The Mother Hunt (Rex Stout Library)

There has never been a smoother operation since Whosis scattered the dust on the temple floor. Absolutely flawless. Orrie got taken to an apartment-house superintendent by a doorman, but it wasn't his fault, and Fred got bounced from backstage in a theater, but a bounce is all in the day's work. As an example of superlative snoopery it was a perfect performance. And when Saul phoned at half past three Saturday afternoon, July 7, to report that he had closed the last little gap in the adoption and had actually seen the baby, and the operation was complete, we were precisely where we had been on June 12, twenty-six days earlier.

With a difference, though. There had been a couple of developments, but we hadn't done the developing. One, the minor one, was that I was no longer the last person known to have seen Ellen Tenzer alive. That Friday afternoon she had called at the home of a Mrs. James R. Nesbitt on East 68th Street, an ex-patient from her New York nursing days. Mrs. Nesbitt had waited nearly two weeks to mention it because she didn't want her name to appear in connection with a murder, but had finally decided she must. Presumably the DA had promised her that her name would not appear, but some journalist had somehow got it, and hooray for freedom of the press. Not that Mrs. Nesbitt was really any help. Ellen Tenzer had merely said she needed advice about something from a lawyer and had asked Mrs. Nesbitt to tell her the name of one who could be trusted, and she had done so and had phoned the lawyer to make an appointment. But Ellen Tenzer hadn't kept the appointment. She hadn't told Mrs. Nesbitt why she needed a lawyer. Mrs. Nesbitt was added to Saul's list of names, just in case, but she hadn't had a baby for ten years and her twenty-year-old daughter had never had one.