The Mother Hunt (Rex Stout Library)

Saul and Fred and Orrie were in the old brownstone Saturday evening until after midnight. They spent the first half hour in the office getting briefed (Saul was to direct their deployment in the square in the morning), and the next three hours in the dining room with me, with refreshments, playing pinochle.

SUNDAY MORNING. To the kitchen for breakfast at nine thirty. At ten o'clock, the moment when Sally would be entering the square pushing the carriage, I was starting on my third sour-milk griddle cake with my right hand, while my left hand held the Gazette open to the full page spread entitled WOMEN LOVE BABIES. It's a matter of taste. In my opinion, WOMEN LIKE BABIES would have been more subtle.

When Lon Cohen said there would be a mob he had overrated something, perhaps the punch of the Gazette. The Sunday crop was twenty-six pictures, seven in the morning and nineteen in the afternoon. I was at the house when Sally returned with the carriage and its cargo a little after five, and helped her remove the films. There had been only two exposures with the camera in the box at the front of the carriage, but we rolled it through and took it. The way we were spending the client's dough, another couple of bucks was nothing.

Twenty-four hours later we still didn't know whether we had a picture of the mother or not. All we knew was that Lucy didn't recognize any of the twenty-six as someone she could name, and Julian Haft, Leo Bingham, and Willis Krug said they didn't. Wolfe had spoken to each of them on the phone in the morning, asking them to look at some pictures without explaining how we had got them, and when I got the prints from A1 Posner around noon, six of each, I had sent packets by messenger. By five o'clock they had all phoned. Negative from all three. I took a set to Lucy and she gave them a good look. There was one she wasn't sure about, but the woman she thought it resembled had been on her list and had been eliminated by Saul. She invited me to stay until Sally took the baby on the afternoon outing and returned, and get the day's crop of films, but I wanted to be at 35th Street to get the reports from Krug and Haft and Bingham.

At twenty minutes past four Haft and Bingham had called but not Krug, and when the phone rang I supposed it would be him. But after the first word of the routine I was interrupted.

Saul, Archie. A booth on University Place.

And?