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.