The Greek Coffin Mystery

Chapter 1. Tomb

From the very beginning the Khalkis case struck a sombre note. It began, as was peculiarly harmonious in the light of what was to come, with the death of an old man. The death of this old man wove its way, like a contrapuntal melody, through all the intricate measures of the death march that followed, in which the mournful strain of innocent mortality was conspicuously absent. In the end it swelled into a crescendo of orchestral guilt, a macabre dirge whose echoes rang in the ears of New York long after the last evil note had died away.

It goes without saying that when Georg Khalkis died of heart failure no one, least of all Ellery Queen, suspected that this was the opening motif in a symphony of murder. Indeed, it is to be doubted that Ellery Queen even knew that Georg Khalkis had died until the fact was forcibly brought to his attention three days after the blind old man’s clay had been consigned, in a most proper manner, to what every one had reason to believe was its last resting-place.

What the newspapers failed to make capital of in the first announcement of Khalkis’s death―an obituary tribute which Ellery, a violent non-reader of the public prints, did not catch―was the interesting location of the man’s grave. It gave a curious sidelight on old New Yorkana. Khalkis’s drooping brownstone at 11 East Fifty-fourth Street was situated next to the tradition-mellowed church which fronts Fifth Avenue and consumes half the area of the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues, flanked on the north by Fifty-fifth Street and on the south by Fifty-fourth Street. Between the Khalkis house and the church itself was the church graveyard, one of the oldest private cemeteries in the city. It was in this graveyard that the bones of the dead man were to be interred. The Khalkis family, for almost two hundred years parishioners of this church, were not affected by that article of the Sanitary Code which forbids burial in the heart of the city. Their right to lie in the shadow of Fifth Avenue’s skyscrapers was established by their traditional ownership of one of the subterranean vaults in the church graveyard―vaults not visible to passers-by, since their adits were sunken three feet below the surface, leaving the sod of the graveyard unmarred by tombstones.

The funeral was quiet, tearless and private. The dead man, embalmed and rigged out in evening clothes, was laid in a large black lustrous coffin, resting on a bier in the drawing-room on the first floor of the Khalkis house. Services were conducted by the Reverend John Henry Elder, pastor of the adjoining church―that Reverend Elder, it should be noted, whose sermons and practical diatribes were given respectful space in the metropolitan press. There was no excitement, and except for a characteristic swooning entered upon with vigour by Mrs. Simms, the dead man’s housekeeper, no hysteria.

Yet, as Joan Brett later remarked, there was something wrong. Something that may be attributed, we may suspect, to that superior quality of feminine intuition which, medical men are prone to say, is sheer nonsense. Nevertheless she described it, in her straight-browed and whimsical English fashion, as “a tightness in the air”. Who caused the tightness, what individual or individuals were responsible for the tension―if indeed it existed―she could not or would not say. Everything, on the contrary, seemed to go off smoothly and with just the proper touch of intimate, unexploited grief. When the simple services were concluded, for example, the members of the family and the scattering of friends and employees present filed past the coffin, took their last farewell of the dead clay, and returned decorously to their places. Faded Delphina wept, but she wept in the aristocratic manner―a tear, a dab, a sigh. Demetrios, whom no one would dream of addressing by any other name than Demmy, stared his vacant idiot’s stare and seemed fascinated by his cousin’s cold placid face in the coffin. Gilbert Sloane patted his wife’s pudgy hand. Alan Cheney, his face a little flushed, had jammed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and was scowling at empty air. Nacio Suiza, director of the Khalkis art gallery, correct to the last detail of funereal attire, stood very languidly in a corner. Woodruff, the dead man’s attorney, honked his nose. It was all very natural and innocuous. Then the undertaker, a worried-looking, bankerish sort of man by the name of Sturgess, manipulated his puppets and the coffin-lid was quickly fastened down. Nothing remained but the sordid business of organizing the last procession. Alan, Demmy, Sloane, and Suiza took their places by the bier, and after the customary confusion had subsided, hoisted the coffin to their shoulders, passed the critical scrutiny of Undertaker Sturgess, the Reverend Elder murmured a prayer, and the cortege walked firmly out of the house.

Now Joan Brett, as Ellery Queen was later to appreciate, was a very canny young lady. If she had felt a ‘tightness in the air”, a tightness in the air there was. But where―from what direction? It was so difficult to pin it to―someone. It might have proceeded from bearded Dr. Wardes, who with Mrs. Vreeland made up the rear of the procession. It might have proceeded from the pallbearers, or from those who came directly after, with Joan. It might, in point of fact, have proceeded from the house itself, arising from just such a simple matter as Mrs. Simms wailing in her bed, or Weekes the butler rubbing his jaw foolishly in the dead man’s study.

Certainly it does not seem to have thrust barriers in the way of expedition. The cortege made its way, not through the front door to Fifty-fourth Street, but through the back door into the long garden-court serving as a little private lane for the six residences on Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Streets which enclosed it. They turned to the left and marched through the gate on the west side of the court, and they were in the graveyard. Passers-by and curiosity-seekers, attracted like flies to Fifty-fourth Street, probably felt cheated; which was precisely the reason that the private route to the graveyard had been selected. They clung to the spike-topped fence, peering into the little cemetery through the iron bars; there were reporters among them, and cameramen, and everyone was curiously silent. The actors in the tragedy paid no attention to their audience. As they wound across the bare sod, another little company faced them, surrounding a rectangular cavity in the grass and a mathematically upturned heap of earth. Two grave-diggers―Sturgess’s assistants―were there, and Honeywell, the church sexton; and by herself, a little old lady wearing a preposterously outmoded black bonnet and wiping her bright rheumy eyes.

The tightness, if we are to give credence to Joan Brett’s intuition, persisted.

Yet what followed was as innocent as what had gone before. The customary ritualistic preparations, a gravedig-ger leaning far forward and grasping the handle of a rusty old iron door embedded horizontally in the earth; a slight rush of dead air; the coffin gently lowered into the old brick-lined crypt beneath; a milling of workmen, some low hurried words, the shifting of the coffin slowly to one side out of sight, where it nudged its way into one of the many niches of the underground vault; the iron door clanging to, the earth and sod replaced above it . . .

And somehow, Joan Brett was positive when she later told of her impressions of that moment, somehow the tightness in the air vanished.