The Comfortable Coffin

by Richard S. Prather

  The nude gal was trying to get into Grieg’s car. He was probably trying to push her away, in horror, but it appeared that he might instead have lost control of himself.

  I said to the officers, “Surely that sort of thing is against the law. Do your duty, men.”

  Maybe there were supposed to be two or three other nude babes around here somewhere, but that wasn’t important to Flannery and Wilkins. A bird in the hand is worth two or three in the bush, and they took off like hungry eagles.

  The male reporter was quick to follow them. Only Skull- and-Crossbones remained. 1 smiled at her and said, “Make yourself at home, dear. I’m going to finish my shower—love to feel clean…clean.” I went back to the john. In a moment I peeked out, but she had given up and was gone. A quick look toward the street showed me the whole gang of them waving arms. Grieg’s face was a splendid color. The blonde was in the Continental looking out and yakking.

  So that took care of that. Grieg and I weren’t through with each other—barely started, in fact—but I figured the interruptions were finished for a while. I knew Wilkins and Flannery well, and that gang wouldn’t be back—at least not today. I took a look out my bedroom window. One floor below, Agony and Lomey still sprawled on the lawn where I’d dropped them, still unconscious. They had made a relatively soft spot upon which to drop the tired tiger.

  I went back to the bathroom. I opened the shower curtain all the way. My two nude lovelies were still there, quiet as can be, big-eyed and pressed back against the wall. Like the Purloined Letter.

  “They gone?” the bronzed blonde asked softly.

  “Yeah, all’s clear. Well, you can get dressed now—I stuffed your clothes in the laundry bag, along with the camera.”

  The redhead grinned. “Keep your shirt off. What’s the rush? You said they were gone.”

  I heard a siren. “There they go now,” I said. “I, uh, did I hear—”

  The blonde spoke, smiling an incandescent smile, “Torchy and I were talking…just a second ago…and she said…”

  Torchy, huh? It was high time I learned their names. The blonde—Brandy—told me what they’d been saying.

  I had to chuckle. Me, Shell Scott, the guy who is usually examining the dead ones…

  The Gentleman Caller

  Veronica Parker Johns

  Miss Emmy Rice, who didn’t look a day over seventy-five, lifted a lid to sniff the fragrance of bubbling beef stew. Beef it really was this time—not scraps conned from a kindly butcher but nuggets of succulent beef bought with twice-counted pennies. The young man, the light of her fast-dimming lire, was coming to dinner.

  Lowering the gas, she glanced at the turnip watch which had belonged to her father and now hung on the hook of an abandoned birdcage. It was a quarter to six. The guest, Gerald, would appear in fifteen minutes if he continued to indulge his admirable habit of punctuality, which seemed an anachronism in this impolite world. Nightly, for weeks, he had joined her at precisely eight o’clock on the park bench facing the river, since that first evening when the unlikely had happened; then, observing his unease, his need, Miss Emmy had defied convention and struck up a conversation with a member of the opposite sex.

  Combing her wispy hair, fluffing it deceptively into a net, she recalled the details of that encounter. It was strange how she could remember almost everything that related to Gerald, although frequently she forgot her own name and address, and had to consult the paper pinned inside her handbag for that data. Once, in one of those sudden flashes of lucidity which in the pattern of her vagueness were now the exception, not the rule, she had heard her landlady remark of her that she had lost contact with reality. Indeed, it was quite the contrary. Reality had lost contact with her. Until that night on the bench—how long ago was it, as though time mattered?

  She digressed from the sweet recollection of her meeting with Gerald to think spitefully of her landlady. A lot she knew, nagging Emmy constantly to part with some of the magazines which crowded the nine by twelve bed-dining-living-room. “Dust catchers,” Mrs. Martin complained, jabbing at a tottering pile of them with an angry carpet sweeper, “full of outdated news which could be news to nobody.” Emmy had primly replied that they were pretty and that was enough for her.

  “Pretty!” Mrs. Martin snorted antagonistically. “I’d like to know what’s pretty about Time magazine for February of ’48.”

  Miss Emmy had not demeaned herself to retort. She chuckled now, content that she had not yielded to pressure, in which event she might have missed the ’53 issue of Life with the picture that looked like Gerald.

  It wasn’t really Gerald, of course. Gerald’s hair was red, whereas the man in the photograph was obviously a towhead. Gerald sported a mustache as dashingly as ever was done in the ’90s; she was sure it did not conceal a mouth as weak as this other’s. Still, there was something about the eyes and the corners of them, the deep cleft chin and the jawline, which had made her tear out the picture and squirrel it away in a bureau drawer.

  Spiritually, there was no comparison between Gerald and the young man who had achieved national notoriety, who was a thief and an escaped convict. Some time, just for a joke, she would show Gerald the clipping and they would have a good laugh over it, but not tonight. Tonight she wanted everything to be just perfect.

  There had been a girl with him that first evening, a flashy, cheap-looking hussy not worth the apologies he was lavishing upon her. The girl had grumbled about something, her shrill voice fairly drowning out Gerald’s placatory murmurings, while Miss Emmy stood tentatively behind the bench which years of occupancy had led her to think of as her own. Before she had decided to assert squatters’ rights, the baggage had flounced off, happily never to reappear in that vicinity.

  Miss Emmy, then, had spoken to the distraught young man, making a diversionary remark about the number of cars there were on the streets nowadays, had he noticed, and wasn’t it a caution? It was an observation she often made, always with an air of well-bred surprise and moderate disapproval because she always was surprised to notice that the horseless carriage had entirely taken over.

  “I shudder to think,” she murmured, illustrating her reaction with a Delsarte gesture, “what became of all the horses. They seem to have vanished from the face of the earth.”

  “Lady,” he said, not turning toward her, “it should happen to the nags I bet on.”

  Young people talked differently nowadays, she knew, and this was the only thing Gerald had ever said to her which might be considered coarse or common. After that he turned and looked at her, long and silently. He stared at the pink straw hat which obligingly lent itself to an endless routine of retrimming, at the mined-diamond pinky ring, the paired gold bangles, the pince-nez on a thin gold pully pinned to her crepe dress.

  Gerald’s blue eyes were set a little too close together for him to be as handsome as she pretended. Their gaze had grown so intense that for a second or two she regretted the impulse which had led her to speak to him. Then, in some recess of his ordered mind, Gerald pushed a button marked Charm. A smile flooded his face.

  “I bet you’ve driven many a spanking pair in your day, ma’am,” he said.

  “When I was little,” she told him, “I used to have a pony.”

  She told him lots more, then and later, to which he listened with rapt attention. He was such an audience as she had believed no longer existed. People, it seemed, did not have the time or simply weren’t interested in the things she found absorbing. Gerald’s attitude was refreshingly different

  Which was why she had invited him to dinner tonight. No other man had been permitted to enter her tiny home. Mrs. Martin had had fits trying to find a lady electrician when the ceiling light blew out, and there was a cracked pane in the window because of the shortage of female glaziers. Gerald would be the first man ever to put foot in Emmy’s room.

  It was precisely six when the downstairs bell of the converted brownstone rang sharply. Emmy went to the top of the top flight
of steps to welcome her gentleman caller.

  Gerald had brought a bottle of port and three sweetheart roses. Her eyes brimmed with tears as she filled a vase from the bathroom which she shared with four other roomers. Meticulously she rinsed dusty wineglasses, her hands trembling with the long-forgotten ecstasy of receiving a gift of posies.

  She hurried, an onset of panic nearly convincing her that she had invented the whole thing, that there was no Gerald, that these receptacles were being prepared for wine and flowers that were dust and ashes. Her imagination had played similarly plausible pranks on her only recently.

  She had found things in her room the presence of which she could not possibly explain. On the other hand she kept losing things, or thought she kept losing things she had never owned. There had been that frightful row with the woman in the room adjoining hers about a saucepan. Mrs. Martin had meddled in that affair, proving to her own if not Miss Emmy’s satisfaction that the pan belonged to the neighbor. There was definitely a new dimension in Miss Emmy’s life in which fact and fancy were interchangeable.

  It was an area, she was aware, in which she must tread gently, for Mrs. Martin was always ready to pounce upon her. Mrs. Martin had indicated that she could very well do without a tenant who was so unclear about what was and wasn’t. One false step, Emmy knew, would send her hurtling into that “Institution” in which, the landlady often stated behind a not too carefully cupped hand, she ought to be.

  Back in her room she was pleased to discover that Gerald abided in the factual world. He was whistling a waltz as he uncorked the port. She set down the wet glasses and started looking for the dish towel. By the time she had found it, wrapped in crumpled newspaper in a compartment of the desk, he had already done the honors with a clean handkerchief.

  “Thank you,” she said humbly. “I don’t know what gets into me. It seems almost as if I take great pains to hide things even from myself.”

  She meant objects like the towel, and the nightgown for which she had to hunt an average of fifteen minutes every night, but under the stimulus of Gerald’s sympathy she broadened the field to include all those secret things about herself that currently worried her.

  “I’m not as sharp as I used to be,” she asserted boldly, glad at last to have said it aloud.

  “You’re bright as a dollar,” Gerald protested, “and a grand cook, by the smell of that stew.” With a gallant bow he handed her one of the filled wineglasses, saying, “Do you know what it means to me, a home-cooked meal?”

  “I hope you enjoy it.”

  She sipped the port, saying it tasted strong, did he suppose she should? “I’m not used to it now, although they did say I had quite a head when I was a girl. Did I tell you about that young man wining and dining me at the Hotel Brevoort?”

  “No,” Gerald said. This would make seven times he had heard it

  She had just reached the part about the champagne in the slipper, an apocryphal bit which by now she found wholly convincing, when her eyelids began to droop.

  “You must forgive an old lady,” she said breathlessly. “Just a cat nap. I take them often. Ten minutes or so and I’m fit as a fiddle.”

  In an instant she was asleep, bolt upright. Gerald reached for the bottle and poured himself two in quick succession. It wasn’t exactly his kind of liquor, but it was better than nothing. He was hungry, and the stew did smell good, but that could wait. Waiting was a thing he did well because he’d had plenty of practice.

  Nevertheless, after a quarter of an hour he grew restless. The straight-backed chair on which he sat was uncomfortable. The room was small, like a cell, and seemed to be growing smaller. He got up and twiddled the knob of the early model radio. Sound filled the small room but the old lady slept on. He tuned in a rhumba full blast and walked over to her, mockingly pantomiming an invitation to dance. But she did not stir. Maybe she’s dead already, he thought, shrugging; just my luck.

  She was not. A few minutes later, she awoke with a start.

  “My goodness!” she exclaimed, stumbling over to the stove. ‘‘Phew! Why didn’t you turn it off? Didn’t you smell it?”

  “Smell what?”

  “Scorching. I smelled it so hard it woke me up. Always did have a keen sense of smell. My eyesight’s failing and my hearing’s gone off badly, but,” she tapped her high- bridged nose, “my smeller’s still A-number-one. When I was a girl Papa used to say he’d hire me out as one of the bloodhounds in an Uncle Tom troupe. Joking, of course.”

  Papa would have been beside himself to hear the reception given his sally by Gerald. Gerald laughed until he sounded as if he were having hysterics, and momentarily she expected hammering on the common wall of her neighbor’s room.

  She managed to salvage enough of the stew, which was delicious. After dinner, they went out and sat on their bench for a while and watched the boats go up and down the river.

  He didn’t mention the will until the third visit.

  She’d served meatloaf that night, counter scraps eked out with bread crumbs. She knew she was overspending, but she didn’t give it too much thought. Chiefly what she thought was that few people get a chance to live more than once—that very few elderly ladies, their friends gone on before them, ever found a whole new life on a riverside bench.

  He called her “Aunty” by now; he had appointed himself her favorite nephew. “I want to talk to you about something,” he announced after the dinner dishes had been washed and put away. “It’s rather a touchy subject. I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  “You’re not going away?” she asked, panicky, that being the worst thing she could think of.

  “No,” he said soberly. “It’s not me. It’s you. You’ll be going away some day, maybe sooner than we think.”

  “Me?” She chuckled. “I never go anywhere.”

  “I’m referring,” there was tremolo in his voice, “to that last, long journey.”

  His mien was so funereal that she could not miss the point

  Comfortingly she told him that she would be ready when the call came to join her family and friends Beyond.

  “That’s not what I’m getting at,” he said. “Look, I guess the best way to say this is just to say it right out. I’ve been reading a book about wills. Have you made one?”

  “No, I haven’t. I didn’t think I had enough to bother.”

  “You have plenty of nice things,” he contradicted, fingering a chipped Meissen shepherdess. “You have your treasures. You want to make sure, don’t you, the right people get them afterward?”

  She saw the wisdom of this. She supposed that if she left no specific instructions Mrs. Martin would simply come in and pirate everything.

  Gerald hung the smile on his face. “Don’t go thinking your favorite nephew is only fixing it so he will inherit your fortune,” he teased.

  “Fortune?” she echoed, bewildered. “I’m sure I’ve got no fortune. Papa lost almost everything, and Mama’s last illness ate up the rest.”

  “Don’t kid me.” There was dust from the shepherdess on the finger with which he stroked her cheek. “Until I came into your life you were what the newspapers call a ‘recluse.’ Recluses always have millions in banknotes stashed away between the pages of old magazines. It’s expected.”

  “Not me,” she insisted. “All I have is a few little shares of Consolidated Gas and American Telephone. They’re very nice to me, the companies. They send me money every now and again. It’s what I live on.

  “Sometimes,” she added shyly, “they send me an envelope and I think it’s money but it turns out to be some kind of paper to sign, a p-r-o-x-y, something I don’t understand. The next thing I don’t understand, will you explain to me?”

  “Sure thing, Aunty, glad to oblige. But about a will, that stock is something you should say who gets it.”

  “There isn’t anyone,” she mused. “No one I can remember seeing for a long, long time.”

  The tremolo came back to Gerald’s voice: “When the ang
els gather you to them, I’d like to have a momentum of our happy hours together. That watch, for instance. Boy, that’s a beaut!”

  Momentum, she thought. Momentum. It sounded queer, and somehow wrong. Words did that nowadays—they stood on their heads and did not seem to mean what they used to.

  Gerald removed the watch from the birdcage hook, whistled at it appreciatively.

  “It was Papa’s,” she told him. “I’ll write your name on the back of it. I do that. I’ll show you.”

  She darted about the room, exhibiting tiny scraps of adhesive on which she had written names, stuck to the backs of pictures and the bases of bric-a-brac.

  Gerald wasn’t sure the bits of adhesive would have any legal value.

  “But lawyers cost money,” she protested. “I couldn’t afford one.”

  “It so happens you don’t need one. I read this here book about wills very carefully, and I took the liberty of drawing you up a proper one. It’s simple. I’ll go over it with you, and if it’s okay you can sign it in front of a couple of witnesses. Think we could dig up some people here in the house?”

  “Mrs. Martin usually has a few friends over. I could go downstairs with you when you leave. It’s good of you to do this. Since Papa’s been gone there hasn’t been a man around to take care of my affairs.”

  “A pleasure,” he assured her.

  He drew a single typed sheet from his pocket, unfolded it, and began to read:

  “‘I give, devise, and bequeath all my property, whether real, personal, or mixed wheresoever located to,’” he raised his head, “what’s the name of your church?”

  “My church? I’ve got it here somewhere. I go every Sunday, at least I used to.” She rummaged through the desk, came up with a dog-eared Gift Offering envelope which she handed to him. Gerald copied the name in ink in a space he had reserved.

  “Paragraph Two,” he intoned. “There are only two, and this one I’ll mostly have to fill in, subject to your approval.”