VIII
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 cancelled 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.
He pressed one of his desk’s pearl buttons with a fumbling pink finger, and in a minute or two a little sallow man with a hairless head came in.
“Do you remember taking a check for twenty thousand from Miss Jeanne Delano a few weeks ago?” I asked him.
“Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Perfectly.”
“Just what do you remember about it?”
“Well, sir, Miss Delano came to my window with Mr. Burke Pangburn. It was his check. I thought it was a large check for him to be drawing, but the bookkeepers said he had enough money in his account to cover it. They stood there—Miss Delano and Mr. Pangburn—talking and laughing while I entered the deposit in her book, and then they left, and that was all.”
“This check,” Axford said slowly, after the teller had gone back to his cage, “is a forgery. But I shall make it good, of course. That ends the matter, Mr. Clement, and there must be no more to-do about it.”
“Certainly, Mr. Axford. Certainly.”
Clement was all enormously relieved smiles and head-noddings, with this twenty-thousand-dollar load lifted from his bank’s shoulders.
Axford and I left the bank then and got into his coupe, in which we had come from his office. But he did not immediately start the engine. He sat for a while staring at the traffic of Montgomery Street with unseeing eyes.
“I want you to find Burke,” he said presently, and there was no emotion of any sort in his bass voice. “I want you to find him without risking the least whisper of scandal. If my wife knew of all this—She mustn’t know. She thinks her brother is a choice morsel. I want you to find him for me. The girl doesn’t matter any more, but I suppose that where you find one you will find the other. I’m not interested in the money, and I don’t want you to make any special attempt to recover that; it could hardly be done, I’m afraid, without publicity. I want you to find Burke before he does something else.”
“If you want to avoid the wrong kind of publicity,” I said, “your best bet is to spread the right kind first. Let’s advertise him as missing, fill the papers up with his pictures and so forth. They’ll play him up strong. He’s your brother-in-law and he’s a poet. We can say that he has been ill—you told me that he had been in delicate health all his life—and that we fear he has dropped dead somewhere or is suffering under some mental derangement. There will be no necessity of mentioning the girl or the money, and our explanation may keep people—especially your wife—from guessing the truth when the fact that he is missing leaks out. It’s bound to leak out somehow.”
He didn’t like my idea at first, but I finally won him over.
We went up to Pangburn’s apartment then, easily securing admittance on Axford’s explanation that we had an engagement with him and would wait there for him. I went through the rooms inch by inch, prying into each hole and hollow and crack; reading everything that was written anywhere, even down to his manuscripts; and I found nothing that threw any light on his disappearance.
I helped myself to his photographs—pocketing five of the dozen or more that were there. Axford did not think that any of the poet’s bags or trunks were missing from the pack-room. I did not find his Golden Gate Trust Company deposit book.
I spent the rest of the day loading the newspapers up with what we wished them to have; and they gave my ex-client one grand spread: first-page stuff with photographs and all possible trimmings. Anyone in San Francisco who didn’t know that Burke Pangburn—brother-in-law of R. F. Axford and author of Sandpatches and Other Verse—was missing, either couldn’t read or wouldn’t.
IX
This advertising brought results. By the following morning, reports were rolling in from all directions, from dozens of people who had seen the missing poet in dozens of places. A few
