The Father Hunt by Rex Stout Read Free Book Online Page B

connected with her work here. Could you suggest a candidate?”
    He shook his head. “You mentioned that before. I don’t have to dodge. Forget it. There are forty-six people in this organization, counting everybody. Over the years there have been, oh, I suppose around a hundred and fifty. They haven’t all thought Mrs. Denovo was perfect, we’ve had our share of scraps and grudges, but murder'Not a chance. Forget it.”
    Of course I was glad to, since Amy’s father couldn’t f have been one of the hundred and fifty unless Elinor had lied in the letter, and I decided it wasn’t necessary to nag him just to keep up appearances. I opened the notebook. “Okay, we’ll pass that for now. Now some dates. When did Mrs. Denovo start with you?”
    “I looked that up the day I found the pictures. It was July second, nineteen forty-five.”
    “You had known her before that?”
    “No. She walked in that morning and said she had heard that I needed a stenographer. I was in radio then- we got into television later-and I had only four people in three little rooms on Thirty-ninth Street. It was vacation time and my secretary had gone on hers, so I handed Mrs. Denovo a notebook and gave her some letters. And she was so good I kept her.”
    “Had she been sent by an agency?”
    “No. I asked who had sent her, and she said nobody, she had heard someone say I needed a stenographer.”
    “But you checked on her references.”
    “I never asked her for any. Three days was enough to see how good she was, not only as a stenographer, and I didn’t bother. After a week I didn’t give a damn where she had worked before or how she happened to walk in that morning. It didn’t matter.”
    I closed the notebook and stuck it in my pocket. “But that makes it a blank. First you tell me to forget everybody connected with her work here, there’s not a chance it was one of them, and now are you saying you know nothing about her before the second of July, nineteen forty-five'What she had done or where she had been?”
    “Yes, I am.”
    “After being closely associated with her for twenty-two years'I don’t believe it.”
    He nodded. “You’re not the first detective that can’t believe it. Two of them from the police, at different times, couldn’t either. But it’s-“
    “Were they here recently?”
    “No, that was back in May, just after her death. But it’s true. She never spoke of her family or background- anything you could call personal, and she wasn’t a woman you would& Well, she kept her distance. I’ll give you an example. Once a woman-an important woman, important to us; she represented one of our clients-she was saying something about her sister, and she asked Mrs. Denovo if she had a sister, and she just ignored it. Not even a yes or no. I’m pretty quick at getting on to people, and within a month after I met her, less than that, I knew she had lines I wasn’t to cross. And I never did. If you want to ask some of the others here go ahead, but you’ll be wasting your time. Do you want to try?”
    Ordinarily I would have said yes, and perhaps I should have, but I was only partly there. I had come only because Wolfe had said to. Where I wanted to be was with Avery Ballou. So I said I didn’t want to interfere with their lunch hours but I might be back later, tomorrow if not today, and thanked him on behalf of Miss Denovo. He said if I come tomorrow he would have the copies of the photographs by four o’clock, and I thanked him again.
    As I went down the hall to the elevator I decided to head for Al’s diner and treat myself to bacon and eggs and home-fried potatoes. Eggs are never fried in Wolfe’s and Fritz’s kitchen, and neither are potatoes, but that wasn’t the main point. The idea of sitting through lunch with Wolfe and discussing something like the future of computers or the effect of organized sport on American culture, when we should be discussing how to handle Avery Ballou, didn’t appeal to me.
    But