conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a story about Archie, Amy, Denovo entitled The Father Hunt.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Father Hunt: Amy Denovo, a young woman assisting Lily Rowan, hires Nero Wolfe because she must find out who her father is, or was.\nAfter her mother was killed in a recent hit-and-run, Amy received a locked metal box containing more than a quarter of a million dollars in cash—and a letter from her mother that explained only that the money came from her father.\nThe mystery of Amy\'s mother\'s identity rivals that of her father\'s.\nLily Rowan has employed Amy Denovo, a recent Smith graduate, to assist her in collecting material about her father for a story.\nAfter a brief acquaintance with Archie Goodwin, Amy intercepts him one afternoon in the lobby of Lily\'s building.\n"It\'s very personal," Amy tells Archie as she asks for a few minutes of his time.\nAmy has never known her own father, and she asks Archie to help her find out who he is, or was.\nShe believes her mother took the name Denovo—"de novo," Latin for "anew," "afresh"—because she began a new life after Amy was born.\nShe can\'t be certain because Elinor Denovo was killed three months before, in a hit-and-run.\nAmy is curious about her mother, but she must know about her father—and the inquiry must be kept secret.\nAmy knows Archie is the only person she can trust.\nAlthough he is intrigued, Archie turns Amy down.\nNero Wolfe charges high fees, and the $2,000 Amy has in the bank would not begin to cover what promises to be a long and expensive job.\nArchie floats the idea of having Lily supply the funds — she undoubtedly would—but Amy is adamant that no one is to know about the father hunt.\nLeaving Amy at a loss to know what she should do next, Archie goes to Saul Panzer\'s place to play poker—but the cards do not cooperate.\nThe next afternoon, Amy arrives at the brownstone with $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills — a retainer.\nArchie parks Amy in the front room, explains the situation to Nero Wolfe, and introduces her.\nWolfe wants reassurance that the money is in Amy\'s possession legally.\nAmy says that her mother\'s death has brought to light the fact that Elinor Denovo had received $1,000 a month since Amy was born—a total of $264,000—and that this money is from Amy\'s father.\nShe recites her mother\'s letter verbatim.\nWolfe keeps the money, but only for safekeeping pending Archie\'s verification of the letter.\nA visit to Elinor Denovo\'s apartment tells Archie next to nothing about her.\nHe reviews documents in her handwriting, finds the letter is authentic, and tells Amy she is now a client in good standing.\n"I doubt if there\'s another girl anywhere who had a mother for twenty-two years and knows so little about her," Archie tells Wolfe when he returns to the office.\nAmy has no photographs of her mother.\nShe knows nothing of her mother\'s friends, her background, her childhood.\nShe doesn\'t know what her mother did for a living before she was born.\nShe isn\'t even sure what kind of work she did for Raymond Thorne Productions, a television production company.\nShe doesn\'t know where she herself was born.\nAt the Gazette, Archie gets what little Lon Cohen can give him about the hit-and-run that killed mrs Denovo, and concludes that the police were getting nowhere.\nOn his way out, Archie stops at a phone booth to call Sergeant Purley Stebbins, and casually asks how the case is progressing.\n"It\'s hanging," Purley tells him.\n"But we\'re not forgetting it".\nInspector Cramer visits the brownstone the next morning, indicating the police will also not be forgetting that Archie is asking questions.\nArchie visits the Madison Avenue office of Raymond Thorne Productions, Elinor Denovo\'s employer for more than 20 years.\nHe tells Thorne that Amy is convinced that her mother was deliberately killed and has hired Nero Wolfe to find the murderer.\nThorne says there is no chance anyone working there killed her.\nHe, too, knows nothing of mrs Denovo\'s life before she began working for him.\nOne day in July 1945 she had walked in, he was short staffed, and after a week he didn\'t care where she\'d come from because she was so good.\nWhen she died she was vice-president of the company.\nThorne isn\'t surprised there are no photographs in the apartment, because mrs Denovo could never be persuaded to have one taken, not even for professional purposes.\nBut Thorne has one—two, actually, captured by accident and without her knowledge.\nHe will give copies to Archie.\nArchie traces the checks Elinor Denovo received every month to the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company.\nWolfe imposes upon the good will of a director of Seaboard—Avery Ballou, who had paid Wolfe well for rescuing him from a predicament a year and a half before.\nBallou soon tells him that the checks were drawn by Cyrus Jarrett, who was president of Seaboard and 54 years old when Amy was born.\nJarrett has a daughter living in Europe, and a son, Eugene, age 43.\nBallou doesn\'t like Jarrett—a lot of people don\'t, he says — and when Archie meets the old man, he knows why.\nBallou arranges for Archie to have lunch with Bert McCray, a vice president at Seaboard who once had been Jarrett\'s protégé.\nMcCray recognizes the photographs of Elinor Denovo, whose name was Carlotta Vaughn when they both worked for Cyrus Jarrett.\nFreelance detective Orrie Cather is sent to Washington,C, to check on Cyrus Jarrett.\nSaul Panzer and Fred Durkin try to turn up something, anything, about Carlotta Vaughn.\nArchie follows two promising leads that end in humiliation.\nWolfe drafts a display ad to run in all of the New York papers, offering a $500 reward for information about the whereabouts of Carlotta Vaughn, alias Elinor Denovo, between April and October 1944.\nAfter placing the ads, Archie leaves to spend the weekend at Lily\'s place in the country.\nSome uninvited people drop by, but following custom there is only one other weekend houseguest.\nThis weekend Lily has invited Amy Denovo, who makes the mistake of calling Archie by his first name in Lily\'s presence, after dinner on the terrace.\nThe weekend is less than perfect, and Archie is annoyed by the presence of Floyd Vance, an obnoxious press agent.\nBy 3m.\nThursday, few leads have been turned up by the newspaper ad.\nWhen Saul, Fred and Orrie call in, Archie will not be disappointed since he expects nothing.\nWolfe has exceeded his quota of beer, and Archie has come back to the office with a slug of Irish whiskey.\nSitting with his eyes closed, Wolfe declares that he has decided to assume that Amy\'s father killed her mother, since a three-month-old murder will be easier to solve than a 22-year-old mystery.\nThey will begin by speaking to Raymond Thorne.\nDuring a long, rambling interview that extends into the wee hours, Archie gets something.\nAfter hearing that something, Wolfe goes to the kitchen for beer and brings Archie a glass of cognac.\nThe next morning Archie tells Wolfe he\'ll brief Saul, Fred and Orrie during breakfast.\n"Only Saul," Wolfe says.\n"We won\'t risk it with Fred and Orrie".\nArchie arranges for Lily to play bodyguard to Amy, since it is now a certainty that Elinor Denovo was murdered and she may be next.\nThen Archie and Saul go to work.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this story.. Start with the sentence 'The Father Hunt
  A longer silence, and of course I knew why'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Father Hunt
  A longer silence, and of course I knew why. He couldn't ask what was up. He couldn't ask anything on a phone that someone else might be on. But he did. He asked, "Will it take long?"
  At 5:30, having finished the dozen or so letters he had given me, I went up to my room to change my shirt, because the walk to the bank and back with the temperature twenty degrees above what it was in that air-conditioned house had worked up a sweat, but I was down again in twenty minutes, so I was there when Wolfe came down. As he reached his desk the doorbell rang.
  His hand dropped to grip the chair arm. "I'm not accust—" he began, but it came out hoarse and he stopped. He started over. "I'm not in the habit of getting a peremptory summons from a—from anybody."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If that really shows him to you, you have better sight than I have. It did exclude the Jarretts and Bertram McCray, but they were already out. I wish I knew if you would really be interested in what we did during the next forty-eight hours. I doubt it, because it was all negative. Wednesday morning Saul and Fred had been put on it too, and also Orrie when he returned from Washington. If we could name and place Carlotta Vaughn's dinner partner for those months of 1944 it was 20 to 1 that we would have Amy's father, which was the job, and we gave it all we had. Detecting can be fun, but it can be a pain not only in the neck but also in the head, the guts, the back, the legs, the feet, and the ass. And often is. It was that time.
  So at three o'clock Thursday afternoon Wolfe and I sat in the office with nothing more to say. Saul and Fred and Orrie were still out pecking at it, but when they called in we wouldn't be disappointed because we were expecting nothing. Wolfe had started his second bottle of beer since lunch, which exceeded his quota, and I had just returned from the kitchen with a slug of Irish, which made me a lush trying to drown it. I looked at Wolfe, who had his eyes closed and his jaw clamped, and said, "If you're trying to figure how much you're out, it's three grand plus, not counting me."
  He shook his head but didn't open his eyes. "I am making assumptions. I am assuming that Miss Denovo's father murdered her mother; that it is more feasible to find him as a murderer than as a father, since he became a father twenty-two years ago and became a murderer only three months ago; that some recent event supplied the motive for the murder; and that the most likely person to have knowledge of that event is Raymond Thorne or someone in his employ who was closely associated with Elinor Denovo." His eyes opened. "I'll start with Mr. Thorne."
  I put the glass with what was left of the Irish on my desk. "Holy heaven. That's the wildest goose you ever chased."
  It took nearly an hour to get Raymond Thorne because he was somewhere watching TV cameras make a Raymond Thorne production, and when I finally had him he said he couldn't possibly make it at six o'clock. I reminded him that he had told me he would like to help Amy any way he could, and he said he would come at nine. Getting Inspector Cramer was easier and quicker. He was at his office and would see me. Wolfe had gone up to the plant rooms and I went to the kitchen to tell Fritz I was leaving.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As the Heron rolled I shut the door, went to the alcove, and said, "I hope you could hear all right. We can't report or repeat anything."
  Saul slid the panel shut. Amy, leaving the stool, misjudged the distance to the floor and landed off balance. I took her arm, and she said, "Thank you," politely. Her cheeks had less color than usual.
  When the door had closed behind her, Saul said, "She took it fine. I wasn't needed."
  The purpose of this footnote is to add to your knowledge of your fellow man. Cyrus M. Jarrett's check for fifty grand—personal, not a bank check—came in the mail on January twenty-sixth, three days after the jury brought in their first-degree verdict on Floyd Vance.
  Now, for the first time ever, enjoy a peek into the life of Nero Wolfe's creator, Rex Stout, courtesy of the Stout Estate. Pulled from Rex Stout's own archives, here are rarely seen, some never-before-published memorabilia. Each title in "The Rex Stout Library" will offer an exclusive look into the life of the man who gave Nero Wolfe life.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Don't.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As the Heron rolled I shut the door, went to the alcove, and said, "I hope you could hear all right. We can't report or repeat anything. "
  Saul slid the panel shut. Amy, leaving the stool, misjudged the distance to the floor and landed off balance. I took her arm, and she said, "Thank you," politely. Her cheeks had less color than usual. 
  When the door had closed behind her, Saul said, "She took it fine. Don't pay me for today. I wasn't needed. "
  The purpose of this footnote is to add to your knowledge of your fellow man. Cyrus M. Jarrett's check for fifty grand—personal, not a bank check—came in the mail on January twenty-sixth, three days after the jury brought in their first-degree verdict on Floyd Vance. 
  Now, for the first time ever, enjoy a peek into the life of Nero Wolfe's creator, Rex Stout, courtesy of the Stout Estate. Pulled from Rex Stout's own archives, here are rarely seen, some never-before-published memorabilia. Each title in "The Rex Stout Library" will offer an exclusive look into the life of the man who gave Nero Wolfe life.