“ Been living?” Mason asked.
“Sure,” Drake said. “She hadn’t figured on having to give her name at the bank. When the cashier demanded it, she was smart enough to give him the right name so it checked with her driving license. She was also smart enough to go home, pack up her things and move out that afternoon.”
“Any back trail?” Mason asked.
“Of course not. What the hell do you think she moved for?”
“And that,” Mason said sarcastically, “represents the result of your complete investigation, I take it.”
Drake was silent while he drew in a lungful of smoke, then blew it out, and resumed his account as casually as though he had not heard Mason’s comment. “I did a little snooping around the place where she had her apartment. The banker had described her as hard. That was only the first half.”
“You mean hard and fast?” Della Street asked.
“You guessed it,” Drake said. “So I hunted up the landlady and ran a blazer on her about the kind of joint she was running and scared her into convulsions. She said she’d do anything she could, but the girl hadn’t left any forwarding address and all that. I told her I wanted to know something about the men who had called on Marcia Whittaker. That lead didn’t pan out. Then I asked the manager if she gave apartments to every tramp who showed up without asking for references. She said she certainly didn’t. She usually asked for references, although she admitted that if a girl gave references that sounded all right and didn’t hesitate or ‘hem and haw’ about it, she seldom wrote to the references.
“So we looked up Marcia Whittaker and found that when she’d taken the place, she’d given as a reference an L. C. Conway, manager of the Conway Appliance Company at 692 Herrod Avenue.”
Mason lit a cigarette. “Not bad, Paul.”