Noon struck. No sign of the girl. We told the newspapers to turn loose the story, with the added developments of the past few hours.
Gatewood was broken; he sat with his head in his hands, looking at nothing. Just before I left to follow a hunch I had, he looked up at me, and I’d never have recognized him if I hadn’t seen the change take place.
“What do you think is keeping her away?” he asked.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I was beginning to suspect, now that the money had been paid and she had failed to show up. So I stalled with some vague assurances, and left.
I caught a street-car and dropped off down in the shopping district. I visited the five largest department stores, going to all the women’s wear departments from shoes to hats, and trying to learn if a man — perhaps one answering Leighton’s description — had been buying clothes that would fit Audrey Gatewood within the past couple days.
Failing to get any results, I turned the rest of the local stores over to one of the boys from the agency, and went across the bay to canvass the Oakland stores.
At the first one I got action. A man who might easily have been Leighton had been in the day before, buying clothes that could easily fit Audrey. He had bought lots of them, everything from lingerie to a cloak, and — my luck was hitting on all its cylinders — had had his purchases delivered to T. Offord, at an address on Fourteenth street.
At the Fourteenth street address, an apartment house, I found Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Offord’s names under the vestibule telephone for apartment 202.
I had just found them when the front door opened and a stout, middle-aged woman in a gingham house-dress came out. She looked at me a bit curiously, so I asked:
“Do you know where I can find the manager?”
“I’m the manager,” she said.
I handed her a card and stepped indoors with her.
“I’m from the bonding department of the North American Casualty Company” — a repetition of the lie that was printed on the card I had given her — “and a bond for Mr. Offord has been applied for. Is he all right so far as you know?” With the slightly apologetic air of one going through with a necessary but not too important formality.
She frowned.
“A bond? That’s funny! He is going away tomorrow.”
“Well, I can’t say what the bond is for,” I said lightly. “We investigators just get the names and addresses. It may be for his present employer, or perhaps the man he is going to work for wherever he’s going has applied for it. Or some firms have us look up prospective employees before they hire them, just to be safe.”
“Mr. Offord, so far as I know, is a very nice young man,” she said, “but he has been here only a week.”
“Not staying long, then?”
“No. They came here from Denver, intending to stay, but the low altitude doesn’t agree with Mrs. Offord, so they are going back.”
“Are you sure they came from Denver?”
“Well,” she said, “they told me they did.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Only the two of them; they’re young people.”
“Well, how do they impress you?” I asked, trying to get the impression that I thought her a woman of shrewd judgment over.
“They seem to be a very nice young couple. You’d hardly know they were in their apartment most of the time, they are so quiet. I am sorry they can’t stay.”
“Do they go out much?”
“I really don’t know. They have their keys, and unless I should happen to pass them going in or out I’d never see them.”
“Then, as a matter of fact, you couldn’t say whether they stayed away all night some nights or not. Could you?”
She eyed me doubtfully — I was stepping way over my pretext now, but I didn’t think it mattered — and shook her head.
“No, I couldn’t say.”
“They have many visitors?”
“I don’t know. Mr. Offord is not—”
She broke off as a man came in quietly from the street, brushed past me, and started to mount the steps to the second floor.
“Oh, dear!” she whispered. “I hope he didn’t hear me talking about him. That’s Mr. Offord.”
A slender man in brown, with a light brown hat — Leighton perhaps.
I hadn’t seen anything of him except his back, nor he anything except mine. I watched him as he climbed the stairs. If he had heard the manager mention his name he would use the turn at the head of the stairs to sneak a look at me.
He did. I kept my face stolid, but I knew him. He was “Penny” Quayle, a con man who had been active in the East four or five years before. His face was as expressionless as mine. But he knew me.
A door on the second floor shut. I left the manager and started for the stairs.
“I think I’ll go up and talk to him,” I told her.
Coming silently to the door of apartment 202, I listened. Not a sound. This was no time for hesitation. I pressed the bell-button.
As close together as the tapping of three keys under the fingers of an expert typist, but a thousand times more vicious, came three pistol shots. And waist-high in the door of apartment 202 were three bullet holes.
The three bullets would have been in my fat carcass if I hadn’t learned years ago to stand to one side of strange doors when making uninvited calls.
Inside the apartment sounded a man’s voice, sharp, commanding.
“Cut it, kid! For God’s sake, not that!”
A woman’s voice, shrill, bitter, spiteful screaming blasphemies.
Two more bullets came through the door.
“Stop! No! No!” The man’s voice had a note of fear in it now.
The woman’s voice, cursing hotly. A scuffle. A shot that didn’t hit the door.
I hurled my foot against the door, near the knob, and the lock broke away.
On the floor of the room, a man — Quayle — and a woman were tussling. He was bending over her, holding her wrists, trying to keep her down. A smoking automatic pistol was in one of her hands. I got to it in a jump and tore it loose.
“That’s enough!” I called to them when I was planted. “Get up and receive company.”
Quayle released his antagonist’s wrists, whereupon she struck at his eyes with curved, sharp-nailed fingers, tearing his cheek open. He scrambled away from her on hands and knees, and both of them got to their feet.
He sat down on a chair immediately, panting and wiping his bleeding cheek with a handkerchief.
She stood, hands on hips, in the center of the room, glaring at me.
“I suppose,” she spat, “you think you’ve raised hell!”
I laughed — I could afford to.
“If your father is in his right mind,” I told her, “he’ll do it with a razor strop when he gets you home again. A fine joke you picked out to play on him!”
“If you’d been tied to him as long as I have, and had been bullied and held down as much, I guess you’d do most anything to get enough money so that you could go away and live your own life.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Remembering some of the business methods Harvey Gatewood had used — particularly some of his war contracts that the Department of Justice was still investigating — I suppose the worst that could be said about Audrey was that she was her father’s own daughter.
“How’d you rap to it? ” Quayle asked me, politely.
“Several ways,” I said. “First, I’m a little doubtful about grown persons being kidnapped in cities. Maybe it really happens sometimes, but at least nine-tenths of the cases you hear about are fakes. Second, one of Audrey’s friends saw her on Market street between 8:15 and 8:45 the night she disappeared; and your letter to Gatewood was post-marked 9 P.M. Pretty fast work. You should have waited a while before mailing it, even if it had to miss the first morning delivery. I suppose she dropped it in the post office on her way over here?”