“Cramer: ‘By God, I will. Some day I will.”’
Wolfe waved a hand toward the hall, waving Cramer out. “Next time I’ll turn the recorder on. Questions.”
I uncrossed my legs and straightened up. “No questions, just two comments. First, I think you left out a word or two, particularly one that he often uses. That’s censorship, which you condemn. Second, there’s something about that hit-and-run that makes it special, and it would be nice to know what it is. Cramer wouldn’t be bothering personally about a three-month-old hit-and-run, even with you interested in the victim, unless it had some special kink. Maybe a hot lead that fizzled out—anyway, something. But as you said, it’s her life we’re working on, not her death. Thank you for the report. Satisfactory.”
He pushed a button, two short and one long, for beer.
I spent most of the next three hours finding out next to nothing about Eugene Jarrett. He wasn’t in Who’s Who, and since there was no other likely source of information about him in the office I went for a walk, keeping on the shady side of the street. There were just four items about him in the Gazette morgue, and the only two worth an entry in my notebook were that he had married a girl named Adele Baldwin on November 18, 1951, and he had become a vice-president of Seaboard Bank and Trust Company in December 1959. Lon Cohen knew absolutely nothing about him, and neither did a couple of others on the Gazette that he got on the phone. On the way out I stopped at the sixteenth floor to see if there were any more replies to the ad and got two that were more of the same.
At the Times there was another reply, also impossible, and nothing in the morgue about Eugene Jarrett except such routine facts as that he graduated from Harvard in 1945 and he had been a sponsor of a dinner to honor somebody in 1963. The biggest blank was the New York public library, where I got stubborn and spent a full hour. You wouldn’t believe that after all that expert research I didn’t even know whether that vice-president of the third largest bank in New York had any children or not, when I returned to the old brownstone a little before six o’clock. But I didn’t. I had supposed, when I left, that I would have to get back in time to go up to the plant rooms to brief Wolfe on him before he came, but it wasn’t even worth buzzing him on the house phone. When he came down I told him that we would learn more about Eugene Jarrett in one glance at him than I had learned all afternoon, and the doorbell rang.
I was right, too. What I learned looking at him, as I let him in and escorted him to the office and got him seated in the red leather chair, may have been irrelevant and immaterial, but at least it was definite. If a vice-president of a big bank is supposed to do any work, he didn’t belong there. There was no resemblance to his father at all, especially the eyes. His were gray-blue too, but even when they were aimed straight at you, you had the feeling that they were seeing something else, maybe a ship he wanted to be on or a pretty girl sitting on a cloud. I don’t often have fancy ideas, so that shows you the effect those eyes had. It would be dumb to expect a man like that to do any work. The rest of him was normal enough—about my height, square-shouldered, an ordinary face. Seated, he ignored Wolfe and me while his eyes took their time to go around the room. Apparently they liked the rug, but they stayed longest on the globe over by the bookshelves. Not many people coming there have seen a globe as big as that one, 35½ inches in diameter.
He finally turned the eyes on Wolfe and said, “A fascinating occupation, yours, Mr. Wolfe. People come to you for answers as they did to the Pythia at Delphi or the Clarian prophet. But of course you make no claim to mantic divination. That is now only for charlatans. What are you, a scientist, or an artist?”
Wolfe was frowning at him. “If you please, Mr. Jarrett, no labels. Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled. Do you have one?”
“No. But I can label any man whose faculties are concentrated on a single purpose. I can label Charles de Gaulle or Robert Welch or Stokely Carmichael.”
“If you do, don’t glue them on, and have replacements handy.”
Jarrett nodded. “Nothing is unalterable, not even a label. I have altered mine for my father several times. I mention him because it is apropos. The only reference to him in your letter was that Carlotta Vaughn was in his employ, but Bert McCray has told me about your poke at him and how he met it. He has also told me of your intention to transfer the poke to me. I would enjoy discussing my father with you—we might get a better label for him than the one I have—but your letter asks about Carlotta Vaughn. First we should dispose of me. You thought my father was the father of a child she bore, were confronted with evidence that he wasn’t, and decided that I was. Is that correct?”
“Not ‘decided.’ Conjectured or surmised—or even inferred.”
“No matter. You’re in for another disappointment. When Bert McCray told me about it Saturday, and then when your letter came, I decided to save you time and expense—and of course avoid annoyance for myself—by telling you something that many people conjecture or surmise but only a few really know. But I realized that my telling you wouldn’t settle it for you, so this morning I phoned my doctor.”
He turned to me. “You’re Archie Goodwin?”
I told him yes. He got a leather case from his pocket, fingered a card out, and extended his hand, and I went and took the card. The “James Odell Worthington, M.D.” might actually have been engraved.
“Dr. Worthington will see you at nine tomorrow morning,” Jarrett said. “Be on time; he’s a very busy man. He will tell you that I am incapable of impregnating a woman and always have been. He has a reputation and would on no account risk it by telling you that if there was any remote possibility that you would ever prove him wrong.”
He turned to Wolfe. “Your letter said that you want information about Carlotta Vaughn.”
I would have told him to go climb a tree. Wolfe probably would have liked to, but the only visible sign was the tip of his forefinger making a little circle on the desk blotter. He asked, “Did Dr. Worthington know you in nineteen forty-four?”
“Yes, he was one of the doctors who had tried to save my mother. He’s an internist and the cancer specialists had taken charge, but my mother depended on him. Don’t ask me, ask him.” He brushed it aside. “Ask me anything you want to about Carlotta Vaughn, but I doubt if I know anything that will help. She changed her name to Elinor Denovo, and she had a daughter now twenty-two years old, and during those twenty-two years my father sent her a check for a thousand dollars every month. Is that the situation?”
“Yes.”
“Then I need a new label for him. This is fantastic. It doesn’t fit anything I thought I knew about him. Not that he would ignore a responsibility; he fulfills any and all responsibilities; but he decides when he is responsible and when he isn’t. He certainly wouldn’t have felt responsible if I had impregnated Carlotta Vaughn or any other woman, or a dozen. Bert McCray thinks it was blackmail, but it wasn’t. It’s inconceivable that he has ever submitted to blackmail by anybody for anything. It’s fascinating. I understand from Avery Ballou that this Elinor Denovo is dead, but didn’t she ever tell anyone what the money was for?”
“While alive, no. But a letter opened by her daughter after her death said this money is from your father. And again, this money came from your father. Mr. Goodwin and I see no reason to question it.”
“Fantastic. Unbelievable.” Jarrett narrowed his eyes to slits, put his elbows on the chair arms, and rubbed his left palm with his right. Then he came up and was on his feet. “I’m no good sitting down.” He moved, across to the bookshelves and looked at titles, then to the globe and rotated it, slowly, twice around. He came and stood in the center of the room, looking down at me as if I were a pretty girl on a cloud, then turned to Wolfe. “I don’t do anything at the bank, you know. I know nothing about banking. But they don’t keep me and pay me only because my father owns stock that he won’t sell. They say I have insight. I don’t know what to call it, I
can’t label that, but I do sometimes see things that they have not seen. I have never tried to force it, and I’m not going to try to force this, but I want to see it more than I have ever wanted to see anything. My father!”
He went to the red leather chair and sat. “It would be pointless to ask me anything about Carlotta Vaughn. Bert McCray told me that her child was conceived in the summer of nineteen forty-four. I had been rejected by the army and spent that summer working in a war-materials plant in California. I know nothing that could possibly help you.” He got up again. “Come and have dinner with me.” He looked at me. “You too. Sometimes it helps to have people around, I don’t know why.”
“I doubt,” Wolfe said, “if it would help to have Mr. Goodwin and me around. We’re in a pickle. I wrote you that I would appreciate it if you would call at my office. I retract that. I don’t appreciate it at all.”
“I suppose not.” He turned and sort of wandered toward the hall, but stopped and swung around. “The pickle you’re in is nothing to mine. I thought I had my father plain and clear, and now this! I’m going to see it—I don’t know when, but I will. I have to.”
I had circled around him and was in the hall, but he didn’t see me as he came to the front, where I had the door open. I shut the door after him, returned to the office, and stood looking down at Wolfe. With his chin down he had to have his eyes wide open to glare at the globe. After ten seconds of that he raised his head to growl at me. “Sit down. Confound it, you know I like eyes at a level.”
“Yeah. Shall I get the darts out?”
“No. How much have we spent?”
That was dangerous. That question meant, If I return the retainer and drop it, how much am I out? That hadn’t happened often, but it wasn’t unthinkable. I went to my chair and sat. “I admit,” I said, “that we’ve never had a tougher one, and it may be too tough even for you, but why can’t we just hang on until Eugene sees it? He’ll tell us, and we’ll check it and hand it to the client, and she’ll think—”
“Shut up!”
That was better. There wasn’t going to be a battle about quitting. He scowled at me and demanded, “Do we abandon that wretch?”
I thought that was hitting below the belt, to call a vice-president a wretch just because he couldn’t impregnate a woman. “Yes,” I said, “any odds you want. Of course I’ll see that doctor, but we might as well cross him off now.”
“Do we also abandon Mr. McCray?”
I grinned at him. Even in that pickle, that called for a grin. “I’m right with you,” I said. “We have never considered McCray; we were considering only Jarretts. You were considering McCray for the first time when I went to let that wretch out, and so was I. He is our only source for the fact that the checks were charged to Cyrus M. Jarrett. We have had no corroboration of it. Might they have been actually charged to McCray? Certainly. Might he have had opportunities to impregnate Carlotta Vaughn during the summer of nineteen forty-four? Certainly. But in that case, Jarrett knew nothing about the checks, and why didn’t he just kick me out?”
I waved a hand. “I reported it verbatim. Jarrett said, ‘Those checks are in the files of the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company. Who told you about them?’ The next day, Thursday, why did the name Carlotta Vaughn, just the name, get me to him? Why was he ready with those places and dates for that summer? His whole reaction, everything he said.” I shook my head. “The checks came from Cyrus M. Jarrett. Since you had a good two minutes to consider Mr. McCray I’m surprised that you bothered to mention him.”
“You saw Mr. Jarrett and I didn’t.”
“And I have no desire to see him again. Forget McCray.”
“Then we’re left with nothing.”
“We have Saul and Fred and Orrie. And me. And, oh, yes, excuse me, we have you.”
He looked at his current book, always there on the desk, picked it up, dropped it, and glared at me.
Chapter 10
Sixty-eight hours later, at three o’clock Thursday afternoon, Wolfe and I sat in the office with nothing more to say. We still had exactly what we had had Monday at dinnertime, five detectives, counting us.
First, to finish off Eugene Jarrett. At 8:50 Tuesday morning I had got off the elevator at the tenth floor of a building on Park Avenue in the Eighties, given my name to a woman at a desk, and been sent to a big old-fashioned room with twenty chairs distributed around the walls and tables, eight or nine of them occupied by people who didn’t look very gay, which wasn’t too discouraging because the names of four M.D.s had been on the plaque. At 9:20 another woman had come and ushered me down a hall to a door which she opened. When I entered, a gray-haired man with shaggy black eyebrows and a tired wide mouth, at a desk, writing on a pad, nodded and pointed to a chair, went on writing for a couple of minutes, and then put the pen down and turned to me. He asked if my name was Archie Goodwin and I said yes, and he said that since the information he was to give me was confidential he would like to be sure.…
I got my wallet out and showed him things, and he nodded and looked at his wristwatch. “We squeezed you in,” he said, “because Mr. Jarrett said it was urgent. He asked me to confirm his statement to you that he is sterile and has been sterile all his adult life. Very well, I do. That is true.”
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “we want it airtight. That’s of your personal knowledge? Not hearsay?”
“I wouldn’t make such a statement from hearsay. My professional knowledge, yes. Four examinations and analyses, at intervals, in seventeen years. Not only is the sperm count per se too low, but also the percentage of abnormal forms is too high. It is conclusive.”
“Thank you. Seventeen years ago was nineteen fifty. What about earlier? Say nineteen forty-four.”
He shook his head. “Extremely unlikely. I would accept it as a possibility only on incontrovertible evidence, and even then with reluctance. I have known the family for nearly thirty years, since nineteen forty. If Eugene Jarrett was fertile in nineteen forty-four only certain infections—mumps is the commonest one—could have caused his present condition, and he has had none of them.” He looked at his watch. “Mr. Jarrett didn’t tell me what this is about. If it’s a paternity suit it’s ridiculous. I would be glad to testify.”
I thanked him again and went. So much for Eugene Jarrett. But on the way home I stopped in at Doc Vollmer’s office, in a house he owns on the same block as the old brownstone, and asked him about the reputation of James Odell Worthington, M.D., and sperm counts and abnormal forms and mumps; and that did finish off Eugene Jarrett.
Cyrus M. Jarrett was finished too, on Wednesday, when Orrie came back from Washington with three notebooks full of details from official records. The places and dates as Jarrett had rattled them off to me all checked, and if he had taken a day off to fly across the Atlantic on a personal errand off the record, where did he get an airplane in wartime?
After dinner Monday evening I had made a trip uptown and spent a couple of hours with the client. The news that her mother’s real name was Carlotta Vaughn and that she had come from Wisconsin didn’t impress her much; as she had said, she had known her mother all her life. Also, she wasn’t too impressed by the news that we had eliminated the Jarretts; she wasn’t interested in men who were not her father; what she was after was the man who was her father. I made it plain that we were no longer turning over stones, we were trying to find a stone to turn, and it was anybody’s guess how long it would take. She said she should have taken my bet a week ago when I offered her even money that we would spot her father within three days.
Saul and Fred had kept at their hunt for stones until Tuesday noon, but had been called in when I got seven more replies to the ad and three of them were worth a look. Saul took one, from a shoe-repair man on West Fifty-fourth Street who wrote that Carlotta Vaughn had been a customer of his for several months in 1944. I got his letter at the News. When Saul went to see him, he took along photographs of six other young women, and the shoeman picked Carl
otta Vaughn at the first look. He knew nothing of any Elinor Denovo, but he remembered it was during the summer of 1944 that Carlotta Vaughn had been a regular customer for both repairs and shines, because it was that August that his son had been killed in action in France. He couldn’t say when he had seen her last, but thought it had been late summer or early fall. He didn’t think he had ever had her address, but if so it was gone now. Of course she had probably lived nearby, and after shelling out five hundred dollars to the shoeman, Saul had gone to work on the neighborhood.
A reply I got at the Times was from a woman who had been a clerk at Altman’s in 1944 and was now at a nursing home in Fairfield County. Fred took her, and found her so vague that after twenty-four hours he was still trying to find out how she knew that a customer she had waited on several times was named Carlotta Vaughn, since there was no record of any deliveries ever made to her. But she, too, had picked Carlotta Vaughn out of seven pictures, so she got her five centuries.
The third reply that seemed possible, which I got at the Gazette, was from a man named Salvatore Manzoni. I took him. He had been a waiter at Sardi’s for fifteen years and still was. In 1944 he had been a waiter at Tufitti’s, a restaurant on East Forty-sixth Street which had folded in 1949, and Carlotta Vaughn had dined at one of his tables two or three times a week for several months in 1944. He spotted her picture instantly, and he knew her name was Carlotta Vaughn because she had often reserved a table. What made Salvatore Manzoni a real find was that he had probably actually seen Amy’s father in the flesh, not once but many times, for Carlotta Vaughn had always had a male companion, and always the same one. When I heard that, I had a tingle at the bottom of my spine; by God, I was going to get the name, then and there. But I didn’t. It wasn’t that Salvatore Manzoni couldn’t remember it; he had never known it. As far as he knew, a reservation had never been made under the man’s name. Possibly it might have been known to someone else at the restaurant, perhaps the owner and manager, Giuseppe Tufitti, who might or might not be still alive.
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