“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?”