Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 43

by The Father Hunt

  A description by anyone of a man he saw last week will never make you really see him, and 1944 was twenty-three years ago, and this subject had been mostly sitting at a table when he was under Salvatore Manzoni’s eyes, which makes a difference. What I got was: age, early thirties. Height, around six feet. Weight, around a hundred and seventy. Shoulders, maybe square, maybe rounded a little. Head, a little bigger than average. Face, not round, maybe rather long; not pale, maybe a little tanned. Hair, dark brown. Eyes, brown (just a guess). Nose and mouth and ears and chin, yes, he had them.

  If that really shows him to you, you have better sight than I have. It did exclude the Jarretts and Bertram McCray, but they were already out. I wish I knew if you would really be interested in what we did during the next forty-eight hours. I doubt it, because it was all negative. Wednesday morning Saul and Fred had been put on it too, and also Orrie when he returned from Washington. If we could name and place Carlotta Vaughn’s dinner partner for those months of 1944 it was 20 to 1 that we would have Amy’s father, which was the job, and we gave it all we had. Detecting can be fun, but it can be a pain not only in the neck but also in the head, the guts, the back, the legs, the feet, and the ass. And often is. It was that time.

  So at three o’clock Thursday afternoon Wolfe and I sat in the office with nothing more to say. Saul and Fred and Orrie were still out pecking at it, but when they called in we wouldn’t be disappointed because we were expecting nothing. Wolfe had started his second bottle of beer since lunch, which exceeded his quota, and I had just returned from the kitchen with a slug of Irish, which made me a lush trying to drown it. I looked at Wolfe, who had his eyes closed and his jaw clamped, and said, “If you’re trying to figure how much you’re out, it’s three grand plus, not counting me.”

  He shook his head but didn’t open his eyes. “I am making assumptions. I am assuming that Miss Denovo’s father murdered her mother; that it is more feasible to find him as a murderer than as a father, since he became a father twenty-two years ago and became a murderer only three months ago; that some recent event supplied the motive for the murder; and that the most likely person to have knowledge of that event is Raymond Thorne or someone in his employ who was closely associated with Elinor Denovo.” His eyes opened. “I’ll start with Mr. Thorne.”

  I put the glass with what was left of the Irish on my desk. “Holy heaven. That’s the wildest goose you ever chased.”

  “Perhaps. Sitting here hour after hour and day after day getting futile reports from you and Saul and Fred and Orrie is affecting my appetite and my palate. This morning I had to read a page twice. Intolerable. Can you have Mr. Thorne here at six o’clock?”

  “I can try. Is this just a spasm or do you mean it?”

  “I don’t have spasms.”

  “We can discuss that some other time. I have a suggestion. You may remember my saying Monday afternoon that Cramer wouldn’t be bothering about a three-months-old hit-and-run unless it had some special kink. It might help to know what it is. I request permission to go and ask him.”

  “Why should he tell you?”

  “Leave that, quoting you, to my intelligence guided by experience.”

  “You can’t give him the client’s name.”

  “Certainly not. But he probably knows it, after that ad.”

  “Very well. First, Mr. Thorne.”

  It took nearly an hour to get Raymond Thorne because he was somewhere watching TV cameras make a Raymond Thorne production, and when I finally had him he said he couldn’t possibly make it at six o’clock. I reminded him that he had told me he would like to help Amy any way he could, and he said he would come at nine. Getting Inspector Cramer was easier and quicker. He was at his office and would see me. Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms and I went to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was leaving.

  The cop at the top of Homicide South could surely have had a bigger room and a bigger desk and better chairs for visitors than the setup on West Twentieth Street, but Cramer liked to stick to things he was used to, including that old felt hat, which was always there on a corner of his desk when it wasn’t on his head, although there was a rack only a step away. I sat on the wooden chair at the end of his desk while he finished with a folder he was going through. When he closed it and turned to me, I said, “I bring hot news. We’re working on that hit-and-run. Mr. Wolfe thought we should tell you because we said we weren’t.”

  He put on an act. He demanded, “What hit-and-run?”

  “On May twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-seven, a woman named Elinor Denovo was crossing Eighty-second Street and—”

  “Oh, yes. So you’re working on it. So Wolfe wants to know something, so he sends you. He can go to hell.”

  I nodded. “So you would like to know what he wants to know, so you let me in when you’re busy. I’ll make it brief and answer questions within reason. What we told you was the truth and the whole truth: our only client was and is a woman who wants us to find her father, whom she has never seen. She doesn’t know who or what he was or is, and she wants to. We have smoked out three different Grade A leads, but they have all fizzled. Two full weeks, and we have a load of nothing, either for the client or for you. So an hour ago Mr. Wolfe decided that it’s easier to find a murderer than a father, therefore the father was the murderer. As you know, that isn’t how his mind usually works, but this isn’t his mind working, it’s a spasm, though he says he doesn’t have spasms. It’s just that his appetite is letting him down and he’s desperate, and he pays me and I have to humor him when he sends me on a sappy errand. I would like to buy a fact. If there is any interesting fact about that hit-and-run that hasn’t been published and you’ll tell me what it is, off the record, I am authorized to give you Mr. Wolfe’s word of honor that if we get anything you might be able to use we’ll pass it on to you before we make any use of it ourselves. At least two minutes before. I’d offer my word of honor too, only I’m not sure you think I have one. Questions.”

  He picked up a phone transmitter, in a moment told it, “Coffee,” replaced it, and swiveled his chair to face me without twisting his thick neck. “We haven’t bothered with Amy Denovo,” he said. “After that ad of course we knew she was Wolfe’s client, but we had pumped her good in June. The father angle didn’t help us any unless she found him and maybe not then. You say you haven’t? Found him?”

  “We haven’t got even a smell. But you came to see me and you phoned Mr. Wolfe.”

  “You had phoned Stebbins. You know damned well that when I find Wolfe within a mile I smell a rat. I thought—”

  “Do I tell him you called him a rat?”

  “You do not. He’s a lot of things I can name, but he’s not a rat. I thought he might be able to name a man who smokes a certain kind of cigar.”

  “I know one who smokes Monte Cristos. He gets them from a purser on a ship.”

  “Yeah. You’ll clown while they’re embalming you. If you want an interesting fact off the record, we’ve got one we’ve been saving, but hell, we might as well put it on television. We’ve got nine fingerprints of that hit-and-run driver, and six of them are as good as you could want.”

  The door opened and a uniformed city employee entered, came, and put an old scarred wooden tray on Cramer’s desk blotter. As Cramer nodded thanks and picked up the pot to pour, I asked, “Didn’t the damn fool ever hear of gloves?”

  He put the pot down. “They weren’t on the car. On the floor, in front, was a leather cigar case. He got it out to light one while he was parked on Second Avenue waiting for her, and there she came, and he dropped it on the seat …”

  My brows were up. “You’re saying it was first-degree.”

  He took a healthy swallow of coffee. I have to sip when it’s that hot. “Wolfe is,” he said, “not me. I was doing him a favor, reconstructing it for him. I don’t give a damn how he happened to leave it; we’ve got it. But we can’t match the prints—here, Washington, London—nowhere. There were two cigars in the case. Gold Label Bon
itas. Knowing, as I do, the kind of stunts Wolfe is capable of, it was possible he was getting set to ask me if I would care to meet a man who smoked Gold Label Bonitas and was shy a case to carry them in.” He drank coffee.

  “If the case is handy,” I said, “I would enjoy looking at it. So I could describe it to Mr. Wolfe.”

  “It’s at the laboratory. It’s polished black calfskin, not new but not worn much, stamped on the inside ‘Corwin Deluxe.’ No other marks. Nothing special about it to trace.”

  “I suppose the woman who owned the car—”

  The door was opening and a cop stepped in. Cramer asked him, “Yes?” and he said Sergeant So-and-so had arrived with What’s-his-name, and I stood up. It would have been a dumb remark anyway. They have some darned smart dicks at Homicide South, and one of them had certainly asked the owner of the car if the cigar case was hers.

  Chapter 11

  Raymond Thorne was more than half an hour late. It was 9:40 when the doorbell rang and I went and admitted him, took him to the office, introduced him, nodded him to the red leather chair, asked him what he would like to drink, and went to the kitchen to fill his order for brandy and a glass of water.

  When the three ’teers had phoned in with their usual reports, nothing, they had been told to call at nine in the morning. They were the three ’teers because once at a conference Orrie had said they were the three musketeers and we had tried to change it to fit. We tried snoopeteers, privateers (for private eyes), dicketeers, wolfeteers, hawketeers, and others, and ended up by deciding that none of them was good enough and settling for the three ’teers. They had not been told that we were now looking for a murderer, not just a father; I saved that for morning so they would get a good night’s sleep.

  On the way back from Twentieth Street I had found a cigar counter with a box of Gold Label Bonitas, the third counter I tried, and had bought a couple—two for sixty-five cents—and Wolfe and I had given them a good look. A Gold Label Bonita is four and three-quarters inches long, medium thick, and medium blunt at both ends. It comes in a cellophane tube, and its label says Gold Label but not Bonita. The Bonita is only on the box. I lit one and took a few puffs, but neither Wolfe nor I could claim that if we entered a room where a man had recently smoked a cigar we could testify under oath that it had been a Gold Label Bonita. It did taste and smell like tobacco smoke, which is more than I can say for the—but he may read this. I dropped the other one in a drawer and gave Wolfe a full account of my conversation with Raymond Thorne ten days earlier, which I had never reported verbatim.

  Thorne’s first remark after a sip of brandy was that a close-up of Wolfe there in his chair, with sprays of orchids scattered over the desk, would make a marvelous shot for a one-minute commercial. He said that of course he didn’t make many commercials, but a friend of his did, and what a picture! Wolfe had to rub his lips with a knuckle to stop the words that wanted out. Thorne was going to help him find a murderer, or he hoped he was.

  “My friend would be glad to come and discuss it with you,” Thorne said.

  “That can wait,” Wolfe said. “I’m fully occupied with the job I’m on. On behalf of Miss Denovo, I thank you for coming. I know you told Mr. Goodwin that you could supply no information that would help, but it is a common occurrence for a man to have knowledge of a fact and to be quite unaware of its significance. I once questioned a young woman for three days on what she regarded as irrelevant trivialities, and finally got a fact that exposed a murderer.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t spare three days.” Thorne took a sip of brandy and stirred it in his mouth with his tongue. “This cognac is marvelous. Speaking of facts, evidently you knew one I didn’t, from that ad … I suppose that ad in the Times was yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alias Elinor Denovo. Carlotta something alias Elinor Denovo. Why the ‘alias’ if Denovo was her married name? Her daughter’s name is Amy Denovo.”

  “That’s one of the complications, Mr. Thorne. A client’s communications with a detective she has hired are not legally privileged, but they are often confidential.”

  “Goodwin said on the phone that you’re blocked.”

  “We’re stumped.”

  “But you still think it was premeditated murder?”

  “Miss Denovo does, as Mr. Goodwin told you ten days ago. Do I? Yes, for reasons you might think deficient. But getting you here is not merely stumbling around in the dark. It isn’t fatuous to assume that some recent event induced the murder and that something connected with that event, however remotely, was seen or heard by you. In conversation with her, how did you address her? Mrs. Denovo, or Elinor?”

  “Elinor.”

  “Then I shall. How many others there called her Elinor?”

  “Why … Let’s see … three. No, four.”

  “Their names?”

  “Now listen.” Thorne flipped a hand. “That wouldn’t be just irrelevant trivialities, it would be drivel. It would take three weeks, not just three days. Goodwin said someone at my place might be involved in it, and I told him there wasn’t the slightest chance. Simply impossible. Nobody there had any personal relations with her. Even I didn’t, actually. We often had meals together, lunch and dinner and even breakfast sometimes, but only to talk business.” He turned to me. “I told you I soon saw she had lines she didn’t want crossed.” Back to Wolfe: “I can give you the names, sure, but I’m telling you, that will get you nowhere.”

  “I would expect it to. On an excursion such as this you get nowhere again and again. Very well, we’ll try another tack. When and where did you last see Elinor?”

  “That Friday around noon at the studio. I was taking a plane to the coast on business, to see a scriptwriter I wanted.”

  “What studio?”

  “Mine, of course.”

  “Did she speak of her plans for that evening?”

  “Yes. We did. She was going to see a preview of a movie for a look at an actor we thought we might want to use.”

  “A preview where? At a theater?”

  “No, a studio in the Bronx. That’s why she took her car. Of course I went over all this with the police. They said she left the studio a little after ten that evening, and I told them she probably went for a drive. She often did. She said it relaxed her. I never saw her relaxed, not really.”

  “Who went to the preview with her?”

  “No one.” Thorne emptied his glass and put it on the stand, started a hand for the bottle, and pulled it back. “That’s marvelous cognac.”

  “Help yourself. I have nine bottles left. We’ll start with that Friday and work back. How much were you with Elinor that morning?”

  “Not much. There was a staff conference, but she had to leave it when someone came. Later I—”

  “Who came?”

  “A woman from an agency about a replacement their client didn’t like. Just routine. Agencies’ clients never like anything. Later I dictated some notes to her. Of course I had my secretary and she had hers, but she still did shorthand, and dictating to her made it different. It came out better. She was a very remarkable woman. She had offers of twice, three, or four times as much as she could make with me, agencies and public-relations people, but she turned them all down.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. My guess was that they were mostly big outfits and she liked the complete freedom she had with me.”

  “What if I asked you to tell me everything you heard her say that morning? Could you do it?”

  “My God, no. Anyway it was just business. There couldn’t possibly have been anything with any hint of what was going to happen to her that night. You know, I might be better at this if I knew why you think it was premeditated murder. Goodwin told me it was Amy’s intuition. Isn’t a hit-and-run nearly always just a hit-and-run?”

  “Yes. I would like to oblige you, Mr. Thorne, if only as a token of Miss Denovo’s appreciation of your willingness to help, but I can’t divulge information that the police
are reserving. Only five hours ago a police officer of high rank, discussing that hit-and-run with Mr. Goodwin, said, ‘He got a cigar out to light it while he was parked on Second Avenue waiting for her, and there she came.’ If I were free to tell you more I would. Help yourself to brandy. If you please, Archie, beer?”

  That was a fair example of how to lie while sticking to the truth. It was perfectly true that he couldn’t, or anyhow shouldn’t, divulge information that the police were reserving. It was also true that a high-ranking police officer had said that to me. So a truth plus a truth equaled a bare-faced lie.

  It was the only one he told during the four long hours that Thorne sat in the red leather chair while downing a third of a bottle of marvelous cognac. I doubted if he knew how good it was; a man had once offered Wolfe fifty bucks for a bottle of it.

  The four hours took us an hour and a half past midnight, into Friday morning, and the brandy took Thorne into a kind of talking trance that made him forget about time, and also seemed to oil his memory, which was just luck. He remembered Thursday a little better than Friday, and by the time they got back to Monday he was remembering so much that I began to suspect him. He had remarked at one point that he had done some scriptwriting, so he had had practice making things up.

  But he didn’t make up the thing, the thing that hit. It wasn’t a smack. I damned near let it slide by. I had been sitting there listening to irrelevant trivialities for more than three hours; it was well past midnight, I had covered at least a dozen yawns, and I had been drinking milk, not brandy. They had been on Monday for maybe twenty minutes, and had got to where Thorne and Elinor were on their way out to have lunch with somebody, and Thorne was telling how the receptionist had stopped Elinor to tell her that Floyd Vance had been there again and she had had to threaten to call in a policeman if he didn’t leave. The receptionist said he might be out in the hall. Elinor had thanked her and they had left. Naturally Wolfe had asked who Floyd Vance was, but Thorne knew nothing about him; he said probably some nut who wanted to peddle an idea for a show that the networks would give a million for. They were a dime a dozen.