The Father Hunt

some- special kink. Maybe a hot lead that fizzled out-anyway, something. But as you said, it's her life we're working on, not her death. Thank you for the report. Satisfactory.'

He pushed a button, two short and one long, for beer.

I spent most of the next three hours finding out next to nothing about Eugene Jarrett. He wasn't in Who's Who, and since there was no other likely source of information about him in the office I went for a walk, keeping on the

sfiady side of the street. There were just four items about him in the Gazette morgue, and the only two worth an entry in my notebook were that he had married a girl named Adele Baldwin on November 18, 1951, and he had become a vice-president of Seaboard Bank and Trust Company in December 1959. Lon Cohen knew absolutely nothing about him, and neither did a couple of others on the Gazette that he got on the phone. On the way out I stopped at the sixteenth floor to see if there were any more replies to the ad and got two that were more of the same.

At the Times there was another reply, also impossible, and nothing in the morgue about Eugene Jarrett except such routine facts as that he graduated from Harvard in 1945 and he had been a sponsor of a dinner to honor somebody in 1963. The biggest blank was the New York public library, where I got stubborn and spent a full hour. You wouldn't believe that after all that expert research I didn't even know whether that vice-president of the third largest bank in New York had any children or not, when I returned to the old brownstone a little before six o'clock. But I didn't. I had supposed, when I left, that I would have to get back in time to go up to the plant rooms to brief Wolfe on him before he came, but it wasn't even worth buzzing him on the house phone. When he came down I told him that we would learn more about Eugene Jarrett in one glance at him than I had learned all afternoon, and the doorbell rang.

I was right, too. What I learned looking at him, as I let him in and escorted him to the office and got him seated in the red leather chair, may have been irrelevant and immaterial, but at least it was definite. If a vice-president of a big bank is supposed to do any work, he didn't belong there. There was no resemblance to his father at all, especially the eyes. His were gray-blue too, but even when they were aimed straight at you, you had the feeling that they were seeing something else, maybe a ship he wanted to be on or a pretty girl sitting on a cloud. I don't often have fancy ideas, so that shows you the effect those eyes had. It would be dumb to expect a man like that to do any work. The rest of him was normal enough-about my height, square-shouldered, an ordinary face. Seated, he

ignored Wolfe and me while Ms eyes took their time 'fa go around the room. Apparently they liked the rug, but they stayed longest on the globe over by the bookshelves. Not many people coming there have seen a globe as big as that one, 35Vi inches in diameter.

He finally turned the eyes on Wolfe and said, 'A fascinating occupation, yours, Mr. Wolfe. People come to you for answers as they did to the Pythia at Delphi or the Clarian prophet. But of course you make no claim to mantic divination. That is now only for charlatans. What are you, a scientist, or an artist?'

Wolfe was frowning at him. 'If you please, Mr. Jarrett, no labels. Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled. Do you have one?'

'No. But I can label any man whose faculties are concentrated on a single purpose. I can label Charles de Gaulle or Robert Welch or Stokely Carmichael.'

'If you do, don't glue them on, and have replacements handy.'

Jarrett nodded. 'Nothing is unalterable, not even a label. I have altered mine for my father several times. I mention him because it is apropos. The only reference to him in your letter was that Carlotta Vaughn was in his employ, but Bert McCray has told me about your poke at him and how he met it. He has also told me of your intention to transfer the poke to me. I would enjoy discussing my father with you-we might get a better label for him than the one I have-but your letter asks about Carlotta Vaughn. First we should dispose of me. You thought my father was the father of a child she bore, were confronted with evidence that he wasn't, and decided that I was. Is that correct?'

'Not 'decided.' Conjectured or surmised-or even inferred.'

'No matter. You're in for another disappointment. When Bert McCray told me about it Saturday, and then when your letter came, I decided to save you time and expense -and of course avoid annoyance for myself-by telling you something that many people conjecture or surmise but only a few really know. But I realized that my telling you

wouldn't settle it for you, so this morning I phoned my doctor.'

He turned to me. 'You're Archie Goodwin?'

I told him yes. He got a leather case from his pocket, fingered a card out, and extended his hand, and I went and took the card. The 'James Odell Worthington, M.D.' might actually have been engraved.

'Dr. Worthington will see you at nine tomorrow morning,' Jarrett said. 'Be on time; he's a very busy man. He will tell you that I am incapable of impregnating a woman and always have been. He has a reputation and would on no account risk it by telling you that if there was any remote possibility that you would ever prove him wrong.'

He turned to Wolfe. 'Your letter said that you want information about Carlotta Vaughn.'

I would have told him to go climb a tree. Wolfe probably would have liked to, but the only visible sign was the tip of his forefinger making a little circle on the desk blotter. He asked, 'Did Dr. Worthington know you in nineteen forty-four?'

'Yes, he was one of the doctors who had tried to save my mother. He's an internist and the cancer specialists had taken charge, but my mother depended on him. Don't ask me, ask him.' He brushed it aside. 'Ask me anything you want to about Carlotta Vaughn, but I doubt if I know anything that will help. She changed her name to Elinor Denovo, and she had a daughter now twenty-two years old, and during those twenty-two years my father sent her a check for a thousand dollars every month. Is that the situation?'