Skeleton Key (10 page)

“Yes. On a little table by the—here it is. What'll I say? You do it.”

Georgine listened for the operator's voice, but nothing came except the hum of wires. Surely in just one more minute someone would answer? The light shone as if in a spot of phosphorescence on Mimi's white robe, moving slightly with her nervous breathing.

Then all at once the white robe wasn't there. Georgine heard a gasp and a rush, and felt wind coming through the open door. “Something in the house,” a terrified murmur sounded from the path outside.

Was that someone moving in one of the rear rooms?

Georgine flicked off the light. If there had been a little glow under the living-room door, if she hadn't imagined that yellowish line, it was gone now.

Her heart was doing its best to thunder its way through her ribs. She could have turned on her torch again, and moved to the door and peered through the layers of darkness in that room—to see if anyone was there.

Probably that's what a really brave woman would do.

Instead, sheer instinct prompted her. “Police!” she said breathlessly into the dead transmitter. “Hello, operator, will you give me the police station?”

If there had been a rustling sound in that room, that too was gone.

She could not gauge the time, nor even guess how long it was she stood there, clutching the smooth vulcanite of the unanswering telephone. New voices sounded, hushed, in the street outside; she thought she recognized Ricky Devlin's tones, and heard him calling softly, reassuringly, to his mother. She would have given a great deal to rush out and join the others; but a stubborn sense of duty held her where she was. It could have been five minutes, or twenty, before an operator responded to her repeated jigglings of the connection bar. It was minutes later before a voice answered, “Emergency hospital.”

Georgine's knees were weak with relief as she gave her message. She managed to remember the cross-streets nearest to Grettry Road, for help in location; she was switched to the police-station, after another long wait. As soon as the blackout was over, an ambulance and a squad car would start for the Road; perhaps sooner.

She wondered if she'd given all the right details. Her hand was cramped from its hard clutch on the telephone, the cool darkness seemed to press on her and make breathing difficult. She stumbled out into the Road.

From the campus, far below, came the notes of the Campanile, rising slowly and heavily. Eleven o'clock. And, as if that had been a signal, a long sustained note droned through the night, and the fog began to reflect light. The windows of Grettry Road flashed into illumination, and around the bend came a car on which shone the great red eye of the police signal.

“Stand back there, please, and let me get to him. Don't crowd… Did anyone see the car hit him?…Where was it parked?…His name—no, just one of you, please… Any family? Who got to him first?”

Questions, and voices answering them, sometimes singly, sometimes in chorus; the glare of the police-car's headlights, shining on the Road's inhabitants, some fully dressed, some in the odd combinations of clothing snatched up in the dark; the calm listening face of the young officer from the squad car, and the glinting top of his pencil as it moved back and forth over the pages of a notebook; voices, babbling in the street…

Sheila Devlin: “Ricky, stay right here near me, won't you, dear? You were certainly sleeping soundly, not to hear the sirens.—But you heard me when I called through your door, didn't you, dear? I was sure you answered.”

Ricky (absently): “Yeah, sure I did. I must of thought it was morning, and rolled over again, until I—I heard that crash.”

Claris Frey: “Oh, how terrible! How perfectly awful! Is he—is he dead?… No, I didn't wake Daddy, he went to bed ages ago with a headache. He's there now. Of course he hasn't heard a thing. Oh, what a shame about Mr. Hollister. It was just yesterday afternoon he was laughing so, with Daddy…”

John Devlin: “Hell, no. I didn't come out when I heard that crash. I thought it was a bomb, just like all the rest of you, and I was looking for something to get under so I wouldn't be killed. Lord knows Hollister himself pounded that into us often enough: stay in your house, don't look out the door.”

“…bombs…” “…that awful crash…” “Alone in the house…”

They buzzed and racketed in Georgine's ears until she felt deafened. She went into the Professor's house to wash her hands and get a drink of water, only then discovering that she had left the door swinging wide. Fortunately, it had done no harm, and the Professor would never know.

The lights were perversely easy to find, this time. There was no one in the house, but—Georgine paused on her way to the kitchen, lifting her head and sniffing—there was a funny smell that reminded her of baking in an old-fashioned range. Had someone been burning paper?

She made a brief detour around the house, cautiously switching on the lights before she entered each room. She must have dreamed that, too. There was nothing in the fireplace but a neatly laid fire which would never be lit.

When she returned to the street the ambulance had come. The body of Roy Hollister had been left where it was, however, and the blanket had been drawn up over the lacerated face. She could see more clearly, now that the shock was wearing off; little details, magnified by the sharp contrast of darkness with the white glare of headlights, stood out in her vision. She saw Ricky Devlin and Claris Frey standing together, a little apart from the others, not looking at each other; their lips moved cautiously as if they were exchanging guarded words. Ricky moved away at a summons from the officer, and Georgine saw him reach down a hand to rub his knee, gingerly, before he went on. He was limping just perceptibly.

She saw a shadowy figure joining the group, and recognized Professor Paev. He had come up from the canyon, through the Gillespies' back yard. Presumably he had walked up via the short-cut, for burrs and foxtails clung to his trouser-legs. He was in a mood so brusque that it hinted at a crushing disappointment as well as annoyance. “I was only halfway home from the train,” the Professor barked, “when the lights went out. I've been sitting on someone's front porch for an hour. On someone's front porch!” he repeated angrily, as if this were the last straw.

The keys that John Devlin had pressed into Georgine's hand were still in her coat-pocket. Perhaps the officer would want them.

She went slowly up to the young policeman, who was talking to Mimi. Mrs. Gillespie, with her golden swirl of hair and her curves noticeable even through the folds of a white chenille robe, was the sort of witness any man would like to question. “We heard him say ‘Come, I'm dying,'” Mimi told the officer earnestly. “I guess he—he was conscious for just that minute. Don't you think so, Mrs. Wyeth?”

Georgine, who had already told her story, nodded thoughtfully. “Here are his keys,” she said.

The young officer held out a hand for the heavy bunch, and bent over them. Georgine had not looked at them before; one or two were of an unusual shape, she thought.

The policeman looked up at her with sudden attention, and opened his lips as if to speak. Then he changed his mind. He was frowning slightly as he pocketed the keys.

“That car must have been smashed to bits,” said Mrs. Gillespie, her eyes wide with pleasurable horror. “I'm going down to look at it, do you want to come?”

“I'd better take a look myself,” said Ricky Devlin from behind them, rather huskily. The officer had already inspected the wrecked car in the canyon; nevertheless he accompanied the two women and the boy as they climbed through the gap in the low fence, and slipped and scrambled down the slope, following the trail of broken bushes.

“Gosh,” said Ricky inadequately, turning the beam of his flashlight on the crumpled mass of metal.

There seemed to be little else to say. The four stood viewing the Jeep's carcass, tipped on its side in the brush. The windshield was gone except for a few shreds of glass, the steering wheel hung rakishly from a near-by bush, and the shabby leather upholstery was scarred and torn. Ricky started toward the car, and the officer said, “Don't touch it, sonny. We'll want to inspect those brakes.”

“I wasn't going to do anything. And I told you fifty times I left it in gear, with the handbrake on and the wheels turned against a rock. I told you!”

“Sure,” the officer said. “I know you told me.”

Ricky swallowed. “Poor old Jeep,” he said with fine carelessness. “Two of the tires gone, that's the real disaster.” He scrambled round to the front and surveyed the crushed radiator. For a minute more he said nothing; then out of the dimness behind the torch his face looked at his companions, its lower lip hanging slack. “It—it killed someone. It killed a man,” he said in an unsteady whisper, and suddenly dropped the torch and disappeared into the bushes. There were sounds.

“Poor kid,” Mimi muttered. “Should we go and—”

“I'd leave him alone,” Georgine said quietly.

The young officer looked at the Jeep and then up the slope, and shook his bead. “These hills!” he said soberly. “It's a wonder more people aren't killed just this way. There's hardly a month that a car doesn't get away and run into someone's back garden. This jalopp' could have got up a lot of impetus, tearing down that hill; hit this fellow near the bottom, knocked him for a loop and run over him—one wheel at least—and then bounced against this fence and somersaulted over. Crazy sort of accident, but it's not so unusual.”

Ricky emerged from the bushes, very white, wiping his lips with a handkerchief. “Listen, officer,” he said. “Am I supposed to be responsible? What'll they do to me?”

The young policeman resumed his official reticence. “There may have to be an investigation,” he said.

Ricky looked at the two women. There was appeal in his eyes, and the most abysmal terror Georgine had ever seen.

CHAPTER FIVE

O
N THE MORNING OF
July 4, Georgine Wyeth walked downtown through almost deserted streets, and came to the handsome new building that housed the Berkeley Police Department, and hesitated only a moment before she went in. It had taken her the larger part of a restless night to make up her mind to this move.

Maybe it would be simpler just to find out where the offices of the Homicide Squad were. It proved to be easy; down the hall to the right, and through the door with its glass panel blacked out. She went in, glancing to her right into a glass-enclosed cubicle. A man in plain clothes was standing at the desk, his back to her. She tapped on the door, and he turned.

The Messrs. Walter Pidgeon, Gary Cooper and Ian Hunter paraded rapidly through Georgine's mind, and then vanished. No, not like any of them; but a hint of each face in the rugged, blue-eyed one before her. “Something I can do?” the man said courteously.

“Yes,” Georgine said. “I have some—what might be some information about the death of that air-raid warden who was killed last night. I didn't know to whom to give it.”

“Perhaps I'm the one you'd want to see,” the man said. “I'm Inspector Nelsing. Will you sit down?”

She took the chair he indicated. Inspector Nelsing was looking at her in a disconcerting way, as if she were not a person at all, but a sexless entity labeled Bringer of Information.

“Do you know about that accident?” She made herself speak steadily. “It was a man named Roy Hollister. A car ran downhill in the blackout and killed him. The car belonged to a young boy who lived on his block, and I—the officer didn't say what might happen to him, but I thought if they decided it was his fault it would be called criminal negligence. There were one or two things I noticed that it seemed you ought to know.”

“Just a minute,” the Inspector said, and walked rapidly out and down the hall. Before he returned with a handful of papers Georgine had had time to reflect that he wasn't even approaching middle-age, with that unlined skin around his eyes; and she had inadvertently read the address of a letter tucked into the desk blotter. His first name was Howard.

He shut the door behind him and sat down, his eyes already devouring line after line of a typewritten report. “You'll excuse me if I read this?” he inquired, briefly glancing up. “The officer who handled the case isn't on duty just now.”

Georgine said she'd excuse him. She had never in her life met with such devastating politeness as was practiced by the police of this city, even when they were making light of her fears. She wondered how they acted if they suspected you of murder. “Pardon me, madame, would you mind stepping into the jail?”

Inspector Nelsing put the sheets of paper on the desk, and meticulously evened their edges. “You are—?”

“Mrs. Wyeth.”

“Oh, yes. You heard the impact, and after a time—how long? Several minutes?—yes; you went out to see if someone had been hurt.”

“There was something else. I didn't tell the officer this, I wasn't absolutely sure I'd heard it, but—it sounded to me as if someone might have been tiptoeing off up the road.”

“H'm. Near the body?”

“I thought farther up. You know, I may have imagined it,” said Georgine in a hurry, forestalling him if he should think of this himself. “When I got to Hollister he moved once or twice, very feebly, and his hand struck against the pavement. It could have been that.”

“Anything else?” He was serious, and very patient.

“Yes. He—said something before he died; or at any rate before he lost consciousness for the last time. Mrs. Gillespie heard it. She thought, and of course she may have been right, that he said he was dying. But I was nearer.”

“What did you think he said?”

Georgine looked at him warily. “I worried about it all night, the words seemed to—well, sort of stick in my ears, and I couldn't convince myself that was all he said. I think the words were—‘
someone driving
.'”