Эд Горман - Hard-Boiled - An Anthology of American Crime Stories

My watch told me it was nine-thirty: too late to line up any more of the girls’ friends. I went home, wrote my report for the day, and turned in, thinking more about Mrs. Correll than about the girls.

She seemed worth an investigation.

Some telegraphic reports were in when I got to the office the next morning. None was of any value. Investigation of the names and addresses in other cities had revealed nothing. An investigation in Monterey had established reasonably — which is about as well as anything is ever established in the detecting business — that the girls had not been there recently, that the Locomobile had not been there.

The early editions of the afternoon papers were on the street when I went out to get some breakfast before taking up the grind where I had dropped it the previous night.

I bought a paper to prop behind my grapefruit.

It spoiled my breakfast for me:

Mrs. Stewart Correll, wife of the vice-president of the Golden Gate Trust Company, was found dead early this morning by her maid in her bedroom, in her home in Presidio Terrace. A bottle believed to have contained poison was on the floor beside the bed.

The dead woman’s husband could give no reason for his wife’s suicide. He said she had not seemed depressed or...

At the Correll residence I had to do a lot of talking before I could get to Correll. He was a tall, slim man of less than thirty-five, with a sallow, nervous face and blue eyes that fidgeted.

“I’m sorry to disturb you at a time like this,” I apologized when I had finally insisted my way into his presence. “I won’t take up more of your time than necessary. I am an operative of the Continental Detective Agency. I have been trying to find Ruth and Myra Banbrock, who disappeared several days ago. You know them, I think.”

“Yes,” he said without interest. “I know them.”

“You knew they had disappeared?”

“No.” His eyes switched from a chair to a rug. “Why should I?”

“Have you seen either of them recently?” I asked, ignoring his question.

“Last week — Wednesday, I think. They were just leaving — standing at the door talking to my wife — when I came home from the bank.”

“Didn’t your wife say anything to you about their vanishing?”

“No. Really, I can’t tell you anything about the Misses Banbrock. If you’ll excuse me—”

“Just a moment longer,” I said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if it hadn’t been necessary. I was here last night to question Mrs. Correll. She seemed nervous. My impression was that some of her answers to my questions were — uh — evasive. I want—”

He was up out of his chair. His face was red in front of mine.

“You!” he cried. “I can thank you for—”

“Now, Mr. Correll,” I tried to quiet him, “there’s no use—”

But he had himself all worked up.

“You drove my wife to her death,” he accused me. “You killed her with your damned prying — with your bulldozing threats. With your—”

That was silly. I felt sorry for this young man whose wife had killed herself. Apart from that, I had work to do. I tightened the screws.

“We won’t argue, Correll,” I told him. “The point is that I came here to see if your wife could tell me anything about the Banbrocks. She told me less than the truth. Later, she committed suicide. I want to know why. Come through for me, and I’ll do what I can to keep the papers and the public from linking her death with the girls’ disappearance.”

“Linking her death with their disappearance?” he exclaimed. “That’s absurd!”

“Maybe — but the connection is there!” I hammered away at him. I felt sorry for him, but I had work to do. “It’s there. If you’ll give it to me, maybe it won’t have to be advertised. I’m going to get it, though. You give it to me — or I’ll go after it out in the open.”

For a moment I thought he was going to take a poke at me. I wouldn’t have blamed him. His body stiffened — then sagged, and he dropped back into his chair. His eyes fidgeted away from mine. “There’s nothing I can tell,” he mumbled. “When her maid went to her room to call her this morning, she was dead. There was no message, no reason, nothing.”

“Did you see her last night?”

“No. I was not home for dinner. I came in late and went straight to my own room, not wanting to disturb her. I hadn’t seen her since I left the house that morning.”

“Did she seem disturbed or worried then?”

“No.”

“Why do you think she did it?”

“My God, man, I don’t know! I’ve thought and thought, but I don’t know!”

“Health?”

“She seemed well. She was never ill, never complained.”

“Any recent quarrels?”

“We never quarreled — never in the year and a half we have been married!”

“Financial trouble?”

He shook his head without speaking or looking up from the floor.

“Any other worry?”

He shook his head again.

“Did the maid notice anything peculiar in her behavior last night?”

“Nothing.”

“Have you looked through her things — for papers, letters?”

“Yes — and found nothing.” He raised his head to look at me. “The only thing” — he spoke very slowly — “there was a little pile of ashes in the grate in her room, as if she had burned papers, or letters.”

Correll held nothing more for me — nothing I could get out of him, anyway.

The girl at the front gate in Alfred Banbrock’s Shoreman’s Building suite told me he was in conference. I sent my name in. He came out of conference to take me into his private office. His tired face was full of questions.

I didn’t keep him waiting for the answers. He was a grown man. I didn’t edge around the bad news.

“Things have taken a bad break,” I said as soon as we were locked in together. “I think we’ll have to go to the police and newspapers for help. A Mrs. Correll, a friend of your daughters, lied to me when I questioned her yesterday. Last night she committed suicide.”

“Irma Correll? Suicide?”

“You knew her?”

“Yes! Intimately! She is — that is, she was a close friend of my wife and daughters. She killed herself?”

“Yes. Poison. Last night. Where does she fit in with your daughters’ disappearance?”

“Where?” he repeated. “I don’t know. Must she fit in?”

“I think she must. She told me she hadn’t seen your daughters for a couple of weeks. Her husband told me just now that they were talking to her when he came home from the bank last Wednesday afternoon. She seemed nervous when I questioned her. She killed herself shortly afterward. There’s hardly a doubt that she fits in somewhere.”

“And that means—?”

“That means,” I finished for him, “that your daughters may be perfectly safe, but that we can’t afford to gamble on that possibility.”

“You think harm has come to them?”

“I don’t think anything,” I evaded, “except that with a death tied up closely with their going, we can’t afford to play around.”

Banbrock got his attorney on the phone — a pink-faced, white-haired old boy named Norwall, who had the reputation of knowing more about corporations than all the Morgans, but who hadn’t the least idea as to what police procedure was all about — and told him to meet us at the Hall of Justice.

We spent an hour and a half there, getting the police turned loose on the affair, and giving the newspapers what we wanted them to have. That was plenty of dope on the girls, plenty of photographs and so forth, but nothing about the connection between them and Mrs. Correll. Of course we let the police in on that angle.