by Helen Reilly
McKee pulled a sheet of yellow paper across the desk and began to scribble on it. “Quarrel with Luke. Nephew looking for money. One hundred thousand dollars. Twenty-five hundred dollars. Discrepancy. Interest?”
“All right, Gault,” he said. “Report back at six.”
As the detective left Shearer came in with an envelope in his hand. He said, “Here’s the special-delivery stuff from Craig in Edgewood. I’m-- ”
McKee slit the stout brown paper wrapping with a knife that had been especially designed for him by a man who had been hanged in Wethersfield the previous June and drew out the enclosed sheets headed “DB426.” It was a report on Luke Cambridge.
There was little in it he hadn’t already surmised, except that Cambridge was wealthier than he had thought. He wasn’t a millionaire but he was close to being one. The toy factory, of which his niece’s fiance, Toby Newell, was the manager, was a going concern, but it was his real estate and his interest in the local bank that put Luke in the higher brackets. His niece Ellen was looked upon in Edgewood, as far as the family went, as Luke’s favorite, and it was generally presumed that she would inherit the bulk of his estate.
Fernandez went through the sheets as McKee discarded them. “This fellow, Newell,” he said, “rather fell into a tub of butter, didn’t he, McKee? What’s Newell like?”
“I haven’t seen him,” McKee answered, “but from this”— he turned a page—“he’s free, white and thirty-one, came originally from Kansas and was a Conference football star. The usual thing, insurance in New York and then he met Ellen Cambridge and through Ellen got the job with Luke, running the toy factory. He seems to have made good there. Independent sort of guy.” The Scotsman turned another page. “When Luke objected to Ellen’s engagement to him he stuck to his guns. The old man seems to think it’s all right now. A bit of a tyrant, Luke. He’s had things too much his own way and they’re all afraid of him. It’s natural enough. He has what it takes, cash—and plenty of it.”
It was then that Detective Caldwell arrived from Field-ston where he had been searching the dead man’s house and going over the grounds, not only for a more particular slant on Franklin Borrow, but for a lead to Judith’s, and Todhunter’s, assailant.
Caldwell was carrying a bundle under his arm. He put it down on the desk in front of the inspector, undid the wrappings and revealed a green tooled-leather dispatch case. The name “Franklin Borrow” was embossed in dull gold letters in a small panel inset in the middle of the cover. On the side there was a small round gold lock. McKee tried it. The case opened. It was empty.
There could be no doubt that this was the case that Judith Borrow had gone so hastily to the isolated house above Fieldston that snowy night to get the moment she discovered that her father was dead.
“Where was this found, Caldwell?” The inspector turned the box over. The fine-grained leather was scarred with deep gashes. Ragged stains spread across its surfaces. In one corner the partial imprint of the tread of an automobile tire was faintly perceptible. The case had evidently received rough treatment recently.
Caldwell described how and where the box had been picked up. He said, “Some kids were skiing at the north end of the Van Cortlandt Park golf links. One kid’s skis got away from him and he tumbled into the bushes. He found the box lying in the snow. It was about twenty feet from that side road. The kids played football with it for a while, and then the boy who found it took it home with him when he went to lunch. His mother saw the name Borrow on it. She happened to be reading the Daily News at the time. She made the connection and called the Kingsbridge precinct. They got in touch with me.’’
The point at which the dispatch case had been retrieved was a little over a mile from Borrow’s house. McKee examined the lock. The circle of dull gold holding the slotted keyhole was unmarred by the slightest scratch. The box had not been forced. Whoever had opened it to abstract the contents, an unknown quantity that was becoming more and more important as the case progressed, had used a key.
He dismissed Caldwell and pressed a buzzer. When Shearer came in the Scotsman handed him the green leather case. “Put it away, Shearer,” he said. “I have a hunch that it’s going to be Exhibit A in the case of the State of New York versus the murderer of Franklin Borrow.” He looked at his watch. “Busy, Fernandez?”
The medical examiner had been watching the Scotsman intently. He said, “I’ve got a post-mortem to do—that Porto Rican who was stilettoed at the Grantham. Why? Where are you off to?”
The Scotsman was getting into his coat. “I’m going back to Garth and Campbell’s. Sorry you can’t come along. I’m going to have a look at a pretty girl who’s going to be fitted for her wedding dress.”
The medical examiner shuddered. “Even the thought of getting that close to wedding bells makes me nervous.”
The two men left the precinct together, McKee picking up Pierson as he went through the outer office.
CHAPTER 8
“THIS WAY, Miss Cambridge. Your fitter is all ready for you.”
The dapper floor manager bowed to Ellen Cambridge, seated on a deep white leather couch in a corner of the French salon on the fourth floor of Garth and Campbell’s. It was the exclusive store’s most exclusive department. It was to this department that gowns, hot from Auetiel and the workrooms of Paris designers, were rushed by air across the Atlantic, to be bought and copied and adapted by America’s millions.
Ellen Cambridge wasn’t alone. Toby Newell was with her. She rose from beside him, very young and charming in a severe black sports dress, her round cheeks wind-stung from the keen January air, her eyes bright. She had only entered the store with Newell some five minutes earlier. She said, laughing down at him, “No, you can’t come with me, Toby, this is a very serious business. But if you want I’ll come out and show it to you when I have it on.”
“All this fuss,” Newell said, grinning at her derisively. “Why didn’t we just walk off and get married? I like you in the dress you’ve got on now. You look all right to me.”
There was an interchange of glances between them. Ellen Cambridge stuck the tip of a small red tongue out at Newell from between two arches of creamy teeth and turned and followed the floor manager down the long room banked with mirrors into a cubicle numbered three at the far end. Newell fidgeted uneasily on the white leather couch, got up, found an ash tray, returned to his seat and opened a copy of Mademoiselle. He turned the pages with a half-puzzled, half-wry expression on his rugged but not unprepossessing face.
From behind a tapestry some sixty feet away McKee looked in the direction of the ascending elevator. It stopped. The door opened. Irene Cambridge was among the mink-coated women who stepped out. Mink swathed her to the knees. A small mink toque with a blue pompon in it accentuated the coppery gleams of the smooth bronze hair covering her shapely head. Her long slim legs in beige stockings intensified the impression of vigor and of youth she managed to convey in spite of her undoubted forties. There was something buoyant about her, something living and free, that formed a strong contrast to McKee’s memory of Gregory Cambridge as he had sat, pedestrian, heavy and rather stolid, glowering meaningly at his wife in the house in Edgewood the night before.
Irene looked around. Her face lit up when she saw Toby Newell. She crossed half-a-dozen yards of expensive dove-colored carpet, greeted him gaily and dropped down on the couch beside him. They were too far away for McKee to hear what they were saying but they appeared to be good friends.
Irene Cambridge raised her head. McKee turned his. With the fitter behind her and a saleswoman hovering, Ellen Cambridge stepped out of cubicle three at the far end of the salon. Framed in the doorway, she paused a moment to adjust the tight basque of heavy satin about her slender waist and walked toward the two waiting for her on the white leather couch.
She looked very young and very pretty and somehow rather childish and a little lost in the sweeping, statuesque folds of the moyen-age gown that revealed the budding curves of a m
aturity not yet complete and that was, on the whole, rather too much for her to carry.
Irene Cambridge evidently got the same reaction. Chin in gloved palm above crossed knees, she studied her stepdaughter thoughtfully and with a little frown as Ellen continued to advance.
“Stand still, darling.” Her voice was absorbed. Clothes were important to Irene. There was a real anxiety in her as she said, “No, move back a few feet. Now turn.”
Ellen obeyed.
Irene was frowning. “No, definitely no. It’s not right over the hips; there’s too much fullness around them and the waist’s got to be raised. I’m not too well satisfied about the neckline either.”
The fitter, a small wizened man, nodded reluctant agreement. “Mademoiselle is a little, just a little full in the hips. That’s why I brought the basque down. But, if Madam thinks ”
Irene examined Ellen, having her move this way and that. “Yes, perhaps you’re right.”
Ellen said, “What do you think, Toby darling?”
Toby Newell said, “You look absolutely swell to me, honey, but I’m no judge. What about the veil and things?” “Goof!” Ellen laughed at him. “That doesn’t come until later.”
They were interrupted. “My dears, I’ve found you. Oh! Ellen! How marvelous! How perfectly marvelous!” Muriel Cambridge came hurrying toward the sequestered little group out of a cluster of women who had just debarked from an ascending car. Newell, Irene and Ellen looked at each other. It was obvious that they hadn’t expected Muriel, equally obvious that while they didn’t mind her appearance they were faintly amused by it.
Muriel was pirouetting around Ellen. “My dear, it’s lovely. It’s simply marvelous. But oughtn’t there to be—I mean —isn’t it a little plain? Oughtn’t there to be some lace or something somewhere?”
Irene gave her short shrift. She said impatiently, “Get out of the way, Muriel. Ellen, throw your shoulders back, I want to look at those buttons.”
A door beyond and behind McKee opened. It was the door of a service elevator. Two women came out accompanied by Pierson. They were Miss Torrens and Miss Eber-hardt from the blouse and glove counters, the girls McKee had previously interviewed. They joined the inspector. Because of the arrangement of mirrors which were really screens, and of an intervening table holding lace jabots, McKee and Pierson and the two salesgirls were invisible to that other cluster some distance away, but they themselves could see very well.
It was Miss Torrens who had reported that she had seen a man going through the door labeled display late the previous afternoon.
McKee indicated the little group with Ellen Cambridge who stood there, a bright nucleus, surrounded by Toby Newell, Irene and Muriel. Miss Torrens scrutinized them all in turn. She frowned, stared, started to speak, changed her mind and looked harder.
“Well?” McKee asked.
Miss Torrens said, “That woman in the mink coat ... I thought I saw a man go down and I don’t see But that woman in the mink coat bought a pair of gloves from me at—it must have been at around four o’clock.”
That was all from Miss Torrens, except that the gloves were cream suede, had cost $3.79 and that the customer had paid for them with cash and had taken them with her.
Well, well. First Gregory Cambridge lying as to his whereabouts during the period under scrutiny, and now his beautiful wife. Get hold of the record and verify, but it was the Scotsman’s impression that Irene Cambridge had stated categorically that she wasn’t inside Garth and Campbell’s the previous afternoon. She had explained that she tried to get in but failed because of the crowds. Lies during the progress of a murder case, lies that had no bearing on the crime itself were not unusual. Mr and Mrs Gregory Cambridge’s departure from the truth was unexplained. Not enough yet. There was only one conclusion. Get more.
It was Miss Eberhardt, the girl from the blouse counter, who drove the resolution home.
Toby Newell’s whereabouts at the time of Borrow’s murder had been checked as a matter of course, just as everyone in the remotest contact with the dead man had been checked. Newell had no alibi. He had apparently been shut up in his rooms at the old red brick toy factory on a side street of Edgewood, working on summer production, from half-past three the previous afternoon until something like ten last night. But he had a car and could have made New York and returned if the necessity had arisen.
Miss Eberhardt had insisted she saw a woman opening the display doors shortly prior to Borrow’s shooting. McKee turned to her, indicating the group again. The girl shook her head. Then she looked again and stared intently and with a faint scowl at Ellen Cambridge.
“That’s the girl,” she said acidly. “Yeah, that’s her. And I thought she was sick or something. I felt sorry for her, even if she did waste a lot of my time. And look at her now. Not a damn thing the matter with her.”
Miss Eberhardt had not seen Ellen Cambridge at the display doors, but McKee undid the tangled skein of the blouse-counter girl and Ellen with tact and patience. Ellen had reached the blouse counter at something like four-five. It was after the hour, Miss Eberhardt said, because it was at four sharp that she herself had returned to her post, following a wrangle with another customer at the floor manager’s desk over an ecru frontee that had shrunk.
Garth and Campbell’s employees got a commission on sales over and above certain quotas. Miss Eberhardt said, indicating Ellen: “That dame walks up and she’s all smiles. She says ‘I want some blouses suitable for Southern wear.’ I show her the classics and she picks three of those, white, tan and pimpernel, and then I show her a new French number and a military jacket in silver cloth and she likes them both, and I’m getting down a size sixteen from the shelf—just for a moment I turn my back—and what happens? She’s off. ‘Thanks very much,’ she says, picking up her purse and gloves. ‘Another time.’ And with that she walks away. Absolutely. Leaving me with the stuff I thought she was going to take spread out on the counter.
“Her face looked queer. Sort of mottled and—oh, I don’t know—like she’d decided something all at once or that her stomach had gone back on her. Sort of braced, if you know what I mean.”
McKee both did and didn’t. What he did know positively was that Irene Cambridge and her daughter Ellen, or rather Gregory’s daughter Ellen, had both been placed inside Garth and Campbell’s in close proximity to the door leading to display’s quarters at a crucial period. They were not shown to have been acting in collusion. The salesgirls hadn’t seen them together. It was within the bounds of possibility that either of them, separately, could have gone down the staircase, along the corridor and into the department where Borrow was at work. Borrow had had an appointment with Luke Cambridge, Ellen’s uncle and Irene’s brother-in-law. Borrow had been shot and killed before he could keep the appointment, an appointment that, to say the least, was mysterious and that was beginning, more and more, to accent itself.
It was time to stop fooling. Within the loosely arranged depths of the French salon Ellen had returned to cubicle three to change back into street clothes, Irene was inspecting a new tennis dress and Muriel Cambridge was chatting at high speed to a bored but tolerant Toby Newell.
McKee thanked the two counter girls, dismissed them and made for a telephone. He wanted Todhunter and he wanted an interview with Luke Cambridge. The moment had come, as in every case, to cut through intangibles, get down to bedrock and talk turkey.
CHAPTER 9
“I CAN only repeat, Inspector”—Luke Cambridge took a sip of stout from his glass—“what I told you before, that I haven’t the slightest idea of what Borrow wanted to see me about.”
Hickory logs flamed in the big fireplace in the little old study, filling the pleasant book-lined room with a rosy glow. Dusk was coming again, the dusk following the one in which Franklin Borrow’s life had been terminated in his own working place, fifty miles or more to the south. No glow, no trick of light could soften or mellow the lean ascetic mask that was Luke Cambridge’s face, a face which was
turned coldly on McKee. Cambridge sat stiffly in his accustomed blue velvet chair in the corner near the hearth.
There was a monkish cut to Luke that distressed the Scotsman. The man wasn’t happy. He was as tight as a fiddlestring. And he had armed himself—but against what?
McKee flicked ash negligently into the receiver at his elbow and leaned toward his involuntary and unwelcoming host.
“Then I was right to make the trip up here. Mr Cambridge, I should say, and it’s my considered opinion, that you are in danger.”
“Danger!” Luke Cambridge started. He put down his glass. Some of the brown liquid splashed to the table. The idea was apparently new to him, gave him pause for thought.
McKee eyed the straight nose, the pallid skin, a skin habitually pallid, the folding of the narrow mouth. If only he could follow where these indications led.
He said, “Yes, Mr. Cambridge, examining Mr Borrow’s background, his mode of living, the procedure by which he operated, I can find nothing strange, nothing at all out of the way, nothing that gives the slightest clue to his death— except the appointment with you that he did not keep.”
Luke Cambridge said broodingly:
“I’ve been thinking that over rather extensively myself, Inspector. The name Borrow meant nothing to me until after the man died and then I started fishing. Borrow’s not a usual name. It seems to me now that I recall a man named Borrow at Yale. He roomed with a friend of mine when I was doing postgraduate work there and he used to talk a lot. The recollection is tenuous. There’s nothing I can tie it to. But anyway—there it is. That’s all I’ve got to offer.”