Read Online The Golden Horseshoe and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett - Free Book Online Page B

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 the girl? Or is Burke imagining things?”
    â€œI don’t know. I thought it was a dream at first. But in a couple of her letters there are hints that something was wrong.”
    â€œYou might go ahead and find her then,” Axford said. “I don’t suppose any harm will come from letting him have his Jeanne back. It will at least give him something to think about for a while.”
    â€œI have your word for it then, Mr. Axford, that there will be no scandal or anything of the sort connected with the affair?”
    â€œAssuredly! Burke is all right, you know. It’s simply that he is spoiled. He has been in rather delicate health all his life; and then he has an income that suffices to keep him modestly, with a little over to bring out books of verse and buy doo-daws for his rooms. He takes himself a little too solemnly—is too much the poet—but he’s sound at bottom.”
    â€œI’ll go ahead with it, then,” I said, getting up. “By the way, the girl has an account at the Golden Gate Trust Company, and I’d like to find out as much about it as possible, especially where her money came from. Clement, the cashier, is a model of caution when it comes to giving out information about depositors. If you could put in a word for me it would make my way smoother.”
    â€œBe glad to.”
    He wrote a couple of lines across the back of a card and gave it to me; and, promising to call on him if I needed further assistance, I left.
    IV
    I telephoned Pangburn that his brother-in-law had given the job his approval. I sent a wire to the agency’s Baltimore branch, giving what information I had. Then I went up to Ashbury Avenue, to the apartment house in which the girl had lived.
    The manager—an immense Mrs. Clute in rustling black—knew little, if any, more about the girl than Pangburn. The girl had lived there for two and a half months; she had had occasional callers, but Pangburn was the only one that the manager could describe to me. The girl had given up the apartment on the third of the month, saying that she had been called East, and she had asked the manager to hold her mail until she sent her new address. Ten days later Mrs. Clute had received a card from the girl instructing her to forward her mail to 215 N. Stricker Street, Baltimore, Maryland. There had been no mail to forward.
    The single thing of importance that I learned at the apartment house was that the girl’s two trunks had been taken away by a green transfer truck. Green was the color used by one of the city’s largest transfer companies.
    I went then to the office of this transfer company, and found a friendly clerk on duty. (A detective, if he is wise, takes pains to make and keep as many friends as possible among transfer company, express company and railroad employees.) I left the office with a memorandum of the transfer company’s check numbers and the Ferry baggage-room to which the two trunks had been taken.
    At the Ferry Building, with this information, it didn’t take me many minutes to learn that the trunks had been checked to Baltimore. I sent another wire to the Baltimore branch, giving the railroad check numbers.
    Sunday was well into night by this time, so I knocked off and went home.
    V
    Half an hour before the Golden Gate Trust Company opened for business the next morning I was inside, talking to Clement, the cashier. All the traditional caution and conservatism of bankers rolled together wouldn’t be one-two-three to the amount usually displayed by this plump, white-haired old man. But one look at Axford’s card, with “Please give the bearer all possible assistance” inked across the back of it, made Clement even eager to help me.
    â€œYou have, or have had,