Who Killed Bob Teal? and Other Stories Page 11

  I looked at the Italian.

  Paget, reading my mind, explained:

  “Cereghino lives over in the hills. Got a grape-ranch there. Been around here five or six years, an’ ain’t killed nobody that I know of.”

  “Remember the place where you found the picture?” I asked the Italian.

  His grin broadened under his mustache, and his head went up and down.

  “For sure, I remember that place.”

  “Let’s go there,” I suggested to Paget.

  “Right. Comin’ along, Tom?”

  The marshal said he couldn’t. He had something to do in town. Cereghino, Paget and I went out and got into a dusty Ford that the deputy sheriff drove.

  We rode for nearly an hour, along a county road that bent up the slope of Mount Diablo. After a while, at a word from the Italian, we left the county road for a dustier and ruttier one.

  A mile of this one.

  “This place,” Cereghino said.

  Paget stopped the Ford. We got out in a clearing. The trees and bushes that had crowded the road retreated here for twenty feet or so on either side, leaving a little dusty circle in the woods.

  “About this place,” the Italian was saying. “I think by this stump. But between that bend ahead and that one behind, I know for sure.”

  V

  Paget was a countryman. I am not. I waited for him to move.

  He looked around the clearing, slowly, standing still between the Italian and me. His pale eyes lighted presently. He went around the Ford to the far side of the clearing. Cereghino and I followed.

  Near the fringe of brush at the edge of the clearing, the scrawny deputy stopped to grunt at the ground. The wheel-marks of an automobile were there. A car had turned around here.

  Paget went on into the woods. The Italian kept close to his heels. I brought up the rear. Paget was following some sort of track. I couldn’t see it, either because he and the Italian blotted it out ahead of me, or because I’m a shine Indian.

  We went back quite a way.

  Paget stopped. The Italian stopped.

  Paget said, “Uh-huh,” as if he had found an expected thing.

  The Italian said something with the name of God in it.

  I trampled a bush, coming beside them to see what they saw.

  I saw it.

  At the base of a tree, on her side, her knees drawn up close to her body, a girl was dead.

  She wasn’t nice to see. Birds had been at her.

  A tobacco-brown coat was half on, half off her shoulders. I knew she was Ruth Banbrock before I turned her over to look at the side of her face the ground had saved from the birds.

  Cereghino stood watching me while I examined the girl. His face was mournful in a calm way. The deputy sheriff paid little attention to the body. He was off in the brush, moving around, looking at the ground.

  He came back as I finished my examination.

  “Shot,” I told him, “once in the right temple. Before that, I think, there was a fight. There are marks on the arm that was under her body. There’s nothing on her—no jewelry, money—nothing.”

  “That goes,” Paget said. “Two women got out of the car back in the clearin’, an’ came here. Could’ve been three women—if the others carried this one. Can’t make out how many went back. One of ’em was larger than this one. There was a scuffle here. Find the gun?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Neither did I. It went away in the car, then. There’s what’s left of a fire over there.” He ducked his head to the left. “Paper an’ rags burnt. Not enough left to do us any good. I reckon the photo Cereghino found blew away from the fire. Late Friday, I’d put it, or maybe Saturday mornin’. … No nearer than that.”

  I took the deputy sheriff’s word for it. He seemed to know his stuff.

  “Come here. I’ll show you somethin’,” he said, and led me over to a little black pile of ashes.

  He hadn’t anything to show me. He wanted to talk to me away from the Italian’s ears.

  “I think the guinea’s all right,” he said, “but I reckon I’d best hold him a while to make sure. This is some way from his place, an’ he stuttered a little bit too much tellin’ me how he happened to be passin’ here. Course, that don’t mean nothin’ much. All these guineas peddle vino, an’ I guess that’s what brought him out this way. I’ll hold him a day or two, anyways.”

  “Good,” I agreed. “This is your country, and you know the people. Can you visit around and see what you can pick up? Whether anybody saw anything? Saw a Locomobile cabriolet? Or anything else? You can get more than I could.”

  “I’ll do that,” he promised.

  “All right. Then I’ll go back to San Francisco now. I suppose you’ll want to camp here with the body?”

  “Yeah. You drive the Ford back to Knob Valley, an’ tell Tom what’s what. He’ll come or send out. I’ll keep the guinea here with me.”

  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-grey that was deader than solid grey 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. (Whitey Clayton used to say the Old Man could spit icicles in August.)

  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.

  VI

  Reddy lit one of his awful cigars. “We found the car,” the Old Man said.

  “Where?”

  “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 hock-shop 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,” Pat said. “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 hock-shop 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 do 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 happen 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.

  There were six suicides in it, three murders, and twenty-one disappearances.

  Reddy had other work to do. I put the list in my pocket and went calling.

  VII

  For four days I ground at the list. I hunted, found, questioned, and investigated friends and relatives of the women and girls on my list. My questions all hit in the same direction. Had she been acquainted with Myra Banbrock? Ruth? Mrs. Correll? Had she been in need of money before her death or disappearance? Had she destroyed anything before her death or disappearance? Had she known any of the other women on my list?

  Three times I drew yeses.

  Sylvia Varney, a girl of twenty, who had killed herself on November 5th, had drawn six hundred dollars from the bank the week before her death. No one in her family could say what she had done with the money. A friend of Sylvia Varney’s—Ada Youngman, a married woman of twenty-five or -six—had disappeared on December 2nd, and was still gone. The Varney girl had been at Mrs. Youngman’s home an hour before she—the Varney girl—killed herself.

  Mrs. Dorothy Sawdon, a young widow, had shot herself on the night of January 13th. No trace was found of either the money her husband had left her or the funds of a club whose treasurer she was. A bulky letter her maid remembered having given her that afternoon was never found.

  These three women’s connection with the Banbrock-Correll affair was sketchy enough. None of them had done anything that isn’t done by nine out of ten women who kill themselves or run away. But the troubles of all three had come to a head within the past few months—and all three were women of about the same financial and social position as Mrs. Correll and the Banbrocks.

  Finishing my list with no fresh leads, I came back to these three.

  I had the names and addresses of sixty-two friends of the Banbrock girls. I set about getting the same sort of catalogue on the three women I was trying to bring into the game. I didn’t have to do all the digging myself. Fortunately, there were two or three operatives in the office with nothing else to do just then.

  We got something.

  Mrs. Sawdon had known Raymond Elwood. Sylvia Varney had known Raymond Elwood. There was nothing to show Mrs. Youngman had known him, but it was likely she had. She and the Varney girl had been thick.

  I had already interviewed this Raymond Elwood in connection with the Banbrock girls, but had paid no especial attention to him. I had considered him just one of the sleek-headed, high-polished young men of whom there was quite a few listed.

  I went back at him, all interest now. The results were promising.

  He had, as I have said, a real estate office on Montgomery Street. We were unable to find a single client he had ever served, or any signs of one’s existence. He had an apartment out in the Sunset District, where he lived
alone. His local record seemed to go back no farther than ten months, though we couldn’t find its definite starting point. Apparently he had no relatives in San Francisco. He belonged to a couple of fashionable clubs. He was vaguely supposed to be “well connected in the East.” He spent money.

  I couldn’t shadow Elwood, having too recently interviewed him. Dick Foley did. Elwood was seldom in his office during the first three days Dick tailed him. He was seldom in the financial district. He visited his clubs, he danced and tead and so forth, and each of those three days he visited a house on Telegraph Hill.

  The first afternoon Dick had him, Elwood went to the Telegraph Hill house with a tall fair girl from Burlingame. The second day—in the evening—with a plump young woman who came out of a house out on Broadway. The third evening with a very young girl who seemed to live in the same building as he.

  Usually Elwood and his companion spent from three to four hours in the house on Telegraph Hill. Other people—all apparently well-to-do—went in and out of the house while it was under Dick’s eye.

  I climbed Telegraph Hill to give the house the up-and-down. It was a large house—a big frame house painted egg-yellow. It hung dizzily on a shoulder of the hill, a shoulder that was sharp where rock had been quarried away. The house seemed about to go ski-ing down on the roofs far below.

  It had no immediate neighbors. The approach was screened by bushes and trees.

  I gave that section of the hill a good strong play, calling at all the houses within shooting distance of the yellow one. Nobody knew anything about it, or about its occupants. The folks on the Hill aren’t a curious lot—perhaps because most of them have something to hide on their own account.

  My climbing uphill and downhill got me nothing until I succeeded in learning who owned the yellow house. The owner was an estate whose affairs were in the hands of the West Coast Trust Company.

  I took my investigations to the trust company, with some satisfaction. The house had been leased eight months ago by Raymond Elwood, acting for a client named T. F. Maxwell.