The Father Hunt

being neglected. I had phoned her Friday morning that it was very unlikely that Jarrett was her father, and told her why, and that was all. She deserved to know that she had been right about Denovo, that her mother's real name was Carlotta Vaughn; at least we could give her that for the eight days we had been on it. Personally, there I was bound for a swimming pool in a glade while Orrie was in Washington digging into army records and Saul and Fred were poking into holes that were probably empty. I should have been doing something brilliant, like finding a mattress somewhere with hairs from two human heads on it which a scientist would prove had been left there by Carlotta Vaughn, alias Elinor Denovo, and Eugene Jarrett.

I wasn't feeling any better as I drove back to town Sunday evening. The weekend had been messy. There is never more than one house guest besides me; it may be anybody from a female poet to a cowboy from the Montana ranch Lily owns; and that time it was Amy Denovo. She gave it a good start only an hour after I arrived. She called me Archie. We were on the terrace. I had finished off the steak Mimi had broiled-they had eaten-and was forking the blueberry pie when Amy got out a cigarette and I lit it, and she said, "Thank you, Archie." Of course Lily didn't bat an eye; she wouldn't. But as far as she knew Amy had seen me only three times for a total of about nine minutes, and she didn't have to be a cluster of vagaries to wonder what the score was. Was Amy just being flip, or had I decided to see more of her, not at the penthouse, and taken steps? I couldn't tell her what Miss Denovo had hired Wolfe to do, so I skipped it. But it was there in the air. Between Lily and me it was thoroughly understood that what I did was none of her business unless it touched her-and, naturally, vice versa-but the fact that I had met Miss Denovo at the penthouse put it on the borderline. So it didn't help the weekend.

A couple of other things didn't help either. One of the five guests for lunch Saturday was a woman with a green wig who had positive inside information that President Johnson and Dean Rusk had decided three years ago to kill everybody in China with hydrogen bombs, and that was the real reason for what they were doing in Vietnam.