The Father Hunt

I went to the pot of coffee on Wolfe's desk, poured a full cup, returned to my chair, and took a couple of sips. "Did Elinor have any close friends, men or women? Amy doesn't know. Of course she has been away at college for most of the last four years. What was Elinor's basic character? Careful, correct, and cold about covers it, according to Amy. One of the words she used was 'introvert,' which I would have supposed was moth-eaten for a girl just out of Smith."

I nipped a page of my notebook. "Elinor must have dropped some hints without thinking, at least one little one in twenty years, about her background, her childhood, but Amy says no. She doesn't know what Elinor did for a living before she went to work for Raymond Thome Productions, the firm she was with when she died. She doesn't even know what Elinor did, specifically, at Thome's; she only knows it must have been an important job."

I nipped another page and took some coffee. "Believe it or not, Amy doesn't know where she was born. She thinks it might have been Mount Sinai Hospital, because that's where Elinor went for an appendectomy about ten years ago, but that's just a guess. Anyway it probably wouldn't help much, since Elinor certainly wasn't letting things she didn't want known get into the record. Amy does know one thing, and of course it's essential, the date. She was bom April twelfth, nineteen forty-five. About five years ago she decided to see the doctor who signed her birth certificate but found he was dead. So she was conceived around the middle of July nineteen forty-four, so that's the time to place Elinor, but Amy doesn't know where she was living. The first home Amy remembers was a walkup, two flights, on West Ninety-second Street, when she was three. When she was seven they moved to a better one on West Seventy-eighth Street, and when she was thirteen they jumped the park to the East Side, to the one I inspected this morning."

I emptied my cup and decided it was enough. "I'll skip the details of the inspection unless you insist. As I said,