The Father Hunt

"Yes, he was one of the doctors who had tried to save my mother. He's an internist and the cancer specialists had taken charge, but my mother depended on him. Don't ask me, ask him." He brushed it aside. "Ask me anything you want to about Carlotta Vaughn, but I doubt if I know anything that will help. She changed her name to Elinor Denovo, and she had a daughter now twenty-two years old, and during those twenty-two years my father sent her a check for a thousand dollars every month. Is that the situation?"

"Yes."

"Then I need a new label for him. This is fantastic. It doesn't fit anything I thought I knew about him. Not that he would ignore a responsibility; he fulfills any and all responsibilities; but he decides when he is responsible and when he isn't. He certainly wouldn't have felt responsible if I had impregnated Carlotta Vaughn or any other woman, or a dozen. Bert McCray thinks it was blackmail, but it wasn't. It's inconceivable that he has ever, submitted to blackmail by anybody for anything. It's fascinating. I understand from Avery Ballou that this Elinor Denovo is

dead, but didn't she ever tell anyone what the money was for?"

"While alive, no. But a letter opened by her daughter after her death said this money is from your father. And again, this money came from your father. Mr. Goodwin and I see no reason to question it."

"Fantastic. Unbelievable." Jarrett narrowed his eyes to slits, put his elbows on the chair arms, and rubbed his left palm with his right. Then he came up and was on his feet. "I'm no good sitting down." He moved, across to the bookshelves and looked at titles, then to the globe and rotated it, slowly, twice around. He came and stood in the center of the room, looking down at me as if I were a pretty girl on a cloud, then turned to Wolfe. "I don't do anything at the bank, you know. I know nothing about banking. But they don't keep me and pay me only because my father owns stock that he won't sell. They say I have insight. I don't know what to call it, I can't label that, but I do sometimes see -things that they have not seen. I have never tried to force it, and I'm not going to try to force this, but I want to see it more than I have ever wanted to see anything. My father!"