"You know why," he said.

Johnny stood dead still, as though listening, looking down at him. Finally he said, "You've tried to kill me. I ain't going to do nothing about that. You've called her a murderess. I ain't going to do nothing about that, either. I don't think you're crazy, so we can rule that out. All I want to ask you is why?"

Reverend Short's near-sighted eyes filled with a look of malignant evil.

"There's only two of you who would have done it," he said in a thin dry voice no louder than a whisper. "That's you and her. And if you didn't do it, then she did. And if you don't know why, then ask her. And if you think you're going to save her by killing me, then go ahead and do it."

"I ain't got much of a hand," Johnny said. "But I'll call it."

He turned and picked his way through the church benches toward the door. Light from the street lamps came in through the unpainted upper rim of the dingy front windows, showing him the way.

11.

It was eight o'clock, but still light.

"Let's go for a ride," Grave Digger said to Coffin Ed, "and look at some scenery. See the brown gals blooming in pink dresses, smell the perfume of poppies and marijuana."

"And listen to the stool pigeons sing," Coffin Ed supplied.

They were cruising south on Seventh Avenue in the small battered black sedan. Grave Digger eased the little car behind a big slow-moving trailer truck, and Coffin Ed kept his eyes skinned along the sidewalk.

A numbers writer standing in front of Madame Sweetiepie's hairdressing parlor, flashing a handful of paper slips with the day's winning numbers, looked up and saw Coffin Ed's baleful eyes pinned on him and began eating the paper slips as though they were taffy candy.

Hidden behind the big truck trailer, they sneaked up on a group of weedheads standing in front of the bar at the corner of 126th Street. Eight young hoodlums dressed in tight black pants, fancy straw hats with mixed-colored bands, pointed shoes and loud-colored sport shirts, wearing smoked gla.s.ses, and looking like an a.s.semblage of exotic gra.s.shoppers, had already finished one stick and were pa.s.sing around the second one when one of them exclaimed, "Split! Here comes King Kong and Frankenstein." The boy smoking the stick swallowed it so fast the fire burnt his gullet and he doubled over, strangling.

The one called Gigolo said, "Play it cool! Play it cool! Just clean, that's all."

They threw their switchblade knives onto the sidewalk in front of the bar. Another boy palmed the two remaining sticks and stuck them quickly in his mouth, ready to eat them if the detectives stopped.

Grave Digger smiled grimly.

"I could hit that punk in his belly and make him vomit up enough evidence to give him a year in the cooler," he said.

"We'll teach him that trick some other time," Coffin Ed said.

Two of the boys were beating the strangling boy on the back, the others began talking with big gestures as though discussing a scientific treatise on prost.i.tution. Gigolo stared at the detectives defiantly.

Gigolo was wearing a chocolate-colored straw hat with a wide yellow band polka-dotted with blue. When Coffin Ed fingered his right coat lapel with the first two fingers of his right hand, Gigolo pushed his straw hat back on his head and said, "Nuts to them mother-rapers, they ain't got nothing on us."

Grave Digger drove on slowly without stopping, and in the rear-view mirror he saw the punk take the wet marijuana sticks from his mouth and start blowing on them to dry them.

They kept on down to 119th Street, turned back to Eighth Avenue, went uptown again and parked before a dilapidated tenement house between 126th and 127th Streets. Old people were sitting on the sidewalk in kitchen chairs propped against the front of the building.

They climbed the dark steep stairs to the fourth floor. Grave Digger knocked on a door at the rear, three single raps s.p.a.ced exactly ten seconds apart.

For the s.p.a.ce of a full minute no sound was heard. There was no sound of locks being opened, but slowly the door swung inward five inches, held by two iron cables at top and bottom.

"It's us, Ma," Grave Digger said.

The ends of the cables were removed from the slots and the door opened all the way.

A thin old gray-haired woman with a wrinkled black face, who looked to be about ninety years old, wearing a floor length Mother Hubbard dress of faded black cotton, stood to one side and let them pa.s.s into the pitchdark hallway and closed the door behind them.

They followed her without further comment down to the far end of the hall. She opened a door and sudden light spilled out, showing a snuff stick in the corner of her wrinided mouth.

"There he," she said, and Coffin Ed followed Grave Digger into a small back bedroom and closed the door behind him.

Gigolo sat on the edge of the bed with his fancy hat pushed to the back of his head, biting his dirty nails to the quick. The pupils of his eyes were big black disks in his tight, sweaty brown face.

Coffin Ed sat facing him, straddling the single straightbacked wooden chair, and Grave Digger stood glaring down at him and said, "You've had a bang of heroin."

Gigolo shrugged. His skinny shoulders jerked beneath the canary-colored sport shirt.

"Don't get him excited," Coffin Ed warned, and then asked Gigolo in a confidential tone of voice, "Who made the sting last night, sport?"

Gigolo's body began jerking as though someone had slipped a hot poker down the seat of his pants.

"Poor Boy got new money," he said in a rapid blurred voice.

"Who kind of money?" Grave Digger asked.

"Hard money."

"No green money?"

"If he is, he ain't showed it."

"Where's he likely to be at this time?"

"Acey-Deucey's poolroom. He's a pooi freak."

Grave Digger asked Coffin Ed, "Do you know him?"

"This town is full of Poor Boys," Coffin Ed said, turning back to the stool pigeon. "What's he look like?"

"Slim black boy. Plays it cool. Working stiff jive. Don't never flash. Looks a little like Country Boy used to look 'fore they sent him to the pen."

"How does he dress?" Grave Digger asked.

"Like I just said. Wears old blue jeans, T-shirt, canvas sneakers, always looks raggedy as a bowl of yakamein."

"Has he got a partner?"

"Iron Jaw. You know Iron Jaw."

Grave Digger nodded.

"But he don't seem to be in on this sting. He ain't showed outside today," Gigolo added.

"Okay, sport," Coffin Ed said, standing up. "Lay off the heroin."

Gigolo's body began to jerk more violently. "What's a man going to do? You folks keeps me scared. If anybody finds out I'm stooling for you I be scared to shake my head." He was referring to a story they tell in Harlem about two jokers, in a razor fight and one says, Man, you ain't cut me, and the other one says, if you don't believe I done cut you, just shake you head and it goin' to fall off.

"The heroin isn't going to keep your head on any better," Coffin Ed warned.

On the way out, he said to the old lady who'd let them in, "Cut down on Gigolo, Ma, he's getting so hopped he's going to blow his top one day."

"Lawd, I ain't no doctor," she complained. "I don't know how much they needs. I just sells it if they got the money to pay for it.. You know, I don't use that junk myself."

"Well, cut down anyway," Grave Digger said harshly. "We're just letting you run because you keep our stool pigeons supplied."

"If it wasn't for these stool pigeons you'd be out of business," she argued. "The cops ain't goin' to never find out nothing if don't n.o.body tell 'em."

"Just put a little baking soda in that heroin, and don't give it to them straight," Grave Digger said. "We don't want these boys blind. And let us out this hole, we're in a hurry."

She shuffled down the black dark hail with hurt feelings and opened the three heavy locks on the front door without a sound.

"That old crone is getting on my nerves," Grave Digger said as they climbed into their car.

"What you need is a vacation," Coffin Ed said. "Or else a laxative."

Grave Digger chuckled.

They drove over to 137th Street and Lenox Avenue, on the other side from the Savoy Ballroom, climbed a narrow ifight of stairs beside the Boll Weevil Bar to the AceyDeucey poolroom on the second floor.

A small s.p.a.ce at the front was closed off by a wooden Counter for an office. A fat, bald-headed brown-skinned man, wearing a green eyeshade, a collarless silk shirt and a black vest adorned with a pennyweight gold chain, sat on a high stool behind the cash register on the counter and looked over the six pool tables arranged crosswise down the long, narrow room.

When Grave Digger and Coffin Ed appeared at the top of the stairs, he greeted in a low ba.s.s voice usually a.s.sociated with undertakers. "Howdy do, gentlemen, how is the police business this fine summer day?"

"Booming, Acey," Coffin Ed said, his eyes roving over the lighted tables. "More folks getting robbed, slugged and stabbed to death in this hot weather than usual."

"It's the season of short tempers," Acey said.

"You ain't lying, son," Grave Digger said. "How's Deucey?'

"Resting as usual," Acey said. "Far as I heard."

Deucey was the man he had bought the business from, and he had been dead for twenty-one years.

Grave Digger had already spotted their man down at the fourth table and led the way down the cramped aisle. He took a seat at one end of the table and Coffin Ed took a seat at the other.

Poor Boy was playing a slick half-white pool shark straight pool, twenty-no-count, for fifty cents a point, and was already down forty dollars.

The b.a.l.l.s had been racked for the start of a new game. It was Poor Boy's break and he was chalking his cue stick. He looked slantwise from one detective to the other and chalked his stick for so long the shark said testily, "Go head and break, man, you got enough chalk on that mother-raping stick to make a fifteen-cushion billiard shot."

Poor Boy put his cue ball on the marker, worked his stick back and forth through the circle of his left index finger and scratched. He didn't tear the velvet, but he made a long white stripe. His cue ball trickled down the table and tapped the racked b.a.l.l.s so lightly as to barely loosen them.

"That boy looks nervous," Coffin Ed said.

"He ain't been sleeping well," Grave Digger replied.

"I ain't nervous," the shark said.

He broke the b.a.l.l.s and three dropped into pockets. Then he settled down and ran a hundred without stopping, going from the break seven times, and when he reached up with his cue stick and flipped the century marker against the other ninety-nine on the line overhead, all the other games had stopped and jokers were standing on the table edges to get a look.

"You ain't nervous yet," Coffin Ed corrected.

The shark looked at Coffin Ed defiantly and crowed, "I told you I wasn't nervous."

When the rack man put the paper sack holding the stakes on the table, Coffin Ed got down from his seat and picked it up.

"That's mine," the shark said.

Grave Digger moved in behind, putting both the shark and Poor Boy between himself and Coffin Ed.

"Don't start getting nervous now, son," he said. "We just want to look at your money."

"It ain't nothing but plain United States money," the shark argued. "Ain't you wise guys never seen no money?"

Coffin Ed upended the bag and dumped the contents onto the table. Dimes, quarters and half dollars spilled over the green velvet, along with a roll of greenbacks.

"You ain't been in Harlem long, son," he said to the shark. "He ain't goin' to be here long either," Grave Digger said, reaching out to flip the roll of greenbacks apart from the silver money. "There's your roll, son," he said. "Take it and find yourself another town. You're too smart for us country clicks in Harlem." When the shark opened his mouth to protest, he added roughly, "And don't say another G.o.d-d.a.m.ned word or I'll knock out your teeth."

The shark pocketed his roll and melted into the crowd. Poor Boy hadn't said a word.

Coffin Ed scooped up the change and put it back into the paper sack. Grave Digger touched the slim black boy on his T-shirted shoulder.

"Let's go, Poor Boy, we're going to take a ride."

Coffin Ed made an opening through the crowd. Silence followed them.

They put Poor Boy between them in the car and drove around the corner and parked.

"What would you rather have?" Grave Digger asked him. "A year in the Auburn state pen or thirty days in the city jail?"

Poor Boy looked at him slantwise through his long muddy eyes. "What you mean?" he asked in a husky Georgia voice.

"I mean you robbed that A and P store manager this morning."

"Naw sub, I ain't even seen no A and P store this morning. I made that money shining shoes down at the 125th Street Station."