The Comfortable Coffin

by Richard S. Prather

  “Trying to establish an alibi, eh?”

  “Well, son,” said his father in a troubled voice, “the professor’s more than just tried. He’s done it.”

  “Established an alibi?” Ellery cried.

  “It’s a two-hour seminar, from six to eight. He’s alibied for every second from 6 p.m. on by the dozen people taking the course—including a minister, a priest, and a rabbi. What’s more,” mused the Inspector, “even assuming the 7:15 on the dean’s broken watch was a plant, Professor Gorman can account for every minute of his day since your lunch broke up. Ellery, something is rotten in New York County.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said a British voice from the anteroom. “I was to meet Dr. Hope here at eight o’clock.”

  Ellery whirled. Then he swooped down on the owner of the voice, a pale skinny man in a bowler hat carrying a package under one arm.

  “Don’t tell me you’re Alfred Mimms and you’re just bringing the Bacon!”

  “Yes, but I’ll—I’ll come back,” stammered the visitor, trying to hold on to his package. But it was Ellery who won the tug of war, and as he tore the wrappings away the pale man turned to run.

  And there was Inspector Queen in the doorway with his pistol showing. “Alfred Mimms, is it?” said the Inspector genially. “Last time, if memory serves, it was Lord Chalmerston. Remember, Dink, when you were sent up for selling a phony First Folio to that Oyster Bay millionaire? Ellery, this is Dink Chalmers of Flatbush, one of the cleverest confidence men in the rare-book game.” Then the Inspector’s geniality faded. “But, son, this leaves us in more of a mess than before.”

  “No, Dad,” said Ellery. ‘‘This clears the mess up.”

  From Inspector Queen’s expression, it did nothing of the kind.

  “Because what did Doc Hope reply when I asked him what happened?” Ellery said. “He replied, ‘Book taken.’ Well, obviously, the book wasn’t taken. The book was never here. Therefore he didn’t mean to say ‘book taken.’ Professor, you’re a devotee of the Matthew Arnold Hope Cult of Spoonerisms: What must the dean have meant to say?”

  “‘Took…Bacon’!” said Professor Gorman.

  “Which makes no sense, either, unless we recall, Dad, that his voice trailed off. As if he meant to add a word, but failed. Which word? The word ‘money’—‘took Bacon money’ Because while the Bacon book wasn’t here to be taken, the ten thousand dollars Doc Hope was toting around all day to pay for it was.

  “And who took the Bacon money? The one who knocked on the dean’s door just after seven o’clock and asked to be let in. The one who, when Dr. Hope unlocked the door—indicating the knocker was someone he knew and trusted—promptly clobbered the old man and made off with his life’s savings.”

  “But when you asked who hit him,” protested the Inspector, “he answered ‘Gorman’.”

  “Which he couldn’t have meant, either, since the professor has an alibi of granite. Therefore—”

  “Another spoonerism!” exclaimed Professor Gorman.

  “I’m afraid so. And since the only spoonerism possible from the name ‘Gorman’ is Morgan,’ hunt up Mr. Morgan Naseby of the underpaid English department, Dad, and you’ll have Doc’s assailant and his ten grand back, too.”

  Later, at Bellevue Hospital, an indestructible Elizabethan scholar squeezed the younger Queen hand feebly. Conversation was forbidden, but the good pedagogue and spoonerist extraordinary did manage to whisper, “My queer Dean…”

  —Your Cake and Eat It

  Berkely Mather

  The old T and S Line it was. The initials stood for Tamworth and Stafford, but we changed them to “Toil and Starvation.” Small but fast freighters on the regular Sydney-to-Liverpool run. Through the Suez if the cargo was worth it—round the Cape if it wasn’t. It has folded up now. Nowadays no self-respecting sailorman would ship in them, but in the hungry Thirties it was different. They were undermanned and the grub would have made a Cape Horn shellback spit. It was always a quick turn-round in Sydney in the wool season—seven days at the most—and during that time they used to keep you at it, red-leading and working cargo. It was bad enough for the fo’c’sle hands, but for us apprentices it was murder. The former could demand a few bob advance and go uptown in the evenings and drown their sorrows but we kids were sailoring for a shilling a month and the doubtful privilege of being taught the rudiments of our craft. If we could raise the energy to clean up after knocking off, most of us used to drift along to the Mariners’ Haven at Millers Point.

  All seamen’s missions are good and they do an excellent job, but this one was better than most. It had no official backing and it was run on subscriptions from goodhearted people and the sheer love that Auntie Wimslow and the Old Man bore for everything and everybody that floated. The Old Man had been a hard-driving skipper in his day but he had seen the light and developed arthritis at the same time so he and his wife had hit the beach and started this place some years before. Their love usually exceeded the subscriptions but however tight things were there was always a welcome there—a decent meal at bedrock prices, a hot bath and a quiet room where you could read or write a letter. There was no hard liquor, of course, but at the same time nobody prayed at you or urged you to sing “Sailor Beware” if you didn’t want to. If you were flat busted you could put your Lancashire hotpot, coffee and bun on the cuff till you were financial again, although most of us had our pride and didn’t like doing that too often.

  This particular night Gannet-guts Frisby and I rated ninepence between us, which was affluence, so we washed up in buckets, shifted into brass-bound jackets and strolled round Circular Quay and over the Point to the Haven. Gannet-guts was the senior apprentice and was sitting for his second mate’s ticket after the next trip but one. He hated the sea and was sticking it out purely for the forty-pound refund of his indenture money that he was entitled to on coming out of his time. When that happy day arrived he said he intended to buy a pair of oars, put them over his shoulder and start walking into the hinterland of New South Wales. When somebody asked him what the hell the things he was carrying were, he intended to stop and settle right there. It didn’t, in the event, quite work out that way because he is now commodore skipper of a crack passenger line. He was then the hungriest youth I have ever met—ashore or afloat. That boy could have eaten curried jackal in a China Sea typhoon.

  Well, we reached the Haven and had a coffee and a couple of good solid buns apiece, Gannet-guts swallowing his like oysters with me eking mine out and keeping my cap over the one I wasn’t actually engaged on—then we played dominos and listened to a couple of Peruvian boys strumming a guitar and singing until, browned off and bored stiff, we decided to return to our Spartan berths. We were coming out when Auntie intercepted us.

  “Hello, boys,” she greeted us. “Not going before the singsong, are you?” She was a sweet little woman—plump and rosy like a Devonshire apple, although her home was, as she’d told us nostalgically on many an occasion, just across the Mersey from Liverpool, on the New Brighton side.

  We murmured something about having to be back on board and she said that was a pity as she and the Old Man had intended asking us back to their place for supper later on. I moved between her and Gannet-guts quickly because the drools were running down his chin and it wasn’t pleasant to look at. “It’s nothing terribly important,” I said. “We’d love to come.”

  She was really pleased and we went back and sang our heads off for nearly two hours and then, after they’d closed the place, the Old Man got his battered Ford round and they drove us up to their little flat in Darlinghurst, as the Haven was half of an old warehouse and didn’t run to living quarters. Several of the lads on our ship and others of the same line had been up there before although this was our first visit, and the supper they gave us lived up to everything we had heard. She had partly cooked everything in the morning before opening the Haven and it only needed warming up. There was a huge joint of beef, two vegetables, roast potatoes and to fo
llow it, an enormous apple pie with thick cream. The Old Man and Auntie didn’t drink, of course, but they weren’t narrow-minded either and they even produced a bottle of lager apiece for us from the icebox. I was a bit ashamed of Gannet-guts at first, but the old people were so obviously delighted to see us tucking in well that it really didn’t matter. Yes, it was a memorable feed all right, and afterwards we sat back, loaded to the scuppers, while Auntie talked wistfully about their daughter back in New Brighton who was married to a head cargo clerk in the docks, and their little grandchildren, and she showed us photos and we pretended not to notice the tears that almost overflowed at times from her kind and tired old eyes. We were glad when the Old Man changed the subject and got on to the days when sailoring was really tough, back when he was rounding Cape Stiff in square-riggers. We realized then, youngsters though we were, what this self-imposed exile meant to them. Granted, this warm climate was better for the Old Man’s arthritis than the mists and rain of Merseyside, but that wasn’t all that kept them here. They felt they had a job to do—the making of life just a little more bearable for half-starved, overworked kids in this far-flung bit of the world. I know it made an impression on me, and, fair play to him,

  on Gannet-guts also. These weren’t just another pair of longshore do-gooders. They were dedicated.

  The Old Man insisted on driving us back to Circular Quay in the early hours of the morning. We protested of course, because even climbing the stairs to their flat was an effort for him, but he wouldn’t hear of letting us walk. Auntie made us promise faithfully we’d go and see the daughter and the kids when we docked in Liverpool. Lots of the boys did, apparently. It made a sort of a link. She gave us some snaps to deliver—photos of the Haven that somebody had taken with a box camera, and the Old Man said, “What about the cake? It would save it being mucked about in the mail.”

  Auntie said it would be too much trouble for us. It was a medium-sized Dundee cake that she’d baked specially for the youngest grandchild’s birthday then some weeks off. She showed it to us, brown and delicious, the top smothered in almonds and glistening golden sugar, nestling in tissue paper and ready to go into its cardboard box. We said it was no trouble at all, and in the end, guiltily grateful, she packed it and we took it away with us. She wrote the daughter’s name and address down on a slip of paper and I tucked it for safekeeping inside the sweatband of my best cap.

  I took good care of that cake on the voyage home. Gannet-guts was as straight as the next lad in matters of money, cigarettes and so on, but when it came to food he would have stolen his blind grandmother’s gruel, and the cuisine on that parish-rigged hooker of ours didn’t help his fortitude any.

  As a matter of fact he did suggest once or twice rather obliquely that a slice of it wouldn’t go down too bad—and we could always buy another like it when we got to Liverpool, but I wouldn’t hear of it and I kept the key of my seachest well hidden.

  We arrived in the late afternoon of a blustery October day and, since the tide was just right, we went straight into the Herculaneum Dock without anchoring in midstream. There was mail for us there, but no time to read it as the Mate was devil-driving us to get cargo lights rigged, hatches off and things made ready generally for an early start in the morning. The fact that Gannet-guts had slipped ashore didn’t please him one little bit either, and he vowed blasphemously that he’d kick the shark-bellied young varmint into the ’tweendecks when he showed up again. For once I was all on the side of the Mate because the work of the absentee automatically fell to me in addition to my own.

  I was helping to rig stages over the open hatches when this fellow came up to me out of the gang of agents’ touts and seamen’s outfitters that always manage to get aboard no matter what time you dock. He said, “Your name Askew?” I said it was.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said. “We had a letter from my ma-in-law in Sydney the other day. Said you were bringing a cake for the kids—”

  “It’s in my cabin,” I said, “but—”

  At that moment the Mate, who was hanging over the rail of the lower bridge watching for possible wastes of the company’s time, inquired in a voice midway between the howl of a banshee and that of a foghorn, whether I, Mister Blurry Shrimshanking Askew, thought I was an A-deck passenger on the unspeakably vulgar Majestic—or what? I begged the head cargo clerk to scram and told him that I’d bring it as soon as I could. He muttered that he’d meet me outside the dock gates and went his way, for which I was thankful.

  We knocked off about seven. Gannet-guts had come back to the fold by this time, stiff twitching slightly after his interview with the Mate. He told me in mumbled asides as we worked that he’d had a ten-bob postal order from his eldest sister and he just couldn’t stick it any longer so he’d hopped it and blew the lot on steak and chips along the Dock Road.

  Things were a little strained as we cleaned up and changed. We went ashore and out through the gates, myself four paces in front, carrying the boxed cake. I anticipated some formalities at the gate office and had started to unwrap the box when we came to it, but the policeman was one we knew. He asked me whether I was carrying the ship’s compass with intent to flog it, or just plain opium—then grinned and said, “Okay, Admiral—’op it—and leave the judies alone.”

  There was no sign of the head cargo clerk outside, which was not surprising since some hours had elapsed since we spoke, so we went along to Pierhead on the Overhead Railway—I fuming because Gannet-guts hadn’t a brass razoo left out of his ten bob and I had to pay the fares. We crossed on the New Brighton ferry and then we had a devil of a job to find the address. It was a rundown terrace house in the not so superior end of that otherwise pleasant resort. I rang at the bell and it was some time before there was any response—then the paint-peeled door opened a scant inch and a woman’s voice said in the darkness, “What do you want?”

  I said, “Mrs. Plumley? We’re off the Bellstruther. Your mother gave us a cake in Sydney—”

  “Anyone with you?” There was a note of anxiety in the voice.

  “No—only us.”

  The door opened a few more inches and I saw a dim face staring at us through the darkness. She hesitated a few moments then said, “All right—come in—quick.”

  We went into the narrow dark hall and the door snapped to behind us. The woman pushed past us and opened the door of the front room. We stood waiting in the gloom while she drew the blinds and curtains, then she switched the light on. The room wasn’t what I’d have expected the front parlor of a head cargo clerk to be. It wasn’t exactly dirty and poverty-stricken, but it didn’t stop far short of it. They’ve coined a word for it since those days—beat-up. The word fitted the woman too. She might have been a brunette at one time, but now she was a brassy blonde rapidly running to seed. Involuntarily I glanced at Gannet-guts and caught his eye. I think we were both thinking of the same thing—poor old Auntie’s tremulous pride in her family as she talked of them that night in Sydney.

  The woman looked at the box in my hand and held out her own. “That it?” she asked. I nodded and gave it to her. She looked at us both in turn, half-questioningly—then said, “Okay—hang on a second.” She hurried from the room.

  “Lumme,” muttered Gannet-guts. “Poor old Auntie. That bint’s a trollop.”

  We stood uncomfortably, caps in hand, in the middle of the untidy room until she came bade after a few minutes. Her manner was different now. She was grinning from ear to ear and she was carrying a half bottle of gin and three cups. “Sorry to keep you waiting, boys,” she said. “Here—what am I thinking of? Sit down while I pour us a gargle.”

  “No thanks,” I answered. “I’m afraid we’ve got to be on our way.”

  “Aw, come on. A gargle won’t hurt you. Whoever heard of a sailor refusing a gargle?” and she leered at us.

  Gannet-guts, with his constant preoccupation with food, came the old Cunard-White Star and said stiffly, “We don’t usually drink before dinner.”

  “Sor
ry I’ve got nothing in the eats line to offer you,” she said. “Unless you’d like a chunk of that cake.” She splashed neat gin into the three cups—real bosun’s pegs—and added, “Here, get that down you and I’ll get you a couple of hunks. I know what you Toil and Starvation kids are like.” I heard Gannet-guts gasp in sheer indignation.

  “I thought it was a birthday cake for your little girl,” I said.

  “Oh—-er—her?” She seemed slightly taken aback, but only for a moment “You don’t have to worry about her. Worms, you know. Not allowed a thing with sugar in. I don’t tell the Old Lady in case it worries her. You might as well have a bit—I’ve cut it already. Looks real nice.”

  It may have been the cargo of Dock Road steak and chips that steeled Gannet-guts but I prefer, in looking back, to give him credit for nice-mindedness. He said firmly, “No thank you. And now we really must be going.”

  “Have it your own way,” she shrugged. She tossed off two of the gins in quick succession. “Mud in your eye. Thanks a lot.” As we moved to the door she fumbled under her skirt and I heard the unmistakable crackle of paper money and felt my ears going red as I hurried into the hall. “Couple of bob for your trouble,” she said and tried to slip it into Gannet-guts’s hand.

  Gannet-guts dropped the Cunard-White Star. “Stow it in your locker, missus,” he said. “What do you think we are? Flipping errand boys?”

  “Jump off the pier, you cheeky young rip,” she snapped. “All right—no skin off my elbow.” She lea the way to the front door.

  I said, “Your husband saw me on board and asked for the cake, but I was too busy to get it for him. He said he’d meet us outside the dock gate, but we must have missed him.”

  “Not half you didn’t,” she giggled. “Give him my love if you see him and tell him not to be late home.” She giggled again as she let us out and said, “Okay, Nelson—look after John Paul Jones—and see he gets his flaming dinner.”