Rex Stout - The Second Confession

“But you—”

“No, please. You think if I repeat the conversation I had with you and your family this afternoon it will give the impression that all of you, except one, had good reason to wish Mr. Rony dead, and you’re quite right. That will make it next to impossible for them to regard his death as something short of murder, and, no matter what your position in this community may be, you and your family will be in a devil of a fix. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it. I have withheld information from the police many times, but only when it concerned a case I was myself engaged on and I felt I could make better use of it if I didn’t share it. Another—”

“Damn it, you’re engaged on this case!”

“I am not. The job you hired me for is ended, and I’m glad of it. You remember how I defined the objective? It has been reached — though not, I confess, by my—”

“Then I hire you for another job now. To investigate Rony’s death.”

Wolfe frowned at him. “You’d better not. I advise against it.”

“You’re hired.”

Wolfe shook his head. “You’re in a panic and you’re being impetuous. If Mr. Rony was murdered, and if I undertake to look into it, I’ll get the murderer. It’s conceivable that you’ll regret you ever saw me.”

“But you’re hired.”

Wolfe shrugged. “I know. Your immediate problem is to keep me from repeating that conversation to the police, and, being pugnacious and self-assured, you solve your problems as they come. But you can’t hire me today and fire me tomorrow. You know what I would do if you tried that.”

“I know. You won’t be fired. You’re hired.” Sperling arose. “I’ll phone the police.”

“Wait a minute!” Wolfe was exasperated. “Confound it, are you a dunce? Don’t you know how ticklish this is? There were seven of us in that conversation—”

“We’ll attend to that after I’ve phoned.”

“No, we won’t. I’ll attend to it now.” Wolfe’s eyes darted around. “All of you, please. Miss Sperling?”

Gwenn was face down on the bed and Madeline was seated on the edge.

“Do you have to bark at her now?” Madeline demanded.

“I’ll try not to bark. But I do have to speak to her — all of you.”

Gwenn was sitting up. “I’m all right,” she said. “I heard every word. Dad hired you again, to — oh, my God.” She hadn’t been crying, which was a blessing since it would have demoralized Wolfe, but she looked fairly ragged. “Go ahead,” she said.

“You know,” Wolfe told them curtly, “what the situation is. I must first have a straight answer to this: have any of you repeated the conversation we had in the library, or any part of it, to anyone?”

They all said no.

“This is important. You’re sure?”

“Connie was—” Jimmy had to clear his throat. “Connie was asking questions. She was curious.” He looked unhappy.

“What did you tell her?”

“Oh, just — nothing much.”

“Damn it, how much?” Sperling demanded.

“Not anything, Dad, really. I guess I mentioned Louis — but nothing about X and all that crap.”

“You should have had more sense.” Sperling looked at Wolfe. “Shall I get her?”

Wolfe shook his head. “By no means. We’ll have to risk it. That was all? None of you has reported that conversation?”

They said no again.

“Very well. The police will ask questions. They will be especially interested in my presence here — and Mr. Goodwin’s. I shall tell them that Mr. Sperling suspected that Mr. Rony, who was courting his daughter, was a Communist, and that—”

“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.

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.