Skeleton Key

by Lenore Glen Offord

Georgine, conquering a slight uneasiness, started up the staircase. She rounded the turn of the stairs.

  On the top landing a huge figure stood motionless.

  For one startled moment she thought it was a suit of armor, so broad and dark was its silhouette against the eastern window, so round the shape of its head.

  Then the figure stirred, and she saw that the round crown was a shipyard worker’s helmet, and the wide shoulders were those of Harry Gillespie.

  “Oh!” Georgine said on a gasp of relief. “You scared me. I—I hoped I’d find Mimi.”

  He spoke in a voice so flat, so drained of expression that it sounded like that of a man under torture.

  “She’s not here,” said Harry Gillespie. “What have you done with her?”

  “Why, nothing, Mr. Gillespie!” Georgine retreated a step or two, and he began to descend steadily, his weight making each tread groan a little. “Nothing! What could I have done with her? I haven’t seen her since yesterday.”

  “You know where she is.” His feet thudded on step after step. “You’re going to tell me.”

  “I’d be glad to if I could, but I don’t know.” Georgine was feeling her way backward, down and down; the turn of the stairs hid his face from her momentarily, and she thought: There’s something about his voice…I’d better run for the door.

  Then his feet were on the landing, and he stood looking down at her. He was still dressed in his working clothes, with the stiff windbreaker and the greenish helmet making him look more than ever like something not quite alive. In the dimness of the hall his face was half shadowed, but its outlines looked like a grotesque mask of tragedy.

  “You’re going to tell me,” said Harry Gillespie, in his flat far-away voice, “or I’ll kill you.”

  She found herself looking into a round black hole rimmed with steel.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Where Mimi Was

  HER FIRST IMPULSE WAS to nervous laughter. Why, she knew this man, better than any of the other neighbors in Grettry Road! A simple, obnoxious, candidly patriotic soul, who loved his wife and was proud of his new prosperity. She had ridden with him, chatting about movies and the war and the graveyard shift.

  “Oh, go on, Harry,” said Georgine cheerfully. “Don’t wave that gun. How should I know where Mimi is?”

  “You saw her last. Then she disappeared. That cop said so. What did you do with her?”

  He was on the lowest step now, and the pistol was held unwaveringly trained on her. She put out a hand to push it aside, and saw his hand go taut.

  Why, he meant that.

  Her gesture died in mid-air, and she looked at his eyes. He could not have slept for two days. He had come home from a long bout of questioning at the police station, and found his wife was gone. Had he gone back to the shipyards for his night’s work, thinking she would reappear, and returned to discover that she was really lost? There was only one emotion behind those burned-out eyes.

  He was determined and dangerous as a half wild animal intent on the kill. “Go on in there,” he said, with a motion of his free hand toward the living room. “We’ll sit down. I’m tired, I’ve been huntin’ her in every vacant house up and down the road.” The words fell heavily, one by one, as he backed Georgine into a chair at the far end of the room.

  He sat down a few feet away, neither his eyes nor the gun hand wavering. “She’s not at the Carmichaels’ and she’s not at Hollister’s and she’s not at the Cliftons’. She’s been at the Cliftons’ but she’s not there now. All night, I looked. Then I came back here and sat and thought.”

  She could see him, hunched on the edge of a chair, unshaven and unfed, his tired mind plodding round and round a despairing circle. “Harry, I’m so sorry. I’ve worried about her, too. But I can’t—”

  “I was going to get you alone, and make you tell me somehow. And then you walked in here.” The dry lips stretched without amusement. “Funny, ain’t it? You know where she is now. If she wasn’t hid somewhere she’d come back to me.” He waited. “I’ll give you ten minutes.”

  “Now look, Harry,” said Georgine in an unsteady low voice, “that doesn’t make sense. Why on earth should I hide—”

  His eyes flickered and rested momentarily on the door to the hall. “Come in and sit down,” said Harry Gillespie in his dead voice. “Over there, not too near her, not too near me. Don’t make any noise, either of you, or I’ll shoot you both.”

  Todd McKinnon must have been caught unaware, full in the open door. Georgine had not heard him approaching, but now she heard his light step on the carpet as he slowly, warily obeyed.

  “What’s it all about, Gillespie?” said the casual voice.

  “She knows where Mimi is. I’m going to kill her if she doesn’t tell me. Keep your hands out of your pockets. Put ’em on the chair-arms where I can see ’em.”

  “I haven’t a thing in my pockets,” McKinnon said agreeably. “Well; this is interesting. Just as well I’m curious, and spied on you, Georgine, when you came back up the road.”

  She tore her eyes from the hypnotizing sight of the gun, and looked round at him. There he sat in one of the deep leather chairs, his legs in their admirable flannel slacks negligently crossed. He looked cool as a diplomat at an afternoon tea. Only his eyes were brilliantly alive.

  McKinnon caught her glance and screwed up one eye in a burlesque wink. “That’s no way to get information, Gillespie,” he said. “You can’t scare it out of a woman, you know; you have to coax it. Look, Georgine do you really know where Mimi is?”

  “No!”

  “I’ll do the askin’,” Harry said deliberately. “You were the last person to see Mimi. She told you where she was goin’, or else you hid her. Maybe she knew something you didn’t want told. You’ll tell me now.”

  His obsession swept away logic, and was the more dangerous for that. She knew it with a cold thrill at the pit of her stomach.

  “Five minutes to make up your mind,” said the dead voice.

  She looked incredulously around her. Her gaze rested on the mantel, and the clock that stood there. Twenty-eight minutes past five, and the hands moving onward in silence, the thin spike of the second-hand sweeping round and round the dial… She looked at Todd McKinnon. He wasn’t just going to sit there and let her—

  “Go on, why don’t you?” he advised, as if encouraging her to repeat an amusing story. “He’s her husband, he’s got a right to know.”

  “I can’t,” Georgine said in a whisper.

  “She told you something,” said McKinnon quietly, and his eyes slid toward Gillespie with an effect of warning. “Better come out with it now.”

  She could almost have laughed. If only Mimi had told her something of importance, how quickly she’d have come out with it! Her brain wasn’t working very well, or she’d think of some plausible lie—something, anything to convince this madman of her innocence. Think. Think.

  Her eyes seemed to have got fastened to the clock. Five-thirty, and that long glistening finger gliding unceasingly round.

  McKinnon’s voice cracked like a lash. “Georgine. Snap out of it.” She looked round at him, startled. “That’s better,” he said, relaxing. “Tell him what you talked about, you and Mimi. That’s all he wants to know.”

  “But it was nothing to do with me. What she told me was—a military secret.”

  “That doesn’t matter now. You couldn’t tell anyone safer than Harry, anyway. He’s working for his country.”

  “All right,” Georgine said. She hesitated for another moment, wetting her lips, glancing at the stiff mask of Harry Gillespie’s face under the helmet. Why, if he could be driven half mad like this, at such a moment, it might have happened before. Creeping back to Grettry Road during the blackout, getting into the little jeep, those big hard hands sure and ruthless on the wheel…fastening a cord to that heavy pot so that it would tip over on her head…

  She began to speak, slowly, watching his face. “Your brother-in-law was afraid of
Hollister.” He’d known that; not a muscle moved. “Hollister forced him to go home and get his plane and fly over the Bay last Friday night. That blackout was intentional.”

  But that had surprised him: his head jerked slightly; and, although she was not looking at Todd McKinnon, she knew that it surprised him also.

  “Mimi called me in,” she said, feeling her way with breathless caution, “and told me about it. You were at the police station and she was terribly worried. She wanted to know if it would help you if she told them the story. I—I didn’t believe it would, and of course she wasn’t willing to give away her brother if she could help it; but I tried to convince her she ought to let them know anyway.”

  “That’s your story,” said Harry Gillespie, still with that deadly slowness. “That’s where they got that stuff about her maybe goin’ down to the police station. Go on.”

  “I wondered if anyone had heard her and Ralph talking about the planned blackout. She said nobody could have known, not possibly,” said Georgine with emphasis; watching him. “And then she started off to get dressed, and she must have run out the garden door, downstairs; at least that’s what they figured. I never saw her again. That’s all.”

  It was not what he had wanted. It was not enough. She saw it before the last words had died away.

  “Now I’ll tell you what happened.” His voice came harsh and difficult, as if his throat were dry. “You stopped her before she got downstairs, or upstairs, or wherever she went. You told her she—” The lack of logic seemed to penetrate even his mind, for he paused and licked his lips, looking bewildered. “You hid her, anyhow. You frightened her, so she ran over to the Cliftons’ and hid until people quit lookin’ for her.”

  “What makes you think that?” McKinnon inquired.

  Harry Gillespie put his left hand deliberately inside the stiff jacket, and as slowly brought it out. It grasped something white and furry.

  “Her slipper,” he said harshly. “Inside their house, dropped off her in the breakfast-room.”

  For a long moment McKinnon said nothing. Georgine’s eyes slid round to search his face. In the yellow light that filtered through the half-closed slats of the blinds, it looked as if it had been carved from blond wood.

  “In the breakfast room,” he repeated. “Under that window that was left open from the top?”

  “She wouldn’t have gone farther by herself. I know that.” Harry Gillespie said, “Not Mimi, that liked clothes, that always had to be dressed up just right. She had on her wrapper and those slippers. She got that far, and then this Wyeth woman took her some place else. I want to know where.”

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

  “Or I’ll kill you,” said Harry, as if she had not spoken.

  The gun came up slowly. Georgine felt herself pressing back in the chair until its padded leather sighed.

  Then Todd McKinnon began to laugh, softly and cruelly. “My God, but you’re blind, Gillespie,” he said. “Thinking your wife went off with another woman!”

  “What else happened to her?”

  “You know. You know!” The voice jeered quietly. “You had a li’le suspicion once, didn’t you, when the neighbors began talking about the man that used to call on Mimi after you’d gone to work!”

  “Sure I knew that,” Harry said. His face twitched painfully once. “I knew Hollister was here too much, but she told me—”

  “She told you a good story, and you swallowed it because you were crazy about her. Did she ever mention the fact that her brother went to Hollister’s as often as he entertained him at home, and then she was alone, and Hollister was accounted for?”

  “I knew all about what she did.”

  McKinnon laughed again. “That’s what you think. Hollister made a good stalking-horse—maybe too good; maybe he tried to muscle in on the other fellow’s territory, and got bumped off for his pains. But why should he have been the only one to call on her late at night? H’m?”

  The bleak mask of Harry’s face was changing; a dusky flush rose slowly from neck to forehead. “Why, you—” he said harshly.

  “And you think that pretty li’le blonde, that drove every man who saw her crazy, was taken away by force? Or that another woman got her to go? Oh, brother, do you rate with yourself! Thought she’d never leave you, did you?”

  “What do you know about it?” The voice grated.

  “Nothing, except what I heard,” Todd said quickly; too quickly, nervously. “How should I know who the other guy was? I just work up here.” He gave a careless chuckle. “Yeah. At the Clifton house. I should ’a’ remembered that.”

  Slowly, slowly Harry Gillespie swung his body in a quarter-circle, and the gun moved too. Georgine felt its going like the removal of a heavy weight. It was not pointed at her, now; it was trained on Todd McKinnon.

  Her muscles jerked in reflex; get out of the chair, run…

  The gun faced her again, momentarily. “Sit there,” Harry said, and his eyes blazed with animal fury. “You’re not goin’ to run for help. It wouldn’t do any good; you and him could both be dead and buried before they could ever catch me.” He leaned forward deliberately. Georgine, transfixed, was turned sideways now so that she saw Todd McKinnon, sitting rigid and quiet.

  “So that’s it,” Harry Gillespie said. “I might ’a’ wondered about that. Why, you—” He took a deep breath and loosed a stream of deadly epithets. “You gave yourself away that time, braggin’, bein’ so afraid somebody’d get the credit for your tom-cattin’ that you had to show off to me!”

  “Who, me?” McKinnon said. “What are you talking about? I just said there might be somebody else. Whoa there, careful with that Roscoe!”

  “I can be careful, all right.” The mask was dissolved now, and Harry Gillespie’s face was black with fury. He was sweating; Georgine saw a great drop trickle down his cheek; and he shifted his grip slightly on the pistol-butt. “I’ll kill you. Not nice and quick and easy, but where a bullet’ll hurt the most. What do I care what they do with me?”

  “Listen, buddy,” McKinnon said with a thin attempt at nonchalance. “Listen, you’ve got it all wrong.”

  “I saw you once or twice talkin’ to my wife. I saw you lookin’ at each other. I told myself she was just—just friendly. You were right, chum,” said Harry deliberately. “I was blind, but I’m not now!”

  “Listen, Gillespie. Wait. No, don’t—Why, you can’t mean any of this; you’re just fooling, trying to scare me. Well, you did. Drop it. Gillespie, for God’s sake. A joke’s a joke!”

  The laugh jarred false on Georgine’s ears. She dared not move, she could only turn her eyes from the furious man to the terrified one. The leather chair-arm was hot and slippery under her hand.

  “Of course you don’t mean it,” McKinnon said. He was chattering fast now, as if to convince himself. “You haven’t even got the safety-catch off. Hell, you sure had me fooled.”

  Without shifting his glance, Gillespie fumbled for the catch. His right thumb seemed to have lost its power; he brought up the other hand and steadied the gun.

  “You couldn’t hit me even if you did shoot,” McKinnon told him, again with that chuckle that seemed to catch in the middle and go off into breathlessness. “Man, look at the way your hand’s wobbling. You’d send a bullet through the window if you shot. Yon couldn’t hit a barn door from there! Come off it, bud. Let the whole thing slide.”

  “I couldn’t hit you?” said Harry Gillespie, and got to his feet. “Well, I can fix that, too. I can’t miss from two feet away.”

  There were ten feet between him and the slight figure in the big chair. Georgine watched his slowly advancing feet cover the distance, step by careful step. She forgot to breathe. It wasn’t possible, he wasn’t going to shoot a man in cold blood, right in front of—She ought to do something, run, scream, throw herself against that massive figure and clutch at its arm; but she had no breath in her lungs.

  “You don’t mean it! For God’s s
ake, you don’t mean—” Todd McKinnon watched the approaching doom, his eyes growing fixed, his hands clutching painfully at the chair-arms. “Get away from me!” He shrank back in the chair, slipping lower and lower on the small of his back. “Don’t—don’t come any closer, Gillespie. I swear I was only fooling. Be careful, that thing could blow me to pieces!”

  “It will,” said Harry Gillespie in measured tones.

  “You—you can’t do that—don’t point it like that—Get it, Georgine!”

  The knee that had been crossed over the other straightened with lightning speed, the foot shot up and caught Harry Gillespie’s elbow, and the gun flew from the sweating hand of the big man. The sharp shout of command lifted Georgine from her chair and launched her across the floor, her hands groping for the dark metal of the gun, trying to push away the larger hand that snatched for it before she could reach it. Her shoulder thudded hard against the rug, and a dark weight descended on her.

  With a detonation that seemed to burst in her very skull, the gun went off. The heavy weight slumped sideways.

  She got to her knees, by a violent effort. Her eyes would not focus for a moment; the floor was nothing but a dark blur. Then it resolved itself into a patterned rug, and the heavy stiffness of a windbreaker, and a big blond head from which the helmet had slipped. From a deep groove above the ear blood trickled slowly, sliding along the hair and falling in shining drops.

  Harry Gillespie’s face had relaxed into its normal lines. He looked like the man she had first seen at the block meeting: simple, sane, candid.

  “He’s dead,” Georgine said in sharp whisper. “We killed him.”

  She looked up. McKinnon was also sitting on the floor, leaning against the chair from which he had launched his attack. He looked rather pale, and his eyes were closed.

  “No,” he said, opening them. “I don’t think so.” With an effort he got himself to Harry’s side, and felt the pulse. “He’s just creased a li’le, and he did that himself.”

  The pistol was still in the big flaccid hand. McKinnon did not touch it. He felt for the pressure point beside Harry’s ear and held his finger on it firmly. “See if you can find a first-aid kit anywhere, will you, Georgine?” he said.