Skeleton Key

by Lenore Glen Offord

  “Why, thank you very much, Professor,” said Howard Nelsing, also rising. His courteous smile did not illumine his eyes. “I think that will be all for tonight.”

  He turned to Slater. “You brought your car? You live up on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, isn’t that right? Then it’d be out of your way to drive Mrs. Wyeth home.” His eyes touched her. “May I offer you a lift?”

  “You may, thanks,” she said, walking past the Professor with her head turned away and her chin firmly set. She got into the car, still smoldering. When Nelsing was beside her, “That old so-and-so!” she said wrathfully. “When I think of all the dirt I’ve taken for a hundred dollars!”

  “Why did you do it?” he inquired.

  “I needed the hundred dollars,” said Georgine shortly.

  “You got some of your own back tonight, anyway.”

  “Yes, as a part of your campaign to make people tattle on each other. If I’d known I was to be high-pressured, I’d never have come up here.”

  “See here, Mrs. Wyeth,” said Nelsing quietly, “there’s something you ought to understand. The police don’t solve cases by inspiration. Ninety percent of the time we have to depend on information received.”

  “Stool pigeons, you mean.” Her tone lashed at him.

  He was unperturbed. “In the criminal classes, yes. In these rare cases in the upper middle class, hardly anybody wants to tell tales on his neighbors; and in this situation, where the murdered man was unpopular, nobody’s willing to give us so much as a hint, unless we put on a bit of pressure.”

  She maintained an annoyed silence. “Take the deaf man, Frey, for instance,” he went on. “He was eager to get that story about the detective agency off his chest. Then, for fear we’d lay too much emphasis on the fact that he’d known Hollister years ago, he mentioned—almost casually—that Mrs. Gillespie had more than once entertained Hollister at night. Mrs. Gillespie bursts into tears, threatens to faint”—there was a wry note of disgust in his voice—“and tells us that Mr. Devlin never talked to Hollister if he could help it, and acted nervous when he did. We do a little investigation on Devlin, and the pressure can be put on him, too.”

  Before she could stop herself, Georgine burst out, “That Las Vegas story wasn’t true?”

  Nelsing ignored the question. He went on, his hands expertly twisting and straightening the steering-wheel for the dark curves of the streets. “Devlin brought out the FBI story. Hollister was watching someone in the Road, he suggested; perhaps, Professor Paev. Paev to Wyeth, Wyeth to Paev, Paev to Gillespie. Most of ’em took a little side-swipe at McKinnon, too, but we didn’t need to put any pressure on him. He fairly spouts information.”

  “Oh, dear,” Georgine said. “Oh, dear me. Isn’t anyone completely free from suspicion?”

  “Yes,” Nelsing said. “Mrs. Blake.”

  “That’s right. She told me she was home, on the night Hollister died, with ‘her husban’, her daughtah, her two grandsons, and her no-’count nephew.’ I remember thinking that ought to have stopped you in your tracks!”

  “We checked it,” he said seriously, “as we did everything else.”

  “Including my mysterious visitor,” she said acidly.

  “Certainly. That was a shot in the dark, but it got something out of you, didn’t it? When on earth,” said Nelsing irritably, “will people learn that an investigator wants to know everything, no matter how irrelevant it may seem? If we’d heard about that grave earlier, we’d have had a clear line to Hollister’s real purpose in Grettry Road.”

  “Well, you know everything now. And—I’m sorry to seem dumb, but what was Hollister? Not an FBI man, I take it, but—oh, please, not an international spy?”

  “Hollister,” said Nelsing grimly, “was a hired thief.”

  Georgine thought this over for a moment, and sighed. “What a fine street I chose to work in. That sort of coincidence isn’t like me, either; I mean, I’m the type who always gets to the fire after it’s all out and the engines have left. Just bad luck this time, I guess.”

  “Don’t you see, Mrs. Wyeth,” said Nelsing quietly, “that all these things started happening because you went to work for the Professor?”

  She looked round, startled. “You can’t think—”

  “Hollister’d been hanging around there for months, watching his chance. Maybe he’d managed to get access to the Professor’s files before, and had found that the experiment wasn’t finished. Naturally, this Fenella Corporation would want its information as complete as possible, so he waited. Then, a secretary turned up—you, as it happened—and Hollister knew the notes were to be typed into a workable form, which meant the research was almost done. He had to work fast, now, and copy those notes before you’d finished typing, and rush them to his employers so they could beat the professor to the draw. It was your arrival that gave the signal, that set the whole thing off.”

  “Oh, no. But that’s uncanny, because the first day I went there Mrs. Blake met me at the door and said, ‘We been waitin’ fo’ you.’ It gave me a horrible shiver, just for a minute; and then I thought it meant something quite different. But it was true,” Georgine finished in a low tone, and drew her coat closer around her shoulders.

  “Someone was waiting for you, certainly. Hollister.”

  She frowned into the darkness. There was something that had been troubling her all evening, ever since she’d learned his true mission. “Wasn’t that blackout convenient for him, though? I never heard of anything that came so pat, just when it was needed.”

  “It was handy, all right,” said Nelsing, suddenly ferocious. “But believe me that lad knew how to take advantage of it when it came.” He added a string of lurid adjectives to qualify the lad’s name, and did not apologize. “When I think of the way he deliberately fooled the Warden Service! They wouldn’t let in an habitual criminal, they take all the precautions they can, fingerprinting and investigating, but how in the hell can they spot a man who joins for the express purpose of committing his first crime? All that zeal, all that patriotism—the whole thing was a fake.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Georgine surprisingly. “He meant it.”

  “Nuts.” Sometimes Nelsing relaxed his official formality, and the moments frankly gladdened her heart. She thought, I’m doing all right; if I have the nerve to contradict him now and then, it’s more like a conversation!

  “Nuts nothing. I heard him talk. He came to Berkeley last August, and I really don’t believe he got the United States into the war in December, on purpose to make his job easier! If any bombs had really fallen last Friday, he’d have been in there pitching, saving lives, doing his job. It’s perfectly possible to be a real patriot and still do something that—that may be wrong but that may seem all right to you. You know—if you could see all Hollister’s letters from that corporation, maybe you’d find that they’d fooled him; told him, maybe, that Professor Paev meant never to release his germicide and that the corporation would be doing something for humanity if they could manage to get hold of it.”

  “You’re very charitable, Mrs. Wyeth. You’re not by any chance including yourself in those excuses?” Nelsing made the suggestion so gently that for a minute she didn’t catch his meaning.

  “Now, look, Inspector Nelsing,” she said, “You can’t really think I had anything to do with this. I started you on the investigation myself, by telling you about the dying words and the footsteps. You think I haven’t any sense?”

  “Well,” said Nelsing simply, “you’re a woman.”

  Georgine flounced fiercely in her seat. “According to you, women are all cowards and liars, and spiteful and senseless! I suppose a policeman does get the seamy side, and not much else, but you—you ought to know better.”

  “I’m very sorry,” said Nelsing in his politest tone. He stopped the car in front of her house.

  I didn’t mean, she thought, to carry it to the length of fighting with him! She swung round to get out, wishing she could stalk away by hers
elf, with dignity; but there was the dark path behind the gate, and the dark house, and the shuddering moment before her hand found the light switch.

  “Would you mind coming in with me?” she murmured ungraciously.

  “Not at all.” He was as maddeningly calm as ever.

  She stopped on the sidewalk. “Listen,” she said incredulously. “Am I hearing things?”

  From the gloom of the rear garden came a thin rippling strain of music. “In einem Bächlein helle, da schoss in froher Eil’…”

  The tune was clear and simple as running water; it was incongruous enough to be funny, heard like this from the darkness; and for some reason it rasped on Georgine’s nerves.

  “That can’t be our friend Mac?” Nelsing said. “What’s he doing, sitting on the doorstep waiting for you to come home so he can pump you?”

  “Crudely put, but probably far from wrong.” She started up the short walk to the gate. “You’ll come in anyway, won’t you?”

  “Certainly.” He sounded indulgent, patronizing, moving beside her. “You afraid something’ll jump at you out of the yard? It’ll be darker yet next month, when the dimout starts.”

  Georgine was conscious of lingering, trying to prolong even this impersonal moment with him. “Do they have to do that?”

  “Afraid so. The city lights make too much skyglow.”

  Both of them looked up at the sky. “I suppose they do,” said Georgine, sighing, and putting her hand on the gate.

  Against the fog the pots of petunias on the landlords’ balcony, directly above, loomed like huge round heads peering over the edge. “Only good thing about it is, the stars will show up better.” She pushed hard at the gate, which seemed to be stuck. “You ought to see them in Colorado, on cold—Look! Is there someone up there—?”

  On the balcony above, one of the huge heads seemed to be leaning gently forward, as if to get a closer view of her, its bulk curved and black against the sky-glow. She stood with her face tipped up, one hand still outstretched to the gate. It seemed queer that she couldn’t move…

  Dreadfully inexorable, the head leaned farther; faster, faster.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Murderers One to Seven

  THE EARTH SWUNG UP on edge and struck her, hard and searingly rough on arms and chest and knees. Beside her a dark form skimmed horizontally as if sliding for base. Behind, and terribly near, sounded a great shattering explosion.

  Too stunned, too breathless to scream, Georgine lay gasping with her face buried in grass and leaves. Howard Nelsing had scarcely touched the ground before he was up again, with an acrobatic leap to his feet, and away—toward the corner of the landlords’ house. Someone else was coming, running fast down the dark pathway. Or was it running away?

  Outside the whirling ache in her skull the sounds came, clear but far away. A deep voice shouted, “Here, Mac! Hurry up, head him off at the corner.” There was a sudden thunder of feet on the balcony’s outside staircase. Those running steps had been Todd McKinnon’s. He was bending over her, calling into her ear, “Georgine. Georgine, are you hurt?”

  With an immense effort she raised her head, got up somehow to a half-sitting position. McKinnon’s arm was behind her shoulders. “Are you hurt?” he repeated quietly.

  “I—I don’t think so. S-Skinned a little. What was it?”

  “One of the big flowerpots fell,” said McKinnon grimly, “just where you were standing. Lucky you saw it!”

  “I couldn’t move,” Georgine said, her teeth chattering. “I saw it tipping over, and I c-couldn’t get—get away. He must have p-pushed me, or thrown, or something—”

  The light casual voice soothed her. “Take it easy. Do you feel any pain? Ankles all right?”

  “I’m—I’m fine. Where—what happened to—”

  “He’s having a look around,” McKinnon said. “Feeling better? Sit quiet for a minute.”

  In the neighboring houses lights were going on, windows were raised. “What happened?” voices called. “Did you hear that? Where was it?”

  Nelsing came back, breathing hard. “Got away,” he said gruffly, “if there was anyone there. Damn it, McKinnon, you might have given me a hand.”

  “I’m a first-aider,” said McKinnon mildly, “not a cop.”

  The detective’s torch flashed briefly on the gate; then he stepped closer, examining something. “So that was it. There wasn’t anyone here to chase. It was a booby-trap; string tied to the gate, to make that pot overbalance when the pull came.” His foot stirred among the scattered earth, the limp petunias and jagged fragments of pottery. “Must have weighed fifty pounds.”

  He stepped suddenly to the walk, intercepting the first of an excited group of neighbors. “Just an accident, ladies and gentlemen,” he said smoothly. “This lady and I managed to jump out of the way in time. Yes, a big flowerpot; you can see for yourselves.—Get her into the house, Mac,” he flung over his shoulder. “Carry her if you have to. No, I forgot. I’ll do it.”

  “I can walk,” said Georgine crossly. “I’m all right.”

  There was a blank interval, and she found herself miraculously on her feet, going up her own front steps. “That could have killed us,” she said earnestly to McKinnon. “That could have killed both of us. That could have—”

  “Yes, I know. Sit down a minute, and let’s see what that fall did to you.”

  The sight brought back her senses with a rush. “My stockings!” Georgine wailed. “My last good ones, in rags!”

  McKinnon materialized from the bathroom with a bowl and a washrag. He passed the cloth gently and expertly over her face, brushed leaves and twigs from her hair, and then turned his attention to her knees. “You took most of the skin off your legs, too,” he remarked mildly. “Bleeding in one or two places.”

  “Skin grows in again,” Georgine snapped. “Nylon doesn’t. Oh, dear. And not another pair to be h-had for love or money.” Her voice was perfectly all right, except for an annoying tendency to break in the middle of words.

  “She hurt?” Nelsing said, coming in and closing the door behind him. “Sorry I had to throw you around, Mrs. Wyeth.”

  “D-don’t mention it.” She gave a little gasp of laughter. “You—you—just in time…”

  His small gesture silenced her. “Mac,” he said deliberately, “how long have you been here? Where were you?”

  McKinnon did not look up from his task of applying iodine and gauze. “About twenty minutes. Sitting on the steps.”

  “You were”—Georgine began faintly—“you were playing—”

  “I heard you coming, and I was afraid I’d startle you if you happened on me suddenly. I knew you were out, Mrs. Wyeth; you and Nelse passed me on your way up to the Road.”

  Nelsing stood looking down at him, his blue eyes cold and remote. “How did you get into the garden without pulling that thing down on your head?”

  “Came in the back way,” said Mr. McKinnon casually. “I’ve made a habit of it, luckily.”

  “A habit?”

  “Yes. I’ve called on Mrs. Wyeth once or twice.” He finished the bandaging and rose, meeting Nelsing’s eyes for the first time. “Want to make something of it?”

  “No. A call’s innocent enough. That contraption, out there”—Nelsing gestured over his shoulder—“that was malice. Somebody figured on a ten-to-one chance of killing her.”

  “Not I, I assure you,” said McKinnon. “Somebody else. Take that suspicious look off your face, Nelse. Don’t you get the similarity? Somebody who hasn’t quite the guts to use a gun or knife, somebody who takes these chancey methods—running a man down with an automobile, setting a trap that may or may not work—leaving a loophole for the victim to escape through, to soothe his conscience—” He looked round at Georgine, his straight sandy brows drawn together. “But why you?”

  She sat upright, an incoherent jumble of words forcing their way out. “How should I—I won’t be classed with Hollister, that’s a lot of—you know I’ve had nothing t
o do with this in any way, b-both of you know that!”

  “But you were there when Hollister died,” McKinnon said, looking at her intently. “If you were a witness, perhaps someone wants to put you out of the way.” His eyes glinted suddenly. “By God, Nelse,” he said in a hushed voice, “it’s the Nervous Murderer. Old Number Four.”

  “What are you holding back, Mrs. Wyeth?” said Nelsing.

  “Nothing!” Georgine got to her feet, found they wouldn’t support her, and fell back on the couch. The room began to tilt oddly across her blurred vision.

  “Here,” said McKinnon quickly, “lie down. Put your feet on this pillow.”

  “I’m all right. D-Don’t fuss.”

  “You look mighty pale for a well woman,” said the quiet voice.

  “Well, I feel pale. But don’t fuss over me, please! Just g-go on talking for a few minutes.”

  She let her eyelids fall. She could hear the two men moving about the small brown room; plenty of noise they made, too, their feet clumped so in those big shoes… Funny sound in this house of women; no men in your life for seven years, and then suddenly two at once.

  She heard McKinnon’s voice, running on without cessation, without hurry. “I thought for a while this one might be a standpatter. Thought it with hope, I’ll admit, because I’ve never seen one yet. It would have been a good set-up, come to think of it: a murder committed on impulse, or almost so, and then—just nothing. No panic, no give-away, no evidence. You haven’t got any material evidence, have you, Nelse? I thought not. Someone was smart enough not to leave fingerprints.”

  His voice faded away and resumed from another point in the house. What was he doing in the kitchen, opening and shutting cupboards? “But this attack comes along, and Number One is out. A standpatter would hardly take a chance like this. Number Two wouldn’t either; the Perfect Murderer. He makes his plans in advance, and arranges to leave no evidence, or to frame someone else. And it isn’t often he repeats. Repeaters choose simpler methods.”