Crime Stories Page 36

  “My fiancée,” he began immediately in a high-pitched voice that was within a notch of hysteria, “has disappeared! Something has happened to her! Foul play of some horrible sort! I want you to find her—to save her from this terrible thing that . . .”

  I followed him this far and then gave it up. A jumble of words came out of his mouth—“spirited away . . . mysterious something . . . lured into a trap”—but they were too disconnected for me to make anything out of them. So I stopped trying to understand him, and waited for him to babble himself empty of words.

  I have heard ordinarily reasonable men, under stress of excitement, run on even more crazily than this wild-eyed youth; but his dress—the parroted robe and gay pajamas—and his surroundings—this deliriously furnished room—gave him too theatrical a setting; made his words sound utterly unreal.

  He himself, when normal, should have been a rather nice-looking lad: his features were well spaced and, though his mouth and chin were a little uncertain, his broad forehead was good. But standing there listening to the occasional melodramatic phrase that I could pick out of the jumbled noises he was throwing at me, I thought that instead of parrots on his robe he should have had cuckoos.

  Presently he ran out of language and was holding his long, thin hands out to me in an appealing gesture, saying:

  “Will you?” over and over. “Will you? Will you?”

  I nodded soothingly, and noticed that tears were on his thin cheeks.

  “Suppose we begin at the beginning,” I suggested, sitting down carefully on a carved bench affair that didn’t look any too strong.

  “Yes! Yes!” He was standing legs apart in front of me, running his fingers through his hair. “The beginning. I had a letter from her every day until—”

  “That’s not the beginning,” I objected. “Who is she? What is she?”

  “She’s Jeanne Delano!” he exclaimed in surprise at my ignorance. “And she is my fiancée. And now she is gone, and I know that—

  The phrases “victim of foul play,” “into a trap” and so on began to flow hysterically out again.

  Finally I got him quieted down and, sandwiched in between occasional emotional outbursts, got a story out of him that amounted to this:

  This Burke Pangburn was a poet. About two months before, he had received a note from a Jeanne Delano—forwarded from his publishers—praising his latest book of rhymes. Jeanne Delano happened to live in San Francisco, too, though she hadn’t known that he did. He had answered her note, and had received another. After a little of this they met. If she really was as beautiful as he claimed, then he wasn’t to be blamed for falling in love with her. But whether or not she was really beautiful, he thought she was, and he had fallen hard.

  This Delano girl had been living in San Francisco for only a little while, and when the poet met her she was living alone in an Ashbury Avenue apartment. He did not know where she came from or anything about her former life. He suspected—from certain indefinite suggestions and peculiarities of conduct which he couldn’t put in words—that there was a cloud of some sort hanging over the girl; that neither her past nor her present were free from difficulties. But he hadn’t the least idea what those difficulties might be. He hadn’t cared. He knew absolutely nothing about her, except that she was beautiful, and he loved her, and she had promised to marry him. Then, on the third of the month—exactly twenty-one days before this Sunday morning—the girl had suddenly left San Francisco. He had received a note from her, by messenger.

  This note, which he showed me after I had insisted point blank on seeing it, read:

  Burkelove:

  Have just received a wire, and must go East on next train. Tried to get you on the phone, but couldn’t. Will write you as soon as I know what my address will he. If anything. [These two words were erased and could be read only with great difficulty.] Love me until I’m back with you forever.

  YOUR JEANNE

  Nine days later he had received another letter from her, from Baltimore, Maryland. This one, which I had a still harder time getting a look at, read:

  Dearest Poet:

  It seems like two years since I have seen you, and I have a fear that it’s going to be between one and two months before I see you again.

  I can’t tell you now, beloved, about what brought me here. There are things that can’t be written. But as soon as I’m back with you, I shall tell you the whole wretched story.

  If anything should happen—I mean to me—you’ll go on loving me forever, won’t you, beloved? But that’s foolish. Nothing is going to happen. I’m just off the train, and tired from traveling.

  Tomorrow I shall write you a long, long letter to make up for this.

  My address here is 21S N. Strieker St. Please, Mister, at least one letter a day!

  YOUR OWN JEANNE

  For nine days he had had a letter from her each day—with two on Monday to make up for the none on Sunday. And then her letters had stopped. And the daily letters he had sent to the address she gave—215 N. Strieker Street—had begun to come back to him, marked “Not known.” He had sent a telegram, and the telegraph company had informed him that its Baltimore office had been unable to find a Jeanne Delano at the North Strieker Street address.

  For three days he had waited, expecting hourly to hear from the girl, and no word had come. Then he had bought a ticket for Baltimore.

  “But,” he wound up, “I was afraid to go. I know she’s in some sort of trouble—I can feel that—but I’m a silly poet. I can’t deal with mysteries. Either I would find nothing at all or, if by luck I did stumble on the right track, the probabilities are that I would only muddle things; add fresh complications, perhaps endanger her life still further. I can’t go blundering at it in that fashion, without knowing whether I am helping or harming her. It’s a task for an expert in that sort of thing. So I thought of your agency. You’ll be careful, won’t you? It may be—I don’t know—that she won’t want assistance. It may be that you can help her without her knowing anything about it. You are accustomed to that sort of thing; you can do it, can’t you?”

  I turned the job over and over in my mind before answering him. The two great bugaboos of a reputable detective agency are the persons who bring in a crooked plan or a piece of divorce work all dressed up in the garb of a legitimate operation, and the irresponsible person who is laboring under wild and fanciful delusions—who wants a dream run out.

  This poet—sitting opposite me now twining his long, white fingers nervously—was, I thought, sincere; but I wasn’t so sure of his sanity.

  “Mr. Pangburn,” I said after a while, “I’d like to handle this thing for you, but I’m not sure that I can. The Continental is rather strict, and, while I believe this thing is on the level, still I am only a hired man and have to go by the rules. Now if you could give us the endorsement of some firm or person of standing—a reputable lawyer, for instance, or any legally responsible party—we’d be glad to go ahead with the work. Otherwise, I am afraid—”

  “But I know she’s in danger!” he broke out. “I know that—And I can’t be advertising her plight—airing her affairs—to everyone.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t touch it unless you can give me some such endorsement.” I stood up. “But you can find plenty of detective agencies that aren’t so particular.”

  His mouth worked like a small boy’s, and he caught his lower lip between his teeth. For a moment I thought he was going to burst into tears. But instead he said slowly: “I dare say you are right. Suppose I refer you to my brother-inlaw, Roy Axford. Will his word be sufficient?”

  “Yes.”

  Roy Axford—R.F. Axford—was a mining man who had a finger in at least half of the big business enterprises of the Pacific Coast; and his word on anything was commonly considered good enough for anybody.

  “If you can get in touch with him now,” I said, “and arrange for me to see him today, I can get started without much delay.”

  Pangburn crossed t
he room and dug a telephone out from among a heap of his ornaments. Within a minute or two he was talking to someone whom he called “Rita.”

  “Is Roy home? . . . Will he be home this afternoon? . . . No, you can give him a message for me, though . . . Tell him I’m sending a gentleman up to see him this afternoon on a personal matter—personal from me—and that I’ll be very grateful if he’ll do what I want . . . Yes . . . You’ll find out, Rita . . . It isn’t a thing to talk about over the phone . . . Yes, thanks!”

  He pushed the telephone back into its hiding place and turned to me.

  “He’ll be at home until two o’clock. Tell him what I told you and if he seems doubtful, have him call me up. You’ll have to tell him the whole thing; he doesn’t know anything at all about Miss Delano.”

  “All right. Before I go, I want a description of her.”

  “She’s beautiful! The most beautiful woman in the world!”

  That would look nice on a reward circular.

  “That isn’t exactly what I want,” I told him. “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Height?”

  “About five feet eight inches, or possibly nine.”

  “Slender, medium or plump?”

  “She’s inclined toward slenderness, but she—”

  There was a note of enthusiasm in his voice that made me fear he was about to make a speech, so I cut him off with another question.

  “What color hair?”

  “Brown—so dark it’s almost black—and it’s soft and thick and—”

  “Yes, yes. Long or bobbed?”

  “Long and thick and—”

  “What color eyes?”

  “You’ve seen shadows on polished silver when—”

  I wrote down gray eyes and hurried on with the interrogation.

  “Complexion?”

  “Perfect!”

  “Uh-huh. But is it light, or dark, or florid, or sallow, or what?”

  “Fair.”

  “Face oval, or square, or long and thin, or what shape?”

  “Oval.”

  “What shaped nose? Large, small, turned-up—”

  “Small and regular!” There was a touch of indignation in his voice.

  “How did she dress? Fashionably? Did she favor bright or quiet colors?”

  “Beaut—” And then as I opened my mouth to head him off he came down to earth with: “Very quietly—usually dark blues and browns.”

  “What jewelry did she wear?”

  “I’ve never seen her wear any.”

  “Any scars, or moles?” The horrified look on his white face urged me to give him a full shot. “Or warts, or deformities that you know?”

  He was speechless, but he managed to shake his head.

  “Have you a photograph of her?”

  “Yes, I’ll show you.”

  He bounded to his feet, wound his way through the room’s excessive furnishings and out through a curtained doorway. Immediately he was back with a large photograph in a carved ivory frame. It was one of these artistic photographs—a thing of shadows and hazy outlines—not much good for identification purposes. She was beautiful—right enough—but that meant nothing; that’s the purpose of an artistic photograph.

  “This the only one you have?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have to borrow it, but I’ll get it back to you as soon as I have my copies made.”

  “No! No!” he protested against having his lady love’s face given to a lot of gumshoes. “That would be terrible!”

  I finally got it, but it cost me more words than I like to waste on an incidental.

  “I want to borrow a couple of her letters, or something in her writing, too,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “To have photostatic copies made. Handwriting specimens come in handy—give you something to go over hotel registers with. Then, even if going under fictitious names, people now and then write notes and make memorandums.”

  We had another battle, out of which I came with three envelopes and two meaningless sheets of paper, all bearing the girl’s angular writing.

  “She have much money?” I asked, when the disputed photograph and handwriting specimens were safely tucked away in my pocket.

  “I don’t know. It’s not the sort of thing that one would pry into. She wasn’t poor; that is, she didn’t have to practice any petty economies; but I haven’t the faintest idea either as to the amount of her income or its source. She had an account at the Golden Gate Trust Company, but naturally I don’t know anything about its size.”

  “Many friends here?”

  “That’s another thing I don’t know. I think she knew a few people here, but I don’t know who they were. You see, when we were together we never talked about anything but ourselves. There was nothing we were interested in but each other. We were simply—”

  “Can’t you even make a guess at where she came from, who she was?”

  “No. Those things didn’t matter to me. She was Jeanne Delano, and that was enough for me.”

  “Did you and she ever have any financial interests in common? I mean, was there ever any transaction in money or other valuables in which both of you were interested?”

  What I meant, of course, was had she got into him for a loan, or had she sold him something, or got money out of him in any other way.

  He jumped to his feet, and his face went fog-gray. Then he sat down—slumped down—and blushed scarlet.

  “Pardon me,” he said thickly. “You didn’t know her, and of course you must look at the thing from all angles. No, there was nothing like that. I’m afraid you are going to waste time if you are going to work on the theory that she was an adventuress. There was nothing like that! She was a girl with something terrible hanging over her; something that called her to Baltimore suddenly; something that has taken her away from me. Money? What could money have to do with it? I love her!”

  R.F. Axford received me in an office-like room in his Russian Hill residence: a big blond man, whose forty-eight or -nine years had not blurred the outlines of an athlete’s body. A big, full- blooded man with the manner of one whose self-confidence is complete and not altogether unjustified. “What’s our Burke been up to now?” he asked amusedly when I told him who I was. His voice was a pleasant vibrant bass.

  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 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.

  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. Strieker 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 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 baggageroom 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.