The Mother Hunt (Rex Stout Library)

Not much of a tip this time, I told him. I'm checking on a rumor I just heard. Have you got anything on a woman named Tenzer? Ellen Tenzer?

Ellen Tenzer.

Right.

We might have. Don't be so damned roundabout, Archie. If you want to know how far we have got on a murder just say so.

So.

That's more like it. We haven't got very far unless more has come in the last hour. Around six o'clock this morning a cop glanced in a car, a Rambler sedan, that was parked on Thirty-eighth Street near Third Avenue and saw a woman in the back, on the floor. She had been strangled with a piece of cord that was still around her throat and had been dead five or six hours. She has been tentatively identified as an Ellen Tenzer of Mahopac, New York. That's it. I can call downstairs for the latest and call you back if it's that important.

I told him no, thanks, it wasn't important at all, and hung up. So did Wolfe. He glared at me and I glared back.

This makes it nice, I said. Talk about ifs.

He shook his head. Futile.

One particular if. If I had stuck and gone to work on her then and there I might have opened her up and she would be here right now and we would be wrapping it up. To hell with intelligence guided by experience.

Futile.

What isn't, now? We couldn't have asked for anything neater than white horsehair buttons, and now we've got absolutely nothing, and we'll have Stebbins and Cramer on our necks. Thirty-eighth Street is in Homicide South.

Homicide is their problem, not ours.

Tell them that. The niece will tell them that a button merchant named Archie Goodwin got her to give him her aunt's address Thursday afternoon. The guy at the filling station will describe the man who wanted directions to her place Friday morning. They'll find thousands of my fingerprints all over the house, including the cellar, nice and fresh. I might as well call Parker now and tell him to get set to arrange bail when I'm booked as a material witness.

Wolfe grunted. You can supply no information relevant to the murder.

I stared. The hell I can't.