Skeleton Key (11 page)

“That would refer to the car that hit him?” said Inspector Nelsing dispassionately. “Was the engine running?”

“No, no. All I heard was a kind of rush and rattle, just the noise a car would make if it had started downhill by itself. It's perfectly possible that's all that happened, only I thought you should know. Please understand I'm not being a busybody, I'm—”

“Mrs. Wyeth,” said Nelsing, “may I ask you not to apologize so much? Just tell me what facts you gathered, and let me decide for myself whether they're worth consideration.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. Those are all the facts.”

“Did you want to add any conjectures?”

“Are you
asking
for them? Well, I did have some, but they sound rather fantastic.” She caught his eye, and hurried on. “If someone had got into that car, as the warden went down the road, I—I suppose it wouldn't have been impossible to wait till he was in the right position and then run him down?”

The impersonal gaze did not change. “Just a minute. The report says that no one was in the car when it went over the fence; at least, there were no signs of an occupant. It would mean that the person would have to jump out somehow before the crash.”

“That—that might have been possible, too, if the car slowed up on the level part of the road. Ricky's car didn't have any doors. That made it like a jeep; he was very proud of the resemblance.”

“Did you hear anything like a person jumping out?”

“No, but there are drifts of leaves along the road.”

“It would have to be a very agile person. A leap like that, from a car going even at half speed, would spin you around hard; you'd be likely to fall. I don't suppose you noticed if any of the people who were standing around after the accident showed signs of having had a spill?”

Georgine hadn't thought this far ahead. She looked at him, frowning. “The—the only one—yes, there was one, but it couldn't have meant anything.”

“Who was it, Mrs. Wyeth?” His handsome mouth tightened. “I presume you didn't volunteer this information with the intention of withholding part of it?”

Her eyes dropped. She said in a troubled voice, “Ricky Devlin, the boy who owned the car.”

“I see,” Nelsing said quietly. He waited for a minute before letting drop his next question. “Did you know the man who was killed?”

“Hollister? No. I met him only once or twice in his capacity as warden.”

“What kind of a man was he?”

“The boss of the barnyard,” Georgine said with a subdued laugh. “He wardened harder than anyone I ever saw. Otherwise, he was just ordinary, like—like all the men you see walking along the street smoking cigars. And yet—” she hesitated, wondering how to frame the next sentence. “He had a sort of
impact
on people that I couldn't define or explain to save me.”

“Was he popular with the neighbors?”

“Well, no. On the contrary, I'm afraid,” she said.

The question slid in casually. “Would any one of them want to kill him?”

“I don't know, Inspector. I thought if there was somebody driving that car, he might have come from outside.”

Inspector Nelsing just looked at her, during a lengthening pause. She became aware of several things, one after another. A) She must have believed that someone in the Road had killed Hollister, but B) in the attempt to convince herself it wasn't true she had said exactly the opposite; and C) the detective was scornfully aware of this process of reasoning.

After a long time he spoke. “Everyone is immobilized during a blackout,” he said wearily. Georgine made no response.

Nelsing arranged the sheets of the report once more. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “That isn't a great deal to go on, Mrs. Wyeth,” he said, “but it so happens that there are one or two points of interest in this report. The officer said you had Hollister's keys for awhile.”

“Yes. Mr. Devlin insisted that I take them, but the door was unlocked. And—while I was in the hall, using the telephone, it seemed to me that someone else was in the house. Mrs. Gillespie thought so too, and ran. But we might have dreamed that up too, you know, simply because we were scared. I was
awfully
scared,” she added, defiantly.

“I see,” said Nelsing. “Someone in his house. You didn't investigate?”

“Certainly not.”

“Did you examine those keys at all? No? I wonder, Mrs. Wyeth, if you've ever seen a skeleton key.”

She looked up at him again, silently.

Inspector Nelsing rose. “Yes,” he said deliberately, “there were two or three on that bunch you had, and the Warden Service hasn't authorized the use of any such thing. I think I'll take a little run up to this Grettry Road. I wonder if you'd mind coming with me.”

From a welter of thoughts and disturbing new ideas, Georgine expressed only one. “No,” she said firmly.

Nelsing looked up from locking his desk. “No what?”

“No, I don't want to go up to the Road with you. I've given you my information, and now I want to go home. Soon or late I suppose I'll have to go back to the Professor's and finish my typing, but I've no desire to meet any of those neighbors again.”

“Could I ask why?”

“No reason, only a silly feeling. I've been—well, uneasy, ever since I stepped into that place last Monday. And now that there's been a—” She broke off and swallowed. “You might as well know. I'm a terrible coward.”

“Many women are,” said Inspector Nelsing calmly.

Well!

It had cost her a good deal to make that honest admission. “But I asked for it,” Georgine told herself; “what did I expect him to do, say, ‘Oh no, not
you
, you're brave as five lions'?”

“And surely,” he added, “if you've mingled freely with the neighbors during this week, if you talked with them and went in and out of their homes last night, you shouldn't be afraid of them now. If you kept your head enough to try first aid and call the ambulance when you found a man was hurt, surely you see that your fears can be overcome?”

“I was geared for a war, not for a murder.”

Howard Nelsing stood by his desk, tapping it softly with a forefinger, looking down at her. “There isn't so much difference,” he said seriously. “Murder is on a smaller scale, that's all, and it stems from the same things: greed, jealousy, fear, hatred. Somebody gets stabbed in the back, and justice demands that the stab be avenged. The ordinary citizen gets caught up in it just as he does in war. And have you thought that individual crime goes on just the same, century after century, no matter whether we're fighting other nations or not? If we could wipe it out, perhaps there wouldn't be any wars.

“Besides,” his tone became suddenly more personal, “I'm afraid I'm going to need you, Mrs. Wyeth.”

She looked up again, seeing how the hard light of a foggy sky struck across his face, the serious mouth, the blue eyes. This sensation inside her was very disturbing, as of a well-made gelatine, firm but ready to quiver at a touch. “All right,” said Georgine ungraciously. “After all, you're not sure there's been a murder, are you?”

“Not at all sure,” said Nelsing briskly. “Now; we'll drop in at the Civilian Defense office for a moment.”

She did not see what was written on Hollister's dossier, but as Nelsing helped her into his car he told her. “Nobody seems to know much about him; no family, as near as we can discover. He came here last August and took a lease on that house. Seemed to be retired, young as he was. After Pearl Harbor, when the Warden Service was organized, he offered his services. They were glad to get him; nobody else in Grettry Road could serve. He's been faithful and efficient, and that's what counts, mainly.”

“But, skeleton keys!” Georgine said, troubled. “What on earth do those mean?”

“Maybe nothing.” Nelsing shrugged. “Don't worry about that, Mrs. Wyeth. In cases of violent death, we're always running into odd little sidelines, loose ends that haven't a thing to do with the situation. Will you tell me about the boy that owned the jalopy? What does he do, go to school or just hang around?”

The car skirted the University campus and began to climb steadily through winding tree-lined streets. “Ricky?” Georgine said thoughtfully. “In vacation I suppose he does just hang around, except that he's crazy to get into the War himself, somehow, and his mother won't let him. Seems he might get into coarse company if he went fruit-picking, and he can't sign up as a warden's messenger because that'd mean being out during an air-raid—though she denies at the top of her lungs that there will ever be any. She's rather a dreadful woman, though I imagine she's really devoted to her husband and her son and doesn't know any other way of expressing it. You should have heard her telling Ricky that he was only a baby yet, and that they'd never take him as an air-raid warden unless all the available men were—Oh!”

Nelsing said nothing. He could scarcely have missed it.

“I've given you the wrong impression,” said Georgine, trying to speak quietly. “He's a nice kid, and when I saw he might be in trouble through no fault of his own I wanted to help him. He looked at me so—I have a little girl myself, you see, and I'm awfully susceptible to young things.”

The man set his car in low gear for the precipitous climb up Rose Street; it growled and hummed to itself. “Don't worry about forming my impressions,” he said calmly. “I'll decide on my own, after I've talked to him.”

Georgine did not feel much better. The higher they climbed, the lower her heart seemed to sink. The thick fringe of eucalyptus against the sky looked black and unfriendly; in a minute the car would swerve under those trees and drop down into Grettry Road.

“I'll park up here,” Nelsing said, stopping near the road signs at the intersection. He looked round at her soberly. “I'll introduce myself as a city detective, but it may make things easier if the Homicide Squad isn't mentioned.”

“Very well,” said Georgine. “You're incog; I shan't give you away.”

They rounded the turn and the slope of Grettry Road was spread before them, alive with the excited babble of sightseers. The fence at the end was completely obscured by leaning forms. At the curve of the vacant lot stood Mr. Todd McKinnon, hands in the pockets of an admirably cut tweed jacket. He seemed to be sighting carefully down the road.

“Incog, hell!” said Inspector Nelsing in an undertone.

“You know him?” Georgine looked up, surprised. “He's kind of a screwball, isn't he?”

“Acts like one,” Nelsing said, walking toward him. “What's he doing here so soon?”

“He works here daytimes, I believe, but at what I don't know. He wasn't here last night, of course.”

“Of course,” said Nelsing, “and I bet it's eating him.”

At the sound of footsteps, McKinnon looked round casually. The oddest thing happened to his face; it could scarcely be called an expression, since not a muscle moved, but his agate eyes took in Georgine and her companion with a sudden complete awareness.

With one long step he was off the edge of the lot and onto the pavement. “Great Scott,” he said easily, “have I messed up any evidence?”

“What makes you think that?”

“I'm practiced,” McKinnon said to Georgine, “at jumping to conclusions. Eleven feet from a standing start was my last record.”

Nelsing looked him over with a wry smile; he was much more at ease with men than with women, Georgine thought. “How the vultures do gather,” he observed.

“Vultures,” McKinnon repeated, interested. “I've been called worse than that, by smaller men than you. Nothing ever happened to them,” he added pensively. “Well, this is interesting, Nelse. You don't tell me—”

“I tell you nothing, as usual. Haven't you got it figured out for yourself, already?”

McKinnon looked sadly at Georgine. “I'm afraid he's making fun of me. If you must have it, Nelsing, I'd begun to tell myself a fine story. Young Devlin's jeep parked at the one spot where it would have a clear run down the road; someone who dislikes the warden, who lies in wait for him during the blackout, knocks him out in the street, gives the car a push downhill to make it look like one of our hill accidents; that's as far as I'd gone, but it has possibilities.”

“There wasn't time for that,” Georgine said. “Hollister was walking, right up to the minute the car hit him.”

The detective glanced at her quickly. “You're sure?” he said, and at the same moment McKinnon put in, “Were you here when it happened, Mrs. Wyeth?”

“Oh, yes,” said Georgine wearily. “Throwing my weight about, trying to be a little angel of mercy. Next time maybe I'll know enough to stay inside.”

“Good Lord! You went out in the blackout?” McKinnon thrust a hand through his sleek hair. “I should hope you would know better. For six months the wardens have been trying to educate people, and the first time—”

Georgine interrupted him tartly, quoting the immortal utterance of a high official, “Well, no bombs fell, did they?”

“And consider this, Mac,” said Nelsing quietly. “A dying statement comes in kind of handy.”

“A dying—oh, God give me strength.” McKinnon looked agonized, and then, in the face of this new idea, gradually appeared to forget the Warden Service. “So,” he said slowly, “that's why—H'm. You think your mystery has come along at last?”

“I've told you, I think nothing. I collect facts.” Nelsing had been surveying the terrain with rapid, intent glances. “Straight line across the curve of the street,” he murmured, beginning to descend toward the jagged gap in the fence. Georgine and McKinnon followed as if drawn in his wake. “Where was he struck, Mrs. Wyeth? I see someone's been out with the hose and washed the street. Very thoughtful. Tramped all over the ground where it levels out, too.” He clamped his lips together and shook his head quickly.