The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

by Penzler, Otto

  “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 awhile.”

  “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.

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

  Half an hour before the Go
lden 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-in-law. 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 Glen-ton 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 wife 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.