“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.