Rex Stout - Nero Wolfe 10 (18 page)

They all glanced at the window, and I did too, to make it unanimous.

Fife was on his feet. “I want to use that phone.”

Wolfe shook his head. “It requires a little discussion, General. For one thing, we can’t afford to make enemies of the police. For another, they are already attending to Miss Bruce. I arranged with Inspector Cramer to post men outside, to follow any of you, including Miss Bruce, who left the house before one o’clock. For still another, General Carpenter phoned me from Washington last evening and gave me some special instructions. As I said, he sent me that grenade. And with it, the instructions in writing. So if you’ll bear with me a little longer—”

Fife sat down.

“I do not state,” Wolfe said, “that Miss Bruce murdered Colonel Ryder. She has the appearance of a resourceful and determined woman, but we certainly haven’t enough evidence to charge her with murder. Why she stayed in here seven minutes, instead of seizing the envelope as soon as she saw it and leaving with it, I don’t know. She may have been coolheaded enough to open it and examine the contents, but that doesn’t seem likely, since all it contained was blank sheets of paper. At any rate, we can now start to work on her, and whether her wrongdoing went to the length of murder or not, she’ll pay for whatever she did.” Wolfe frowned. “I admit I don’t like her having that grenade. I didn’t foresee that. If she gets in a corner and kills someone with it—” He shrugged. “Archie, you’d better phone Mr. Cramer and tell him to warn his men—but first, where’s that letter from General Carpenter? Have you got it in your desk?”

It was just as I opened my mouth to answer him that I realized what he was doing. This was the booby trap.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think you took it. I’ll look.” I pulled a drawer of my desk open. I would have given a month’s pay to be able to watch their faces, but I knew that was Wolfe’s part of it and went on with mine. I shut the drawer and opened another one. “Not here.” I opened a third drawer and closed it.

Wolfe, leaning back with his arms folded, said testily, “Try mine.”

I went around to the side of his desk and did so. The middle drawer; the three on the left; the four on the right. I was about to mutter something about trying the files when Wolfe spoke.

“Confound it, I remember! I put it back in the suitcase. Get it.”

I returned to my desk. Just as my fingers were reaching for the catches of the suitcase Wolfe’s voice snapped like a whip: “Mr. Shattuck! What’s the matter?”

“Matter? Nothing,” Shattuck’s reply came, but it wasn’t much like his voice.

I wheeled to look at him. His hands were grasping the arms of his chair, his jaw was clamped, and his eyes glittered with what seemed to be, from my distance, half fear and half fight.

“It’s adrenaline,” Wolfe told him. “You can’t control it. Perhaps you would have done better if you were a brave man, but obviously you’re a coward.” He reached down and pulled a drawer open, and his hand came up holding the grenade. “See, here it is. Just to reassure you. Calm yourself. Miss Bruce didn’t set a trap with it in one of the drawers, or in that suitcase, as you did yesterday in Colonel Ryder’s suitcase.” He put the grenade on his desk.

“Good God,” Fife said.

Lawson got up and stood there in front of his chair, stiff and erect as at attention.

Tinkham, who had been staring at Wolfe, transferred the stare to Shattuck, and stroked his mustache.

Shattuck neither moved nor spoke. He hadn’t recovered control, and he was waiting till he did. He may not have been brave, but he had a good set of brakes.

Wolfe rose to his feet. “General,” he said to Fife, “I’m afraid you’re out of this. Mr. Shattuck is not in the Army, so it’s for the civil authorities after all. I want him where he’ll feel free to talk, so he and I are going for a little ride in my car. Major Goodwin will drive us. If you gentlemen are thirsty, Fritz will serve you.” He turned. “Mr. Shattuck. You can tell me to go to the devil. You can run to your lawyers. You can, for the moment, do whatever you please. But I strongly advise you, if you know me at all, and from what you said yesterday you seem to have heard my name, to accept my invitation to talk it over with me.”

T
o Van Cortlandt Park,” Wolfe directed me from the rear seat.

If and when I write a book called
Interesting Trips I Have Taken
, that one will be the first on the list.

I was behind the wheel. I was violating Regulations by having three buttons on my jacket unfastened, for quick and easy access to the gun in my shoulder holster. That was on my own initiative. John Bell Shattuck was in front beside me, and had not been frisked. In the back was Wolfe, alone, making a more comical picture than usual, for the hand that was not gripping the strap at the side was gripping something else: the grenade. Whether he had brought it along for protection, or just to get it out of the house, I didn’t know; but he sure was hanging on to it. And why Van Cortlandt Park? He had never been anywhere near the place.

I headed for the 47th Street entrance to the West Side Highway.

“It was sensible for you to come along without protest, Mr. Shattuck,” Wolfe rumbled.

“I’m a sensible man,” Shattuck said. Apparently he was in running order again. There was no adrenaline in his voice. He had twisted around on the seat to be able
to face Wolfe. “Whatever you’re up to—I don’t know what you’re driving at. To accuse me of killing Harold Ryder was absolutely ridiculous, and you couldn’t possibly have been serious. But you said it before four witnesses. I came with you—away from them—because I’m willing to give you a chance to explain—if you can. But it will have to be damned good.”

“I’ll make it as good as I can,” Wolfe told him. We crossed the 42nd Street car tracks. “Archie. Go slower.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll try to keep to the essentials,” Wolfe said. “If you want a point elaborated, say so. First, I confess that most of what I told you and the others was a pack of lies.”

“Ah,” Shattuck said. “But you haul me off alone to admit it. I expect you to justify that. Let’s hear you.”

“I’ll specify—” Wolfe grunted as we hit a little bump.“—a few of the lies. I was not undecided as to the manner of Colonel Ryder’s death. One look at the remains of his suitcase told the story—by the way, I have it in my office. I got no letter of instructions from General Carpenter, though I did talk with him on the phone. He’s coming to New York this afternoon and will dine with me this evening. But most of the lies concerned Miss Bruce. Practically everything I said about her was untrue. She was under no suspicion. Colonel Ryder was preparing no report that could have injured her. I had not arranged with the police to follow her when she left my house. The truth is, Miss Bruce is a confidential assistant of General Carpenter, reporting directly to him. He told me last evening that she’s worth any two men on his staff. I doubt that, but she did show some intelligence about the suitcase. Seeing it
only from a distance of several feet, from the door of the anteroom, she saw the significance of its condition.”

“What the devil was the significance of its condition?” Shattuck demanded.

“Now, now,” Wolfe reproached him. “I beg you, none of those transparent implications of innocence. Miss Bruce was also clever enough to get the suitcase out of there, to show to General Carpenter. He had sent her to New York because of indications that someone in that unit was involved in the suspected transactions regarding industrial secrets. It was she who typed that anonymous letter to you—incidentally, you shouldn’t have let it scare you like that. No one had the slightest suspicion of you. The same letter was sent to some thirty people—key people in legislative and administrative positions. They were merely fishing. It was different with Colonel Ryder. There was no proof, but he was under observation, and that’s why Miss Bruce was assigned to his office from Washington. He may have suspected something of the sort, and that was a factor in his decision to go to General Carpenter and make a clean breast of it. Another—”

“By God!” Shattuck cut in. “That’s dirty! That’s lousy! If you want to make damn fool accusations about me, and stand the consequences, that’s all right, I’m here, and I can take care of myself, and I will. But Harold’s dead. To start a dirty lie like that about a dead man—”

“Stop it,” Wolfe said curtly. “You’ll have me thinking you’re not only a coward but a fool. To try to impress me with that rubbish! You know quite well why you came and got in this car with me: to find out how much I know. Then let me talk. Speak only if you want to say something. Where was I? Oh, Miss Bruce. That will do for her. I may mention that Lieutenant
Lawson is also on special assignment from General Carpenter, as a sort of errand boy for Miss Bruce. In that capacity he may possibly be satisfactory. I wouldn’t be telling you these things, Army secrets in a way, if there were any chance of your passing them on. But there’s no risk, since in an hour from now, less than that I should say, you won’t be alive.”

Shattuck stared at him, speechless.

We were rolling along the West Side Highway. I was myself sufficiently startled to look aside at Shattuck, and returned to my driving just in time to jerk away from kissing the curb.

“Are you crazy?” Shattuck found his voice to ask.

“No, sir,” Wolfe said. “I did state an overwhelming probability as a certainty. We all do that.”

“I won’t be alive? An hour from now?” Shattuck laughed, and it wasn’t very hollow at that. “This is incredible. I suppose you’re going to threaten to blow me to pieces with that grenade unless I sign a confession to anything you tell me to. Absolutely unbelievable!”

“Not like that. The grenade, yes. I brought it along for you to kill yourself with.”

“By God—you
are
crazy!”

Wolfe shook his head. “Don’t shout at me. Keep your wits. You’re going to need them. Archie, where are you going?”

“Leaving the highway,” I told him, “for the park entrance. Then what?”

“Secluded roads in the park.”

“Yes, sir.” We rolled on down the incline.

“The reason you shouted,” Wolfe went on to Shattuck, “was because the first glimmer of a fact darted into your brain—the fact that you are fighting for your life. That was a mean trick I played you in my office.
You had seen the grenade on my desk. You were told that a person who thought I was endangering her safety had been in there alone for seven minutes, had departed, and the grenade had disappeared. The most vivid impression your mind held at that moment was the memory of what you yourself had done the day before with a grenade like that one. When Major Goodwin began pulling drawers open—the grenade trap, just like the one you had set,
might
have been in any of them—control of your involuntary processes was out of the question. When I told him to open the suitcase—it’s a pity you couldn’t have seen yourself. It was magnificent—better, really, than if you had leaped screaming to your feet and fled from the room.

“Archie, confound it, can’t you see a hole?

“What you want, of course, is to learn how much I know. How much General Carpenter knows. I’m not going to tell you. You got in this car with me to match your wits against mine. Abandon the attempt. If we met on equal terms, there’s no telling what the score would be, but we don’t. I am free and safe; you are a doomed man. You’re cornered, with no space to maneuver.”

“I’m letting you talk,” Shattuck said. “You’re talking drivel.”

We entered Van Cortlandt Park.

Wolfe ignored his remark. “A crook is not always a fool,” Wolfe said. “As you know, Mr. Shattuck, there are men in high places in public life, even as high as yours, who are venal, dishonest and betrayers of trust, and who yet will die peacefully in their beds, surrounded with tokens of respect, their chief regret being that they will be unable to read the glowing obituaries the following day. You might have been one of them. From the tremendous backlog of credit for services
performed which you were piling up among wealthy and influential persons, by these crooked operations you were supervising and protecting from attack, you might even have succeeded in reaching the limit of your ambition.

“But you had bad luck. You encountered me. I have two things. First, I have ingenuity. I used it today, with the result that you are here with me now. Second, I have pertinacity. I have decided that the simplest way out of this business is for you to die. I am counting on you to agree with me. If you don’t, if you try to fight it out, try to go back to life, you’re lost. There is not now sufficient evidence to convict you of the murder of Colonel Ryder. Perhaps there never will be; but there will be enough to indict you and put you on trial. I’ll see to that. If you are acquitted, I shall only have begun. I shall never stop. There is the murder of Captain Cross. There are all the hidden transactions and convolutions of your traffic in the industrial secrets entrusted to our Army to help fight the war.

“Now that I know who you are and know where to look, how long will it take me to get enough to impeach you, drag you into court, condemn you? A week? A month? A year? What about your associates, when they see the lightning about to strike and smash you? Colonel Ryder will never testify against you, you saw to that, but there are others. How about them, Mr. Shattuck? Can you trust them further than you could trust your old friend Ryder when we get to them and they are ready to break? You can’t kill all of them, you know.”

Shattuck was no longer looking at Wolfe. His body was still twisted around on the seat, but from the corner of my eye I could see that his gaze was aimed straight past my chin, on through the open window.

“Stop the car, Archie,” Wolfe said.

I swerved to the grassy shoulder and stopped. We were on one of the secondary roads in the higher section of the park, and, on a weekday, there wasn’t a soul in sight. To the left was woods, sloping down; to the right was a stretch of meadow with scattered trees, gently rising. All it needed was a herd of cows to make it a remote spot in Vermont.

“Is this a dead-end road?” Wolfe asked.