by Helen Reilly
Luke said, “Yes, I’d like to read it. His book on lamps was fairly authentic. Where’s Gregory this morning, Irene? Did he go to New York?”
Irene Cambridge said, “No. He swore he was going to stay in bed and get a really good sleep. He’s still at home. Why?”
“I wanted to see him about some repairs that have to be made on the factory. Tillman says we need a new roof.”
They chatted on for a few moments, amiably enough. Luke seemed to like his brother’s wife. His habitual austerity imperceptibly relaxed as he looked at her smooth creamy skin and her bright eyes, framed in the masses of her soft copper hair in the shadow of the brown felt hat. As they separated and Luke moved up the street toward the post office and Irene headed south Todhunter’s wandering gaze stood still.
According to his wife, Gregory Cambridge was supposed to be at home and in bed, enjoying a late sleep. Only Gregory Cambridge wasn’t. He was standing behind the bulk of a newspaper stall across the street, in shadow, had been watching his wife and Luke. As Todhunter stared Gregory disappeared into the depths of the store.
The little detective rejoined Luke Cambridge at the foot of the post-office steps. He said smilingly, “I’m glad I found you, Mr Cambridge. I don’t know exactly how to get back to the house.”
Luke Cambridge ignored his own subterfuge; he said indifferently, “The car will be around. Andrews always waits for me in front of the bank.”
Todhunter accompanied him while he got his mail and went to the bank and had a check cashed. When they reached the old colonial house on the hill beyond the town Toby Newell was waiting to see Luke on business connected with the factory. The two men went into the study and talked. Todhunter resumed his place in the living room. At around noon the conference was interrupted by the arrival of Irene and Ellen Cambridge. Irene had brought a book with her. Luke thanked her for it and presently the four of them were summoned into the dining room by Andrews. Lunch was ready.
Talk and laughter, animated on Ellen’s and Toby Newell’s part, drifted out to Todhunter. They were still in the dining room when Leslie and Muriel Cambridge entered the hall, stamping snow from their feet. They wore galoshes and sweaters, had been out for a walk. They refused food but had coffee.
At around one the three women went upstairs. Muriel glanced curiously at Todhunter as she followed in Irene’s and Ellen’s wake. Toby Newell was talking to Luke in the dining room. He said, “If you want to O.K. the consignment today it will save us twenty-four hours. I’ve got the lists with me. I can get them ready right here. And then all you’ll have to do will be sign them.”
The telephone in the study was ringing. Andrews answered it. He said, “Hold the wire, please,” crossed the hall, went into the dining room and said to Luke Cambridge, “New York calling you, Mr Luke.”
Luke broke off what he was saying to Toby Newell, went into his study, closed the door behind him and took the call.
Todhunter got quietly out of his chair. He slipped into the long, dim hall. There was no one in sight. The diningroom doors were closed. He moved softly toward the door of the study, paused a few feet from it and listened. Luke Cambridge was talking into the receiver in a low, steady and earnest voice. Todhunter couldn’t hear what he was saying.
His conversation went on for three or four minutes. Then the receiver clicked. Footsteps approached the closed door of the study. Todhunter didn’t have time to make the living room; he veered nimbly to the right and examined a Hogarth print hanging on the side wall.
The study door opened. Luke Cambridge stood looking out. He wasn’t looking at Todhunter, he was looking past the detective, toward the graceful curve of the wide shallow staircase on the right that ascended to the floor above.
“Well, where did you come from?” Luke demanded. The question was acrid, terse. Todhunter swung.
He hadn’t heard the front door open. He had heard no sound whatever since the three women had mounted the stairs a few minutes earlier. Yet Gregory Cambridge was standing on the landing, at least twenty feet from the front door.
Gregory left the landing and strolled toward his brother. He took a cigar out of his pocket and bit off the end. He said, “I’m looking for Irene and Ellen. There must have been at least twenty telephone calls for them in the last hour. Florists and caterers and God knows what have been chewing my ear off. Are they here?”
Ellen’s clear voice answered him from the top of the stairs. “Hello, Dad,” she called and came running down, followed at a more sedate pace by Irene and Muriel.
Todhunter retreated to his place in a corner of the living room. There was a good deal of moving to and fro. The afternoon wore on. By four o’clock the house was empty except for Luke, the houseman, the cook and Todhunter. Outside the sun dropped lower in the west and shadows lengthened on the snowy hills. Night was coming. For no apparent reason Todhunter shifted in his chair. The house was very still. There was no wind. The grandfather’s clock in the hall above ticked wheezily, lethargically. A paper rustled in Luke’s study. A log crashed softly to the hearth. Beyond the windows twilight faded and the darkness thickened. Todhunter’s uneasiness, an uneasiness for which he could find no legitimate explanation, began to grow.
CHAPTER 11
FIFTY-ODD MILES to the south, on the third floor of the tenth precinct on West Twentieth Street in New York City, the lean, towering inspector at the head of the Manhattan Homicide Squad echoed Todhunter’s uneasiness within his own mind. A long tiring day, most of which had been devoted to the death of Franklin Borrow and subsequent developments, was drawing to a close without his having gotten anywhere in particular.
McKee paced the floor restlessly, hands in his pockets, head bent. There was no possible doubt, could be no possible doubt, that the accident to Toby Newell’s car had been deliberately rigged. He had looked the car over himself before leaving Edgewood. The bolts had been removed with malice aforethought.
The Scotsman lit a cigarette. This removal could only have been accomplished between the time Newell left his car at Gregory Cambridge’s house at around noon the previous day to drive to New York with Irene and Ellen in the Cambridges’ car and the time McKee saw him leave the house that same night and get into the coupe and start down the hill.
Going through a pile of accumulated reports once more, Pierson said plaintively, “They were all there, Inspector, at some period during the day or evening. Everyone we’re having watched in this Borrow case, with the exception of his daughter, had the opportunity to tamper with that car.” Kent looked up from his typewriter.
“What about Savage? Was he hanging around the Gregory Cambridge place again?”
The stenographer’s trek through the snow on Savage’s trail had given him a keen, if somewhat embittered interest in that young man. McKee said,
“Yes. Savage was back again at Gregory Cambridge’s last night. Niles was on his tail. Niles followed him there from Garth and Campbell’s. Savage took the five-ten up to Edgewood, got there around half-past six and made straight for that house. He was scared off the other night. He returned last night, waiting until dark. Niles saw him hanging around at the rear of the place for ten or fifteen minutes before he headed for his own shack in the woods.”
McKee came to a full stop in the middle of the floor. “I don’t like it,” he said, his brown eyes fastened on a lighted window across the street. “Why should Savage, or any of those others for that matter—and they had the same chance that he had—want to smack Toby Newell’s car head on into a tree? And what possible connection has this crash of Newell’s, a crash that was arranged, with Borrow’s murder?”
The Scotsman resumed his pacing. “I don’t get it,” he murmured. “There are too many ends lying around loose; too many leads, quite promising leads, that take us exactly nowhere.”
The telephone rang. It was Rheinstein, the detective McKee had sent back to Garth and Campbell’s to check again on various angles.
Rheinstein had news. It gave the inspector
a lift. Jones, the handy man in the display department who had remained behind with Borrow after the rest of the staff had left, had given the time of his departure from the store as four-two. This had been verified by his timecard. But according to the guard at the employees’ exit, while Jones had punched his card at four-two he hadn’t left the building then. He had returned to the display department, explaining that he had forgotten his sister’s kid’s socks and that he’d get hell if he went home without them. As to how long
Jones had been downstairs after he turned back, the guard couldn’t say. He didn’t think it was very long. Maybe five minutes, maybe fifteen. Rheinstein hadn’t been able to pin the guard down.
McKee stamped out his cigarette. Four-two. Add fifteen minutes. Four-seventeen. Perhaps it was later. That was getting toward the crucial period. Borrow had been shot at between about four-thirty and four fifty-five. He said aloud, “I wonder if Mr Jones could be holding out on us.”
Pierson asked, “Did Rheinstein say whether this guy Jones was in the store when the body came up?”
“No,” McKee answered, “he wasn’t in the store at that time. According to Rheinstein, the guard is sure that Jones left before four-thirty. But what I’d like to know is what he was doing when he went back there. He didn’t say anything about this return trip when we talked to him this morning. It looks, yes, decidedly it looks as though a talk with Mr Jones is indicated. What’s his address, Kent?”
The stenographer gave it and McKee lifted the receiver. He called the detective bureau of the Bronx precinct. He asked for Lieutenant Kraft. When Kraft came on he said: “Hello, Kraft, 27—Adams Avenue is close by, isn’t it?” Lieutenant Kraft said it was.
“All right,” McKee said. “Have someone drop around there right away, will you? I want all the information I can get on a man named Arnold Jones who lives at that address. I also want to talk to Jones as soon as I can.”
Kraft promised to ring back as soon as he had the information. McKee hung up, dropped into the chair behind his desk and reached for the pile of books containing the record of Yale classes from 1903 to 1915. They had been brought from the public library earlier in the day.
Borrow was a member of the class of 1914, while Luke Cambridge had been graduated in 1904. But Luke was back at Yale during 1911-12 for postgraduate work. Borrow had been a member of the debating team in his senior year. McKee glanced down the list. There were five names. One of them caught and held his attention. It was Ferdinand J. Ashton. Ferdinand J. Ashton was a member of the board of governors of the exchange and had been in the news on and off recently on the battle over the new rules.
“Ashton,” McKee said. “Ashton. Let’s see, he has a place in Syosset. He’d be—no—he’d be at his Park Avenue place now. Ring him, Kent.”
The mention of the police brought Ashton to the phone. In answer to the Scotsman’s question the broker said,
“Yes, I remember Borrow. Shocked to read of his death. In that way, especially. No. Haven’t seen anything of him in years but he was a close friend of George Booth.”
McKee wanted to know where Booth could be reached and Ashton said,
“Funny how things work out. I couldn’t have told you that a year ago. But I ran into Booth at the Yale-Princeton game last fall and he told me he was ranching in Texas. Place with a funny name—Chestnut Springs? No—Walnut Springs, Texas. That’s it.”
The inspector thanked Ashton. Less than a minute later an inquiry addressed to the chief of police of Walnut Springs was winging its way southward via the telegraph bureau.
Borrow’s past, apparently innocuous on the surface, was becoming of more and more interest. Somewhere within it was the essential fact that had led to murder.
Kraft was on the wire. Pierson handed the instrument to McKee. The Bronx lieutenant reported that the man named Arnold Jones who resided at the address given him lived with a sister, Mrs Sadie Weller, a widow with two children. As far as the precinct was concerned the police had never had' any trouble with Jones. Jones wasn’t at home so they hadn’t been able to talk to him. His sister had expected him early in the afternoon but he hadn’t yet turned up. His sister didn’t know where he could be located. Kraft asked if the inspector wanted anything further.
McKee said, “Put a man on his apartment and have me notified the minute he shows there,” cut the connection and frowned at the floor. Jones might or might not be an important factor. He didn’t like not being able to get his hands on him at this point. There were too many elusive quantities unresolved, altogether too many. The keys for instance. He said aloud, “Those keys of Borrow’s? Where are they?”
“Huh?” Pierson said. The Scotsman didn’t pay any attention, he went on musingly: “Whatever was stolen from that dispatch box of Borrow’s has a real bearing on his death. The contents were removed by someone who took Borrow’s keys in order to make use of them for exactly that purpose.”
Kent interrupted mildly.
“Doesn’t that let Savage out, Inspector? He has a key to Borrow’s house in Fieldston. He used to go up there a lot. He was pretty close to Borrow and they used to work together there sometimes over week ends. I checked on that.”
McKee nodded.
“It’s true that Savage had a key to the house,” he said, “but that most emphatically doesn’t let him out. You examined Savage’s key ring. There was no key to Borrow’s dispatch box on it. And whoever threw that box into the bushes up there on the outskirts of Van Cortlandt Park after abstracting what it held opened the box with the proper key. The lock wasn’t forced and there were no scratches on it.
Pierson wanted to know, “What about the girl, Borrow’s daughter?”
“The same thing goes for Judith Borrow that goes for Savage,” McKee answered. His mouth took a twist. “And the gun, where is it? It ought to have shown up by this time. Pierson, give Jenkins a ring at the building. Tell him to jazz things up. I want more action. If the gun was discarded by the killer we ought to have been able to get some kind of line on it before this. If it wasn’t ” He crossed to the window, stood looking down into the darkening street and exclaimed in a covered voice, “That is what I’m afraid of!”
Again the telephone rang. Thompson, who had relieved Niles as a tail for Michael Savage, was calling from Edgewood. He began to detail his report on Savage’s movements. Kent took it down.
Savage had come down from Edgewood that morning, had gone to Garth and Campbell’s at the regular time and from there he went to Borrow’s funeral. That took most of the morning. From the cemetery he had taken a subway downtown. He went to West Eighty-sixth Street, had a cup of coffee and a sandwich in a drugstore and then he’d gone to Judith Borrow’s apartment. He remained in the girl’s apartment about an hour and a half. When he left it he went to Grand Central and took the first train for Edge-wood which arrived at four-forty. In the town he stopped in a grocery store and a haberdasher’s, where he bought a pair of gloves. At present he was in a dog wagon on a corner, having a bite to eat, and this was what had given Thompson his first chance to report.
Still holding on, Kent read the message to the inspector. “Thompson wants to know if there’s anything special?” he asked.
McKee said, “Tell him to stick like glue and on no account to lose him tonight.”
Kent passed the order on. The Scotsman was getting into his hat and coat. He said,
“When Savage and Judith Borrow parted company in Garth and Campbell’s they weren’t on exactly what you’d call visiting terms. And yet Savage paid the girl a call today, a call that lasted an hour and a half.” His brown eyes were fixed under down-drawn brows as he moved toward the door. “Come on, Pierson. You come along, too, Kent. I think we’d better pay a little visit to Miss Judith Borrow ourselves.”
The brownstone house on West Eighty-eighth Street was the fourth in a row from a big apartment at the corner. Everything was quiet. As the Cadillac drew to a stop before the door McQuillan, the man covering the girl, came unobtrusiv
ely out of the shadows from behind the next stoop. McQuillan said,
“She’s still in there, Inspector.” He waved toward a pair of lighted front windows on the third floor.
McKee, Pierson and Kent mounted the steps. In the entry the inspector didn’t ring Judith Borrow’s bell. He pressed the button belonging to apartment 4b. The latch clicked. The three men entered the warm, dim hall and climbed the carpeted stairs.
On the third floor Judith Borrow’s door faced them at the far side of a small landing. Light seeped through a crack in one of the panels. McKee knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again, more loudly. There was still no answer. The inspector wheeled sharply on Pierson and said, his voice harsh,
“Quick. Go downstairs and get the superintendent and have him bring the keys. I want this door opened and I want it opened fast.”
CHAPTER 12
IN the old Cambridge house in Edgewood Todhunter stood at one of the front windows watching Luke Cambridge, wrapped in overcoat and muffler and with a battered deerstalker hat pulled low over his bushy white head, pacing the broad veranda from end to end.
Promptly at six o’clock Luke had gone out for what was apparently a regular constitutional. The cook, Mrs Johnson, came around the corner of the end wing, bundled in a worn fur coat and with a scarf tied over her head. She was carrying a paper-wrapped package at which Luke, coming to a halt, glanced suspiciously.
“It’s your shirts, Mr Cambridge,” Mrs Johnson said defensively. “I’m taking them over for Mrs Rudolph to do.” She said good night, passed on her way down the front drive and disappeared into the blackness.
The stone church and the graveyard in the hollow below were invisible. The day, which had begun well, had clouded over at sundown, and a wind had come up out of the north; there was more bad weather on the way. The wind blew hard around the old house, tormenting it in every wrack and sinew.