The Father Hunt

"I'll bet you could. Now we have a problem. I have to ask people questions about your mother, a few of those whose names you gave me yesterday, and I am to start with Raymond Thorne. You'll phone him and tell him you're sending me and you hope he'll cooperate, but I can't just say I'm after men your mother knew in the summer of nineteen forty-four-that's when the genes met -since you don't want anyone to know or even suspect that it's a father hunt. So I have a suggestion, approved by Mr. Wolfe, which we expect you to approve."

"Oh, I'll approve anything you-" She stopped and tightened her lips. Then she smiled. "Listen to me. You might think I had no brains at all. Tell me and we'll see." I told her.

5

The office of Raymond Thome Productions was on the sixth floor of one of the newer steel-and-glass hives on Madison Avenue in the Forties. Judging from its size, and the furniture and fixtures, and the cordial smile of the receptionist, the television art, or maybe industry, was doing fine. Also I had to wait twenty minutes to get in to Thorne, though he had told Amy on the phone that his door would always be open for her or anyone she sent.

Of course I wasn't suspecting that he might himself be the target. In her letter Elinor had told Amy that she hadn't seen or heard from her father since four months before she was born, and there was no reason to suppose that that might be flam and she had seen him every work day for twenty years. The idea that a detective should suspect everything that everybody says is a good general rule, but there's a limit.

Thorne and his room went together fine. The room was big and modern and so was he. After giving me a man-to-man handshake and saying how much he would like to help Amy any way he could, and telling me to sit, he returned to his desk and said he didn't know what it was I wanted because Amy had been rather vague on the phone.

I nodded. "She thought I could tell it better, but it's really very simple. She wants Nero Wolfe-you may have heard the name."

"Oh, sure."

"She wants him to find out who killed her mother. I think she's a little hipped on it, but that's her privilege.

She thinks the cops should have nailed him long ago, and also she thinks they went at it wrong. She thinks it was premeditated murder. In fact, she's sure it was. Don't ask me why she's sure; I have asked her, and she says it's intuition. How old were you when you learned not to argue with intuition?"

"It's so long ago I've forgotten."