The Mother Hunt (13 page)

“I’ll bet you are.” Cramer’s eyes were slits. “If you’re reserving the message why did you tell me about it?”

“To explain why Mrs. Valdon is at such pains about a baby left in her vestibule. To prevent her harassment I had to tell you what she hired me to do, and if I told you that, I had to tell you why.”

“Of course you’ve got the message.”

“I may have. If you have in mind getting a judge to order me to produce it, it will not be available. Don’t bother.”

“I won’t.” Cramer stood up. He took a step, threw the cigar at my wastebasket, and missed as usual. He looked down at Wolfe. “I don’t believe there was a message. I noticed you didn’t use that fine old phrase. I want the real reason Mrs. Valdon is spending a fortune on a stray baby, and keeping her lip buttoned, and if I don’t get it from you, by God I’ll get it from her. And if there was a message I’ll get
that
from her.”

Wolfe hit the desk with his fist. “After all this!” he roared. “After I have indulged you to the utmost! After I have given you my word on the two essential points! You would molest my client!”

“You’re damn right I would.” Cramer took a step toward the door, remembered his hat, reached across the red leather chair to get it, and marched out. I went to the hall to see that he was on the outside when he shut the door. When I stepped back in, Wolfe spoke.

“No mention of anonymous letters. A stratagem?”

“No. The mood he’s in, he would have used any club he had. So it wasn’t Upton. Not that that matters. There were a dozen lines to her.”

He took in air through his nose, clear down, and let it
out through his mouth. “She knows nothing he doesn’t know, except the message. Should you tell her to talk, reserving only that?”

“No. If she answers ten questions they’ll make it a million. I’ll go and tell her what to expect, and I’ll be there when they come with a warrant. I suggest you should phone Parker. Tomorrow’s the Fourth of July, and arranging bail on a holiday can be a problem.”

“The wretch,” he growled, and as I headed for the front I was wondering whether he meant Cramer or the client.

W
hen Saul Panzer phoned at half past three Saturday afternoon, July 7, to report that he had closed the last gap on the adoption, eliminating the girl who worked in Willis Krug’s office, the second stage of the mother hunt was done. A very superior job by all five of us (I might as well include Wolfe): 148 girls and women covered and crossed off, and nobody’s face scratched. Very satisfactory. Nuts. I told Saul that would be all for now but there might be more chores later. Fred and Orrie had already been turned loose.

Wolfe sat and scowled at whatever his eyes happened to light on. I asked him if he had any program for me, and when he gave me a look that the situation fully deserved but I didn’t, I told him I was going to a beach for a swim and would be back Sunday night. He didn’t even ask where he could reach me, but before I left I put a slip on his desk with a phone number. It belonged to a cottage on Long Island which Lucy Valdon had rented for the summer.

Cramer’s bark had been worse than the DA’s bite. She hadn’t even had her name in the paper. When I
arrived at Eleventh Street, Tuesday noon, and told her a caller would be coming she had a mild attack of funk, and she didn’t eat much lunch, but when a Homicide Bureau dick came around three o’clock he didn’t even have a warrant. Just a written request, signed by the DA himself. And when she phoned some four hours later she was already back home. The captain in charge of the bureau and two assistant DA’s had each had a go at her, and one of them had been fairly tough, but she had lost no hide. The trouble with a clam is that you have only two choices: just sit and look at her, or lock her up. And she was an Armstead, she owned a house, she had a lot of friends, and the chance that she had killed Ellen Tenzer or knew who had was about one in ten million. So she spent the Fourth of July at the beach cottage with the baby, the nurse, the maid, and the cook. It had five bedrooms and six baths. What if the rooms are all occupied and a Homicide Bureau dick drops in and wants to take a bath? You have to be equipped.

Ordinarily, when I am out and away I forget the office and the current job, if any, and especially I forget Wolfe, but that Sunday at the beach my hostess was the client, so as I lay on the sand while she was inside feeding the baby I took a look at the prospect. One hundred per cent gloom. It often happens with the first look at a job that there seems to be no place to start, but you can always find some little spot to peck at. This was different. We had been at it nearly five weeks, we had followed two lines and come to a dead end both times, and there was no other possible line that I could see. I was about ready to buy the idea that Richard Valdon had not been the baby’s father, that he had never met the girl who was its mother, and that she was some kind
of a nut. She had read his books or seen him on television, and when she had a baby it wasn’t convenient to keep, she had decided to arrange for it to be named Valdon. If it was something screwy like that, she was a needle in a haystack and the only hope was to forget the mother and go after the murderer, and the cops had been doing that for a solid month. At least ninety-nine per cent gloom. On my back on the sand with my eyes closed, I pronounced aloud an unrefined word, and Lucy’s voice came. “Archie! I suppose I should have coughed.”

I scrambled up and we made for the surf.

And Monday morning at eleven o’clock Wolfe walked into the office as if he were bound for somewhere, put the orchids in the vase, sat, and without glancing at the mail said, “Your notebook.”

That started the third stage.

By lunchtime we had settled the last detail of the program and all that remained was to carry it out, which of course was my part. It took me only three days to get it set, but it was another four before the ball started to roll, because the Sunday
Gazette
appears only on Sunday. My three days went as follows:

M
ONDAY
A
FTERNOON
. Back to the beach to sell the client on it. She balked and I stayed for dinner. It wasn’t so much the moving back to town she objected to, it was the publicity, and it would have been no go if I hadn’t stretched a point and mixed personal relations with business relations. When I left I had her promise to be back at Eleventh Street by Wednesday noon and to stay as long as necessary.

T
UESDAY
M
ORNING. TO
AI Posner, co-owner of the Posait Camera Exchange on 47th Street, to persuade him to come and help me buy a baby carriage. Back at
his place with it, I left the selection of the cameras and their installation to him, after explaining how they were to be used, and he promised to have it ready by Wednesday noon.

T
UESDAY
A
FTERNOON. TO
Lon Cohen’s office on the twentieth floor of the
Gazette
Building. If Lon has a title I don’t know what it is. Only his name is on the door of the small room, the second door down the hall from the big corner office of the publisher. I have been there maybe a hundred times over the years, and at least seventy of them he was at one of the three phones on his desk when I entered. He was that Tuesday. I took the chair at the end of the desk and waited.

He hung up, passed his hand over his smooth black hair, swiveled, and aimed his quick black eyes at me. “Where’d you get the sunburn?”

“I don’t burn. You have no feeling for color.” I patted my cheek. “Rich russet tan.”

When that point had been settled, or rather not settled, I crossed my legs. “You’re one lucky guy,” I said. “Just because I like you, within reason, I walk in and hand you an exclusive that any paper in town would pay a grand for.”

“Uh-huh. Say Ah.”

“This is not a gift horse you have to look in the mouth of. You may have heard the name Lucy Valdon. The widow of Richard Valdon, the novelist?”

“Yeah.”

“It will be a Sunday feature, full page, mostly pictures. A good wholesome title, maybe
WOMEN LIKE BABIES
. What text there is, there won’t be much, will be by one of your word artists. It will tell how Mrs. Valdon, the young, beautiful, wealthy widow of a famous man, with no child of her own, has taken a baby into her
luxurious home and is giving it her loving care. How she has hired an experienced nurse who is devoted to the little toddler—no, it can’t toddle yet. Maybe the little angel or the little lambkin. I’m not writing it. How the nurse takes it out twice a day in its expensive carriage, from ten to eleven in the morning and from four to five in the afternoon, and wheels it around Washington Square, so it can enjoy the beauties of nature—trees and grass and so forth.”

I gestured. “What a poem! If you have a poet on the payroll, swell, but it must include the details. The pictures can be whatever you want—Mrs. Valdon feeding the baby, or even bathing it if you like nudes—but one picture is a must, of the nurse with the carriage in Washington Square. I’ll have to insist on that. Also it will have to be in next Sunday. The pictures can be taken tomorrow afternoon. You can thank me at your leisure. Any questions?”

As he opened his mouth, not to thank me, judging by his expression, a phone buzzed. He turned and got it, the green one, listened and talked, mostly listened, and hung up. “You have the nerve of a one-legged man at an ass-kicking convention,” he said.

“That’s not only vulgar,” I said, “it’s irrelevant.”

“The hell it is. You may remember that one day a month ago, when you were here asking me about Ellen Tenzer, I asked you if you had found the buttons.”

“Now that you remind me, yes.”

“And you dodged. Okay, but now listen to you. You know more about the buttons than I do, but I know this much, they were on a baby’s overalls, and Ellen Tenzer made them, and some of them were on baby’s overalls in her house, and she had had a baby in her house, and the night after you went to see her she was murdered.
And now you come with this whimwham about Lucy Valdon and a baby, and you ask if I have any questions. I have. Is the baby in Lucy Valdon’s house the one that Ellen Tenzer had in hers?”

Of course I had known that would come. “Absolutely off the record,” I said.

“All right.”

“Until further notice.”

“I said all right.”

“Then yes.”

“Is Lucy Valdon its mother?”

“No.”

“I don’t ask if she’s Wolfe’s client, because that’s obvious. If she wasn’t you wouldn’t have her lined up for your caper. As for it, the caper, I pass. No soap.”

“There’s no catch in it, Lon. She’ll sign a release.”

He shook his head. “That wouldn’t help if someone throws a bomb. It’s a good guess that Ellen Tenzer got murdered on account of that baby. That baby is hot, I don’t know why, but it is. You’re asking me to put a spotlight on it, not only where it lives, but where it can be seen outdoors twice a day. That would be sweet. The
Gazette
spots it, and the next day it gets snatched, or run over and killed, or God knows what. Nothing doing, Archie. Thank you for calling.”

“I can tell you, straight, that there’s no such risk. None at all.”

“Not good enough.”

I uncrossed my legs. “Everything we have said is off the record.”

“Right.”

“Here’s more off the record. One will get you a thousand that there will be no snatch or any other trouble. Mrs. Valdon hired Nero Wolfe five weeks ago today to
find out who the baby’s mother is. It had been left in the vestibule of her house, and she knew nothing about it and still knows nothing. We have spent a lot of her money and our time and energy trying to find the mother, and have got nowhere. We’re still trying.
This
attempt is based on the theory that a woman who had a baby six months ago and ditched it, no matter why, would like to see what it looks like. She will see the page in the
Gazette
, go to Washington Square, recognize the nurse and carriage from the picture, and have a look.”

Lon’s head was cocked. “What if she doesn’t know the baby Mrs. Valdon has is hers?”

“She
probably
does. If she doesn’t we’re wasting some more time and energy and money.”

“The
Gazette’s
circulation is nearly two million. If we ran that story there would be a mob of women around the carriage the next day. So?”

“I hope not a mob. There would be some, yes. The nurse will be a detective, the best female op around. You may have heard of her—Sally Corbett.”

“Yeah.”

“Saul Panzer and Fred Durkin and Orrie Cather will be on hand, within range. There will be three cameras attached to the carriage, not visible, and the nurse will know how to work them. They’ll take shots of everyone who comes close enough for a look, and the pictures will be shown to Mrs. Valdon. Since the baby was left in her vestibule, it’s a fair bet that the mother is someone she would recognize. The pictures will also be shown to a couple of other people whose names you don’t need. Of course it depends on about a dozen ifs, but what doesn’t? If you cross on the green you may get home alive. If you know what’s good for your newspaper you’ll grab this exclusive. If you run it and it works, you
can have the picture of the mother and the story of how we got it, maybe.”

“How straight is all this, Archie?”

“As straight as an ace, king, queen, jack, and ten.”

“Who killed Ellen Tenzer?”

“How the hell do I know? Ask the cops or the DA.”

“You say Panzer and Durkin and Cather will be on hand. Will you?”

“No. I might be recognized. I’m a celebrity. My picture has been in the
Gazette
three times in the last four years.”

He lowered his head and rubbed his chin with a fingertip for five seconds. He looked up. “All right. The picture deadline for Sunday is eight a.m. Thursday.”

It took an hour to get the details all settled because we were interrupted by four phone calls.

T
UESDAY
A
FTERNOON
C
ONTINUED. TO
Dol (Theodolinda) Bonner’s office on 45th Street to keep a date with Sally Corbett, made on the phone that morning. Dol and Sally had been responsible, six years back, for my revision of my basic attitude toward female ops, and I held it against them, just as Wolfe held it against Jane Austen for forcing him to concede that a woman could write a good novel. That afternoon Sally showed me once again that I had to keep the revised version. She made only the notes that were necessary, she restricted her curiosity to her dark blue eyes, and she asked only the questions she had to. We arranged to meet at the Posart Camera Exchange in the morning.