The Mother Hunt (16 page)

“Yes.”

“And you know Mr. Willis Krug, since you were married to him. All of the pictures taken by the cameras were shown to those three men. Is one of them the father of your baby?”

“No!”

“Was Richard Valdon the father?”

No reply.

“Will you answer me, madam?”

“No.”

“You won’t answer, or he wasn’t the father?”

“I won’t answer.”

“I advise you to. It is known that you were formerly intimate with Richard Valdon. Further inquiry will disclose if you renewed the intimacy in the spring of last year.”

No comment.

“Will you answer?”

“No.”

“When you arrived in New York with the baby on February fifth what did you do with it?”

No reply.

“Will you answer?”

“No.”

“Did you at a later date leave the baby in the vestibule of Mrs. Valdon’s house on Eleventh Street?”

No reply.

“Will you answer?”

“No.”

“Did you print the message that was pinned to the baby’s blanket when it was left in Mrs. Valdon’s vestibule? Will you answer?”

“No.”

“I strongly advise you, madam, to answer
this
question. How did you know that the baby Mrs. Valdon had in her house, as reported in the newspaper article, was your baby?”

No reply.

“Will you answer that?”

“No.”

“Where were you in the evening of Sunday, May twentieth? Will you answer?”

“No.”

“Where were you the night of Friday, June eighth? Will you answer?”

She got up and walked out, and I have to hand it to her, she walked straight and smooth. I would have had to double-quick to beat her to the front door, so I merely stepped to the hall. When she was out and the door was shut I stepped back in, returned to my desk, sat, and looked at Wolfe, and he looked back at me.

“Grrrr,” he said.

“That last question,” I said.

“What about it?”

“It may have been a little—uh—previous. It’s barely possible, just barely, that she doesn’t know about Ellen Tenzer. If the idea was to start her poking, shouldn’t we have had Saul standing by? Or all three?”

“Pfui. Is she a nincompoop?”

“No.”

“Then could even Saul shadow her?”

“Probably not. Then why ask her about June eighth?”

“She came here to find out how much we know. It was as well to inform her that our interest is not restricted to the baby and its parentage, that we are also concerned, even if only incidentally, with the death of Ellen Tenzer.”

“Okay.” I doubted if it was okay, but there was no point in pecking at it. “What comes next?”

“I don’t know.” He glowered at me. “Confound it, I am not lightning. I’ll consider it. I shall probably want to see Mr. Bingham, Mr. Haft, and Mr. Krug, to ask why they failed to recognize her picture, though that may be inconsequential. I’ll consider it. Will she approach Mrs. Valdon? Is she on her way there now?”

“No. Any odds you name.”

“Is Mrs. Valdon in danger? Or the baby?”

I took five seconds and shook my head. “I can’t see it.”

“Nor can I. Report to her and tell her to return to the beach. Escort her. Return this evening. If you’re anchored here you’ll badger me and we’ll squabble. Tomorrow we’ll do something, I don’t know what.”

I objected. “Mrs. Valdon will want her own car at the beach. After reporting to her I’ll have the afternoon and evening for checking on Carol Mardus for May twentieth.”

“No!” He slapped the desk. “A jackass could do that. Have I no imagination? No wit? Am I a dolt?”

I stood. “Don’t ask me if I’ll answer. I might. Tell Fritz to save some lobster for me for when I come home tonight. The food at the beach is apt to be spotty.” I went, first upstairs for a clean shirt.

So five hours later I was stretched out on the sand at the edge of the Atlantic. If I had extended an arm my fingers would have touched the client. Her reaction to the report had been in the groove for a woman. She had wanted to know what Carol Mardus had said, every word, and also how she had looked and how she had been dressed. There was an implication that the way she had been dressed had a definite bearing on the question, was Richard Valdon the father of the baby? but of course I let that slide. No man with any sense assumes that a woman’s words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.

Naturally she wanted to know what we were going to do now. I told her if I knew the answer to that I wouldn’t be there with her, I would be somewhere else, doing it. “The difficulty,” I said, “is that Mr. Wolfe is a genius. A genius can’t be bothered with just plain work
like having someone tailed. He has to do stunts. He has to take a short cut. Anybody can get a rabbit out of a hat, so he has to get a hat out of a rabbit. This evening he will be sitting in the office, leaning back with his eyes closed, working his lips, pushing them out and pulling them in, out and in. That’s probably how Newton discovered the law of gravitation, leaning back with his eyes closed and working his lips.”

“He did not. It was an apple falling.”

“Sure. His eyes were closed and it hit him on the nose.”

When I got back to the old brownstone a little after midnight I was expecting to find on my desk a note telling me to come to Wolfe’s room at 8:15 in the morning, but it wasn’t there. Evidently his imagination and wit hadn’t delivered. Fritz’s had. In the kitchen there was a dish of Lobster Cardinal and a saucer with Parmesan ready grated. I sprinkled the cheese on and put it in the broiler, and drank milk and made coffee while it was browning, and while I was thinking that when Fritz came down after taking up the breakfast tray he might have word that I was to go up for instructions. Now that we had flushed the mother we had damn well better get a gun up.

Nothing doing. When Fritz returned to the kitchen at 8:20 Saturday morning, no word; and I had done with only six hours’ sleep in order to be on tap. I decided to poke him, and it would be better to get him in his room before he went up to the orchids, so I speeded up with the poached eggs Creole and toasted muffins and skipped the second cup of coffee; and I was pushing my chair back when the phone rang.

It was Saul. He asked if I had listened to the 8:30 news, and I said no, I had been brooding.

“Then I’m bad news,” he said. “About three hours ago a cop found a corpse in an alley off of Perry Street and it has been identified as Carol Mardus. She was strangled.”

I said something but it didn’t get out. My throat was clogged. I cleared it. “Anything else?”

“No, that was all.”

“Thank you very much. I don’t have to tell you to bite your tongue.”

“Of course.”

“And stand by.” I hung up.

I looked at my watch: 8:53.1 went to the hall, to the stairs, mounted a flight, found the door standing open, and entered. Wolfe had finished breakfast and was on his feet, shirt-sleeved, his jacket in his hand.

“Yes?” he demanded.

“Saul just phoned an item from the eight-thirty news. The body of Carol Mardus was found in an alley by a cop. Strangled.”

He glared. “No.”

“Yes.”

He threw the jacket at me.

It came close, but I didn’t catch it; I was too stunned. I couldn’t believe he had actually done it. As I stood and stared he moved. He went to the house phone, on the table by a window, pushed the button, and lifted the receiver, and in a moment said in a voice tight with rage, “Good morning, Theodore. I won’t be with you this morning.” He cradled the phone and started pacing back and forth. He never paced. After half a dozen turns he came and picked up the jacket, put it on, and headed for the door.

“Where are you bound for?” I demanded.

“The plant rooms,” he said, and kept going, and the sound came of the elevator. He was off his hinges. I went down to the kitchen and got my second cup of coffee.

W
hen Wolfe entered the office at eleven o’clock, assuming that he followed his schedule, he found on his desk a note which read as follows:

Actually the phone number was useless if he had something urgent to say, because at the moment he was reading the note I was in the Heron with the client beside me, parked under a tree at the roadside. There were two weekend guests at the cottage, in addition to the maid and cook and nurse, not a good setting for a strictly private conversation, and I had got Lucy in the car and away before telling her the news. Now, parked,
I could give her my whole attention, and she needed it. She had a grip on my arm and her teeth were clamped on her lip.

“Okay,” I said, “it’s tough. It’s damn tough. All the ifs. If you hadn’t hired Nero Wolfe I wouldn’t have found Ellen Tenzer, and if I hadn’t found her she wouldn’t have been murdered. If you hadn’t helped with that article in the paper and the baby-carriage act we wouldn’t have found Carol Mardus, and if we hadn’t found her
she
wouldn’t have been murdered. But you have simply—”

“Do you
know
that, Archie?”

“No. I only know what Saul told me and what I heard on the radio on the way here. Just what I told you. But it’s a million to one that that’s why she got it. You have simply got to ignore the ifs. If you want to turn loose because of the risks you’ll be taking if you don’t, that might be sensible—”

“I don’t want to turn loose.”

I guess I gawked. “You don’t?”

“No. I want Nero Wolfe to find him. To get him. The man who—the murderer—he killed both of them, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“He put the baby in my vestibule, didn’t he?”

“Yes. Almost certainly.”

“Then I want Nero Wolfe to get him.”

“The cops would get him sooner or later.”

“I want Nero Wolfe to get him.”

I thought to myself, you never know. I had wasted my breath on the ifs; they were no longer bothering her. Maybe it was merely a matter of quantity; she could feel responsible for one murder but not for two. Any- how, my errand had turned out to be quite different from what I had expected.

“Mr. Wolfe would certainly like to get him,” I said. “So would I. But you’re his client and you must understand that this changes the situation. On Ellen Tenzer we could claim that no connection had been established between her death and the job you hired Mr. Wolfe to do, and probably get away with it. Not on Carol Mardus. If we don’t tell what we know about her, and the ‘we’ includes you, we are definitely withholding important evidence in a homicide case, and we couldn’t claim we didn’t know it was important evidence. Of course we know. So if we don’t tell, and the cops dig it up themselves and get the murderer before we do, we’re sunk. Mr. Wolfe and I would not only lose our licenses, we would also probably be sent up on a felony charge. You have no—”

“Archie, I don’t—”

“Let me finish. You have no license to lose, but you would also be open to the felony charge. I doubt very much if they would press it, they probably wouldn’t even charge you, but you would be wide open. I want to make that absolutely clear before you decide what to do.”

“But you mean … you would go to jail?”

“Probably.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“I’ll turn loose.”

“Damn it, Lucy, you’ve twisted it all around. Or I have. We don’t want you to turn loose. We positively don’t. Mr. Wolfe is stiff with fury. He resented Ellen Tenzer being killed because he sent me to her, but that was nothing compared to this. If he doesn’t nail the man who killed Carol Mardus he won’t eat for a year. I
merely had to make it plain what you might be in for if you stick.”

“But you’ll go to jail.”

“That’s my funeral. Also my business, I’m a detective. Leave that to us. The cops don’t know there is any connection between Carol Mardus and Ellen Tenzer and you and us, and with any kind of a break they won’t know until we’ve got the murderer, and then it won’t matter. Have you mentioned Carol Mardus to anybody?”

“No.”

“Positive?”

“Yes. You ordered me not to.”

“So I did. I now order you to forget Mr. Wolfe and me and think only of yourself. Do you stick or let go?”

She gripped my arm again. Her fingers were stronger than you would expect. “Tell me honestly, Archie. Do you want me to stick? Thinking only of yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Then I stick. Kiss me.”

“That sounds like an order.”

“It is.”

Twenty minutes later I turned the Heron into the driveway, circled around the curve, and stopped at the door of the cottage. No one was visible; they were all on the beach side. As Lucy was getting out I spoke. “I just had an idea. I have one a year. I might possibly be walking past the house and feel like dropping in. May I have a key?”

Her eyes widened. Nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a thousand, as things stood between us, would have said, “Of course, but why?” She said only, “Of course,” swung the car door shut, and went. In a couple of minutes she was back. She handed me the key,
said, “No phone call for you,” and tried hard to smile. I pressed the gas pedal and was off.

One of the various prospects for the future that I didn’t care for was sitting down for lunch with Wolfe. It would be painful. He always talked at table, and one of two things would happen. Either he would grump through it without even trying, or worse, he would pick something as far as possible from babies or murders, say the influence of Freud on theological dogma, and fight his way through. The prospect was bad enough without that. So I stopped at a place along the way and ate duckling, with a sauce that Fritz would have turned up his nose at, and it was five minutes to two when, after leaving the Heron at the garage around the corner, I mounted the stoop of the old brownstone and used my key.

Wolfe would be toward the end of lunch. But he wasn’t. Not in the dining room. Crossing the hall to the office door, I glanced in. He wasn’t there either, but someone else was. Leo Bingham was in the red leather chair, and Julian Haft was in one of the yellow ones. Their heads turned to me, and their faces were not cheerful. I beat it to the kitchen, and there was Wolfe at my breakfast table, with a board of cheese, crackers, and coffee. He looked up, grunted, and chewed. Fritz said, “The duckling’s warm, Archie. Flemish olive sauce.”