The Father Hunt

Monday morning a sunburned woman at the East and West Realty Corporation gave us the name of the previous agent, Kauffman Management Company, and at their office on Forty-second Street we were lucky enough to find a smart and active young man who believed in giving service. He spent half an hour looking up old records. The man who had been the superintendent at Ten East Thirty-ninth Street in 1944, named William Polk, had died in 1962. There was no record of the names of any of the service personnel, but there was a complete list of the 1944 tenants-twenty-two of them, counting Floyd Vance-and we copied it. The smart young man said there was no one active in the Kauffman Management Company who had been there for twenty-three years. Bernard Kauffman, who had founded it, was dead.

Saul and I each took half of the list of tenants and went to work on them. I could make a full report on the first four I tackled, but this is not a treatise on economics or sociology. It was the fifth one that rang the gong, a little before five o'clock in the afternoon-a woman named Dorothy Sebor, fifty, gray-haired and blue-eyed and fully as smart as the young man at the Kauffman Management

Company-who beaded and probably owned the Sebor Shopping Service in a tenth-floor suite at Rockefeller Center. She was busy. The forty minutes I spent with her wouldn't have been more than half that if the phone hadn't interrupted several times, and I might have had a problem getting to her if I hadn't sent in word that I wanted to ask her something about Ten East Thirty-ninth Street. When I entered her room she asked if I was the Archie Goodwin who worked for Nero Wolfe, and when I said yes she asked, "But what can I possibly tell you about Ten East Thirty-ninth Street? I left eighteen years ago. I loved that dump. Sit down."

I sat. "I don't know what you can tell me, Miss Sebor, but I know what I want to ask. A job we're on goes back pretty far and it's nineteen forty-four we're interested in. Would you mind telling me what floor you were on?"

"No, why should I? The ninth. In the rear."

"We understand that another of the tenants was named Floyd Vance. Did you know him?"

"I wouldn't say I knew him. I knew him by sight, he was on the same floor, the ninth, down the hall toward the front. We exchanged nods, remarks about the weather; you know how it is."