Skeleton Key (25 page)

Her pace slackened. “I don't know why I was in such a hurry.”

“You were looking for Mrs. Gillespie, I take it,” McKinnon said casually. “I heard you calling her. Wasn't she home? Seemed to me I saw her early in the afternoon.”

“Yes. No.” Some instinct stronger than thought kept her from telling him, from telling anyone.

Anyone except Howard Nelsing.

So that was where she was going; hurrying to the only place of safety. Then, with a reviving spurt of inner laughter, she thought:
A fine thing when I can't feel safe anywhere except at the police station; and haven't I walked myself into a steam, though?

She jerked her handkerchief from her coat pocket, and her compact came with it, shooting halfway across the road and scattering powder, puff and mirror. The mishap restored her to sanity. “Oh, dear!” Georgine said furiously, stopping short. “Oh,
dear!
”

McKinnon was laughing as he retrieved the battered objects. “Such profanity,” he said, restoring them. “You must have been very well brought up.”

“As a matter of fact, no,” said Georgine, walking onward.

“Is that all you ever say, Oh dear?”

“When I'm deeply moved I say Oh, dear
me
.”

“You don't, uh, know any other words?”

“Plenty. My father dragged us around every mining camp in the southwest, when I was little. I've had to forget the vocabulary, though, because of Barby. I don't want her to be like the kid next door, telling the kindergarten teacher that he would be damned if he'd make any more of those lousy paper mats… Laugh away if you want to, but it doesn't sound funny when it's your own child.”

“I'm overcome with respect,” McKinnon assured her. “When I meet Barby, I'll curb my own language. Do you smoke in front of her?”

“Oh, yes. She urged me to. It seems that most of the other mothers smoke, and Barby's anxious to have me conform.”

She looked at him again, and added with ominous sweetness, “I amuse you?”

“Not you, Georgine. Just femininity. And I'm with you all the way on the—Well, well; there's the good Inspector. Going up to Grettry Road, d'you suppose?”

“Nelse!” Georgine cried out, in a tone that made McKinnon glance at her sharply. Nelsing stopped his car beside the curb.

“I was going,” he said, and cleared his throat, “I was going up there to get you.”

“I trust,” said Mr. McKinnon smoothly, scrambling uninvited into the car, “that you're offering me a lift home, too.”

“I seem to be,” said Nelsing, a trifle grimly. He backed the car around and headed south. “You left early, Georgine. Did the atmosphere get you down after all?”

“M-More or less,” she said, relaxing in exquisite relief. Todd's inconsequential chatter had begun the process, but this was needed to finish it. Now she could put her terror into words. “Is Harry Gillespie still being questioned?”

“We let him go about an hour ago,” Nelsing said.

“Then he's probably home by now. And if she was hiding, she'd come out when she heard him.”

“If who was hiding?”

“Mimi.”

“God's sake,” McKinnon said, over her shoulder. “What were you doing, playing hide-and-seek? Way you were calling her name, it sounded as if you were begging her to come back from the dead.”

“What's this about?” Nelsing said peremptorily.

“She—we were talking,” Georgine said, gripping her hands together, “and I'd talked her into—I mean, she wanted to go down to the station and see you, Nelse; something about her husband. She was pretty tight, but she was able to talk. And then she went upstairs to get dressed, and—disappeared into nothing.”

No sound came from the back seat. Nelsing, looking straight ahead, pulled the car to the curb and stopped. “Disappeared in her own house?” he said slowly.

“Yes.” The blessed relief of saying it was tempered by an uneasy caution; Mimi had meant to tell the story herself, it would not be fair to give it away. “I went up after her, and there wasn't anybody there. Not anyone at all.”

Nelsing squared his shoulders around to face her. “Do you know what you're saying? You looked for her?”

“Oh, everywhere. It scared the daylights out of me.”

“Did you
see
her go up?”

She shook her head. “Heard her. And then—nothing. She couldn't have come down again without passing me.”

“You're sure of that? H'm. What shape was she in?”

She wet her lips. “Upset; about—about Harry, mostly.”

“Suicide frame of mind?” said Nelsing.

“Good heavens! I never thought of that. But what could she have done to herself?”

“Jumped out a window.”

Georgine shut her eyes, visualizing those empty rooms. “The windows were all closed, except for one open a crack in the bedroom.”

“Off the sun-deck, then.”

“That's over the living room, isn't it? I'd have heard her walking; and I never heard a sound after her feet on the stairs.”

Nelsing seemed to relax. “On what stairs, going up or down?”

Her eyes opened and she looked at him, startled. “I don't know.”

“Look,” he said kindly, “didn't you happen to think how those houses are built? There's a short flight of steps going up to the bedrooms, and another that goes down to the game room.

“
Oh
,” Georgine said on a long note. “I forgot. The poor thing probably passed out down there. Somebody ought to be told about it, she might lie there for hours.”

“We'll call up Gillespie,” Nelsing said, stepping on the starter. “Your house is nearest.”

“So,” McKinnon's mild voice said from behind her, “that's why you were in such a dither when you came out.”

“Had me going for a minute,” said Nelsing. “Here, where's your door key? Let me have it.” In her cottage, he went straight to the telephone. “Gillespie. When'd you get in?…Oh, I see. Is your wife at home? Look on the lower floor, will you?…Yes, in the hall or your brother-in-law's bedroom.” He turned, leaning against the table, and said to his companions, “Dear Ralphie slept down there. Gillespie'll be back in a minute.”

Ralphie's bedroom
, Georgine thought;
Mimi remembered something he'd left behind
.

“What?” Nelsing said into the telephone. “She's not there? Oh, the garden door was unlatched. Well, she probably went out that way, and Mrs. Wyeth didn't see her go. She was planning to see me at the Hall of Justice, it seems. Good-by.”

She'd scarcely have gone to the police by herself
, Georgine thought uneasily;
it was too much trouble to convince her at all
. And yet, there was a chance that Mimi would prefer a voluntary-seeming visit. She could have had a dress and shoes downstairs, somewhere, and slipped out by herself—maybe forgetting that anyone was waiting.

It was just possible, but a stronger possibility was that Mimi hadn't been able to go through with it; that, with guilt as a spur, she'd run away.

I don't want to believe it
, Georgine told herself.
I liked her; I liked her better when she was common and pathetic, and half seas over. I can't tell anyone I suspected her, not till I'm sure
.

“Not at the Hall of Justice, either,” said Howard Nelsing, turning away from the telephone.

“Give her time,” said Georgine. She sat down, not looking at either of the men. She braced herself for the inevitable question.

“You and she were talking,” said Nelsing meditatively. “What was she coming to tell me?”

“I can't tell you that. Let her do it.”

“Evidence?”

“Not—not direct evidence.”

“A confession?”

“Nothing of the sort.”

“Did she know who killed Hollister?”

“Oh, don't look so menacing!” Georgine snapped. “If she'd said anything of the kind, don't you suppose I'd have let you know long ago?”

“I'm not so sure. Why won't you tell me what you talked about?”

“Because I told her I wouldn't,” said Georgine defiantly. “If it had been anything of immediate value, I'd have telephoned you at once. You'll have to take my word for that.”

“You told her you wouldn't,” Nelsing repeated scornfully. “Why, you meant that about not caring for justice! I thought it was only a figure of speech, I was ready to believe you hadn't any more information about Hollister's death; but now you admit—”

“Hey, Nelse,” said Todd McKinnon from his obscure corner, “leave her a few human virtues. In some circles, people who keep their words are highly thought of.”

“Damnation, I'd forgotten you were there. Keep out of this, Mac. I'll question a witness in my own way, and if you don't like it you can get the hell out.”

“I do not like it,” said McKinnon deliberately. It was the first time Georgine had seen him when he wasn't casual. He sat relaxed as ever, but his voice rang like a coin flung down on marble. “We private citizens can't be expected to share this passion of yours for abstract justice and the hell with good faith and kindness and everything else. We've got to live with ourselves afterward.”

Nelsing turned slowly. For half a minute something flickered almost visibly between the two men. “Very pretty,” he said. “And just what's your interest in helping Georgine keep information from the police? Anything personal?”

“Only what I said.” McKinnon's voice was quiet again, his face immobile. He shrugged and got up. “I'm on her side, that's all. I'll be going now. No, it's all right, Georgine, he's not going to torture you. I know him better than that.”

“Just as soon have him gone,” Nelsing murmured, closing the door behind the erect figure. “Would you mind, after this, saving your revelations until we are alone?”

Georgine looked at him, startled. “I will if you think I should.”

Todd was a writer, he was interested in every detail of the crime whose scene and actors he was studying. It was natural that he should be omnipresent. Nelsing couldn't suspect him.

Although, she reflected ruefully, he'd never tell
me
whom he suspects. Well, he won't shake my story about Mimi.

She sat up, preparing for battle; but unaccountably, Nelsing's severity had abated and he didn't try many more questions. He said, finally, “Please don't think I doubt your word.” He called up his office again, and was told that Mimi Gillespie had not appeared.

“If she's run away she won't get very far,” he said, his handsome mouth set in a straight line. “The boys will be on the lookout for her. I'd better get up to her home and have a look around before the light goes.” And stalked out.

Georgine locked the door tightly behind him. She sat down again, trying not to think of Mimi's hand reluctantly detaching itself from the door-frame, of Mimi's piteous voice breaking as she said her brother's name.

But of course. She was still afraid of getting Ralph into trouble for his part in the blackout. “Maybe,” Georgine told herself uneasily, “I should have given away that part so they could catch him”—and at once found arguments in her own support. How could it help now? The blackout was nearly a week ago and by now Ralph Stort must either have been caught or got away.

Been caught—or got away. She drew herself together, uncomfortably. She didn't know what they would do to anyone they caught.

“There's no very serious penalty,” the army officer said in a cautious murmur to the doctor. “He'd be grounded for life, of course. The ship would be confiscated, if there were anything left of it.” He paused, his eyes narrowed, seeing again the barren stretch of desert, and the grotesque crumpled shape of the Cub cruiser. “What I want to know is
why
he did it?”

“If you don't find out now, sir,” the doctor said, “maybe you never will. Yes, he's conscious, able to talk a little. No more than fifteen minutes, please.”

The window gave on a stretch of desert, and on the formidable wall of the Tehachapi mountains. A bulky dark shape cut diagonally across it; a leg, held high in the harness of a fracture bed. The man in the bed was almost invisible under swathed bandages.

The officer sat down and began his inquisition in a quiet voice. He spoke for several minutes. Now and then the man in the bed muttered a word of affirmation or denial.

“Why was it, Stort?” the officer said. “Why was it necessary?”

“…Teach whom a lesson?”

“…You can't mean that. They weren't doing so badly; not enough for you to concern yourself about them.”

Fishy
, he thought disgustedly; and thought of the stoppage of work at the shipyards, of the four deaths from heart attack, of the dubious citizens able to slip about unnoticed in the sudden darkness.

“Who made you?”