The Comfortable Coffin

by Richard S. Prather

  I didn’t wait. I walked out to meet him.

  “Go sweep the chapel, Danny,” I said. “Hello, Al.”

  “Pete!” Al gave me the big smile. “My old friend Pete. How are ya?”

  I let that go. Just because we had been in the pen together, that didn’t make us friends.

  “Well, Pete,” Al said. “Nice place you’ve got here. Quiet. Real quiet. Remember how noisy those cells were, huh? Always somebody coughing, screaming, spitting. Enough to drive a guy nuts.”

  “Why are we talking about cells?” I asked.

  Al shucked his expensive, wet gabardine and tossed it on a bench.

  “Why don’t we get comfortable, Pete boy?” he said. “As for talking about cells, let’s forget them. Let’s forget that you’re a three-time loser. Let’s forget everything except that we’re on the outside and we’re going to stay on the outside and we’re going to live it up.”

  I didn’t ask what all that meant; I knew. I led him back to the office and pulled out the extra chair.

  “All right, Al, what is it?” I asked, feeling sick inside. Because if there was one thing I didn’t want, it was to get back into the business again. And if there was one man I didn’t want to get back into the business with, it was Al Thomas.

  AI pulled out a gold-plated pocket flask, and a little gadget that unfolded into two cups. He filled them with expensive Scotch and handed me one. I took it because when Al Thomas handed you something, you took it—and pretended to like it

  “Happy days,” he said, and we drank. Then Al gave me a toothy smile. “A nice setup you have here, Pete. Your own boss and no interference all night long. Perfect.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Just a little deal I have in mind. Just you and me. An eighty-twenty cut. No muss, no fuss, no risk.”

  I wiped my mouth.

  “I’m going straight these days, Al,” I said, trying to sound very, very regretful. “Doc told me to stay away from excitement. The old ticker isn’t what it ought to be.”

  That wasn’t a lie. At the moment my heart was pumping in a way no pump should.

  “That’s okay,” Al said. “Because there won’t be any excitement on this job. The only excitement will come when we count the take. How high can you count, Pete boy?”

  I told him I didn’t know; I’d never tried. And I laughed as if I had just said something that was a real yock.

  “You’ll have to get in practice. Practice counting up to three million.”

  “Three million dollars?” I asked.

  “And not Confederate money. Twenty percent is six hundred thousand smackers. Think your heart can take that kind of excitement, Pete boy?”

  What could I say? All Al had to do was frame me on some charge—maybe plant some hot goods in my apartment—and I’d be back in the can for life. Not a good prospect.

  “Yeah, Al,” I said. “Yeah, I guess it could.

  And that’s how the Dollar Delivery heist started.

  Well, not exactly how it started. It was more complicated than that. But how my part in it started. Next afternoon I went to see Al. He was living in a crummy rooming house on the edge of the downtown district. He was living there because it was almost across the street from the Dollar Delivery headquarters. Dollar Delivery operated out of a two-story brick building, with high brick walls all around an inner courtyard that could only be reached through wrought-iron gates that were kept locked.

  Next door to Dollar Delivery, in a vacant lot, a steam shovel was at work on an excavation. Trucks pounded past, kids played hopscotch in the street, and women yelled at them. It was a nice, noisy neighborhood.

  Al took me to the window and jerked his head toward the bride building.

  “It don’t look like any bank,” he said, “but on paydays they got from two to three million in the vault over there. All these airplane factories. The jerks who work in ’em like to be paid off in cash.”

  “They also got at least five guards armed with tommy guns inside there day and night,” I told him.

  “Six,” chuckled Al. “Did you know Dollar Delivery has an unwritten rule that any guard who kills a holdup joe gets two grand?”

  “That’s dandy. Six guys with tommy guns all trying to be first to ventilate us.”

  “Not us, not us. You see that steam shovel?”

  I said I saw it

  “The guy working that steam shovel is Marty O’Bannion. The guy driving that dump truck is Legs Judson. Big Finger Maxie, Soup Boner, and Fast Friday are all around someplace. Marty has been setting this deal up for a year. He’s been waiting till he could get to someone on the inside, and he’s finally done it. Now he’s ready to go. Thursday night, when they’re counting the money, Marty will hit them.”

  “You and Marty are working together?” I asked, knowing different

  “In a way, Pete boy. I was in town three months ago when I recognized Legs Judson driving a truck. I got curious. I found that Marty owns a construction company in town—under another name. He also owns that vacant lot. Marty could give tactical lessons at the Army War College. While his men were supposed to be shoring up the brick wall around Dollar Delivery to prevent the excavation from weakening it, they were fixing it so it would topple if a cat sneezed. They’ll walk in with an engraved invitation.”

  I said Al certainly had it down pat. I made it sound admiring.

  “They all have an apartment together in a building over on the other side of town. I found out about it, got the next apartment, and bugged the place. I’ve been listening to them breathe for two months. So don’t worry about how much I know. I know all of it.”

  I said I wasn’t worried. I said it very convincingly. Al said he was glad.

  “I can see where they can get in and out again,” I told Al. “But this business district is built on an island. There’s only four bridges to get off it, and suppose there’s a fast alarm? The cops’ll have those four bridges blocked off faster’n you can blow your nose.”

  “Pete boy—” Al looked pained—“let me worry about the details. Just answer one question. Can you drive a horse?”

  “Sure I can drive a horse.”

  “Good.” He clapped me on the back and I almost fell down. “Then you’ll be the first guy in history to earn more than half a million bucks for driving a horse.”

  I risked one more question.

  “What kind of a horse, Al?”

  He dead-panned me.

  “Who said anything about a horse? I said hearse.”

  I spent the rest of the day biting off my fingernails.

  When I had them off down to the knuckle, I quit. So Al Thomas was planning on letting Marty O’Bannion and his gang pull the biggest job in history, then he was going to hijack the loot. With nobody to help him but me. Pete Wilson, five-seven, near-sighted, never shot a gun in my life. I hadn’t gotten beyond jimmying open the back door of a store or gas station.

  I got out my bank book to figure how far I could get. Not far on two hundred thirty-five bucks. Not far enough. Al wanted my help. What Al wanted, he got. Why me, I didn’t know. But he’d spotted me while prowling the town, after stumbling on Marty’s setup, and he’d included me in somehow. And by and by the idea of knocking over three million bucks began to eat at me. Who ever heard of two men making a haul like that, anyway? And taking it away from the toughest mob in the country, too. It scared me, but I couldn’t stop thinking of it. Twenty per cent of three million was six hundred thousand. I told myself to be realistic. Al wouldn’t give me any twenty per cent. Ten per cent, maybe. No, five per cent was more like it. That was still a hundred and fifty thousand. He couldn’t give me less than five per cent

  I figured up the pros and cons, and the pros won. Al was the pro and I was the con, with a life stretch to do if I didn’t go along. What would you have done?

  I still didn’t know what Al wanted me for, and he didn’t tell me. That night, after midnight, he showed up at the crematorium again. I showed Al arou
nd the place. It was quiet at night—dead, you might say—compared to what it was like during the day. And it was small, but new and efficient. There was an unloading platform in back, where two men could slide a casket out onto a roller track that carried it smoothly inside through a small door, and straight through the receiving room into the cremation room, where the furnace was, unless it was desired to carry it into the chapel for services.

  I showed him the gas-fired oven with the nice clean flame that did all the work. The customers just slid into the oven in light pine boxes, and a few hours later an attendant swept a couple of pounds of ashes into an urn for the family. Very neat and sensible. Danny loved it when we took a dozen customers and condensed them so they’d fit into a space no bigger than a suitcase. Besides talking about how we’d all be standing on each other’s shoulders if it weren’t for that four a minute, he liked to talk about how the country would be one big burying ground someday if things went on the way they were. Danny had read an article someplace, and it had stuck with him.

  Danny hung around, giving Al an earful until I chased him away. Then, because Al asked, I took him into the office and showed him all the forms necessary for a cremation—all the red tape.

  Over my protest, AL took a sample of each form necessary.

  “You’ll get them back,” he told me. “I need them. You’ll be seeing me again about midnight, next Thursday night. Meantime, don’t get nervous. Don’t do anything you’d regret later.”

  I knew what he meant. I told him I wouldn’t. After he was gone I tried to get back to reading my western, but my heart wasn’t in it. I kept wondering how Al was going to hijack Marty O’Bannion’s mob with just me to help. How? How? How?

  And would I really be driving a hearse?

  Or would I be in one?

  Thursday night came fast. I got out my bank book and studied it half a dozen times. It still said just two hundred thirty-five bucks. Not enough. I didn’t go anyplace. I was there when Al came back Thursday night.

  He came to the rear entrance, so Danny wouldn’t see him, and I let him in. Then I told Danny I was going down in the storeroom to take a little nap. He was to hold the fort, and if anyone wanted me, to say I was busy and would call back. There wasn’t a chance in a thousand anyone would want me. Then Al and I slipped out the side entrance.

  It was a nice night. We walked. The city was quiet; the theatres were all in the other direction. We passed dingy tenements and rooming houses and heard babies bawling, cats squalling, husbands and wives arguing. There was hardly anyone on the street. We reached Al’s rooming house, which he used only when he wanted to check on the Dollar Delivery building, and eased upstairs.

  In the dark of Al’s room, we pulled a couple of chairs up to the window. Across the street, the lights were on in the Dollar Delivery building. An armored car pulled up to the big gate, a guard got out and unlocked it, the truck went in, the guard relocked the gate, and the truck drove around to the back.

  Down in the street, a prowl car went by.

  First I felt hot. Then I felt cold. Nothing happened. Nothing I could see, anyway. But finally Al leaned forward.

  “Hear that?”

  All I had heard was a sound as if someone had dropped a shovelful of coal.

  “That was the bricks on the wall. Marty and the boys are inside now, doing our work for us. If there isn’t any alarm inside the next two minutes, they’ve made it. Then it’ll be our turn for some action.”

  It was a long two minutes. The prowl car went by down below again.

  There wasn’t any alarm.

  Al got up, and now he seemed on the tense side.

  “Come on,” he said. We went down the rooming-house stairs, out the back door, through an alley, and came out on the next street

  We went four blocks. We came to a bus stop that had a couple of benches. On one of them a woman who looked like a cleaning woman was waiting. We sat down on the other. Al didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. I had to keep my teeth clamped shut so they wouldn’t chatter. I wanted to run but my legs wouldn’t move.

  A bus came in. The woman got on. The bus left. We stayed. A block away, a milk wagon came down the street toward us, the horse’s hooves going clippety-clop, clippety-clop.

  Al stood up. “Come on.” We started toward the milk wagon. “Act drunk. Try to buy a quart of milk. Keep the driver’s attention. But no noise.”

  Then he slid over to the other side of the street and drifted along opposite me. I didn’t know what he wanted, but it had to be good. I put on a little stagger. It didn’t take much doing; my knees felt like buckling anyway. The milk wagon, clippety-clopped toward me. The driver, a young fellow in brown coveralls and a cap, was busy running up to the front steps of a row of shabby brownstone houses, putting down bottles of milk, coming back to the wagon for more. The horse moved along at a steady pace, stopped if the fellow stopped, kept going when the fellow did.

  I timed it so I got there just as the driver was hopping off the wagon with a dozen fresh bottles of milk in his wire carrier.

  “Buddy,” I said. “Buddy, I wanna buy a quart of milk.”

  The driver tried to duck around me. I got in his way and held his arm.

  “Lishen, buddy,” I said, “my ole lady sent me out for a. bottle of milk. Shtores’re all closed. I wanna buy a bottle of milk.”

  “I don’t sell, just deliver,” he said. “On your way, lush.”

  “Gotta have a bottle,” I said. “Gotta have one or I can’t go home—”

  That was when he hit me. I don’t know what he used. Maybe just his fist. It felt like the horse had kicked me. All I knew was that I was on the ground and he was leaning over me and I thought I saw a blackjack being lifted. Then all the wind went out of me. The driver had fallen on my stomach.

  Al pulled him off me and pulled me up.

  “Help me get him into his wagon before anyone comes along!”

  I got an arm around the driver, who was limp as a wet gunny sack, and we dragged him to his wagon. The horse had stopped. We toppled the man onto the floor out of sight. Al got in back with the cases of milk.

  “Grab the reins; get this horse going!”

  I got the reins, clucked the horse into low, and we went clip-clopping down the street. The whole thing hadn’t taken sixty seconds.

  Then the night seemed to blow open. The sirens coming toward us sounded like an air raid alarm. Two squad cars buzzed past wide open. Another followed. Down the block two more flickered by on a cross street. In the distance more sirens wailed. Between the buzz in my head and the sirens it sure was noisy and confusing.

  Nobody paid any attention to us.

  “Seventeen minutes,” came Al’s voice. “Marty and his boys had plenty of leeway. They’re miles away by now. Every cop in town is heading for Dollar Delivery, which is the one place they won’t find anybody.”

  “Then they got away with the dollars,” I said. “Where does that leave us?”

  Al chuckled.

  “They weren’t taking any chances,” he answered. “They played it the safe way—in case the alarm came too fast. They put the dough in a place nobody would suspect, to be picked up later. Why do you think that lug on the floor put the slug on you? He’s one of the gang. He’s had the milkman job a year now—just part of Marty’s build-up. The Dollar Delivery loot is back there under the milk. Who’s going to search a milk wagon for three million bucks?”

  I didn’t say anything. My tongue was frozen. Two more prowl cars went by, too fast to notice I wasn’t delivering any milk.

  We went a block. We went two blocks. Then Al told me to turn into the next alley. I turned in. It was lined with ramshackle garages. Halfway down it, Al told me to stop. I told the horse to stop. He stopped. AL hopped out, got one of the garages open.

  “Drive in,” he said. I managed to get the horse to go in, got the milk wagon in, and Al swung the door shut. Then he began to laugh. He laughed until I thought he was going to fall down and
roll on the ground.

  “Wait till Marty and the boys discover the dough is gone,” he gasped. “I wonder what they’ll do to this jerk who was driving the wagon? If he’s smart, he’ll be in Africa by tomorrow. Well, let’s get busy.”

  He pulled out a flashlight and shone it around. It was just an alley garage—long and narrow, with a tin roof and board walls. A couple of old tires hung on the wall. Under them was an old canvas. Al pulled up the canvas and showed me a hole opening into the next garage, big enough for a man to get through if he stooped down.

  “Let’s have a look at Sleeping Beauty first,” he said. He leaned into the wagon and jabbed a fist into the driver’s ribs. The lug didn’t stir. AL lifted one of his eyelids. His ye was rolled up toward his forehead. He was out, but out.

  “He’ll keep like a frozen side of beef,” AL said. “Come on, Pete boy. Got something to show you.”

  I followed him through the hole in the wall. He used his flashlight, and there was a shiny black hearse waiting for us. It wasn’t new and it wasn’t old. Just a nice, respectable hearse such as a small-town undertaker might be using. On one side of it a little metal plate said Cashmore Mortuary Parlor.

  AL pointed it out to me and I laughed, just for politeness’ sake.

  “I’ve been lining up this job for a long time, too,” Al chortled. “Marty isn’t the only one who can make plans. Now come around and see what’s inside.”

  He led me around to the back and opened it up. I wasn’t surprised to see it held a coffin, a pine shell. It was oversized, for a big man. We climbed into the hearse and AL opened the coffin. The lid was really held by a couple of secret catches so it could be opened and shut fast, but when they were in place it looked just like any coffin. I was beginning to feel a little admiration for Al’s work.

  “Okay,” AL said. “Now we bring the money over here and stow it inside.”