The Mother Hunt

by Rex Stout

  The only time he has been overruled about the furniture in his house was when he bought a king-size armchair for the kitchen and Fritz vetoed it. It was delivered, and he sat in it for half an hour one morning discussing turnip soup with Fritz, but when he came down from the plant rooms at six o'clock it was gone. If he or Fritz ever mentioned it again they did so in privacy.

  Since none of the four invited guests could be the mother we were looking for, and there was no reason to suppose that one of them was the murderer, I sized them up only from force of habit as I answered the doorbell and admitted them. Willis Krug, the literary agent, who arrived first, a little early, was a tall bony guy with a long head and flat ears. He started for the red leather chair, but I headed him off because I had decided Bingham should have it—Valdon's oldest and closest friend—and he was the next to show, on the dot at nine o'clock. Leo Bingham, the television producer. He was tall and broad and handsome, with a big smile that went on and off like a neon sign. Julian Haft, the publisher, who came next, was a barrel from the hips up and a pair of toothpicks from the hips down, bald on top, with balloon-tired cheaters. Manuel Upton, editor of Distaff, was last to arrive, and looking at him I was surprised that he had arrived at all. A shrimp to begin with, he was sad-eyed and wrinkled, he sagged, and he was panting from climbing the stoop. I was sorry I hadn't saved the red leather chair for him. When he was safe if not sound on one of the yellow ones I went to my desk and buzzed the kitchen on the house phone.

  Wolfe entered. Three of the guests rose. Manuel Upton, who had the least to lift, didn't. Wolfe, no handshaker, asked them to sit, went to his desk, and stood while I pronounced names, giving them all-out nods, at least half an inch. He sat, sent his eyes from right to left and back again, and spoke. "I don't thank you for coming, gentlemen, since you are obliging Mrs. Valdon, not me. But I'm appreciative. You're busy men with a day's work behind you. Will you have refreshment? None is before you because that restricts choices, but a supply is at hand. Will you have something?"

  Willis Krug shook his head. Julian Haft declined with thanks. Leo Bingham said brandy. Manuel Upton said a glass of water, no ice. I said scotch and water. Wolfe had pushed a button and Fritz was there and was given the order, including beer for Wolfe.

  Bingham gave Wolfe the big smile. "I was glad to come. Glad of the chance to meet you." His baritone went fine with the smile. "I've often thought of your enormous possibilities for television, and now that I've seen you and heard your voice—my God, it would be stupendous! I'll come and tell you about it."

  Manuel Upton shook his head, slow to the left and slow to the right. "Mr. Wolfe may not understand you, Leo. 'Enormous.' 'Stupendous.'" His croak went fine with all of him. "He may think that's a personal reference."

  "Don't you two get started now," Willis Krug said. "You ought to hire the Garden and slug it out."

  "We're incompatible," Bingham said. "All magazine men hate television because it's taking all their gravy. In another ten years there won't be any magazines but one. TV Guide. Actually I love you, Manny. Thank God you'll have Social Security."

  Julian Haft spoke to Wolfe. "This is the way it goes, Mr. Wolfe. Mass culture." His thin tenor went all right with his legs but not with his barrel. "I understand you're a great reader. Thank heaven books don't depend on advertising. Have you ever written one? You should. It might not be enormous or stupendous, but it certainly would be readable, and I would like very much to publish it. If Mr. Bingham can solicit, so can I."

  Wolfe grunted. "Unthinkable, Mr. Haft. Maintaining integrity as a private detective is difficult; to preserve it for the hundred thousand words of a book would be impossible for me, as it has been for so many others. Nothing corrupts a man so deeply as writing a book; the myriad temptations are overpowering. I wouldn't presume—"

  Fritz had entered with a tray. First the beer to Wolfe, then the brandy to Bingham, the water to Upton, and the scotch and water to me. Upton got a pillbox from a pocket, fished one out and popped it into his mouth, and drank water. Bingham took a sip of brandy, looked surprised, took another sip, rolled it around in his mouth, looked astonished, swallowed, said, "May I?" and got up and went to Wolfe's desk for a look at the label on the bottle. "Never heard of it," he told Wolfe, "and I thought I knew cognac. Incredible, serving it offhand to a stranger. Where in God's name did you get it?"

  "From a man I did a job for. In my house a guest is a guest, stranger or not. Don't stint yourself; I have nearly three cases." Wolfe drank beer, licked his lips, and settled back. "As I said, gentlemen, I appreciate your coming, and I won't detain you beyond reason. My client, Mrs. Valdon, said she would leave it to me to explain what she has hired me to do, and I shall be as brief as possible. First, though, it should be understood that everything said here, either by you or by me, is in the strictest confidence. Is that agreed?"

  They all said yes.

  "Very well. My reserve is professional and merely my obligation to my client; yours will be personal, on behalf of a friend. This is the situation. In the past month Mrs. Valdon has received three anonymous letters. They are in my safe. I'm not going to show them to you or disclose their contents, but they make certain allegations regarding her late husband, Richard Valdon, and they make specific demands. The handwriting, in ink, is obviously disguised, but the sex of the writer is not in question. The contents of the letters make it clear that they were written by a woman. My engagement with Mrs. Valdon is to identify her, speak with her, and deal with her demands."

  He reached for his glass, took a swallow of beer, and leaned back. "It's an attempt to blackmail, but if the allegations are true Mrs. Valdon will be inclined to accede to the demands, with qualifications. When I find the letter-writer she will not be exposed or indicted, or compelled to forgo her demands, unless the allegations are false. The first necessity is to find her, and that's the difficulty. Her arrangement for having the demands met is extraordinarily ingenious; nothing so crude as leaving a packet of bills somewhere. I'll suggest its nature. You are men of affairs. Mr. Haft, what if you were told, anonymously, under threat of disclosure of a secret you wished to preserve, to deposit a sum of money to the credit of an account, identified only by number, in a bank in Switzerland? What would you do?"

  "Good lord, I don't know," Haft said.

  Krug said, "Swiss banks have some funny rules."

  Wolfe nodded. "The letter-writer's arrangement is even more adroit. Not only is there no risk of contact, there is no possible line of approach. But she must be found, and I have considered two procedures. One would be extremely expensive and might take many months. The other would require the cooperation of men who were close friends or associates of Mr. Valdon. From Mrs. Valdon's suggestions four names were selected: yours. On her behalf I ask each of you to make a list of the names of all women with whom, to your knowledge, Richard Valdon was in contact during the months of March, April, and May, nineteen-sixty-one. Last year. All women, however brief the contact and regardless of its nature. May I have it soon? Say by tomorrow evening?"

  Three of them spoke at once, but Leo Bingham's baritone smothered the others. "That's a big order," he said. "Dick Valdon got around."

  "Not only that," Julian Haft said, "but there's the question, what's the procedure? There are eight or nine girls and women in my office Dick had some contact with. What are you going to do with the names we list?"

  "There are four in my office," Willis Krug said.

  "Look," Manuel Upton croaked. "You'll have to tell us about the allegations."

  Wolfe was drinking beer. He put the empty glass down. "To serve the purpose," he said, "the lists must be all-inclusive. They will be used with discretion. No one will be pestered; no offense will be given; no rumors will be started; no prying curiosity will be aroused. Very few of the owners of the names will be addressed at all. Inferences I have drawn from indications in the letters limit the range of possibilities. You have my firm assurance that you will have no cause for regret that you h
ave done this favor for Mrs. Valdon, with this single qualification: if it should transpire that the writer of the letters is one for whom you have regard, she will of course be vexed and possibly frustrated. That will be your only risk. Have some brandy, Mr. Bingham."

  Bingham rose and went for the bottle. "Payola." He poured. "It's a bribe." He took a sip. "But what a bribe!" The big smile.

  "I want to hear about the allegations," Upton croaked.

  Wolfe shook his head. "That would violate a firm assurance I have given my client. Not discussible."

  "She's my client too," Krug said. "I was Dick's agent, and now I'm hers since she owns the copyrights. Also I'm her friend, and I'm against anyone who sends anonymous letters, no matter who. I'll get the list to you tomorrow."

  "Hell, I'm hooked," Leo Bingham said. He was standing, twirling the cognac in the snifter. "I've been bribed." He turned to Wolfe. "How about a deal? If you get her from my list I get a bottle of this."

  "No, sir. Not by engagement. As a gesture of appreciation perhaps."

  Julian Haft had removed his balloon-tired cheaters and was fingering the bows. "The letters," he said. "Were they mailed in New York? The city?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then you have the envelopes?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "May we see them—just the envelopes? You say the writing is disguised, but it might—one of us might get a hint from it."

  Wolfe nodded. "Therefore it would be ill-advised to show them to you. One of you might indeed get a hint of the identity of the writer but not divulge it, and that might complicate the problem for me."

  "I have a question," Manuel Upton croaked. "I've heard that there's a baby in Mrs. Valdon's house, and a nurse for it. I know nothing about it, but the person who told me isn't a windbag. Is there any connection between the baby and the letters?"

  Wolfe was frowning at him. "A baby? Mrs. Valdon's baby?"

  "I didn't say her baby. I said there's a baby in her house."

  "Indeed. I'll ask her, Mr. Upton. If it is somehow connected with the letters she must be aware of it. By the way, I have advised her to mention the letters to no one. No exceptions. As you gentlemen know, she didn't mention them to you. The matter is in my hands."

  "All right, handle it." Upton got to his feet. His weight was just about half of Wolfe's, but from the effort it took to get it up from a chair it might have been the other way around. "From the way you're handling us, or trying to, you'll hash it up. I don't owe Lucy Valdon anything. If she wants a favor from me she can ask me."

  He headed for the door, jostling Leo Bingham's elbow as he passed, and Bingham's other hand darted out and gave him a shove. Because a guest is a guest, and also because I doubted if he had the vim and vigor to shut the door, I got up and went, passed him in the hall, and saw him out. When I returned to the office Julian Haft was speaking.

  "… but before I do so I want to speak with Mrs. Valdon. I don't agree with Mr. Upton, I don't say you're handling it badly, but what you ask is rather—uh—unusual." He put the cheaters back on and turned. "Of course I agree with you, Willis, about people who send anonymous letters. I suppose you think I'm being overcautious."

  "That's your privilege," Krug said.

  'To hell with privilege," Bingham said. He flashed the big smile at Haft. "I wouldn't say overcautious, I'd say cagey. You were born scared, Julian."

  You have to make allowances. Buyers and sellers. To a literary agent a publisher is a customer, but to a television producer he's just another peddler.

  Chapter 10

  I HAVE BEFORE ME a copy of the expense account of the case in the files under V for Valdon. Its second stage, working on the names on the lists furnished by Willis Krug, Leo Bingham, Julian Haft, and the client (we never got one from Manuel Upton) lasted twenty-six days, from June 12 to July 7, and cost the client $8,674.30, not including any part of my salary, which is covered by the fee and is never itemized.

  Lucy's list had 47 names, Haft's 81, Bingham's 106, and Krug's 55. One of Upton's daughters, married, was on Haft's and Bingham's lists, but not on Krug's. Haft's married daughter was on Lucy's list but none of the others. A certain friend of Bingham's was on nobody's list; Orrie picked up her name along the way. Of course there were many duplications on the four lists, but there were 148 different names, as follows:

  Section Number Status

  A 57 Single

  B 52 Married, living with husbands

  C 18 Divorced

  D 11 Divorced

  E 10 Married, separated

  Another statistic, those in each section who had babies between December 1, 1961, and February 28, 1962:

  Section Number

  A 1

  B 2

  C 0

  D 1

  E 0

  The one in Section A (single) who had a baby worked in Krug's office, but everybody knew about it and the baby had been legally given (or sold) to an adoption service. It took Saul nearly two weeks to cinch it that the baby had not got sidetracked somehow and ended up in Mrs. Valdon's vestibule. The one in Section D (widowed) may have been a problem for her friends and enemies, but not for us. Her husband had died two years before the baby came, but she was keeping it and didn't care who knew it. I saw it.

  The two babies in Section B (married, living with husbands) were really three; one was twins. They were all living with their parents. Fred saw the twins and Orrie saw the single.

  Besides the mothers, two girls in Section A, two women in B, two in C, and one in D, had been away from their homes and/or jobs for a part or all of the period. Orrie had to take a plane to France, the Riviera, to settle one of them, and Fred had to fly to Arizona to settle another one.

  There has never been a smoother operation since Whosis scattered the dust on the temple floor. Absolutely flawless. Orrie got taken to an apartment-house superintendent by a doorman, but it wasn't his fault, and Fred got bounced from backstage in a theater, but a bounce is all in the day's work. As an example of superlative snoopery it was a perfect performance. And when Saul phoned at half past three Saturday afternoon, July 7, to report that he had closed the last little gap in the adoption and had actually seen the baby, and the operation was complete, we were precisely where we had been on June 12, twenty-six days earlier.

  With a difference, though. There had been a couple of developments, but we hadn't done the developing. One, the minor one, was that I was no longer the last person known to have seen Ellen Tenzer alive. That Friday afternoon she had called at the home of a Mrs. James R. Nesbitt on East 68th Street, an ex-patient from her New York nursing days. Mrs. Nesbitt had waited nearly two weeks to mention it because she didn't want her name to appear in connection with a murder, but had finally decided she must. Presumably the DA had promised her that her name would not appear, but some journalist had somehow got it, and hooray for freedom of the press. Not that Mrs. Nesbitt was really any help. Ellen Tenzer had merely said she needed advice about something from a lawyer and had asked Mrs. Nesbitt to tell her the name of one who could be trusted, and she had done so and had phoned the lawyer to make an appointment. But Ellen Tenzer hadn't kept the appointment. She hadn't told Mrs. Nesbitt why she needed a lawyer. Mrs. Nesbitt was added to Saul's list of names, just in case, but she hadn't had a baby for ten years and her twenty-year-old daughter had never had one.

  The other development, the major one, was that the client came within an ace of quitting. She phoned at a quarter after four on Monday, July 2. Of course I had kept in touch with her; when you're spending more than three Cs a day of a client's money and getting nothing for it, the least you can do is give her a ring, or drop in and say hello, it's a fine day but I guess they need rain in the country. I had watched her feed the baby once, lunched with her once, dined with her twice, taught her to play pinochle, and listened to her playing the piano for a total of about six hours. Also we had done a little dancing, to records in the dining room, which wasn't carpeted. She was plenty good enough to spend an eve
ning with at the Flamingo or Gillotti's, but that would have to wait, since it would have broken security. If you ask, would I have gone to so much trouble to keep a client patient if she had been cross-eyed or fat-ankled? the answer is no.

  When I answered the phone at a quarter after four on July 2 and started the formula, "Nero Wolfe's—" she broke in, "Can you come, Archie? Right away?"

  "I could, sure. Why?"

  "A man was here, a policeman. He just left. He asked when I hired Nero Wolfe, and he asked about the baby. Will you come?"

  "What did you tell him?"

  "Nothing, of course. I said he had no right to ask about my private affairs. That's what you told me to say."

  "Right. Did you get his name?"

  "He told me, but I was so—I don't know."

  "Was it Cramer?"

  "Cramer … no."

  "Rowcliff?"

  "No."

  "Stebbins?"

  "That sounds like it. Stebbins. Yes, I think so."

  "Big and solid with a broad nose and a wide mouth and trying hard to be polite?"

  "Yes."

  "Okay. My favorite cop. At ease. Play the piano. I can do it in twenty minutes since I won't have to bother about a tail."

  "You're coming?"

  "Certainly."

  I hung up, got the house phone, buzzed the plant rooms, and after a wait had Wolfe's voice: "Yes?"

  "Mrs. Valdon phoned. Purley Stebbins came and asked her about you and the baby. She told him nothing. She wants me to come and I'm leaving. Any instructions?"

  "No. Confound it."

  "Yes, sir. Bring her?"

  "Not unless you must." He hung up.

  I went to the kitchen to tell Fritz the phone and the door were his until he saw me again, and was off. As I descended the stoop to the sidewalk and turned east I automatically glanced around, but actually I didn't give a damn, now, if I had a shadow or not. Almost certainly there was an eye on the Valdon house anyway.