The Second Confession

Chapter 17

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 offhand 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 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 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 her. 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 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 license is in it.”

“Your driving license?”

I shook my head. “Detective license.”

“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 onto 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 southwest, 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 graveled 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 hit 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 of 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 Kane, 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 case 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 Tuesday afternoon. You may remember that you might have seen or heard something 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 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 onto 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-colored, and the low ones were dark and wet and slippery. Those on the bank, beyond the water, were also smooth and dry and light-colored until they got up to a certain level, where there was an abrupt change and they were rough and much darker — a greenish gray. 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 Labor 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 onto 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 gray, whereas all its neighbors were smooth and light-colored. 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.

One thing sure, that rock hadn’t been there long.

I bent over double so as to use both hands to pick it up, touching it only with the tips of four fingers, and straightened to take a look. The best bet would of course be prints, but one glance showed that to be an outside chance. It was rough all over, hundreds of little indentations, with not a smooth spot anywhere. But I still held it with my fingertips, because while prints had been the best bet they were by no means the only one. I was starting to turn, to move away from the brook to better footing, when a voice came from right behind me.

“Looking for hellgrammites?”

I swiveled my head. It was Connie Emerson. She was close enough to reach me with a stretched arm, which would have meant that she was an expert at the silent approach, if it hadn’t been for the noise of the brook.

I grinned at the clear strong blue of her eyes. “No, I’m after gold.”

“Really? Let me see—”

She took a step, lit on a stone with a bad angle, gave a little squeal, and toppled into me. Not being firmly based, over I went, and I went clear down because I spent my first tenth of a second trying to keep my fingertip hold on my prize, but I lost it anyway. When I bounced up to a sitting position Connie was sprawled flat, but her head was up and she was stretching an arm in a long reach for something, and she was getting it. My greenish gray stone had landed less than a foot from the water, and her fingers were ready to close on it. I hate to suspect a blue-eyed blonde of guile, but if she had it in mind to toss that stone in the water to see it splash all she needed was another two seconds, so I did a headlong slide over the rocks and brought the side of my hand down on her forearm. She let out a yell and jerked the arm back. I scrambled up and got erect, with my left foot planted firmly in front of my stone.

She sat up, gripping her forearm with her other hand, glaring at me. “You big ape, are you crazy?” she demanded.

“Getting there,” I told her. “Gold does it to you. Did you see that movie, Treasure of Sierra Madre?”

“Damn you.” She clamped her jaw, held it a moment, and released it. “Damn you, I think you broke my arm.”

“Then your bones must be chalk. I barely tapped it. Anyway, you nearly broke my back.” I made my voice reasonable. “There’s too much suspicion in this world. I’ll agree not to suspect you of meaning to bump me if you’ll agree not to suspect me of meaning to tap your arm. Why don’t we move off of these rocks and sit on the grass and talk it over? Your eyes are simply beautiful. We could start from there.”

She pulled her feet in, put a hand — not the one that had reached for my stone — on a rock for leverage, got to her feet, stepped carefully across the rocks to the grass, climbed the bank, and was gone.

My right elbow hurt, and my left hip. I didn’t care for that, but there were other aspects of the situation that I liked even less. Counting the help, there were six or seven men in and around the house, and if Connie told them a tale that brought them all down to the brook it might get embarrassing. She had done enough harm as it was, making me drop my stone. I stooped and lifted it with my fingertips again, got clear of the rocks and negotiated the bank, walked down the drive and on out to the car, and made room for the stone in the medicine case, wedged so it wouldn’t roll around.

I didn’t stop for lunch in Westchester County, either. I took to the parkways and kept going. I didn’t feel really elated, since I might have got merely a stray hunk of granite, not Exhibit A at all, and I didn’t intend to start crowing unless and until. So when I left the West Side Highway at Forty-sixth Street, as usual, I drove first to an old brick building in the upper Thirties near Ninth Avenue. There I delivered the stone to a Mr. Weinbach, who promised they would do their best. Then I drove home, went in and found Fritz in the kitchen, ate four sandwiches — two sturgeon and two home-baked ham — and drank a quart of milk.