The Second Confession (14 page)

There’s no problem.' He drank.

Wolfe poured beer. 'Well,' he said, 'now you know what this is like. The contingency I have described may never arise, but it had to be foreseen. With that understood we can proceed. Unless we have some luck this could drag on for weeks. Mr Sperling’s adroit stroke in persuading a man of standing to sign that confounded statement, not merely a chauffeur or other domestic employee has made it excessively difficult. There is one possibility which I shall have explored by a specialist-none of you is equipped for it-but meanwhile we must see what we can find. Archie, tell Fred about the people who work there. All of them.' I did so, typing the names for him. If my weekend at Stony Acres had been purely social, I wouldn’t have been able to give him a complete list, from the butler to the third assistant gardener, but during the examinations Monday night and Tuesday morning I had got well informed. As I briefed Fred on them he made notes on the typed list 'Anyone special?' Fred asked Wolfe.

'No. Don’t go to the house. Start at Chappaqua, in the village, wherever you can pick up a connection. We know that someone in that house drugged a drink intended for Mr Rony on Saturday evening, and we are assuming that someone wanted him to die enough to help it along. When an emotion as violent as that is loose in a group of people there are often indications of it that are heard or seen by servants. That’s all I can tell you.' 'What will I be in Chappaqua for?' 'Whatever you like. Have something break on your car, something that takes time, and have it towed to the local garage. Is there a garage in Chappaqua, Archie?' 'Yes, sir.' 'That will do.' Wolfe drank the last of his beer and used his handkerchief on his lips. 'Now Saul. You met young Sperling today.' 'Yes, sir. Archie introduced us.' 'We want to know what he and his mother were looking for at Mr Rony’s apartment.

It was almost certainly a paper, since they were looking in books, and probably one which had supported a threat held by Mr Rony over young Sperling or his mother. That conjecture is obvious and even trite, but things get trite by occurring frequently. There is a clear pattern. A month ago Mrs Sperling reversed herself and readmitted Mr Rony to her home as a friend of her daughter, and the son’s attitude changed at the same time. A threat could have been responsible for that, especially since the main objection to Mr Rony was then based on a mere surmise by Mr Sperling. But Monday afternoon they were told something which so blackened Mr Rony as to make him quite unacceptable. Yet the threat still existed. You see where that points.' 'What blackened him?'Saul asked.

Wolfe shook his head. 'I doubt if you need that, at least not now. We want to know what the threat was, if one existed. That’s for you and Orrie with you in charge. The place to look is here in New York, and the son is far more likely than the mother, so try him first-his associates, his habits-but for that you need no suggestions from me. It’s as routine as Fred’s job, but perhaps more promising. Report as usual.' That finished the conference. Fred got the rest of his beer down, not wanting to offend Wolfe by leaving some. I got money for them from the safe, from the cash drawer, not disturbing the contribution from our latest client. Fred had a couple of questions and got them answered and I went to the front door to let them out.

Back in the office, Fritz had entered to remove glasses and bottles. I stood and stretched and yawned.

'Sit down,' Wolfe said peevishly.

'You don’t have to take it out on me,' I complained, obeying. 'I can’t help it if you’re a genius, as Paul Emerson says, but the best you can do is to stick Fred on the hired help and start Saul and Orrie hunting ratholes. God knows I have no bright suggestions, but then I’m not a genius. Who is my meat'Aloysius Murphy'Emerson?' He grunted. 'The others replied to the question I put. You didn’t.' 'Nuts. My worry about this murderer, if there is one, is not what you’ll do with him after you get him, but whether you’re going to get him.' I gestured. 'If you do, he’s yours. Get him two thousand volts or a DSO-as you please. Will you need my help?' 'Yes. But you may be disqualified. I told you last week to establish a personal friendship,' 'So you did. So I did.' 'But not with the right person. I would like to take advantage of your acquaintance with the elder Miss Sperling, but you may balk. You may have scruples.' 'Much obliged. It would depend on the kind of advantage. If all I’m after is facts, scruples are out. She knows I’m a detective and she knows where we stand, so it’s up to her. If it turns out that she killed Rony I’ll help you pin the medal on her. What is it you want?' 'I want you to go up there tomorrow morning.' 'Glad to. What for?' He told me.

Like all good drivers, I don’t need my mind for country driving, just my eyes and ears and reflexes. So when we’re on a case and I’m at the wheel of the car in the open, I’m usually gnawing away at the knots. But as I rolled north on the parkways that fine sunny June morning I had to find something else to gnaw on, because in that case I couldn’t tell a knot from a doughnut. There was no puzzle to it; it was merely a grab bag. So I let my mind skip around as it pleased, now and then concentrating on the only puzzle in sight, which was this: had Wolfe sent me up here because he thought I might really get something, or merely to get me out of the way while he consulted his specialist'I didn’t know. I took it for granted that the specialist was Mr Jones, whom I had never been permitted to meet, though Wolfe had made use of him on two occasions that I knew of. Mr Jones was merely the name he had given me off-hand when I had had to make an entry in the expense book.

On the phone I had suggested to Madeline that it might be more tactful for me to park outside the entrance and meet her somewhere on the grounds, and she replied that when it got to where she had to sneak me in she would rather I stayed out.

I didn’t insist, because my errand would take me near the house anyway, and Sperling would be away, at his office in New York, and I doubted if Jimmy or Mom would care to raise a howl at the sight of me since we were now better acquainted. So I turned in at the entrance and drove on up to the house, and parked on the plaza behind the shrubbery, at the exact spot I had chosen before.

The sun was shining and the birds were twittering and leaves and flowers were everywhere in their places, and Madeline, on the west terrace, had on a cotton print with big yellow butterflies on it. She came to meet me, but stopped ten feet off to stare.

'My Lord,' she exclaimed, 'that’s exactly what I wanted to do! Who got ahead of me?' 'That’s a swell attitude,' I said bitterly. 'It hurts.' 'Certainly it does, that’s why we do it.' She had advanced and was inspecting my cheek at close range. 'It was a darned good job. You look simply awful. Hadn’t you better go and come back in a week or two?' 'No, ma’am.' 'Who did it?' 'You’d be surprised.' I tilted my head to whisper in her ear. 'Your mother.' She laughed a nice little laugh. 'She might do the other side, at that, if you get near. You should have seen her face when I told her you were coming. How about a drink'Some coffee?' 'No, thanks. I’ve got work to do.' 'So you said. What’s this about a wallet?' 'It’s not really about a wallet, it’s a card case. In summer clothes, without enough pockets, it’s a problem. You told me it hadn’t been found in the house, so it must be outdoors somewhere. When we were out looking for your sister Monday night it was in my hip pocket, or it was when we started, and in all the excitement I didn’t miss it until yesterday. I’ve got to have it because my licence is in it.' 'Your driving licence?' I shook my head. 'Detective licence.' 'That’s right, you’re a detective, aren’t you'All right, come on.' She moved.

'We’ll take the same route. What does it look like?' Having her along wasn’t part of my plan. 'You’re an angel,' I told her. 'You’re a little cabbage. In that dress you remind me of a girl I knew in the fifth grade. I’m not going to let you ruin it scrambling around hunting that damn card case. Leave me but don’t forget me. If and when I find it I’ll let you know.' 'Not a chance.' She was smiling with a corner of her mouth up. 'I’ve always wanted to help a detective find something, especially you. Come on!' She was either on to me or she wasn’t, but in any case it was plain that she had decided to stay with me. I might as well pretend that nothing would please me better, so I did.

'What does it look like?' she asked as we circled the house and started to cross the lawn toward the border.

Since the card case was at that moment in my breast pocket, the simplest way would have been to show it to her, but under the circumstances I preferred to describe it. I told her it was pigskin, darkened by age, and four inches by six.

It wasn’t to be seen on the lawn. We argued about where we had gone through the shrubbery, and I let her win. It wasn’t there either, and a twig whipped my wounded cheek as I searched beneath the branches. After we had passed through the gate into the field we had to go slower because the grass was tall enough to hide a small object like a card case. Naturally I felt foolish, kicking around three or four blocks away from where I wanted to be, but I had told my story and was stuck with it.

We finally finished with the field, including the route around the back of the outbuildings, and the inside of the barn. As we neared the vicinity of the house from the other direction, the south-west, I kept bearing left, and Madeline objected that we hadn’t gone that way. I replied that I had been outdoors on other occasions than our joint night expedition, and went still further left. At last I was in bounds. Thirty paces off was a clump of trees, and just the other side of it was the gravelled plaza where my car was parked. If someone had batted Rony on the head, for instance with a piece of a branch of a tree with stubs of twigs on it, before running the car over him, and if he had then put the branch in the car and it was still there when he drove back to the house to park, and if he had been in a hurry and the best he could do was give the branch a toss, it might have landed in the clump of trees or near by. That cluster of ifs will indicate the kind of errand Wolfe had picked for me. Searching the grounds for a likely weapon was a perfectly sound routine idea, but it needed ten trained men with no inhibitions, not a pretty girl in a cotton print looking for a card case and a born hero pretending he was doing likewise.

Somebody growled something that resembled 'Good morning.' It was Paul Emerson. I was nearing the edge of the clump of trees, with Madeline not far off. When I looked up I could see only the top half of Emerson because he was standing on the other side of my car and the hood hid the rest of him. I told him hello, not expansively.

'This isn’t the same car,' he stated.

'That’s right,' I agreed. 'The other one was a sedan. That’s a convertible. You have a sharp eye. Why, did you like the sedan better?' 'I suppose,' he said cuttingly, 'you have Mr Sperling’s permission to wander around here?' 'I’m here, Paul,' Madeline said sweetly. 'Maybe you couldn’t see me for the trees. My name’s Sperling.' 'I’m not wandering,' I told him. 'I’m looking for something.' 'What?' 'You. Mr Wolfe sent me to congratulate you on your broadcast yesterday. His phone’s been busy ever since, people wanting to hire him. Would you mind lying down so I can run the car over you?' He had stepped around the front of the hood and advanced, and I had emerged from the clump of trees. Within arm’s reach he stood, his nose and a corner of his mouth twitching, and his eyes boring into me.

'There are restrictions on the air,' he said, 'that don’t apply here. The animal I had in mind was the hyena. The ones with four legs are never fat, but those with two legs sometimes are. Your boss is. You’re not.' 'I’ll count three,' I said. 'One, two, three.' With an open palm I slapped him on the right cheek, and as he rocked I straightened him up with one on the left The second one was a little harder, but not at all vicious. I turned and moved, not in haste, back among the trees. When I got to the other edge of the clump Madeline was beside me.

'That didn’t impress me much,' she declared, in a voice that wanted to tremble but didn’t 'He’s not exactly Joe Louis.' I kept moving. 'These things are relative,' I explained. 'When your sister called Mr Wolfe a cheap filthy little worm I didn’t even shake a finger at her, let alone slap her. But the impulse to wipe his sneer off would have been irresistible even if he hadn’t said a word and even if he had been only half the size. Anyway, it didn’t leave a mark on him. Look what your mother did to me, and I wasn’t sneering.' She wasn’t convinced. 'Next time do it when I’m not there. Who did scratch you?'

'Paul Emerson. I was just getting even. We’ll never find that card case if you don’t help me look.' An hour later we were side by side on the grass at the edge of the brook, a little below the bridge, discussing lunch. Her polite position was that there was no reason why I shouldn’t go to the house for it, and I was opposed.

Lunching with Mrs Sperling and Jimmy, whom I had caught technically breaking and entering, with Webster Kine, whom Wolfe had called a liar, and with Emerson, whom I had just smacked on both cheeks, didn’t appeal to me on the whole.

Besides, my errand now looked hopeless. I had covered, as well as I could with company along, all the territory from the house to the bridge, and some of it beyond the bridge, and I could take a look at the rest of it on the way out.

Madeline was manipulating a blade of grass with her teeth, which were even and white but not ostentatious. 'I’m tired and hungry,' she stated. 'You’ll have to carry me home.' 'Okay.' I got to my feet. 'If it starts me breathing fast and deep don’t misunderstand.' 'I will.' She tilted her head back to look up at me. 'But first why don’t you tell me what you’ve been looking for'Do you think for one minute I’d have kept panting around with you all morning if I had thought it was only a card case?' 'You haven’t panted once. What’s wrong with a card case?' 'Nothing.' She spat out the blade of grass. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes, either. Haven’t I seen you'Half the time you’ve been darting into places where you couldn’t possibly have lost a card or anything else. When we came down the bank to the brook I expected you to start looking under stones.' She waved a hand. 'There’s thousands of ‘em. Go to it’ She sprang to her feet and shook out her skirt. 'But carry me home first And on the way you’ll tell me what you’ve been looking for or I’ll tear your picture out of my scrapbook.' 'Maybe we can make a deal,' I offered. 'I’ll tell you what I’ve been looking for if you’ll tell me what your idea was on Tuesday afternoon. You may remember that you might have seen or heard something on Monday evening that could have given you a notion about someone using my car, but you wouldn’t tell me because you wanted to save your father some dough. That reason no longer holds, so why not tell me now?' She smiled down at me. 'You never let go, do you'Certainly I’ll tell you. I saw Webster Kane on the terrace about that time, and if he hadn’t used the car himself I thought he might have seen someone going to it or coming back.' 'No sale. Try again.' 'But that was it!' 'Oh, sure it was.' I got to my feet. 'It’s lucky it happened to be Kane who signed that statement. You’re a very lucky girl. I think I’ll have to choke you.

I’ll count three. One, two-' She sprinted up the bank and waited for me at the top. Going back up the drive, she got fairly caustic because I insisted that all I had come for was the card case, but when we reached the parking plaza and I had the door of the car open, she gave that up to end on the note she had greeted me with. She came close, ran a fingertip gently down the line of my scratch, and demanded, 'Tell me who did that, Archie. I’m jealous!' 'Some day,' I said, climbing in and pushing the starter button, 'I’ll tell you everything from the cradle on.' 'Honest?' 'Yes, ma’am.' I rolled away.

As I steered the curves down the drive my mind was on several things at once.

One was a record just set by a woman. I had been with Madeline three hours and she hadn’t tried to pump me with a single question about what Wolfe was up to.

For that she deserved some kind of a mark, and I filed it under unfinished business. Another was a check on a point that Wolfe had raised. The brook made a good deal of noise. It wasn’t the kind you noticed unless you listened, but it was loud enough so that if you were only twenty feet from the bridge, walking up the drive, and it was nearly dark, you might not hear a car coming down the drive until it was right on you. That was a point in support of Webster Kane’s confession, and therefore a step backward instead of forward, but it would have to be reported to Wolfe.

However, the thing in the front of my mind was Madeline’s remark that she had expected me to start looking under stones. It should have occurred to me before, but anyway it had now, and, not being prejudiced like Wolfe, I don’t resent getting a tip from a woman. So I went on through the entrance on to the public highway, parked the car at the roadside, got a magnifying glass from the medicine case, walked back up the drive to the bridge, and stepped down the bank to the edge of the brook.

There certainly were thousands of stones, all shapes and sizes, some partly under water, more along the edge and on the bank. I shook my head. It was a perfectly good idea, but there was only one of me and I was no expert I moved to a new position and looked some more. The stones that were in the water all had smooth surfaces, and the high ones were dry and light-coloured, and the low ones were dark and wet and slippery. Those on the bank, beyond the water, were also smooth and dry and light-coloured until they got up to a certain level, where there was an abrupt change and they were rough and much darker-a greenish grey.

Of course the dividing line was the level of the water in the spring when the brook was up.

Good for you, I thought, you’ve made one hell of a discovery and now you’re a geologist. All you have to do now is put every damn rock under the glass, and along about Labour Day you’ll be ready to report. Ignoring my sarcasm, I went on looking. I moved along the edge of the brook, stepping on stones, until I was underneath the bridge, stood there a while, and moved again, upstream from the bridge. By that time my eyes had caught on to the idea and I didn’t have to keep reminding them.

It was there, ten feet up from the bridge, that I found it. It was only a few inches from the water’s edge, and was cuddled in a nest of larger stones, half hidden, but when I had once spotted it it was as conspicuous as a scratched cheek. About the size of a coconut, and something like one in shape, it was rough and greenish grey, whereas all its neighbours were smooth and light-coloured. I was so excited I stood and gawked at it for ten seconds, and when I moved, with my eyes glued on it for fear it would take a hop, I stepped on a wiggler and nearly took a header into the brook.