Then from the room came the low grating sound of Coffin Ed's voice, saying, "Drop it," sounding as dangerous as a rattlesnake's rattle.
Grave Digger leaped over the big man's body, knocking the woman to her knees, and went into the room with his pistol ready.
The room was a bedroom, with twin beds covered with green chenille spreads. Beyond the second bed Slick stood motionless, looking straight ahead. He wore a pink flannel smoking jacket with a blue velvet collar, and in the soft light from the single bed table lamp his thin, ascetic face was expressionless. The blued steel. 38 caliber automatic lay on the bedspread in front of him.
Coffin Ed stood just inside the hall door with its shattered lock. His. 38 caliber revolver hung motionless at his side. From the muzzle of its long nickel-plated barrel came a lingering wisp of smoke, adding to the tingling smell of cordite in the room.
Grave Digger lowered his pistol and let out his breath.
"All right, bring him in here," he said, turning to re-enter the sitting room.
The woman was on her hands and knees, rocking from side to side.
Dummy lay on his belly with his arms spread out and his face turned to one side. The handle of the knife Susie had been sharpening on his boot earlier in the day protruded from the center of his back, between the shoulder blades. He was breathing in soft shallow gasps, and shaking his head almost imperceptibly. His brown eyes peered from beneath the lumps of scar tissue with the pleading look of a sick dog.
"Don't worry, I won't pull out the knife," Grave Digger assured him, and gave his attention to the other man.
Susie had two bullet holes in the back of his heavy tweed coat, from one of which the heavy pumping of blood was beginning to ebb. He had the absolutely motionless, relaxed, gone-for-good look of the brand-new dead.
"Straight through the ticker," Grave Digger muttered.
He stood aside as Coffin Ed ushered Slick into the room.
Without looking at the body, Slick stepped over it. He stepped past the woman without looking at her either, and stood with his hands raised shoulder high. He didn't move while Coffin Ed frisked him.
"He killed my cat," the woman said suddenly, and began to cry hysterically.
"Jesus Christ!" Grave Digger said.
Holstering his gun, he put his hands beneath the woman's arms and lifted her gently to her feet.
"You cat is all right," he said. "The man called Dummy was stabbed, and your husband shot his partner in the back."
She seemed reassured. He helped her to the chaise longue and laid her down. Then he turned and looked at Slick.
"Now I know why they call you Slick," he said.
Slick didn't answer.
Grave Digger found a telephone on a table near the door. He telephoned Harlem Hospital for an ambulance and then contacted Lieutenant Anderson at the Precinct Station.
"Hold everything," Anderson ordered. "Sergeant Frick from the Homicide Bureau is on his way up there now."
"Right," Grave Digger said.
"I don't know anything about these people," Slick said. "They've been trying to proposition me into helping them rob some woman, but I nixed them off. They came here tonight to try again. When you people came, each one accused the other of stooling. I had to shoot the big guy, Susie, to keep him from killing the little dummy."
The detectives stared at him. Neither bothered to answer.
After a moment Slick added sardonically, "I got a soft heart."
Grave Digger slapped him with the open palm of his right hand with such force that he spun three feet, straight into Coffin Ed's short right to his belly. They beat him until the doorbell rang, one slapping and the other punching-not hard enough to bruise, just hard enough to hurt.
The room was beginning to empty. For a time it had been crowded.
The ambulance had come and taken Dummy.
An assistant Medical Examiner had arrived and examined the body. He had written on the tag that was later tied to the right big toe:
NAME: Susie Green
AGE: apprx. 26
NATIONALITY: colored
ADDRESS: unknown
DIED: murdered by two gunshot wounds penetrating the back of the thorax, one penetrating the heart
The body had begun its lonely journey to the morgue.
Sergeant Frick had arrived with two assistant detectives. They remained.
A table bad been dragged to the center of the floor, and Sergeant Frick sat behind it. One of the detectives sat beside him with a pad and stylo to take down the preliminary statements.
"I'll talk to the woman first and get her out of the way," Frick said.
"I had better tell you, she's blind," Grave Digger said.
The woman pulled her knees beneath her and hunched forward on the chaise longue.
"I'm blind, but I can hear," she said.
The five policemen stared at her with varying emotions.
Slick, sprawled in an armchair against the inner wall, said menacingly, "Just keep your mouth shut, bitch."
His face was swollen, as though he had run into a nest of hornets, and his discolored eyes were almost shut.
Coffin Ed reached over and slapped him across the mouth. Slick didn't move.
"No more of that," Sergeant Frick said sharply.
Grave Digger leaned against the wall, looking into the distance.
"I want to make a statement," the woman said in a tired, dead voice. "Slick killed the Jew."
Grave Digger pushed from the wall, and his body tensed. The other four policemen froze.
Slick sat forward in his chair. "Bitch, if you try to frame me, I'll kill you, if it takes all my life to do it," he threatened in a deadly voice.
"Take him out," Frick said.
Grave Digger reached down, clamped Slick back of the neck and yanked him to his feet Coffin Ed took him by the arm.
"Let Haines take him-I want you two here," Frick said.
The second white detective from the Homicide Bureau handcuffed Slick's hands behind him and marched him down the hall toward the kitchen.
"Go on," Frick told the woman.
"Slick knew that a woman named Alberta Wright hit the numbers for thirty-six thousand dollars," the woman said.
The detective scratched rapidly on his pad.
"He propositioned Susie to rob her on a half-and-half basis," she went on. "He told Susie where she lived and gave him the setup. Susie went down to rob her, but he didn't get a chance. Her man was hanging around outside her window all night. But Susie got a chance to see her hide the money in her mattress before he was chased away. When he got back on Sunday and looked through the window, he saw Rufus there. He went down the street to wait for Rufus to leave, but the Jew came with his moving van and started taking away all of her furniture. So he stole the mattress from the van. But the money wasn't in the mattress.
"He came here Sunday afternoon and told Slick what had happened. Slick thought that either Rufus or the Jew had found the money; he didn't know which. He and Susie left the house and were gone for about an hour. I heard them talking when they came back. They had found out where Rufus lived, but they weren't sure he had found the money, and they didn't know where the Jew had taken the furniture. Slick decided he'd watch Rufus. He told Susie to wait here for a telephone call in case he would need him. He telephoned here Sunday night, sometime between ten-thirty and eleven o'clock. When I heard the phone ring I went to the kitchen and listened in on the extension.
"Slick told Susie that the Jew had searched the furniture and had found the money. He said he had followed Rufus to the Jew's place in the Bronx and had seen the Jew find the money. He said he had trapped the Jew and killed him; he didn't say how he had done it; but he said the Jew had given the money to Rufus and that Rufus had got away. Susie asked him how he had let Rufus get away, and he said Rufus had stabbed him in the shoulder. He told Susie to go to Rufus's place on Manhattan Avenue and get the money from him before he could get into his house and hide it.
<
br /> "When Slick came home he gave me the clothes he was wearing and told me to get rid of them. Then he went into the bathroom, and bandaged his shoulder and had me fix him three pipes of opium. Before he went to sleep, he told me to wake him up when Susie called. Susie didn't call at all that night, and it was morning when Slick woke up. He thought that Susie had doublecrossed him. He had dressed and had started out to look for Susie when Susie came here. Susie told him he had got the money from Rufus, but it was only Confederate money. Slick didn't believe him.
"Susie had some plan of using the money for a confidence game to beat Sweet Prophet, and Slick agreed. They went out together and came back a couple of hours later with the money they had made. But Slick wasn't satisfied; he still thought Susie was trying to trick him. They left again when Slick went to work-he was a payoff man for the Tia Juana house-and when they came back they brought Dummy. There was a fight, and Slick drew his pistol on Dummy.
"Later on Slick called up a bail-bondsman and had him go Alberta Wright's bail. When the bondsman phoned around eight o'clock to say that Alberta Wright was out, they left the house. They got back a few minutes before the policemen arrived.
She stopped talking suddenly and waited for someone else to speak.
Frick looked from Grave Digger to Coffin Ed.
"Do you believe it?" he asked them.
The detectives exchanged looks.
"I believe it," Grave Digger said. "It figures all around."
"It's just her word," Frick said. "She hasn't offered any substantiating evidence."
"You'll find the clothes he was wearing in my overnight case in the bedroom clothes closet," she said. "There's a pocketbook in one of the pockets that might mean something. And you ought to be able to find some kind of evidence in his car-maybe he stepped in some blood or something."
"Get the bag," Frick said, but Coffin Ed had already moved.
It contained the suit, with the blood splotch around a small cut on the left shoulder, just as she had said. In the inside coat pocket was an old worn billfold with half a dozen cellophane card holders containing licenses and identifications made out to Abraham Finkelstein.
"This might do it," Frick said. "But, as his wife, she won't be allowed to testify against him, and we will need her statement to make it stick."
"I'm not his wife," she said in that tired, dead voice. "I'm just a woman he blinded, beating me with his fists."
During the embarrassed silence that followed, no one looked at anybody else.
"Did you believe her?" Coffin Ed asked as they drove leisurely down Seventh Avenue, returning to the station to write up their report.
"Hell, no," Grave Digger said with an almost inaudible chuckle.
"It's more likely that Rufus killed the Jew."
"Sure it was Rufus."
"And it was Susie who attacked Rufus, trying to get the money," Coffin Ed surmised.
"That's the way I have it figured too," Grave Digger agreed. "Susie had Slick's car and followed Rufus to the Bronx then beat him back home and killed him."
"But she'll make it stick," Coffin Ed said.
"Yeah, she'll pay him off," Grave Digger confirmed.
Dummy never reported the tan jumper with the bloodstained shoulder he had found in Susie's hotel room, and the police never discovered it. It stayed like the woman said.
24
For six days Alberta lay in bed in a ward with nine other women. Her head was swathed in bandages; her flat, pretty, brown-skinned face was sullen.
Police came to see her; friends came to see her; Sugar Stonewall came to see her; Dummy came in a wheel chair from another ward to see her. She did not speak a single word to anyone. She lay there with her mouth shut tight and wouldn't even say hello.
During that time sympathetic attendants washed her uniform and cleaned her once-white shoes.
On the seventh day, another Monday, she ate her breakfast in dead silence, as usual.
Then the nurse brought her clothes and gave her permission to get up and walk about the ward.
She got dressed in her clean white uniform and wrapped her pink-checked hand towel about the bandages on her head. She walked up and down the ward two or three times, then went out into the corridor. No one stopped her; no one seemed to notice her.
As though by instinct, she went downstairs to the kitchen. It was a big kitchen with a lot of people working in it, all of them clad in white uniforms. The head cook thought she was a new helper and put her to work peeling potatoes.
She got a long sharp paring knife and sat down on a wooden stool before a five-gallon can of spuds and went to work. By ten-thirty o'clock she had finished with that can. She quit, stuck the paring knife into the pocket of her uniform, got up and walked out
Instinctively, she found the service exit. The guard on duty gave her scarcely a glance as she passed on her way out of the building; to him she looked like any number of hospital workers.
It was not far down Lenox Avenue to 116th Street. No one on the street paid her the slightest attention.
She turned over on 116th Street to the Temple of Wonderful Prayer and went upstairs to Sweet Prophet's reception room.
Elder Jones congratulated her on being well again, and told her to wait and he would see if Sweet Prophet could give her an audience.
Sweet Prophet sat behind his desk, clad in the same shining garments he had worn the previous Monday, when she had last seen him. Evidently it was his Monday outfit.
When Elder Jones informed him that Alberta Wright wished to see him, he exclaimed, "That woman again! My God, she's got more lives than a cat!"
But he was prevailed upon to give her an audience.
He looked more than ever like the rising sun as she came into the room. She walked toward his desk with her hands in her pockets. The secretary, standing behind the Prophet, looked at her compassionately.
Sweet Prophet was searching in his pocket for the crumb he expected her to buy. He looked up with a patient expression and said, "My child, what's troubling you this time?"
She leaned one hand on the desk, whipped the paring knife out of her pocket with the other hand and plunged it into the left side of his chest with such force that only the handle protruded.
He gasped and dropped forward over the desk like a stone.
Twenty minutes later, it was announced to the people crowded in the street that word had come from Harlem Hospital that he would live.
The blade had penetrated the left pleura, but had missed the aorta by a hair's breadth.
By that time Alberta was in the booking room of the Harlem Precinct Station, surrounded by bug-eyed cops.
Finally Sergeant Ratigan, the day man from the Homicide Bureau, who had been on the case from the beginning, arrived. He had brought along his own stenographer, and he took over the precinct captain's office for the interrogation. The captain sat in, as did several precinct detectives.
Alberta sat in a straight-backed chair, looking composed and resigned as she faced the battery of officers behind the desk.
"Why did you do it, Alberta?" Ratigan asked in what he mistakenly thought was a kindly tone of voice.
"He stole my money," Alberta replied in the whining Southern voice she employed when talking to white people.
Ratigan's eyes popped in amazement, but he controlled his voice.
"How did he steal your money?" he asked, as though reasoning with a child.
"I gave it to him," she said.
"Oh," Ratigan said. "But that doesn't mean he stole it."
"Nawsuh, but he didn't give it back."
"All right, let's get this straight," Ratigan said. "You gave him the money, and he didn't give it back. Did you ask him for it?"
"Nawsuh. I forgot I gave it to him."
Slowly, and at first unnoticeably, she began to cry.
"All right," Ratigan said. "Don't get upset. Take your time and tell me just what happened."
She swallowed. "I went to him Sunday morning to pay
for to get baptized," she said, "and I told him I needed to get religion because I had won all that money on the numbers."
"It was thirty-six thousand, wasn't it?" Ratigan asked.
"Yassuh, but I didn't have but twenty-nine thousand, four hundred left," she said.
"Yes, go on," Ratigan prompted.
Everyone in the room was staring at her unblinkingly, their mouths half open as though their breathing were suspended.
"He told me to look him straight in the eye," she said. "I kept looking him in the eyes until my head seemed to get empty of everything but just his eyes. Then he said, 'You will do exactly as I say.' And I said, 'Yes Sweet Prophet.' He said, 'Go back to your house and get all of the money from where it is hidden and bring it to me.' I said, 'Yes Sweet Prophet.'
"And I went and got the money and brought it beck and gave it to him. He took it and put it away, and then he looked me in the eye again and said, 'You will forget everything you have done since you came into this room.' And I said, 'Yes Sweet Prophet.'
"And the next thing I knew I was sitting there talking to him about getting baptized, and I had forgotten everything else. I had no idea where my money had gone until I came to in the hospital after I had got knocked on the head. Then I remembered everything. He knowed I was looking for my money, and he wouldn't give it back."
She started crying out loud. Her big-boned body was racked by uncontrollable paroxysms.
The hard-boiled cops stared at her in awe.
"He thought I didn't know anything about hypnotism," she wailed. "He thought I was just a big simple fool. He didn't have to go and hypnotize me and take my money and then try to keep it," she blubbered. "I would have given it all to him if he had just come right out and asked for it."
Ratigan stared at her in speechless amazement "You mean you would have given that charlatan all of that huge sum of money that you won if he had asked for it? Good God, woman, why?"
"Because I believed in him," she said, crying almost hysterically now. "That's why. If you is a black woman like me, you got to believe in something."
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