He shook his head without speaking or looking up from the floor.
“Any other worry?”
He shook his head again.
“Did the maid notice anything peculiar in her behavior last night?”
“Nothing.”
“Have you looked through her things — for papers, letters?”
“Yes — and found nothing.” He raised his head to look at me. “The only thing” — he spoke very slowly — “there was a little pile of ashes in the grate in her room, as if she had burned papers, or letters.”
Correll held nothing more for me — nothing I could get out of him, anyway.
The girl at the front gate in Alfred Banbrock’s Shoreman’s Building suite told me he was in conference. I sent my name in. He came out of conference to take me into his private office. His tired face was full of questions.
I didn’t keep him waiting for the answers. He was a grown man. I didn’t edge around the bad news.
“Things have taken a bad break,” I said as soon as we were locked in together. “I think we’ll have to go to the police and newspapers for help. A Mrs. Correll, a friend of your daughters, lied to me when I questioned her yesterday. Last night she committed suicide.”
“Irma Correll? Suicide?”
“You knew her?”
“Yes! Intimately! She is — that is, she was a close friend of my wife and daughters. She killed herself?”
“Yes. Poison. Last night. Where does she fit in with your daughters’ disappearance?”
“Where?” he repeated. “I don’t know. Must she fit in?”
“I think she must. She told me she hadn’t seen your daughters for a couple of weeks. Her husband told me just now that they were talking to her when he came home from the bank last Wednesday afternoon. She seemed nervous when I questioned her. She killed herself shortly afterward. There’s hardly a doubt that she fits in somewhere.”
“And that means—?”
“That means,” I finished for him, “that your daughters may be perfectly safe, but that we can’t afford to gamble on that possibility.”
“You think harm has come to them?”
“I don’t think anything,” I evaded, “except that with a death tied up closely with their going, we can’t afford to play around.”
Banbrock got his attorney on the phone — a pink-faced, white-haired old boy named Norwall, who had the reputation of knowing more about corporations than all the Morgans, but who hadn’t the least idea as to what police procedure was all about — and told him to meet us at the Hall of Justice.
We spent an hour and a half there, getting the police turned loose on the affair, and giving the newspapers what we wanted them to have. That was plenty of dope on the girls, plenty of photographs and so forth, but nothing about the connection between them and Mrs. Correll. Of course we let the police in on that angle.
After Banbrock and his attorney had gone away together, I went back to the detectives’ assembly room to chew over the job with Pat Reddy, the police sleuth assigned to it.
Pat was the youngest member of the detective bureau — a big blond Irishman who went in for the spectacular in his lazy way.
A couple of years ago he was a new copper, pounding his feet in harness on a hillside beat. One night he tagged an automobile that was parked in front of a fireplug. The owner came out just then and gave him an argument. She was Althea Wallach, only and spoiled daughter of the owner of the Wallach Coffee Company — a slim, reckless youngster with hot eyes. She must have told Pat plenty. He took her over to the station and dumped her in a cell.
Old Wallach, so the story goes, showed up the next morning with a full head of steam and half the lawyers in San Francisco. But Pat made his charge stick, and the girl was fined. Old Wallach did everything but take a punch at Pat in the corridor afterward. Pat grinned his sleepy grin at the coffee importer, and drawled, “You better lay off me — or I’ll stop drinking your coffee.”
That crack got into most of the newspapers in the country, and even into a Broadway show.
But Pat didn’t stop with the snappy comeback. Three days later he and Althea Wallach went over to Alameda and got themselves married. I was in on that part. I happened to be on the ferry they took, and they dragged me along to see the deed done.
Old Wallach immediately disowned his daughter, but that didn’t seem to worry anybody else. Pat went on pounding his beat, but, now that he was conspicuous, it wasn’t long before his qualities were noticed. He was boosted into the detective bureau.
Old Wallach relented before he died, and left Althea his millions.
Pat took the afternoon off to go to the funeral, and went back to work that night, catching a wagonload of gunmen. He kept on working. I don’t know what his wife did with her money, but Pat didn’t even improve the quality of his cigars — though he should have. He lived now in the Wallach mansion, true enough, and now and then on rainy mornings he would be driven down to the Hall in a Hispano-Suiza brougham; but there was no difference in him beyond that.
That was the big blond Irishman who sat across a desk from me in the assembly room and fumigated me with something shaped like a cigar.
He took the cigar-like thing out of his mouth presently, and spoke through the fumes. “This Correll woman you think’s tied up with the Banbrocks — she was stuck-up a couple of months back and nicked for eight hundred dollars. Know that?”
I hadn’t known it. “Lose anything besides cash?” I asked.
“No.”
“You believe it?”
He grinned. “That’s the point,” he said. “We didn’t catch the bird who did it. With women who lose things that way — especially money — it’s always a question whether it’s a hold-up or a hold-out.”
He teased some more poison-gas out of the cigar-thing, and added, “The hold-up might have been on the level, though. What are you figuring on doing now?”
“Let’s go up to the Agency and see if anything new has turned up. Then I’d like to talk to Mrs. Banbrock again. Maybe she can tell us something about the Correll woman.”
At the office I found that reports had come in on the rest of the out-of-town names and addresses. Apparently none of these people knew anything about the girls’ whereabouts. Reddy and I went on up to Sea Cliff to the Banbrock home.
Banbrock had telephoned the news of Mrs. Correll’s death to his wife, and she had read the papers. She told us she could think of no reason for the suicide. She could imagine no possible connection between the suicide and her stepdaughters’ vanishing.
“Mrs. Correll seemed as nearly contented and happy as usual the last time I saw her, two or three weeks ago,” Mrs. Banbrock said. “Of course she was by nature inclined to be dissatisfied with things, but not to the extent of doing a thing like this.”
“Do you know of any trouble between her and her husband?”
“No. So far as I know, they were happy, though—”
She broke off. Hesitancy, embarrassment showed in her dark eyes.
“Though?” I repeated.
“If I don’t tell you now, you’ll think I am hiding something,” she said, flushing, and laughing a little laugh that held more nervousness than amusement. “It hasn’t any bearing, but I was always just a little jealous of Irma. She and my husband were — well, everyone thought they would marry. That was a little before he and I married. I never let it show, and I dare say it was a foolish idea, but I always had a suspicion that Irma married Stewart more in pique than for any other reason, and that she was still fond of Alfred — Mr. Banbrock.”
“Was there anything definite to make you think that?”
“No, nothing — really! I never thoroughly believed it. It was just a sort of vague feeling. Cattiness, no doubt, more than anything else.”