I didn’t give him all the details.
“He was engaged to marry a Jeanne Delano, who went East about three weeks ago and then suddenly disappeared. He knows very little about her; thinks something has happened to her; and wants her found.”
“Again?” His shrewd blue eyes twinkled. “And to a Jeanne this time! She’s the fifth within a year, to my knowledge, and no doubt I missed one or two who were current while I was in Hawaii. But where do I come in?”
“I asked him for responsible endorsement. I think he’s all right, but he isn’t, in the strictest sense, a responsible person. He referred me to you.”
“You’re right about his not being, in the strictest sense, a responsible person.” The big man screwed up his eyes and mouth in thought for a moment. Then: “Do you think that something has really happened to the girl? Or is Burke imagining things?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was a dream at first. But in a couple of her letters there are hints that something was wrong.”
“You might go ahead and find her then,” Axford said. “I don’t suppose any harm will come from letting him have his Jeanne back. It will at least give him something to think about for a while.”
“I have your word for it then, Mr. Axford, that there will be no scandal or anything of the sort connected with the affair?”
“Assuredly! Burke is all right, you know. It’s simply that he is spoiled. He has been in rather delicate health all his life; and then he has an income that suffices to keep him modestly, with a little over to bring out books of verse and buy doo-daws for his rooms. He takes himself a little too solemnly — is too much the poet — but he’s sound at bottom.”
“I’ll go ahead with it, then,” I said, getting up. “By the way, the girl has an account at the Golden Gate Trust Company, and I’d like to find out as much about it as possible, especially where her money came from. Clement, the cashier, is a model of caution when it comes to giving out information about depositors. If you could put in a word for me it would make my way smoother.”
“Be glad to.”
He wrote a couple of lines across the back of a card and gave it to me; and, promising to call on him if I needed further assistance, I left.
IV
I telephoned Pangburn that his brother-in-law had given the job his approval. I sent a wire to the agency’s Baltimore branch, giving what information I had. Then I went up to Ashbury Avenue, to the apartment house in which the girl had lived.
The manager — an immense Mrs. Clute in rustling black — knew little, if any, more about the girl than Pangburn. The girl had lived there for two and a half months; she had had occasional callers, but Pangburn was the only one that the manager could describe to me. The girl had given up the apartment on the third of the month, saying that she had been called East, and she had asked the manager to hold her mail until she sent her new address. Ten days later Mrs. Clute had received a card from the girl instructing her to forward her mail to 215 N. Stricker Street, Baltimore, Maryland. There had been no mail to forward.
The single thing of importance that I learned at the apartment house was that the girl’s two trunks had been taken away by a green transfer truck. Green was the color used by one of the city’s largest transfer companies.
I went then to the office of this transfer company, and found a friendly clerk on duty. (A detective, if he is wise, takes pains to make and keep as many friends as possible among transfer company, express company and railroad employees.) I left the office with a memorandum of the transfer company’s check numbers and the Ferry baggage-room to which the two trunks had been taken.
At the Ferry Building, with this information, it didn’t take me many minutes to learn that the trunks had been checked to Baltimore. I sent another wire to the Baltimore branch, giving the railroad check numbers.
Sunday was well into night by this time, so I knocked off and went home.
V
Half an hour before the Golden Gate Trust Company opened for business the next morning I was inside, talking to Clement, the cashier. All the traditional caution and conservatism of bankers rolled together wouldn’t be one-two-three to the amount usually displayed by this plump, white-haired old man. But one look at Axford’s card, with “Please give the bearer all possible assistance” inked across the back of it, made Clement even eager to help me.
“You have, or have had, an account here in the name of Jeanne Delano,” I said. “I’d like to know as much as possible about it: to whom she drew checks, and to what amounts; but especially all you can tell me about where her money came from.”
He stabbed one of the pearl buttons on his desk with a pink finger, and a lad with polished yellow hair oozed silently into the room. The cashier scribbled with a pencil on a piece of paper and gave it to the noiseless youth, who disappeared. Presently he was back, laying a handful of papers on the cashier’s desk.
Clement looked through the papers and then up at me.
“Miss Delano was introduced here by Mr. Burke Pangburn on the sixth of last month, and opened an account with eight hundred and fifty dollars in cash. She made the following deposits after that: four hundred dollars on the tenth; two hundred and fifty on the twenty-first; three hundred on the twenty-sixth; two hundred on the thirtieth; and twenty thousand dollars on the second of this month. All of these deposits except the last were made with cash. The last one was a check — which I have here.”
He handed it to me: a Golden Gate Trust Company check.
Pay to the order of Jeanne Delano, twenty thousand dollars.
(Signed) BURKE PANGBURN.
It was dated the second of the month.
“Burke Pangburn!” I exclaimed, a little stupidly. “Was it usual for him to draw checks to that amount?”
“I think not. But we shall see.”
He stabbed the pearl button again, ran his pencil across another slip of paper, and the youth with the polished yellow hair made a noiseless entrance, exit, entrance, and exit.
The cashier looked through the fresh batch of papers that had been brought to him.
“On the first of the month, Mr. Pangburn deposited twenty thousand dollars — a check against Mr. Axford’s account here.”
“Now how about Miss Delano’s withdrawals?” I asked.
He picked up the papers that had to do with her account again.
“Her statement and canceled checks for last month haven’t been delivered to her yet. Everything is here. A check for eighty-five dollars to the order of H. K. Clute on the fifteenth of last month; one ‘to cash’ for three hundred dollars on the twentieth, and another of the same kind for one hundred dollars on the twenty-fifth. Both of these checks were apparently cashed here by her. On the third of this month she closed out her account, with a check to her own order for twenty-one thousand, five hundred and fifteen dollars.”
“And that check?”
“Was cashed here by her.”
I lighted a cigarette, and let these figures drift around in my head. None of them — except those that were fixed to Pangburn’s and Axford’s signatures — seemed to be of any value to me. The Clute check — the only one the girl had drawn in anyone else’s favor — had almost certainly been for rent.
“This is the way of it,” I summed up aloud. “On the first of the month, Pangburn deposited Axford’s check for twenty thousand dollars. The next day he gave a check to that amount to Miss Delano, which she deposited. On the following day she closed her account, taking between twenty-one and twenty-two thousand dollars in currency.”