“All right. Before I go, I want a description of her.”
“She’s beautiful!” he exclaimed. “The most beautiful woman in the world!”
That would look nice on a reward circular.
“That isn’t exactly what I want,” I told him. “How old is she?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Height?”
“About five feet eight inches, or possibly nine.”
“Slender, medium or plump?”
“She’s inclined toward slenderness, but she—”
There was a note of enthusiasm in his voice that made me fear he was about to make a speech, so I cut him off with another question.
“What color hair?”
“Brown—so dark that it’s almost black—and it’s soft and thick and—”
“Yes, yes. Long or bobbed?”
“Long and thick and—”
“What color eyes?”
“You’ve seen shadows on polished silver when—”
I wrote down grey eyes and hurried on with the interrogation.
“Complexion?”
“Perfect!”
“Uh-huh. But is it light, or dark, or florid, or sallow, or what?”
“Fair.”
“Face oval, or square, or long and thin, or what shape?”
“Oval.”
“What shaped nose? Large, small, turned-up—”
“Small and regular!” There was a touch of indignation in his voice.
“How did she dress? Fashionably? And 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 on 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 ladylove’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. You know what I mean: 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-grey. Then he sat down again—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!”
III
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 who were current 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
