Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [88]
“Making it more likely,” said McAdoo, “that a foreign power was behind this outrage. If that’s true, it must come out, and the enemy must be made to feel the full force of American might. Commissioner, your Captain can’t be fired—or suspended. It would look as if we feared war and feared the truth. They would say we’d deliberately eliminated the one man daring to ask what enemy of this country might have massacred our people and attacked our finances. Fall would undoubtedly cast it in that light, and the story would run in every newspaper in the country.”
“I make the decisions in this city,” said the Mayor.
“To be sure, Hylan, to be sure,” replied McAdoo. “I wouldn’t dream of interfering. Nor would I hesitate to urge the Attorney General to revisit your statements in opposition to the late war. The Sedition Act is still in force, I believe.”
Hylan looked stricken. “I don’t care about your Littlemore. Let him stay on. Just give me Smith.”
“And I don’t care about your Smith,” said McAdoo. “Let him go free.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” said Enright. “I seem to be the only one who cares about both Captain Littlemore and Mr. Smith. I’m not going to suspend Littlemore—”
“Good,” said McAdoo.
“And I’m not going to release Mr. Smith,” said Enright.
“What?” said Hylan.
“You have until Monday, Captain,” replied Enright.
“I’m sorry?” asked Littlemore.
“To obtain probable cause against Smith, if that’s in fact his name.”
“But today’s Friday, Mr. Enright,” said Littlemore.
“And you’ve had Mr. Smith in jail since last Friday, when he should have been in a hospital. By Monday you will have had ten days to collect evidence against him, Littlemore, which is more than adequate. Either you come up with hard evidence by Monday, or you let him go. Will that do, Hylan?”
“That’ll do,” grumbled the Mayor.
“That will be all, Captain,” said Enright.
Younger tried to write a letter to Colette, seated at his hotel room desk. How could she love a convicted criminal so devoted to the German cause that he had volunteered to serve in its army? There had to be some reality to love—surely. If a girl loved a man who wasn’t the man she thought he was, she didn’t really love him—did she?
But perhaps Hans Gruber wasn’t the man Younger thought he was. Why shouldn’t Gruber be the sweet, devout, ailing soul that Colette remembered? Yes, he was in prison for assault on an innocent victim, but his imprisonment might be a mistake. Younger himself had been jailed for assault only last week. Worse, much worse: Didn’t Gruber deserve Colette more than Younger did? Gruber had instantly seen what Younger had taken years to grasp—that his life would be void and dull and pointless and black without her.
The letter he was trying to write, offering Colette reasons not to go to Europe, failed to flow trippingly off his pen. He started, stopped, and started again, crumpling sheets of hotel stationery and throwing them into a wastebasket. Eventually he pulled them out and burned them, one by one, in an ashtray. It had come to him that, with Freud having agreed to treat Luc, Colette would never be dissuaded from going to Vienna.
Younger packed his bags.
Littlemore reexamined the evidence seized from Colette’s and Luc’s kidnappers. He combed through every item, turned inside out every article of clothing. He looked for laundry marks, for threads of hair, for anything that would connect the jailed man, Drobac, to the kidnapping. All to no avail.
Then he went to the police garage, where he personally re-dusted the criminals’ car for fingerprints, both exterior and interior, from tailpipes to steering wheel to ashtrays. This painstaking process took many hours. It proved equally futile, revealing a host of prints, none of which matched the ones taken from the man Younger had assaulted. Frustrated but not beaten, Littlemore went home for the night.
Even as the train conductor announced New Haven as the next stop, Younger still had not decided whether to disembark there or continue on to Boston,