The Second Confession

by Rex Stout

  It started off with a bang. When they were all in and greetings, such as they were, had been attended to, and everyone was seated, Wolfe began his preamble. He had got only four words out when Archer blurted, “You said the man that murdered Rony would be here!”

  “He is.”

  “Where?”

  “You brought him.”

  After that beginning it was only natural that no one felt like having a slice of cheese or a handful of nuts. I didn’t blame any of them, least of all William Reynolds. Several of them made noises, and Sperling and Paul Emerson both said something, but I didn’t catch either of them because Gwenn’s voice, clear and strong but with a tremble under it, came from behind my back.

  “I told my father what I told you that evening!”

  Wolfe ignored her. “This will go faster,” he told Archer, “if you let me do it.”

  “The perfect mountebank!” Emerson sneered.

  Sperling and Archer spoke together. A growl from the side made their heads turn. It was Sergeant Stebbins, raising his voice from his seat near the door. He got all eyes.

  “If you take my advice,” he told them, “you’ll let him tell it. I’m from the New York Police, and this is New York. I’ve heard him before. If you pester him he’ll string it out just to show you.”

  “I have no desire to string it out,” Wolfe said crossly. His eyes went from left to right and back. “This shouldn’t take long if you’ll let me get on. I wanted you all here because of what I said to you up there in my bedroom eight days ago, the evening Mr. Rony was killed. I thereby assumed an obligation, and I want you to know that I have fulfilled it.”

  He took the audience in again. “First I’ll tell you why I assumed that Mr. Rony was killed not accidentally but deliberately. While it was credible that the driver of the car might not have seen him until too late, it was hard to believe that Mr. Rony had not been aware of the car’s approach, even in the twilight, and even if the noise of the brook had covered the noise of the car, which could not have been going fast. Nor was there any mark on the front of the car. If it had hit him when he was upright there would probably, though not certainly, have been a mark or marks.”

  “You said all this before,” Archer cut in impatiently.

  “Yes, sir. The repetition will take less time if you don’t interrupt. Another point, better than either of those, why was the body dragged more than fifty feet to be concealed behind a shrub? If it had been an accident, and the driver decided not to disclose his part in it, what would he have done? Drag the body off the road, yes, but surely not fifty feet to find a hiding place.”

  “You said that before too,” Ben Dykes objected. “And I said the same argument would apply just as well to a murderer.”

  “Yes,” Wolfe agreed, “but you were wrong. The murderer had a sound reason for moving the body where it couldn’t be seen from the drive if someone happened to pass.”

  “What?”

  “To search the body. We are now coming to things I haven’t said before. You preferred not to show me the list of articles found on the body, so I preferred not to tell you that I knew something had been taken from it. The way I knew it was that Mr. Goodwin had himself made an inventory when he found the body.”

  “The hell he had!”

  “It would have been better,” Archer said in a nasty voice for him, “to tell us that. What had been taken?”

  “A membership card, in the name of William Reynolds, in the American Communist party.”

  “By God!” Sperling cried, and left his chair. There were exclamations from others. Sperling was following his up, but Archer’s voice cut through.

  “How did you know he had one?”

  “Mr. Goodwin had seen it, and I had seen a photograph of it.” Wolfe pointed a finger. “Please let me tell this without yanking me around with questions. I have to go back to Saturday evening a week ago. Mr. Goodwin was there ostensibly as a guest, but actually representing me in behalf of my client, Mr. Sperling. He had reasons to believe that Mr. Rony was carefully guarding some small object, not letting it leave his person. There were refreshments in the living room. Mr. Goodwin drugged his own drink and exchanged it for Mr. Rony’s. He drank Mr. Rony’s. But it had been drugged by someone else, as he found to his sorrow.”

  “Oh!” A little cry came from behind me, in the voice of the little cabbage. Wolfe frowned past my shoulder.

  “Mr. Goodwin had intended to enter Mr. Rony’s room that night to learn what the object was, but didn’t, because he was himself drugged and Mr. Rony was not. Instead of swallowing his drink, Mr. Rony had poured it into the ice bucket. I am still giving reasons why I assumed that he was not killed by accident, and that’s one of them: his drink had been drugged and he either knew it or suspected it. Mr. Goodwin was mortified, and he is not one to take mortification lightly; also he wanted to see the object. The next day, Sunday, he arranged to have Mr. Rony return to New York in his car, and he also arranged for a man and woman—both of them have often worked for me—to waylay them and blackjack Mr. Rony.”

  That got a reaction from practically everybody. The loudest, from Purley Stebbins, reached me through the others from twenty feet off. “Jesus! Can you beat him?”

  Wolfe sat and let them react. In a moment he put up a hand.

  “That’s a felony, I know, Mr. Archer. You can decide what to do about it at your leisure, when it’s all over. Your decision may be influenced by the fact that if it hadn’t been committed the killer of Mr. Rony wouldn’t have been caught.”

  He took in the audience, now quiet again. “All they took from him was the money in his wallet. That was necessary in order to validate it as a holdup—and by the way, the money has been spent in my investigation of his death, which I think he would regard as fitting. But Mr. Goodwin did something else. He found on Mr. Rony the object he had been guarding, and took some photographs of it, not taking the object itself. It was a membership card, in the name of William Reynolds, in the American Communist party.”

  “Then I was right!” Sperling was so excited and triumphant that he yelled it. “I was right all the time!” He glared indignantly, sputtering. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t—”

  “You were as wrong,” Wolfe said rudely, “as a man can get. You may be a good businessman, Mr. Sperling, but you had better leave the exposure of disguised Communists to competent persons. It’s a task for which you are disqualified by mental astigmatism.”

  “But,” Sperling insisted, “you admit he had a membership card—”

  “I don’t admit it, I announce it. But it would have been witless to assume that William Reynolds was necessarily Louis Rony. In fact, I had knowledge of Rony that made it unlikely. Anyway, we have the testimony of three persons that the card was in his possession—you’ll find that a help in the courtroom, Mr. Archer. So at the time the identity of William Reynolds—whether it was Mr. Rony or another person—was an open question.”

  Wolfe turned a hand up. “But twenty-four hours later it was no longer open. Whoever William Reynolds was, almost certainly he wasn’t Louis Rony. Not only that, it was a workable assumption that he had murdered Rony, since it was better than a conjecture that he had dragged the body behind a bush in order to search it, had found the membership card, and had taken it. I made that assumption, tentatively. Then the next day, Tuesday, I was carried a step further by the news that it was my car that had killed Rony. So if William Reynolds had murdered Rony and taken the card, he was one of the people there present. One of those now in this room.”

  A murmur went around, but only a murmur.

  “You’ve skipped something,” Ben Dykes protested. “Why did it have to be Reynolds who murdered and took the card?”

  “It didn’t,” Wolfe admitted. “These were assumptions, not conclusions. But they were a whole; if one was good, all were: if one was not, none. If the murderer had killed and searched the body to get that card, surely it was to prevent the disclosure that he had join
ed the Communist party under the name of William Reynolds, a disclosure threatened by Rony—who was by no means above such threats. That’s where I stood Tuesday noon. But I was under an obligation to my client, Mr. Sperling, which would be ill met if I gave all this to the police—at least without trying my own hand at it first. That was what I had decided to do”—Wolfe’s eyes went straight at Sperling—“when you jumped in with that confounded statement you had coerced Mr. Kane to sign. And satisfied Mr. Archer, and fired me.”

  His eyes darted at Kane. “I wanted you here for this, to repudiate that statement. Will you? Now?”

  “Don’t be a fool, Web,” Sperling snapped. And to Wolfe, “I didn’t coerce him!”

  Poor Kane, not knowing what to say, said nothing. In spite of all the trouble he had caused us, I nearly felt sorry for him.

  Wolfe shrugged. “So I came home. I had to get my assumptions either established or discredited. It was possible that Mr. Rony had not had the membership card on his person when he was killed. On Wednesday Mr. Goodwin went to his apartment and made a thorough search—not breaking and entering, Mr. Stebbins.”

  “You say,” Purley muttered.

  “He had a key,” Wolfe asserted, which was quite true. “The card wasn’t there; if it had been, Mr. Goodwin would have found it. But he did find evidence, no matter how or what, that Mr. Rony had had in his possession one or more objects, probably a paper or papers, which he had used as a tool of coercion on one or more persons here present. It doesn’t matter what his demands were, but in passing let me say that I doubt that they were for money; I think what he required, and was getting, was support for his courtship of the younger Miss Sperling—or at least neutrality. Another—”

  “What was the evidence?” Archer demanded.

  Wolfe shook his head. “You may not need it; if you do, you may have it when the time comes. Another assumption, that Mr. Rony was not upright when the car hit him, also got confirmed. Although the car had not struck his head, there was a severe bruise above his right ear; a doctor hired by me saw it, and it is recorded on the official report. That helped to acquit the murderer of so slapdash a method as trying to kill a lively and vigorous young man by hitting him with a car. Obviously it would have been more workmanlike to ambush him as he walked up the drive, knock him out, and then run the car over him. If that—”

  “You can’t ambush a man,” Ben Dykes objected, “unless you know he’ll be there to ambush.”

  “No,” agreed Wolfe, “nor can you expect me ever to finish if you take no probabilities along with facts. Besides the private telephone lines in Mr. Sperling’s library there are twelve extensions in that house, and Miss Sperling’s talk with Mr. Rony, arranging for his arrival at a certain hour for a rendezvous on the grounds, could have been listened to by anyone. William Reynolds could certainly have heard it; let him prove he didn’t. Anyhow, the ambush itself is no longer a mere probability. By a brilliant stroke of Mr. Goodwin’s, it was established as a fact. On Thursday he searched the grounds for the instrument used for laying Mr. Rony out, and he found it, in the presence of a witness.”

  “He didn’t!” It was Madeline’s voice from behind me. “I was with him every minute and he didn’t find anything!”

  “But he did,” Wolfe said dryly. “On his way out he stopped at the brook and found a stone. The question of the witness, and of the evidence that the stone had been in contact with a man’s head, can wait, but I assure you there’s no doubt about it. Even if the witness prefers to risk perjury we’ll manage quite well without her.”

  His eyes made an arc to take them in. “For while such details as the head bruise and the stone will be most helpful and Mr. Archer will be glad to have them, what clinches the matter is a detail of a different sort. I have hinted at it before and I now declare it: William Reynolds, the owner of that card, the Communist, is in this room. You won’t mind, I hope, if I don’t tell you how I learned it, so long as I tell you how I can prove it, but before I do so I would like if possible to get rid of a serious embarrassment. Mr. Kane. You’re an intelligent man and you see my predicament. If the man who murdered Mr. Rony is charged and put on trial, and if that statement you signed is put in evidence by the defense, and you refuse to repudiate it, there can be no conviction. I appeal to you: do you want to furnish that shield to a Communist and a murderer? No matter who he is. If you are reluctant to credit my assertion that he is a Communist, consider that unless that can be proven to the satisfaction of a judge and jury he will not be in jeopardy, for that is essential to the case against him. But as long as your statement stands it would be foolhardy even to arrest him; Mr. Archer wouldn’t dare to move for an indictment.”

  Wolfe got a paper from a desk drawer. “I wish you would sign this. It was typed by Mr. Goodwin this evening before you came. It is dated today and reads, ‘I, Webster Kane, hereby declare that the statement signed by me on June twenty-first, nineteen forty-nine, to the effect that I had killed Louis Rony accidentally by driving an automobile over him, was false. I signed it at the suggestion of James U. Sperling, Senior, and I hereby retract it.’ Archie?”

  I got up to reach for the paper and offer it to Kane, but he didn’t move a hand to take it. The outstanding economist was in a hole, and his face showed that he realized it.

  “Take out the last sentence,” Sperling demanded. “It isn’t necessary.” He didn’t look happy either.

  Wolfe shook his head. “Naturally you don’t like to face it, but you’ll have to. On the witness stand you can’t possibly evade it, so why evade it now?”

  “Good God.” Sperling was grim. “The witness stand. Damn it, if this isn’t just an act, who is Reynolds?”

  “I’ll tell you when Mr. Kane has signed that, not before—and you have witnessed it.”

  “I won’t witness it.”

  “Yes, sir, you will. This thing started with your desire to expose a Communist. Now’s your chance. You won’t take it?”

  Sperling glowered at Wolfe, then at me, then at Kane. I thought to myself how different this was from smiling like an angel. Mrs. Sperling murmured something, but no one paid any attention.

  “Sign it, Web,” Sperling growled.

  Kane’s hand came out for it, not wanting to. With it I gave him a magazine to firm it, and my pen. He signed, big and sprawly, and I passed it along to the Chairman of the Board. His signature, as witness, was something to see. It could have been James U. Sperling, or it could have been Lawson N. Spiffshill. I accepted it without prejudice and handed it to Wolfe, who gave it a glance and put it under a paperweight.

  He sighed. “Bring them in, Archie.”

  I crossed to the door to the front room and called out, “Come in, gentlemen!”

  I would have given a nickel to know how much time and effort they had wasted trying to hear something through the soundproofed door. It couldn’t be done. They entered in character. Harvey, self-conscious and aggressive in the presence of so much capitalism, strode across nearly to Wolfe’s desk, turned, and gave each of them in turn a hard straight eye. Stevens was interested in only one of them, the man he knew as William Reynolds; as far as he was concerned the others were dummies, including even the District Attorney. His eyes too were hard and straight, but they had only one target. They both ignored the chairs I had reserved for them.

  “I think,” Wolfe said, “we needn’t bother with introductions. One of you knows these gentlemen well; the others won’t care to, nor will they care to know you. They are avowed members of the American Communist party, and prominent ones. I have here a document”—he fluttered it—“which they signed early this evening, with a photograph of a man pasted on it. The writing on it, in Mr. Stevens’s hand, states that for eight years the man in the photograph has been a fellow Communist under the name of William Reynolds. The document is itself conclusive, but these gentlemen and I agreed that it would be helpful for them to appear and identify Reynolds in person. You’re looking at him, are you, Mr. Stevens?”
r />   “I am,” said Stevens, gazing at Webster Kane with cold hate.

  “You goddam rat,” rumbled Harvey, also at Kane.

  The economist was returning their gaze, now at Stevens, now at Harvey, stunned and incredulous. His first confession had required words, written down and signed, but this one didn’t. That stunned look was his second confession, and everybody there, looking at him, could see it was the real thing.

  He wasn’t the only stunned one.

  “Web!” roared Sperling. “For God’s sake—Web!”

  “You’re in for it, Mr. Kane,” Wolfe said icily. “You’ve got no one left. You’re done as Kane, with the Communist brand showing at last. You’re done as Reynolds, with your comrades spitting you out as only they can spit. You’re done even as a two-legged animal, with a murder to answer for. The last was my job—the rest was only incidental—and thank heaven it’s over, for it wasn’t easy. He’s yours, Mr. Archer.”

  I wasn’t needed to watch a possible outburst, since both Ben Dykes and Purley Stebbins were there and had closed in, and I had an errand to attend to. I pulled my phone over to me and dialed the Gazette, and got Lon Cohen.

  “Archie?” He sounded desperate. “Twelve minutes to go! Well?”

  “Okay, son,” I said patronizingly. “Shoot it.”

  “As is? Webster Kane? Pinched?”

  “As specified. We guarantee materials and workmanship. If you’re a leading economist I know where there’s a vacancy.”

  Chapter 23

  Later, long after midnight, after everyone else had gone, James U. Sperling was still there. He sat in the red leather chair, eating nuts, drinking Scotch, and getting things clear.