I had a funny mixed feeling. I was surprised, I was even flabbergasted, that is true. But it is also that the surprise was canceled out by its exact opposite; that I had been expecting this all along. They say that the conscious mind is the upper tenth and everything else is down below. I don’t know how they got their percentages, but if they’re correct I suppose nine-tenths of me had been doing the expecting, and it broke through into the upper layer when Ben Dykes put it into words.
Wolfe darted a glance at me. I lifted my brows and shook my head. He nodded and lifted his glass for the last of his beer.
“That makes it different,” said Sperling, not grief-stricken. “That seems to settle it.”
“Look, Mr. Archer,” Lieutenant Noonan offered. “It’s only a hit-and-run now, and you’re a busy man and so is Dykes. This Goodwin thinks he’s tough. Why don’t I just take him down to the barracks?”
Archer, skipping him, asked Dykes, “How good is it? Enough to bank on?”
“Plenty,” Dykes declared. “It all has to go to the laboratory, but there’s blood on the under side of the fender, and a button with a piece of his jacket wedged between the axle and the spring, and other things. It’s good all right.”
Archer looked at me. “Well?”
I smiled at him. “I couldn’t put it any better than you did, Mr. Archer. My contribution is entirely negative. If that car killed Rony I was somewhere else at the time. I wish I could be more help, but that’s the best I can do.”
“I’ll take him to the barracks,” Noonan offered again.
Again he was ignored. Archer turned to Wolfe. “You own the car, don’t you? Have you got anything to say?”
“Only that I don’t know how to drive, and that if Mr. Goodwin is taken to a barracks, as this puppy suggests, I shall go with him.”
The DA came back to me. “Why don’t you come clean with it? We can wind it up in ten minutes and get out of here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said courteously. “If I tried to fake it at a minute’s notice I might botch it up and you’d catch me in a lie.”
“You won’t tell us how it happened?”
“No I won’t. I can’t.”
Archer stood up and spoke to Sperling. “Is there another room I can take him to? I have to be in court at two o’clock and I’d like to finish this if possible.”
“You can stay here,” Sperling said, leaving his chair, eager to co-operate. He looked at Wolfe. “I see you’ve finished your beer. If you’ll come—”
Wolfe put his hands on the chair arms, got himself erect, took three steps, and was facing Archer. “As you say, I own the car. If Mr. Goodwin is taken away without first notifying me, and without a warrant, this affair will be even more regrettable than it is now. I don’t blame you for wanting to talk with him; you don’t know him as well as I do; but I owe it to you to say that you will be wasting valuable time.”
He marched to the door, with Sperling at his heels, and was gone.
Dykes asked, “Will you want me?”
“I might,” Archer said. “Sit down.”
Dykes moved to the chair Wolfe had vacated, sat, took out a notebook and pencil, inspected the pencil point, and settled back. Meanwhile Noonan walked across and deposited himself in the chair Sperling had used. He hadn’t been invited and he hadn’t asked if he was wanted. Naturally I was pleased, since if he had acted otherwise I would have had to take the trouble to change my opinion of him.
Archer, his lips puckered, was giving me a good look. He spoke. “I don’t understand you, Goodwin. I don’t know why you don’t see that your position is impossible.”
“That’s easy,” I told him. “For exactly the same reason that you don’t.”
“That I don’t see it’s impossible? But I do.”
“Like hell you do. If you did you’d be on your way by now, leaving me to Ben Dykes or one of your assistants. You’ve got a busy schedule ahead of you, but here you still are. May I make a statement?”
“By all means. That’s just what I want you to do.”
“Fine.” I clasped my hands behind my head. “There’s no use going over what I did and when. I’ve already told it three times and it’s on the record. But with this news, that it was Mr. Wolfe’s car that killed him, you don’t have to bother any more with what anybody was doing, even me, eight o’clock or nine or ten. You know exactly when he was killed. It couldn’t have been before nine-thirty, because that’s when he got out of the cab at the entrance. It couldn’t have been after nine-fifty, because that’s when I got in the car to drive to Chappaqua. Actually, it’s even narrower, say between nine-thirty-two and nine-forty-six — only fourteen minutes. During that time I was up in the bedroom with Mr. Wolfe. Where were the others? Because of course it’s all in the family now, since our car was used. Someone here did it, and during that fourteen minutes. You’ll want to know where the key to the ignition was. In the car. I don’t remove it when I’m parking on the private grounds of a friend or a client. I did remove it, however, when I got back from Chappaqua, since it might be there all night. I didn’t know how long it would take Sperling to decide to let go of forty grand. You will also want to know if the engine was warm when I got in and started it. I don’t know. It starts like a dream, warm or cold. Also it is June. Also, if all it had done was roll down the drive and kill Rony, and turn around at the entrance and come back again, and there wasn’t time for much more than that, it wouldn’t have got warmed up to speak of.”
I considered a moment. “That’s the crop.”
“You can eat that timetable,” Noonan said in his normal voice, which you ought to hear. “Try again, bud. He wasn’t killed in that fifteen minutes. He was killed at nine-fifty-two, when you went down the drive on your way to Chappaqua. Do your statement over.”
I turned my head to get his eyes. “Oh, you here?”
Archer said to Dykes, “Ask him some questions, Ben.”
I had known Ben Dykes sort of off and on for quite a while, and as far as I knew, he was neither friend nor enemy. Most of the enforcers of the law, both in and out of uniform, in the suburban districts, have got an inferiority complex about New York detectives, either public or private, but Dykes was an exception. He had been a Westchester dick for more than twenty years, and all he cared about was doing his work well enough to hang onto his job, steering clear of mudholes, and staying as honest as he could.
He kept after me, with Archer cutting in a few times, for over an hour. In the middle of it a colleague brought sandwiches and coffee in to us, and we went ahead between bites. Dykes did as well as he could, and he was an old hand at it, but even if he had been one of the best, which he wasn’t, there was only one direction he could get at me from, and from there he always found me looking straight at him. He was committed to one simple concrete fact: that going down the drive on my way to Chappaqua I had killed Rony, and I matched it with the simple concrete fact that I hadn’t. That didn’t allow much leeway for a fancy grilling, and the only thing that prolonged it to over an hour was their earnest drive to wrap it up quick and cart it away from Stony Acres.
Archer looked at his wrist watch for the tenth time. A glance at mine showed me 1:20.
“The only thing to do,” he said, “is get a warrant. Ben, you’d better phone — no, one of the men can ride down with me and bring it back.”
“I’ll go,” Noonan offered.
“We’ve got plenty of men,” Dykes said pointedly, “since it looks like we’re through here.”
Archer had got up. “You leave us no other course, Goodwin,” he told me. “If you try to leave the county before the warrant comes you’ll be stopped.”
“I’ve got his car key,” Dykes said.
“This is so damned unnecessary!” Archer complained, exasperated. He sat down again and leaned forward at me. “For God’s sake, haven’t I made it plain enough? There’s no possibility of jeopardy for a major crime, and very little of any jeopardy at all. It was night. You didn’t see him until you were on top of him. When you got out and went to him he was dead. You were rattled, and you had an urgent confidential phone call to make. You didn’t want to leave his body there in the middle of the drive, so you dragged it across the grass to a bush. You drove to Chappaqua, made the phone call, and drove back here. You entered the house, intending to phone a report of the accident, and were met by Miss Sperling, who was concerned about the absence of her sister. You went out with her to look for the sister, and you found her. Naturally you didn’t want to tell her, abruptly and brutally, of Rony’s death. Within a short time you went to the house and told Wolfe about it, and he told Sperling, and Sperling notified the police. You were understandably reluctant to admit that it was your car that had killed him, and you could not bring yourself to do so until the course of the investigation showed you that it was unavoidable. Then, to me, to the highest law officer of the county, you stated the facts — all of them.”
Archer stretched another inch forward. “If those facts are set down in a statement, and you sign it, what will happen? You can’t even be charged with leaving the scene of an accident, because you didn’t — you’re here and haven’t left here. I’m the District Attorney. It will be up to me to decide if any charge shall be lodged against you, and if so what charge. What do you think I’ll decide? Considering all the circumstances, which you’re as familiar with as I am, what would any man of sense decide? Whom have you injured, except one man by an unavoidable accident?”
Archer turned to the table, found a pad of paper, got a pen from his pocket, and offered them to me. “Here. Write it down and sign it, and let’s get it over with. You’ll never regret it, Goodwin, you have my word for that.”
I smiled at him, “Now I am sorry, Mr. Archer, I really am.”
“Don’t be sorry! Just write it down and sign it.”
I shook my head. “I guess you’ll have to get the warrant, but you’d better count ten. I’m glad you weren’t peddling a vacuum cleaner or you’d have sold me. But I won’t buy signing such a statement. If all it had to have in it was what you said — hitting him and dragging him off the road, and going on to make the phone call, and coming back and helping Miss Sperling hunt her sister, and getting the cops notified but not mentioning the fact that it was me that ran over him — if that was all there was to it I might possibly oblige you, in spite of the fact that it wouldn’t be true, just to save trouble all around. But one detail that you didn’t include would be too much for me.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The car. I’m in the detective business. I’m supposed to know things. I’m certainly supposed to know that if you run over a man and squash him the way Rony was squashed, the car will have so much evidence on it that a blindfolded Boy Scout could get enough to cinch it. Yet I drove the car back here and parked it, and played innocent all night and all morning, so Ben Dykes could walk in on us at noon and announce aha, it was Nero Wolfe’s car! That I will not buy. It would get me a horse laugh from the Battery to Spuyten Duyvil. I would never live it down. And speaking of a warrant, I don’t think any judge or jury would buy it either.”
“We could make it—”
“You couldn’t make it anything but what it is. I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t believe Ben Dykes has bought it, and I doubt very much if you have. Ben may not like me much, I don’t know, but he knows damn well I’m not a sap. He went after me as well as he could because you told him to and you’re the boss. As for you, I can’t say, except that I don’t blame you a bit for not liking to start fires under people like the Sperlings. If nothing else, they hire only the best lawyers. As for this bird in uniform named Noonan, you may be a church member and I’d better keep within bounds.”
“You see what he’s like, sir,” Noonan said under restraint. “I told you he thinks he’s tough. If you had let me take him to the barracks—”
“Shut up!” Archer squeaked.
It may not be fair to call it a squeak, but it was close to it. He was harassed and I felt sorry for him. In addition to everything else, he was going to be late at court, as he realized when he took another look at his watch. He ignored me and spoke to Dykes.
“I’ve got to go, Ben. Take care of these papers. If anyone wants to leave the place you can’t hold them, the way it stands now, but ask them not to leave the jurisdiction.”
“What about Wolfe and Goodwin?”
“I said anyone. We can’t hold them without a warrant, and that will have to wait. But the car stays where it is. Immobilize it and keep a guard on it. Have you tried it for prints?”
“No, sir, I thought—”
“Do so. Thoroughly. Keep a man at the car and one at the entrance, and you stay. You might have another try at the servants, especially the assistant gardener. Tell Mr. Sperling that I’ll be back some time between five and six — it depends on when court adjourns. Tell him I would appreciate it if they can all find it convenient to be here.”
He trotted out without even glancing at me, which I thought was uncalled for.
I grinned at Ben Dykes, strolled insolently out of the room, and went in search of Wolfe, to do a little mild bragging. I found him out at the greenhouse, inspecting some concrete benches with automatic watering.