The Mother Hunt (Rex Stout Library)

Pfui. If you really thought that likely you would take me. You have in your pocket a statement signed by me declaring that I have no knowledge whatever, no inkling, of the identity of the murderer of Ellen Tenzer, and I have good ground for my conviction that my client has none. As for your threat to deprive me of my license, I would sleep under a bridge and eat scraps before I would wantonly submit a client to official harassment.

Cramer shook his head. You eating scraps. Good God. Come on, Goodwin.

We had no inkling of the identity of the mother, either, and had taken no steps to get one, though we hadn't been idle. We had let Saul and Fred and Orrie go. We had read the newspapers. We had sent me to ask Lon Cohen if the Gazette had anything that hadn't been printed. We had also sent me to see the client. We had mailed fifty bucks to Beatrice Epps. We had answered phone calls, two of them being from Anne Tenzer and Nicholas Losseff.

I admit that it would have been a waste of the client's money to have Saul and Fred and Orrie check on Ellen Tenzer, since that was being done by city employees and journalists. From the papers and Lon Cohen we had more facts than we could use and more than you would care about. She had been a registered nurse but had quit working at it ten years ago, when her mother had died and she had inherited the house at Mahopac and enough to get by on. She had never married but apparently had liked babies, for she had boarded more than a dozen of them during the ten years, one at a time. Where they had come from and gone to wasn't known; specifically, no one knew anything about her last boarder except that it was a boy, it had been about one month old when it had arrived, in March, she had called it Buster, and it had left about three weeks ago. If anyone had ever visited it nobody had seen him come or go. The best source of information about the babies, the local doctor who had been called on as needed, was a tightlip. Lon doubted if even Purley Stebbins had got anything out of him.

Besides the niece, Anne, the only surviving relatives were a brother and his wife, Anne's parents, who lived in California. Anne was refusing to talk to reporters, but Lon said that apparently she hadn't seen her aunt very often and didn't know much about her.

When I had got up to go Lon had said, All take and no give, all right, there's still a balance. But I can ask a question. Did you find the buttons? Yes or no.