The Last Drive

by Rex Stout

  “Then you admit the theory of suicide?”

  “Merely because as a possibility it cannot rightfully be excluded. Before Fred and Harry I rejected it, not to wound their sensibilities; and to me also the thought of self-destruction in connection with Carson Phillips is—well—distasteful. But reason requires me to admit it. The point is, the motive.”

  “There is nothing here?” Rankin waved his hand about the room.

  “Nothing. Everything is in the best possible condition, with the exception of one unfortunate financial deal, and that was hardly a serious inconvenience; it certainly was not vital enough to serve as the cause of tragedy. There is a lawsuit on with an estate in Connecticut; nothing serious.”

  “What was the financial deal? A speculation?”

  “Yes. Against my advice. United Traffic. Of course, you know the circumstances; the bottom fell out of it two weeks ago. I just got rid of the last of it yesterday; you see what it amounted to.”

  The lawyer pointed to an entry in one of the books before him, on which the ink was scarcely dry:

  2000 United Traffic 57 $114,000.00

  1000 United Traffic 56 56,000.00

  2000 United Traffic 52 104,000.00

  “He bought around a hundred and twenty, so the loss amounted to something over three hundred thousand,” Mawson explained. “But, of course, it was only a temporary inconvenience.”

  “Of course.” Rankin agreed. “Mighty imprudent, though, for Carson Phillips—but financial difficulties are beside the question. There is nothing else?”

  “No. The best way, perhaps, would be to look yourself, but I know every paper in the room, and there is nothing. That isn’t to be wondered at. If there were anything in Carson’s life that might have led—as it did lead—to this, he wouldn’t have left evidence of it lying around where even I could see it. No, if my theory is correct, Mr. Rankin, the mystery of our friend’s death isn’t going to be easy to solve. For my part, I am not even convinced that it came from that little green spot that Wortley showed us. I’ll have to have better proof than that little spot on his skin.”

  “The symptoms were conclusive.”

  “In a way. Second-hand. Wortley didn’t get there till it was over.”

  “The examination of the organs will settle it.”

  “By Wortley?”

  “Yes. He’s at it now.”

  “Of course, that will settle it,” agreed the lawyer. “I don’t dispute the probable correctness of his diagnosis, but I wait for proof. Anyway, you have my theory. You understand my position in the matter. As the representative of the Colonel’s heirs, I feel it my duty to defend them against what seems to me unjust suspicion. I thought it best to be entirely frank with you . . .”

  “Then you think I am merely wasting my time here at Greenlawn?”

  “I do. Not that I regard the time as particularly valuable. I doubt if any direct evidence will be discoverable anywhere. It is my opinion that if the mystery is solved it will be only after a most minute and thorough examination of the Colonel’s life. I feel that the roots of this tragedy are buried somewhere deep in the past.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right, Mr. Mawson.” The detective got to his feet. “But as you say, in that case the present time is of no peculiar value, and I believe I’ll use some of it snooping around here just to satisfy an idea I’ve got. You’ve no objection to my looking through the safe?”

  For reply the lawyer handed him the bunch of keys to the several compartments. Rankin prosecuted his search in a leisurely and deliberate manner, still his eye was alert. Mawson turned to his books and resumed his writing.

  The search revealed nothing. In these papers and books that the detective examined the simple straightforwardness of Carson Phillips’s life was revealed logically and in order, like the lucid march of a geometrical proposition to its Q.E.D. The mistakes of his youth were chronicled in letters of thirty-five years ago by his father; the brilliancy of his early army career in medals and copies of dispatches; his one affair of the heart in a bundle of blue-tinted envelopes; the generosity and charity of his maturity in innumerable letters and receipts and documents of various kinds. Here, too, were copies of affidavits, since proven forgeries, on which a famous breach of promise suit had been based; Rankin knew of it, though it had been before his time. The only note of hardness was a reminder here and there of the sternness with which the Colonel had insisted on the same standard of strict loyalty in others as he imposed on himself. To him treachery and deceit had been the deadly, unforgivable sin; his detestation of these qualities had at times smothered his charity.

  Rankin had about finished when a servant appeared at the door with a message that Doctor Wortley wished to see him in the library. He went at once, leaving Mawson still poring over the account books. In the hall he saw the two Adams boys at the foot of the great staircase; Fred had returned from the Mortons, then. They were talking in low tones with Mrs. Graves, the old housekeeper, whose eyes were red with weeping.

  Doctor Wortley was alone in the library, standing by a window overlooking the garden. As he turned at the detective’s entrance the latter saw at once by the expression of his face that he had made some new discovery. Immediately and hastily he came forward, holding out some small object in his hand.

  “I’ve probed,” he said, abruptly. “See what I found.”

  Rankin took the small object and examined it. It was a tiny steel needle, little more than an inch in length, with the blunt end filed off square; there was no eye. Rankin tried the sharpness of the point against his finger.

  “Take care!” called the Doctor sharply, stopping him. “There may be poison left on it.”

  Dusk was coming on, and the detective moved nearer the light of the window. “So this is what did it,” he breathed slowly. “A little thing like that to bring a man like Carson Phillips to the ground! You found it beneath that spot on the abdomen?”

  The Doctor nodded. “Straight in, buried half an inch beneath the skin, but pointing a little upward toward the breast bone. It must have entered at that angle, for there was nothing to deflect its course. Its velocity was not very high, or a sharp pointed needle like that would have penetrated much deeper.”

  “You say it pointed upwards? Are you sure of that?”

  “Absolutely. An angle of about twenty degrees from the horizontal.”

  The detective seated himself and thoughtfully turned the needle over and over in his hand. During a long silence his brow was wrinkled and his eyes half closed in speculation.

  “It is incomprehensible that it should have been pointing upwards,” he said at last, turning to the Doctor.

  Admitting that it was difficult to understand, the other maintained that such was the fact. “To tell the truth,” he added, “it takes a load from my mind. In spite of my conviction to the contrary, I have been forced to confess inwardly that it might have been suicide. This removes that possibility. That needle was shot from a gun of some kind—possibly a blow-gun—it must have been noiseless—”

  “Undoubtedly. A report would have been heard. But that doesn’t explain—” The detective got up from his chair. “See. You stand there. I here. Now how would it be possible, with any kind of a gun, for me to fire that needle at you so it would enter your breast pointing upwards?”

  “If you were on the ground, and a little closer—” the Doctor suggested.

  “But I’m not. Remember, concealment was out of the question. There was no place for it.”

  “It might have been deflected by something—a button on his shirt, for instance.”

  “A bullet, yes. But hardly a thin sharp needle like this. The deuce of it is, we can’t know the exact moment it happened. It’s evident that the Colonel didn’t feel the thing at all when it struck him. You say it would take from five to fifteen minutes for the poison to work.
Then it might have been anywhere from the fourth green to where he took his second on the fifth. What I can’t understand is how it could possibly have been done without one of those men seeing it—or one of the other two, if one of the three is the murderer.”

  Again the detective thoughtfully turned the needle over in his fingers, as though he would extract the stubborn secret somehow from the slender piece of steel. There was a long silence. Doctor Wortley, wandering to the closed fireplace, found himself regarding the Colonel’s golf bag, left standing there by Harry Adams on their arrival at Greenlawn. The Doctor took out the driver and passed his hand slowly up and down the shaft. “Poor old Carson, he’s had his last drive,” he breathed. At that moment the dinner bell rang.

  “You found it beneath that spot on the abdomen?” The Doctor nodded.

  At the table the subject of Fred’s visit to the Mortons was brought into the conversation by a remark of Harry’s and the elder of the two young men defended himself by explaining that he had had an engagement to play tennis with Dora Morton that afternoon, and had driven over merely to break it. Furthermore, he announced his intention of remaining away from her for a time, out of respect for his uncle’s memory. Fraser Mawson and Doctor Wortley signified their approval of this. Nobody ate much, and the conversation was by fits and starts. Fred, grave and thoughtful, seemed a different person from the young man who had so gaily chaffed his two elders only that morning; Harry seemed to be irritable and nervous, to an extent that caused the old doctor to turn a solicitous eye on him. At the end, over the coffee, the Doctor announced that in accordance with the boys’ request he had made the preliminary arrangements over the telephone for the funeral to be held on Monday morning; the services were to be military. The young men acquiesced with silent nods.

  Afterwards—and it was quite dark when the meal was finished, for they had not sat down till late—Rankin and the Doctor went to the piazza with their cigars, while Mawson, observing that he wanted to have everything straightened out that night, returned to his books and papers in the little office at the end of the hall.

  Half an hour later the detective, having left the Doctor below on the piazza, made his way upstairs to the room at the front of the house where the blinds had been closed since early in the afternoon. The door was shut. He turned the knob softly and entered; then, as he heard the sound of smothered sobbing from the further side of the room, where a dim light burned above the motionless form on the bed, he would have turned back. But already he had been seen: the young man who was kneeling there had lifted his tearstained face to gaze at the intruder. It was Fred Adams.

  “I’m sorry,” Rankin apologized. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “It’s all right, sir. It doesn’t matter.” The young man barely managed to control his voice.

  Rankin moved across to the bed and stood there looking down at the face to Colonel Phillips, set in death. The other remained on his knees beside him.

  “I haven’t prayed for ten years,” said the young man presently, in a voice now almost calm. “And I can’t now. I don’t know what to pray for. I suppose you think I’m a baby, Mr. Rankin, but you don’t know . . . Only yesterday I had a quarrel with him . . . I said things . . . I’d give anything in the world to have those words back. And he was so good. He let me have my way. It was about Dora—Miss Morton. He was going with me to see her tomorrow.”

  Rankin looked at him, and nodded. “Then it’s no wonder you feel badly, my boy. Your uncle was a noble and good man. Tears for him are nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “No, sir. I know how good he was. He was father and mother to Harry and me. Better than we deserved. And we didn’t—we treated him—”

  The voice broke again, and silence followed. Rankin felt vaguely uncomfortable, and after a minute he turned and tiptoed silently out of the room.

  He left the house by a side door and strolled into the garden. The night was cool, with a fresh breeze from the east, and the light of a full moon shed its silvery radiance everywhere. The fragrance of the blossoms, stirred by the breeze, filled the air; the soft music of the fountain came from the terraces at the other end. Rankin, lighting a cigar, wandered about the gravel paths for a time, and finally sat down on a bench in the dark shadow of a great spreading laca bush.

  His thoughts were for the most part confused. Try as he might, he could fasten on no theory that would fit the circumstances of Colonel Phillips’s mysterious death; he could not even evolve a satisfactory explanation of the manner in which the crime had been committed. For the twentieth time he pictured to himself the scene on the golf links that morning, trying to discover some possible combination of events that would answer to the known facts. He, himself, had seen the foursome drive off from the first tee. He went over again the answers of the Colonel’s caddie to his questions. He tried to deduce the solution from what was known; he tried to arrive at it by elimination; he tried to visualize it. Without success. His brain whirled. Finally he rose to his feet with a sigh, pulling out his watch, and was surprised to see that it was past eleven o’clock. Probably the others had gone to bed, with the exception of Doctor Wortley, who was to sit up with the dead. He had been in the garden over two hours. A glance showed him that all the windows on that side were dark.

  He turned toward the house, but before he had taken two steps he saw something that caused him to draw back hastily into the shadow of the laca bush. Someone was moving on the piazza, and this someone suddenly leaped over the rail onto the driveway and stood there in the moonlight glancing furtively about him in every direction. It was the furtiveness in that look that caused the detective to draw back.

  Suddenly the man turned and moved swiftly down the driveway. Rankin thought it looked like one of the Adams boys. He waited till there was a hundred yards between them, then followed, being careful to keep on the soft turf at the edge of the drive. The man ahead moved so swiftly that he was forced to trot to keep up. Down the length of the driveway he was led, until finally the great entrance gate was reached; there the man turned to the right without hesitation and continued on down the road. A moment later Rankin emerged from the gateway and, seeking the shadow of the trees along the opposite side, followed warily. The man ahead kept to the center of the road, full in the moonlight, pounding along at a rapid walk.

  They had gone perhaps two hundred yards from the gate when the detective, happening to glance back over his shoulder, saw the figure of still another man emerge from the entrance of Greenlawn and turn up the road toward him.

  He, too, was being followed!

  CHAPTER IV

  As Rankin turned he saw the man in the rear dodge hastily into the shadow of a tree. With a mental shrug of the shoulders the detective turned again and strode on. His chief concern was with the man in front; if the other came along, so much the better.

  In the bright moonlight the straight macadam road stretched ahead like a pale silver ribbon, embroidered at more or less regular intervals with the bunchy shadows of bordering trees; and so still was the nocturnal countryside that the footsteps of the man two hundred yards in front rang sharply out, staccato. Rankin, keeping to the turf at the edge of the macadam, followed noiselessly. An automobile passed, honk-honking at the man in the road, its lamps piercing the moonlight with two cones of yellow fire; and they had gone perhaps a mile when a dog came out from a gate and ran barking after the pedestrian. Rankin crossed to the other side of the road to escape the dog’s observation, and got safely by.

  At the crossings, a little further on, the man turned to the east. This, Rankin knew, was the detour to Brockton, three miles away. He kept straining his eyes ahead in an effort to guess the identity of the man he was following, but all he could certainly discern was that the youthfulness of his figure and gait made it probable that it was one of the Adams boys, if anyone who belonged at Greenlawn.

  A mile beyond the crossing a quick glance over the detec
tive’s shoulder showed him the man in the rear trudging doggedly along. Thus the queer procession wound its way along the country road. Now and then, even at that late hour, an automobile whizzed by in one direction or the other; in the tonneau of a big touring car Rankin fancied that he recognized Harrison Matlin, president of the Corona Country Club, which was not improbable. Finally lights shone ahead, and the houses began to come closer together; they were entering the village of Brockton.

  Rankin quickened his step and drew a little closer to the man in front, who kept straight ahead as one who knew where he was going and wanted to get there. Reaching the main street of the town, he turned swiftly to the right and went on past a block of business buildings to the next corner, where stood an old three-story frame hotel, the only one in the place. It was past midnight now, and save for one or two stragglers the street was deserted, with the bright moonlight over everything, like sunshine strained through a silver cloth. In front of the hotel stood a racy-looking roadster. Rankin was on the heels of his man as he sprang up the steps of the hotel porch and entered the door; but there the detective stopped and tiptoed to a window a little distance to the right, through which he could observe the interior.

  The man was indeed one of the Adams brothers: Harry, the younger. He advanced a few steps into the room, a typical country hotel office, with wooden chairs and a fly-specked cigar case, then stopped and turned at sound of a voice.

  “Harry! Thank God!”