I liked that. It could mean something.
“And,” Pat went on, “Correll has just remembered that his wife had an uncle who went crazy in Pittsburgh in 1902, and that she had a morbid fear of going crazy herself, and that she had often said she would kill herself if she thought she was going crazy. Wasn’t it nice of him to remember those things at last? To account for her death?”
“It was,” I agreed, “but it doesn’t get us anywhere. It doesn’t even prove that he knows anything. Now my guess is—”
“To hell with your guess,” Pat said, getting up and pushing his hat in place. “Your guesses all sound like a lot of static to me. I’m going home, eat my dinner, read my Bible, and go to bed.”
I suppose he did. Anyway, he left us.
We all might as well have spent the next three days in bed for all the profit that came out of our running around. No place we visited, nobody we questioned, added to our knowledge. We were in a blind alley.
We learned that the Locomobile was left in Sacramento by Myra Banbrock, and not by anyone else, but we didn’t learn where she went afterward. We learned that some of the jewelry in the pawnshop was Mrs. Correll’s. The Locomobile was brought back from Sacramento. Mrs. Correll was buried. Ruth Banbrock was buried. The newspapers found other mysteries. Reddy and I dug and dug, and all we brought up was dirt.
The following Monday brought me close to the end of my rope. There seemed nothing more to do but sit back and hope that the circulars with which we had plastered North America would bring results. Reddy had already been called off and put to running out fresher trails. I hung on because Banbrock wanted me to keep at it so long as there was the shadow of anything to keep at. But by Monday I had worked myself out.
Before going to Banbrock’s office to tell him I was licked, I dropped in at the Hall of Justice to hold a wake over the job with Pat Reddy. He was crouched over his desk, writing a report on some other job.
“Hello!” he greeted me, pushing his report away and smearing it with ashes from his cigar. “How do the Banbrock doings?”
“They don’t,” I admitted. “It doesn’t seem possible, with the stack-up what it is, that we should have come to a dead stop! It’s there for us, if we can find it. The need of money before both the Banbrock and the Correll calamities: Mrs. Correll’s suicide after I had questioned her about the girls; her burning things before she died and the burning of things immediately before or after Ruth Banbrock’s death.”
“Maybe the trouble is,” Pat suggested, “that you’re not such a good sleuth.”
“Maybe.”
We smoked in silence for a minute or two after that insult.
“You understand,” Pat said presently, “there doesn’t have to be any connection between the Banbrock death and disappearance and the Correll death.”
“Maybe not. But there has to be a connection between the Banbrock death and the Banbrock disappearance. There was a connection—in a pawnshop—between the Banbrock and Correll actions before these things. If there is that connection, then—”
I broke off, all full of ideas.
“What’s the matter?” Pat asked. “Swallow your gum?”
“Listen!” I let myself get almost enthusiastic. “We’ve got what happened to three women hooked up together. If we could tie up some more in the same string—I want the names and addresses of all the women and girls in San Francisco who have committed suicide, been murdered, or have disappeared within the past year.”
“You think this is a wholesale deal?”
“I think the more we can tie up together, the more lines we’ll have to run out. And they can’t all lead nowhere. Let’s get our list, Pat!”
We spent all the afternoon and most of the night getting it. Its size would have embarrassed the Chamber of Commerce. It looked like a hunk of the telephone book. Things happen in a city in a year. The section devoted to strayed wives and daughters was the largest; suicides next; and even the smallest division—murders—wasn’t any too short.
We could check off most of the names against what the police department had already learned of them and their motives, weeding out those positively accounted for in a manner nowise connected with our present interest. The remainder we split into two classes; those of unlikely connection, and those of more possible connection. Even then, the second list was longer than I had expected, or hoped.
There were six suicides in it, three murders, and twenty-one disappearances.
Reddy had other work to do. I put the list in my pocket and went calling.
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
