“Look here,” I said. “I have the number of that check. That dynamite is in the trunk. It’s liable to go off any minute and kill a lot of people. I can trace that check, but it will take time, and you better tell me quick where you left the trunk.”
“All right,” Holt answered, and said that he had sent it to a storage warehouse whose office was somewhere near 40th Street and Seventh Avenue. Two minutes later Lieut. Barnitz and I were out of the jail and in a motor bound for New York.
It took just 28 minutes to cover the 20 miles to Fifty-Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, and we turned south to the section around Fortieth Street. We found the office of the storage company—empty. The warehouse itself was at 342 West 38th Street, and we hurried over there, arriving simultaneously with the detectives who had been tracing the check number from the Pennsylvania station. An old watchman was in charge who knew nothing whatever of the records of the office, but who turned bright green when we told him what we were after. While Detectives Barnitz, Coy, Murphy, Sterett, Walsh and Fenelly went up into the recesses of the warehouse to hunt for the trunk, I called headquarters.
“Commissioner Woods just called and wants you to call him at the Harvard Club,” the office said. I did so, and reported our progress.
“Get that trunk as fast you can and find out exactly what’s in it,” said the Commissioner. “Washington just called me to say that Governor Colquitt down in Dallas just wired them. He says Holt’s wife got a letter from Holt dated July 2 saying that he’s put dynamite on a ship now at sea, and that it will sink on the seventh!”
On the fifth floor of the great dark barn they discovered the trunk, with a dozen others on top of it. There were no lights, and it was necessary to roll it over, haul it out, snake it across other piles, and carry it down four flights of steep stairs in the dark to the office. Barnitz picked up an axe and hacked the lock away. He lifted the cover, and there we found one hundred and thirty-four sticks of dynamite—one hundred in their original box, and the rest packed in small spaces between hammers, nails, bolts, and other tools, several bottles of sulphuric and nitric acid, and 197 detonating caps—a pretty package to trundle down four flights of dark stairs and open with an axe!
Fifty sticks of the original 200 were unaccounted for. I telephoned the report to the Commissioner, and followed it to the Harvard Club, in 44th Street, while Barnitz telephoned for the inspector of combustibles to come and take possession of the explosives. The Commissioner, with Guy Scull, were sitting in the lounge, and I was reporting in greater detail when the Commissioner was called to the telephone. He returned a moment later, and his first remark was this:
“Holt is dead at Mineola!”
And there went our case.
The first wild report from Mineola had it that Holt had been shot by a German. The international consequences of the case, which had been hovering just out of reach for the past four days, now seemed certain. A nation which was still bitterly angry over the recent Lusitania sinking would certainly not brook the violation of its Capitol and the attempted assassination of one of its chief figures by a German agent, and if Holt had been shot by a German, it was more than likely that he had been killed to prevent a further confession which would implicate the Imperial German Government. These thoughts passed through our minds as we motored back across the Queensboro Bridge, and retraced the route Barnitz and I had just traveled.