Skeleton Key (17 page)

Georgine reached for the teapot. “Who's the accomplice?” she asked suspiciously.

“You, of course.”

“Good. I'd hate to be left out.” She grinned, and tipped the pot over her cup.

Then she looked up at Nelsing.

He was not smiling at all; his eyes were invisible behind dropped lids, and his forefinger was slowly tapping on the table.

She felt a warm drip on her knee, and looked down with dazed eyes, to see that she had poured the cup full and that the tea was running over its edge, over the surface of the table; and still the teapot hung suspended.

CHAPTER EIGHT

F
ROM BESIDE HER,
McKinnon's hand came out and gently took away the pot, and then went to work with a napkin, mopping. Across the table Howard Nelsing looked up, his blue eyes focused on a point beyond her. “Excuse me a minute, will you?” he said, and rose.

“H'm,” Georgine said, trying to laugh. “We could have made an omelet with that last joke.”

“Nothing's funny to Nelse when he's on a case,” McKinnon said, also gazing intently after the detective.

“He wouldn't believe any of those stories were true? They were all fiction, weren't they?”

“Sure. He must know that. But he thought of something, all at once; something that was said gave him an idea, maybe.”

“But what?”

He gave her one of his sidelong looks. “Couldn't tell you. I hope your life is an open book?”

“Well, certainly; but that doesn't mean I want it investigated. I didn't want to be
in
this.”

“You can't always choose,” said Todd McKinnon.

Nelsing extricated himself from the telephone booth and returned. “Sorry I can't stay to drive you home,” he said remotely. “Here, Mac, let me have that check.”

“I'll be damned if I will,” said McKinnon cheerfully, keeping a tight hold on it. After Nelsing had gone he added, “Bad enough for him to horn in on the dinner, and get us a table.—Now what do you suppose struck him?”

“You're the one who ought to know, he's your friend.”

“Acquaintance. Shall we go? Can you get us a cab, Charlie?”

Georgine got up thankfully. Somehow, in the last few minutes, the bamboo walls had seemed to he closing in on her, and the South Sea haze had become thick.

They walked up and down in the chilly air outside, waiting for the taxi. “What struck Nelsing?” the man repeated, musingly. “Great Scott, you don't suppose one of those stories could have hit close to the truth?”

“No,” said Georgine uncompromisingly. “There are times when I think Hollister must have died by an Act of God. Look here, can you imagine any of these Grettry Road people being
bad
enough to commit murder?”

“It doesn't always take badness,” said McKinnon. He gazed straight ahead of him, and for a moment there was no sound but that of their feet regularly striking the sidewalk. “It may be weakness,” he said at last. “Somebody who's afraid of consequences, and can't stop to figure out the worse ones that come from murder. There are plenty of minds like that. It's an immature reaction, of course.”

He stopped walking, and stood still on the pavement. Georgine also stopped. “Not those children! You can't be thinking of them again!”

“I could make you out a case against them,” he said slowly, beginning once more to pace, “or against anyone in Grettry Road. And I wouldn't know which of 'em was possible and which impossible until the pattern begins to show up. Look; start at the top of the Road. Let's give John Devlin a real mistress in Las Vegas, and at the same time a sense of obligation to his wife. He handles her money, he may have lost some of it or spent it on the mistress, but we'll put it on a higher plane and say that he recognizes Sheila's devotion and when he's at home stays faithful in his fashion.” His eyes narrowed; the lights that spelled out “Trader Vic” shone fleetingly on the hard bony structures of his face and then they went on into the darker stretches of the walk and Georgine could no longer see him. “You know what kind of man Devlin is?” he said. “I'm guessing, from one thing I saw of him, but I think he's the victim of a conscience. He signed up for the sugar ration last May, and swore his family had no more than ten pounds. They had a hundred pound sack in the basement. All right, plenty of people had done the same thing. But Devlin couldn't do it and
forget
it. After he'd falsified that report it kept weighing on him; he told half a dozen persons about it. But he didn't give up the sugar.”

“Well, what's that got to do with—”

“Not much, except that I think he'd be the last man on earth to face a blackmailer. The only way to get rid of 'em is to say, publish and be damned. But that means giving up one side or the other of your double life, and it's possible Devlin wants to keep both of 'em.”

“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 ways.” 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.”