“What’d the woman look like?” I asked him.
“I don’t know! I thought you were hanging around to take care of her! She was old and bent, kind of, I guess, but I couldn’t see her face for her veil. I don’t know! What the hell were you men doing? It’s a damned outrage the way...”
I finally got him quieted down and took him home, leaving the city men to keep the neighborhood under surveillance. There were fourteen or fifteen of them on the job now, and every shadow held at least one.
The girl would head for home as soon as she was released and I wanted to be there to pump her. There was an excellent chance of catching her abductors before they got very far, if she could tell us anything at all about them.
Home, Gatewood went up against the whiskey bottle again, while I kept one ear cocked at the telephone and the other at the front door. O’Gar or Thode phoned every half hour or so to ask if we’d heard from the girl.
They had still found nothing.
At 9 o’clock they, with Lusk, arrived at the house. The woman in black had turned out to be a man, and had got away.
In the rear of one of the apartment buildings that touched the alley — just a foot or so within the back-door — they found a woman’s skirt, long coat, hat and veil — all black. Investigating the occupants of the house, they had learned that an apartment had been rented to a young man named Leighton three days before.
Leighton was not at home when they went up to his apartment. His rooms held a lot of cold cigarette butts, an empty bottle, and nothing else that had not been there when he rented it.
The inference was clear: he had rented the apartment so that he might have access to the building. Wearing women’s clothes over his own, he had gone out of the back door — leaving it unlatched behind him — to meet Gatewood. Then he had run back into the building, discarded his disguise, and hurried through the building, out the front door, and away before we had our feeble net around the block — perhaps dodging into dark doorways here and there to avoid O’Gar and Thode in their cars.
Leighton, it seemed, was a man of about 30, slender, about five feet eight or nine inches tall, with dark hair and eyes; rather good-looking, and well-dressed on the two occasions when people living in the building had seen him, in a brown suit and a light brown felt hat.
There was no possibility, according to both of the detectives and the post-office inspector, that the girl might have been held, even temporarily, in Leighton’s apartment.
Ten o’clock came, and no word from the girl.
Gatewood had lost his domineering bullheadedness by now and was breaking up. The suspense was getting him, and the liquor he had put away wasn’t helping him. I didn’t like him either personally or by reputation, but this morning I felt sorry for him.
I talked to the Agency over the phone and got the reports of the operatives who had been looking up Audrey’s friends. The last person to see her had been an Agnes Danger-field, who had seen her walking down Market Street near Sixth, alone, on the night of her abduction — some time between 8:15 and 8:45. Audrey had been too faraway for the Danger-field girl to speak to her.
For the rest, the boys had learned nothing except that Audrey was a wild, spoiled youngster who hadn’t shown any great care in selecting her friends — just the sort of girl who could easily fall into the hands of a mob of highbinders.
Noon struck. No sign of the girl. We told the newspapers to turn loose the story, with the added developments of the past few hours.
Gatewood was broken; he sat with his head in his hands, looking at nothing. Just before I left to follow a hunch I had, he looked up at me, and I’d never have recognized him if I hadn’t seen the change take place.
“What do you think is keeping her away?” he asked.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I had every reason to suspect, now that the money had been paid and she had failed to show up. So I stalled with some vague assurances, and left.
I caught a cab and dropped off in the shopping district. I visited the five largest department stores, going to all the women’s wear departments from shoes to hats, and trying to learn if a man — perhaps one answering Leighton’s description — had been buying clothes in the past couple days that would fit Audrey Gatewood.
Failing to get any results, I turned the rest of the local stores over to one of the boys from the Agency, and went across the bay to canvass the Oakland stores.
At the first one I got action. A man who might easily have been Leighton had been in the day before, buying clothes of Audrey’s size. He had bought lots of them, everything from lingerie to a coat, and — my luck was hitting on all cylinders — had had his purchases delivered to T. Offord, at an address on Fourteenth Street.
At the Fourteenth Street address, an apartment house, I found Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Offord’s names in the vestibule for Apartment 202.
I had just found the apartment number when the front door opened and a stout, middle-aged woman in a gingham house-dress came out. She looked at me a bit curiously, so I asked:
“Do you know where I can find the superintendent?”
“I’m the superintendent,” she said.
I handed her a card and stepped indoors with her.
“I’m from the bonding department of the North American Casualty Company” — a repetition of the lie that was printed on the card I had given her — “and a bond for Mr. Offord has been applied for. Is he all right so far as you know?” With the slightly apologetic air of one going through with a necessary but not too important formality.
“A bond? That’s funny! He is going away tomorrow.”
“Well, I can’t say what the bond is for,” I said lightly. “We investigators just get the names and addresses. It may be for his present employer, or perhaps the man he is going to work for has applied for it. Or some firms have us look up prospective employees before they hire them, just to be safe.”
“Mr. Offord, so far as I know, is a very nice young man,” she said, “but he has been here only a week.”
“Not staying long, then?”
“No. They came here from Denver, intending to stay, but the low altitude doesn’t agree with Mrs. Offord, so they are going back.”
“Are you sure they came from Denver?”
“Well,” she said, “they told me they did.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Only the two of them; they’re young people.”
“Well, how do they impress you?” I asked, trying to get over the impression that I thought her a woman of shrewd judgment.
“They seem to be a very nice young couple. You’d hardly know they were in their apartment most of the time, they’re so quiet. I’m sorry they can’t stay.”
“Do they go out much?”
“I really don’t know. They have their keys, and unless I should happen to pass them going in or out I’d never see them.”
“Then, as a matter of fact, you couldn’t say whether they stayed away all night some nights or not. Could you?”
She eyed me doubtfully — I was stepping way over my pretext now, but I didn’t think it mattered — and shook her head.
“No, I couldn’t say.”
“They have many visitors?”
“I don’t know. Mr. Offord is not—”
She broke off as a man came in quietly from the street, brushed past me, and started to mount the steps to the second floor.
“Oh, dear!” she whispered. “I hope he didn’t hear me talking about him. That’s Mr. Offord.”
A slender man in brown, with a light brown hat — Leighton perhaps.
I hadn’t seen anything of him except his back, nor he anything except mine. I watched him as he climbed the stairs. If he had heard the woman mention his name he would use the turn at the head of the stairs to sneak a look at me.