Crime Stories Read online

  Sunday was well into night by now, so I knocked off and went home.

  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 would but 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.”

  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.”

  “Exactly,” the cashier said.

  Before going up to the Glenton Apartments to find out why Pangburn hadn’t come clean with me about the twenty thousand dollars, I dropped in at the agency, to see if any word had come from Baltimore. One of the clerks had just finished decoding a telegram. It read:

  BAGGAGE ARRIVED MT. ROYAL STATION ON EIGHTH. TAKEN AWAY SAME DAY. UNABLE TO TRACE. 215 NORTH STRICKER STREET IS BALTIMORE ORPHAN ASYLUM. GIRL NOT KNOWN THERE. CONTINUING OUR EFFORTS TO FIND HER.

  The Old Man came in from luncheon as I was leaving. I went back into his office with him for a couple of minutes.

  “Did you see Pangburn?” he asked.

  “Yes. I’m working on his job now—but I think it’s a bust.”

  “What is it?”

  “Pangburn is R.F. Axford’s brother-inlaw. He met a girl a couple of months ago, and fell for her. She sizes up as a worker. He doesn’t know anything about her. The first of the month he got twenty thousand dollars from his brother-in-law and passed it over to the girl. She blew, telling him she had been called to Baltimore, and giving him a phony address that turns out to be an orphan asylum. She sent her trunks to Baltimore, and sent him some letters from there—but a friend could have taken care of the baggage and could have remailed her letters for her. Of course, she would have needed a ticket to check the trunks on, but in a twenty-thousand-dollar game that would be a small expense. Pangburn held out on me; he didn’t tell me a word about the money. Ashamed of being easy pickings, I reckon. I’m going to the bat with him on it now.”

  The Old Man smiled his mild smile that might mean anything, and I left.

  Ten minutes of ringing Pangburn’s bell brought no answer. The elevator boy told me he thought Pangburn hadn’t been in all night. I put a note in his box and went down to the railroad company’s offices, where I arranged to be notified if an unused Baltimore-San Francisco ticket was turned in for redemption.

  That done, I went up to the Chronicle office and searched the files for weather conditions during the past month, making a memorandum of four dates upon which it had rained steadily day and night. I carried my memorandum to the offices of the three largest taxicab companies.

  That was a trick that had worked well for me before. The girl’s apartment was some distance from the street car line, and I was counting upon her having gone out—or having had a caller—on one of those rainy dates. In either case, it was very likely that she—or her caller—had left in a taxi in preference to walking through the rain to the car line. The taxicab companies’ daily records would show any calls from her address, and the fares’ destinations.

  The ideal trick, of course, would have been to have the records searched for the full extent of the girl’s occupancy of the apartment; but no taxicab company would stand for having that amount of work thrust upon them, unless it was a matter of life and death. It was difficult enough for me to persuade them to turn clerks loose on the four days I had selected.

  I called up Pangburn again after I left that last taxicab office, but he was not at home. I called up Axford’s residence, thinking that the poet might have spent the night there, but was told that he had not.

  Late that afternoon I got my copies of the girl’s photograph and handwriting, and put one of each in the mail for Baltimore. Then I went around to the three taxicab companies’ offices and got my reports. Two of them had nothing for me. The third’s records showed two calls from the girl’s apartment.

  On one rainy afternoon a taxi had been called, and one passenger had been taken to the Glenton Apartments. That passenger, obviously, was either the girl or Pangburn. At half past twelve one night another call had come in, and this passenger had been taken to the Marquis Hotel.

  The driver who had answered this second call remembered it indistinctly when I questioned him, but he thought that his fare had been a man. I let the matter rest there for the time; the Marquis isn’t a large hotel as San Francisco hotels go, but it is too large to make canvassing its guests for the one I wanted practicable.

  I spent the evening trying to reach Pangburn, with no success. At eleven o’clock I called up Axford, and asked him if he had any idea where I might find his brother-in-law.

  “Haven’t seen him for several days,” the millionaire said. “He was supposed to come up for dinner last night, but didn’t. My wif
e tried to reach him by phone a couple times today, but couldn’t.”

  The next morning I called Pangburn’s apartment before I got out of bed, and got no answer.

  Then I telephoned Axford and made an appointment for ten o’clock at his office.

  “I don’t know what he’s up to now,” Axford said good-naturedly when I told him that Pangburn had apparently been away from his apartment since Sunday, “and I suppose there’s small chance of guessing. Our Burke is nothing if not erratic. How are you progressing with your search for the damsel in distress?”

  “Far enough to convince me that she isn’t in a whole lot of distress. She got twenty thousand dollars from your brother-in-law the day before she vanished.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars from Burke? She must be a wonderful girl! But wherever did he get that much money?”

  “From you.”

  Axford’s muscular body straightened in his chair. “From me?”

  “Yes—your check.”

  “He did not.”

  There was nothing argumentative in his voice; it simply stated a fact.

  “You didn’t give him a check for twenty thousand dollars on the first of the month?”

  “No.”

  “Then,” I suggested, “perhaps we’d better take a run over to the Golden Gate Trust Company.”

  Ten minutes later we were in Clement’s office.

  “I’d like to see my canceled checks,” Axford told the cashier.

  The youth with the polished yellow hair brought them in presently—a thick wad of them—and Axford ran rapidly through them until he found the one he wanted. He studied that one for a long while, and when he looked up at me he shook his head slowly but with finality.

  “I’ve never seen it before.”

  Clement mopped his head with a white handkerchief, and tried to pretend that he wasn’t burning up with curiosity and fears that his bank had been gypped.

  The millionaire turned the check over and looked at the endorsement.

  “Deposited by Burke,” he said in the voice of one who talks while he thinks of something entirely different, “on the first.”

  “Could we talk to the teller who took in the twenty-thousand-dollar check that Miss Delano deposited?” I asked Clement.

  He pressed one of his desk’s pearl buttons with a fumbling pink finger, and in a minute or two a little sallow man with a hairless head came in.

  “Do you remember taking a check for twenty thousand from Miss Jeanne Delano a few weeks ago?” I asked him.

  “Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Perfectly.”

  “Just what do you remember about it?”

  “Well, sir, Miss Delano came to my window with Mr. Burke Pangburn. It was his check. I thought it was a large check for him to be drawing, but the bookkeepers said he had enough money in his account to cover it. They stood there—Miss Delano and Mr. Pangburn—talking and laughing while I entered the deposit in her book, and then they left, and that was all.”

  “This check,” Axford said slowly, after the teller had gone back to his cage, “is a forgery. But I shall make it good, of course. That ends the matter, Mr. Clement, and there must be no more to-do about it.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Axford. Certainly.”

  Clement was all enormously relieved smiles and head-noddings, with this twenty- thousand-dollar load lifted from his bank’s shoulders.

  Axford and I left the bank then and got into his coupe, in which we had come from his office. But he did not immediately start the engine. He sat for a while staring at the traffic of Montgomery Street with unseeing eyes.

  “I want you to find Burke,” he said presently, and there was no emotion of any sort in his bass voice. “I want you to find him without risking the least whisper of scandal. If my wife knew of all this—She mustn’t know. She thinks her brother is a choice morsel. I want you to find him for me. The girl doesn’t matter any more, but I suppose that where you find one you will find the other. I’m not interested in the money, and I don’t want you to make any special attempt to recover that; it could hardly be done, I’m afraid, without publicity. I want you to find Burke before he does something else.”

  “If you want to avoid the wrong kind of publicity,” I said, “your best bet is to spread the right kind first. Let’s advertise him as missing, fill the papers up with his pictures and so forth. They’ll play him up strong. He’s your brother-inlaw and he’s a poet. We can say that he has been ill—you told me that he had been in delicate health all his life—and that we fear he has dropped dead somewhere or is suffering under some mental derangement. There will be no necessity of mentioning the girl or the money, and our explanation may keep people—especially your wife—from guessing the truth when the fact that he is missing leaks out. It’s bound to leak out somehow.”

  He didn’t like my idea at first, but I finally won him over.

  We went up to Pangburn’s apartment then, easily securing admittance on Axford’s explanation that we had an engagement with him and would wait there for him. I went through the rooms inch by inch, prying into each hole and hollow and crack; reading everything that was written anywhere, even down to his manuscripts; and I found nothing that threw any light on his disappearance.

  I helped myself to his photographs—pocketing five of the dozen or more that were there. Axford did not think that any of the poet’s bags or trunks were missing from the pack-room. I did not find his Golden Gate Trust Company deposit book.

  I spent the rest of the day loading the newspapers up with what we wished them to have; and they gave my ex-client one grand spread: first-page stuff with photographs and all possible trimmings. Anyone in San Francisco who didn’t know that Burke Pangburn—brother-in-law of R.F. Axford and author of Sand-patches and Other Verse—was missing, either couldn’t read or wouldn’t.

  This advertising brought results. By the following morning, reports were rolling in from all directions, from dozens of people who had seen the missing poet in dozens of places. A few of these reports looked promising—or at least possible—but the majority were ridiculous on their faces.

  I came back to the agency from running out one that had—until run out—looked good, to find a note asking me to call up Axford.

  “Can you come down to my office now?” he asked when I got him on the wire.

  There was a lad of twenty-one or -two with Axford when I was ushered into his office: a narrow-chested, dandified lad of the sporting clerk type.

  “This is Mr. Fall, one of my employees,” Axford told me. “He said he saw Burke Sunday night.”

  “Where?” I asked Fall.

  “Going into a roadhouse near Halfmoon Bay.”

  “Sure it was him?”

  “Absolutely! I’ve seen him come in here to Mr. Axford’s office often enough to know him. It was him all right.”

  “How’d you come to see him?”

  “I was coming up from further down the shore with some friends, and we stopped in at the roadhouse to get something to eat. As we were leaving, a car drove up and Mr. Pangburn and a girl or woman—I didn’t notice her particularly—got out and went inside. I didn’t think anything of it until I saw in the paper last night that he hadn’t been seen since Sunday. So then I thought to myself that—”

  “What roadhouse was this?” I cut in.

  “The White Shack.”

  “About what time?”

  “Somewhere between eleven-thirty and midnight, I guess.”

  “He see you?”

  “No. I was already in our car when he drove up.”

  “What did the woman look like?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see her face, and I can’t remember how she was dressed or even if she was short or tall.”

  That was all Fall could tell me. We shooed him out of the office, and I used Axford’s telephone to call up “Wop” Healey’s dive in North Beach and leave word that when “Porky” Grout came in he was to call up “Jack.” That was a standing arrangement by which I got word t
o Porky whenever I wanted to see him, without giving anybody a chance to tumble to the connection between us.

  “Know the White Shack?” I asked Axford, when I was through.

  “I know where it is, but I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Well, it’s a tough hole. Run by ‘Tin-Star’ Joplin, an ex-yegg who invested his winnings in the place when Prohibition made the roadhouse game good. He makes more money now than he ever heard of in his piking safe-ripping days. Retailing liquor is a sideline with him; his real profit comes from acting as a relay station for the booze that comes through Halfmoon Bay for points beyond; and the dope is that half the booze put ashore by the Pacific rum fleet is put ashore in Halfmoon Bay.

  “The White Shack is a tough hole, and it’s no place for your brother-in-law to be hanging around. I can’t go down there myself without stirring things up; Joplin and I are old friends.

  But I’ve got a man I can put in there for a few nights. Pangburn may be a regular visitor, or he may even be staying there. He wouldn’t be the first one Joplin had ever let hide out there. I’ll put this man of mine in the place for a week, anyway, and see what he can find.”

  “It’s all in your hands,” Axford said.

  From Axford’s office I went straight to my rooms, left the outer door unlocked, and sat down to wait for Porky Grout. I had waited an hour and a half when he pushed the door open and came in.” ‘Lo! How’s tricks?” He swaggered to a chair, leaned back in it, put his feet on the table and reached for a pack of cigarettes that lay there.

  That was Porky Grout. A pasty-faced man in his thirties, neither large nor small, always dressed flashily—even if sometimes dirtily—and trying to hide an enormous cowardice behind a swaggering carriage, a blustering habit of speech, and an exaggerated pretense of self-assurance.

  But I had known him for three years; so now I crossed the room and pushed his feet roughly off the table, almost sending him over backward.

  “What’s the idea?” He came to his feet, crouching and snarling. “Where do you get that stuff? Do you want a smack in the—”