The Comfortable Coffin

by Richard S. Prather

  We walked back to the ferry, the ice broken now, discussing untruthfully tarts we had met and didn’t like, and voting this one top place. How could a dear old soul like Auntie Wimslow have a daughter like that?

  We were both in more grief when we got back to the ship. In the short hour or so we had been away orders had been changed and we were now to get out on the next tide and go on to Glasgow to discharge. The sleepy, wrathful crew, or those of them who were still aboard, were getting the hatches on under the lash of the Mate’s tongue. We turned to dolefully and wished we were chicken farmers.

  Boys’ memories aren’t long, and we had almost forgotten the whole thing—until, outward-bound again and halfway down the Red Sea, it was violently brought back to us. It was Gannet-guts who saw it first. The Seaman’s Mission in Port Said had put the usual bundles of magazines and papers aboard—papers that had come out during the time we had taken from Glasgow to the Canal and which, overland and by fast mail packet, had beaten us there. Gannet-guts had been idly looking through a copy of the Liverpool Echo when the photo leapt at him. Blurred newsprint notwithstanding, it was unmistakable; and even had there been doubts, the accompanying story would have dispelled them. He brought it to me speechlessly and pointed to it with a trembling finger. A Mrs. Plumley of Tolbeck Row, New Brighton, had been found in her front room beaten near to death. Motives at this stage appeared obscure, but “the police were acting on certain clues and an early arrest was anticipated.” They wished, apparently, to interview two young seamen who had been inquiring the way to her house on the night of the attack. It went on to say that her husband, a head cargo clerk, was in police custody in connection with another charge at the time—so he, at least, had an alibi.

  We stood and gaped at each other with sagging jaws.

  “What the hell do we do?” Gannet-guts quavered. “See the skipper and tell him what we know?”

  I mulled over this for a time and then slowly shook my head.

  “What good would that do?” I asked. “We didn’t do it, and we can’t give any information, except that she was all right when we left her—but who the hell would believe us? Certainly not the skipper. It would only make the rest of the trip unbearable—and we’ll have the police swarming all over us when we arrive in Fremantle. Much better to say nothing until we get to Sydney. By that time they may have caught the bloke that did it, in which case we’ll be in the clear. If they haven’t, we could at least see Auntie Wimslow and explain things to her—and then tell the police ourselves.”

  So that’s what we did; just sweated it out until the morning we warped alongside in Sydney. Sweating it out is right. Gannet-guts went off his grub to an extent that worried even the Mate—although that was compensated for by the gratification of the Steward.

  The usual crowd of sharks and officials swarmed aboard—customs, port doctor, immigration and harbor police. Numb-fingered and prickly-scalped, we went about our duties waiting for a summons to the skipper’s cabin. But it didn’t come, and knocking-off time that evening found us breathing a little easier—but not much—and not for long.

  We cleaned up and went ashore, dreading our meeting with Auntie but realizing that it was the only thing to do.

  The big man in a blue suit and wide-brimmed trilby loomed up out of the shadows as we emerged from the wharf building. He said, “Askew and Frisby?” We shivered, gulped and nodded. “They want a little talk to youse blokes up at Headquarters,” he grunted and shepherded us across to a dosed car. We got in without a word. There were two more in the car—one at the wheel and the other beside him. I managed to get my atrophied throat muscles under partial control.

  “I know this looks a bit funny,” I squeaked, “but we were coming to see you after we’d had a talk to Auntie Wimslow. You see—”

  He said, “Yeah?” noncommittally, and added, “Better hold your water, dig, till we get along there.”

  It wasn’t a long drive; up Macquarrie Street and left through the Domain and then down into Woolloomoolloo, in those days a very tough quarter indeed. We pulled up in a dark side street in front of a door in a blank wall. The big man nudged us out and the others followed. He unlocked the door and we went through. My knees were almost giving way under me. The police are frightening in your own country; in another they’re paralyzing.

  They pushed us into a bare room and one of them rabbit-chopped me and I went down in a heap. Behind me I heard a yelp from Gannet-guts as he received the same, then two practiced boots jerked us up onto our feet again. I gasped indignantly, “The police can’t do this—”

  “They can, dig,” said the big man calmly. “Only it so happens we ain’t police—but by the time we get through with you maybe you’ll be wishing we was. Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?” I asked—and got a round-armed swipe across the mouth that sent me spinning up against the wall. The big man said, “Get weaving on ’em, Barney—just a sort of pree-lim warm-up that won’t stop ’em talking altogether —just talking squish.”

  One of the others carefully removed his jacket, ostentatiously laying down an automatic on a box in the corner first. He rolled up his sleeves with deliberation and then fitted a set of brass knuckles over his ham-like right fist. I watched, mesmerized with horror. It was too much for Gannet-guts. He started to weep and gibber.

  “It wasn’t me,” he screamed. “It was him—he made me do it! It was him, I tell you! You ask him. Go on—ask him!”

  The rat!

  The others turned and converged on me slowly. I couldn’t speak. My mouth worked dryly. I closed my eyes. Gannet-guts was cowering in the other corner mopping and mowing. My hands came up weakly to cover my face—then I heard Gannet-guts snap out, “Reach for’ the ceiling—all of you.” And that was long before the days of television.

  I opened my eyes. Gannet-guts was standing like the sheriff of Deadman’s Gulch with the automatic that had been placed on the box in his fist and held in approved six-shooter style. The others turned and looked at him—pained and incredulous. He jerked the gun at them sharply. They reached for the ceiling.

  The big man said, “Now look here, kid—let’s talk sense.”

  “Sure,” said Gannet-guts, shifted the gun to his left hand, stepped up to him, kicked him neatly in the shins and then rabbit-chopped him much sharper and infinitely harder than he had us. He went down like a poleaxed bull.

  Barney said placatingly, “Now there’s no need for that sort of thing, kid. We’re all men togeth—” I didn’t hear the rest—maybe because Barney hadn’t time to say any more before Gannet-guts kicked him in the pit of the belly, and I was lifting the third gent off his feet with a right hook under the port earhole. We were gangling striplings and they didn’t feed us properly, but eight hours backbreaking toil a day had done plenty for our muscles, and if your reactions weren’t quick under the unrelenting eye of our Mate your life was correspondingly harder. This, maybe, all sounds very Wild Westernish. Actually it was, although our retreat lacked drama. We just took it on the lam then—pell mell and without dignity—running like bats out of hell until we jumped a streetcar that took us to Elizabeth Street—and lights and real policemen.

  We sneaked back aboard, jumping at every shadow, and locked ourselves in our cabin, and sat and shivered with the gun on the locker between us.

  “What the hell did you mean by saying I knew all about it?” I demanded when I was able. “About what?”

  “How in blazes do I know?” spat Gannet-guts. “I had to do something to get their attention off me while I grabbed the gun, didn’t I? You were useless, you clot.”

  Next morning we heard from some of the other boys that Auntie and the Old Man had been forced to give up the unequal struggle for funds to run the Haven and that it had been dosed for some weeks. It was a pity. It had done a good job.

  Well, there you are. We discussed it, argued about it, theorized over it and even almost fought for weeks afterwards but got nowhere near an acceptable solution. We were sc
ared stiff for the rest of our stay in Sydney and never went ashore. Once or twice we saw the big man hanging about the wharves looking up at the ship, but we pointed him out to Ole Brundahl, the Swedish A.B. who had permanent gangway watch in port, as somebody’s husband and asked that he be politely but firmly excluded if he wanted to come aboard. Ole was six feet six and built like a Dutch eel barge and had a mind like a sewer. The big man didn’t come aboard.

  We were scared again when we got back to Liverpool but there were no heavy hands on our shoulders when we docked. Gannet-guts disappeared into the maw of the Board of Trade examination rooms and I was transferred to the Gulf run and the whole thing was forgotten. An unsolved mystery.

  It remained unsolved too, right until one day midway through the war when Gannet-guts and I, now both Mates of our respective ships, happened to meet in Charleston, South Carolina. The swab came clean then.

  “It was that damned cake that did it,” he said reminiscently. “I used to think about it night after night in the middle watch—until just out of Gib, when it was beginning to get cold, and I couldn’t take it any longer. I sneaked down to the cabin and lifted your keys. You were turned in and asleep. I took the cake out of its wrappings and replaced it with a slab of caulking pitch and sealed it up again. Then I wolfed it—right down to the last crumb—in the lee of the funnel in the dark. What I intended to do was to slip ashore as soon as we docked and buy another just like it—and nobody would have been any wiser. That’s what I did do, as a matter of fact—but there were complications.”

  “What complications?”

  “The beads.”

  “What beads?”

  “Aren’t I telling you? In the middle of the damned thing there was a string of artificial pearl things. They made me feel bad.”

  “You swallowed them?”

  “No, you bloody fool. I mean they made me feel a louse. I thought poor old Auntie had put them in as a surprise for the kid—like people put sixpences and charms in a plum pudding. However, I decided to cut a plug out of the new cake, replace the pearls and dolly it up again.”

  “Well?”

  “Complications again,” he said gloomily. “I was dead broke as usual when we got in, so I flogged the pearls to the bosun for seven bob. He was always buying junk jewelry for his girl. I made up the yam about the ten-bob postal order just to cover things with you. I went ashore—the cake cost me four bob and I got a lovely string of pearls off a cheapjack’s barrow for half-a-crown—and everything was Sir Garnet, as you know.”

  “But that explains nothing,” I protested.

  “Look here, Askie—let me tell this my own way, will you?” he said complainingly. “The damned pearls I flogged were real—worth over eight thousand quid.”

  “What?”

  “A fact. They’d been swiped off some sheep baron’s missus in Queensland. The bint we delivered them to didn’t realize there had been a switch—all she saw were pearls covered in cake crumbs, but when the boss of the runners turned up to claim them he spotted it immediately. Then there were more complications. The woman’s husband had been knocked off by the police that same afternoon for another matter and the woman herself was grabbing the opportunity of scramming with the loot. What with that and the substitution, the boss got angry and set about her. See it now?”

  “No,” I said. “Two things don’t click. One—why the hell didn’t you tell me all this at die time?”

  “Because you were a pi-jaw little swipe and you’d have raised hell over the cake—”

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “But, two—how do you know all this, anyhow?”

  “I didn’t at the time. I got all the details from the Old Man—in Cape Town just before the war.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  ‘Waiting for Auntie to come out. She’d got seven years on the Breakwater for illicit diamond buying. She’d been running the racket under cover of a home for fallen coloured girls. She’d been in those games for years all over the world.”

  There was a long silence as we twisted our glasses and stared into the past.

  “I wonder what became of the real pearls?” I said at last. “Probably still round some superannuated tart’s neck in Liverpool,” he said. “If she only knew.” He sighed. “And if I only knew her.”

  Squeakie’s Second Case

  Margaret Manners

  I should have realized that things would begin to happen when Squeakie announced that she was taking a course in journalism. She broke the news to me in her own fashion, something like this:

  “I think a wife should understand her husband’s work, don’t you, darling?”

  “Yes,” I said, leaving myself wide open.

  “And then, dear. I’ll be able to help you. Your stuff is excellent, but newspaper work is stultifying.”

  I dropped the book I was trying to read. I realized that this was a serious moment “Newspaper writing is a profession,” I said, “an interesting profession, and not stultifying unless one harbors the delusion that one is a Pulitzer prize novelist.”

  “Oh,” she said softly, “I couldn’t feel that way about you, dear. But your writing is full of cliches. ‘Harbors a delusion,’ for instance.”

  “Of course it is,” I said. “I cultivate them carefully.” I refrained from remarking that Squeakie uses clichés too, but that she quotes them incorrectly which gives them a peculiar freshness. Rather like finding an avocado on an apple tree.

  “After all,” she said, “I have the woman’s angle. That can only be helpful.”

  “What are you talking about, sweetheart?” I said warily.

  She smiled benevolently. “My course. Professor Van Cornfeldt’s course, Journalism as the New American Literature.”

  “Good God!” I said. “When did this happen?”

  “It’s a surprise for you, darling. And now I’m ready to handle one of your assignments.”

  “One of my assignments? Squeakie!”

  “Yes,” she said pridefully. “Drink your coffee, dear, it will get cold. One with a feminine slant. You know, something I can get my teeth into!”

  Being married to Squeakie is a full-time job. Her name is Desdemona really, but I do my best to forget it. Her father was a gentleman of the old school, a chronic quoter of Shakespeare. Squeakie takes after him. Not that that makes things so difficult. A little Shakespeare is a wonderful thing. It’s just that sometimes I feel like the guy who was riding the tiger; he couldn’t dismount. Well, for days I kept her at bay. Once I stayed out with the boys till four in the morning, because I didn’t want to face it.

  “Harris,” I kept telling her, “would certainly know. Besides he’s paying for my copy, not yours. And then your style, dear, it’s different!”

  “Harris,” she said, “might like the difference.”

  I tried to appeal to a better nature that wasn’t there. “Imagine, darling, what your style would be, full of Shakespearean quotes and all!”

  “That,” she said smugly, “is my idea. Freshen the journalistic jargon!”

  Was it any wonder that I gave in when Harris presented me with the perfect (as I thought) way out? He wanted me to interview Ruth Denver Bradley, the popular novelist. It wasn’t my sort of beat, and anyway I don’t like lady authoresses. I had it all doped out. I’d make Squeakie happy by letting her interview the lady. Then I’d take her stuff and rewrite it, killing two birds with one stone.

  If Squeakie didn’t like it, I could say the office had edited her piece. Naturally we couldn’t do anything about that because I was supposed to have written it. There was always a chance that such a shocking experience might kill Squeakie’s germinating talent in the first flower of youth. But I doubted it

  The night before the interview Squeakie talked about Ruth Denver Bradley and nothing else. She read the paragraph in Who’s Who until I could have recited it. She informed me that she had been reading Ruth Denver Bradley’s latest serial in Modem Magazine, and wasn’t that lucky? She told me that it
was a wonderful psychological novel, and favored me with a synopsis.

  “It’s about a man who wants to marry but won’t because something terrible happened to him when he was a child. There’s something queer about his parents, too. His father died from a fall one day, and that was a great shock to him. His mother isn’t dead, but he acts as if she is, never mentions her. Oh, it’s very mysterious. He’s on the threshold of a political career... David, which doctor is the one that Ruth Denver Bradley is married to?”

  “He’s a psychiatrist,” I said. “Dr. Robert Bradley.”

  “She’s a remarkable woman,” Squeakie said enviously. “I wonder where she gets her material. Her stuff is so authentic.”

  “Did Professor Van Cornfeldt teach you to say that?” I asked.

  “Don’t be jealous, darling. She’s an amazing person—an invalid, you know. Never goes out Rheumatic heart. Her life is a triumph of mind over matter.”

  “Speaking of clichés!” I said.

  I never did get to rewrite the interview because Squeakie never gave it to me. She simply sent it in to Harris with my name on top—and he liked it! Said he hadn’t realized I was so versatile.

  It was two weeks later, on my day off. The phone rang. I picked up the receiver and sure enough it was Harris.

  “Ruth Denver Bradley killed in domestic accident!” Harris shouted. He always talks in headlines. “Call her editor, David. Get the story. See the bereaved husband. Give us the picture of the famous invalid at home, and death lurking on the staircase.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  Harris dropped the rhetoric and went to work. ‘‘Tall, private house with a big stair well in the center. She fell from the top all the way down. There’s an invalid’s elevator, a lift without a shaft, rigged up in the stair well for the convenience of the sick wife. But the lady was timid about it, and didn’t use it very often. Obliging husband takes top floor for office, even though inconvenient for a doctor. His wife used downstairs floor. This morning she went up to see him and fell over—dizzy spell—bad heart— Look, do I have to tell you your business? Get busy!”