I found one more of the Banbrock girls’ friends before I called it a day. Her name was Mrs. Stewart Correll. She lived in Presidio Terrace, not far from the Banbrocks. She was a small woman, or girl, of about Mrs. Banbrock’s age. A little fluffy blonde person with wide eyes of that particular blue which always looks honest and candid no matter what is going on behind it.
“I haven’t seen either Ruth or Myra for two weeks or more,” she said in answer to my question.
“At that time—the last time you saw them—did either say anything about going away?”
“No.”
Her eyes were wide and frank. A little muscle twitched in her upper lip.
“And you’ve no idea where they might have gone?”
“No.”
Her fingers were rolling her lace handkerchief into a little ball.
“Have you heard from them since you last saw them?”
“No.”
She moistened her mouth before she said it.
“Will you give me the names and addresses of all the people you know who were also known by the Banbrock girls?”
“Why—? Is there—?”
“There’s a chance that some of them may have seen them more recently than you,” I explained. “Or may even have seen them since Friday.”
Without enthusiasm, she gave me a dozen names. All were already on my list. Twice she hesitated as if about to speak a name she did not want to speak. Her eyes stayed on mine, wide and honest. Her fingers, no longer balling the handkerchief, picked at the cloth of her skirt.
I didn’t pretend to believe her. But my feet weren’t solidly enough on the ground for me to put her on the grill. I gave her a promise before I left, one that she could get a threat out of if she liked.
“Thanks, very much,” I said. “I know it’s hard to remember things exactly. If I run across anything that will help your memory, I’ll be back to let you know about it.”
“Wha—? Yes, do!” she said.
Walking away from the house, I turned my head to look back just before I passed out of sight. A curtain swung into place at a second-floor window. The street lights weren’t bright enough for me to be sure the curtain had swung in front of a blonde head.
My watch told me it was nine-thirty: too late to line up any more of the girls’ friends. I went home, wrote my report for the day, and turned in, thinking more about Mrs. Correll than about the girls.
She seemed worth an investigation.
III
Some telegraphic reports were in when I got to the office the next morning. None was of any value. Investigation of the names and addresses in other cities had revealed nothing. An investigation in Monterey had established reasonably—which is about as well as anything is ever established in the detecting business—that the girls had not been there recently; that the Locomobile had not been there.
The early editions of the afternoon papers were on the street when I went out to get some breakfast before taking up the grind where I had dropped it the previous night. I bought a paper to prop behind my grapefruit.
It spoiled my breakfast for me.
BANKER’S WIFE SUICIDE
Mrs. Stewart Correll, wife of the vice-president of the Golden Gate Trust Company, was found dead early this morning by her maid in her bedroom, in her home in Presidio Terrace. A bottle believed to have contained poison was on the floor beside the bed.
The dead woman’s husband could give no reason for his wife’s suicide. He said she had not seemed depressed or …
I gave my eggs and toast a quick play, put my coffee down in a lump, and got going.
At the Correll residence I had to do a lot of talking before I could get to Correll. He was a tall, slim man of less than thirty-five, with a sallow, nervous face and blue eyes that fidgeted.
“I’m sorry to disturb you at a time like this,” I apologized when I had finally insisted my way into his presence. “I won’t take up more of your time than necessary. I am an operative of the Continental Detective Agency. I have been trying to find Ruth and Myra Banbrock, who disappeared several days ago. You know them, I think.”
“Yes,” he said without interest. “I know them.”
“You knew they had disappeared?”
“No.” His eyes switched from a chair to a rug. “Why should I?”
“Have you seen either of them recently?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“Last week—Wednesday, I think. They were just leaving—standing at the door talking to my wife—when I came home from the bank.”
“Didn’t your wife say anything to you about their vanishing?”
“No. Really, I can’t tell you anything about the Misses Banbrock. If you’ll excuse me—”
“Just a moment longer,” I said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if it hadn’t been necessary. I was here last night, to question Mrs. Correll. She seemed nervous. My impression was that some of her answers to my questions were—uh—evasive. I want—”
He was up out of his chair. His face was red in front of mine.
“You!” he cried. “I can thank you for—”
“Now, Mr. Correll,” I tried to quiet him, “there’s no use—”
But he had himself all worked up.
“You drove my wife to her death,” he accused me. “You killed her with your damned prying—with your bulldozing threats; with your—”
That was silly. I felt sorry for this young man whose wife had killed herself. Apart from that, I had work to do. I tightened the screws.
“We won’t argue, Correll,” I told him. “The point is that I came here to see if your wife could tell me anything about the Banbrocks. She told me less than the truth. Later, she committed suicide. I want to know why. Come through for me, and I’ll do what I can to keep the papers and the public from linking her death with the girls’ disappearance.”
“Linking her death with their disappearance?” he exclaimed. “That’s absurd!”
“Maybe—but the connection is there!” I hammered away at him. I felt sorry for him, but I had work to do. “It’s there. If you’ll give it to me, maybe it won’t have to be advertised. I’m going to get it, though. You give it to me—or I’ll go after it out in the open.”
For a moment I thought he was going to take a poke at me. I wouldn’t have blamed him. His body stiffened—then sagged, and he dropped back into his chair. His eyes fidgeted away from mine.
“There’s nothing I can tell,” he mumbled. “When her maid went to her room to call her this morning, she was dead. There was no message, no reason, nothing.”
“Did you see her last night?”
“No. I was not home for dinner. I came in late and went straight to my own room, not wanting to disturb her. I hadn’t seen her since I left the house that morning.”
“Did she seem disturbed or worried then?”
“No.”
“Why do you think she did it?”
“My God, man, I don’t know! I’ve thought and thought, but I don’t know!”
“Health?”
“She seemed well. She was never ill, never complained.”
“Any recent quarrels?”
“We never quarreled—never in the year and a half we have been married!”
“Financial trouble?”
He shook his head without speaking or looking up from the floor.
“Any other worry?”
He shook his head again.
“Did the maid notice anything peculiar in her behavior last night?”
“Nothing.”
“Have you looked through her things—for papers, letters?”
“Yes—and found nothing.” He raised his head to look at me. “The only thing”—he spoke very slowly—“there was a little pile of ashes in the grate in her room, as if she had burned papers, or le
tters.”
Correl held nothing more for me—nothing I could get out of him, anyway.
The girl at the front gate in Alfred Banbrock’s Shoreman’s Building suite told me he was in conference. I sent my name in. He came out of conference to take me into his private office. His tired face was full of questions.
I didn’t keep him waiting for the answers. He was a grown man. I didn’t edge around the bad news.
“Things have taken a bad break,” I said as soon as we were locked in together. “I think we’ll have to go to the police and newspapers for help. A Mrs. Correll, a friend of your daughters, lied to me when I questioned her yesterday. Last night she committed suicide.”
“Irma Correll? Suicide?”
“You knew her?”
“Yes! Intimately! She was—that is, she was a close friend of my wife and daughters. She killed herself?”
“Yes. Poison. Last night. Where does she fit in with your daughters’ disappearance?”
“Where?” he repeated. “I don’t know. Must she fit in?”
“I think she must. She told me she hadn’t seen your daughters for a couple of weeks. Her husband told me just now that they were talking to her when he came home from the bank last Wednesday afternoon. She seemed nervous when I questioned her. She killed herself shortly afterward. There’s hardly a doubt that she fits in somewhere.”
“And that means—?”
“That means,” I finished for him, “that your daughters may be perfectly safe, but that we can’t afford to gamble on that possibility.”
“You think harm has come to them?”
“I don’t think anything,” I evaded, “except that with a death tied up closely with their going, we can’t afford to play around.”
Banbrock got his attorney on the phone—a pink-faced, white-haired old boy named Norwall, who had the reputation of knowing more about corporations than all the Morgans, but who hadn’t the least idea as to what police procedure was all about—and told him to meet us at the Hall of Justice.
We spent an hour and a half there, getting the police turned loose on the affair, and giving the newspapers what we wanted them to have. That was plenty of dope on the girls, plenty of photographs and so forth; but nothing about the connection between them and Mrs. Correll. Of course we let the police in on that angle.
IV
After Banbrock and his attorney had gone away together, I went back to the detectives’ assembly room to chew over the job with Pat Reddy, the police sleuth assigned to it.
Pat was the youngest member of the detective bureau—a big blond Irishman who went in for the spectacular in his lazy way.
A couple of years ago he was a new copper, pounding his feet in harness on a hillside beat. One night he tagged an automobile that was parked in front of a fireplug. The owner came out just then and gave him an argument. She was Althea Wallach, only and spoiled daughter of the owner of the Wallach Coffee Company—a slim, reckless youngster with hot eyes. She must have told Pat plenty. He took her over to the station and dumped her in a cell.
Old Wallach, so the story goes, showed up the next morning with a full head of steam and half the lawyers in San Francisco. But Pat made his charge stick, and the girl was fined. Old Wallach did everything but take a punch at Pat in the corridor afterward. Pat grinned his sleepy grin at the coffee importer, and drawled:
“You better lay off me—or I’ll stop drinking your coffee.”
That crack got into most of the newspapers in the country, and even into a Broadway show.
But Pat didn’t stop with the snappy come-back. Three days later he and Althea Wallach went over to Alameda and got themselves married. I was in on that part. I happened to be on the ferry they took, and they dragged me along to see the deed done.
Old Wallach immediately disowned his daughter, but that didn’t seem to worry anybody else. Pat went on pounding his beat, but, now that he was conspicuous, it wasn’t long before his qualities were noticed. He was boosted into the detective bureau. Old Wallach relented before he died, and left Althea both of his millions.
Pat took the afternoon off to go to the funeral, and went back to work that night, catching a wagonload of gunmen. He kept on working. I don’t know what his wife did with her money, but Pat didn’t even improve the quality of his cigars—though he should have. He lived now in the Wallach mansion, true enough, and now and then on rainy mornings he would be driven down to the Hall in a Hispano-Suiza brougham; but there was no difference in him beyond that.
That was the big blond Irishman who sat across a desk from me in the assembly room and fumigated me with something shaped like a cigar.
He took the cigar-like thing out of his mouth presently, and spoke through the fumes.
“This Correll woman you think’s tied up with the Banbrocks—she was stuck-up a couple of months back and nicked for eight hundred dollars. Know that?”
I hadn’t known it.
“Lose anything besides cash?” I asked.
“No.”
“You believe it?”
He grinned.
“That’s the point,” he said. “We didn’t catch the bird who did it. With women who lose things that way—especially money—it’s always a question whether it’s a hold-up or a hold-out.”
He teased some more poison-gas out of the cigar-thing, and added:
“The hold-up might have been on the level, though. What are you figuring on doing now?”
“Let’s go up to the Agency and see if anything new has turned up. Then I’d like to talk to Mrs. Banbrock again. Maybe she can tell us something about the Correll woman.”
At the office I found that reports had come in on the rest of the out-of-town names and addresses. Apparently none of these people knew anything about the girls’ whereabouts. Reddy and I went on up to Sea Cliff to the Banbrock home.
Banbrock had telephoned the news of Mrs. Correll’s death to his wife, and she had read the papers. She told us she could think of no reason for the suicide. She could imagine no possible connection between the suicide and her stepdaughters’ vanishing.
“Mrs. Correll seemed as nearly contented and happy as usual the last time I saw her, two or three weeks ago,” Mrs. Banbrock said. “Of course she was by nature inclined to be dissatisfied with things, but not to the extent of doing a thing like this.”
“Do you know of any trouble between her and her husband?”
“No. So far as I know, they were happy, though—”
She broke off. Hesitancy, embarrassment showed in her dark eyes.
“Though?” I repeated.
“If I don’t tell you now, you’ll think I am hiding something,” she said, flushing, and laughing a little laugh that held more nervousness than amusement. “It hasn’t any bearing, but I was always just a little jealous of Irma. She and my husband were—well, everyone thought they would marry. That was a little before he and I married. I never let it show, and I dare say it was a foolish idea, but I always had a suspicion that Irma married Stewart more in pique than for any other reason, and that she was still fond of Alfred—Mr. Banbrock.”
“Was there anything definite to make you think that?”
“No, nothing—really! I never thoroughly believed it. It was just a sort of vague feeling. Cattiness, no doubt, more than anything else.”
It was getting along toward evening when Pat and I left the Banbrock house. Before we knocked off for the day, I called up the Old Man—the Continental’s San Francisco branch manager, and therefore my boss—and asked him to sic an operative on Irma Correll’s past.
I took a look at the morning papers—thanks to their custom of appearing almost as soon as the sun is out of sight—before I went to bed. They had given our job a good spread. All the facts except those having to do with the Correll angle were there, plus photographs, and the usual assortment of guesses
and similar garbage.
The following morning I went after the friends of the missing girls to whom I had not yet talked. I found some of them, and got nothing of value from them. Late in the morning I telephoned the office to see if anything new had turned up.
It had.
“We’ve just had a call from the sheriff’s office at Martinez,” the Old Man told me. “An Italian grapegrower near Knob Valley picked up a charred photograph a couple of days ago, and recognized it as Ruth Banbrock when he saw her picture in this morning’s paper. Will you get up there? A deputy sheriff and the Italian are waiting for you in the Knob Valley marshal’s office.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
At the ferry building I used the four minutes before my boat left trying to get Pat Reddy on the phone, with no success.
Knob Valley is a town of less than a thousand people, a dreary, dirty town in Contra Costa county. A San Francisco-Sacramento local set me down there while the afternoon was still young.
I knew the marshal slightly—Tom Orth. I found two men in the office with him. Orth introduced us. Abner Paget, a gawky man of forty-something, with a slack chin, scrawny face, and pale intelligent eyes, was the deputy sheriff. Gio Cereghino, the Italian grapegrower, was a small, nut-brown man with strong yellow teeth that showed in an everlasting smile under his black mustache, and soft brown eyes.
Paget showed me the photograph. A scorched piece of paper the size of a half-dollar, apparently all that had not been burned of the original picture. It was Ruth Banbrock’s face. There was little room for doubting that. She had a peculiarly excited—almost drunken—look, and her eyes were larger than in the other pictures of her I had seen. But it was her face.
“He says he found it day ’fore yesterday,” Paget explained dryly, nodding at the Italian. “The wind blew it against his foot when he was walkin’ up a piece of road near his place. He picked it up an’ stuck it in his pocket, he says, for no special reason, I guess, except maybe that guineas like pictures.”
He paused to regard the Italian meditatively. The Italian nodded his head in vigorous affirmation.
“Anyways,” the deputy sheriff went on, “he was in town this mornin’, an’ seen the pictures in the papers from ’Frisco. So he come in here an’ told Tom about it. Tom an’ me decided the best thing was to phone your agency—since the papers said you was workin’ on it.”