“Hold it.” I turned to Wolfe. “I suppose I go for a drive?”
He shuddered. I presume he calculated that there must be at least a thousand jolts between 35th Street and Brewster, and ten thousand cars to meet and pass. The lurking dangers of the night. He nodded at me.
I told Fred, “Go on back. Keep Gebert, and don’t let them in. I’ll be there as soon as I can make it.”
Chapter 13
It was a quarter to ten by the time I got away and around the corner to the garage on Tenth Avenue and was sailing down the ramp in the roadster, and it was 11:13 when I rolled into the village of Brewster and turned left — following the directions I had heard Helen Frost give Saul Panzer. An hour and twenty-eight minutes wasn’t bad, counting the curves on the Pines Bridge Road and the bum stretch between Muscoot and Croton Falls.
I followed the pavement a little over a mile and then turned left again onto a dirt road. It was as narrow as a bigot’s mind, and I got in the ruts and stayed there. My lights showed me nothing but the still bare branches of trees and shrubbery close on both sides, and I began to think that Fred’s jabber about the wilds hadn’t been so dumb. There was an occasional house, but they were dark and silent, and I went on bumping so long, a sharp curve to the left and one to the right and then to the left again, that I began wondering if I was on the wrong road. Then, finally, I saw a light ahead, stuck to the ruts around another curve, and there I was.
Besides a few rapid comments from Wolfe before I started, I had trotted the brain around for a survey of the situation during the drive, and there didn’t seem to be anything very critical about it except that it would be nice to keep the news of Gebert’s expedition to ourselves for a while. They were welcome to go in and look for the red box all they wanted to, since Saul, with the whole afternoon to work undisturbed, hadn’t found it. But Gebert was worth a little effort, not to mention the item that we had our reputation to consider. So I stopped the roadster alongside the two cars that were parked at the edge of the road and leaned out and yelled:
“Come and move this bus! It’s blocking the gate and I want to turn in!”
A gruff shout came from the porch: “Who the hell are you?” I called back:
“Haile Selassie. Okay, I’ll move it myself. If it makes a ditch, don’t blame me.”