The Second Confession Read online

  THE REX STOUT LIBRARY

  Rex Stout is one of America’s best-loved mystery writers, and Bantam is proud to present these special collector’s editions

  AND BE A VILLAIN

  CHAMPAGNE FOR ONE

  DEATH OF A DOXY

  DEATH TIMES THREE

  FER-DE-LANCE

  THE GOLDEN SPIDERS

  IN THE BEST FAMILIES

  OVER MY DEAD BODY

  A RIGHT TO DIE

  THE SECOND CONFESSION

  THE SILENT SPEAKER

  SOME BURIED CAESAR

  THE DOORBELL RANG

  PRISONERS BASE

  HOMICIDE TRINITY

  THREE DOORS TO DEATH

  AND FOUR TO GO

  THE MOTHER HUNT

  THREE WITNESSES

  TROUBLE IN TRIPLICATE

  THREE AT WOLFE’S DOOR

  TRIO FOR BLUNT

  INSTRUMENTS

  BLACK ORCHIDS

  NOT QUITE DEAD ENOUGH

  THREE FOR THE CHAIR

  Rex Stout

  REX STOUT, the creator of Nero Wolfe, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children of John and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, both Quakers. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Wakarusa, Kansas. He was educated in a country school, but by the age of nine he was recognized throughout the state as a prodigy in arithmetic. Mr. Stout briefly attended the University of Kansas, but he left to enlist in the Navy and spent the next two years as a warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. When he left the Navy in 1908, Rex Stout began to write freelance articles and worked as a sightseeing guide and an itinerant bookkeeper. Later he devised and implemented a school banking system which was installed in four hundred cities and towns throughout the country. In 1927 Mr. Stout retired from the world of finance and, with the proceeds of his banking scheme, left for Paris to write serious fiction. He wrote three novels that received favorable reviews before turning to detective fiction. His first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, appeared in 1934. It was followed by many others, among them, Too Many Cooks, The Silent Speaker, If Death Ever Slept, The Doorbell Rang, and Please Pass the Guilt, which established Nero Wolfe as a leading character on a par with Erie Stanley Gardner’s famous protagonist, Perry Mason. During World War II Rex Stout waged a personal campaign against Nazism as chairman of the War Writers’ Board, master of ceremonies of the radio program “Speaking of Liberty,” and member of several national committees. After the war he turned his attention to mobilizing public opinion against the wartime use of thermonuclear devices, was an active leader in the Authors’ Guild, and resumed writing his Nero Wolfe novels. Rex Stout died in 1975 at the age of eighty-eight. A month before his death he published his seventy-second Nero Wolfe mystery, A Family Affair. Ten years later, a seventy-third Nero Wolfe mystery was discovered and published in Death Times Three.

  The Rex Stout Library

  Fer-de-Lance

  The League of Frightened Men

  The Rubber Band

  The Red Box

  Too Many Cooks

  Some Buried Caesar

  Over My Dead Body

  Where There’s a Will

  Black Orchids

  Not Quite Dead Enough

  The Silent Speaker

  Too Many Women

  And Be a Villain

  The Second Confession

  Trouble in Triplicate

  In the Best Families

  Three Doors to Death

  Murder by the Book

  Curtains for Three

  Prisoner’s Base

  Triple Jeopardy

  The Golden Spiders

  The Black Mountain

  Three Men Out

  Before Midnight

  Might As Well Be Dead

  Three Witnesses

  If Death Ever Slept

  Three for the Chair

  Champagne for One

  And Four to Go

  Plot It Yourself

  Too Many Clients

  Three at Wolfe’s Door

  The Final Deduction

  Gambit

  Homicide Trinity

  The Mother Hunt

  A Right to Die

  Trio for Blunt Instruments

  The Doorbell Rang

  Death of a Doxy

  The Father Hunt

  Death of a Dude

  Please Pass the Guilt

  A Family Affair

  Death Times Three

  Introduction

  When I was a teenager, I thought something was wrong with me: I didn’t like Sherlock Holmes! I found him pompous and rude, narrow-minded and opinionated, neurotic and egocentric. Oh, he was smart, all right. And he sure knew it. To me, he was an obnoxious show-off. Nor did I have much respect for poor, dull, dutiful, dim-witted Watson, who seemed to worship the man without reservation.

  But I enjoyed stories of detection. I liked assembling and connecting clues and matching my intellect with that of the Great Man (although I never thought it was quite fair that he could identify the region where tobacco had been grown when I hadn’t had the chance to examine the ash for myself), and so I read the entire Conan Doyle canon.

  One day my well-meaning local librarian, who knew my reading habits, said to me, “You should try Nero Wolfe. He’s a lot like Sherlock Holmes.” Rather than confess my low-brow literary taste (everyone, I understood, loved Holmes), I borrowed a couple of Rex Stout novels.

  And I discovered that my librarian was right: Wolfe was a lot like Holmes, and I didn’t like him, either. Wolfe was arrogant and vain, grouchy and lazy, and as far as I could tell, his only interest in life was making a lot of money so he could eat, raise orchids, sit in comfortable chairs, avoid travel, boss Archie Goodwin around, and impress people with how smart he was.

  Yet I devoured the books! The difference was Archie. He saw Wolfe the same way I did (Archie sometimes referred to his employer as “the worm”), and I was grateful to him for it. Archie validated my feelings about Wolfe, who tended to infuriate me. Archie did all the work, it seemed to me, investigating and detecting and gathering clues, which he brought back and deposited in the fat man’s lap. And Wolfe’s most generous expression of appreciation was: “Satisfactory, Archie.”

  But Archie, bless him, echoed my feelings perfectly by retorting, “Don’t strain yourself.” He put Wolfe in his place and thereby made him tolerable. Archie’s wry irreverence allowed me to accept Wolfe’s eccentricities and admire his brainpower.

  Archie was the perfect complement to Wolfe—and the ideal narrator. Together, they made an entertaining Odd Couple and a detecting team designed for the long haul. Wolfe was the Great Detective, the problem solver, the brain, in the classic Sherlock Holmes mold. But Archie was no mealymouthed yes-man. Rather, he was a genuine hard-boiled detective in his own right, with a narrative voice as sharp and earthy as anything out of Hammett or Chandler.

  There is no question that Rex Stout knew precisely what he was up to. In pairing Wolfe with Archie, he found the perfect reconciliation between the classic British drawing room mystery and the naturalistic American novel of the mean streets—Sherlock Holmes meets Sam Spade.

  In the 1950s, when my librarian introduced me to him, Rex Stout was around seventy, and he still had another several dozen stories left in him before his death in 1975. In his life as a writer, he published fifty-one novels and seventy-five novellas and short stories, all but a handful of which were Wolfe-Goodwin yarns. I guess I eventually read most of them. I liked some of the storylines better than others (The Second Confession happens to be one of my favorites), but I didn’t read them for their puzzle or plot. I just wanted to spend more time with Archie.

  Many of the books—including this one—add
ress important social issues of Stout’s time: fascism, McCarthyism, racism, communism, censorship, and the FBI. This is not surprising. Stout himself was a political activist—often a controversial one. He broadcast anti-Nazi propaganda during World War II, then argued for crippling economic sanctions against Germany after the war. When he became chairman of the Writers’ Board for World Government in 1949, despite the clear anticommunist sentiments expressed in The Second Confession (“intellectually contemptible and morally unsound”), published that same year, Stout was accused of communism by a congressional committee. He responded by attacking McCarthyism. He steadfastly supported Nixon’s Vietnam policies, and then, in response to Watergate, called Nixon “unquestionably the greatest danger that ever occurred to American democracy.”

  Rex Stout did not use Archie and Wolfe to promote his causes, however. He never lost sight of his purpose—to write entertaining detective stories populated with compelling characters.

  When, sometime around my fortieth birthday, I was struck by the urge to try to write a novel, I was vastly comforted to learn that Rex Stout didn’t write his first Nero Wolfe tale until he was forty-seven, and that he proceeded to write them right up to his death at the age of eighty-eight. It was considerably less comforting to learn that he typically completed a novel in thirty-eight days, and that he always got it right on the first try.

  P. G. Wodehouse once said, “Stout’s supreme triumph was the creation of Archie Goodwin.”

  That’s how I’ve always felt about it, too. When I returned those first Rex Stout books to my librarian, I said to her, “Do you have any more of these Archie Goodwin stories?”

  She smiled, I recall, and said, “Why, yes. Dozens.”

  —William G. Tapply

  Chapter 1

  I didn’t mind it at all,” our visitor said gruffly but affably. “It’s a pleasure.” He glanced around. “I like rooms that men work in. This is a good one.”

  I was still swallowing my surprise that he actually looked like a miner, at least my idea of one, with his big bones and rough weathered skin and hands that would have been right at home around a pick handle. Certainly swinging a pick was not what he got paid for as chairman of the board of the Continental Mines Corporation, which had its own building down on Nassau Street not far from Wall.

  I was also surprised at the tone he was using. When, the day before, a masculine voice had given a name on the phone and asked when Nero Wolfe could call at his office, and I had explained why I had to say never, and it had ended by arranging an appointment at Wolfe’s office for eleven the next morning, I had followed up with a routine check on a prospective client by calling Lon Cohen at the Gazette, Lon had told me that the only reason James U. Sperling didn’t bite ears off was because he took whole heads and ate them bones and all. But there he was, slouching in the red leather chair near the end of Wolfe’s desk like a big friendly roughneck, and I’ve just told you what he said when Wolfe started the conversation by explaining that he never left the office on business and expressing a regret that Sperling had had to come all the way to our place on West Thirty-fifth Street nearly to Eleventh Avenue. He said it was a pleasure!

  “It will do,” Wolfe murmured in a gratified tone. He was behind his desk, leaning back in his custom-made chair, which was warranted safe for a quarter of a ton and which might some day really be put to the test if its owner didn’t level off. He added, “If you’ll tell me what your problem is perhaps I can make your trip a good investment.”

  Seated at my own desk, at a right angle to Wolfe’s and not far away, I allowed myself a mild private grin. Since the condition of his bank balance did not require the use of sales pressure to snare a client, I knew why he was spreading the sugar. He was merely being sociable because Sperling had said he liked the office. Wolfe didn’t like the office, which was on the first floor of the old brownstone house he owned. He didn’t like it, he loved it, and it was a good thing he did, since he was spending his life in it—except when he was in the kitchen with Fritz, or in the dining room across the hall at mealtime, or upstairs asleep, or in the plant rooms up on the roof, enjoying the orchids and pretending he was helping Theodore with the work.

  My private grin was interrupted by Sperling firing a question at me: “Your name’s Goodwin, isn’t it? Archie Goodwin?”

  I admitted it. He went to Wolfe.

  “It’s a confidential matter.”

  Wolfe nodded. “Most matters discussed in this office are. That’s commonplace in the detective business. Mr. Goodwin and I are used to it.”

  “It’s a family matter.”

  Wolfe frowned, and I joined in. With that opening it was a good twenty-to-one shot that we were going to be asked to tail a wife, and that was out of bounds for us. But James U. Sperling went on.

  “I tell you that because you’d learn it anyhow.” He put a hand to the inside breast pocket of his coat and pulled out a bulky envelope. “These reports will tell you that much. They’re from the Bascom Detective Agency. You know them?”

  “I know Mr. Bascom.” Wolfe was still frowning. “I don’t like ground that’s been tramped over.”

  Sperling went right on by. “I had used them on business matters and found them competent, so I went to Bascom with this. I wanted information about a man named Rony, Louis Rony, and they’ve been at it a full month and they haven’t got it, and I need it urgently. Yesterday I decided to call them off and try you. I’ve looked you up, and if you’ve earned your reputation I should have come to you first.” He smiled like an angel, surprising me again, and convincing me that he would stand watching. “Apparently you have no equal.”

  Wolfe grunted, trying not to look pleased. “There was a man in Marseille—but he’s not available and he doesn’t speak English. What information do you want about Mr. Rony?”

  “I want proof that he’s a Communist. If you get it and get it soon, your bill can be whatever you want to make it.”

  Wolfe shook his head. “I don’t take jobs on those terms. You don’t know he’s a Communist, or you wouldn’t be bidding so high for proof. If he isn’t, I can’t very well get evidence that he is. As for my bill being whatever I want to make it, my bills always are. But I charge for what I do, and I can do nothing that is excluded by circumstance. What I dig up is of necessity contingent on what has been buried, but the extent of my digging isn’t, nor my fee.”

  “You talk too much,” Sperling said impatiently but not impolitely.

  “Do I?” Wolfe cocked an eye at him. “Then you talk.” He nodded sidewise at me. “Your notebook, Archie.”

  The miner waited until I had it ready, open at a fresh page, and then spoke crisply, starting with a spelling lesson. “L-o-u-i-s. R-o-n-y. He’s in the Manhattan phone book, both his law office and his home, his apartment—and anyway, it’s all in that.” He indicated the bulky envelope, which he had tossed onto Wolfe’s desk. “I have two daughters. Madeline is twenty-six and Gwenn is twenty-two. Gwenn was smart enough to graduate with honors at Smith a year ago, and I’m almost sure she’s sane, but she’s too damn curious and she turns her nose up at rules. She hasn’t worked her way out of the notion that you can have independence without earning it. Of course it’s all right to be romantic at her age, but she overdoes it, and I think what first attracted her to this man Rony was his reputation as a champion of the weak and downtrodden, which he has got by saving criminals from the punishment they deserve.”

  “I think I’ve seen his name,” Wolfe murmured. “Haven’t I, Archie?”

  I nodded. “So have I. It was him that got What’s-her-name, that baby peddler, out from under a couple of months ago. He seems to be on his way to the front page.”

  “Or to jail,” Sperling snapped, and there was nothing angelic about his tone. “I think I handled this wrong, and I’m damned sure my wife did. It was the same old mistake, and God only knows why parents go on making it. We even told her, and him too, that he would no longer be admitted into our home, and of cours
e you know what the reaction was to that. The only concession she made, and I doubt if that was to us, was never to come home after daylight.”

  “Is she pregnant?” Wolfe inquired.

  Sperling stiffened. “What did you say?” His voice was suddenly as hard as the hardest ore ever found in any mine. Unquestionably he expected it to crush Wolfe into pretending he hadn’t opened his mouth, but it didn’t.

  “I asked if your daughter is pregnant. If the question is immaterial I withdraw it, but surely it isn’t preposterous unless she also turns her nose up at natural laws.”

  “She is my daughter,” Sperling said in the same hard tone. Then suddenly his rigidity gave way. All the stiff muscles loosened, and he was laughing. When he laughed he roared, and he really meant it. In a moment he controlled it enough to speak. “Did you hear what I said?” he demanded.

  Wolfe nodded. “If I can believe my ears.”

  “You can.” Sperling smiled like an angel. “I suppose with any man that’s one of his tenderest spots, but I might be expected to remember that I am not just any man. To the best of my knowledge my daughter is not pregnant, and she would have a right to be astonished if she were. That’s not it. A little over a month ago my wife and I decided to correct the mistake we had made, and she told Gwenn that Rony would be welcome at our home as often as she wanted him there. That same day I put Bascom onto him. You’re quite right that I can’t prove he’s a Communist or I wouldn’t have had to come to you, but I’m convinced that he is.”

  “What convinced you?”

  “The way he talks, the way I’ve sized him up, the way he practices his profession—and there are things in Bascom’s reports, you’ll see that when you read them—”

  “But Mr. Bascom got no proof.”

  “No. Damn it.”

  “Whom do you call a Communist? A liberal? A pink intellectual? A member of the party? How far left do you start?”

  Sperling smiled. “It depends on where I am and who I’m talking to. There are occasions when it may be expedient to apply the term to anyone left of center. But to you I’m using it realistically. I think Rony is a member of the Communist party.”