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 skiing 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.
We couldn’t find Maxwell. We couldn’t find anybody who knew Maxwell. We couldn’t find any evidence that Maxwell was anything but a name.
One of the operatives went up to the yellow house on the hill, and rang the bell for half an hour with no result. We didn’t try that again, not wanting to stir things up at this stage.
I made another trip up the hill, house-hunting. I couldn’t find a place as near the yellow house as I would have liked, but I succeeded in renting a three-room flat from which the approach to it could be watched.
Dick and I camped in the flat—with Pat Reddy, when he wasn’t off on other duties—and watched machines turn into the screened path that led to the egg-tinted house. Afternoon and night there were machines. Most of them carried women. We saw no one we could place as a resident of the house. Elwood came daily, once alone, the other time with women whose faces we couldn’t see from our window.
We shadowed some of the visitors away. They were without exception reasonably well off financially, and some were socially prominent. We didn’t go up against any of them with talk. Even a carefully planned pretext is as likely as not to tip your mitt when you’re up against a blind game.
Three days of this—and our break came.
It was early evening, just dark. Pat Reddy had phoned that he had been up on a job for two days and a night, and was going to sleep the clock around. Dick and I were sitting at the window of our flat, watching automobiles turn toward the yellow house, writing down their license numbers as they passed through the blue-white patch of light an arc-lamp put in the road just beyond our window.
A woman came climbing the hill, afoot. She was a tall woman, strongly built. A dark veil, not thick enough to advertise the fact that she wore it to hide her features, nevertheless did hide them. Her way was up the hill, past our flat, on the other side of the roadway.
A night-wind from the Pacific was creaking a grocer’s sign down below, swaying the arc-light above. The wind caught the woman as she passed out of our building’s sheltered area. Coat and skirts tangled. She put her back to the wind, a hand to her hat. Her veil whipped out straight from her face.
Her face was a face from a photograph—Myra Banbrock’s face.
Dick made her with me.
“Our Baby!” he cried, bouncing to his feet.
“Wait,” I said. “She’s going into the joint on the edge of the hill. Let her go. We’ll go after her when she’s inside. That’s our excuse for frisking the joint.”
I went into the next room, where our telephone was, and called Pat Reddy’s number.
“She didn’t go in,” Dick called from the window. “She went past the path.”
“After her!” I ordered. “There’s no sense to that! What’s the matter with her?” I felt sort of indignant about it. “She’s got to go in! Tail her. I’ll find you after I get Pat.”
Dick went.
Pat’s wife answered the telephone. I told her who I was.
“Will you shake Pat out of the covers and send him up here? He knows where I am. Tell him I want him in a hurry.”
“I will,” she promised. “I’ll have him there in ten minutes—wherever it is.”
Outdoors, I went up the road, hunting for Dick and Myra Banbrock. Neither was in sight. Passing the bushes that masked the yellow house, I went on, circling down a stony path to the left. No sign of either.
I turned back in time to see Dick going into our flat. I followed.
“She’s in,” he said when I joined him. “She went up the road, cut across through some bushes, came back to the edge of the cliff, and slid feet-first through a cellar window.”
That was nice. The crazier the people you are sleuthing act, as a rule, the nearer you are to an ending of your troubles.
Reddy arrived within a minute or two of the time his wife had promised. He came in buttoning his clothes.
“What the hell did you tell Althea?” he growled at me. “She gave me an overcoat to put over my pajamas, dumped the rest of my clothes in the car, and I had to get in them on the way over.”
“I’ll cry with you after awhile,” I dismissed his troubles. “Myra Banbrock just went into the joint through a cellar window. Elwood has been there an hour. Let’s knock it off.”
Pat is deliberate.
“We ought to have papers, even at that,” he stalled.
“Sure,” I agreed, “but you can get them fixed up afterward. That’s what you’re here for. Contra Costa county wants her—maybe to try her for murder. That’s all the excuse we need to get into the joint. We go there for her. If we happen to run into anything else—well and good.”
Pat finished buttoning his vest.
“Oh, all right!” he said sourly. “Have it your way. But if you get me smashed for searching a house without authority, you’ll have to give me a job with your law-breaking agency.”
“I will.” I turned to Foley. “You’ll have to stay outside, Dick. Keep your eye on the getaway. Don’t bother anybody else, but if the Banbrock girl gets out, stay behind her.”
“I expected it,” Dick howled. “Any time there’s any fun I can count on being stuck off somewhere on a street corner!”