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  DEATH DEMANDS AN AUDIENCE

  IT WAS A VERY PUBLIC MURDER

  THE BIG, LONELY HOUSE MADE THE POLICEMAN ON GUARD UNEASY

  He was a city man, and the quietness surrounding this suburban mansion was getting on his nerves.

  Suddenly there was a noise in the basement, and he went to investigate. As he explored the dark shadows, he heard another sound that made the blood freeze in his veins.

  Someone had closed the door leading to the basement; the latch clicked into place. Now he was cut off from the rest of the house, leaving the murderer free to roam around upstairs. Or was the murderer locked in down there with him . . . ?

  DEATH DEMANDS AN AUDIENCE

  HELEN REILLY

  MB

  A MACFADDEN-BARTELL BOOK

  A MACFADDEN BOOK

  THIS IS THE COMPLETE TEXT OF THE HARDCOVER EDITION

  Macfadden-Bartell Corporation A subsidiary of Bar tell Media Corporation 205 East 42nd Street, New York, New York 10017

  Copyright, ©, 1940 by Helen Reilly. Published by arrangement with Brandt & Brandt. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

  DEATH DEMANDS AN AUDIENCE

  CHAPTER I

  AT FOUR FIFTY-THREE o’clock on the afternoon of January eleventh dusk was coming down over the city. The dark days were by no means over. Fifth Avenue was already a river of light, a swiftly moving river whose granite banks, towering precipitately into the cold evening sky, were slashed with the brilliance of electric signs in red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Parisian decorators, English tobacconists and retailers without number cried their wares aloud in crashing color on the twilight. Traffic jammed the roadbed from curb to curb and the pavements were full. New York was beginning to go home. There was a bite in the frosty air. It felt like snow.

  At Forty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue Garth and Campbell’s windows shone through the gloom, pale yellow rectangles that held the cream of what the city had to offer to the luxury trade in showmanship and content. Fur wraps that could be drawn through a ring, outrageous hats at still more outrageous prices, laces like star dust, gowns and bags and lingerie and perfumes in next year’s modes beckoned enticingly to the passers-by.

  In one window a centaur carried a nude girl wrapped insufficiently in a white tunic toward a lair of ermine and mink and silver fox, in another a small jeweled dagger and a cup of coffee gave point to an exquisite pair of green suede gauntlets thrown down on a marble bench within sight of a summer sea. It was before still another window that a crowd had gathered. It was the third window to the right of the huge bronze entrance doors.

  The curious phenomenon was that in spite of the intent and motionless scrutiny of half-a-hundred eyes the window into which the crowd stared was empty—or rather there was no window, there were simply three blank walls and a sheet of plate glass. Garth and Campbell’s had recently installed the new rising and falling cages which were really elevators holding the completed sets, sets that were designed and executed elsewhere before being lifted into place. The store’s windows were rapidly becoming famous for their novel and striking presentations.

  As a general rule the windows made their appearance in the morning after a night of work. To find one empty or in process of construction at that hour was unusual. Any deviation from routine, however slight, commands an immediate audience on the city streets.

  At four fifty-three and a half a small mousy man in a dun-colored overcoat and a shapeless hat added himself to the throng in front of the empty shaft. The little man’s name was Todhunter. Todhunter’s business was concerned with all deviations from the usual, their cause, manifestations and possible consequences. He looked about him through the thickening purple of the dusk. The crowd was fairly representative of the time and place. Women predominated, women of all ages, old and young, stout and thin, well dressed and shabby. Two girls in mink with a blanketed Mexican hairless on leash jostled a group of bustling housewives, dowagers in high hats rubbed elbows with clerks and stenographers, there was a whistling errand boy and a loitering postman and there were men carrying brief cases and smoking cigars.

  Without exception they stood at gaze, waiting patiently. Their patience was finally rewarded. At four fifty-four the submerged cage began to rise. It came slowly into view, dome first. There was light on the dusk, lambent clarity in a long slit. The slit widened and the interior of a crystal room revealed itself by gradual stages.

  Walls, floor and ceiling were of mirrored glass. The single piece of furniture it contained was a small Empire sofa in one corner. The figure of a girl lounged against the cushions of the sofa. Trailing draperies of sea-green chiffon, yards and yards of it, set off the slender long-limbed figure, the high firm breast. One white hand, on which a magnificent star sapphire flashed, emerged from ruffles of duchesse point, holding a cigarette from whose glowing tip a thread of blue smoke ascended. The small head haloed with a froth of dark curls, short straight nose, long shadowy eyes and curved scarlet mouth with indentations at the corners were repeated three times in the mirrored walls. It was an enigmatic and striking face. The girl was smiling a little.

  The attitude of arrested motion, the workmanship, on broad modernistic lines, created an impression of life that no mere verisimilitude of detail could have achieved. An involuntary sigh of admiration rose from the watchers. A stout woman with a bundle under a shiny black serge arm exclaimed to no one in particular, “Gee, don’t she look nice? Like a play, ain’t it?” Someone else said, “My dear— what a negligee! Look at those lines.”

  And then came a surprise, the incongruity, the bizarre note for which Garth and Campbell’s windows were becoming known. The girl wasn’t alone in her crystal cubicle. There was a man kneeling at her feet, his back to the pavement, his body pressed forward against her knees, his face buried in her lap. The man looked as though he had just finished pleading with the young woman, pleading for something he wanted very much indeed.

  If the tableau was intended even remotely to suggest beauty and the beast and thus throw the girl’s loveliness and the beauty of the gown she wore into sharper focus it was successful—up to a point. But there was something wrong about it. The man’s posture certainly conveyed complete surrender. There was no fight left in him—but why not have put a decent suit on the fellow, made him a little younger, why not have arranged his arms and legs in a gentler, more harmonious pattern?

  The cage had fully risen. It settled into place with a tiny jar, was still. As if the stillness were a signal the man moved. He drew back from the girl’s knees, lurched sideways, fell to the crystal floor and rolled over.

  A gasp rose from the startled spectators. The gasp changed to a thick, sobbing moan. The little man named Todhunter stood on tiptoe. “The better to see you with, my dear.” Bright red blood was issuing from the mouth of the man inside the window in an arched scarlet stream. It ran down over his chin onto his collar and from there dribbled into a growing pool on the floor beside him. The man made no attempt to wipe the blood away. He lay as he had tumbled, staring upward.

  His eyes were the pay-off. They didn’t even flicker. Wide open and surprised, they remained fastened, not on the crystal ceiling above his head but on a horizon without limits. The man on the floor of Garth and Campbell’s show window had breathed his last. But only just. He had shuffled off the mortal coil, had jerked himself loose from it, literally, before the gaze of at least one hundred and fifty people. Death was on display in the January dusk in the showcase in one of New York’s smartest department stores.

  The spectacle was unique. It took a moment or two for the full inwardness of it to register. The grisly truth shook the hushed crowd into horror-stricken action. Voices, cries, screams lace
d the bitter air above the tumult of the streets. A woman crumpled. “Look out. Move back. She’s fainted. What is it? Don’t you see? A man, dead. Where? There—in the window.”

  People in front pulling away, people in back craning forward to get a better view; men and women surged this way and that in a wild hypnotic rhythm. The throng, enormous by this time, spilled over the pavement and out into the roadbed. Traffic snarled itself into an impacted jam. The doors of taxis and private cars were thrown open and their occupants joined the multitude. Blue-coated officers left their posts at Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth streets and came galloping, whistles at full blast. At the heart of the disturbance the little man Todhunter, caught in the press, was able neither to advance nor retreat. He kept looking around. His wandering gaze focused. It came to rest on a girl ten feet away from him, a girl with a slim dark face under a small green hat cocked sideways, in a narrow-waisted green coat with swinging skirts. The girl had pushed her way through the crowd to a point of vantage, was in the front row of spectators. She was staring, frozen, into the window.

  Todhunter wasn’t easily startled. A wide range of emotion that had nothing to do with his own personal concerns had been crammed, willy-nilly, into his existence. He was startled then. The girl on the sidewalk and the mannequin in the showcase were exactly alike, feature for feature, short straight nose, broad white forehead, black curls sweeping the tips of the ears, curved scarlet mouth with a lift to it. The resemblance was amazing. It could be chance, it didn’t seem possible. Todhunter edged closer to the slender figure in green.

  The girl’s eyes were fastened on the body of the man on the floor of the window behind the sheet of plate glass. They were long-lashed luminous eyes under arched dark brows. There was desperation in them, and knowledge, a very definite and special kind of knowledge. As Todhunter watched the girl’s hand went to her mouth and gloved fingers, balled into a fist, crushed themselves against her lips.

  She stood that way, staring and staring, for half a minute, then her hand fell to her side and she removed her gaze from the window, as though she had had enough and more than enough. Her eyes were veiled now, and her mouth was tight. Resolution had formed itself in her. With a movement remarkably like an intolerable urge toward escape she turned and started to push her way through the throng, and all at once, in the sea of faces, oblongs and ovals and squares hung on the dimness about her, she saw someone or something that attracted her attention, something that, if possible, increased the tumult inside of her. Ducking her head, she twisted her wide slender shoulders round, put her back to the window and dove for the curb. With a violent effort Todhunter eased himself out from between enclosing walls of flesh, lost his fedora, retrieved it, removed an elbow gently but firmly from his ribs and followed her through the drove of wildly babbling and excited watchers into the darkness. As he went he made a note of the time. It lacked a couple of seconds of five o’clock.

  It was at five-four that Christopher McKee, the head of the Manhattan homicide squad, picked up the phone in the long narrow inner office on the third floor of the tenth precinct. It was the telephone bureau calling from headquarters.

  A voice at the other end of the wire said: “Inspector McKee? Hello, Inspector. Acting Captain Conley talking. Homicide. Garth and Campbell’s on Fifth Avenue. There’s a man dead there in one of the department store’s show windows.”

  The lean, towering Scotsman sighed, pushed aside a belated sandwich and a cup of coffee and crushed out a cigarette from which he had taken only one puff. It was the third homicide since noon. He said languidly: “Thanks, Conley. Nice of the gentleman. One of Garth and Campbell’s windows? Where will they choose next? Well, anyhow, I’m on my way.”

  Dropping the instrument into place, McKee called to Kent, .his stenographer, a small fair man typing at the far end of the narrow room, and rose. On his way to the Cadillac parked at the curb below he picked up a brace of detectives who fell in behind him.

  Order in chaos, a sort of order, achieved with considerable effort, was beginning to make itself felt when the inspector reached Fifth Avenue’s largest and most publicized department store. Outside in the surrounding streets blue-clad patrolmen from the local precinct were routing the traffic, human and vehicular, north, east, south and west. “This way. Move on, please. No, madam, it’s not an air raid. No, no, just an accident. Your wife Mabel? I’m sorry, sir, you’ll probably find her waiting for you at home. Don’t cry, lady, there isn’t any danger. Just keep tight hold of the little girl’s hand. This way, this way. Move along, please.”

  The short winter twilight was over. Night had come. With darkness the wind had risen and snow was beginning to fall. McKee didn’t bother with the show window off to the right. It was of no use in the position in which it was. With the help of a cordon of precinct men Dalligan, the photographer from headquarters, was doing his stuff behind a hastily improvised canvas screen. Blue-white brilliance of exploding flash bulbs entranced the crowd which still lingered in force. With Kent at his elbow and Pierson and Lutz behind, McKee pushed a path through staring men and women and entered the store by way of the big bronze main doors.

  It was quieter inside the great store. Light from inverted alabaster bowls fell softly on vast airy spaces divided into wide aisles by counters covered with merchandise in all colors of the rainbow. The aisles were well filled with shoppers who were standing motionless, listening to the final phrases of an announcement over the loud-speaker system to the effect that the management regretted that the store would have to be closed because of an accident on the premises but that it would be open as usual the following morning.

  Captain Barclay of the local precinct and the slim, dark medical examiner, Fernandez, joined McKee in front of the information booth just inside the main doors.

  “Got the exits bottled up, Inspector,” Barclay said. “We’re taking the customers’ names and addresses as they leave. It’s probably an inside job, but I thought we might as well make sure. Hell of a mess to handle. Whatever happened didn’t happen here. It happened on the floor below. The window came up from there.”

  The precinct captain led McKee, Fernandez and the accompanying detectives past the information booth about which puzzled and inquiring buyers clustered like bees about to swarm. They skirted the cocktail lounge where beautifully gowned women and well-tailored men sat at small tables under gay lamps sipping their drinks. Cocktails at Garth and Campbell’s had become one of the things to do. The great store served as a clearing-house for engagements in mid-Manhattan and it was as smart as it was expensive. Orders that had already been placed were being filled. Now that the exits were under control there was no longer any hurry about getting rid of people.

  J. A. Paulson, the executive vice-president, was waiting for the group of officials at the door leading to the display department from which the window with the dead man in it had risen. Paulson was a plump whitish man with thin brassy hair and red-rimmed, lashless eyes.

  He said that anything the management could do to facilitate the work of the police was at the inspector’s disposal, although it was difficult to see, at the moment, the necessity of the furor that had been created by an accident to a member of the staff which could have no possible connection with the customers. He was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

  The dead man’s name was Franklin Borrow. Borrow was the head of the display department in charge of windows and had been with Garth and Campbell’s for more than fifteen years.

  Dalligan, the big rawboned photographer, came swinging along the aisle with his cameras. “Got the flashes from outside, Inspector,’’ he announced cheerfully. “The girl in the window’s a honey. Got her too. Where do we go from here?”

  “Downstairs, to the floor below,” McKee answered.

  The isolation of the display department was one of the first things that commanded his attention. Garth and Campbell’s faced east and ran from Forty-seventh to Forty-eighth Street and a third of the way along the block. The doo
r leading to the display department was a small, inconspicuous brown panel in the northeast corner. The word “Display” was neatly lettered on it, but the lettering was small. The wide aisle that led to it was flanked on one side by a counter devoted to gloves, on the other side by blouses.

  Paulson opened the door. As they descended a broad iron staircase that angled three times on itself to a landing in the basement, where it ended in a square vestibule, the vice-president said in answer to a question from the inspector, “I don’t know. It’s not intended for use by the public, but I suppose anybody could get down here without being challenged, anybody who really wanted to.”

  From the vestibule a narrow cement-walled corridor led to a pair of double doors, fifty feet away and to the left. These again were labeled with the word “Display.” The little group of officials went through them. McKee paused at the head of a short downward-sloping ramp and looked around.

  They were behind the scenes. This was the workshop where fantasy was produced, where the glamorous windows were created, windows as carefully planned and executed as the stage-sets for a Broadway show.

  The apartment devoted to display wasn’t cut up into cubicles. It was one enormous room that was, in space, a counterpart of the pavement above, bounded on the north or narrow end by Forty-eighth, on the south by Forty-seventh, on the east by the invisible line of the curb above their heads and on the west, or inner side, by the fronts of the empty shafts into which the windows were lowered to be dressed. A narrow platform ran along in front of these shafts, then came a sunken aisle with, on the far side, a broad and wide platform up a couple of steps. This platform was backed with tall bins, and scattered with tables and racks and cabinets and small hand trucks that held clothing, accessories, gowns, cloaks, furs, bibelots, statuary, props and ornaments of all sorts that serviced the windows.

  Paulson said: “It’s window number three,” and the group of men moved toward the northern end of the long apartment and came to a halt before the empty shaft, which was the last in the row. Before McKee would permit the cage to be brought down he studied the lowering device. It was a small flat metal box fixed in the panel to the right of the shaft with three buttons, one above the other. The push buttons were small and bore no perceptible marks. Nevertheless Dalligan and the fingerprint man went to work on them.