Skeleton Key

by Lenore Glen Offord

  “You come out of that, Todd McKinnon, and start breathing. Todd darling…don’t you dare die!”

  When the ambulance interne came, she had to be lifted away, expostulating, “I can’t stop, you mustn’t stop it for a minute. Let me go on, or take it over yourself.”

  “He’s conscious, lady,” the interne said. It was the same one who had supervised the removal of Harry Gillespie, and he gave her a curious look. “He’s got his eyes open, didn’t you see? I guess he’s been conscious for three, four minutes.”

  “He has!” Georgine stood trembling, looking down at the eyes which were now innocently closed. “You mean to say I’ve been falling on him every five seconds, with that lung of his? I might have killed him!”

  The bluish lips moved, and the interne bent over. Then he gave Georgine another penetrating glance. “He says from you it felt good,” the interne said.

  “Where are you taking him?” Painfully she moved up the drive, following the stretcher.

  “Emergency Hospital.”

  “Can I go with him?”

  “You his wife?” He shook his head. “Afraid there won’t be room. You can come after, if you like, but he’ll have to be quiet for a few days.”

  “He’s not going to die?” She turned to Nelsing, who stood beside the ambulance. “Nelse, he didn’t throw away his life for me?”

  Nelsing looked at the interne. “Good chance he’ll recover, I should think,” the white-coated young man said. “Doesn’t seem to be any skull fracture.” The stretcher slid gently into the ambulance.

  “He’ll be all right, Georgine,” Nelsing said. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, he was gazing at her intently. “You look a sight,” he said.

  Not until long afterward did Georgine realize that he had been testing her. She didn’t lift a hand to her smeared face and disordered hair. “I suppose I must,” she said.

  “It’s McKinnon, is it?” he said cryptically.

  She understood him, and nodded.

  There was a murmur from the ambulance. Nelsing swung himself inside, and bent over Todd. She could hear his answers.

  “Sure, we knew, as soon as we analyzed the stuff under Mrs. Gillespie’s toenails. She lost that slipper in the struggle and her foot scraped the floor. Paint, and—”

  “…Almost too late. He hadn’t expected us, but he saw us coming, and took gopher poison in the bathroom, with the door locked so we had to break it down. Got a statement, though. They have a few lucid moments even when they’re dying of strychnine. Did you see him when he attacked you?”

  “…Oh, you guessed. He must have hoped against hope, trying to make it look like a double suicide or something. He’d have the world’s best excuse for not knowing that engine was running.”

  “…Okay, you get well. I’ll be in later.”

  He swung down again, and the ambulance backed slowly round in the space at the foot of Grettry Road. “What will happen to him?” Georgine asked breathlessly.

  Nelsing looked down at her, frowning a little. “Nothing! You can’t punish a dead man.”

  “But you said he’d be all right,” she insisted wearily.

  “Oh. You’re still talking about Mac. Don’t you know who the murderer was?”

  She shook her head dumbly.

  “For the Lord’s sake, don’t you even care?” said Nelsing incredulously.

  Again Georgine shook her head.

  He gave her a look of despair, of vast scorn, of something very like relief. He turned and set his hat at a jaunty angle on his head, and walked away up the road, whistling a little tune.

  It must have welled up from his subconscious, for Howard Nelsing, who had no laughter lines around his eyes, would never have chosen it deliberately: that song whose words ran, “And they sing, oh, ain’t you glad you’re single!”

  She sighed and pressed her palms against her face. It must be well after five, and she must get home to meet Barby, like greeting someone out of another life.

  Maybe one of the policemen would give her a lift home. She too began to climb Grettry Road. There were men moving about the doorway in one of the small white houses. One of them was jostled against the door-post, and she heard, as if through a night of fog and impenetrable darkness, a single chime. It sounded like a clock striking the half-hour; but it was Peter Frey’s tubular doorbell.

  “Visitors, Mr. McKinnon,” said the nurse brightly, opening the door of the hospital room.

  “Ah, Mrs. Wyeth,” said Todd, politely bowing. “And Miss Wyeth, I presume?”

  Georgine squeezed her daughter’s hand, and Barby looked up and smiled at her; the plain, thin little face became luminous with the swift passage of that smile. Then they both looked at Todd.

  He seemed perfectly well, he was on his feet to receive them. His face, bent toward Barby, softened and came completely alive.

  “How are you, Todd?” Georgine said.

  “I could go home this minute,” he said, holding chairs for his visitors and himself perching on the high bed, “but they love me here. And besides, who’d nurse me at home?” He attempted to look pathetic.

  “Three guesses,” Georgine said, “but you’re probably afraid I’d be too stern with you. That blond nurse would eat out of your hand.”

  Barby was looking Todd over, seriously. “Mamma,” she said, “is he the funny man you told me about?”

  “He’s the one, Barby.”

  “Say something funny,” Barby requested courteously.

  Georgine had never before seen Todd completely at a loss. He fell back against his pillow, looking at her wildly, reproachfully. “My dear young lady,” he said in a feeble voice, “you paralyze me.”

  A small miracle occurred. Miss Wyeth accepted this as an answer to her request. She tried it over under her breath, “you paradise me,” she murmured, and then began to shake with quiet giggles. “He’s funny,” she said confidentially to her mother.

  “And when he’s well,” said Georgine, exchanging a glance with Todd and drawing a long breath simultaneous with his, “he’ll play the mouth-organ for you, I have no doubt.”

  “Now,” Barby whispered, entreating.

  “Of course I can,” Todd said in answer to Georgine’s dubious look. “I’ve been getting along on half the normal allotment of air for years. What’s a little gas?”

  He gave her a level look, and added, “I’m glad you’re not a lung counter. Dreadful habit, that.”

  “Oh, you heard all that, did you?” She grinned at him, unembarrassed. “Fine. It ought to save a lot of trouble.”

  “It will. Okay, Barby, here we go.”

  Georgine sat relaxed and serene in the hard hospital chair, watching a technique that might have given points to the Pied Piper himself. The way Todd looked at Barby, they might be sharing a private joke; and Barby was succumbing completely.

  She must be an instinctive judge of character, thought her mother fatuously.

  Todd played Oh Susanna, and Camptown Races and La Golondrina. By the time he’d finished repeating Jingle Jangle three times, by request, Barby was smiling. Her thin face had grown slowly radiant, and she had risen from her chair and gone to stand by Todd. Barby the solemn, the reserved and undemonstrative, was actually leaning against a stranger’s knee.

  The atmosphere of good will, in fact, was all but overpowering.

  The concert came to an end. Todd gave the harmonica to Barby, having first thoughtfully wiped it off with alcohol, and watched her retire with it to a corner. Then he looked at Georgine.

  “I’d thank you for saving my life,” she said placidly, “but it gets too monotonous.”

  “Saving it, yet!” Todd said. “When I got you into that hole and da—and very nearly killed you?”

  “We can cancel that,” Georgine told him, “because it turns out I needn’t have gone to the Professor’s at all that day, except for my ghastly conscientiousness. He hadn’t remembered to tell me that there was no hurry any more. The poor old cre
ature had just found out that most of his experiments had been paralleled by some other scientist. I think it was announced that Monday morning.”

  Mr. McKinnon gave a sympathetic whistle.

  “The odd thing was, he didn’t seem to mind so much. It was given out, free to everyone, through the Medical Association; and he’s got a few refinements of his own left, so he’ll still have the honor. Did Nelse come to see you?”

  “He did,” said Todd with a subdued groan. “I had to tell him I’d guessed right on everything except who was the murderer. It ought to have been Sheila Devlin, you know; willing to go to any lengths to preserve her illusions. Also, when I heard she was in bed guarded by a nurse, I figured she couldn’t walk in that back door and listen to what we were saying in the lab. Just a slight miscalculation, da—bad luck to it.”

  “Barby knows that gentlemen sometimes used bad language, but ladies never.”

  “Good. Damn it, then. You were on the right track from the first, when you asked about sound perception. I ought to have guessed, I suppose, that if Frey had the genius to put over the rest of his total-deafness act, he wouldn’t forget a point like that. He was genuinely deaf for two years or so, you know; a sort of prolonged shell-shock from that industrial explosion. He had plenty of opportunity to start learning the technique.”

  “But Todd, what made him keep it up after his hearing returned? You’d think he—”

  “My dear,” Todd said, “he’d never been so happy in his life. He didn’t have to work any more, he could live modestly on the pension—some kind of compensation insurance—that was paid him so long as he was disabled. There’s no way for an examining doctor to be sure the nerve of hearing hasn’t been destroyed. It was a really stupendous feat of malingering, the sort that’s got away with once in a thousand cases. The act got better and better as he went on. Pretty soon it was fixed in everyone’s mind that he couldn’t hear a thing. He never forgot the li’le tricks, saying the wrong thing and looking embarrassed, or making his voice too loud or soft—that was so he wouldn’t have to counterfeit that unmistakable flat tone the very deaf use.”

  “I guessed most of that when I realized that he must have knocked against his chime doorbell when he stole back into his own house. And then I tried to remember the sound I’d heard, through the blackout, and hinted there was something I might know—standing right outside that hedge of the Carmichaels’. Well, if he attacked me after that—he must have been able to hear. All so simple, isn’t it, when you know the answer? But I don’t quite see about Hollister.”

  “Hollister knew. He’d known Frey when the divorce went through, which was after the two years of deafness. Maybe the act wasn’t so good in those early days, and Hollister tumbled to it and filed away the knowledge for reference. Then Fenella Corporation hired him and gave him the Professor’s address. He thought of Frey, who was already on the Coast; he’d kept in touch with him just in case, and he needed to make sure of getting a house as near Paev as possible. I think it was quite by chance that Frey took a fancy to the place and snapped up the other vacant house.”

  “He didn’t mean to kill Hollister from the beginning, then?”

  “Not until that last day.” Todd sighed and gave her a melancholy look. “Do you know what was the worst blow to me? I was right there while Hollister put the screws on Frey; I was in the kitchen, drying dishes for Claris as part of my good-will tour, and Hollister, twenty feet away, was keeping up the fiction to the extent of writing on Frey’s pad, and laughing heartily. But what he was writing was something like this: ‘I need a bit of money in a hurry, and I’m sure you’ll let me use that cash you’d earmarked for a War Bond’.”

  “Oh, great heavens. Thirty-seven-fifty, Mimi said. And the Freys never did get around to buying the bond, Claris told us. That unmistakable amount!”

  “Uh-huh. I suppose Frey thought of it as the thin end of a lifelong wedge of blackmail. Hollister knew his secret, and could let the insurance company know about the fraud. It’d mean a jail sentence—and beyond that, the loss of the whole way of life Frey had built up all those years, puttering round happily with his paints, letting someone else support him. He sat there in the next room, within earshot of his daughter and me, and took that blow, but he couldn’t talk to me afterward, he had to rush down into the canyon to paint, to be alone and decide what he should do.”

  Georgine glanced at Barby, who was blissfully breathing soft discords into the mouth-organ.

  “I’ll tone it down,” Todd promised. “He swore that he didn’t have murder in his heart, not even when he learned about the blackout that was to come on the first foggy night. It was only on chance that he turned on the lighted house-number—playing with the idea, was how he put it; and there was nothing to lose in working that shenanigan with the kids’ signals—fixing up Claris’s window-curtain, and then rearranging it after Ricky had put up his answering signal. Frey had known about that affair for a long time, and hadn’t lifted a finger. He was fond of Claris in his way, but he didn’t care much about her upbringing. He was still playing with the idea when the blackout came, and when he slipped out to the Jeep, and when Hollister started to cross the road. At any time he could have dropped the plan, and no harm done. But—nothing went wrong, and Hollister got into position—and Frey released the brake. If he’d missed, or the impact hadn’t been fatal, maybe he’d have had to go back and finish him off; but he just happened to be entirely successful. And then you barged into the middle of it.”

  Georgine nodded, biting her lip. “But wouldn’t you have thought he’d realize I’d never suspect him? Because the person who tiptoed up the road heard me when I called.”

  “You forget,” Todd smiled gravely. “He was the Nervous Murderer. I think he was more concerned about keeping the secret of his deafness than the one about the murder; and as a result he thought about discovery, and feared it, and began to expect it to the extent of mania. Can you guess what Mimi said to him?”

  “The last thing she said to me was, ‘There wasn’t a soul there who could have heard us.’ I suppose”—Georgine looked up—“that Frey was painting in the canyon, and Mimi and Ralph thought of him just as they’d think of a tree. Maybe she wondered if he’d read their lips, or if they’d raised their voices and he could hear just a little—and thought of him not as a murderer, but as a possible witness to Ralphie’s good faith!”

  “And rushed across to his basement studio,” Todd took it up, “in no state to realize implications, and said, ‘Mr. Frey, did you know what Ralphie and I were talking about? Can you hear at all?” And once he’d panicked and set his hands on her throat, to choke back those damning words, he had to go on. He couldn’t afford to revive her, because he’d given himself away. And he could simply,” McKinnon sighed, “have denied the whole thing and been a Standpatter. I guess it wasn’t in his character.”

  “Yes,” Georgine said slowly. “I can understand all that. I can even feel sorry for him. What I never could forgive is the laboratory business. No, I don’t mean his taking another crack at me, that was natural enough. It was his leaving you outside, so I’d think you were the murderer!”

  “You’d have found out I wasn’t, soon or late,” Todd suggested gently. He was smiling again, and his eyes no longer resembled the hardest variety of agate.

  She looked at him, and began to lose her train of thought. “But I might have found you myself, and left you to die in the garage—because I couldn’t ever have stood it, to see you tried for murder. I’m afraid I—even then, for those five or ten minutes, when I thought—when I—”

  “Dear Georgine,” Todd said, “please stop talking. I love you very much, and I want to kiss you now.”

  He swung himself deliberately off the bed, and then halted thoughtfully. “I should like this, at least, to be artistically perfect,” he added. “Barby, my dear, I wonder if you would step into the corridor for a few minutes? And if the nurse comes, tell her I don’t want her.”

  “I like
it in here,” Barby demurred, politely but firmly.

  Georgine broke in. “Darling, when Mr. McKinnon asks you so nicely to do him a favor, you do it right away.”

  Barby, a woman of strong convictions, still hesitated.

  “Or,” her mother concluded, as pleasantly as before, “I will skin you.”

  “Oh,” said Barby, and was gone with the speed of light.

  For more “Vintage” titles from Felony & Mayhem Press, including novels by Ngaio Marsh (the “Inspector Alleyn” series) and Elizabeth Daly (the “Henry Gamadge” series), please visit our website: Felony&Mayhem.com

  All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.

  SKELETON KEY

  A Felony & Mayhem “Vintage” mystery

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  First edition (Duell, Sloan & Pearce): 1943

  First paperback edition (Dell): 1945

  Felony & Mayhem print and digital editions: 2015

  Copyright © 1943 by Lenore Glen Offord

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Sarah Weinman

  All rights reserved

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-63194-033-0