The Second Confession

by Rex Stout

  “No!” Sperling objected. “You will not! That’s—”

  “Nonsense.” Wolfe was disgusted. “If they check in New York at all, and they surely will, they’ll learn that you hired Mr. Bascom, and what for, and then what? No; that much they must have. I shall tell them of your suspicion, and that you engaged me to confirm it or remove it. You were merely taking a natural and proper precaution. I had no sooner started on the job, by sending Mr. Goodwin up here and putting three men to work, than an assault was made on my plant rooms in the middle of the night and great damage was done. I thought it probable that Mr. Rony and his comrades were responsible for the outrage; that they feared I would be able to expose and discredit him, and were trying to intimidate me.

  “So today—yesterday now—I came here to discuss the matter with Mr. Sperling. He gathered the family for it because it was a family affair, and we assembled in the library. He then learned that what I was after was reimbursement; I wanted him to pay for the damage to my plant rooms. The whole time was devoted to an argument between Mr. Sperling and me on that point alone. No one else said anything whatever—at least nothing memorable. You stayed because you were there and there was no good reason to get up and go. That was all.”

  Wolfe’s eyes moved to take them in. “Well?”

  “It’ll do,” Sperling agreed.

  Madeline was concentrating hard. She had a question. “What did you stay here all evening for?”

  “A good question, Miss Sperling, but my conduct can be left to me. I refused to leave here without the money or a firm commitment on it.”

  “What about Gwenn’s phoning Louis to come up here?”

  Wolfe looked at Gwenn. “What did you tell him?”

  “This is awful,” Gwenn whispered. She was gazing at Wolfe as if she couldn’t believe he was there. She repeated aloud, “This is awful!”

  Wolfe nodded. “No one will contradict you on that. Do you remember what you said to him?”

  “Of course I do. I just told him I had to see him, and he said he had some appointments and the first train he could make was the one that leaves Grand Central at eight-twenty. It gets to Chappaqua at nine-twenty-three.”

  “You told him nothing of what had happened?”

  “No, I—I didn’t intend to. I was just going to tell him I had decided to call it off.”

  “Then that’s what you’ll tell the police.” Wolfe returned to Madeline. “You have an orderly mind, Miss Sperling, and you want to get this all neatly arranged. It can’t be done that way; there’s too much of it. The one vital point, for all of you, is that the conversation in the library consisted exclusively of our argument about paying for the damage to my plant rooms. Except for that, you will all adhere strictly to fact. If you try anything else you’re sunk. You probably are anyway, if a strong suspicion is aroused that one of you deliberately murdered Mr. Rony, and if one of the questioners happens to be a first-rate man, but that’s unlikely and we’ll have to chance it.”

  “I’ve always been a very poor liar,” Mrs. Sperling said forlornly.

  “Damn it!” Sperling said, not offensively. “Go up and go to bed!”

  “An excellent idea,” Wolfe assented. “Do that, madam.” He turned to Sperling. “Now, if you will—”

  The Chairman of the Board went to the telephone.

  Chapter 10

  At eleven o’clock the next morning, Tuesday, Cleveland Archer, District Attorney of Westchester County, said to James U. Sperling, “This is a very regrettable affair. Very.”

  It would probably have been not Archer himself, but one of his assistants, sitting there talking like that, but for the extent of Stony Acres, the number of rooms in the house, and the size of Sperling’s tax bill. That was only natural. Wolfe and I had had a couple of previous contacts with Cleveland Archer, most recently when we had gone to the Pitcairn place near Katonah to get a replacement for Theodore when his mother was sick. Archer was a little plump and had a round red face, and he could tell a constituent from a tourist at ten miles, but he wasn’t a bad guy.

  “Very regrettable,” he said.

  None of the occupants of the house had been kept up all night, not even me, who had found the body. The State cops had arrived first, followed soon by a pair of county dicks from White Plains, and, after some rounds of questions without being too rude, they had told everyone to go to bed—that is, everyone but me. I was singled out not only because I had found the body, which was just a good excuse, but because the man who singled me would have liked to do unto me as I would have liked to do unto him. He was Lieutenant Con Noonan of the State Police, and he would never forget how I had helped Wolfe make a monkey out of him in the Pitcairn affair. Add to that the fact that he was fitted out at birth for a career as a guard at a slave-labor camp and somehow got delivered to the wrong country, and you can imagine his attitude when he came and saw Wolfe and me there. He was bitterly disappointed when he learned that Wolfe was on Sperling’s payroll and therefore he would have to pretend he knew how to be polite. He was big and tall and in love with his uniform, and he thought he was handsome. At two o’clock one of the county boys, who was really in charge, because the body had not been found on a public highway, told me to go to bed.

  I slept five hours, got up and dressed, went downstairs, and had breakfast with Sperling, Jimmy, and Paul Emerson. Emerson looked as sour as ever, but claimed he felt wonderful because of an unusual experience. He said he couldn’t remember when he had had a good night’s sleep, on account of insomnia, but that last night he had gone off the minute his head hit the pillow, and he had slept like a log. Apparently, he concluded, what he needed was the stimulant of a homicide at bedtime, but he didn’t see how he could manage that often enough to help much. Jimmy tried halfheartedly to help along with a bum joke, Sperling wasn’t interested, and I was busy eating in order to get through and take Wolfe’s breakfast tray up to him.

  From the bedroom I phoned Fritz and learned that Andy and the others were back at work on the roof and everything was under control. I told him I couldn’t say when we’d be home, and I told Saul to stay on call but to go out for air if he wanted some. I figured that he and Ruth were in the clear, since with Rony gone no one could identify the bandits but me. I also told Saul of the fatal accident that had happened to a friend of the Sperling family, and he felt as Archer did later, that it was very regrettable.

  When Wolfe had cleaned the tray I took it back downstairs and had a look around. Madeline was having strawberries and toast and coffee on the west terrace, with a jacket over her shoulders on account of the morning breeze. She didn’t look as if homicides stimulated her the way they did Paul Emerson, to sounder sleep. I had wondered how her eyes would be, wide open or half shut, when her mind was too occupied to keep them to a program, and the answer seemed to be wide open, even though the lids were heavy and the whites not too clear.

  Madeline told me that things had been happening while I was upstairs. District Attorney Archer and Ben Dykes, head of the county detectives, had arrived and were in the library with Sperling. An Assistant District Attorney was having a talk with Gwenn up in her room. Mrs. Sperling was staying in bed with a bad headache. Jimmy had gone to the garage for a car to drive to Mount Kisco on a personal errand, and had been told nothing doing because the scientific inspection of the Sperlings’ five vehicles had not been completed. Paul and Connie Emerson had decided that house guests must be a nuisance in the circumstances, and that they should leave, but Ben Dykes earnestly requested them to stay; and anyhow their car too, with the others in the garage, was not available. A New York newspaper reporter had got as far as the house by climbing a fence and coming through the woods to the lawn, and had been bounced by a State cop.

  It looked as if it wouldn’t be merely a quick hello and good-by, in spite of the size of the house and grounds, with all the fancy trees and bushes and three thousand roses. I left Madeline to her third cup of coffee on the terrace and strolled to the plaza, behind th
e shrubbery where I had left the sedan. It was still there, and so were two scientists, making themselves familiar with it. I stood and watched them a while without getting as much as a glance from them, and then moved on. Moseying around, it seemed to me that something was missing. How had all the law arrived, on foot or horseback? It needed investigation. I circled the house and struck out down the front drive. In the bright June morning sun the landscape certainly wasn’t the same as it had been the night before when I had taken that walk with Madeline. The drive was perfectly smooth, whereas last night it had kept having warts where my feet landed.

  As I neared the bridge over the brook I got my question answered. Fifteen paces this side of the brook a car was parked in the middle of the drive, and another car was standing on the bridge. More scientists were at work on the drive, concentrated at its edge, in the space between the two cars. So they had found something there last night that they wanted to preserve for daylight inspection, and no cars had been allowed to pass, including the DA’s. I thoroughly approved. Always willing to learn, I approached and watched the operations with deep interest. One who was presumably not a scientist but an executive, since he was just standing looking, inquired, “You doing research?”

  “No, sir,” I told him. “I smelled blood, and my grandfather was a cannibal.”

  “Oh, a gag man. You’re not needed. Beat it.”

  Not feeling like arguing, I stood and watched. In about ten minutes, not less, he reminded me. “I said beat it.”

  “Yeah, I know. I didn’t think you were serious, because I have a friend who is a lawyer, and that would be silly.” I tilted my head back and sniffed twice. “Chicken blood. From a White Wyandotte rooster with catarrh. I’m a detective.”

  I had an impulse to go take a look at the bush where I had found Rony, which looked much closer to the drive than it had seemed last night, but decided that might start a real quarrel, and I didn’t want to make enemies. The executive was glaring at me. I grinned at him as a friend and headed back up the drive.

  As I mounted the three steps to the wide front terrace a State employee in uniform stepped toward me.

  “Your name Goodwin?”

  I admitted it.

  He jerked his head sideways. “You’re wanted inside.”

  I entered and crossed the vestibule to the reception hall. Madeline, passing through, saw me and stopped.

  “Your boss wants you.”

  “The worm. Where, upstairs?”

  “No, the library. They sent for him and they want you too.”

  I went to the library.

  Wolfe did not have the best chair this time, probably because it had already been taken by Cleveland Archer when he got there. But the one he had would do, and on a little table at his elbow was a tray with a glass and two bottles of beer. Sperling was standing, but after I had pulled up a chair and joined them he sat down too. Archer, who had a table in front of him with some papers on it, was good enough to remember that he had met me before, since of course there was always a chance that I might buy a plot in Westchester and establish a voting residence there.

  Wolfe said Archer had some questions to ask me.

  Archer, not at all belligerent, nodded at me. “Yes, I’ve got to be sure the record is straight. Sunday night you and Rony were waylaid on Hotchkiss Road.”

  It didn’t sound like a question, but I was anxious to cooperate, so I said that was right.

  “It’s a coincidence, you see,” Archer explained. “Sunday night he got blackjacked and robbed, and Monday night he got run over and killed. A sort of epidemic of violence. It makes me want to ask, was there any connection?”

  “If you’re asking me, none that I know of.”

  “Maybe not. But there were circumstances—I won’t say suspicious, but peculiar. You gave a false name and address when you reported it at the State Police barracks.”

  “I gave the name Goodwin.”

  “Don’t quibble,” Wolfe muttered, pouring beer.

  “I suppose you know,” I told Archer, “that I was sent up here by Mr. Wolfe, who employs me, and that Mr. Sperling and I arranged what my name and occupation would be to his family and guests. Rony was present while I was reporting at the barracks, and I didn’t think I ought to confuse him by changing names on him when he was still dim.”

  “Dim?”

  “As you said, he had just been blackjacked. His head was not clear.”

  Archer nodded. “Even so, giving a false name and address to the police should be avoided whenever possible. You were held up by a man and a woman.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You reported the number of the license on their car, but it’s no good.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “No. Nor me. Did you recognize either the man or the woman?”

  I shook my head. “Aren’t you wasting your time, Mr. Archer?” I pointed at the papers on the table. “You must have it all there.”

  “I have, certainly. But now that the man who was with you has been killed, that might sharpen your memory. You’re in the detective business, and you’ve been around a lot and seen lots of people. Haven’t you remembered that you had seen that man or woman before?”

  “No, sir. After all, this is—okay. No, sir.”

  “Why did you and Rony refuse to let the police take your wallets to get fingerprints?”

  “Because it was late and we wanted to get home, and anyway it looked to me as if they were just living up to routine and didn’t really mean it.”

  Archer glanced at a paper. “They took around three hundred dollars from Rony, and over two hundred from you. Is that right?”

  “For Rony, so he said. For me, right.”

  “He was wearing valuable jewelry—stickpin, cufflinks, and a ring. It wasn’t taken. There was luggage in the car, including two valuable cameras. It wasn’t touched. Didn’t that strike you as peculiar?”

  I turned a hand over. “Now listen, Mr. Archer. You know damn well they have their prejudices. Some of them take everything that’s loose, even your belt or suspenders. These babies happened to prefer cash, and they got over five C’s. The only thing that struck me worth mentioning was something on the side of my head.”

  “It left no mark on you.”

  “Nor on Rony either. I guess they had had practice.”

  “Did you go to a doctor?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t know that Westchester required a doctor’s certificate in a holdup case. It must be a very progressive county. I’ll remember it next time.”

  “You don’t have to be sarcastic, Goodwin.”

  “No, sir.” I grinned at him. “Nor do you have to be so goddam sympathetic with a guy who got a bat on the head on a public road in your jurisdiction. Thank you just the same.”

  “All right.” He flipped a hand to brush it off. “Why did you feel so bad you couldn’t eat anything all day Sunday?”

  I admit that surprised me. Wolfe had mentioned the possibility that there would be a first-rate man among the questioners, and while this sudden question was no proof of brilliancy it certainly showed that someone had been good and thorough.

  “The boys have been getting around,” I said admiringly. “I didn’t know any of the servants here had it in for me—maybe they used the third degree. Or could one of my fellow guests have spilled it?” I leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. “I had nine drinks and they were all doped.”

  “Don’t clown,” Wolfe muttered, putting down an empty glass.

  “What then?” I demanded. “Can I tell him it must have been something I ate with my host sitting here?”

  “You didn’t have nine drinks,” Archer said. “You had two or three.”

  “Okay,” I surrendered. “Then it must have been the country air. All I know is, I had a headache and my stomach kept warning me not to make any shipments. Now ask me if I went to a doctor. I ought to tell you, Mr. Archer, that I think I may get sore, and if I get sore I’ll start making w
isecracks, and if I do that you’ll get sore. What good will that do us?”

  The District Attorney laughed. His laughing routine was quite different from Sperling’s, being closer to a giggle than a roar, but it suited him all right. No one joined him, and after a moment he looked around apologetically and spoke to James U. Sperling.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m taking this lightly. This is a very regrettable affair. Very.”

  “It certainly is,” Sperling agreed.

  Archer nodded, puckering his mouth. “Very regrettable. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be entirely frank with you, Mr. Sperling—and in Mr. Wolfe’s presence, since you have retained him in your interest. It is not the policy of my office to go out of its way to make trouble for men of your standing. That’s only common sense. We have considered your suggestion that Rony was killed elsewhere, in a road accident, and the body brought here and concealed on your property, but we can’t—that is, it couldn’t have happened that way. He got off the train at Chappaqua at nine-twenty-three, and the taxi driver brought him to the entrance to your grounds, and saw him start walking up the driveway. Not only that, there is clear evidence that he was killed, run over by a car, on your drive at a point about thirty feet this side of the bridge crossing the brook. That evidence is still being accumulated, but there is already enough to leave no room for doubt. Do you want me to send for a man to give you the details?”

  “No,” Sperling said.

  “You’re welcome to them at any time. The evidence indicates that the car was going east, away from the house, toward the entrance, but that is not conclusive. Inspection of the cars belonging here has not been completed. It is possible that it was some other car—any car—which came in from the road, but you will understand why that theory is the least acceptable. It seems improbable, but we haven’t rejected it, and frankly, we see no reason for rejecting it unless we have to.”