Ten minutes of ringing Pangburn’s bell brought no answer. The elevator boy told me he thought Pangburn hadn’t been in all night. I put a note in his box and went down to the railroad company’s offices, where I arranged to be notified if an unused Baltimore-San Francisco ticket was turned in for redemption.
That done, I went up to the Chronicle office and searched the files for weather conditions during the past month, making a memorandum of four dates upon which it had rained steadily day and night. I carried my memorandum to the offices of the three largest taxicab companies.
That was a trick that had worked well for me before. The girl’s apartment was some distance from the street car line, and I was counting upon her having gone out—or having had a caller—on one of those rainy dates. In either case, it was very likely that she—or her caller—had left in a taxi in preference to walking through the rain to the car line. The taxicab companies’ daily records would show any calls from her address, and the fares’ destinations.
The ideal trick, of course, would have been to have the records searched for the full extent of the girl’s occupancy of the apartment; but no taxicab company would stand for having that amount of work thrust upon them, unless it was a matter of life and death. It was difficult enough for me to persuade them to turn clerks loose on the four days I had selected.
I called up Pangburn again after I left the last taxicab office, but he was not at home. I called up Axford’s residence, thinking that the poet might have spent the night there, but was told that he had not.