The Father Hunt

I thanked him again and went. So much for Eugene Jarrett. But on the way home I stopped in at Doc Vollmer's office, in a house he owns on the same block as the old brownstone, and asked him about the reputation of James Odell Worthington, M.D., and sperm counts and abnormal forms and mumps; and that did finish off Eugene Jarrett.

Cyrus M. Jarrett was finished too, on Wednesday, when Orrie came back from Washington with three notebooks full of details from official records. The places and dates as Jarrett had rattled them off to me all checked, and if he had taken a day off to fly across the Atlantic on a personal errand off the record, where did he get an airplane in wartime?

After dinner Monday evening I had made a trip uptown and spent a couple of hours with the client. The news that her mother's real name was Carlotta Vaughn and that she had come from Wisconsin didn't impress her much; as she had said, she had known her mother all her life. Also, she wasn't too impressed by the news that we had eliminated the Jarretts; she wasn't interested in men who were not her father; what she was after was the man who was her father. I made it plain that we were no longer turning over stones, we were trying to find a stone to turn, and it was anybody's guess how long it would take. She said she should have taken my bet a week ago when

I offered her even money that we would spot her father within three days.

Saul and Fred had kept at their hunt for stones until Tuesday noon, but had been called in when I got seven more replies to the ad and three of them were worth a look. Saul took one, from a shoe-repair man on West Fifty-fourth Street who wrote that Carlotta Vaughn had been a customer of his for several months in 1944. I got his letter at the News. When Saul went to see him, he took along photographs of six other young women, and the shoeman picked Carlotta Vaughn at the first look. He knew nothing of any Elinor Denovo, but he remembered it was during the summer of 1944 that Carlotta Vaughn had been a regular customer for both repairs and shines, because it was that August that his son had been killed in action in France. He couldn't say when he had seen her last, but thought it had been late summer or early fall. He didn't think he had ever had her address, but if so it was gone now. Of course she had probably lived nearby, and after shelling out five hundred dollars to the shoeman, Saul had gone to work on the neighborhood.