Grab Bag Read online

  “It’s not there,” he wailed.

  “Then it’s under the table, where you generally wind up, you old souse,” shouted Archer the wit.

  It was not. It wasn’t anywhere. That cumbrous chain of heavy silver with its dependent silver codfish, so recently ornamenting Jeremy Kelling’s neat little paunch, was now vanished like the chowders of yesteryear.

  “You forgot to put it on,” sneered the Highmost Hod-carrier. “Softening of the brain, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. Let’s have our Codly coffee.”

  All hailed this sage counsel except the Exalted Chowderhead. A relative infant among the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish, being yet on the sunny side of seventy, Jeremy Kelling had labored long to achieve high office. He’d worked his way up from Journeyman Bouncer to Leastmost Hod-carrier. He’d been Fluke Flounder for one halcyon term, during which he’d pulled a calf muscle leaping to the piano and strained a tonsil putting too much fortissimo into his shouts.

  At every meeting and frequently in between, he’d dreamed of the day when he would wear the Great Chain, sit behind the Ceremonial Cauldron, and show these clods how to run a meeting. His installation had taken place only last month. This was the first time he’d got to officiate. How breathtaking had been the moment when the Great Chain was withdrawn from its secret hiding place by the Opener of the Shell and hung around his palpitating neck. At the end of the meeting, the Chain was supposed to be returned to its hiding place with the Secret Valedictory Chant. How the hell could he conduct the concluding ceremonies without the blasted Codfish?

  Where, Jeremy asked himself as he sipped with less than usual relish at his whiskey-laden coffee under its cargo of whipped cream, had the damn thing got to? The Great Chain couldn’t have fallen off. Its overlapping links had been clinched together forever and aye by an old-time artisan, there was no clasp to come undone. The only way to get it away from him would have been to lift it over his head.

  Quod erat absurdem. An experienced toper like Jeremy Kelling could never have got drunk enough on a paltry few schooners of special dark to be oblivious to any such trick as that. Furthermore, he’d been in full view of all the Comrades ever since he’d donned the Chain, and there was not such unanimity of spirit among them that somebody wouldn’t have ratted on anybody else who made so free with the revered relic.

  As the Codly coffee mugs were replenished, speculation about the Chain’s disappearance grew more imaginative. Everybody naturally accused everybody else of codnapping. They took to visiting the men’s room in squads to make sure nobody was trying to sneak the Codfish off in his codpiece.

  Mrs. Coddie, of course, was exonerated, firstly because she’d been under escort by the three Hod-carriers all the time, secondly because she’d been in her swoon during the time when the fell deed was most likely to have befallen, and thirdly because she proved to be somebody’s mother.

  At last a thorough search of the room was conducted, with all the members crawling around the floor on hands and knees, barking like a pack of foxhounds, but finding nothing. For the first time in the club’s history, they had to close the meeting without the Valedictory Chant, though a few Comrades gave it anyway either because they were too befuddled not to or because they always had before and they damn well would now if they damn well felt like it.

  Most appeared to regard the Great Chain’s disappearance as a jolly jape and to be confident it would turn up at the April meeting pinned to the seat of the Ancient and Timeworn Overalls. Jeremy Kelling was not so sanguine. His first act on returning to his Beacon Hill apartment was to fight off the ministrations of his faithful henchman Egbert, who took it for granted Mr. Jem must be sick because he’d come home sober and perturbed instead of sloshed and merry. His second was to put in an emergency call to his nephew-in-law, Max Bittersohn.

  “Max, I’ve lost the Codfish!”

  “I knew a man once who lost a stuffed muskellunge,” Max replied helpfully.

  “Dash it, man, cease your persiflage. The Great Chain of the Convivial Codfish is a sacred relic. Like the grasshopper on top of Faneuil Hall,” he added to emphasize the gravity of the situation. “It disappeared while I was removing the Ancient and Timeworn Overalls from the Ceremonial Cauldron.”

  “That was probably as good a time as any,” said Max. “The Chain didn’t fall into the pot, by any chance?”

  “How the hell could it? I looked. Anyway, the thing was around my neck. I’d have had to fall in, too. Which,” Jem added, “I did not. I’d have remembered. I’m not drunk. Egbert can testify to that.”

  “Put him on,” said Bittersohn.

  Egbert, to their mutual amazement, was able to vouch for his employer’s unprecedented sobriety.

  “It’s very worrisome, Mr. Max. I’ve never seen him like this before. Except sometimes on the morning after,” he qualified, for Egbert was a truthful man when circumstances didn’t require him to be otherwise. “I think he might be described as shaken to the core.”

  “To the core, eh? Okay, let me talk to him again.”

  Max Bittersohn was a professional tracker-down of valuables that been stolen, pawned by spouses faced with private financial emergencies, or otherwise detached from their rightful owners. Thanks to his expertise, he was able to extract from Jem a complete and perhaps even reasonably accurate account of what had happened. He offered words of cheer and comfort, then went back to his Sarah, who did not want to hear about her uncle’s missing Codfish, she being a recent bride with other things on her mind.

  In truth, Bittersohn himself gave little thought to Jeremy Kelling’s dilemma until the following evening when Egbert dropped by to break the tidings that Mr. Jem had fallen downstairs and broken his hip. Sarah was horrified. Max was intrigued.

  “Fell downstairs? How the hell did he manage that? Jem hates stairs.”

  “The elevator appears to have been stuck on the top floor, Mr. Max.”

  That was credible enough. The building where Jem and Egbert lived had an antique elevator about the size of a telephone booth, that wouldn’t work unless it had been tightly latched by the last person who got out of it, which frequently didn’t happen.

  Jem’s usual procedure in such cases was to bellow up the elevator shaft until somebody was goaded into going out and shutting the door properly. In desperate circumstances, however, such as when it was Egbert’s day off and he’d run out of gin, Jem had been known to walk down the one flight of stairs from his second-floor apartment. This had been one of those times. Now he was over at Phillips House with a brand-new stainless steel ball where the hip end of his left femur used to be. Egbert thought Mrs. Sarah and Mr. Max would want to know.

  “Of course we do,” cried Sarah. “How ghastly! Bad enough for Uncle Jem, of course, but think of those poor nurses. What happened, do you know?”

  “All I know is, I got home about five o’clock and found him sprawled on the floor of the vestibule, yowling his head off. He said Fuzzly’s had called to say his whiskers were ready and they’d be closing soon, so he’d rushed out, found the elevator stuck, and gone cavorting down the stairs. There was no darn need of it, you know. I could perfectly well have gone and got them tomorrow morning but you know Mr. Jem. He wanted those whiskers.”

  “What for?” asked Max.

  “The Tooters’ railroad party,” Sarah told him. “Uncle Jem was going to dress up in Dundreary whiskers and Grandfather Kelling’s old frock coat, and impersonate Jay Gould.”

  “Did Jay Gould have Dundrearies?”

  “Who knows? Anyway, Uncle Jem was all in a dither about the party. He’s an old railroad buff like Tom Tooter.”

  “Do you mean model trains?”

  “No, that’s Tom’s brother Wouter. Tom collects real trains. He has his own steam locomotive and a parlor car with velvet-covered settees and fringed lampshades. Also a dining car and a caboose.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  Sarah shrugged. “I suppose he got them cheap. The Tooters have alwa
ys been in railroads. Anyway, Tom and his wife are having an anniversary and Tom’s rented the B&M tracks for the evening. They’re going to have a string ensemble playing Strauss waltzes and a fountain spouting champagne.”

  “My God,” said Bittersohn. “Jem will have apoplexy at missing a bash like that.”

  “He was in a highly aggravated state of profanity when I left him,” Egbert agreed. “They were about to administer a sedative.”

  “I don’t wonder.” Sarah poured Egbert a tot of their best brandy, for he was an old and beloved friend. “Here, have one yourself, then Max will walk you home. Go to bed early, you’re going to need your rest.”

  “Truer words were never spoken, Mrs. Sarah.”

  “At least a broken hip ought to take his mind off that silly Codfish for a while. He’s been phoning every hour on the hour to see whether Max has found it yet.”

  “As a matter of fact, his parting bellow was that I—er—call the matter to Mr. Max’s attention.”

  Max grinned. “In precisely those words?”

  “Not precisely, Mr. Max.”

  “Tell him I’m hot on the trail. More brandy?”

  “Thanks, but I ought to be getting along.”

  “Come on, then.”

  The two men set out to walk the short distance from Tulip Street to Pinckney. “Who else is going to the party?” Max asked. “The whole Codfish crowd?”

  “No, I believe Mr. Jem was the only Comrade invited, except for the Tooters themselves, of course, and Mr. Wripp, who’s recently had a cataract operation. Mrs. Tooter felt the outing would do Mr. Wripp good.”

  “No doubt,” said Bittersohn. “What office does Mr. Wripp hold?”

  “Mr. Wripp is a Formerly Grand Exalted Chowderhead. Being by now ninety-two years of age, he appears content to rest on past laurels. Oh yes, and Mr. Obed Ogham will be among those present. So maybe it’s all for the best that Mr. Jem won’t.”

  “Why? Don’t he and Ogham get along?”

  “None of the Kellings get along with Obed Ogham, Mr. Max. He’s the bird who sued Mr. Percy Kelling for two dollars and forty-seven cents he claimed Mr. Percy overcharged him. That was after Mr. Percy’s accounting firm had helped Ogham recover the five and a half million dollars Ogham’s comptroller had been swindling him out of.”

  “Oh yes, the King of the Crumbs. How come he and Jem both belong to the same club?”

  “There have always been Kellings and Oghams among the Codfish,” Egbert explained. “Neither is willing to cede his ancestral right. Noblesse oblige, as you might say.”

  “But don’t the Tooters know Jem and Ogham are feuding?”

  “They’re not exactly feuding, Mr. Max. I believe it’s more a matter of maintaining a haughty silence in each other’s presence.”

  Max found his mind boggling at the notion of Jem’s maintaining a haughty silence in anybody’s presence, but he was kind enough not to say so.

  “Besides,” Egbert went on, “Mr. Ogham and Mr. Wouter Tooter are this year’s Highmost and Least-most Hod-carriers respectively. It’s not the done thing for one Hod-carrier to exclude a Comrade of the Hod from any of his routs and junkets, personal feelings notwithstanding. Comrade White, the Midmost Hod-carrier, would normally have been included, too, but he’s just left for Nairobi on a business trip. Mr. Jem was to have escorted Mrs. White.”

  “Mrs. White’s a good-looking, well-dressed woman somewhat on the buxom side and fond of a good time in a nonthreatening sort of way, right?”

  “You know the lady, Mr. Max?”

  “No, but I know Jem. And the rest, I suppose would be friends of the Tooters?”

  “I expect they’ll be mostly railroad buffs and members of Mr. Wouter Tooter’s model railroad club. It won’t be a large party, since the parlor car can’t accommodate more than thirty or forty people comfortably.”

  “That sounds like a lot of money to spend on a relatively small affair, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Between you and me, Mr. Max. I think it’s partly what they call public relations. Somebody’s been spreading a rumor that the Tooter enterprises are in financial difficulties. I shouldn’t be surprised if making a splash now is their way of squashing the rumor before their stock starts to drop.”

  “Very interesting. Well, here’s the old homestead. Mind if I come up with you?”

  “Thanks, Mr. Max, but you mustn’t feel obliged.”

  “I want to see where it happened.”

  “Just a second till I find my key. Ah, here we are. There’s the staircase, you see, and Mr. Jem was on the floor at the foot.”

  “Marble floor, I see. Damn good thing he didn’t go down head first. Who uses the stairs as a rule?”

  “Nobody, unless the elevator gets stuck. I used to, but I have to say I find them more of a climb than I like nowadays.”

  “Did Jem say how he happened to use them today?”

  “He said there was a power outage just as he received the phone call from the shop. The lights were out and the radio went off. That meant the elevator wouldn’t be working either, of course. A very unfortunate coincidence. My mother always claimed bad luck came in threes. First the Codfish, and now this. What next, is what I’m wondering. Do you think we can count Mr. Jem’s having to miss the party as the third piece of bad luck, Mr. Max?”

  “I’m not sure we should count any of it as just luck. What happened to the clothes he was wearing when he fell?”

  “I brought them home from the hospital and dropped them off before going on to your place.”

  “Good. Let’s have a look.”

  The tiny elevator was sitting in the lobby, its folding brass gates meticulously fastened. Word of Jem’s accident must have got around. Max and Egbert squeezed in together and rode to the second floor. Egbert fetched the clothes and Max pulled out a magnifying glass.

  “Aha! See that, Egbert?”

  “A grease spot on his pantleg? Mr. Max, you don’t think I’d have let Mr. Jem go around looking like that? He must have done it when he fell.”

  “My thought exactly. There’s grease on his shoe sole, too. Got a good flashlight?”

  “Oh yes, I always keep one handy.”

  “Come on then, let’s see which stair got buttered.”

  It was Egbert who first noticed the brownish glob under the fifth tread from the landing. “Would this be what you’re looking for, Mr. Max?”

  Bittersohn rubbed a little on his finger and sniffed. “It sure as hell would. Bowling alley wax, I’d say. It’s been cleaned off the step with some kind of solvent, but whoever did it forgot to wipe underneath, probably because he was in a hurry to get away. I’ll bet he was hiding in the cellar while they were lugging Jem off. Let’s go call on the neighbors.”

  The first-floor people were away. On the third floor lived an elderly lady, her cook and her maid. The lady was out playing bridge with her maid in attendance because Herself didn’t like going out alone at night, the cook explained. “Can I give you a cup of tea in the kitchen, now?”

  Then two men were happy to accept. “I see your electric clock’s right on the dot,” Max remarked as they sat down.

  “Has to be,” said the cook. “Herself likes her meals prompt to the second.”

  “You haven’t had to reset it lately?”

  “No, I haven’t touched it in ages, except to dust it now and then when the spirit moves me.”

  Cook was plainly glad of company and ready to talk, but she didn’t have much to tell. The first-floor people were in Palm Beach, and had been for the past two months. Her own household hadn’t known about Jeremy Kelling’s fall until they heard him being taken away in the ambulance. Herself considered him to have been struck down by a Mighty Hand in retribution for his ungodly and riotous ways. Cook personally thought Mr. Kelling was a lovely man, always so kind-spoken when they happened to meet, which wasn’t often because Herself was of the old school and believed in servants using the back stairway. This very night, Mary the maid had been r
equired to go down the back way, around the alley, and walk back up to the front door while Herself used the elevator in lone elegance. Mary might get to ride up after Herself when they got back, it being so late and good maids hard to come by.

  “That’s nice,” said Max. “Thanks for the pleasure of your company. The cake was delicious.”

  “Would you be wanting a piece to take to Mr. Kelling, now?”

  Egbert expressed the opinion that Mr. Jem would prefer a cake that had a bottle of Old Grandad baked into it, and they parted on a merry note.

  Going back to Jem’s flat, Max asked, “Egbert, would you have a recent picture of that Codfish crowd?”

  “Scads of them, Mr. Max. Mr. Jem keeps an album of all the doings since he joined the club.”

  “Great. Where is it?”

  New Englanders love to look at photograph albums, for some reason. They spent quite a while over this one. Jem had each photograph neatly labeled. He himself appeared in most of them wearing various appurtenances of office. The latest showed the Great Chain of the Convivial Codfish adorning his well-padded front.

  “I’ll take this,” said Max.

  Egbert was alarmed. “Mr. Max, if anything should happen to that album, Mr. Jem would have a stroke.”

  “I’ll guard it with my life. Where’s his invitation to that ungodly revel he was supposed to go on?”

  “It’s a ticket. Mr. Tooter had them printed up special. Can’t ride the train without a ticket, you know.” Egbert produced the precious oblong. “Is it a clue, do you think?”

  “Who knows? Anyway, Jem won’t be needing it now. Sleep tight, Egbert. Sarah will be over to the hospital at crack of dawn, I expect, so take your time in the morning.

  Max took his leave, pondering deeply. The next day, leaving Sarah to comfort the afflicted, he first collected Jem’s whiskers from Fuzzly’s, dropped in on some pals at the Fraud Squad, lunched with a prominent member of the Securities and Exchange Commission who owed him a favor, had a chat with his Uncle Jake the lawyer, paid a call on a fair and buxom matron who was mystified, gratified, and eager to cooperate; and finally went home to placate his wife.