The Comfortable Coffin

by Richard S. Prather

  “Mr. Terhune has moved,” she said. “I want the whole house thoroughly cleaned.”

  “Morning, Joe,” George said.

  The handyman included both of them in a surly nod and went on toward the house. Myra turned back cheerfully to George. “Bye now, dear. See you this afternoon.”

  George went back to his car. Myra watched him drive away, then followed Joe into the house. He was sweeping the kitchen.

  “You can do that later. I want to get the fireplace cleaned out first,” she said.

  He dropped the broom and left it where it had fallen. He went into the living room, removed the fire screen. His lips moved silently as he worked and, if Myra had been a lip reader, she and Joe Cramm would have parted company instantly. She would have got rid of him if it had meant cleaning the fireplace herself.

  The handyman had what he believed to be a legitimate beef. Three big legitimate beefs, if you added them all up and passed over any number of minor irritations that would have raised the dander of a less easy-going man. The month before, for a promised fifty dollars, he had moved a car port for her—and found out later that three contracting companies had refused to touch the job for Jess than a hundred and eighty. That was the first beef. The second was that, after thirty days, she still hadn’t handed over the fifty. He would have to wait until Miss Murchison paid her next month’s rent. Myra was very short of cash right now.

  That’s what she’d said—and Joe at the time had been staring at the top of a fat roll of bills she had tucked in her brassiere!

  But it was the wheelbarrow runaround that had really got him down. He’d needed one to do some work for her, and there was a guy down the street would let him have an old barrow for a buck a day. She’d given him the buck and the guy had told him that for four bucks more he could keep the thing for good. So Myra had said, “Buy it. I’ll make it up to you later.” So he’d put up four bucks of his own cash and that had been two weeks ago, and she hadn’t made it up. Worse than that, she’d latched on to the barrow, kept it locked in her garage. When he wanted to use it, he had to ask her like it was a favor.

  “What on earth are you muttering about, Joe?” she asked.

  He growled unintelligibly.

  “Well, hurry up with that fireplace. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  The cement for the lanai floor had been promised for early that afternoon. At one o’clock Myra pulled Joe off the job and sent him up to her house to wait for the delivery. “I’ll finish up here. When the cement comes you can start right in.”

  “How about lunch?”

  “Take something from the refrigerator and fix your own. You know where I Keep the key,” she said.

  Joe, arriving at the hillside house, was surprised to see that all the trash he had painstakingly piled on the far side of the street, as Myra had told him to do, was now stacked up on her side. A further surprise awaited him when, taking the key from the window box, he opened the front door. George Lambert and Vince Terhune were in the living room. They looked as low-down mean as Joe Cramm felt.

  George said, “Come in, sucker.”

  “Welcome to the club,” Vince said.

  “She told me I was to get something to eat out of the ice box,” Joe mumbled.

  George leaned forward in his chair. “I’ll lay you a small bet. The only food you’ll find is tuna for the cat. That’s what she eats herself.” He turned to Vince as Joe went through the dining room into the kitchen. “My correspondent in the divorce case was neither beautiful nor particularly intelligent, but she liked good food. Her cooking would have made a Cordon Bleu turn green.”

  Vince nodded his sympathetic understanding. “Myra lowered the boom on me this morning.”

  “I know. Did you get the twenty-eight bucks?”

  “No.”

  George sighed. “You and I and poor Joe Cramm are fellow-passengers in the same sinking boat.”

  Joe came back glumly from the kitchen. “You’re right, Mr. Lambert. Nothing but cat food. Tuna and milk and paint and weed killer and more tuna.” He sat down and looked around the room. “What’s she got to live for anyway? She ain’t even got a television set.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then George said softly, “The cat she had before she got Antoine drank a little of her weed killer. In twenty seconds it was dead.”

  A longer silence followed during which the three men—a winner of five decorations for legalized killing, a dealer-out of mayhem to opposing backfields, and a former violent inmate of a hospital for the criminally insane—avoided looking at one another. They all sat staring at the floor. Then Vince Terhune got quietly to his feet

  “Excuse me for a minute, please,” he said.

  He went into the kitchen. Returning after a couple of minutes, he resumed his former seat. More time passed and then Joe Cramm stood up. He, too, entered the kitchen. It seemed to him that there was less weed killer in the bottle now than there had been when he had seen it last. He did what he had come to do and went back to the living room.

  George Lambert was the last to excuse himself. The other two watched him disappear into the kitchen. He located the weed killer without difficulty and was not surprised to find the bottle less than half full. It was only about a third full when he left.

  At five minutes after two Myra Lambert parked her white Cadillac at the curb in front of her house. She saw the pile of rubbish on her lawn and blew the horn. The front door opened and Joe Cramm came out.

  “Cement ain’t been delivered yet,” he said.

  Myra indicated the trash-filled cartons. “Who carried that stuff over here?”

  “Couldn’t tell you.”

  “Well, I want it all put back where it was,” she said.

  She got out of the car as Joe started lugging the broken cement across the street and re-stacking it on Miss Alice’s front lawn. She went into the house. Her ex-tenant and ex-husband were sitting in the living room. Both got up courteously as she came in.

  “You’re early,” she said. “You’ll have to wait a minute while I have my lunch.”

  She left the room, and George and Vince did not sit down again. Imperceptibly they edged toward the arch that opened on the little dining room. Listening, their heads were cocked in the direction of the kitchen. They heard the refrigerator door open and bang shut. A plate clattered. There was a rattle of silverware. Then they heard nothing for a while. The front door opened and Joe came in to join them. As he, too, settled into a listening position, the silence was broken by a sudden crash. They all moved quickly through the dining room into the kitchen.

  Myra sat on a high stool at the sink. In front of her was a plate that, a few minutes before, had been heaped with tuna and which she had obviously just emptied. Her eyebrows lifted as they came running in.

  “What’s the matter?”

  George stammered, “We—we heard a noise—”

  “That was the frying pan,” she said. “It fell.”

  A frying pan was on the floor. They studied it gravely.

  Vince said, “Did you enjoy your lunch?”

  She shrugged. “It was food. I eat to keep my strength up, not for pleasure.”

  “I hope you’re feeling well?” George asked.

  “I’m sleepy.” She frowned at Vince. “That’s your fault,” she said. “I had to get up at dawn to catch you. Give me my twenty-eight dollars and let me take a nap.”

  “I don’t have it, Myra.”

  “How about you, George?”

  “Well, Myra—”

  “You’re broke, too?”

  “Maybe if I had more time—”

  “You both have an hour or so,” she said. “I’m going to lie down. I’ll call the sheriff and Vince’s boss as soon as I get up.” She turned to Joe. “Wake me when the cement comes. In the meantime, tidy up the lawn. Now all of you get out.”

  She watched them go, noting their common air of furtive perplexity but not particularly interested. When the front door had been sh
ut she descended an inner stairway to the lower apartment and went into the roofless bedroom she was having converted into a lanai. It was fairly private there; no one could see her except from above. A couch was still over in a corner. She crossed to it, more tired than she had realized, lay down and closed her eyes.

  Outside on the street the three men stood beside Joe’s pickup truck. They were watching the house, but gradually the focus of their attention shifted. Their heads and eyes turned, and suspiciously they studied one another.

  George said it first, in a voice so low that it was practically a whisper. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but did we or did we not have a sort of unspoken understanding?”

  “You’re not wrong,” Vince said.

  Joe nodded. “Couldn’t be righter if you tried.”

  “Then what happened? I swear that cat hardly stuck its tongue in the stuff before it rolled over and curled up its toes. It doesn’t make good sense, unless—”

  “Unless what?” Vince prompted when he did not go on.

  “Unless we all reneged. Tell me the truth, Vince. When you were in the kitchen did you…do anything?”

  Vince hesitated. “Did you?”

  “I’ll let you have it straight,” George said. “I took the weed killer and poured a jolt of it into the sink. I was hoping—”

  “I know,” Vince said. “I did the same thing. I was hoping, too.”

  They looked at Joe. He sighed and turned away. His lips moved, silently at first but, after a moment, they began to form distinguishable words.

  “Chicken, all of us,” he muttered. “Just plain chicken. Couldn’t go through with it in a million years.” He observed as though from far away a boy on a bicycle coming down the street. “Might as well give up and go on home to roost.”

  The boy on the bicycle was delivering the afternoon paper. Passing Miss Alice’s house, he hurled a folded copy. It plunked against her door. She heard the sound, opened the door, picked up the paper. Straightening, she caught sight of the rubbish once more piled on her front lawn.

  She stiffened. “Well, really, after all!” she said aloud. She tossed her head—a phrase descriptive of a gesture forgotten now for nearly half a century—and walked with dignified determination across the street.

  Miss Alice pushed the bell beside Mrs. Lambert’s door. There was no answer. She pressed her thumb against the bell and held it there. The door remained shut; there was no sign of life. Reluctantly, Miss Alice at last turned back toward the street.

  A sound stopped her, attracting her attention. It was a kind of rasping gurgle, not immediately identifiable as a snore. But Miss Alice placed the direction from which it was coming, and she crossed to the waist-high wall. She looked over the wall and down, and saw Mrs. Lambert stretched out on a couch in a corner of the unfinished lanai. Mrs. Lambert lay on her back. Her eyes were shut, and her mouth was open wide.

  Miss Alice, for some reason, found the sight intriguing. She became so fascinated with it that she was not aware of the arrival of the yellow truck with the strange-looking revolving drum mounted on its rear until the man who drove it spoke.

  “Where you want it, lady?” the man asked.

  Miss Alice turned. “I beg your pardon. Where do I want what?”

  “Cement. Nice fresh cement. This ain’t a Good Humor truck, you know.”

  “That—that device—” Miss Alice indicated the drum—“is filled with fresh cement?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you want a place to put it?”

  “You’re real bright, lady. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

  Miss Alice studied the drum. She had no knowledge of mechanics, but it was apparent, from its position on the truck, that it was designed to tilt and drop cement into attendant wheelbarrows.

  “Why,” she said, “I think it might be a good idea if you backed your truck in right where I am standing and dropped your cement over the wall.”

  “You’re paying for it. You got a right to have it where you want it,” the driver said.

  A few minutes later, Myra Lambert awoke to the startled realization that she could not breathe. She thought at first that it was a return of her asthma but, trying to sit up, she found that neither could she move. Something wet, heavy, and airless was pinning her to the couch. The only part of her body over which she had control was her right hand. She wiggled it frantically, but its movement gradually slowed until the fingers came to rest. When Antoine sniffed them curiously, Myra did not even know the cat was there.

  From the waist-high wall above, three men looked down into the roofless bedroom. They saw a hand projecting from a pile of fresh cement. They watched a white Angora sniff the hand, and tiptoe delicately away.

  Then, one by one, they followed the cat’s example. They tiptoed back to their respective cars as, from the house across the street, there came the soft plunking of a harp. It played, and an old lady sang an old, old favorite in a sweet, uncertain voice.

  * * *

  “Oh, don’t you remember sweet Alice Ben Bolt,

  Sweet Alice with hair so brown,

  Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile

  And trembled with fear at your frown?”

  * * *

  Miss Alice Murchison lived by the standards of conduct considered proper for girls of good family in the years immediately preceding and following the turn of the century. Those were stirring times. Between 1901 and 1905 there were recorded five hundred and forty-one lockouts and thirteen thousand nine hundred and sixty-four strikes. In June of 1901 an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz assassinated President McKinley, and in January of that same year Carrie Nation made her first hatchet raid on a saloon in Wichita, Kansas. And there was another impeccably reared young lady who, toward the close of the nineteenth century, when Miss Alice had been an impressionable child, also had made good use of a hatchet. Displeased with her family, Lizzie Borden got rid of its component members in a manner equally as effective but much more messy than the one employed by Miss Alice in dispatching Myra Lambert.

  Murder and a ladylike demeanor do not necessarily preclude each other. We live nowadays in a world of half-men and half-women, but Miss Alice Murchison was born of a generation of giants.

  Kiss Me, Dudley

  Evan Hunter

  She was cleaning fish by the kitchen sink when I climbed through the window, my .45 in my hand. She wore a low-cut apron, shadowed where her full breasts bunched together near the frilly top. When she saw me, her eyes went wide, and her lips parted, moist and full. I walked to the sink, and I picked up the fish by the tail, and I batted her over the eye with it.

  “Darling,” she murmured.

  I gave her another shot with the fish, this time right over her nose. She came into my arms, and there was ecstasy in her eyes, and her breath rushed against my throat. I shoved her away, and I swatted her full on the mouth. She shivered and came to me again. I held her close, and there was the odor of fish and seaweed about her. I inhaled deeply, savoring the taste. My father had been a sea captain.

  “They’re outside,” I said, “all of them. And they’re all after me. The whole stinking, dirty, rotten, crawling, filthy, obscene, disgusting mass of them. Me. Dudley Sledge. They’ve all got guns in their maggoty fists, and murder in their grimy eyes.”

  “They’re rats,” she said.

  “And all because of you. They want me because I’m helping you.”

  “There’s the money, too,” she reminded me.

  “Money?” I asked. “You think money means anything to them? You think they came all the way from Washington Heights for a lousy ten million bucks? Don’t make me laugh.” I laughed.

  “What are we going to do, Dudley?”

  “Do? Do? I’m going to go out there and cut them down like the unholy bastards they are. When I get done there’ll be twenty-six less rats in the world, and the streets will be a cleaner place for our kids to play in.”

  “Oh, Dudley,” she said.
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  “But first...”

  The pulse in her throat began beating wildly. There was a hungry animal look in her eyes. She sucked in a deep breath and her hands over her hips, smoothing the apron. I went to her, and I cupped her chin in the palm of my left hand.

  “Baby,” I said.

  Then I drew back my right fist and hit her on the mouth. She fell back against the sink, and I followed with a quick chop to the gut, and a fast uppercut to the jaw. We went down on the floor together, and we rolled around in the fish scales, and I thought of my sea-captain father, and my mother, who was a nice little lass from New England. And then I didn’t think of anything but the blonde in my arms, and the .45 in my fist, and the twenty-six men outside, and the four shares of Consolidated I’d bought that afternoon, and the bet I’d made on the fight with One-Lamp Louie, and the defective brake lining on my Olds, and the bottle of rye in the bottom drawer or my file cabinet back at Dudley Sledge, Investigations.

  I enjoyed it.

  She had come to me less than a week ago.

  Giselle, my pretty red-headed secretary, had swiveled into the office and said, “Dud, there’s a broad to see you.”

  “Another one?” I asked.

  “She looks distraught.”

  “Show her in.”

  She had walked into the office then, and my whole life had changed. I took one look at the blonde hair piled high on her head. My eyes dropped to the clean sweep of her throat to the breasts that billowed over the top of her green silk dress. She leaned over when she sat in my battered client’s chair, and I admired the shadowed hollow of her navel. When she lifted her green eyes to meet mine, I almost drowned in their fathomless depths. I gripped the desktop and asked, “Yes?”

  “Mr. Sledge?”

  “Yes.”