Death Demands an Audience Read online

  On the narrow platform immediately in front of shaft number three a variety of small objects was scattered. There was a paper of pins from which four or five had been taken, a length of cheesecloth, a tube of glue and a hammer.

  “Nothing much here,” the fingerprint man said disappointedly, examining the dusted areas with a glass.

  “All right then, out of the way.” The medical examiner, Fernandez, was brisk. “Come on, Chris,” he said to the Scotsman. “I can’t get into the window up there. Bring him down so that I can get a look at him, will you? Fve got a dinner engagement.”

  McKee reached for the bottom button on the control, but Paulson said, “Not that one, Inspector, you press the top button to bring the cage down. It’s just the reverse of the usual.”

  A spark flickered at the back of the Scotsman’s eye but he said nothing. He pressed the proper button and the small crystal room began to descend, came slowly into view. When it was nearly level with the platform the vice-president again interrupted: “Stop it here, Inspector, with the middle button, or it will go on down to the floor below.”

  McKee complied and the window came to a halt.

  The man who had been Franklin Borrow lay sprawled on the crystal floor of the three-sided crystal room confronting them. His distorted image, mirrored below him, was blurred by a dull pool of dark red wetness that was blood. The blood ran in a thin streak from under him to the mannequin’s arched satin slipper and from there up onto the high instep, where it made a small scarlet star that stood out, a grim pattern, against the sea-green folds of the voluminous negligee. Untouched by the tragedy at her feet, the strikingly realistic figure of the girl with the dark curls continued to smile faintly over a lovely half-turned shoulder.

  Fernandez shared Dalligan’s opinion. “Some baby,” he said as he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and moved forward. He stooped. “Nothing on the anterior,” he said after a swift but careful examination of the inert body. And to two of the homicide men, Smith and Berkowitz, who had just come downstairs: “Here, give me a hand with him.”

  They turned the body over gently. Expert opinion was unnecessary. In spite of the stains they all saw it, or rather saw them, two small holes in the fabric of Franklin Bor-row’s suit between the shoulder blades. Borrow had been shot twice in the back.

  Fernandez corroborated it. “One for the money and two for the show. Our friend here got a double dose. The slugs are probably still in him. No perceptible exit wounds. And no powder burns. Whoever let him have it stood more than three feet away. Mostly internal hemorrhage. Looks like a weapon with a fairly large caliber. I can’t tell you any more until I get him on the table."

  He stripped off the gloves. “I suppose you want it tonight, McKee—or perhaps tomorrow will do.”

  “I want it as soon as I can get it.”

  The medical examiner grimaced. “There goes my date. Oh weir’—he was resigned—“she has thick ankles and a tendency to be coy. Perhaps it’s all for the best. Well, I’ll be leaving you, boys and girls. Have a good time.” He put on his hat, picked up his bag and moved toward the doors. His work there was over.

  The Scotsman’s was just beginning. Kent, the official stenographer, waited at his elbow, notebook out, pencil poised. Paulson was staring at the dead man, his face the color of oatmeal.

  “Well, Mr. Paulson?” McKee said.

  “I don’t know,” the executive vice-president murmured distractedly, “what anyone would want to kill him for.” “Someone did.” The inspector’s tone was dry. “Let’s have the rest of it. Full name, address, age, etc.”

  Paulson spoke to the clerk behind him. “Get the Borrow record, Hank. File B.”

  While they waited McKee established the groundwork. He said: “First, Mr Paulson, let me get the picture clear. I can see you ordinarily have a large staff of men working here and the store doesn’t usually close until six o’clock. How does it happen that Borrow was alone in this place at before five in the afternoon?”

  Paulson explained. He said that the new windows, which were changed every five days, had been placed on display at eight o’clock that morning after a night of hard work on the part of the entire staff. It was customary for the staff to have the following day off for the overtime they had put in. So they had gone. Borrow had remained on, planning future windows.

  The clerk returned with file B. Paulson read Borrow’s record aloud. Kent jotted down the details. Franklin Borrow, forty-nine years old, height five feet ten inches, weight 179 pounds. Married. Home address, 224 Valley Road, Fieldston, New York. Member of the Fine Arts Club and of Painters and Sculptors.

  Married. “Wife living?” McKee asked.

  “No,” Paulson answered. “Mrs Borrow died abroad a year ago. I believe he has one daughter, a girl of around twenty-six or -seven.” Faint warmth tinged the vicepresident’s colorless voice.

  “Miss Borrow work in the store, Mr Paulson?”

  “No. She’s on the stage.”

  “I see. Now—you say the windows were put on display this morning and that they remain in place five days—how did this particular window, window three, come to be lowered earlier this afternoon?”

  “From what I’ve been told, Inspector, the doorman,

  Michaels ”

  “Who’s Michaels?”

  “The doorman on duty at the Fifth Avenue entrance.”

  “Get Michaels,” McKee ordered.

  Michaels was brought. He was a big brawny man with a red face that bloomed with added color above his blue uniform from the whip of the wind. There was snow on his cap. Standing before the inspector, with his back to the lowered window at which he had cast one quick gulping look, Michaels twisted the cap nervously.

  “It was this way, Inspector,” he said. “It might have been—say about a quarter past four that I noticed people stopping in front of one of the windows and looking at it, not just looking at it ordinary, looking at it special. I went over. I seen right off that the dame had fallen sideways, the dame on the couch. I think that’ll never do, and I go in and I tell the girl in Information and she says, ‘O.K., I’ll take care of it,’ so I go out again and in a couple of minutes down goes the window. The next thing I know up she comes and there’s poor Mr Borrow in it, as dead as a duck. Gee, the crowd was awful.”

  Michaels had nothing else to offer. McKee dismissed him and had the information girl, Miss Jacobs, brought. Miss

  Jacobs, trim, businesslike, competent, turned a little pale at the sight of the lowered crystal room and its burden. Her testimony coincided with the doorman’s. She was more precise as to the time. “Michaels came in and told me §bout the window at twenty-four minutes past four. I at once rang Display. I knew that the staff had gone but that someone would be here. Mr Borrow answered. I told him what the trouble was and he said he’d take care of it.” That was all for Miss Jacobs. As she went out two men in white under dark coats came in, carrying a long wicker basket. They were attendants from the morgue. They clumped stolidly along the aisle to the lowered window, paused in front of it and looked at the Scotsman. He nodded and took a farewell glance at the slumped gray huddle on the crystal floor at the feet of the gorgeous girl in the sea-green gown. “Any gun around here—that you know of, Mr Paulson?” he asked suddenly.

  The vice-president was startled by the abruptness of the question. “Why—why, yes,” he answered. “You see, there’s a good deal of valuable material here”—he waved at the platform and the merchandise littering it—“and the management provided one after an attempt at robbery six or seven months ago.”

  McKee was curt. “Where was this gun kept?”

  “In that desk over there.” Paulson pointed to a big old-fashioned roll-top desk against the far wall.

  The inspector crossed to it. Following him, the pallid vice-president said: “The top right-hand drawer, it’s probably locked.” The drawer wasn’t locked. McKee pulled it open. There was no gun in sight. They searched the desk thoroughly. There was no gun in i
t anywhere.

  “Who,” McKee demanded, “had keys to this desk?” “Only Mr Borrow and Michael Savage.”

  “And who is Michael Savage?”

  Paulson was taken aback by the Scotsman’s tone. “He’s— why, he’s Mr Borrow’s assistant. He’s young but able. Very able.”

  “Anyone happen to know where Savage is now or where he can be located?”

  Paulson said, “He must be downstairs in the subbasement doing a mask for the south windows. He was to show them to me when he finished.”

  McKee turned to the waiting detectives. “Get Savage,” he directed.

  But there was no Mr Savage to get. He had been there recently. The bowl of a pipe identified as his, resting in a monkey’s skull among his belongings in a cubicle in the bowels of Garth and Campbell’s on the level two floors below was still warm, but Savage had vanished in what was evidently a hurry shortly before the arrival of the police. McKee picked up the nearest phone and called headquarters.

  CHAPTER 2

  IN THE SNOW that swirled through the crowds in Manhattan’s cross streets the little man named Todhunter had difficulty keeping the girl in sight, the girl with the slim dark face he had followed away from Garth and Campbell’s. Once free of the press in front of the department store she moved fast and with purpose.

  The small green hat she wore was a help. He scuttled after it up Fifth to Forty-ninth, across Forty-ninth to Sixth and up Sixth to Fiftieth. Brilliant light poured down on her as she passed under the canopy at Roxy’s theater. From there she went straight west to the uptown station of the Broadway subway.

  Todhunter decreased the distance between them from sixty to twenty feet as she went down the steps. A local was just pulling to a stop. The girl boarded a car at the northern end. Todhunter slipped through the middle doors. The train was jammed so he edged up slightly in the car until he had a clear view of the green hat.

  At Seventy-second, it moved to the express platform. A Bronx Park train rolled in, rolled out again. The girl remained where she was. The platform seethed with homego-ing throngs. Another local and then the Broadway express: it was the one she wanted.

  In the Broadway express the mousy little man stood not ten feet away from his quarry. It was a long ride. As the occupants of the car thinned Todhunter sidled farther off. The train came out into the open, dived again and finally emerged at Dyckman. Snow flecked the windows, began to freeze in solid sheets across the panes.

  The girl had found a seat. Todhunter got a good look at her from the dimness of the platform where he had taken cover. She was in her early twenties and without being beautiful she gave an impression of vividness and flashing life, an impression that was intensified by the cocked green hat sitting proudly on her black curls and by the military cut of her broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted coat with the swing skirts which gave her the appearance of a slim young officer, a young officer on a mission. Her long luminous eyes fringed with lines of thick black lash were fastened intently on nothingness. Pain, fear and desperate determination were still in them, as they had been when she stood in front of Garth and Campbell’s staring at the dead man.

  At the Van Cortlandt Park station a bitter wind out of the northeast pinched the nostrils. Passengers hurried down the steps to busses and waiting trolleys. She put her back to the crowds and turned the corner into Riverdale Avenue. Taxis were drawn up in a row in front of a group of lighted shops. She got into the nearest one and it started to move away, red taillight gleaming through the slanting snow.

  On the corner Todhunter scribbled rapidly on a small pad. He tore the sheet off. Close by a man in charge of a newsstand was putting down a fresh pile of late editions.

  “Hey, mister,” Todhunter said.

  “Yeah?” The man turned.

  “Call this number, will you?” Todhunter asked. “And tell the inspector just this. Garth and Campbell’s. Girl in it. Covering.”

  “Who the hell are you?” the newsman demanded, surveying the modest little man with open disfavor.

  Todhunter flashed his detective shield. “That good enough?”

  As the newsman nodded quick compliance with sudden respect Todhunter repeated the message, added, “Get it in as fast as you can,” and jumped into the waiting cab he had already signaled.

  “Don’t spare the horses,” he directed the driver as he slammed the door. “Get on the tail of that car ahead. But don’t show.”

  Again the curious stare, again the flashing of the shield: Todhunter’s driver pushed the accelerator down hard and the cab sped up the hill in pursuit of the red tail lamp rounding a distant curve. Intent on the chase, Todhunter didn’t notice the third cab creeping along in the rear.

  The snow-covered road wound steeply upward under tall trees arching overhead, their branches tossing wildly in the wind. They were traveling through a prosperous suburban section. Sleek houses sitting fatly in nests of shrubbery, lighted windows, a glimpse of a maid’s cap, long shining cars standing before porticoed doorways. The bulk of Manhattan College loomed; they passed it. Once more Todhunter had a chance to see the cab idling unhurriedly in the background, once more he missed it.

  Above and far away on the left the main thread of the Hendrik Hudson Parkway was a hem of radiance on the obscurity; the cab ahead didn’t turn left, it turned right into a narrow winding dirt road with a bumpy and uneven surface. Blackness came down like a curtain. They were in a lonelier section now. There were no lights, no houses. There was no guide but the tiny red will-o’-the-wisp in front, appearing and disappearing through the dazzle of the storm. After three or four minutes of this it began to slow, loomed larger.

  Todhunter’s driver looked over his shoulder. “Hold it,” Todhunter said, “and put out your lights.” The cab ahead had come to a stop and the girl was getting out. She paid off her driver and walked away. The little detective did likewise. When he reached the spot at which the girl had vanished into the murk he saw that she had gone through a pair of battered stone gateposts into the grounds of a small estate.

  Craning around one of them, he caught a glimpse of her. Her slim dark figure was just barely visible against planes of whiteness. She was climbing a hill toward a dark bulk sprawled vaguely on its crest, the outlines obscured and broken by tall clustering pines that were very old.

  The prosperous Fieldston to the south, the parkway off to the west, Todhunter recognized the district for what it was, a lonely oasis, an isolated pocket in the fringes of the city that had somehow or other escaped being improved and cut up into building lots.

  The house lay a good two hundred feet from the entrance gates. It was big and black and towering. There wasn’t a gleam of light anywhere but the girl appeared to have no hesitation. She mounted three steps. Blackness swallowed her up. A door opened and closed. Todhunter advanced cautiously, studying the layout. The wind cried piercingly, snow blasting across the roof fell into the soughing pines and down in a shower over the little detective.

  He blinked cold wetness out of his eyelashes. Two broad rectangles of mellow light had flashed out on what was evidently the dim facade of the house, either side of the front door. Someone inside had switched on the lamps. The shades were drawn. The interior was invisible.

  As Todhunter stood there, ankle-deep in snow, a voice reached his ears. It was the beginning of a scream. It never got any place. There was terror in it and the recognition of dreadful danger. It ceased, was cut off sharply in mid-air as definitely as though someone had turned off a tap. At the same moment, or perhaps a fraction of a second before it, the lights inside the house flashed off. Todhunter dashed forward.

  The knob of the front door refused to give under his fingers. The door was locked. He tried the windows right and left, they were firm in their frames. The little detective drew his gun, gripped it by the barrel, smashed an upper pane, slid his hand through the star-shaped opening and slipped the catch. The sash gave. He threw the window high and clambered over the sill.

  He switched on hi
s torch. He was on his feet in a small terra-cotta hall. A staircase ascended steeply in front of him. He climbed the stairs into an upper hall that ran the depth of the house to the foot of the staircase to the second floor.

  He thought he heard movement somewhere. He listened. It didn’t come again. There were doors right, left and in front. The doors in front were curtained with some soft white material. The door on the right was open a couple of feet. Using it as a shield, he put his head and torchlight around it.

  The long funnel-shaped beam cutting the darkness traveled over a table between two windows, an opposite door on the far side of the room, the edge of a buffet—and the girl. She was lying on the floor in a crumpled huddle, one cheek pressed against the carpet. Her eyes were closed, her arms outflung. Her hat had fallen off. Blood mixed itself with the dark curls, trickled across her forehead. She was breathing.

  Outside the wind blew a stentorian blast. The windows rattled. A blast of snow hit the panes. The icy rattle was like machine-gun fire on a smaller scale. Todhunter pushed the door wide. He crossed the rug to the prostrate girl, stooped over her, put forth an exploring hand—and that was all for the little detective.

  He neither saw nor heard what was coming on him from behind. The blow descended with stunning force. It caught him on the back of the head near the nape of the neck. Todhunter buckled.

  The big official Cadillac with its load of detectives pulled to a stop in front of the entrance gates to the small estate north of Fieldston. The man who had driven Todhunter there a short time earlier was on the back seat with McKee. He said: “Yes, Inspector, that’s the place.”