Clayton Rawson
No Coffin for the Corpse
For MOTHER and DAD
Epigraph
“Know then it is a specter, usually
the image of the departed person, who,
either for wrong suffered, sustained
during life, or through treasure hidden
… haunts the spots from time to time,
becomes familiar to those who dwell
there, and takes an interest in their fate.”
Chapter One:
I Meet a Dragon
I was on duty the first time I tangled with Dudley T. Wolff. The New York Evening Press city editor had given me a special assignment to do a series of feature stories on the defense program. My investigation into the subject of bottlenecks and their causes led me to the Wolff Chemical Corporation, makers of smokeless powder and the various other unstable commodities that are used as filling for bombs and shells. I soon discovered that I had a headline yarn in my lap — and a bull by the tail.
Dudley Wolff was the bull. When my copy hit the front pages from here to the coast and back again he took one quick look and exploded with the same dull thunderous roar his factory would have made had I touched a match to it.
This was no surprise to anyone who knew him. I could have rattled off a column or two of descriptive copy on his reaction well in advance. I had interviewed the lion in his den and I knew very well that tagging him in print as a crusty, blustering old industrial pirate with a whim of armor plate — which he was — would get repercussions. But that was no skin off my hide.
The Evening Press didn’t mind. If Vesuvius was for sale, they’d buy it, set it up in the composing-room, and object if it didn’t perform daily. Their publishing theory was simple: Explosions build circulation.
Dudley Wolff, however, was something special in the volcano line. He had a long and devastating record of eruptions. More than one of them had, on occasion, rocked the Stock Exchange to its foundations and reduced the opposition of some very hard-boiled Wall Street financiers to crisp black ashes. Dudley was a self-made man who didn’t know when to stop.
His boyhood years had been spent in the Chicago stockyard district where poverty had caused him to formulate the general rule: Cut the other guy’s throat before he cuts yours. And, though this system had lately hit a few snags, in the pre-New Deal era when business had gone its own merry way, it had worked successfully enough for Wolff. It had also resulted in making him as domineering, ruthless, and dictatorial as a twenty-ton tank. And twice as flattening.
The second time I met him, however, the battle was fought on my home grounds. The city editor certainly hadn’t sent me out to date Kathryn Wolff. That was my own idea. The only story in it was a very old one, headline news with me, but not with our readers. I wasn’t the Duke of Windsor.
The defense-program story would have blown over eventually and Wolff would have forgotten all about a reporter whose by-line read: Ross Harte. But what had happened to Kathryn and myself showed no sign of blowing over. On the contrary it had reached the point of window shopping for a ring. Dudley Wolff wanted to forget me though. He began by trying to get rid of me.
Kay and I had both heard that old one about the course of true love being rocky and replete with hairpin turns. Neither of us believed that any such whiskered adage could possibly apply to us. But when Wolff discovered what was going on we found out differently. He promptly supplied so many bumps that the course of our affections seemed to have been laid out by a hard-drinking roller-coaster designer.
Dudley, it developed, had a rigid set of specifications that must be met by any suitor for his daughter’s hand. On my first test run I checked in with a score of zero minus.
“That young scandalmonger,” Wolff had roared in his best howitzer manner, “certainly has his nerve! He libels me in print and then thinks it would be nice if he married my daughter! Is he crazy? Or does he think I am? Can’t you see what his game is, Kathryn? He has the social background of a flea and a reporter’s salary. He wants to marry money. But he won’t. Not this trip! I don’t want to hear him mentioned again! Do you understand?”
Kathryn, having inherited her due share of the Wolff temper, very nearly did some blowing up of her own. Nearly, but not quite. She knew from past experience that this was an instance where a more subtle strategy was needed. Open opposition would only intensify his determination. Quickly, before she should burst out and tell him what she thought of such medieval, highhanded behavior, she turned and walked out on him.
He got what he asked for, too. He heard nothing more from her about me for the time being. But Kay was as stubborn as her father. We saw each other just as much as ever, in fact, rather more. And we discussed, though without much success, ways and means of undermining the Wolff dictatorship. What we really needed was a mechanized division or two, complete with antitank guns and flame throwers.
The odds against us, in the meantime, climbed steadily. As a direct result of my all-out reportorial attack on the Wolff Chemical Corporation and its methods, the Senate Munitions Committee had summoned Dudley to Washington and laid down a barrage of embarrassing questions. Our Capitol correspondent reported that he hadn’t had so much fun since the Louis-Schmeling fight. But neither Kay nor I was amused. And the evening of the day on which her father returned from this fracas was definitely not one of the moments we had discussed as being favorable to a reopening of the matter of our engagement. Unluckily, that is just when it came up.
I had gone out to the Wolff estate, some twenty-five miles from New York near Mamaroneck, to get Kay. Theater passes, wangled from the drama editor, were in my pocket. The house was built close by the edge of Long Island Sound at the end of a long drive that curved sinuously up from the gatehouse on the Post Road. It pretended to be an English Gothic manor though it was not to the manner born, but had, instead, been built in the 20’s according to one of the standard sets of blueprints that the more conservative architectural firms of the day dusted off whenever a self-made millionaire walked in and said, “I want a house.”
The landscape architect had likewise used a common or garden-variety planting design. He had placed a tight girdle of conical evergreens about the house which, in the course of time, had grown until they now resembled a horde of fat-bellied elves in high, pointed hats who crowded close about and peered in at the lower-floor windows.
The Wolff house did not have the usual swimming pools both upstairs and down. It was the medium size for millionaires with families of three, plus servants; but it was still, at least for my taste, too big to look hospitable. The inky starless sky and the biting February wind that swirled thin, icy flakes of snow around it were no help either. Nor was Phillips, the butler.
When he opened the door and found me on the stoop, an undercurrent of doubt disturbed the smooth, pink surface of his professional poker face. He hesitated perceptibly before he said, “I’ll tell Miss Kathryn that you are here.”
I didn’t blame him much. He was in a spot too. Dudley Wolff had obviously ordered him to put out the smallpox sign when I showed, while Kathryn had insisted that he let me in.
Then she came down the stairs. I forgot Phillips, Dudley Wolff, the weather, and the expensively interior-decorated gloom that filled the house. The shining welcome in her eyes and the quick, glad way she came to greet me made me forget a lot of things, including, as we turned to go, my hat. It wasn’t February any more; it was spring. And when, just outside the door, away from Phillips’s eagle eye, she put her face up to be kissed, it was June.