The Father Hunt Read Online Free PDF

she would like to dip in'I passed, and I still do. After spending three hours with her I doubt it, and anyway, does it matter'To us?”
    “No.” He put his cup down and pushed it back. “Monday should be more fruitful. You’re off, I suppose.”
    I nodded. “I was expected last evening, as you know.” I rose. “Shall I put that in the safe?”
    He said no, he would, and I gave him the key to the box, put the notebook in a drawer, whirled my chair and pushed it against my desk as always, and went-out and up to my room to change and pack a bag. I had phoned Lily that I would make it in time for dinner.
    It was a quarter to three when I left the house, walked around the corner to the garage, got the Heron, and headed up Tenth Avenue. At Thirty-sixth Street I turned right. The direct route would have been left on Forty-fifth Street for the West Side Highway, but I don’t like to have something itching me when I’m stretched out at the edge of Lily’s swimming pool and flowers are smelling and birds are flying and so on. On East Forty-third Street parking was no problem on Saturday afternoon.
    Entering the Gazette building, I took the elevator to the twentieth floor. For the file I could have gone to the morgue instead, but Lon Cohen might know of some recent development that the Gazette hadn’t had room for. When I entered his room, two doors down from the publisher’s corner room, he was talking to one of the three phones on his desk and I sat on the one other chair, at
    the end of the desk, and waited. When he hung up he swung around and said, “After what happened Thursday night how did you get here'Walk'You sure didn’t have taxi fare.”
    I answered suitably, and when personal comments were, in my opinion, even, I said I knew I shouldn’t bother an assistant to a publisher about something trivial; I only wanted to get the details of a hit-and-run that had killed a woman named Elinor Denovo, the last week in May, and would he ring the morgue and tell them to oblige me. He got at a phone and did what he knew I expected him to, told someone to bring the file up to him. When a boy came with it, in about six minutes, no more, he was at another phone and I had moved my chair about a foot back to be discreet. The boy put the file on his desk and I reached and got it.
    There were only seven items: four clippings and three typed reports. It hadn’t made the front page, but was on page 3 for Saturday, May 27, and the first thing I noticed was that there was no picture of her, so even the Gazette hadn’t dug one up. I went through everything. Mrs. Elinor Denovo (so she was Mrs. to the world) had returned her car to the garage where she kept it, on Second Avenue near Eighty-third Street, Friday night after midnight, and told the attendant she would want it around noon the next day. Three minutes later, as she was crossing Eighty-third Street in the middle of the block, presumably bound for her apartment on Eighty-second Street, a car had hit her, tossed her straight ahead, and run over her with two wheels. Only four people had seen it happen: a man on the sidewalk walking east, a hundred feet or more away, a man and woman on the sidewalk going west, the same direction as the car, about the same distance away, and a taxi driver who had just turned his cab into Eighty-third Street from Second Avenue. They all said that the car that hit her hadn’t even slowed down, but were unanimous on nothing else. The hackie thought the driver, alone in the car, was a woman. The man coming east said it was a man, alone. The man and woman thought it was two men, both in the front seat. The hackie thought the car was a Dodge Coronet but wasn’t sure; the man coming
    east said it was a Chewy; the man and woman didn’t know. Two of them said the car was dark green, one said it was dark blue, and one said it was black. So much for eyewitnesses. Actually, it was a dark-gray Ford. It was hot. Mrs. David A. Ernst of Scarsdale, who owned it,