The Father Hunt

"Cramer: 'By God, I will. Some day I will.' "

Wolfe waved a hand toward the hall, waving Cramer out. "Next time I'll turn the recorder on. Questions."

I uncrossed my legs and straightened up. "No questions, just two comments. First, I think you left out a word or two, particularly one that he often uses. That's censorship, which you condemn. Second, there's something about that hit-and-run that makes it special, and it would be nice to know what it is. Cramer wouldn't be bothering personally about a three-month-old hit-and-run, even with you interested in the victim, unless it had some- special kink. Maybe a hot lead that fizzled out-anyway, something. But as you said, it's her life we're working on, not her death. Thank you for the report. Satisfactory."

He pushed a button, two short and one long, for beer.

I spent most of the next three hours finding out next to nothing about Eugene Jarrett. He wasn't in Who's Who, and since there was no other likely source of information about him in the office I went for a walk, keeping on the

sfiady side of the street. There were just four items about him in the Gazette morgue, and the only two worth an entry in my notebook were that he had married a girl named Adele Baldwin on November 18, 1951, and he had become a vice-president of Seaboard Bank and Trust Company in December 1959. Lon Cohen knew absolutely nothing about him, and neither did a couple of others on the Gazette that he got on the phone. On the way out I stopped at the sixteenth floor to see if there were any more replies to the ad and got two that were more of the same.