The Father Hunt

me.

10

Sixty-eight hours later, at three o'clock Thursday afternoon, Wolfe and I sat in the office with nothing more to say. We still had exactly what we had had Monday at dinnertime, five detectives, counting us.

First, to finish off Eugene Jarrett. At 8:50 Tuesday morning I had got off the elevator at the tenth floor of a building on Park Avenue in the Eighties, given my name to a woman at a desk, and been sent to a big old-fashioned room with twenty chairs distributed around the walls and tables, eight or nine of them occupied by people who didn't look very gay, which wasn't too discouraging because the names of four M.D.s had been on the plaque. At 9:20 another woman had come and ushered me down a hall to a door which she opened. When I entered, a gray-haired man with shaggy black eyebrows and a tired wide mouth, at a desk, writing on a pad, nodded and pointed to a chair, went on writing for a couple of minutes, and then put the pen down and turned to me. He asked if my name was Archie Goodwin and I said yes, and he said that since the information he was to give me was confidential he would like to be sure…

I got my wallet out and showed him things, and he nodded and looked at his wristwatch. 'We squeezed you in,' he said, 'because Mr. Jarrett said it was urgent. He asked me to confirm his statement to you that he is sterile and has been sterile all his adult life. Very well, I do. That is true.'

'If you don't mind,' I said, 'we want it airtight. That's of your personal knowledge? Not hearsay?'

'I wouldn't make such a statement from hearsay. My professional knowledge, yes. Four examinations and analyses, at intervals, in seventeen years. Not only is the sperm count per se too low, but also the percentage of abnormal forms is too high. It is conclusive.'

'Thank you. Seventeen years ago was nineteen fifty. What about earlier? Say nineteen forty- four.'

He shook his head. 'Extremely unlikely. I would accept it as a possibility only on incontrovertible evidence, and even then with reluctance. I have known the family for nearly thirty years, since nineteen forty. If Eugene Jarrett was fertile hi nineteen forty-four only certain infections-mumps is the commonest one-could have caused his present condition, and he has had none of them.' He looked at his watch. 'Mr. Jarrett didn't tell me what this is about. If it's a paternity suit it's ridiculous. I would be glad to testify.'

I thanked him again and went. So much for Eugene Jarrett. But on the way home I stopped in at Doc Vollmer's office, in a house he owns on the same block as the old brownstone, and asked him about the reputation of James Odell Worthington, M.D., and sperm counts and abnormal forms and mumps; and that did finish off Eugene Jarrett.

Cyrus M. Jarrett was finished too, on Wednesday, when Orrie came back from Washington with three notebooks full of details from official records. The places and dates as Jarrett had rattled them off to me all checked, and if he had taken a day off to fly across the Atlantic on a personal errand off the record, where did he get an airplane in wartime?

After dinner Monday evening I had made a trip uptown and spent a couple of hours with the client. The news that her mother's real name was Carlotta Vaughn and that she had come from Wisconsin didn't impress her much; as she had said, she had known her mother all her life. Also, she wasn't too impressed by the news that we had eliminated the Jarretts; she wasn't interested in men who were not her father; what she was after was the man who was her father. I made it plain that we were no longer turning over stones, we were trying to find a stone to turn, and it was anybody's guess how long it would take. She said she should have taken my bet a week ago when

I offered her even money that we would spot her father within three days.

Saul and Fred had kept at their hunt for stones until Tuesday noon, but had been called in when I got seven more replies to the ad and three of them were worth a look. Saul took one, from a shoe-repair man on West Fifty-fourth Street who wrote that Carlotta Vaughn had been a customer of his for several months in 1944. I got his letter at the News. When Saul went to see him, he took along photographs of six other young women, and the shoeman picked Carlotta Vaughn at the first look. He knew nothing of any Elinor Denovo, but he remembered it was during the summer of 1944 that Carlotta Vaughn had been a regular customer for both repairs and shines, because it was that August that his son had been killed in action in France. He couldn't say when he had seen her last, but thought it had been late summer or early fall. He didn't think he had ever had her address, but if so it was gone now. Of course she had probably lived nearby, and after shelling out five hundred dollars to the shoeman, Saul had gone to work on the neighborhood.

A reply I got at the Times was from a woman who had been a clerk at Altaian's in 1944 and was now at a nursing home in Fairfield County. Fred took her, and found her so vague that after twenty-four hours he was still trying to find out how she knew that a customer she had waited on several times was named Carlotta Vaughn, since there was no record of any deliveries ever made to her. But she, too, had picked Carlotta Vaughn out of seven pictures, so she got her five centuries.

The third reply that seemed possible, which I got at the Gazette, was from a man named Salvatore Manzoni. I took him. He had been a waiter at Sardi's for fifteen years and still was. In 1944 he had been a waiter at Tufitti's, a restaurant on East Forty-sixth Street which had folded in 1949, and Carlotta Vaughn had dined at one of his tables two or three times a week for several months in 1944, He spotted her picture instantly, and he knew her name was Carlotta Vaughn because she had often reserved a table. What made Salvatore Manzoni a real find was that he had probably actually seen Amy's father hi the flesh, not once but many times, for Carlotta Vaughn

bad always had a male companion, and always the same one. When I heard that, I had a tingle at the bottom of my spine; by God, I was going to get the name, then and there. But I didn't. It wasn't that Salvatore Manzoni couldn't remember it; he had never known it. As far as he knew, a reservation had never been made under the man's name. Possibly it might have been known to someone else at the restaurant, perhaps the owner