To 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.
“No,” I told him, “it goes on over the hill and meets the north drive going east.”
“Then get out, please.” I did so. Wolfe handed me the grenade. “Take this thing.” He pointed up the rise, at right angles to the road, to a big tree in the meadow. “Put it on the ground there at the base of that tree. Next to the trunk.”
“Just lay it on the ground?”
“Yes.”
I obeyed. On my way across the meadow, a good hundred yards, and back again, I spent the time making book. I finally settled on even money. That may sound like shading it in Wolfe’s favor, but I was right there listening to it and seeing them. Wolfe’s voice alone was half of it. It was hard, dry, assured. It made it hard to believe that anything it said would happen, wouldn’t happen. The other half was the way Shattuck looked. Now that I wasn’t driving and could take him in, I realized that the jolt he had got in the office, utterly unexpected, had given him a shock that he hadn’t even begun to recover from. He was flat, taking the count, and Wolfe was doing the counting. When I reached the car Wolfe was saying:
“If so, you’re mistaken. I would prefer to fight it out with you, and so would General Carpenter. You don’t stand a chance. If you’re not put to death by the people of the state of New York, you’re done for anyhow. At a minimum, irremediable disgrace, the ruin of your career. But I don’t pretend that I brought you here, to this, as a favor to you. We would prefer to fight it out with you, but we’re working for our country, and our country is at war. To break a scandal like this, at this time, would do enormous damage. If it can possibly be avoided, it should be. I say that not to affect your decision, for I know it wouldn’t, but to explain why I took the trouble to bring you here.”
I opened the front door on Shattuck’s side, leaned against it to keep it from swinging shut, and told Wolfe, “There’s a flat rock there right near the tree. I put it on that.”
Shattuck looked at me as if he was going to say something, but nothing came out. He wet his lips with his tongue, kept on looking at me, and then wet his lips again.
Wolfe said harshly, “Get out of the car, Mr. Shattuck. It isn’t a long walk — not much more than down that corridor to Colonel Ryder’s office and back again. Thirty or forty seconds, that’s all. We’ll wait here. It will be an accident. I promise you that. The obituaries will be superb. All that any outstanding public figure could ask.”
Shattuck slowly turned to him. “You can’t expect me—” He didn’t have much voice, and in a moment he tried again. “You can’t expect me to—” He tried to swallow, and it wouldn’t work.
“Help him out, Archie.”
I took his elbow, and he came. His foot slipped off the running board, and I held him up, and led him away a couple of paces on the grass.
“He’s all right,” Wolfe said. “Come and get in.”
I climbed in the car and slammed the door and slid across behind the wheel. Wolfe spoke through his open window.
“If you change your mind, Mr. Shattuck, come back to the road, and we’ll take you back to town, and the fight will be on. I advise against it, but I doubt if my advice is needed. You’re a coward, Mr. Shattuck. I’ve had wide experience, and I’ve never known of a more cowardly murder than the murder of Colonel Ryder. Hang on to that as your bulwark. Say to yourself as you cross the meadow, ‘I’m a coward. I’m a coward and a murderer.’ That will carry you through, right to the end. You need something to take you that hundred yards, and since it can’t be courage, let it be your integrity, your deep inner necessity, as a coward. And this too, this knowledge, if you come back, you’re coming back to us — to me. I’ll be waiting.”
Wolfe stopped, because Shattuck was moving. He moved slowly, down the little incline into the drainage ditch, and then up the other side. In a few paces he began to go faster, and he kept on a straight line, straight for the tree. About halfway there his foot caught on something and he nearly fell, but then he was upright again and going faster.
Wolfe muttered at me, “Start the car. Go ahead. Slowly.”
I thought that was a mistake. Shattuck was sure to hear the sound of the engine, and there was no telling what that would do to him. But I did as I was told, as quietly as possible. I eased the car back onto the road and let it crawl uphill. It covered 100 yards, 200.
Wolfe’s voice came. “Stop.”
I shifted to neutral, set the hand brake, let the engine run, and turned in my seat to look back across the meadow. I caught one last brief glimpse of John Bell Shattuck, kneeling there by the tree, his torso bent over, and then—
Nothing got to us but the sound, and that wasn’t anything like as loud as I expected. I could see nothing in the air but the cloud of dust. But a moment later, four seconds maybe, there was a soft rustling noise as particles fell into the grass over a wide area; a noise like the big scattered raindrops that start a summer shower.
“Go ahead,” Wolfe said curtly. “Get to a telephone. Confound it, I’ve got to speak to Inspector Cramer.”