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.
When 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 Sal 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 is 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 act, 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.
MONDAY AFTERNOON. 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.
TUESDAY MORNING. To Al Posner, co-owner of the Posart 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.
TUESDAY AFTERNOON. 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 ova 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 fling 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.