I borrowed the limousine to drive over to Doc’s place after meeting was over that night, and the way I had worked on the motor it took no time at all. I wasn’t surprised when I pulled up in front of the house to see that the lights were on and the shades pulled down, because Doc kept all hours and didn’t like people peeking in on him when he wanted to sit alone with a bottle of Old Reliable. But I was mighty surprised when as soon as I walked into the hallway the door behind me seemed to slam shut of itself, and I felt something hard poking dead center into my back. I never in my life had a gun shoved into my back, so it’s strange, when you think of it, how I knew it was a gun right off without even looking.
“Put your hands up,” said the man holding it—he had a hard city voice and an ugly way of using it, “—and keep walking”
He pushed me along that way into the back office, and shut that door, too, and then I saw I was in the middle of a quick to-do. Doc sat behind his desk looking sick, and a man sat on the edge of the examining table, his legs dangling in a strange, loose sort of way, and his face dead-white and twisted with pain.
Doc looked at me as if he couldn’t believe it, and then he shook his head. “Aaron,” he said, “you sure picked a fine time to come barging in here.”
The man on the table pointed at me. “You know him?” he asked Doc. “What’s his business here?”
“Nothing,” said Doc. “He’s a friend of mine, and you let him be. There’s no sense making trouble for everybody in town just because you got yourself in a mess. I examined you and I told you the God’s honest truth. Your legs are paralyzed, and there’s nothing can be done about it. Not by me, nor by anybody else.”
The man slammed his hand down on the table. “You talk too much!” he said, and then he looked at me, his eyes blinking and fluttering like a woman’s when she’s real scared. “Is there any other doctor in this hole?”
I thought that over a spell, and then I said, “No, I don’t guess there is.”
He slammed the table again. “You’re lying! You’re covering up for someone!”
“Mister,” I told him, “I never yet told a lie to anybody on the face of this blessed earth. And I’m sure not going to risk my everlasting soul by telling you one now.”
“All right!” he said. “All right! But who do you go to around here, if you’re hurt real bad? You can’t tell me everybody depends on this old quack to know what he’s doing.”
And that was when it suddenly came to me, like the dawn coming up over old Turtleback, that all this was meant, too, just as everything had been meant from the day I first met the Healer a long year before. It was being made my bounden duty to snatch Doc back from damnation like a brand from the burning. Once he saw the power at work with his own eyes he’d be saved for sure.
I said, “Doc Buckles is a good man, even if there are a lot of things outside his powers. But I can take you to somebody whose power has never failed. He healed me when Doc couldn’t, and every night he heals all those who come to him, no matter what their affliction.”
The man on the table looked at me with his mouth open, his eyes half dosed. “What kind of a story is that?” he said.
“It’s the truth,” I cried out, “and Doc Buckles here will bear witness. Go on and ask him.”
Doc leaned across his desk. “Aaron Menefee,” he said to me, “I want you to keep out of this, and to keep your healing friend out of this. You don’t know who you’re talking to here, so I’ll tell you. His name’s Vern Byers, and he’s half-crazy and all bad. He killed the cop that put the bullet into him, and then in cold blood he killed the doctor that bungled taking it out, probably because there was a gun at his head when he was doing it. You don’t want to go playing spooky games with anybody like this, Aaron. You want to keep your mouth shut, and trust you’ll see the sunrise tomorrow morning, if you’re lucky!”
Vern Byers looked at Doc with eyes like burning coals in his white face. “You old goat,” he said. “So you were covering up for somebody all die time!”
“No,” I said, “he wasn’t. It’s just that he doesn’t know about the kind of healing that comes from the inside.”
“I don’t care what kind of healing it is! You bring that guy to me right now!”
“You’ll need faith, Brother Byers,” I told him. “Do you think you can be healed?”
“I’ve got to be healed! You hear that? I’ve got to be healed! Here,” he said, and when he pulled open his coat I could see the nasty-looking gun strapped to his chest. He took out a wallet and shuffled money from it into a big wad. “Here’s a thousand dollars cash. That’s right. Don’t look so dumb about it; just stick it into your pocket. That’s for this doctor of yours to come out here, and you can tell him there’s another thousand waiting for him when he gets here. Is that a deal?”
“Brother Byers,” I said, “the Healer won’t take payment for his work. But if this is a Faith Offering it ought to do just fine.”
“Call it what you want, but get him here quick. I’ve got only a couple of hours before they block off every highway out of this State, and I’m not waiting around to see that happen. And here,” he said very slowly, his eyes half closed again, “is what you don’t tell the guy you’re sending. This fat quack was right. I killed the one who put my legs wrong like this, and I’ll kill any man who takes my money and can’t put them right for me. I swear that on my mother’s grave.”
He was done with me then, and the other man, the one with the gun at my back, pushed me along out of the house and into the car and then got into the seat alongside me. I was a little upset driving that way with a gun pointing at me, but I made good time anyhow, and when I got to the camping grounds and saw the light at the side panel of the big tent I pulled right up there.
The man got out of my side of the car almost on top of me, the gun pushing into my ribs, and when I went into the tent he stood just outside, and I knew that gun was aimed my way every second of the time. The Healer was there at the table with Charles M. Fish and the others, working over the Offerings from that meeting, and I walked straight up to him without flickering an eyelash.
“Healer,” I said, “there’s a man outside who needs your help for a friend of his.”
“At this hour?” said the Healer. “It must be mighty serious, Brother Menefee.”
“It’s all of that, Healer,” I told him, the others all gawking at me, “and maybe you can judge of that from the Faith Offering that was made. And,” I said, laying the wad of bills in his hand, “there’s more waiting where that came from.”
The Healer looked at the roll, and you could see his eyes lighting up with gratitude for his power. Then he handed the money over to Charles M. Fish. “Brother Fish,” he said, “you add this to the tally, and if I don’t miss my guess it’ll make it just about one of the biggest nights we ever had.”
Then he got up from his chair and clapped me right on the shoulder. “And you say there’s another such Offering waiting for me, Brother Menefee?”
“There is. But there’s a sort of worrisome thing about all this, Healer.”
“And what might that be?”
“Well, it might be that this Brother Byers who needs your power is short on faith. I put it to him, straight, but the way he spoke up I couldn’t figure whether it was yes or no. He’s a sinner all the way, Healer, and aimed straight for perdition right now, but whether or not he’s working up real faith in his time of trouble I can’t say.”
The Healer laughed right out loud, so that I felt my face turning beet-red. “You’re young and willing, Brother Menefee,’’ he said to me, “but you’re real ignorant of these things. Otherwise you’d know that anyone who makes the kind of Faith Offering you just turned over to me is set and ready for my power to enter him. Now, where is this poor unfortunate I’m being asked to help?”
“Back in town,’’ I said, “the other side of Cincinnati. But his friend’s right outside waiting to take us to him.”
When we walked out
of the tent the man was there, but with his hand in his pocket now, so that I knew the gun was in it and still aiming at me. I wished I could let the Healer know about this, but it seemed a mite risky right then. He and the man got into the front of the car, the Healer behind the wheel, but when I started to get into the back, the Healer held me off with his hand out of the window and slammed the door against me.
“It’s kind of you, Brother Menefee,” he said, “but I don’t figure to need your company along on this mission.”
And before anybody could do anything about it he had gunned that big car into a fast start and was heading down the dirt road.
I stood there with my jaw slack in my head, watching the taillights going off down that road, knowing that when they dipped a little they had hit the highway and turned on to it, and seeing them get smaller and smaller until finally they blinked out like little stars in the first light at morning time. And all that while I was praying as hard as I could that Vern Byer’s faith would bear up under the coming trial, the way the Healer figured it to.
Not that I’d become a doubter, whatever happened. A man’s got no right to question what is meant.
“My Queer Dean!”
Ellery Queen
The queerness of Matthew Arnold Hope, beloved teacher of Ellery’s Harvard youth and lately dean of liberal arts in a New York university, is legendary.
‘The story is told, for instance, of baffled students taking Dr. Hope’s Shakespeare course for the first time. “History advises us that Richard II died peacefully at Pontefract, probably of pneumonia,” Dr. Hope scolds. “But what does Shakespeare say. Act V, Scene V? That Exton struck him down,” and here the famous authority on Elizabethan literature will pause for emphasis, “with a blushing crow!”
Imaginative sophomores have been known to suffer nightmares as a result of this remark. Older heads nod intelligently, of course, knowing that Dr. Hope meant merely to say—in fact, thought he was saying—“a crushing blow.”
The good dean’s unconscious spoonerisms, like the sayings of Miss Parker and Mr. Goldwyn, are reverently preserved by aficionados, among whom Ellery counts himself a charter member. It is Ellery who has saved for posterity that deathless pronouncement of Dr. Hope’s to a freshman class in English composition: “All those who persist in befouling their theme papers with cant and other low expressions not in good usage are warned for the last time: Refine your style or be exiled from this course with the rest of the vanished Bulgarians!”
But perhaps Dean Hope’s greatest exploit began recently in the faculty lunchroom. Ellery arrived at the dean’s invitation to find him waiting impatiently at one of the big round tables with three members of the English Department.
“Dr. Agnes Lovell, Professor Oswald Gorman, Mr. Morgan Naseby,” the dean said rapidly. “Sit down, Ellery. Mr. Queen will have the cute frocktail and the horned beef cash—only safe edibles on the menu today, my boy—well, go fetch, young man! Are you dreaming that you’re back in class?” The waiter, a harried-looking freshman, fled. “My friends, prepare for a surprise.”
Dr. Lovell, a very large woman in a tight suit, said roguishly, “Wait, Matthew! Let me guess. Romance?”
“And who’d marry—in Macaulay’s imperishable phrase—a living concordance?” said Professor Gorman in a voice like an abandoned winch. He was a tall freckled man with strawberry eyebrows and a quarrelsome jaw. “A real surprise. Dr. Hope, would be a departmental salary rise.”
“A consummation devoutly et cetera,” said Mr. Naseby, immediately blushing. He was a stout young man with an eager manner, evidently a junior in the department.
“May I have your attention?” Dean Hope looked about cautiously. “Suppose I tell you,” he said in a trembling voice, “that by tonight I may have it within my power to deliver the death blow—I repeat, the death blow!—to the cockypop that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays?”
There were two gasps, a snort, and one inquiring hum.
“Matthew!” squealed Dr. Lovell. “You’d be famous!”
“Immortal, Dean Hope,” said Mr. Naseby adoringly.
“Deluded,” said Professor Gorman, the snorter. “The Baconian benightedness, like the Marlowe mania, has no known specific.”
“Ah, but even a fanatic,” cried the dean, “would have to yield before the nature of this evidence.”
“Sounds exciting, Doc,” murmured Ellery. “What is it?”
“A man called at my office this morning, Ellery. He produced credentials identifying him as a London rare-book dealer, Alfred Mimms. He has in his possession, he said, a copy of the 1613 edition of The Essaies of Sir Francis Bacon Knight the kings solliciter generall, an item ordinarily bringing four or five hundred dollars. He claims that this copy, however, is inscribed on the title page in Bacon’s own hand to Will Shakespeare.”
Amid the cries, Ellery asked, “Inscribed how?”
“In an encomium,” quavered Dean Hope, “an encomium to Shakespeare expressing Bacon’s admiration and praise for —and I quote—‘the most excellent plaies of your sweet wit and hand’l’”
“Take that!” whispered Mr. Naseby to an invisible Baconian.
“That does it,” breathed Dr. Lovell.
“That would do it,” said Professor Gorman, “if.”
“Did you actually see the book, Doc?” asked Ellery.
“He showed me a photostat of the title page. He’ll have the original for my inspection tonight, in my office.”
“And Mimms’s asking price is—?”
“Ten thousand dollars.”
“Proof positive that it’s a forgery,” said Professor Gorman rustily. “It’s far too little.”
“Oswald,” hissed Dr. Lovell, “you creak, do you know that?”
“No, Gorman is right,” said Dr. Hope. “An absurd price if the inscription is genuine, as I pointed out to Mimms. However, he had an explanation. He is acting, he said, at the instructions of the book’s owner, a tax-poor British nobleman whose identity he will reveal tonight if I purchase the book. The owner, who has just found it in a castle room boarded up and forgotten for two centuries, prefers an American buyer in a confidential sale—for tax reasons, Mimms hinted. But, as a cultivated man, the owner wishes a scholar to have it rather than some ignorant Croesus. Hence the relatively low price.”
“Lovely,” glowed Mr. Naseby. “And so typically British.”
“Isn’t it,” said Professor Gorman. “Terms cash, no doubt? On the line? Tonight?”
“Well, yes.” The old dean took a bulging envelope from his breast pocket and eyed it ruefully. Then, with a sigh, he tucked it back. “Very nearly my life’s savings… But I’m not altogether senile,” Dr. Hope grinned. “I’m asking you to be present, Ellery—with Inspector Queen. I shall be working at my desk on administrative things into the evening. Mimms is due at eight o’clock.”
“We’ll be here at seven-thirty,” promised Ellery. “By the way. Doc, that’s a lot of money to be carrying around in your pocket. Have you confided this business to anyone else?”
“No, no.”
“Don’t And may I suggest that you wait behind a locked door? Don’t admit Mimms—or anyone else you don’t trust—until we get here. I’m afraid. Doc, I share the professor’s skepticism.”
“Oh, so do I,” murmured the dean. “The odds on this being a swindle are, I should think, several thousand to one. But one can’t help saying to oneself…suppose it’s not?”
It was nearly half-past seven when the Queens entered the Arts Building. Some windows on the upper floors were lit up where a few evening classes were in session, and the dean’s office was bright. Otherwise the building was dark.
The first thing Ellery saw as they stepped out of the self-service elevator onto the dark third floor was the door of Dean Hope’s anteroom…wide open.
They found the old scholar crumpled on the floor just inside the doorway. His white hairs dripped red.
“Crook came early,” howled Inspector Quee
n. “Look at the dean’s wristwatch, Ellery—smashed in his fall at 7:15.”
“I warned him not to unlock his door,” wailed Ellery. Then he bellowed. “He’s breathing! Call an ambulance!”
He had carried the dean’s frail body to a couch in the inner office and was gently wetting the blue lips from a paper cup when the Inspector turned from the telephone.
The eyes fluttered open. “Ellery…”
“Doc, what happened?”
“Book…taken…” The voice trailed off in a mutter.
“Book taken?” repeated the Inspector incredulously. “That means Mimms not only came early, but Dr. Hope found the book was genuine! Is the money on him, son?”
Ellery searched the dean’s pockets, the office, the anteroom. “It’s gone.”
“Then he did buy it. Then somebody came along, cracked him on the skull, and lifted the book.”
“Doc!” Ellery bent over the old man again. “Doc, who struck you? Did you see?”
“Yes…Gorman…” Then the battered head rolled to one side and Dr. Hope lost consciousness.
“Gorman? Who’s Gorman, Ellery?”
“Professor Oswald Gorman,” Ellery said through his teeth, “one of the English faculty at the lunch today. Get him.”
When Inspector Queen returned to the dean’s office guiding the agitated elbow of Professor Gorman, he found Ellery waiting behind the dean’s flower vase as if it were a bough from Birnam Wood.
The couch was empty.
“What did the ambulance doctor say, Ellery?”
“Concussion. How bad they don’t know yet.” Ellery rose, fixing Professor Gorman with a Macduffian glance. “And where did you find this pedagogical louse, Dad?”
“Upstairs on the seventh floor, teaching a Bible class.”
“The title of my course, Inspector Queen,” said the Professor furiously, “is The Influence of the Bible on English Literature.”
The Comfortable Coffin Page 6
