by Helen Reilly
“No, darling, not that I know of. Not to me.”
The man and the girl resumed their talk. Irene left the room again. She beckoned to Pierson from the hall.
An hour and a half later while the captain, in a rage by that time, was still hanging around, waiting to hear from him, Kent got in touch, not with Pierson, but with Inspector McKee in New York.
At the end of a wire fifty miles away he said to McKee, “I’ve got him, Inspector. At least I know where he is and it looks as though he’s bedded down for the night.”
“You’ve got who?” McKee asked.
“The man who broke into Gregory Cambridge’s garage tonight, knocked out his daughter’s young man and escaped. I followed him to a shack in the woods two or three miles out into the hills on the banks of the river.”
“Yes,” McKee said. “Yes. Who is it?”
Kent said, “Michael Savage.”
CHAPTER 6
THE BIG BLACK CADILLAC veered out from under the arch on the Vanderbilt Avenue side of Grand Central, turned west on Forty-fifth and swung up Fifth Avenue. It was half-past nine on the morning of January twelfth, the day following Franklin Borrow’s death. Pierson and McKee were in the back seat. The inspector had just picked up the captain from the 9:10 a.m. out of Edgewood for New York.
The captain was tired, disgruntled and in a taking.
“Left me there,” he said bitterly to McKee. “Kent left me there. Not a word from him. I had to spend the night in a dinky hotel in that Godforsaken town and nearly froze to death.”
He gave the inspector a resume of the events of the night before, fished out the sheet of paper he had retrieved from the floor of Luke Cambridge’s bedroom and handed it over.
The Scotsman studied it curiously. It was a simple piece of scratch paper. What it contained was a computation of the interest on one hundred thousand dollars at two-and-a-half, three, three-and-a-half and four per cent. A hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money and Luke Cambridge had been doing some figuring. That was the only conclusion that offered itself at the moment. McKee put the little sheet of paper into his pocket.
The car slid northward through the thickening traffic, swung on Forty-seventh, received a salute from the traffic man and pulled to a stop at the side entrance of Garth and Campbell’s.
McKee said to the chauffeur, “That’s all for now, Charlie. I’ll get you through T. B. when I need you,” and to Pierson as they left the car, “All right, Captain, come ahead. Men have been checking here since yesterday afternoon. Maybe they have something by this time.”
Garth and Campbell’s had returned to normal. The store was still comparatively empty, but the salespeople were in their accustomed places behind the counters and a few customers were visible. The two men went up in the elevator to the vice-president’s office. Paulson received them with his pale, slightly decayed affability. He shook hands with the Scotsman.
“I want to thank you, Inspector, for the consideration you’ve shown. Of course I know that you had to have your men here but I must say they behaved very well, very well indeed.”
“That’s all right, Mr Paulson. Glad to do what we can. Any of my men report yet? They were to get in touch with me here.”
Paulson said, “Yes. They’re waiting in the next room.”
He opened an intervening door, bowed and withdrew. McKee and Pierson entered the room. Pierson shut the door. Detectives Clark, Mendel, Harrison, Hogue, McDonald and Rheinstein rose to their feet.
McKee took a seat at the big desk.
“All right, boys,” he said, “let’s go.”
Clark stepped forward.
“Here you are, Inspector.”
He put a bundle of sales slips on the desk in front of the Scotsman. One by one the other men produced their findings.
Ellen Cambridge had bought three silk nightdresses, costing, in all, $63.41, a dozen pairs of silk stockings at $27.94, half-a-dozen step-ins and half-a-dozen bras at $43.28. Honeymoon stuff, in all probability.
Muriel Cambridge had purchased a chintz apron for seventy-nine cents.
There was a reservation for table three for the cocktail lounge labeled “Cambridge.” The check for table number three was for eight cocktails, five daiquiris, two manhattans and one dry martini. Clark, who had interviewed the head-waiter, said that the daiquiris were the man’s and that the martini was for the young lady, who had only finished half of it. That would mean that Leslie Cambridge had had five cocktails, Ellen half a one and Muriel the two manhattans.
McKee looked thoughtful. Five daiquiris were a lot of cocktails in one sitting in any man’s language. Was Leslie Cambridge bracing himself by any chance for the interview with his uncle Luke which Pierson had witnessed later on that night? '
The exit slips obtained by the precinct men checked with the story the Cambridges had told. There was no record of Irene’s or Gregory Cambridge’s having entered Garth and Campbell’s.
“What’s the situation as far as the display department goes?” McKee asked.
Detectives Hogue and Duffy, who had been told to cover it, stepped forward. Hogue said, “The entire staff went off at nine-thirty yesterday morning after the all-night job. That left three men there, Borrow, Savage and a helper named Jones.”
“Jones?” McKee looked up. “What time did Jones leave?”
Duffy said, “I’ve been trying to check on Jones, Inspector. He ain’t here yet. Nobody knows just what time he did leave.”
“What about the counter girls near the display department door?” McKee asked.
Detective Rheinstein said, “I got one who thinks she saw a man going downstairs late in the afternoon.”
Detective Harrison said, “And I’ve got one who thinks maybe she saw a woman going down.”
McKee rose. “All right, boys.” He gave a series of rapid directions. “Harrison, Rheinstein. Come along with me.” He led the way down to the main floor of the fashionable and expensive department store. There were more people now, drifting along the aisles, examining merchandise and talking in light animated voices. Miss Jacobs, behind the information booth, gave the inspector a smile. He bowed pleasantly and turned left into the aisle that led to the little door at the far end, labeled unobtrusively, “Display.”
Blouses and gloves in illuminated cases with broad tops on either hand. Rheinstein said, “There she is, Inspector.” He beckoned to a trim, bespectacled young woman who was putting away some boxes. She came down the counter to them.
McKee told her who he was. “I’m here investigating the death of Mr Borrow. Your name is?”
“Gertrude Torrens.”
The Scotsman’s voice was kind. “I understand, Miss Torrens, that you saw a man going through the door leading to display late yesterday afternoon. Can you give me a description of him?”
Miss Torrens shifted a box of gloves from in front of her and leaned forward, her elbows propped on the plate glass.
“I don’t know, Inspector. I couldn’t say. I was pretty busy. It just registered with me that the staff was gone and yet somebody was going down.”
“That was at ?”
“I know it was after a quarter-past four, because William, one of our stock boys, had just brought the new consignment of gauntlets and I had to sign for it with the time, and I know it was before the hullabaloo over Mr Borrow began.”
In spite of intensive questioning that was all McKee was able to get from her. Harrison in turn attracted the attention of the girl at the blouse counter. She was a tall blonde with china-blue eyes. Her name was Evelyn Eberhardt. She was the girl who thought she had seen the woman going through the door leading to display.
“I know it was a woman, Inspector, I know it. Miss Torrens says it was a man but I know it was a woman. Because I thought to myself, they’re getting dames down there, maybe I got a chance. I was always good at art in high school.”
A dapper young man, who was one of Paulson’s attaches, hurried up to McKee as he was turning away from the blouse counter. H
e said:
“A message from Mr Paulson, Inspector. He thought you might like to know, those sales slips you collected, about those people named Cambridge. Miss Ellen Cambridge has an appointment with one of our fitters to have a gown tried on this afternoon at three-thirty.”
McKee thanked the young man, gave Rheinstein and Harrison new instructions and, accompanied by Pierson, proceeded along the aisle between the glove and blouse counters, opened the door labeled “Display” and descended the iron staircase.
When he pushed his way through the double doors fifty feet farther along a scene entirely different from the one that had presented itself late the afternoon before confronted him. Men, a number of them, occupied the long and wide platform opposite the row of empty shafts, above which the windows Borrow had designed were still on exhibition.
The members of the display staff were ostensibly busy but no real work was being done. Ranging anywhere from twenty-five to fifty, they stood around in twos and threes, talking freely, in excited voices, about the death of their late chief and filling the air with a high, thin buzz of speculation, conjecture, surmise. Over their heads through thick glass circles set in the steel and concrete of the pavement above, the public tramped steadily past, unaware of and indifferent to the activity beneath their hurrying feet.
At the inspector’s entrance the talking stopped and all eyes turned on the two police officials. Men at the far end of the long apartment moved forward. McKee addressed them pleasantly. What he was after was information. But they had very little to give him. He asked about Jones, the helper who had remained on after the others had taken their departure the day before.
Jones was in the carpentering and painting department on the floor below, where the rough sets were assembled before being raised to be dressed. He had just come in. He was a general handy-and-clean-up man. McKee sent for him.
Jones was short and square and thin. He had a loose mouth and a pair of small shifty blue eyes under thinning sandy hair. He was neatly dressed in a worn brown suit, brown shoes, tan shirt and chocolate-and-red tie. He gave his age as fifty-two. His address was 763 Warburton Avenue, in the Bronx.
The loose mouth was compressed and the shifty eyes were fastened steadily on McKee’s as he said that yes, he had stayed on after the others left the day before. He had been cleaning up. There had been quite a mess when the windows were finished. What time did he leave? Jones wasn’t sure of the exact minute, but the window with the collapsed mannequin in it had already come down. He had offered to help, but when Mr Borrow examined the damage he said it was slight and that he’d attend to it himself, and he told him, Jones, to go on home. So he went.
The little man cleared his throat and shuffled his feet. It was fairly late in the afternoon when he left. He didn’t know the precise minute. His timecard would show. His manner was nervous and uneasy. McKee sent for his timecard.
When it was brought it revealed that Jones had checked out at 4:02 p.m. The window hadn’t been lowered until four twenty-eight and it was between 4:28 p.m. and four fifty-five that Borrow had been shot and killed. McKee didn’t call the discrepancy to the man’s attention. Watch him. He permitted him to return to work and directed his attention to Borrow’s office. He was re-examining the dead man’s files there when the door opened and a girl came in. McKee looked up. It was Judith Borrow.
She stood in the doorway, knob in hand, staring at him. Fatigue and strain gave her slim dark beauty a poignant edge. There was sullenness at the back of her long black-fringed eyes. They were slightly startled, as though his being there somehow interfered with her plans.
McKee smiled. “Good morning, Miss Borrow. What can I do for you?”
Judith Borrow didn’t return his smile. She wasn’t a woman who would smile carelessly or by chance. She said in a contralto voice that was muted but full, “I came here to get my father’s personal belongings. I don’t want them left lying around to be pawed over.”
McKee said, “That’s quite all right, Miss Borrow.” Outside the display department proper there was a sudden furore. “McKee—where’s McKee?” The tone was strident. The Scotsman recognized it. He went out to greet John Francis Dwyer, New York’s cherubic, militant district attorney.
“Well, McKee. Well,” Dwyer said, smoothing back butter-colored hair on his round bullethead, “what’s it all about? Hogarth, one of my assistants, was over here last night. He didn’t have much to tell me. What’s the setup?” McKee patted the district attorney’s bulging shoulder. “Take it easy, Counselor.”
“That’s all very well,” Dwyer exclaimed. “But a man in this department store was shot and killed practically before the eyes of all Fifth Avenue yesterday. You’re not getting anywhere. In the first place, how, exactly, was the job done?”
McKee explained about Borrow’s being alone in that section of the display department, about the window’s having been lowered and his working on it when he was shot by someone while the work was in progress.
“Why was the window sent up to the street level after the fellow was killed?” Dwyer demanded McKee took him across to the lowered cage. He pointed to the control buttons. “My mistake—and the murderer’s,” he said. “Or at least that’s the way it appears to me. What would you do if you were on the fifth floor of a building and you wanted to go down in an elevator? You’d push the bottom button, wouldn’t you? Whoever killed Borrow wanted to send the cage down and out of sight. But in this arrangement”—his delicate blunt forefinger touched the control—“the lower button sends the cage up.”
McKee drifted back to the aisle bisecting the long room. He stood obliquely facing the small crystal room where the mannequin sat on, enigmatically smiling above the dull smear of rust that was dried blood on the mirrored floor. He said, “According to Fernandez’ findings and the position of the body, he was shot from about here. His back was turned to the person who shot him.”
Dwyer scowled. “What about the gun? Can’t you get after that?”
McKee’s glance at a porcelain figurine beyond the district attorney was thoughtful. “The lethal slug came out of a Colt .38. Borrow had a Colt .38 in the top drawer of his desk. The gun is gone. It’s difficult to check on what you haven’t got. But I believe that it was with his own gun that Borrow was shot.”
“Well. Where is it now?” the district attorney wanted to know.
“Ah,” the Scotsman murmured, “I wish I could tell you.” The lines from nose to mouth in his saturnine face deepened. He shook his shoulders as though he were shaking off a weight. A gun floating around in a murder case was something he wasn’t fond of. A weapon that had killed once had a nasty habit of going off again, if the necessity arose.
“Granting that it was his own gun that killed Borrow,” he said, “this is what I figure happened.”
He crossed to a desk against the outside wall twenty feet away, pulled out a chair and sat down. “Borrow’s keys must have been on this desk,” he said, “or else the drawer was open. The vice-president, Paulson, says the gun was here. Keep in mind that Borrow was in the show window working on the mannequin and that his back was turned. Keep in mind also that it was someone with whom Borrow was at ease who sat here, because he went right on working. The drawer was pulled open”—the Scotsman suited the action to the word—“and the gun abstracted.”
Holding an invisible weapon in his hand, he walked toward the spot he had previously indicated to Dwyer. “Bang, bang, there were two shots. Borrow dead, the killer then shoved what he or she thought was the down button and fled. The murderer went this way.”
McKee led the district attorney and the district attorney’s stenographer, who was busily taking notes, twenty feet farther along to a door in the northwest corner of the long apartment. He opened it. It led into a small dynamo room. There was a corresponding door on the far side. This door opened on the bottom landing of the staircase which led to freedom and escape.
“What,” Dwyer asked, “makes you think the killer went this way?
”
“Common sense,” McKee answered. “A person wanting to get out of here fast wouldn’t go all the way down to those double doors and back up along the outside corridor to the staircase.”
Dwyer nodded.
“That’s all right, McKee. That’s fine. Now we know how it was done. The question is, who did it? Stop beating around the bush. It was this fellow Savage, and you know it.” The name of Borrow’s assistant issued from the district attorney’s cupid’s bow of a mouth with the force of a minute explosion.
McKee had expected it. Dwyer was a master at grasping the obvious. The Scotsman shrugged. Disregarding the shrug, the district attorney swept on.
“Savage was here in this department at the time, wasn’t he? He was down on the floor below.” A thick forefinger stabbed floorward. “He beat it. If he’s innocent why didn’t he come forward and say so? And what about the gun? Savage knew where the gun was kept. Why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face. Michael Savage killed Borrow and there’s no use blinking the fact.”
McKee sad, “Look here, Dwyer, you forget ”
The district attorney glared truculently.
“I forget nothing, McKee,” he said. “I know you fellows know where Savage is. And I know you’ve got a tail on him. Bring him in. I want him. If you don’t bring him in, before you know where you are, as sure as God made little apples, he’ll be in Timbuctoo ”
Halfway through the tirade McKee’s eyes left the prosecutor. There was amusement in them as they returned to Dwyer’s mottled face.
“I think not, Mr District Attorney,” he said. “You want Mr Savage, do you? Well, there’s your man.”
McKee waved toward the double doors giving entrance to the display department. Dwyer swung.
Michael Savage had just come in. He stood at the top of the short ramp running from the doors to the aisle that bisected the long room. His gaze rested on the group of officials. A little above medium height, lean but strongly built and with a well-poised head held at a negligent angle, a wide mouth, a definite jaw and keen light eyes under strongly marked brows, Savage gave an impression of being well oriented and very sure of himself. Certainly there was no fear in his attitude or bearing as he left the ramp and strolled slowly forward.
