The Second Confesion

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 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 voter from a tourist at ten miles, but he wasn't a bad guy.

“Very regrettable,” he said.

None of the occupants of the house had been kept up all night, not even me, who had found the body. The State cops had arrived first, followed soon by a pair of county dicks from White Plains, and, after some rounds of questions without being too rude, they had told everyone to go to bed-that is, everyone but me. I was singled out not only because I had found the body, which was just a good excuse, but because the man who singled me would have liked to do unto me as I would have liked to do unto him. He was Lieutenant Con Noonan of the State Police, and he would never forget how I had helped Wolfe make a monkey of him in the Pitcairn affair. Add to that the fact that he was fitted out at birth for a career as a guard at a slave-labour camp and somehow got delivered to the wrong country, and you can imagine his attitude When he came and saw Wolfe and me there. He was bitterly disappointed when he learned that Wolfe was on Sperling's pay roll and therefore he would have to pretend he knew how to be polite. He was big and tall and in love with his uniform, and he thought he was handsome. At two o clock one of the county boys, who was really in charge, because the body had not been found on a public highway, told me to go to bed.