Skeleton Key

by Lenore Glen Offord

  “What makes you think he did?” Nelsing asked.

  “I said something about it,” Georgine began, “and he looked terribly angry. Of course I don’t mean to accuse—”

  “Accuse?” The Professor was out of his chair again, thrusting a shaking hand toward her. “You accuse anyone? You’ve played your part well, I’ll grant you, from the first minute; pretending ignorance of science, coming here by chance—by chance! ha!—to take this job. I see it now. You were in league with Hollister.”

  Georgine’s voice came out in an outraged squeak. “I was? Are you crazy? I never spoke three sentences to him in my life!”

  “Sure you didn’t know him, Mrs. Wyeth?” Nelsing asked.

  “Of course I’m sure. He asked me what the Professor was working on, and I told him I didn’t know.”

  Nelsing’s head turned, and the cold blue eyes rested full on her. She had never seen him look so remote and formidable.

  “What did you talk about,” Nelsing inquired, “when he called on you at your home?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Spade Work at Sundown

  HER FIRST COHERENT thought was, He expected me to be good and flustered by that remark. Well, I won’t be.

  “What makes you think he was there?” she said evenly.

  “I went to talk to your landlords this afternoon. It was a routine check-up; I scarcely expected to hear anything interesting, but that’s where we get our information—in the course of routine. The landlords looked at photographs, and picked out one of them. It was Hollister’s. They identified him as the man who’d gone up the walk to your cottage, one evening last week while it was still light.”

  “What night?”

  “Thursday, they thought.”

  “Did they happen to say I wasn’t home?”

  “They weren’t sure but they mentioned the fact that he didn’t come out again before they went to the movies, so they took it for granted you were there.”

  “I was up here Thursday, working. You know that, Professor Paev.”

  “Do I?” said the Professor, smiling. “I was in the laboratory, and you let yourself out.”

  Georgine realized she’d had that coming. “Inspector Nelsing,” she said, “it was last Thursday when my house was searched. I found out about it when I went home, late. Harry Gillespie drove me to the door, so I can prove I didn’t meet Hollister.”

  “Your house was searched,” said Nelsing, meditating. “It’s the first I’ve heard of that.”

  “It happened before the murder, so I didn’t think to tell you about it. The desk sergeant convinced me it didn’t mean anything, because nothing was taken. He’s probably got the report filed under ‘Hysterical Women.’”

  Professor Paev walked across to her, exactly as he’d done on the first day she saw him, and bent threateningly over her chair. “That won’t do,” he said harshly. “It’s a thin story you trumped up, when you knew you were caught. You were spies together, and you were the one to work from the inside. How many copies of my notes did you make? I should have had you searched every night. The whole thing is plain. He told you, foolishly, trusting to your look of innocence, that my secret was valuable. And you planned to have it all to yourself, you led him on until the last minute, and then—”

  “You old coot,” said Georgine furiously, “take your face out of mine. Get back, there. You—you dare to think up a ridiculous story like that about me, and say it out loud! Trying to turn attention away from yourself, that’s what you’re doing. You’re afraid to have anyone get into that lab of yours, or look in the file cabinet. You’d be even more afraid to have the police look into that grave under your bathroom window!”

  “That what?” Nelsing said incredulously. And then, seeing the look on the old man’s face, he got slowly to his feet and moved forward with an ominous quietness.

  Georgine turned to him. “He’s got something buried there. Ask him what happened to the secretary he tried for one day, two weeks ago! He didn’t keep her because she couldn’t spell his name—he said. Did anyone ever see her again?”

  She looked round defiantly. Alexis Paev was smiling again, with that odd lifting of the lips that had so little mirth in it. “I did not, I’ll admit,” he said, “after she had gone away by the canyon path. Doubtless her friends have seen her. Inspector, has the Acme Typing Agency reported the disappearance of any of its employees?”

  “I’m bound to say it hasn’t,” Nelsing said. He looked at the old man with peculiar directness. “Is there a grave under one of your windows, Professor?”

  “A flower-bed,” said Professor Paev.

  “Surrounded by shrubs?” Georgine inquired, breathing fast. “And placed so it can’t be seen except from one room—his own?”

  “If it’s only a flower-bed,” said Nelsing, “surely you won’t object, sir, if we investigate it.”

  The Professor’s eyelids lowered, very deliberately. He said in a curious flat voice, not quite steady, “You—you have no right. The woman is hysterical. I can’t allow—”

  His voice trailed off into nothing, and his head trembled.

  “Slater,” the Inspector said, “will you see if there’s a spade on the premises?”

  The sun had gone down, but enough afterglow lingered, reflected from the high fog above the Golden Gate, to cast a leaden light over the back gardens of Grettry Road. The high flowering shrubs quivered in the sunset wind, tapping and scraping against the rough stucco of the house.

  It was chilly, but Georgine was still hot with wrath. She led the way around the house, standing back only where the bushes grew so thick that the men had to force their way through. “That’s what I saw,” she said grimly, pointing out the open space beside the blank wall. “Nobody was supposed to know about it. After the first time, Mrs. Blake told me that the Professor had a fit if anyone used his bathroom.”

  The Professor had joined the group, but stood apart from it. His black eyes were fixed, with a queer expression, on the shovel-blades that were scraping aside the covering of leaves, biting into the loose soil underneath, turning, lifting, turning. His long head moved, bobbing, a little at each thrust of the spades.

  “This is preposterous,” he said once, roughly.

  Nelsing himself was taking a hand at digging. It seemed to require no effort, his speech was not even jerky, though punctuated with violent exercise. “Why didn’t you mention this before, Mrs. Wyeth?” he inquired over his shoulder, tossing aside a shovelful of earth.

  “It was here when I came, so I didn’t think of that, either, in connection with Hollister’s death. And I was working for the Professor—then.”

  “You’re not now?” Nelsing stepped down into the rapidly growing hole.

  “Indeed I am not. I’ll get that money back somehow, I hate to ask the doctor to lend it to me again, but I’ll do it. I’ll pay back every cent of it, and never come near this place again.”

  Professor Paev said nothing. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his shapeless coat, and his hot black eyes followed the spades; lift, toss, thrust, lift, toss. Georgine also watched the excavation, with a growing feeling of hotness at the back of her neck. What if they found nothing, wouldn’t she look a fool? It wasn’t possible that the whole thing was a gigantic leg-pull? The old man wasn’t without humor of a malicious type. But he’d certainly put on a good act, if so; she’d have sworn that he was startled, reluctant to let the men dig…

  Nelsing said, over his shoulder, “Did he ever try to do anything to you?”

  “No. You think I’d have stayed if he had? I hardly ever saw him. That was what fooled me into thinking the job was all right.”

  Slater gave a muffled grunt, like a plucked string on the bass fiddle. “Spade hit something, Inspector,” his asleep-in-the-deep voice came out of the twilight.

  Nelsing had heard the little clink; he straightened up, balancing on the loose earth. Georgine leaned over the edge of the pit. Her heart thudded rapidly.

  The yo
ung assistant bent down and found something long and thin, and knocked the soil from it. He rose with it, holding up his arm so that the fading light struck a gleam of dull white from the object.

  In the background, Professor Paev did not move, but he gave out something between a sigh and a groan.

  Howard Nelsing spoke, his voice shaken out of its usual calm into something like stupefaction.

  “So help me,” he said, “it’s a thigh bone.”

  Shocks always went to Georgine’s knees. She found herself sitting down weakly on the edge of the excavation, gazing with horror at Professor Paev. The darkness was drawing in fast, so that his bent-over bald head seemed to shine with its own faint luminosity. He did not move.

  He looks caught in a trap, she thought. Of course it wouldn’t be any use running, trying to escape… I brought him to this, I gave him away.

  She wished she did not feel so obscurely sorry for him.

  An electric torch shed its glaring circle on the earth, and the bony cage of ribs that projected from it. “Looks big,’ Slater murmured deeply, as if to himself. His shovel stirred the earth again. “Here’s another substance, Inspector; body wrapped in leather, d’you suppose?”

  “Here,” said Nelsing in a queer voice, “find the skull, will you?” The spades clanged fast, dragging away the loose soil. He grabbed at the rounded thing that was half uncovered, and lifted it…

  Then he turned, with great deliberation, and climbed out of the hole, dangling the skull from his hand like a careless Hamlet. “I believe, Professor Paev,” he said with awful courtesy, “that we have just dug up the skeleton of a calf and some portions of its skin.”

  “I believe,” said Alexis Paev, “that you have.”

  “And what—what in the hell, Professor,” said Nelsing, still politely, “were you doing with a calf? And why were you so reluctant to have us see it?”

  The old man gave a long sigh, and turned away his head before he answered. “I had every right to it,” he said dully. “It may have been on University property, but it—it was dead when I found it.”

  “Indeed?” said Nelsing. “I suppose you knew that the University doesn’t care to have its livestock stolen. What was this, a sort of revenge because a cow got loose and trampled your garden?”

  “No,” said the Professor. A little of the old fire returned to his tone. “Anything I can get from the University is no more than due. They refused me—”

  “Yes, I know,” Nelsing cut in. “They wouldn’t take all the endowment away from their other departments and give it to you for research.” He sounded gentle, almost plaintive. “But why in the back yard, Professor? Just so you could gloat?”

  “Let us go into the house,” said Professor Paev, abruptly turning to lead the way. Mr. Slater lingered to pick up the shovels, and to help Georgine to her feet. He seemed to be suppressing some powerful emotion. She felt that her face might burst into flames at any minute.

  “It is not so humorous as you think,” the old man said absently, in the living-room. He turned to face the other three under the hard glare of the ceiling light. “I can make a general statement about my work, if”—he avoided Georgine’s eyes—“you will promise to keep it a secret.”

  Georgine murmured something, and retreated to a corner.

  “I needed animal protein as a soil amendment,” said Alexis Paev. “It was necessary, to build some new strains of fungi. And gophers were not enough, nor a dog that had been put out of the way at the pound. I—I had to have that large fresh supply.”

  Inspector Nelsing looked at him sharply. “Professor. Your research isn’t, by any chance, on gramicidin?”

  The bald head nodded. “In that field, but I am preparing a germicide that will be equally effective on Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.”

  “Well, for the good Lord’s sake,” said Nelsing mildly. “You might have got a hint of that from the notes, Mrs. Wyeth.”

  “I still don’t know what it is,” Georgine snapped.

  “Yes, you do. It’s been in the papers, and magazine articles.”

  “I don’t take a paper. I read headlines off the newsstands. And that manuscript was nothing to me but a pack of scientific words.”

  The Professor began to talk, wearily, still not looking at her. A powerful antiseptic, one that would heal wounds in record time, made from the fungi that grew in earth around decayed animal matter… No cost, or almost none…healing of open wounds…others had been working on similar research for years, but they hadn’t yet discovered how to make the germicide reactive on all types of bacteria… He had worked on it for five years, independently, and by certain additions and changes had evolved a new technique; that of anesthetizing the wound as well as destroying the germs…

  “In a way,” said Professor Paev, his black eyes turned toward the carpet, “it might be called a Death Ray, on infection and pain. It will be almost as sure. The University might have shared in the credit of my discovery, but it chose otherwise. It was then that I determined no one else should know.”

  “I should think, Professor,” said Nelsing thoughtfully, “that it would be of incalculable value.”

  “It is. The treatment of war wounds can be speeded by sixty percent.”

  “The sort of thing a Foreign Power would try to steal, do you think?”

  “Nonsense,” said the Professor.

  “I’m inclined to agree. A new gas, a bomb-sight, an explosive, yes; but not an antiseptic, unless they could get it with very little trouble. They’d scarcely have bothered to send a spy into your neighborhood and have him live there for six months, biding his time.”

  “Certainly not.”

  Georgine broke in. “You’re not talking about Hollister?”

  “Yes, I am. Now I think we may have a better picture,” said Nelsing smoothly. Without a change of voice he let off his dynamite. “Professor, you’ve heard of the Fenella Corporation. In fact, you worked for them as research chemist, the first year you came back from Vienna.”

  Professor Paev seemed to have gone very still.

  “A third-rate firm of chemists, and not too ethical. I imagine you found that out, and that’s why you left them so suddenly. Would you have considered letting them handle your discovery, Professor?”

  “Inspector Nelsing!” The black eyes darted light. “I have told you that I’d rather die than let my discoveries be commercialized. My antiseptic, sir, is to be a gift to humanity!”

  “How would you feel toward someone who was planning to steal or copy your notes, so that Fenella Corporation could announce that one of its own research chemists, working independently, had arrived at the same conclusion as you? That happens all the time in science, doesn’t it? You could scarcely prove that someone else hadn’t had the same inspiration. Fenella Corporation could make a great deal of money from the sale of such an antiseptic as you describe. It would be well worth one man’s salary and maintenance, over a period of months, living near you, trying to find out what you were doing, trying to get into the laboratory.”

  “Hollister,” said the Professor thoughtfully, “posing as a warden.”

  “Not posing; being one. Who’d have a better excuse for investigating, knowing how your household was arranged, possibly getting in during your absence with the excuse that he’d thought a light was burning, or that he’d seen a prowler and was protecting your property?”

  “You’re sure that he was employed by Fenella?” The Professor wet his lips.

  “A letter from them was in his mail, Monday morning,” Nelsing said. “He must have destroyed all the other correspondence. There was nothing in his desk, in the house.”

  “I see,” said Alexis Paev, still looking at the carpet. His long hands lay relaxed along the arms of the chair, but he gave a queer impression of holding himself wanly still.

  “You’re not surprised, Professor. You suspected him?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t arrange your trip to the City last Friday
with the express intention of fixing an alibi?”

  The Professor twitched impatiently. “Alibi?” he barked. “When I told you frankly that I never reached the Wadsworth home?”

  “We could have checked up on that, easily. You’re too shrewd not to realize that, Professor. Much better to make it seem you were the victim of a false summons.”

  Professor Paev lifted his eyes, and again that incongruous smile appeared on his face. He was in full command of himself now, almost as if he had led his questioners by devious routes to the point where he could, with one blow, demolish their case. “You forget,” he said suavely, “that in order to arrange this alibi, presumably for the murder of Roy Hollister, or whatever his name was, I had to invent a telephone call to myself at four o’clock in the afternoon; and this fanciful deception must be coincident upon the calling of an alert that very night. I had to know, six hours beforehand, that there would be a blackout—which nobody knew, including the police, the warden service of which Hollister himself was a part, and the Western Defense Command!”

  He leaned easily back in his chair, and folded his bony hands. “A stalemate, I think, Inspector.”

  “Is it?” said Nelsing pleasantly. “At all events, you admit you were in this section of the city when the blackout started.”

  “In this general section, near the campus.”

  “If you had taken the train twenty minutes earlier, you might have been in the canyon, where no warden could see you, by the time the sirens were sounded.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “And if you’d come home forty minutes earlier, you could have been in Grettry Road during the whole affair. Perhaps we could check on that with the train and streetcar employees.”

  “It is good of you, Inspector,” said Alexis Paev formally, getting to his feet, “to keep this in the realm of hypothesis. In return, I will give you a bit of information that might interest you. As I approached the other side of the canyon, on my way home after the All Clear, I saw one of my neighbors turning the corner onto Buena Vista, in a car. He was leaving Grettry Road in a hurry. You might also check with the timekeepers at the Richmond shipyards!”