“I feel sure that if I can find Dan and talk to him we can straighten the mess out somehow without scandal. We had our differences, but Dan’s too decent a man, and I like him too well, for all his occasional wildness, to want to see him in jail. So I want him found with as much speed and as little noise as possible.”
“Has he got a car?”
“Not now. He had one but he sold it five or six months ago.”
“Where’d he bank? I mean his personal account?”
“At the Golden Gate Trust Company.”
“Got any photos of him?”
“Yes.”
He brought out two from a desk drawer — one full-face, and the other a three-quarter view. They showed a man in the middle of his life, with shrewd eyes set close together in a hatchet face, under dark, thin hair. But the face was rather pleasant for all its craftiness.
“How about his relatives, friends, and so on — particularly his feminine friends?”
“His only relative is the brother in Chicago. As to his friends: he probably has as many as any man in San Francisco. He was a wonderful mixer.
“Recently he has been on very good terms with a Mrs. Earnshaw, the wife of a real estate agent. She lives on Pacific Street, I think. I don’t know just how intimate they were, but he used to call her up on the phone frequently, and she called him here nearly every day. Then there is a girl named Eva Duthie, a cabaret entertainer, who lives in the 1100 block of Bush Street. There were probably others, too, but I know of only those two.”
“Have you looked through his stuff, here?”
“Yes, but perhaps you’d like to look for yourself.”
He led me into Rathbone’s private office: a small box of a room, just large enough for a desk, a filing cabinet, and two chairs, with doors leading into the corridor, the outer office, and Zumwalt’s.
“While I’m looking around you might get me a list of the serial numbers of the missing bonds,” I said. “They probably won’t help us right away, but we can get the Treasury Department to let us know when the coupons come in, and from where.”
I didn’t expect to find anything in Rathbone’s office and I didn’t.
Before I left I questioned the stenographer and the bookkeeper. They already knew that Rathbone was missing, but they didn’t know that the bonds were gone too.
The girl, Mildred Narbett was her name, said that Rathbone had dictated a couple of letters to her on the twenty-eighth — the day he left for New York — both of which had to do with the partner’s business — and told her to send Quimby to check his baggage and make his reservations. When she returned from lunch she had typed the two letters and taken them in for him to sign, catching him just as he was about to leave.
John Quimby, the bookkeeper, described the baggage he had checked: two large pigskin bags and a cordovan Gladstone bag. Having a bookkeeper’s mind, he had remembered the number of the berth he had secured for Rathbone on the evening train — lower 4, car 8. Quimby had returned with the checks and tickets while the partners were out at luncheon, and had put them on Rathbone’s desk.
At Rathbone’s hotel I was told that he had left on the morning of the twenty-seventh, giving up his room, but leaving his two trunks there, as he intended living there after his return from New York, in three or four weeks. The hotel people could tell me little worth listening to, except that he had left in a taxicab.
At the taxi stand outside I found the chauffeur who had carried Rathbone.
“Rathbone? Sure, I know him!” he told me around a limp cigarette. “Yeah, I guess it was about that date that I took him down to the Golden Gate Trust Company. He had a coupla big yellow bags and a little brown one. He busted into the bank, carrying the little one, and right out again, looking like somebody had kicked him on his corns. Had me take him to the Phelps Building” — the offices of Rathbone & Zumwalt were in that building — “and didn’t give me a jit over my fare!”
At the Golden Gate Trust Company I had to plead and talk a lot, but they finally gave me what I wanted — Rathbone had drawn out his account, a little less than $5,000, on the twenty-fifth of the month, the Saturday before he left town.
From the trust company I went down to the Ferry Building baggage-rooms and cigared myself into a look at the records for the twenty-eighth. Only one lot of three bags had been checked to New York that day.
I telegraphed the numbers and Rathbone’s description to the Agency’s New York office, instructing them to find the bags and, through them, find him.
Up in the Pullman Company’s offices I was told that car “8” was a through car, and that they could let me know within a couple hours whether Rathbone had occupied his berth all the way to New York.
On my way up to the 1100 block of Bush Street I left one of Rathbone’s photographs with a photographer, with a rush order for a dozen copies.
I found Eva Duthie’s apartment after about five minutes of searching vestibule directories, and got her out of bed. She was an undersized blonde girl of somewhere between nineteen and twenty-nine, depending upon whether you judged by her eyes or by the rest of her face.
“I haven’t seen or heard from Mr. Rathbone for nearly a month,” she said. “I called him up at his hotel the other night — had a party I wanted to ring him in on — but they told me that he was out of town and wouldn’t be back for a week or two.”
Then, in answer to another question:
“Yes, we were pretty good friends, but not especially thick. You know what I mean: we had a lot of fun together but neither of us meant anything to the other outside of that. Dan is a good sport — and so am I.”
Mrs. Earnshaw wasn’t so frank. But she had a husband, and that makes a difference. She was a tall, slender woman, as dark as a gypsy, with a haughty air and a nervous trick of chewing her lower lip.
We sat in a stiffly furnished room and she stalled me for about fifteen minutes, until I came out flat-footed with her.
“It’s like this, Mrs. Earnshaw,” I told her. “Mr. Rathbone has disappeared, and we are going to find him. You’re not helping me and you’re not helping yourself. I came here to get what you know about him.
“I could have gone around asking a lot of questions among your friends; and if you don’t tell me what I want to know that’s what I’ll have to do. And, while I’ll be as careful as possible, still there’s bound to be some curiosity aroused, some wild guesses, and some talk. I’m giving you a chance to avoid all that. It’s up to you.”
“You are assuming,” she said coldly, “that I have something to hide.”
“I’m not assuming anything. I’m hunting for information about Daniel Rathbone.”
She bit her lip on that for a while, and then the story came out bit by bit, with a lot in it that wasn’t any too true, but straight enough in the long run. Stripped of the stuff that wouldn’t hold water, it went like this:
She and Rathbone had planned to run away together. She had left San Francisco on the twenty-sixth, going directly to New Orleans. He was to leave the next day, apparently for New York, but he was to change trains somewhere in the Middle West and meet her in New Orleans. From there they were to go by boat to Central America.
She pretended ignorance of his designs upon the bonds. Maybe she hadn’t known. Anyhow, she had carried out her part of the plan, but Rathbone had failed to show up in New Orleans. She hadn’t shown much care in covering her trail and private detectives employed by her husband had soon found her. Her husband had arrived in New Orleans and, apparently not knowing that there was another man in the deal, had persuaded her to return home.
She wasn’t a woman to take kindly to the jilting Rathbone had handed her, so she hadn’t tried to get in touch with him, or to learn what had kept him from joining her.