The Father Hunt

"No. She walked in that morning and said she had heard that I needed a stenographer. I was in radio then- we got into television later-and I had only four people in three little rooms on Thirty-ninth Street. It was vacation time and my secretary had gone on hers, so I handed Mrs. Denovo a notebook and gave her some letters. And she was so good I kept her."

"Had she been sent by an agency?"

"No. I asked who had sent her, and she said nobody, she had heard someone say I needed a stenographer."

"But you checked on her references."

"I never asked her for any. Three days was enough to see how good she was, not only as a stenographer, and I didn't bother. After a week I didn't give a damn where she had worked before or how she happened to walk in that morning. It didn't matter."

I closed the notebook and stuck it in my pocket. "But that makes it a blank. First you tell me to forget everybody connected with her work here, there's not a chance it was one of them, and now are you saying you know nothing about her before the second of July, nineteen forty-five? What she had done or where she had been?"

"Yes, I am."

"After being closely associated with her for twenty-two years? I don't believe it."

He nodded. "You're not the first detective that can't believe it. Two of them from the police, at different times, couldn't either. But it's-"

"Were they here recently?"

"No, that was back in May, just after her death. But it's true. She never spoke of her family or background- anything you could call personal, and she wasn't a woman you would… Well, she kept her distance. I'll give you an example. Once a woman-an important woman, important to us; she represented one of our clients-she was saying something about her sister, and she asked Mrs. Denovo if she had a sister, and she just ignored it. Not even a yes or no. I'm pretty quick at getting on to people, and within a month after I met her, less than that, I knew she had lines I wasn't to cross. And I never did. If you want to ask some of the others here go ahead, but you'll be wasting your time. Do you want to try?"