The Father Hunt

by Rex Stout

  No suitable words seemed to be ready for the tongue, so I gave them time by removing the rubber bands and unfolding the newspaper for a look. It was centuries, some new and some used, in batches fastened with paper clips, and they looked real when I flipped through some. There were ten in the batch I counted, and there were twenty batches. I rewrapped them in the newspaper and replaced the rubber bands.

  "At five grand a week," she said, "that's enough for four weeks anyway."

  From the hall the sound came of the elevator rattling to a stop. Wolfe was down from the plant rooms.

  "The five grand was just the fee," I said. "It didn't include expenses. But that was a little special, it isn't always five grand a week. Are you telling me that you want to hire Nero Wolfe and you offer this as a retainer?"

  "Yes. Certainly. Provided you're in charge."

  "He's always in charge. I merely do the work."

  "All right, if you do the work."

  "I will. He only does the thinking. I'll explain it to him and then call you in. If you'll wait here?"

  She frowned and shook her head. "I don't want to talk about it to anybody but you."

  "Then it's out. He wouldn't take a client he hasn't seen. He never has and he never will."

  She pressed her lips tight and took a couple of breaths, and finally said, "I guess I can. All right."

  "Good. You won't cotton to him, but you can trust him as far as me." I tapped the package. "Do you want to tell me anything about this?"

  "No, I don't. There's nothing to tell except there it is."

  "I can assume it's in your possession legally?"

  "Of course." She was still frowning. "I didn't rob a bank."

  "It's still in your possession until he takes the job." I handed her the parcel. "It may take me five minutes or it could be half an hour. If you get tired waiting, there are magazines on the table." I started for the connecting door to the office but decided to go around, and went to the door to the hall instead.

  Wolfe was at his desk with his current book, Incredible Victory, by Walter Lord. He probably hadn't got much reading in at Hewitt's and would have to catch up. I went to my desk, sat facing him, and waited for him to finish a paragraph. It must have been a long one. He looked up and growled. "Something?"

  "Somebody," I said. "A girl in the front room named Amy Denovo. I believe I mentioned a while back that Miss Rowan was collecting material for a book about her father, and she hired this girl to help, and I met her there last week. As I was leaving there yesterday afternoon she -the girl-stopped me down in the lobby and we went to a place and had egg-and-anchovy sandwiches which I have told Fritz about but he wasn't interested. She wanted me to do a job for her because I am the one man in the world she can trust, and I told her I couldn't because I already had a job, and she said then she would hire you if I would do the work, and I explained that I always do the work. Of course the next question, my question, was about money, and I asked it. She said she had two thousand dollars in the bank, left to her by her mother, and that's all. No other resources and no prospects. Since the job would be complicated and might take months and no telling what expenses, I told her nothing doing, I wouldn't even mention it to you. I was sorry because-"

  "Pfui." He grunted. "Why do you mention it now?"

  "I'll finish the sentence. I was sorry because the job

  would probably be interesting, and tough, and it has none of the aspects that you won't touch. I mention it now because she is in the front room with a package wrapped in newspaper containing two hundred hundred-dollar-bills, twenty thousand dollars, which she wants you to take as a retainer."

  "Where did she get it?"

  "I don't know. She says it's in her possession legally."

  He put his bookmark, a thin strip of gold that was a gift from a client, at his page and put the book down. "What was said yesterday. In full."

  I had expected that. He hates to take on a job; anything to hold off a commitment. Also, there was the chance that there might be one or more details that he could find unacceptable. I reported. It had taken a lot of practice to get to where I could give a long conversation verbatim, but it was a cinch now, even with three or four talking. As usual, he leaned back and closed his eyes, and didn't interrupt. There was no reaction even to the "pigheaded and high-nosed and toplofty." I omitted nothing except the irrelevant chatter while we were eating. When I finished he stayed put for a minute and then opened his eyes and straightened up.

  He regarded me. "That's not like you, Archie. It's hardly even a sketch. Barely a start."

  "Certainly. There was no point in going deeper with a poor little poor girl."

  He looked up at the wall clock and back at me. "You could have-no matter. Very well. Bring her."

  I went and opened the connecting door. She was still in the chair by the window, and hadn't returned the parcel to her bag; it was in her lap. I told her to come.

  Wolfe seldom rises when someone enters the office, and never if it's a woman. His expression is always the same if it's a woman, no matter who or what she is; he is concentrating on not making a face. There is no telling what he notices or doesn't; for instance, whether he noticed that the skirt of Amy Denovo's brown-striped summer dress wasn't really a mini; it was only about two inches above her knees. Certainly he didn't notice that the knees were worthy of notice, though they were, since that had no bearing on her acceptability as a client. The seat

  of the red leather chair near the end of his desk was too deep for her to settle back, so she sat on the front half, straight, and put her bag on the stand at her elbow, with the parcel in her lap.

  Wolfe, his chair swiveled to face her, his fingers curled over the arm ends, spoke. "So Mr. Goodwin impressed you at first sight."

  Her eyes, meeting his, widened a little. "Yes. He did."

  "That may be a point for you and it may not. It is nothing new for him to impress a young woman. He has reported his conversation with you yesterday, to its conclusion. He says that you now have in your possession, you say legally, twenty thousand dollars in cash, and you offer it to me as retainer for the job you want me to do. Is that correct?"

  "Yes, if Mr. Goodwin does the work."

  "He would do his share, directed by me except when urgency forbids. The money is in that parcel? May I see it?"

  She got up and handed it to him and returned to the chair. He removed the rubber bands and wrapping and took a look at each batch, all twenty of them, stacking them neatly on his desk. He turned to me. "I see no indication of source. Did you?"

  I said no.

  He turned to her. "Did Miss Lily Rowan supply it?"

  "Of course not!"

  "But of course someone did. In view of what you told Mr. Goodwin yesterday, I would have to know the source of this money. Where and how did you get it?"

  Her lips were tight. She opened them to say, "I don't see why you have to know that. There's nothing wrong with the way I got it. It's mine. If I went to a store to buy something and gave them one of those bills they wouldn't ask me where I got it."

  He shook his head. "Not a parallel, Miss Denovo. Yesterday you told Mr. Goodwin that two thousand dollars in the bank was all you had, and you rejected his suggestion that you ask Miss Rowan to help you." He tapped the stack. "This is ten times two thousand. If it was a loan or a gift I would have to know from whom. If you sold something I would have to know what you sold and

  to whom. You may not know, at your age, that that is merely reasonable prudence. To accept a substantial retainer for a difficult and complicated operation without assurance of its legitimacy would be asinine, and if you won't tell me where you got this money I won't take it. If you do tell me it will have to be verified, with proper discretion, but to my satisfaction."

  She was frowning again, not at him, at me, but it wasn't really for me; it was for the problem she had been handed. But when she spoke it was to me and for me, a question: "Is he right, Mr. Goodwin? Or is he just shutting the door, a
s you did?"

  "No," I said, "I'm afraid he's right. As he said, just reasonable prudence. And after all, if it's yours legally, as you told me, and if there's nothing wrong with the way you got it, as you told him, why not spill it? It can't be a deeper secret than the one we already know."

  She looked at Wolfe and back at me. "I could tell you," she said.

  "Okay, tell me, and we'll pretend he's not here."

  "I guess I was being silly." Her eyes were meeting mine. "After what you already know, you might as well know this too. That money came from my father. That and a lot more."

  Both of my brows went up. "That makes a liar of you yesterday. Yesterday you had never had your father and didn't know who or what he was, and the two thousand-"

  "I know. That was true, I never had a father. This is what happened. When my mother died I came to New York, of course, but I had to go back for graduation, and anyway Mr. Thorne had her instructions, about cremation, and that there was to be no funeral, and he attended to all the… the details. Then when I came to New York after the graduation he came-"

  "Mr. Thorne?"

  "Yes. He came-"

  "Who is he?"

  "He's the television producer my mother worked for. He came to see me, to the apartment, and he brought things-papers and bills and letters and other things from my mother's desk in her room at the office. And a box, a locked metal box with a label glued on it that said

  Property of Amy Denovo. And a key with a tag that said Key to Amy Denovo's box. It had been-"

  "Was your mother's name Amy?"

  "No, her name was Elinor. The key had been in a locked drawer in her desk. The box had been in the office safe. It had been there for years-at least fifteen years, Mr. Thome said. It's about this long." She held her opened hands about sixteen inches apart. "I waited until he had gone to open it, and I was glad I did. There were just two things in it: money, hundred-dollar bills- the box was more than half full-and a sealed envelope with my name on it. I opened the envelope and it was a letter from my mother, not a long one, just one page. You want to know what it said."

  "I sure do. Have you got it?"

  "Not here, it's at home, but I know it by heart. It's on her personal letterhead. It isn't dated. It says: Dear Amy, This money is from your father. I have not seen him or heard from him since four months before you were born but two weeks after you were born I received a bank check for one thousand dollars in the mail, and I have received one every month since then, and it now amounts to exactly one hundred thousand dollars. I don't know what it will be when you read this. I didn't ask for it and I don't want it. I want nothing from your father. You are my daughter, and I can feed you and clothe you and give you a place to live, and I will. And see that you are properly educated. But this money came from your father, so it belongs to you, and here it is. I could put it in a bank to draw interest, but there would be taxes to pay and records of it, so I do it this way. Your mother. And below Your mother she signed her name, Elinor Denovo -only I don't think that was her name. And it must have kept coming right up to the time she died, because it's two hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars. Of course I can't put it in a bank or anything like that because I would have to tell how I got it. Wouldn't I? And I won't."

  I looked at Wolfe. He was looking, not at her or at me, but at the stack of lettuce on his desk. Another man could have been thinking that life certainly plays cute tricks, but he was probably reflecting that that was just one-thir-

  teenth of what a father had paid for the privilege, or something similar.

  I said, to him, "So it wasn't a loan or a gift and she didn't sell anything, but we'll have to concede that it's legally in her possession. Of course the Internal Revenue Service and the New York State Income Tax Bureau would like to take a whack at it, but that's not our lookout and what they don't know won't hurt her. What else shall I ask her?"

  He grunted and turned to her. "Is the money still in the box?"

  "Yes, all but that." She gestured toward his desk. "The box is in my apartment-on Eighty-second Street. And the letter. But I don't want… Mr. Goodwin mentioned the Internal Revenue Service."

  "We are not government agents, Miss Denovo, and are not obliged to disclose information received in confidence." He swiveled his head to look at the clock. "It is ten minutes to our dinnertime. May Mr. Goodwin call on you at your apartment at ten tomorrow morning?"

  "Yes. I don't go to Miss Rowan on Saturday."

  "Then expect him around ten o'clock. He will want to see the box and its contents, and the letter, and he will want all the information you can give him. What you told him yesterday is a mere prologue." He turned. "Archie. Give her a receipt for this money. Not as a retainer; that can wait until you have seen the box and the letter, and you will verify the handwriting of the letter. Just a receipt for the amount, her property, entrusted to me for safekeeping."

  I turned my chair, pulled the typewriter around, and opened a drawer for paper and carbon.

  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 were 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 woman who had died, or would die, absolutely photo-graphless.

  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 ha
nded 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."