Waiting for the next west-bound train out of Knob Valley, I got the office on the telephone. The Old Man was out. I told my story to one of the office men and asked him to get the news to the Old Man as soon as he could.
Everybody was in the office when I got back to San Francisco. Alfred Banbrock, his face a pink-gray that was deader than solid gray could have been. His pink and white old lawyer. Pat Reddy, sprawled on his spine with his feet on another chair. The Old Man, with his gentle eyes behind gold spectacles and his mild smile, hiding the fact that fifty years of sleuthing had left him without any feelings at all on any subject.
Nobody said anything when I came in. I said my say as briefly as possible.
“Then the other woman — the woman who killed Ruth was—?”
Banbrock didn’t finish his question. Nobody answered it.
“We don’t know what happened,” I said after a while. “Your daughter and someone we don’t know may have gone there. Your daughter may have been dead before she was taken there. She may have—”
“But Myra!” Banbrock was pulling at his collar with a finger inside. “Where is Myra?”
I couldn’t answer that, nor could any of the others.
“You are going up to Knob Valley now?” I asked him.
“Yes, at once. You will come with me?”
I wasn’t sorry I could not. “No. There are things to be done here. I’ll give you a note to the marshal. I want you to look carefully at the piece of your daughter’s photograph the Italian found — to see if you remember it.”
Banbrock and the lawyer left.
Reddy lit one of his awful cigars.
“We found the car,” the Old Man said.
“Where was it?”
“In Sacramento. It was left in a garage there either late Friday night or early Saturday. Foley has gone up to investigate it. And Reddy has uncovered a new angle.”
Pat nodded through his smoke.
“A hockshop dealer came in this morning,” Pat said, “and told us that Myra Banbrock and another girl came to his joint last week and hocked a lot of stuff. They gave him phoney names, but he swears one of them was Myra. He recognized her picture as soon as he saw it in the paper. Her companion wasn’t Ruth. It was a little blonde.”
“Mrs. Correll?”
“Uh-huh. The shark can’t swear to that, but I think that’s the answer. Some of the jewelry was Myra’s, some Ruth’s, and some we don’t know. I mean we can’t prove it belonged to Mrs. Correll — though we will.”
“When did all this happen?”
“They soaked the stuff Monday before they went away.”
“Have you seen Correll?”
“Uh-huh. I did a lot of talking to him, but the answers weren’t worth much. He says he don’t know whether any of her jewelry is gone or not, and doesn’t care. It was hers, he says, and she could do anything she wanted with it. He was kind of disagreeable. I got along a little better with one of the maids. She says some of Mrs. Correll’s pretties disappeared last week. Mrs. Correll said she had lent them to a friend. I’m going to show the stuff the hockshop has to the maid tomorrow to see if she can identify it. She didn’t know anything else — except that Mrs. Correll was out of the picture for a while on Friday — the day the Banbrock girls went away.”
“What do you mean, out of the picture?” I asked.
“She went out late in the morning and didn’t show up until somewhere around three the next morning. She and Correll had a row over it, but she wouldn’t tell him where she had been.”
I liked that. It could mean something.
“And,” Pat went on, “Correll has just remembered that his wife had an uncle who went crazy in Pittsburgh in 1902, and that she had a morbid fear of going crazy herself, and that she had often said she would kill herself if she thought she was going crazy. Wasn’t it nice of him to remember those things at last? To account for her death?”
“It was,” I agreed, “but it doesn’t get us anywhere. It doesn’t even prove that he knows anything. Now my guess is—”
“To hell with your guess,” Pat said, getting up and pushing his hat in place. “Your guesses all sound like a lot of static to me. I’m going home, eat my dinner, read my Bible, and go to bed.”
I suppose he did. Anyway, he left us.
We all might as well have spent the next three days in bed for all the profit that came out of our running around. No place we visited, nobody we questioned, added to our knowledge. We were in a blind alley.
We learned that the Locomobile was left in Sacramento by Myra Banbrock, and not by anyone else, but we didn’t learn where she went afterward. We learned that some of the jewelry in the pawnshop was Mrs. Correll’s. The Locomobile was brought back from Sacramento. Mrs. Correll was buried. Ruth Banbrock was buried. The newspapers found other mysteries. Reddy and I dug and dug, and all we brought up was dirt.
The following Monday brought me close to the end of my rope. There seemed nothing more to do but sit back and hope that the circulars with which we had plastered North America would bring results. Reddy had already been called off and put to running out fresher trails. I hung on because Banbrock wanted me to keep at it so long as there was the shadow of anything to keep at. But by Monday I had worked myself out.
Before going to Banbrock’s office to tell him I was licked, I dropped in at the Hall of Justice to hold a wake over the job with Pat Reddy. He was crouched over his desk, writing a report on some other job.
“Hello!” he greeted me, pushing his report away and smearing it with ashes from his cigar. “How go the Banbrock doings?”
“They don’t,” I admitted. “It doesn’t seem possible, with the stack-up what it is, that we should have come to a dead stop! It’s there for us, if we can find it. The need of money before both the Banbrock and the Correll calamities, Mrs. Correll’s suicide after I had questioned her about the girls, her burning things before she died and the burning of things immediately before or after Ruth Banbrock’s death.”
“Maybe the trouble is,” Pat suggested, “that you’re not such a good sleuth.”
“Maybe.”
We smoked in silence for a minute or two after that insult.
“You understand,” Pat said presently, “there doesn’t have to be any connection between the Banbrock death and disappearance and the Correll death.”
“Maybe not. But there has to be a connection between the Banbrock death and the Banbrock disappearance. There was a connection — in a pawnshop — between the Banbrock and Correll actions before these things. If there is that connection, then—” I broke off, all full of ideas.
“What’s the matter?” Pat asked. “Swallow your gum?”
“Listen!” I let myself get almost enthusiastic. “We’ve got what happened to three women hooked up together. If we could tie up some more in the same string — I want the names and addresses of all the women and girls in San Francisco who have committed suicide, been murdered, or have disappeared within the past year.”
“You think this is a wholesale deal?”
“I think the more we can tie up together, the more lines we’ll have to run out. And they can’t all lead nowhere. Let’s get our list, Pat!”
We spent all the afternoon and most of the night getting it. Its size would have embarrassed the Chamber of Commerce. It looked like a hunk of the telephone book. Things happened in a city in a year. The section devoted to strayed wives and daughters was the largest; suicides next; and even the smallest division — murders — wasn’t any too short.
We could check off most of the names against what the police department had already learned of them and their motives, weeding out those positively accounted for in a manner nowise connected with our present interest. The remainder we split into two classes; those of unlikely connection, and those of more possible connection. Even then, the second list was longer than I had expected, or hoped.