Skeleton Key

by Lenore Glen Offord

  “You’re thinking of Hollister as a detective? But he was supposed to have retired.”

  “That’s something else,” McKinnon said. “Maybe he had, but nobody believed it. Maybe Frey told that story before Hollister’s death, and someone heard about it and got nervous. Devlin might have jumped to conclusions, and begun fighting with his guilty conscience, and compromised by getting rid of the only threat to his way of life—at least, that’s how he’d see Hollister.

  “Or,” he went on, “what if Sheila Devlin had got wind of some of the double-life story through Hollister?”

  “She wouldn’t believe it, true or not. You have to say for her that she’s loyal.”

  “Is she?” said McKinnon thoughtfully. “I’d say she was loyal to just one thing—her illusions. And you heard Claris say what she does to anyone who tries to shatter them!”

  “Both the children have perfect alibis,” Georgine said.

  “Have they? You know, Ricky’s at a very touchy point of his development. Hollister’s made one or two nasty cracks at him, not only about his youth, but about what he does of nights. I can imagine him—”

  “Well, don’t,” Georgine said. “I went to a lot of trouble to get Ricky out of a mess.”

  “So you did,” he agreed equably. “Just what you might have done if you’d killed Hollister yourself and saw some kid being falsely accused.”

  “Don’t start that again, joke or no joke.”

  “Very well. Take Frey. Hollister might have had some hold over him, maybe they worked some shenanigan over the divorce all those years ago. He lured Hollister out here, and lay in wait for six or eight months—”

  “Good heavens,” said Georgine, “if you put that in a story, could you get anyone to believe it?”

  “If I worked hard at it,” he said chuckling, “and ignored physical impossibilities. Here’s the taxi.”

  They were halfway to her home before either of them spoke again. Then McKinnon, gazing at her through the darkness of the cab’s interior, inquired abruptly, “Mrs. Wyeth, would you mind telling me what you’re thinking of, with that soulful look on your profile?”

  “About going to testify at the inquest tomorrow.”

  “Ah, yes. Does it worry you, or do you like thinking of yourself as the handmaiden of justice?”

  “Neither. But I was thinking,” said Georgine, “that I can’t possibly go in cotton stockings.”

  Astonishingly, Todd McKinnon burst into subdued laughter that sounded almost affectionate.

  The inquest was long and dull, and filled with words like “rupture of the mesentery” and “luxation of vertebrae.” Georgine looked round carefully, and, seeing no sign of Mr. McKinnon, determined that nothing exciting was likely to happen, or he would not have missed it. She was able to relax, to answer the few questions that were put to her with fair brevity and presence of mind, and nearly to go to sleep afterward—to be roused by the verdict.

  Deceased came to his death as a result of being struck and run over by an automobile. No mention of blame, no mention of a possible driver. So that was all.

  She had just finished her solitary supper at home when Inspector Nelsing telephoned.

  “Mrs. Wyeth? I’m sorry to disturb your evening, but it would be a great help to me if you could come up to Grettry Road.”

  “Tonight?” Georgine said doubtfully. “And alone?”

  “I’ll—” he cleared his throat and seemed to hesitate. “I’ll see that you get there. Someone will come for you. I’d like you to be present at an interview, and there are a few questions that must be asked on the ground.”

  He couldn’t have sounded more impersonal, like the voice of Justice itself. She balanced the telephone in her hand, gazing absently out her front window. It showed her the long path that had been a driveway, and the artistic gate under the landlords’ balcony. “That’s quite all right, Inspector Nelsing. I’ll do anything I can to help.”

  Framed in the aperture of the gate, like a picture within a picture, appeared the passing forms of Georgine’s landlords, moving in a stately manner along the sidewalk outside. Their heads and shoulders seemed to swim along the top of the wall, and then to vanish. She thought, What night is this?—Of course, Wednesday; Bank Night at the neighborhood theatre. That meant they’d be gone until midnight.

  Well, it was only seven now, and the light usually lasted until nine or after. You could hardly ask for more stalwart protectors than the police. Nevertheless, she put down the telephone slowly, almost reluctantly.

  Nelsing himself drove up only a few minutes after she had gone out to the curb to wait for him. He wasn’t in a conversational mood.

  He took his car down into Grettry Road and parked it against the fence at the end. Another young man in plain clothes was awaiting him; they conferred in low voices for a moment. Then he helped Georgine out of the car, and, still uncommunicative, led her up the road to the spot where Hollister’s body had lain. Nobody was about, but Georgine had an uneasy sense of faces at windows.

  “While it’s light, Mrs. Wyeth,” he said, “I’d like to try an experiment. We may be some time at the Professor’s.”

  Georgine stood still in the road. “Some time? I hoped we’d not be too late, my landlords have gone out and I’m afr—I don’t like going into my house alone after dark.”

  “We’ll arrange an escort,” said Nelsing stiffly. “Now, where were you standing when you heard the sound you thought was footsteps?”

  “On the Professor’s front porch.”

  “Go back there, please, and listen. Slater”—this must be the other plain-clothes man—“will you walk as lightly as you can up the pavement, from that point, until Mrs. Wyeth tells you to stop?”

  With a queer tightening of her midriff, Georgine thought, Reproducing the crime. What on earth does he expect to prove? She gazed straight before her, at the curve of cliff rough and gray in the dull evening light, and her nostrils widened to the aromatic scent from the canyon. Pretend it was pitch dark, pretend that once more the night pressed on her like a muffling curtain, and that the wind was damp and stinging on her face…

  “Those sound like the footsteps, Mrs. Wyeth?”

  “Not quite. Mr. Slater’s are heavier than the sound I heard.”

  “Come back,” Nelsing said to the silent young man, “and try it again, more quietly.”

  “That’s more like it,” Georgine called across to Nelsing.

  “How far did the steps go?”

  “Try it again, please.” She closed her eves. Those sounds, up to the moment when she stepped out into the street, seemed burned into her mind. “Stop.”

  As if in a game of Ten-Steps, the silent young man froze in his tracks. Georgine looked up the road. Hollister’s path had led him diagonally across the street, from the Carmichaels’ toward Professor Paev’s. He had been struck down midway in that diagonal, and Slater, moving away from the imaginary mark of X, had come opposite Hollister’s own house.

  She walked up toward the two men. “That’s about right; but I called out, you know, and I didn’t hear a sound after that. If there was someone walking away, he didn’t move after he heard my voice.”

  Nelsing’s eyes went to the grass and fallen leaves on the verge of the road. “He may have been making for the edge, where he wouldn’t be heard,” he pointed out. “He could even have taken off his shoes where he stood, and gone clear to the top of the road in his stocking feet. Damn it, if only there were servants, we could ask ’em about the washing.”

  “Could—the person have gone into Hollister’s house? Did you find any signs of a burglar, or anything—or shouldn’t I ask that?”

  “No secret,” said Nelsing. “We found nothing but fingerprints, all over the place; I guess Hollister didn’t do much polishing of woodwork. Some of the prints might have been months old. But, the trouble was, everyone in the road was represented.”

  “Oh. How’d you get their prints to compare?”

  “Various w
ays.” He gave her a level look. “You left a beautiful set on the telephone in the hall. Other people had theirs on file already, in the civilian records. The point is, it doesn’t help us. He’d had everyone in the place in there at those meetings. And his valuables didn’t seem to have been touched, so it probably wasn’t a burglar.”

  She remembered something else, and frowned. “When I went in to telephone, Hollister’s door was closed but not locked. If the—the person had gone in that way, wouldn’t I have heard the door open and close again?—Or no, maybe not, because by the time I’d felt that—the body by my foot, I wasn’t in any state to hear small things.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t hear the door open?”

  “Sure. And yet—you know, it seems to me that there was some other noise. I couldn’t tell you what. It didn’t seem—important, so maybe it wasn’t unnatural; might simply have been the wind, or something like that.” She put a palm to her forehead, pressing hard. “It can’t mean much, but I wish I could think of it.”

  “Maybe it’ll come to you,” said Nelsing hopefully. “And tell me one more thing. Two persons came down, through the dark, to help you when you called. Did the footsteps of either one sound like the ones that stopped when you called out?”

  She closed her eyes again. “I can’t think,” she said presently. “How could one tell, if the first ones had been on tiptoe? I couldn’t be sure. I could never—”

  She stopped, and her eyes went past Nelsing, up the road to the curve of the eucalyptus lot. Someone was standing there—surely too far away to have heard this low-voiced colloquy? As she watched, the figure moved away from behind a tree. It was John Devlin. Without another look he went toward his own house. A moment later the sound of a car’s engine, starting in a garage, came down the hill.

  Georgine looked at Nelsing. He stood with the level light full in his face, casting his shadow on the thick greenery of the Carmichaels’ garden hedge. She thought, I suppose I’ll always remember him this way, those eyes under the soft gray hat looking out at me with no more expression than a judge’s eyes… He can’t think I’m lying? Suppose I were guilty, how easy it would have been to lie about the footsteps, the dying words, everything.

  “Let’s go in and talk to Professor Paev,” said Nelsing abruptly, “You too, Slater, if you please.”

  The young man said, “I’m right with you, Inspector,” in a rumbling basso that surprised Georgine into a foolish impulse to giggle. She had almost expected him to go on, “So be-ware; so beee-ware.”

  The door of Professor Paev’s house opened, and in the gloom of the blacked-out hallway stood the Professor.

  “You are late, gentlemen,” he said testily. “Was your conversation in the street so important?”

  Nelsing said, “May we all sit down, Professor?” He waited in the hall until Alexis Paev, his high naked head moving like a dull moon in the twilight, had grudgingly flung open the door to the living-room.

  “You want light, I presume?” the old man said harshly, and pushed a button. The overhead globe sprang into brilliance, its inverted shade reflecting coldly white against the ceiling; and all the colorless, expensive discomfort of the room was illuminated. Georgine sat down in the corner of a carved settee, and at once regretted her choice.

  “It was good of you to receive us, Professor,’ said Nelsing formally. “There are a few points to be followed up in connection with the death of your neighbor last Friday.”

  “I know nothing about it. I told you on Saturday afternoon that I could contribute nothing.”

  “We understand that at the time of the accident you were in San Francisco, and didn’t reach home until after the blackout.”

  “That is quite correct.”

  “You weren’t caught on the train? Which one did you catch from the Terminal?”

  “The, uh, nine thirty-four.”

  “That got you to Berkeley station about five minutes before the siren sounded. Did you take a cab home?”

  “Young man,” said Professor Paev with deliberation, “if it is any business of yours, I did not. The Euclid Avenue streetcar connected with the train, for once, and I rode past the campus on that. I debarked when the blackout began, hoping I’d be allowed to walk the rest of the way home. I am accustomed to the dark, and I carry a pocket torch. Do you think those officious sons of—I beg your pardon Mrs. Wyeth, those officious gentlemen in the white tin hats would let me proceed? They insisted that I must seek shelter. I sat on a stranger’s porch, which was as near cover as I wished to get, for an interminable time.”

  “Thank you,” said Nelsing. “That’s very clear. And you walked home across the canyon after the all-clear sounded.”

  “I did.”

  “Now, Mrs. Wyeth; how long have you been acting as Professor Paev’s secretary?”

  “About ten days. I hoped to be through with the work before this, but what with murders, and having to stop work to go to inquests, I don’t know when I can finish.”

  This was a sore subject with Georgine, and she saw no harm in letting Nelsing know it.

  “What were your qualifications? Or rather, of what does your work consist?”

  Georgine looked doubtfully at her employer. He had one long thin hand clasped about his chin, and over it his black eyes regarded her unwinkingly.

  “I’m copying a—a sort of manuscript. It seems to have been worked up from notes about some sort of scientific process.”

  “What is the process?”

  “Not you too, Inspector Nelsing! Everyone’s asked me that, and I can’t answer it. I don’t know the first thing about science, only how to copy words.”

  “The Professor hired you in spite of this ignorance?”

  “Because of it,” Georgine said, and saw his eyes narrow.

  “Why was that?” Nelsing asked the old man.

  “Obvious, don’t you think?” Professor Paev seemed almost to be enjoying himself.

  “That’s very interesting,” said Nelsing. “Perhaps you felt it might be dangerous for your secretary to know too much?”

  “Dangerous?” The black eyes snapped. “God help me, Inspector, you hadn’t heard that story about the Death Ray?”

  “I heard that,” said Nelsing calmly, “but I also heard a much more arresting story. One of your neighbors, Professor, suggested that we find out what you were concocting in your laboratory that would be important enough to cause a man’s death.”

  For a moment nobody said anything. Slater, in the background, bent his head over a notebook. Georgine found herself pressed back against the hard stuffing of the settee. From the ceiling, white light poured down on the glistening bald head, the smooth dark one.

  Then Alexis Paev began slowly to lean forward, his eyes on Nelsing’s face. “Hollister?” he said in a low voice. “You have found—some connection between Hollister and my laboratory?”

  Nelsing smiled, with his lips alone, and the Professor sat back abruptly. “We don’t often guess, Professor Paev,” he said, “but we guessed at this. There was no other household in Grettry Road that was as tightly locked as yours. That laboratory is probably the only place to which Hollister, as a warden, wouldn’t have had natural access. Did you ever show him through it?”

  “Never,” Alex Paev barked. “Though not for lack of asking.”

  “And you heard about the keys Hollister was carrying—an unusually heavy collection for a man to have with him.”

  “I heard nothing about them. I do not join in the gossip of this community.”

  “He had skeleton keys on his ring, Professor.”

  Before anyone could say anything to soothe him, the Professor was up out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. He was raising his fists toward heaven and yelling, “Spies! I knew it! I am surrounded by spies! And this man, this Hollister, I trusted because he was recommended by the city. Everyone, the city officials, the University—spying on—”

  “Easy, Professor,” said Nelsing, his calm voice cutting into the old m
an’s incoherent shouts. “The CD office isn’t responsible for the private lives of wardens. The officials try to be careful, but they’re not infallible. They’ve made some mistakes in appointments. But suppose they hadn’t, in this case? Suppose Hollister had been an official investigator?” He leaned back comfortably, his forefinger gently tapping the chair-arm. “Some of the neighborhood gossip is reasonably well founded. I’ve heard it suggested that your research is secret, because when you’ve finished work you mean to sell the result to the highest bidder—whether he comes from the United Nations or the Axis! If it were a new and deadly gas, for example…”

  “Ga-ah,” said Professor Paev contemptuously. He had lowered himself slowly into his chair, and was watching Nelsing with unwinking eyes. “Gas, indeed! And as for selling, sir, I would die before I’d allow my discovery to be commercialized.”

  “What is it, Professor Paev? Can’t you see this must be cleared up before we can go on?”

  The Professor clamped his mouth shut.

  “What is it, Mrs. Wyeth?”

  Georgine jumped. “I don’t know, I tell you.”

  “The Professor keeps it a dead secret, I can see. I wonder how he would feel if he thought someone was trying to find out what he was keeping so private. You suspected Hollister of that, didn’t you, Professor?”

  “I suspect everyone.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t take an earlier train from the City? Your whole trip over there was on false pretenses. You never saw Mr. Wadsworth. Perhaps you never intended to see him. Who answered the telephone? Who took the call that purported to be from the Regent?”

  “I did,” said the Professor in a sulphurous voice.

  “Was there ever such a call? Did you go to San Francisco at all?”

  “God help me,” said the Professor with a mighty effort at control. “Did I go—did I go! She knows!” He swiveled round and pointed at Georgine.

  “Mrs. Wyeth?”

  “I—I saw him start off in a taxi, but of course I don’t know about the rest. And he told me there’d been a telephone call, he was elated about the news. But—Professor Paev, didn’t you come back early?”