Free The Mother Hunt by Rex Stout Page A

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.”
    Having played poker with him a lot of nights, I had had plenty of practice handling my face in his presence. “If you had a trained mind like me,” I said, “you wouldn’t do that. We ran that ad, and now we want to know about Ellen Tenzer, so you assume there’s a connection. None at all. Wolfe likes white horsehair buttons on his pants.”
    “I raise.”
    “For his suspenders,” I said, and went.
    The phone call from Nicholas Losseff came Saturday afternoon. I had been expecting it, since of course Anne Tenzer would have told the cops that Archie Goodwinwas from the Exclusive Novelty Button Company, and they would see him, and no one enjoys talking with homicide dicks. So he would be sore. But he wasn’t. He only wanted to know if I had found out where the buttons came from. I asked him if he had had official callers, and he said yes, that was why he thought I might have news for him. I told him I was afraid I never would have, and
then
he was sore. If I ever get as hipped on one thing as he was, it won’t be buttons.
    Anne Tenzer phoned Sunday morning. I was expecting that too, since my name had been in the papers’ accounts of the developments in what the
News
called the baby-sitter murder. One paper said I was Nero Wolfe’s assistant and another said I was his legman. I don’t know which one Anne Tenzer had seen. She
was
sore, but she didn’t seem to know exactly why. Not that she resented my pretending to be a button man, and not that she blamed me for what had happened to her aunt. When we hung up I took a minute to consider it and decided that she was sore because she was phoning me. It might give me the false impression that she wanted to hear my voice again. Which it did. Granting it was false, she should have settled on exactly what she was sore about before she dialed.
    Nobody is ever as famous as he thinks he is, including me. When, keeping an appointment I had made on the phone, I pushed the button in the vestibule on West Eleventh Street, Sunday morning, and was admitted by Marie Foltz, there was no sign that she had seen my name in the paper. I was just an interruption to what she had been doing. And when I entered the big room one flight up and approached the client, who was at the piano, she finished a run before she turned on the benchand said politely, “Good morning. I suppose you have news?”
    My tongue wanted to ask if she had ever finished the martini, but I vetoed it. “Of a sort,” I said. “If you have seen the morning paper—”
    “I’ve seen it but I haven’t read it. I never do.”
    “Then I’ll have to brief you.” I got a chair and moved it up to a polite distance, and sat. “If you never read the papers I suppose you didn’t see Mr. Wolfe’s ad on Thursday.”
    “No. An ad?”
    “Right. You may remember that I thought the buttons on the overalls were unusual, and he thought so too. The ad offered a reward for information about white horsehair buttons, and we got some. After some maneuvering that wouldn’t interest you, I went to Mahopac Friday morning—do you know where Mahopac is?”
    “Of course.”
    “And called on a woman named Ellen Tenzer, having learned that she made white horsehair buttons. We have now learned more about her, not from her. She made the buttons that are on