The Mother Hunt (Rex Stout Library)

It will be a Sunday feature, full page, mostly pictures. A good wholesome title, maybe WOMEN LIKE BABIES. What text there is, there won't be much, will be by one of your word artists. It will tell how Mrs. Valdon, the young, beautiful, wealthy widow of a famous man, with no child of her own, has taken a baby into her luxurious home and is giving it her loving care. How she has hired an experienced nurse who is devoted to the little toddler no, it can't toddle yet. Maybe the little angel or the little lambkin. I'm not writing it. How the nurse takes it out twice a day in its expensive carriage, from ten to eleven in the morning and from four to five in the afternoon, and wheels it around Washington Square, so it can enjoy the beauties of nature trees and grass and so forth.

I gestured. What a poem! If you have a poet on the payroll, swell, but it must include the details. The pictures can be whatever you want Mrs. Valdon feeding the baby, or even bathing it if you like nudes but one picture is a must, of the nurse with the carriage in Washington Square. I'll have to insist on that. Also it will have to be in next Sunday. The pictures can be taken tomorrow afternoon. You can thank me at your leisure. Any questions?

As he opened his mouth, not to thank me, judging by his expression, a phone buzzed. He turned and got it, the green one, listened and talked, mostly listened, and hung up. You have the nerve of a one-legged man at an ass-kicking convention, he said.

That's not only vulgar, I said, it's irrelevant.

The hell it is. You may remember that one day a month ago, when you were here asking me about Ellen Tenzer, I asked you if you had found the buttons.

Now that you remind me, yes.

And you dodged. Okay, but now listen to you. You know more about the buttons than I do, but I know this much, they were on a baby's overalls, and Ellen Tenzer made them, and some of them were on baby's overalls in her house, and she had had a baby in her house, and the night after you went to see her she was murdered. And now you come with this whimwham about Lucy Valdon and a baby, and you ask if I have any questions. I have. Is the baby in Lucy Valdon's house the one that Ellen Tenzer had in hers?

Of course I had known that would come. Absolutely off the record, I said.

All right.

Until further notice.

I said all right.

Then yes.

Is Lucy Valdon its mother?

No.