The Mother Hunt (Rex Stout Library)

by Rex Stout

  With my hankering for baby clothes fully satisfied, and with the house still to myself, I started over again, in the living room. There must be something somewhere that would give a hint on where and who the baby had come from. But there wasn't. I'll skip the next hour and a half, except to say that I know how to look for something that isn't supposed to be found, and I did a job on that house. It takes more time when you leave everything the way it was, but I did a job. All I had when I finished was a few names and addresses, from letters and envelopes in a drawer in the bedroom, and a few phone numbers, and none of them looked promising.

  I was hungry, and since I was there uninvited it would have been vulgar to help myself from her kitchen. Also it was twenty minutes to three and Saul had probably come some time ago, so I left, through the window I had entered by, took the driveway to the road sad turned right, and when I rounded the bend saw Saul's car, off the road at the wide spot. When he saw me he flopped over on the seat, and when I arrived he was snoring. He isn't much to look at, with his big nose and square chin and wide sloping brow, and snoring with his mouth open he was a sight. I reached in the open window and twisted his nose, and in a millionth of a second he had my wrist and was twisting it. There you are. He knew I would go for his nose before I did.

  Uncle, I said.

  He let go and sat up. What day is it?

  Christmas. How long have you been here?

  An hour and twenty minutes.

  Then you should have left twenty minutes ago. Follow instructions.

  I'm a detective. I saw the Heron. Would you care for a sandwich and raisin cake and milk? I've had mine.

  Would I. There was a carton on the back seat and I got in and opened it. Corned beef on rye, two of them. As I unwrapped one I said, She skipped while I was gone to phone for you. She's been gone over three hours. I took a bite.

  That's life. Anyone else there?

  No.

  Did you find anything?

  Not had I entered; that was taken for granted. I swallowed and got the carton of milk. If any of your girl friends has twins there's enough stuff in the cellar, in a trunk, for both of them. And in a drawer upstairs are two pairs of blue corduroy overalls with white horsehair buttons. Of course that's why they're not in the trunk, the buttons. Also in the cellar is the crib the baby slept in.

  When I briefed him Thursday evening I had given him the whole picture. With him we nearly always do. He took half a minute to look at this addition to it. The clothes could be explained, he said, but the crib settles it.

  Yeah. My mouth was full.

  So the baby was there and she knows the answer. She may not know who the mother is, but she knows enough. How tough is she?

  She's the kind that might surprise you. I think she would clam up. If she came and found me there I was going to tackle her, but now I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine. Probably the best bet is to cover her for at least a couple of days.

  Then we shouldn't be sitting here in my car. She knows your car, doesn't she?

  I nodded and took a swig of milk. Okay. I put the milk and the rest of the sandwich in the carton. I'll go and finish this little snack, which is saving my life, in the Heron. Stick your car in the woods and then join me. If she comes before I leave you can duck. I'll go home and report. If he decides on the cover, either Fred or Orrie will be here by nine o'clock. You decide how you want him to make contact and tell me. If he decides he wants her brought in so he can tackle her himself, I'll come instead of Fred or Orrie, and I may need your help.

  I climbed out, with the carton. Saul asked, If she comes before I join you?

  Stay with your car. I'll find it. I started up the road.

  Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather, in shifts, had Ellen Tenzer's house, or the approach to it, under surveillance for twenty hours Saul from three p.m. to nine p.m. Friday, Fred from nine p.m. Friday to six a.m. Saturday, and Orrie from six a.m. to eleven a.m. Saturday. And nobody came.

  When Wolfe came down to the office at eleven o'clock Saturday morning, a glance at my face answered his question before he asked it. I had no news. In his hand, as always, were the orchids he had picked for the honor of a day in the office. He put them in the vase on his desk, got his bulk adjusted in his chair, and went through the morning mail which I had opened. Finding nothing interesting or useful in it, be shoved it aside and frowned at me.

  Confound it, he growled, that woman has skedaddled. Hasn't she?

  I got a quarter from my pocket, tossed it onto my desk, and looked at it. Heads, I said. No.

  Pfui. I want an opinion.

  You do not. Only a damn fool has an opinion when he can't back it up, and you know it. You are merely reminding me that if I had stayed there instead of going to phone you I would have been on her tail.

  That was not in my mind.

  It's in mine. It was just bad luck, sure, but luck beats brains. My getting in the house and finding things doesn't square it. We would only have had to inquire around for an hour or so to learn that she had had a baby there. I hate bad luck. Saul phoned.

  When?

  Half an hour ago. The niece didn't have a baby in December, January, or February. He has checked on her for that whole period and will report details. He is now finding out if the aunt has been to the niece's apartment since yesterday noon. It's nice to have brains and luck. He'll phone around noon to ask if he is to relieve Orrie and The phone rang and I swiveled to get it. Nero Wolfe's off Orrie Cather speaking. A booth in Mahopac.

  Well?

  No. Not well at all. At ten-fifty-five a car came, state police, and turned in. Three men got out, a trooper, and one I suppose was a county dep, and Purley Stebbins. They went and tried the door and then they went around the corner and the dep climbed in that open window and Stebbins and the trooper went back to the door. Pretty soon it opened and they went in. It didn't look like I could help any so I dusted. Do I go back?

  How sure are you it was Purley?

  Nuts. I didn't say I thought it was, I said it was. I'm reporting.

  You certainly are. Come in.

  If I went back maybe I. Damn it, come in!

  I cradled the phone gently, took a breath, and turned. That was Orrie Cather speaking, a booth in Mahopac. I told him to come in because the aunt won't be coming home. She's dead. Three men came in a state police car and are in the house, and one of them is Purley Stebbins. It doesn't take luck or brains to know that a New York Homicide sergeant doesn't go to Putnam County looking for white horsehair buttons.

  Wolfe's lips were pressed so tight he didn't have any. They parted. A presumption is not a certainty.

  I can settle that. I turned and lifted the phone and dialed the Gazette number, and when Wolfe heard me ask for Lon Cohen he pulled his phone over and got on. Lon is on one of his phones at least half of the time and usually you have to wait or leave a message, but I caught him in between and had him right away. I asked him if I still had a credit balance, and he said on poker no, on tips on tidings yes.

  Not much of a tip this time, I told him. I'm checking on a rumor I just heard. Have you got anything on a woman named Tenzer? Ellen Tenzer?

  Ellen Tenzer.

  Right.

  We might have. Don't be so damned roundabout, Archie. If you want to know how far we have got on a murder just say so.

  So.

  That's more like it. We haven't got very far unless more has come in the last hour. Around six o'clock this morning a cop glanced in a car, a Rambler sedan, that was parked on Thirty-eighth Street near Third Avenue and saw a woman in the back, on the floor. She had been strangled with a piece of cord that was still around her throat and had been dead five or six hours. She has been tentatively identified as an Ellen Tenzer of Mahopac, New York. That's it. I can call downstairs for the latest and call you back if it's that important.

  I told him no, thanks, it wasn't important at all, and hung up. So did Wolfe. He glared at me and I glared back.

  This makes i
t nice, I said. Talk about ifs.

  He shook his head. Futile.

  One particular if. If I had stuck and gone to work on her then and there I might have opened her up and she would be here right now and we would be wrapping it up. To hell with intelligence guided by experience.

  Futile.

  What isn't, now? We couldn't have asked for anything neater than white horsehair buttons, and now we've got absolutely nothing, and we'll have Stebbins and Cramer on our necks. Thirty-eighth Street is in Homicide South.

  Homicide is their problem, not ours.

  Tell them that. The niece will tell them that a button merchant named Archie Goodwin got her to give him her aunt's address Thursday afternoon. The guy at the filling station will describe the man who wanted directions to her place Friday morning. They'll find thousands of my fingerprints all over the house, including the cellar, nice and fresh. I might as well call Parker now and tell him to get set to arrange bail when I'm booked as a material witness.

  Wolfe grunted. You can supply no information relevant to the murder.

  I stared. The hell I can't.

  I think not. Let's consider it. He leaned back and closed his eyes, but his lips didn't start the in-and-out routine. That was needed only for problems that were really tough. In a minute he opened his eyes and straightened. It's fairly simple. A woman came with those overalls and hired me to find out where the buttons came from, and I placed that advertisement. It was answered by Beatrice Epps, and she told you of Anne Tenzer, and Anne Tenzer told you of her aunt, and you went to Mahopac. Since the aunt is dead, the rest is entirely at your discretion. You can't be impeached. As a suggestion: she said she was about to leave to keep an appointment, and after a brief conversation you asked permission to wait there until she returned, and she gave it, saying that she didn't know how long it would be. There alone, and curious about the importance of the white horsehair buttons to our client, and having time to pass, you explored the premises. That should do.

  Not naming the client?

  Certainly not.

  Then it won't be material witness. Withholding evidence. She made the buttons the client wanted to know about, and I was there asking about them, and she got in touch with someone who is connected with the buttons, and the client is connected with the buttons, so they want to ask her questions, so I will name her or else.

  You have a reply. The client had no knowledge of Ellen Tenzer; she hired me to find out where the buttons came from. Therefore it is highly improbable that Ellen Tenzer had knowledge of the client. We are not obliged to disclose a client's name merely because the police would like to test a tenuous assumption.

  I took a minute to look at it. We might get away with it, I conceded. I can take it if you can. As for your suggestion, you left out my going to phone you and buy lunch, but if they did that up I can say that was after she left. However, I have a couple of questions. Maybe three. Isn't it likely that Ellen Tenzer would still be alive if you hadn't taken this job and run the ad and sent me to see her?

  More than likely.

  Then wouldn't the cops be more likely to nail the character who killed her if they know what we know, especially about the baby?

  Certainly.

  Okay. You said, quote, Homicide is their problem, not ours.' If you mean that all the way, it will get on my nerves. It might even cost me some sleep. I saw her and was in her house and spoke with her, and she gave me a drink of water. I'm all for protecting a client's interests, and I'm against Lucy Valdon's being heckled by the cops, and she gave me a martini, but at least she's still alive.

  Archie. He turned a hand over. My commitment is to learn the identity of the mother and establish it to the client's satisfaction, and to demonstrate the degree of probability that her husband was the father. Do you think I can do that without also learning who killed that woman?

  No.

  Then don't badger me. It's bad enough without that. He reached to the button to ring for beer. I was in custody from 3:42 p.m. Sunday, when Inspector Cramer took me down, to 11:58 a.m. Monday, when Nathaniel Parker, the lawyer Wolfe calls on when only the law will do, arrived at the District Attorney's office with a paper signed by a judge, who had fixed the bail at $20,000. Since the average bail for material witnesses in murder cases in New York is around eight grand, that put me in an upper bracket and I appreciated the compliment.

  Except for the loss of sleep and missing two of Fritz's meals and not brushing my teeth, the custody was no great hardship, and no strain at all. My story, following Wolfe's suggestion with a couple of improvements, was first told to Inspector Cramer in the office, with Wolfe present, and after that, with an assistant DA named Mandel whom I had met before, and an assortment of Homicide Bureau dicks, and at one point the DA himself, all I had to do was hold on. The tone had been set by Wolfe, Sunday afternoon in his bout with Cramer, especially at the end, after Cramer had stood up to go.

  He had had to tilt his head back, which always peeves him. I owe you nothing, he had said. I am not obliged by your forbearance. You know it would be pointless to take me along with Mr. Goodwin, since I would be mute, and the only result would be that if at any time in the future I have a suggestion to offer it would not be offered to you.

  One result, Cramer rasped, might be that it would be a long time before you could offer any suggestions.

  Pfui. If you really thought that likely you would take me. You have in your pocket a statement signed by me declaring that I have no knowledge whatever, no inkling, of the identity of the murderer of Ellen Tenzer, and I have good ground for my conviction that my client has none. As for your threat to deprive me of my license, I would sleep under a bridge and eat scraps before I would wantonly submit a client to official harassment.

  Cramer shook his head. You eating scraps. Good God. Come on, Goodwin.

  We had no inkling of the identity of the mother, either, and had taken no steps to get one, though we hadn't been idle. We had let Saul and Fred and Orrie go. We had read the newspapers. We had sent me to ask Lon Cohen if the Gazette had anything that hadn't been printed. We had also sent me to see the client. We had mailed fifty bucks to Beatrice Epps. We had answered phone calls, two of them being from Anne Tenzer and Nicholas Losseff.

  I admit that it would have been a waste of the client's money to have Saul and Fred and Orrie check on Ellen Tenzer, since that was being done by city employees and journalists. From the papers and Lon Cohen we had more facts than we could use and more than you would care about. She had been a registered nurse but had quit working at it ten years ago, when her mother had died and she had inherited the house at Mahopac and enough to get by on. She had never married but apparently had liked babies, for she had boarded more than a dozen of them during the ten years, one at a time. Where they had come from and gone to wasn't known; specifically, no one knew anything about her last boarder except that it was a boy, it had been about one month old when it had arrived, in March, she had called it Buster, and it had left about three weeks ago. If anyone had ever visited it nobody had seen him come or go. The best source of information about the babies, the local doctor who had been called on as needed, was a tightlip. Lon doubted if even Purley Stebbins had got anything out of him.

  Besides the niece, Anne, the only surviving relatives were a brother and his wife, Anne's parents, who lived in California. Anne was refusing to talk to reporters, but Lon said that apparently she hadn't seen her aunt very often and didn't know much about her.

  When I had got up to go Lon had said, All take and no give, all right, there's still a balance. But I can ask a question. Did you find the buttons? Yes or no.

  Having played poker with him a lot of nights, I had had plenty of practice handling my face in his presence. If you had a trained mind like me, I said, you wouldn't do that. We ran that ad, and now we want to know about Ellen Tenzer, so you assume there's a connection. None at all. Wolfe likes white horsehair buttons on his pants.

  I raise.

  For his s
uspenders, I said, and went.

  The phone call from Nicholas Losseff came Saturday afternoon. I had been expecting it, since of course Anne Tenzer would have told the cops that Archie Goodwin was from the Exclusive Novelty Button Company, and they would see him, and no one enjoys talking with homicide dicks. So he would be sore. But he wasn't. He only wanted to know if I had found out where the buttons came from. I asked him if he had had official callers, and he said yes, that was why he thought I might have news for him. I told him I was afraid I never would have, and then he was sore. If I ever get as hipped on one thing as he was, it won't be buttons.

  Anne Tenzer phoned Sunday morning. I was expecting that too, since my name had been in the papers' accounts of the developments in what the News called the baby-sitter murder. One paper said I was Nero Wolfe's assistant and another said I was his legman. I don't know which one Anne Tenzer had seen. She was sore, but she didn't seem to know exactly why. Not that she resented my pretending to be a button man, and not that she blamed me for what had happened to her aunt. When we hung up I took a minute to consider it and decided that she was sore because she was phoning me. It might give me the false impression that she wanted to hear my voice again. Which it did. Granting it was false, she should have settled on exactly what she was sore about before she dialed.

  Nobody is ever as famous as he thinks he is, including me. When, keeping an appointment I had made on the phone, I pushed the button in the vestibule on West EleventhStreet, Sunday morning, and was admitted by Marie Foltz, there was no sign that she had seen my name in the paper. I was just an interruption to what she had been doing. And when I entered the big room one flight up and approached the client, who was at the piano, she finished a run before she turned on the bench and said politely, Good morning. I suppose you have news?

  My tongue wanted to ask if she had ever finished the martini, but I vetoed it. Of a sort, I said. If you have seen the morning paper I've seen it but I haven't read it. I never do.