The Father Hunt

"We can discuss that some other time. I have a suggestion. You may remember my saying Monday afternoon that Cramer wouldn't be bothering about a three-months-old hit-and-run unless it had some special kink. It might help to know what it is. I request permission to go and ask him."

"Why should he tell you?"

"Leave that, quoting you, to my intelligence guided by experience."

"You can't give him the client's name."

"Certainly not. But he probably knows it, after that ad."

"Very well. First, Mr. Thorne."

It took nearly an hour to get Raymond Thorne because he was somewhere watching TV cameras make a Raymond Thome production, and when I finally had him he said he couldn't possibly make it at six o'clock. I reminded him that he had told me he would like to help Amy any way he could, and he said he would come at nine. Getting Inspector Cramer was easier and quicker. He was at his

office and would see me. Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms and I went to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was leaving.

The cop at the top of Homicide South could surely have had a bigger room and a bigger desk and better chairs for visitors than the setup on West Twentieth Street, but Cramer liked to stick to things he was used to, including that old felt hat, which was always there on a corner of his desk when it wasn't on his head, although there was a rack only a step away. I sat on the wooden chair at the end of his desk while he finished with a folder he was going through. When he closed it and turned to me, I said, "I bring hot news. We're working on that hit-and-run. Mr. Wolfe thought we should tell you because we said we weren't."

He put on an act. He demanded, "What hit-and-run?"

"On May twenty-sixth, nineteen sixty-seven, a woman named Elinor Denovo was crossing Eighty-second Street and-"

"Oh, yes. So you're working on it. So Wolfe wants to know something, so he sends you. He can go to hell."