by Helen Reilly
“Well, gentlemen,” he said, his voice level, “here I am. Your detective is probably upstairs. He’ll be able to give you an account of what I did during the night. He came down on the train with me. He sat two seats behind. I wish he wouldn’t smoke such villainous cigars.”
Dwyer’s prominent blue eyes bulged. He held himself in check with difficulty.
“So here you are,” he said. “The question is, Mr Savage, where were you yesterday afternoon at around five minutes of five when Franklin Borrow was shot and killed?”
McKee could see the ripple of antagonism tightening along Michael Savage’s lean jaw. No use letting things get out of hand. He took charge quietly.
“This is a routine investigation, Mr Savage,” he said mildly. “We have to check on everyone who was on or near the scene when Mr Borrow was killed.”
Dwyer cut in impatiently.
“Well—where were you at that time?”
Savage said,
“As you very well know I was right here in this department. I was on the floor below this where I had been working all afternoon on a model for next week’s windows.” “Well, well,” Dwyer said. “Go on.”
Michael Savage was not at all disturbed by the district attorney’s heckling. He said in the same even tone, “I had my hat and coat on and I was starting up the stairs from the floor below to go home when I heard a loud bang on this floor. I ran up. But there seemed to be nothing wrong. The display window had risen to the street level. Anyhow, it wasn’t in sight. Neither was Borrow. There was nothing out of order, nothing to indicate that anything drastic had occurred. So I—well, I just left, that’s all.”
“So that’s all, is it? You mean to tell us you left the store and the neighborhood without knowing that Borrow was dead?” Dwyer’s bullethead reared itself derisively.
“Not at all,” Savage answered calmly. “I saw Frank Borrow. I saw his body in the show window when I reached the pavement in front of the store.”
“And you just walked off?”
“I did nothing of the sort,” Savage replied. “I tried to get back into the store but the crowd was terrific by that time, and when I did reach the main doors the police were already barring people.”
“And then, Mr Savage?” There was an ironic gleam in the Scotsman’s brown eyes.
There was a smile in Savage’s blue ones as he said: “I went up to Edgewood, Inspector. You know that. I’ve got a little shack in the woods up there. I was born and brought up in that town.”
The Scotsman lit a cigarette. “Do you know people there named Cambridge, Mr Savage?”
Savage looked at him. There was wariness in his steady gaze.
“Certainly I know the Cambridges. They’ve been in Edgewood for a couple of generations. I went to high school with Ellen Cambridge.”
The Scotsman leaned toward him a little. “Splendid. And now would you mind telling me why you broke into Gregory Cambridge’s garage last night, Mr Savage?”
A flash of something, it wasn’t fear, went through Michael Savage. He squared his shoulders. His head went up.
“That’s a detail which, at this point, I’m not prepared to tell you about.”
McKee savored Savage’s answer, his attitude. He was concealing evidence; he wasn’t going to talk. That wasn’t the time, nor was it the place, for pressure. “You’re sure?” he asked, his tone patient.
“Quite sure,” Savage answered. There was granite in his voice.
It was too much for Dwyer. The flood gates opened. “For the love of your mother’s wandering ghost, McKee,” he said furiously. “You’re not going to let this fellow get away with that, are you?”
The Scotsman signaled to the district attorney and the two of them walked away. “Listen, Dwyer,” McKee said in a low voice when they were out of range, “I’m not saying that Savage is on the up-and-up. He’s got a lot of explaining to do, but we’re not going to get anywhere by putting him behind bars. Right now, anyhow. Certainly he was here at the time Borrow was killed, and certainly his actions afterward were, to say the least, peculiar. But, and get this point clearly, the window with Borrow’s dead body in it was sent up to the street level by mistake. At least that’s what we’re assuming. Savage wouldn’t have made a mistake like that with those control buttons. He knows them very well, has probably used them hundreds of times.”
Dwyer was struck by the inspector’s point. He didn’t like it but he had rushed in too many times before where the Scotsman had refused to tread and he was wary.
“Assume. Assume,” he muttered uncertainly. “Well, yes, perhaps. I don’t know. All right, I still think there’s a lot on him. However, it’s up to you and if anything happens it’s your responsibility. You’ll have to stand the gaff.”
The two officials turned to rejoin Savage who was waiting on their pleasure, with Pierson planted stolidly at his elbow. Dwyer stood still. His jaw dropped. His glance went, as Todhunter’s had gone some eighteen hours before, from the mannequin in the lowered window to the girl who had left Borrow’s office and come to a halt ten feet from the young man under discussion. Her eyes were fastened intently on Savage’s face. She spoke. She said, “Hello, Michael.” Her voice was icy.
“Hello, Judith.”
For the first time perturbation entered into Savage. His eyes went quickly from the girl to McKee and back to the girl again. He was trying to convey something to her, give her a signal of some sort.
The girl didn’t get it, or if she did she completely disregarded it. Anger flared in the long eyes under the delicate arched brows, and the scarlet bow of her mouth parted over a torrent of words she couldn’t hold back, a torrent in full spate.
“I told you so,” she cried bitterly. “I told you it was horrid, disgusting. You had no business to use me as a model for that mannequin. I told you so in the beginning. I knew that there was going to be trouble. I told you that yesterday afternoon ”
She stopped abruptly. Her glance fled to McKee’s, pinned itself there. The Scotsman said, “So you lied to me, Miss Borrow. You were here in the display department yesterday afternoon?”
The girl nodded her head. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, I was.”
CHAPTER 7
DWYER was a fall guy for a pretty woman, and Judith Borrow was more than that. There was a strange, sharp, half-bitter charm about her slim dark face with the creamy skin stretching taut over the fine bones. During the inquiry that followed, under the Scotsman’s amused and outwardly benevolent gaze, she managed to twist New York County’s shrewd and competent district attorney around her little finger, had him eating out of her hand before she was through.
“I’m sorry, Mr Dwyer.” Breathlessness, an arched upper lip and a starry gaze directed themselves at the prosecutor. “I should have told the inspector the entire truth right at the start, but I was—well—you know I’d had a blow on the head. Someone had attacked me when I entered my father’s house in Fieldston, and I was rather more than a bit confused. I can only repeat that my father told me that that dispatch box of his was important. What did I think? Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t know what was in it. I have no idea. You see, until this last year, I was with my mother. She was ill for a long while.”
It appeared that Judith Borrow had been away at school for almost as long as she could remember. Her holidays had been spent at home, but they were brief. At about the time she finished dramatic school her mother had been taken seriously ill. A heart specialist in Europe was mentioned.
She, Judith, and her mother had gone abroad in 1937. In spite of care and treatment her mother had died in Paris in November 1938.
She herself cut short her voice lessons in the French capital and returned with her mother’s body to America. As far as the previous day went, it was a fact that she hadn’t told the inspector the exact truth. But she was unhappy and upset. While she and her father didn’t see a great deal of each other the attachment between them was deep. He was a fine man in the best sense of the word. Wha
t she actually had done, after receiving his message that he wanted to see her, was to come down to Garth and Campbell’s.
She admitted in a chilly voice having had a quarrel with Savage over the mannequin which he had modeled after her. She said that she had spoken to her father on the way downstairs to see the younger man, that she had rejoined Borrow later, but that at that time he was working on a Southern display for February and that the window had not yet been lowered, nor had any word of it oome down to the display department. She kissed her father good-by and left, after they had arranged to have dinner together the following night.
It was at this point that McKee interjected dryly, “How was it then, Miss Borrow, that you were back in front of Garth and Campbell’s later, when the window with your father’s body reached the street?”
Judith Borrow looked at the Scotsman challengingly. “You know where Greco’s is?”
McKee nodded. The nationally known stocking firm needed no placing.
“I went there,” the girl said, “to buy some stockings, looked in some shop windows, kept on coming north along Fifth Avenue and saw the crowd. I pushed through it and ” Her lovely lips trembled. She pressed them tightly together.
Dwyer laid a protective hand on her arm. “We understand, Miss Borrow. It must have been a blow to you.”
She smiled at him tremulously through tears, wiped them hastily away with a scrap of Irish linen. Her glare went to the young man who was watching her as closely as McKee. It was definitely hostile. Savage made no response whatever.
“I hope everything’s quite clear?” she asked coldly.
McKee bowed. It was impossible to do much with the girl in her present shape. She was all nerves. She spoke too fast and put accents in the wrong places, and there were undercurrents in her story that had to be measured and charted. She might have pulled the trick. Try as he would, the Scotsman couldn’t get hold of a motive. However, as far as motive was concerned, that went for everyone he had so far interviewed. Borrow’s appointment with Luke Cambridge, an appointment he hadn’t been able to keep, was the single outstanding fact that had presented itself.
The girl was being tailed. He let her go. Dwyer departed immediately afterward and Mr Savage was permitted to return to his work. Accompanied by Captain Pierson, the Scotsman started downtown to check on the story Cambridge had told him the night before. The architect’s office was in a big building near Madison Avenue and Fortieth Street. Noon crowds surged along the sidewalks, coat collars up, shoulders hunched. Although the snow had stopped it was very cold.
McKee and Pierson took the elevator to the seventeenth floor. A door labeled “Gregory Cambridge, Architect” led to a suite of four or five rooms. A girl behind a desk with a clump of red roses on it got up at their entrance. McKee asked for Mr Cambridge. The girl was so sorry, but Mr Cambridge was out; was there anything she could do for them? Cambridge’s secretary? This way.
A small, sharp-featured woman with bright blue eyes behind glasses rose to greet them in Gregory Cambridge’s private office, said, “I’m Miss North, Mr Cambridge’s secretary. Mr Cambridge won’t be gone long. Is there anything I can do for you in the meantime?”
The production of the gold insignia from McKee’s pocket made her start and frown. She looked uncertainly from one man to the other. McKee said, “Miss North, I want to ask you a few questions. Routine police affair. I’d like to know if you can recall what happened yesterday afternoon as far as Mr Cambridge was concerned. His wife came here, didn’t she, and his daughter-in-law?”
Miss North said, “Why, yes. Mrs Cambridge and the other two came in to get a check cashed. Mr Cambridge’s daughter is to be married shortly, you know, and they were shopping.”
“What time did they arrive?” McKee asked.
“Let me see,” the secretary calculated. “As I recall, I was back from luncheon and I went out late, so it must have been half-past two or a quarter of three when they arrived.”
“Gregory Cambridge received a call from his brother Luke, in Edgewood, during the afternoon, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” the woman answered, “he did. He got the call while the Cambridge women were here.”
“At what time did they leave?”
“At around three o’clock.”
“What about Mr Cambridge?”
Miss North said, “Mr Cambridge went out very shortly afterward.”
“And when did he come back?”
“He didn’t come back for the rest of the afternoon. I remember it very well because Mrs Cambridge called some time later but Mr Cambridge had gone.”
“At what time did Mrs Cambridge call?”
Miss North pondered for a moment. “I should say it was at a little after four o’clock.”
“Did she say what she wanted?”
“No. She simply asked for Mr Cambridge.”
“And Mr Cambridge wasn’t here?”
“No, he wasn’t,” the secretary said.
McKee thanked her and the two men left the office. Outside in the corridor, as Pierson pressed the button for the elevator, the Scotsman murmured thoughtfully, his voice thin, his eyes narrow, “Why did Gregory Cambridge lie to us as to his whereabouts yesterday afternoon?”
“That’s right, Inspector,” Pierson said, as though he had made a tremendous discovery. “Yeah, that’s right. He did tell us he stayed here all afternoon until he went up to
Garth and Campbell’s and couldn’t get in the store, didn’t he?”
McKee’s gaze at the dial above the elevator door was somber. He inclined his head absently. Too many lies, too much confusion. Why had Gregory Cambridge deliberately resorted to subterfuge as to his movements? Echo answered nothing whatever.
Back at the office of the homicide squad Fernandez was waiting for McKee, seated on the desk close to the window in the long, narrow inner office.
The post-mortem report was there. He amplified it. Borrow had died as a result of the two bullet wounds, one of which had pierced the aorta, the other had smashed through the spine and embedded itself in the lobe of the left lung, taking a couple of arteries with it on its way. Either wound would have been fatal.
Fernandez said, brushing ash from the crease of a well-pressed knee, “The killer needn’t have wasted lead, Chris. Borrow would have died anyhow within the next few months. He had a bad valvular leak and the heart was terrifically enlarged. As a matter of fact, he might have dropped dead at any moment.”
McKee pulled out the chair behind the desk and sat down. “Yes,” he said, “but whoever bumped Borrow off was in a bit of a hurry.”
“In a hurry about what?” Fernandez asked.
McKee shrugged. “I don’t know. I wish I did.”
He began to go through the reports that were piled in front of him.
“Borrow,” Fernandez said, blowing a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling, “I know Borrow was the head of Garth and Campbell’s display department. But what else was he besides? A man doesn’t just get killed out of the blue except by accident, and those two bullets were no accident. They were planted, plenty.”
McKee turned a page and said, characterizing the dead man in a rapid singsong: “Forty-nine, painter-etcher, taught in half-a-dozen art schools, did illustrating for a while, drifted into stage-sets as an assistant to Jay Stander, went to Casey’s first and from Casey’s to Garth and Campbell’s, where he’s been for the last fifteen years. His wife’s dead. She died last year. From what I can gather she was an invalid for a long while. He has one daughter, a girl named Judith.”
“Judith,” Fernandez said. “Judith Borrow. That has a familiar ring.”
“She’s an actress.”
“That's right,” Fernandez nodded. “She did the young girl in A Handful of Silver. And a damned good job too.” McKee said curtly, “She would do a good job at whatever she attempted.”
Fernandez’ brows rose. He smiled. “Something’s got your goat, hasn’t it? I see you had our district attorney down there
this morning.”
“Yes,” McKee said. “Dwyer wasn’t in his usual form.” “Anything to hang your hat on as far as the killing is concerned, McKee?”
The Scotsman laid down a report on the doorman at Garth and Campbell’s.
“Not so much as a thumbtack—as far as actual proof goes.” He tapped restless fingers on the scarred edge of the massive desk. “Here’s a man, Fernandez, who lived an extremely regular life. He got up in the morning and went to the department store. He returned home at night. He had very few friends and his work engrossed him. And after fifteen years of this routine, the same thing day in, day out, without warning or alarums and excursions, he’s knocked off.”
McKee’s glance at the pencil he twisted to and fro was somber, brooding.
“I don’t get it, Fernandez,” he said. “In almost every killing we handle the motive springs to the eye. This is a strange case. There just doesn’t seem to be any motive, at least none that I can find. He hadn’t any enemies. And he had no money to leave. He got a pretty good salary from Garth and Campbell’s, nine thousand dollars a year, but a good deal of it went in doctors’ bills for his wife and he mortgaged himself heavily to give that girl an education. There is one lead and only one. That’s Borrow’s appointment with Luke Cambridge.”
The Scotsman’s gaze darkened and drew down. A tap on the door interrupted him. The door opened. Lieutenant Shearer stuck in his head. He said, “Gault’s here, Inspector. Will you see him now?”
McKee said, “Yes.” Gault was one of the men who had been tailing Leslie Cambridge. He bustled into the office, hat in hand.
“Well, Gault?” McKee asked, and the detective launched into a careful summary that brought Leslie into New York and put him to work in the brokerage office in which he was employed.
“... and then at half-past ten this morning,” Gault said, “he left his office and went to the Pendleton National Bank. He was after money, all right. We went from the Pendleton to the Brown Exchange Bank and from the Brown to the Mutual. Kenny, the man who’s on Leslie now, got it from a cashier at the Mutual, a pal of his. Cambridge was turned down in all three places. He was trying to raise twenty-five hundred dollars. And he must need it bad, ’cause the next place he hits for, that’s where I left him, is Sol Carter’s, and you know what a low-life loan man that guy is. Anybody who gets any cash out of Sol is gonna pay for it ten times over.”