Death Demands an Audience

by Helen Reilly

  “You’d better drive our guide back, Phil,” McKee said and flashed the chauffeur a significant glance.

  As the car moved off he led the way along a small flagged path between dwarf evergreens to the lighted front door. A trim maid in a maroon uniform and a smart white apron and cap received them in a small warm hall, strewn with benches and occasional chairs. Flowers stood about on tables.

  “Just a moment, sir,” the maid said. “It’s Mr Gregory you wish to speak to?”

  She opened a door on the left. Voices drifted out. A man came briskly into the hall. He looked interrogatively at McKee.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Mr Gregory Cambridge?” McKee asked, and the man bowed.

  The Scotsman introduced himself, exposing his shield briefly. He said: “I’ve just been talking with your brother, Luke Cambridge, and I’d like to have a few words with you—if I may.”

  Gregory Cambridge looked surprised but not startled. He was a heavy man in his early fifties with iron-gray hair and a clipped iron-gray mustache. His full brown eyes were steady. The tweeds he wore were well cut and his expensive brogues bore an unobtrusive shine.

  “If you’ll come in here, Inspector?” He led the way into a small sitting room on the right. There was an orange tree in a tub between two windows, magazines and novels with bright jackets were scattered about. Rose-red curtains shot through with silver threads shimmered to the polished floor covered in the middle by a warm Oriental. Big leather chairs stood about invitingly. It was a friendlier room than Luke Cambridge’s study.

  “Sit down, won’t you, Inspector?” Gregory Cambridge said. McKee didn’t waste any more footage with the younger man than he had with the older. He said, “Mr. Cambridge, I understand from your brother, Luke, that you were to meet Franklin Borrow at Garth and Campbell’s this afternoon and from there you were to drive him to your brother’s house here in Edgewood. Did you keep the engagement?”

  Gregory Cambridge smiled and knocked ash from his cigar carefully into a tray.

  “I certainly did. But I didn’t get anywhere. I couldn’t get within a half a mile of the front door of Garth and Campbell’s. The place was alive with policemen. What happened, Inspector? Somebody said something about an accident.”

  “There was an accident. Borrow is dead,” McKee said. “Dead! ” Gregory Cambridge was incredulous.

  “Yes. He was shot and killed in the department store.” Cambridge stared. His ruddy color faded.

  “You mean Borrow was—murdered?”

  “Just that.”

  The muscles in Gregory Cambridge’s jaw moved convulsively. He gazed straight ahead of him. “So that’s why I couldn’t get into the store. What happened? Was there a fight, Inspector? Was it thieves? Who did it? That’s why I couldn’t contact him, is it?”

  McKee made a calming gesture.

  “Just a minute, please, Mr Gregory. I came here to get facts.”

  “Facts? What facts? Surely I-- ”

  McKee said, “In the first place, did you yourself know Mr Borrow personally?”

  Gregory Cambridge was forthright. “I most certainly did not.”

  “Yet you had an engagement to meet him late this afternoon. A question, Mr Cambridge—how were you going to recognize Borrow when you saw him?”

  “I merely followed directions, Inspector. I was told to go and pick up the man who was the head of the display department at Garth and Campbell’s. I didn’t think that difficult. I did as I was told.”

  “By your brother Luke?” McKee’s tone lifted.

  “My brother Luke,” Gregory Cambridge said, “is the head of the family. He’s older ... You, you—understand?” “When did your brother get in touch with you and ask you to do this errand for him?”

  “He called me at my office at—oh, I guess it must have been around two-thirty or three this afternoon.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  Gregory Cambridge harrumphed. His full face flushed. He said gruffly, “I don’t get the drift of these questions, Inspector McKee, and I don’t like them.” He bristled.

  “Don’t get excited, Mr Cambridge,” the Scotsman said soothingly. “I’m investigating a murder. All I’m trying to get at is a clear picture of Borrow’s death and the attendant circumstances.”

  Cambridge leaned back, mollified. “All right,” he said more amicably. “I left my office at, oh—say somewhere around the usual time, five or thereabouts. From my office I walked up to Garth and Campbell’s. I got there, I should say, just before five-thirty. There was a huge crowd around the doors. I tried to push my way through it. I spoke to several policemen but they paid no attention to me. And by the way, Inspector, sometimes your New York police are not any too polite.”

  McKee said patiently, “And after that, Mr Cambridge?” “I waited about for a while and tried two or three other entrances. Same result. I don’t mind telling you I was a bit burned up. When I couldn’t get any satisfaction I walked west to where my car was and drove home.”

  McKee crushed out a cigarette. There was a light knock on the door. Gregory Cambridge shifted impatiently in his chair. The door opened and a woman came in. She was neither tall nor short. Her figure was supple but not full. She wore a black faille dress that followed the line of her hips, then fell in crisp folds. Coppery waves of hair were drawn back from a creamy expanse of forehead. Her soft gray eyes with a hint of silver round the iris went first to Gregory Cambridge and then, questioningly, to the two men.

  “I wonder ” she said.

  “Yes, dear.” Gregory Cambridge’s voice was edged with irritation.

  “I just wondered,” the woman replied, “it’s a cold night, and I wondered if”—she smiled—“you and your guests would care for some coffee and perhaps a brandy?” Gregory Cambridge said, “My wife.”

  She was charming. McKee rose to his feet, his cavernous brown eyes bright. He hated brandy. He said, “Very kind of you, Mrs Cambridge. It’s a nasty night. There’s nothing I’d like better than a cup of coffee and a brandy.”

  Kent shot him a swift glance. “It would hit the right spot.” The words were heartfelt.

  Gregory Cambridge introduced the two men formally. “Inspector McKee of the Manhattan Homicide Squad and his stenographer, Irene.”

  Irene Cambridge bowed. Her smiling ease vanished. She looked startled. She was considerably younger than her husband, in her mid-thirties, perhaps. Luke Cambridge had mentioned a daughter who was about to be married. Could this be the girl’s mother?

  The inspector doubted it as he took in the smooth curves of her still-youthful figure, the delicacy of her color, the freshness of her skin and hair. And yet she was fully a woman, mature and poised.

  “Bring the tray, Alice,” she called over her shoulder, crossing to her husband’s chair and sitting down lightly on the arm.

  Gregory Cambridge said: “Irene, Inspector McKee is here about Mr Borrow, the man we were talking about at dinner, you remember? He’s dead. He was shot and killed at Garth and Campbell’s this afternoon.”

  “Not really! Oh! The poor man! How horrible!” Irene exclaimed.

  “Murder,” McKee said dryly, “is always horrible, Mrs. Cambridge.”

  The maid came in with a tray and served coffee. Irene Cambridge rose and poured brandy into four glasses. As she handed his to McKee she said, “Could you tell me, Inspector—what’s the connection between Mr Borrow and your visit here?”

  McKee explained Gregory’s prospective appointment with the dead man.

  “But you didn't meet him, did you, darling?” Irene asked her husband.

  Gregory Cambridge looked annoyed. “It’s just as I told you and as I’ve told the inspector, my dear. I went to

  Garth and Campbell’s and I couldn’t get in. I didn’t know why then. Now I do.”

  Mrs Cambridge’s expression showed a dawning understanding. “Oh,” she said. “So that's the reason. I couldn’t get into the store either.”

  McKee’s intere
st took a sharp upward leap. “You were at Garth and Campbell’s this afternoon, Mrs Cambridge?” Irene Cambridge said, “Yes, I was. But the crowd was terrific. I didn’t get as far as the main door. People were being turned away in droves and a woman fainted and there was an ambulance and there were police. I simply gave up. I thought I’d faint if women didn’t stop jostling me and trampling on my feet. I had to walk blocks and blocks before I could get a cab. When I did pick one up I was too late for the five-thirty and I had to wait hours at Grand Central.”

  Borrow had been killed at a few minutes before five. The attack on Todhunter and the girl had occurred at approximately six-fifteen. “What train did you catch, Mrs Cambridge?” McKee asked.

  Irene Cambridge smoothed pleats of black faille over a shapely knee. “The six-eighteen.”

  Check with her presence on the train and with her arrival in Edgewood. “Did you know Franklin Borrow?”

  Mrs Cambridge shook her head. “I did not.”

  “Did you know when you were in New York that your husband was to pick Mr Borrow up and bring him up here to see Luke Cambridge this evening?”

  Gregory’s wife rose to rearrange a clump of jonquils on the chimney shelf. The sweep of her supple deep-breasted figure was outlined against the ivory paneling.

  “Borrow, Borrow ...” she murmured. “Gregory, there was something, while I was in your office. That’s why, when I met the Farnums on Fifth Avenue and they asked me about the Willowbrook cottage, about renting it for the spring, I gave you a ring to ”

  Irene Cambridge was not an incoherent woman. Her processes became incoherent then. She was looking at her husband and he was looking back at her, steadily. There was something menacing in the stare of his full brown eyes, the whites faintly flecked with redness. Was it a threat, a warning? McKee couldn’t decide. Whatever it was it caught her up short. She came to a full stop.

  She had not answered his question. The Scotsman didn’t press it. Take care of it later. But Irene Cambridge wasn’t content to leave it at that. She continued smoothly,

  “That’s why, Gregory, I gave you a ring, to see whether you had made any plans for the repairs on the cottage.” Gregory Cambridge put a match to the stub of a dead cigar. “Well, you know, as I told you on the phone, Irene, I didn’t much like the Farnums the last time we had them as tenants. I don’t see any reason why they should turn up trumps this time.”

  Irene Cambridge lit a cigarette. “Oh, they were rather nice people. Mrs Farnum always seemed pleasant. She did make a good fourth at bridge and Luke rather liked her, and he’s not fond of many people.”

  Gregory seemed to be getting ready to work himself into a temper. “I won’t have the Farnums, I tell you, Irene. I won’t have them.”

  McKee interrupted them. “And so, Mrs Cambridge, you were in your husband’s office when his brother Luke called to ask him to pick up Mr Borrow?”

  Her lightly raised brows were cool and a little amused. “I was there when Luke called, certainly. I presume that was what the call was about, if you say so. All I know is that Luke did call while we were there.”

  McKee looked at her. “We, Mrs Cambridge?”

  “Yes. My daughter Ellen was with me—or rather my stepdaughter. Mr Cambridge’s daughter by his first marriage. Just a minute, Inspector. Ellen’s across the hall.”

  Irene went to the door. “Ellen, dear,” she called.

  A girl entered the room with a light step. She paused just inside the door. She was young and fresh and vigorous. Soft fair hair was drawn back from a broad, rather high forehead. Her glance was bright. Her firm young body, in a green wool pleated skirt and a smart green jacket showed the budding curves of developing womanhood. A smoothcheeked oval face with large deep blue eyes was turned inquiringly on her stepmother.

  “Yes, Irene?” Her voice had a happy lift to it.

  Irene Cambridge introduced the two men.

  McKee said, “I understand, Miss Cambridge, that you were in your father’s office with your mother this afternoon when your father received a telephone call from your uncle Luke.”

  The girl tightened a leather belt, accentuating the curves of what promised to be a very pretty figure.

  “Uncle Luke?” she said. “Yes, he did call. It was just after”—she looked at her father—“you cashed the check for us, Dad, for Mother and Muriel and myself.”

  “Muriel?” McKee wanted to know.

  “Yes,” the girl answered. “My sister-in-law, my brother Leslie’s wife. After that Muriel and I went on to Garth and Campbell’s to-- ”

  “You and your sister-in-law were at Garth and Campbell’s this afternoon?” The Scotsman’s tone was interested, nothing else. Gregory Cambridge gave him a sharp glance. He didn’t say anything. Irene Cambridge didn’t say anything either, but he could feel the deepening of their joint emotion.

  “Yes,” the girl said. “Muriel and I went there from Dad’s office and Leslie picked us up there for cocktails later on. He was detained and we had to wait, and that was how we came to be caught in the crush.”

  It wasn’t much. It was enough. Leslie. Leslie was the girl’s brother and Gregory’s son. As the Cadillac sped from the house a few minutes later McKee thought, not too bad. Not too bad, by any means. Gregory Cambridge was at Garth and Campbell’s this afternoon. So was his wife, Irene. So was his daughter Ellen and his son Leslie and his son’s wife, Muriel. Five people in one family, and the head of that family, Luke, had had an appointment with Borrow, an appointment Borrow wasn’t able to keep because he was killed at Garth and Campbell’s before he could do so----

  A couple of hundred yards from the big comfortable house on the hill above McKee stopped the car and began to talk to his two companions, Pierson and Kent. When the car drove on again the lean, towering inspector was alone in the back seat.

  CHAPTER 4

  PIERSON shifted his weight from one foot to the other and took up a new stance in the wind-swept darkness outside the Tudor cottage, tucked away in a corner of the Cambridge estate and occupied by Leslie Cambridge and Leslie’s wife, Muriel.

  From where he stood, some thirty feet to the right and a little in front of the snow-wreathed bulk of the cottage, he had a fair view, through half-drawn curtains, of a living room and a portion of the hall. It was a pretty living room, gay with chintz and bright lights.

  The captain had been at his post for almost an hour. During that time he had witnessed what looked remarkably like a snappy domestic quarrel between husband and wife, after which they relapsed into silence, fuming on the man’s part and injured on the woman’s. A few minutes earlier Leslie Cambridge had thrown down his newspaper and had stalked into another room.

  Muriel Cambridge sat on, drawing a needle through a pile of white cambric in her lap, her neat, carefully marcelled brown head bent in frowning concentration. Now and again she cast an angry look in the direction in which her husband had disappeared. Once she had turned on the radio, had listened restlessly and then had returned to her chair.

  She was very small, with a trim figure and tiny hands and feet. The same meticulous order which marked the furnishings of the room, its ornaments, cushions and hangings, also stamped itself on what Pierson regarded as a very nifty costume, a vivid dress of printed silk with ruffles at the neck and sleeves.

  The captain blinked snow out of his lashes. Inside the living room Mrs Cambridge had risen suddenly to her feet. She appeared to be listening. She swept the folds of white material into a hasty swirl, dropped it into a large sewing basket, put her back to the window and vanished from sight. She was moving toward the hall.

  Pierson shifted his base. The front door had opened. Leslie Cambridge stood with his hand on the knob. He had his hat and overcoat on. Light from an overhead lamp slanted down on his dapper, weedy length, on good-looking but rather muddled features. They were fixed in a scowl.

  “No, I don’t need my rubbers,” he said over his shoulder. “And I don’t know how long I’ll be. I wish you’d sto
p nagging at me. I told you it was a matter of business. There’s nothing personal about it. It has nothing to do with us.”

  “But, Les, darling ”

  Without waiting for the completion of his wife’s remark, Leslie Cambridge stepped out on the small stone porch and pulled the door shut, ran down a short flight of stone steps and started obliquely across the snow-covered lawn toward a clump of trees and a small bridge in a hollow below.

  Pierson followed him with his eyes, waiting until he had reached the copse before picking up the trail. Although it was still snowing his own dark figure would be in full view if Leslie happened to turn. His quarry was within twenty feet of the little bridge, and Pierson was about to move when a faint sound attracted his attention. He didn’t recognize it for the opening and closing of the front door until he saw Muriel Cambridge’s small and easily identifiable figure slipping along in her husband’s wake.

  The captain’s jaw squared itself. He lingered in the shadow of the house until the man had disappeared into the copse and the woman was halfway down the hill. Her progress was both stealthy and careful. It was quite obvious that Mrs Cambridge didn’t want her husband to know that she was following him.

  As she in turn was swallowed up in the snowy shadows of the copse Pierson started after them both at a run down the rise, in among close-pressing nut trees and scrub oaks and along what was a clearly defined path. It skirted a stone wall, twisted on itself and climbed a farther rise.

  Topping the rise, Pierson came to an abrupt halt. Muriel Cambridge was standing still not twenty feet in front of him. Beyond and slightly below her the lights of the house, the house they had left earlier that evening, Luke Cambridge’s house, glimmered through the falling snow. A man’s head and shoulders were silhouetted blackly against one of the windows on the first floor. He was leaning forward in a peering attitude. From his outlines Pierson saw that the man was Leslie Cambridge. Leslie appeared to be trying to see what was going on inside his uncle’s study, because it was outside of the window of Luke Cambridge’s study that he was crouched.