The Father Hunt

You would think that getting through to a vice-president would be easier and quicker than to a president, but it wasn't. Some underling positively wouldn't put Mr. McCray on until Mr. Wolfe was on, and when they were both on, voice to voice, Wolfe got clogged too. He was polite enough, saying how he would appreciate it if Mr. McCray would come at three o'clock, but McCray wasn't even sure he could come at six, and wouldn't Monday do? He wanted to get away for the weekend, but finally agreed to make it at six or a little after.

The trio stayed until lunchtime. I got a Washington call through to a three-star general at the Pentagon who hadn't forgotten something Wolfe had once done for him, strictly private, and he told Wolfe he would be glad to see Orrie Cather and give him any assistance that security would permit. Most of the hour and a half was spent on Saul's and Fred's program. All they would have were the two names and the photographs; they didn't even know if during those long-gone months she had slept among eight million others in New York or in some suburb-or even in Wisconsin. We had the names of only four people who had known her then: the Jarretts, father and son and daughter, and Bertram McCray. The daughter lived in Italy, and McCray had told me that all he knew about Elinor Denovo after she moved out of the Jarrett house was that he had seen her there three or four times during those six or seven months. It's hard to start when you have nowhere to start from. The best we could do was

three feeble stabs: Fred, with photographs, would go the rounds of shops, from dry cleaners to drugstores, in the neighborhood of the Jarrett houses, town and country; Saul would try anything that occurred to him, from old telephone directories to the charge-account records of mid-town stores; and I would put an ad in all New York papers.

After lunch I did that, taking it to an agency instead of phoning it in, because it was to be a display, not a classified, two columns wide and three inches high. Wolfe had drafted it:

$500

will be paid for any verifiable information regarding the whereabouts

and movements of CARLOTTA VAUGHN

alias

ELINOR DENOVO between April 1,1944 and October 1, 1944 Box