The Mother Hunt

by Rex Stout

  "Where in the country?"

  "Near Westport. At Julian Haft's place—he publishes my husband's books."

  "Where is Westport?"

  Her eyes widened a little in surprise. Mine didn't. What he doesn't know about the metropolitan area would fill an atlas. "Why, Connecticut," she said. "Fairfield County."

  "What time did you leave there?"

  "A little after six o'clock."

  "Driving? Your own car?"

  "Yes."

  "With a chauffeur?"

  "No. I have no chauffeur."

  "Was anyone with you in the car?"

  "No, I was alone." She gestured with the wedding-ring hand. "Of course you're a detective, Mr. Wolfe, I'm not, but I don't see the point of all this."

  "Then you haven't used your brain." He turned. "Tell her, Archie."

  He was insulting her. Not caring to bother with something so obvious, he switched it to me. I obliged. "You've probably been too busy with the baby to go into it," I told her. "Say it was me. I put the baby in the vestibule before I phoned you. I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't known you were there, that the phone would be answered. It's possible that I had hung around until I saw you come home or until I saw a light in the house, but it's even more possible that I knew you were away for the weekend and would get home by dark. I might even have known what time you left Westport. Take the last question: was anyone with you in the car? That would have been the simplest and surest way for me to know when you got home, to be with you in the car. So if you had said yes, the next question would have been, who?"

  "Good heavens." She was staring at me. "Someone I know well enough to …" She let it hang and turned to Wolfe. "All right. Ask anything you want to."

  He grunted. "Not want. Must—if I take the job. You own your house. Where is it?"

  "Eleventh Street near Fifth Avenue. I inherited it. My great-grandfather built it. When I said I was sick and tired of being an Armstead I wasn't just talking, I meant it, but I like the house, and Dick loved it."

  "Do you share it? Have you any tenants?"

  "No. Now I may—I don't know."

  "Do the maid and the cook live there?"

  "Yes."

  "Any others?"

  "Not living in. A woman comes five days a week to help."

  "Could the maid or the cook have had a baby in January?"

  She smiled. "Certainly not the cook. Nor the maid either. She has been with me nearly two years. No, she hasn't had a baby."

  "Then a relative of one of them. Perhaps a sister. An ideal arrangement for an inconvenient infant nephew." Wolfe moved a hand to put it aside. "That will be routine." He tapped the slip of paper with a fingertip. "The pinholes. Was it a safety pin?"

  "No, it wasn't. Just an ordinary pin."

  "Indeed." His brows went up . "You said inside the blanket. Where? Near what part of the body—feet, middle, head?"

  "I think the feet, but I'm not sure. I had the baby out of the blanket before I saw the paper."

  Wolfe swiveled. "Archie. You like to give an opinion in terms of odds. What odds that no woman would so expose a baby to a bare pin?"

  I took three seconds. "Not enough data. Exactly where was the pin? What did the baby have on? How accessible was a safety pin? Roughly, say ten to one, but that doesn't mean that one will get you ten that it was a man. I'm merely answering a question. No bet."

  "I didn't invite one." He swiveled back to her. "I don't suppose it was naked in the blanket?"

  "Oh no. It was dressed—too much. A sweater, a corduroy hat, corduroy overalls, a T-shirt, an undershirt, rubber pants, and diaper. Oh, and booties. It was dressed all right."

  "Any safety pins?"

  "Certainly, in the diaper."

  "Was the diaper—uh—fresh?"

  "No. It was a mess. It had probably been on for hours. I changed it before the doctor came, but I had to use a pillow case."

  I cut in. "A bet, since you asked my opinion. One will get you twenty that if a woman pinned the paper to the blanket, it wasn't the one who dressed him."

  No comment. He turned his head for a look at the wall clock. An hour till lunch. He took in through his nose all the air he had room for, which was plenty, let it out through his mouth, and turned to her. "It would be necessary to get more information from you, much more, and Mr. Goodwin can do that as well as I. My commitment would be to learn the identity of the mother and establish it to your satisfaction, and to demonstrate the degree of probability that your husband was the father, with no warranty of success. Is that correct?"

  "Why … yes. If you—No, I'll just say yes."

  "Very well. There's the formality of a retainer."

  "Of course." She reached for her bag. "How much?"

  "No matter." He pushed back his chair and rose. "A dollar, a hundred, a thousand. Mr. Goodwin will have many questions. You will excuse me."

  He crossed to the door and in the hall turned left, toward the kitchen. Lunch was to be shad roe in casserole, one of the few dishes on which he and Fritz had a difference of opinion that had never been settled. They were agreed on the larding, the anchovy butter, the chervil, shallot, parsley, bay leaf, pepper, marjoram, and cream, but the argument was the onion. Fritz was for it and Wolfe dead against. There was a chance that voices would be raised, and before I got my notebook and started in on the client I went and closed the door, which was soundproofed, and on my way back to my desk she handed me a check for one thousand and 00/100 dollars.

  Chapter 2

  AT A QUARTER TO FIVE that afternoon I was in conference, in the kitchen of Lucy Valdon's house on West Eleventh Street. I was standing, leaning against the refrigerator, with a glass of milk in my hand. Mrs. Vera Dowd, the cook, who evidently ate her full share of what she cooked, judging by her dimensions, was on a chair. She had supplied the milk on request. Miss Marie Foltz, the maid, in uniform, who had undoubtedly been easy to look at ten years ago and was still no eyesore, was standing across from me with her back to the sink.

  "I need some help," I said and took a sip of milk.

  I'm not skipping my session with the client before lunch in order to hold something back, but there's no point in reporting everything I put in my notebook. A few samples, taking her word for it:

  No one hated her, or had it in for her, enough to play a dirty trick like saddling her with a loose baby—including her family. Her father and mother were in Hawaii, a stopover on an around-the-world trip; her married brother lived in Boston and her married sister in Washington. Her best friend, Lena Guthrie, one of the only three people to whom she had shown the paper that had been pinned to the blanket, the other two being the doctor and the lawyer, thought the baby looked like Dick, but she, Lucy, was reserving her opinion. She wasn't going to name the baby unless she decided to keep it. She might name it Moses because no one knew for sure who Moses' father was, but a smile went with that. And so on. Also a couple of dozen names—the names of the five other weekend guests at the Haft place in Westport on May 20, the names of four women, which I had to drag out of her, with whom Dick might possibly have played house in April 1961, and an assortment of names, mostly men, who might know more about Dick's personal diversions than his widow did. Three of those were marked as the most promising: Leo Bingham, television producer; Willis Krug, literary agent; and Julian Haft, publisher, the head of Parthenon Press. That's enough samples.

  I was having my conference with Mrs. Dowd and Miss Foltz in the kitchen because talking comes easier to people in a room where they are used to talking. When I told them I needed some help Mrs. Dowd narrowed her eyes at me and Miss Foltz looked skeptical.

  "It's about the baby," I said and took another sip of milk. "Mrs. Valdon took me upstairs for a look at it. To me it looks too fat and kind of greasy, and its nose is just a blob, but of course I'm a man."

  Miss Foltz folded her arms. Mrs. Dowd said, "It's a good enough baby."

  "I suppose so. Apparently whoever left it in the vestibule had the idea
that Mrs. Valdon might keep it. Whether she does or not, naturally she wants to know where it came from, so she has hired a detective to find out. His name is Nero Wolfe. You may have heard of him."

  "Is he on TV?" Miss Foltz inquired.

  "Don't be silly," Mrs. Dowd told her. "How could he be? He's real." To me: "Certainly I've heard of him, and you too. Your picture was in the paper about a year ago. I forget your first name—no, I don't. Archie. Archie Goodwin. I should have remembered when Mrs. Valdon said Goodwin. I have a good memory for names and faces."

  "You sure have." I sipped milk. "Here's why I need help. In a case like this, what would a detective think of first? He would think there must be some reason why the baby was left at this house instead of some other house, and what could the reason be? Well, one good reason could be that someone who lives here wants that baby to live here too. So Mr. Wolfe asked Mrs. Valdon who lives here besides her, and she said Mrs. Vera Dowd and Miss Marie Foltz, and he asked her if one of them could have had a baby about four months ago, and she said—"

  They both interrupted. I raised a hand, palm out. "Now you see," I said, not raising my voice. "You see why I need help. I merely tell you a detective asked a natural and normal question, and you fly off the handle. Try being detectives yourselves once. Of course Mrs. Valdon said that neither of you could have had a baby four months ago, and the next question was, did either of you have a relative, maybe a sister, who might have had a baby she couldn't keep? That's harder to answer. I'd have to dig. I'd have to find your relatives and friends and ask a lot of questions, and that would take time and cost money, but I'd get the answer, that's sure."

  "You can get the answer right now," Mrs. Dowd said.

  I nodded. "I know I can, and I want it. The point is, I don't want you to hold it against Mrs. Valdon that she asked you to have a talk with me. When you hire a detective you have to let him detect. She either had to let me do this or fire Nero Wolfe. If one of you knows where the baby came from and you want it to be provided for, just say so. Mrs. Valdon may not keep it herself, but she'll see that it gets a good home, and nobody will know anything you don't want them to know. The alternative is that I'll have to start digging, seeing your relatives and friends, and finding out—"

  "You don't have to see my relatives and friends," Mrs. Dowd said emphatically.

  "Mine either," Miss Foltz declared.

  I knew I didn't. Of course you can't always get a definite answer just by watching a face, but sometimes you can, and I had it. Neither of those faces had behind it the problem: to consider the offer from Mrs. Valdon, or to let me start digging. I told them so. As I finished the glass of milk I discussed faces with them, and I told them that I had assured Mrs. Valdon that a talk with them would settle it as far as they were concerned, which was a lie. You can't know what a talk is going to settle until you have had it, even when you do all the talking yourself. We parted friends, more or less.

  There was an elevator, smoother and quieter than the one in Wolfe's old brownstone on West 35th Street, but it was only one flight up to where Mrs. Valdon had said she would be, and I hoofed it. It was a large room, bigger than our office and front room combined, with nothing modern in it except the carpet and a television cabinet at the far end. Everything else was probably period, but I am not up on periods. The client was on a couch, with a magazine, and nearby was a portable bar that had not been there an hour ago. She had changed again. For her appointment with Wolfe she had worn a tailored suit, tan with brown stripes; on my arrival she had had on a close-fitting gray dress that went with her eyes better than tan; now it was a lower-cut sleeveless number, light blue, apparently silk, though now you never know. She put the magazine down as I approached.

  "All clear," I told her. "They're crossed off."

  "You're sure?"

  "Positive."

  Her head was tilted back. "It didn't take you long. How did you do it?"

  "Trade secret. I'm not supposed to tell a client about an operation until I have reported to Mr. Wolfe. But they took it fine. You still have a maid and a cook. If we get any ideas I may phone you in the morning."

  "I'm going to have a martini. Won't you? Or what?"

  Having looked at my watch as I left the kitchen, and knowing that Wolfe's afternoon session with the orchids would keep him up in the plant rooms until six o'clock, and remembering that one of my functions was to understand any woman we were dealing with, and seeing that the gin was Follansbee's, I thought I might as well be sociable. I offered to make, saying I favored five to one, and she said all right. When I had made and served and sat, on the couch beside her, and we had sampled, she said, "I want to try something. You take a sip of mine and I'll take a sip of yours. Do you mind?"

  Of course I didn't, since the idea was to understand her. She held her glass for me to sip, and I held mine for her.

  "Actually," I said, "this good gin is wasted on me. I just had a glass of milk."

  She didn't hear me. She didn't even know I had spoken. She was looking at me but not seeing me. How was I to understand that? Not wanting to sit and stare at her, I moved my eyes to her shoulder and arm, which weren't really skinny.

  "I don't know why I suddenly wanted to do that," she said. "I haven't done it since Dick died. I've never done it with anybody but him. All of a sudden I knew I had to try it, I don't know why."

  It seemed advisable to keep it professional, and the simplest way was to bring Wolfe in. "Mr. Wolfe says," I told her, "that nobody ever gets to the real why of anything."

  She smiled. "And upstairs, when you were looking at the baby, I nearly called you Archie. I'm not trying to flirt with you. I don't know how to flirt. I don't suppose— You're not a hypnotist, are you?"

  I sipped the martini. "What the hell," I said. "Relax. Exchanging sips is an old Persian custom. As for calling me Archie, that's my name. Don't call me Svengali. As for flirting, let's discuss it. Men and women flirt. Horses flirt. Parakeets flirt. Undoubtedly oysters flirt, but they must have some special—"

  I stopped because she was moving. She left the couch, went and put the glass, still half full, on the bar, turned, and said, "Don't forget the suitcase when you go," and walked out.

  That took some fancy understanding. I sat and worked on it while I finished the martini, four or five minutes, got up and put my glass on the bar, touching hers to show I understood, which I didn't, and departed. In the lower hall, on my way out, I picked up the small suitcase which she had helped me pack.

  At that time of day getting a taxi in that part of town is like expecting to draw a ten to an eight, nine, jack, and queen, and it was only twenty-four short blocks and four long ones, and the suitcase was light. Anyway I'm a walker. I wanted to make it before Wolfe got down to the office, and did; it was 5:54 when I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone, used my key, entered, went to the office, put the suitcase on my chair, and unpacked. By the time the sound of the elevator came, all the items were spread out on Wolfe's desk, just about covering it, and when he walked in I was at my desk, busy with papers. When he stopped and let out a growl I swiveled.

  "What the devil is this?" he demanded.

  I arose and pointed. "Sweater. Hat. Overalls. T-shirt. Undershirt. Blanket. Booties. Rubber pants. Diaper. You have to hand it to her for keeping the diaper. The maid wasn't there and she didn't get a nurse until the next day. She must have washed it herself. There are no laundry marks or store labels. The sweater, hat, overalls, and booties have brand labels, but I doubt if they will help. There's something about one item that might possibly help. If you don't spot it yourself it may not be worth mentioning."

  He went to his made-to-order chair and sat. "The maid and the cook?"

  "We had a conference. They're out. Do you want it verbatim?"

  "Not if you're satisfied."

  "I am. Of course if we draw nothing but blanks we can check on them."

  "What else?"

  "First, there is a live baby. I saw it. She didn't just dream i
t. There's nothing unusual about the vestibule; the door has no lock and it's only four steps up, anyone could pop in and out; trying to find someone who saw somebody doing so seventeen days ago after dark would be a waste of my time and the client's money. I didn't include the cleaning woman in the conference because if the baby was hers it would be a different color, and I didn't include the nurse because she was hired through an agency the next day. There's a fine Tekke rug in the nursery, which was a spare bedroom. You are aware that I know about rugs from you, and about pictures from Miss Rowan. There's a Renoir in the living room, and I think a Cézanne. The client uses Follansbee gin. I am in bad with her because I forgot she's an Armstead and used a little profanity. She'll sleep it off."

  "Why the profanity?"

  "She jiggled my arm and I spilled gin on my pants."

  He eyed me. "You had better report verbatim."

  "Not necessary. I'm satisfied."

  "No doubt. Have you any suggestions?"

  "Yes, sir. It looks pretty hopeless. If we get nowhere in a couple of weeks you can tell her you have discovered that it's my baby, I put it in the vestibule, and if she'll marry me she can keep it. As for the mother, I can simply—"

  "Shut up."

  I hadn't decided how to handle the mother question anyway. He picked up the sweater and inspected it. I sat, leaned back, crossed my legs, and looked on. He didn't turn the sweater inside out, so this was just a once-over and he would go back to it. He put it down and picked up the hat. When he got to the overalls I watched his face but saw no sign that he had noticed anything, and I swiveled and reached to the rack of phone books for the Manhattan Yellow Pages, formerly the Red Book. I found what I was after, under Children's & Infants' Wear—Whol. & Mfrs., which filled four and a half pages. I started a hand for the phone, but drew it back. He might spot it the second time around and should have the chance without a tip from me. I got up and went to the hall and up two flights to my room, and at the phone on my bedstand I dialed the number, but got what was to be expected at that time of day, no answer. I tried another number, a woman I knew who was the mother of three young ones, and got her, but she was no help; she said she would have to see the overalls. So it would have to wait until morning. I went back down to the office.