me on the rack. Fritz, standing by, asked, “No cinnamon?”

“No,” I said firmly. “I’ve decided it’s an aphrodisiac.”

“Then for you it would be—how is it? Taking coal somewhere.”

“Coals to Newcastle. That’s not the point, but you mean well and I thank you.”

“I always mean well.” Seeing that I had taken the second bite, he stepped to the range to start the next cake. “I saw the advertisement. Also I saw the things on your desk that you brought in the suitcase. I have heard that the most dangerous kind of case for a detective is a kidnaping case.”

“Maybe and maybe not. It depends.”

“And in all the years I have been with him this is the first kidnaping case he has ever had.”

I sipped coffee. “There you go again, Fritz, circling around. You could just ask, is it a kidnaping case? and I would say no. Because it isn’t. Of course the baby clothes gave you the idea. Just between you and me, in strict confidence, the baby clothes belong to him. It isn’t decided yet when the baby will move in here, and I doubt if the mother ever will, but I understand she’s a good cook, and if you happen to take a long vacation …”

He was there with the cake and I reached for the tomato and lime marmalade. With it no butter. “You are a true friend, Archie,” he said.

“They don’t come any truer.”

“Vraiment. I’m glad you told me so I can get things in. Is it a boy?”

“Yes. It looks like him.”

“Good. Do you know what I will do?” He returned to the range and gestured with the cake turner. “I will put cinnamon in everything!”

I disapproved and we debated it.

Instead of waiting until Wolfe came down, to report the development, after I had done the morning chores in the office—opening the mail, dusting, emptying the wastebaskets, removing sheets from the desk calendars, putting fresh water in the vase on Wolfe’s desk—I mounted the three flights to the plant rooms. June is not the best show-off month for a collection of orchids, especially not for one like Wolfe’s, with more than two hundred varieties. The first room, the tropical, had only a few splotches of color; the next one, the intermediate, was more flashy but nothing like March; the third one, the cool, had more flowers but they’re not so gaudy. In the last one, the potting room, Wolfe was at the bench with Theodore Horstmann, inspecting the nodes on a pseudo-bulb. As I approached he turned his head and growled, “Well?” He is supposed to be interrupted up there only in an emergency.

“Nothing urgent,” I said. “Just to tell you that I’m taking a Cypripedium lawrenceanum hyeanum—one flower. To wear. A woman phoned about buttons, and when I meet her at twelve-thirty it will mark me.”

“When will you leave?”

“A little before noon. I’ll stop at the bank on the way to deposit a check.”

“Very well.” He resumed the inspection. Too busy for questions. I went and got the posy and on down. When he came down at eleven he asked for a verbatim report and got it, and had one question: “What about her?” I told him his guess was as good as mine, say one chance in ten that she really had it, and when I said I might as well leave sooner and get the overalls from Hirsh and have them with me, he approved.

So when I took post near the newsstand in the lobby of the Chanin Building, a little ahead of time, having learned from the directory that Quinn and Collins was on the ninth floor, I had the paper bag. That kind of waiting is different, with faces to watch coming and going, male and female, old and young, sure and saggy. About half of them looked as if they needed either a doctor or a lawyer or a detective, including the one who stopped in front of me with her head tilted back. When I said, “Miss Epps?” she nodded.

“I’m Archie Goodwin. Shall we go downstairs? I have reserved a table.”

She shook her head. “I always eat lunch alone.”

I want to be fair, but it’s fair to say that she had probably had very few invitations to lunch, if any. Her nose was flat and she had twice as much chin as she needed. Her age was somewhere between thirty and fifty. “We can talk here,” she said.

“At least we can start here,” I conceded. “What do you know about white horsehair buttons?”

“I know I’ve seen some. But before I tell you—how do I know you’ll pay me?”

“You don’t.” I touched her elbow and we moved aside, away from the traffic. “But I do.” I got a card from my case and handed it to her. “Naturally I’ll have to check what you tell me, and it will have to be practical. You could tell me you knew a man in Singapore who made white horsehair buttons but he’s dead.”

“I’ve never been in Singapore. It’s nothing like that.”

“Good. What is it like?”

“I saw them right here. In this building.”

“When?”

“Last summer.” She hesitated and then went on. “There was a girl in the office for a month, vacation time, filling in, and one day I noticed the buttons on her blouse. I said I had never seen any buttons like them, and she said very few people had. I asked her where I could get some, and she said nowhere. She said her aunt made them out of horsehair, and it took her a day to make one button, so she didn’t make them to sell, just as a hobby.”

“Were the buttons white?”

“Yes.”

“How many were on her blouse?”

“I don’t remember. I think five.”

At the Hirsh Laboratories, deciding it would be better not to display the overalls, I had cut off one of the buttons, one of the three still intact. I took it from a pocket and offered it. “Anything like that?”

She gave it a good look. “Exactly like that, as I remember, but of course it was nearly a year ago. That size too.”

I retrieved the button. “This sounds as if it may help, Miss Epps. What’s the girl’s name?”

She hesitated. “I suppose I have to tell you.”

“You certainly do.”

“I don’t want to get her into any trouble. Nero Wolfe is a detective and so are you.”

“I don’t want to get anybody into trouble unless they have asked for it. Anyway, from what you’ve already told me it would be a cinch to find her. What’s her name?”

“Tenzer. Anne Tenzer.”

“What’s her aunt’s name?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask.”

“Have you seen her since last summer?”

“No.”

“Do you know if Quinn and Collins got her through an agency?”

“Yes, they did. The Stopgap Employment Service.”

“How old is she?”

“Oh—she’s under thirty.”

“Is she married?”

“No. As far as I know.”

“What does she look like?”

“She’s about my size. She’s a blonde—or she was last summer. She thinks she’s very attractive, and I guess she is. I guess you would think so.”

“I’ll see when I see her. Of course I won’t mention you.” I got my wallet out. “My instructions from Mr. Wolfe were not to pay you until I have checked your information, but he hadn’t met you and heard you, and I have.” I produced two twenties and a ten. “Here’s half of it, with the understanding that you will say nothing about this to anyone. You impress me as a woman who can watch her tongue.”

“I can.”

“Say nothing to anyone. Right?”

“I won’t.” She put the bills in her bag. “When will I get the rest?”

“Soon. I may see you again, but if that isn’t necessary I’ll mail it. If you’ll give me your home address and phone number?”

She did so, West 169th Street, was going to add something, decided not to, and turned to go. I watched her to the entrance. There was no spring to her legs. The relation between a woman’s face and the way she walks would take a chapter in a book I’ll never write.

Since I had a table reserved in the restaurant down- stairs, I went down and took it and ordered a bowl of clam chowder, which Fritz never makes, and which was all I wanted after my late breakfast. Having stopped on the way to consult the phone book, I knew the address of the Stopgap Employment Service—493 Lexington Avenue. But the approach had to be considered because (1) agencies are cagey about the addresses of their personnel, and (2) if Anne Tenzer was the mother of the baby she would have to be handled with care. I preferred not to phone Wolfe. The understanding was that when I was out on an errand I would use intelligence guided by experience (as he put it), meaning my intelligence, not his.

The result was that shortly after two o’clock I was seated in the anteroom of the Exclusive Novelty Button Co., waiting for a phone call, or rather, hoping for one. I had made a deal with Mr. Nicholas Losseff, the button fiend, as he had sat at his desk eating salami, black bread, cheese, and pickles. What he got was the button I had removed from the overalls and a firm promise to tell him the source when circumstances permitted. What I got was permission to make a phone call and wait there to get one back, no matter how long it took, and use his office for an interview if I needed to. The phone call had been to the Stopgap Employment Service. Since I had known beforehand that I might have a lot of time to kill, I had stopped on the way to buy four magazines and two paperbacks, one of the latter being His Own Image by Richard Valdon.

I never got to His Own Image, but the magazines got a big play, and I was halfway through the other paperback, a collection of pieces about the Civil War, when the phone call came at a quarter past five. The woman at the desk, who had known what I wanted Wednesday before I told her, vacated her chair for me, but I went and took it on my side, standing.

“Goodwin speaking.”

“This is Anne Tenzer. I got a message to call the Exclusive Novelty Button Company and ask for Mr. Goodwin.”

“Right. I’m Goodwin.” Her voice had plenty of feminine in it, so I put plenty of masculine in mine. “I would like very much to see you, to get some information if possible. I think you may know something about a certain kind of button.”

“Me? I don’t know anything about buttons.”

“I thought you might, about this particular button. It’s made by hand of white horsehair.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Why, how on earth—do you mean you’ve got one?”

“Yes. May I ask, where are you?”

“I’m in a phone booth at Madison Avenue and Forty- ninth Street.”

From her voice, I assumed that my voice was doing all right. “Then I can’t expect you to come here to my office, Thirty-ninth Street and crosstown. How about the Churchill lobby? You’re near there. I can make it in twenty minutes. We can have a drink and discuss buttons.”

“You mean you can discuss buttons.”

“Okay. I’m pretty good at it. Do you know the Blue Alcove at the Churchill?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes, with no hat, a paper bag in my hand, and a white and green orchid in my lapel.”

“Not an orchid. Men don’t wear orchids.”

“I do, and I’m a man. Do you mind?”

“I won’t know till I see you.”

“That’s the spirit. All right, I’m off.”