Not Quite Dead Enough (The Rex Stout Library)

I report what Wolfe said because I heard it and it registered somewhere in my mind but certainly not in the front of it. The front was occupied by something being registered not by hearing but by sight. My eye had just caught it. Behind Wolfe and off to the right-my right as I sat-was a picture on the wall, a painting on glass of the Washington Monument. (The picture, incidentally, was camouflage; it was actually a specially constructed cover for a panel through which you could view the office, practically all of it, from an alcove at the end of the hall next to the kitchen.) Just beyond the picture was a tier of shallow shelves holding various odds and ends, including mementos of cases we had worked on.

What had caught my eye was an object on the fourth shelf from the top that hadn’t been there before, and to call it odd would have been putting it mildly, since it was a memento of the case then in progress and still unresolved. It was the grenade that had exploded and killed Ryder, standing there on its base, just as it had formerly stood on my chest of drawers upstairs.

Of course that was merely the first startling idea that popped into my mind when my eye hit it. But the idea that instantly took its place was startling enough-the realization that it was another grenade exactly like the one Wolfe had ordered me to remove from the premises. I was positive it hadn’t been there when I left two hours previously.

I may have been shocked into staring at it for two seconds, but no longer, knowing as I did that staring at other people’s property wasn’t polite. Apparently neither Wolfe nor Shattuck was aware that I was experiencing a major sensation, for they went right on talking. As I say, I heard them.

Shattuck was saying, “How and why did it explode? Have you reached any conclusions?”

“No,” Wolfe said shortly. “It will be reported in the press as an accident, with no conjecture as to how it happened. General Fife says the safety pin on that grenade is jolt-proof, but expert opinions are by no means infallible. As for suicide, no mechanical difficulties certainly; he could simply have held the thing in his hand and pulled out the pin; but he would have had to want to. Did he? You might know about that; you were his son’s godfather; you called him Harold; did he want to die?”