"That's none of your business," she said.

He suspected a trap, but the thought of getting ten thousand dollars filled him with a reckless greed. He had to hold himself in. He felt as though he were going to explode with exultation. All his life he'd wanted to be a big shot, and now was his chance if he played his cards right.

"Okay," he said. "I don't give a d.a.m.n how you got it, whether you stole it or cut his throat for it, just so long as you've got it."

"I've got it," she said. "But you'll have to bring me your knife before I'll give it to you."

"What the h.e.l.l do you think I am?" he said. "You bring me the money here and we'll talk about the knife."

"No, you've got to come here to the house and get the money and bring me the knife," she said.

"I ain't that crazy, baby," he said. "It ain't that I'm scared of Johnny, but I don't have to take no rape-fiend chance like that. It's your little tail that's in the vise, and you're goin' to have to pay to get it out."

"Listen, honey, there ain't no chance in it," she said. "He can't get back before tomorrow night because it's going to take him all day tomorrow to find out what he's looking for, and when he gets back I got to be gone myself."

"I don't dig you," c.h.i.n.k said.

"You ain't so smart then, honey," she said. "What be's going to find out is what caused Val to wind up dead."

Suddenly c.h.i.n.k began to see the light. "Then it was you--"

She cut him off. "What difference does it make now? I got to be gone when he gets back, and that's for sure. I just want to leave him a souvenir."

An expression of triumph lit c.h.i.n.k's face. "You mean you want me, there in his own house?"

"In his own bed," she said. "The mother-taper always suspected me of cheating on him when I wasn't. Now I'm going to fix him."

c.h.i.n.k gave a low vicious laugh. "You and me, baby, we're going to fix him together."

"Well, hurry up then," she said.

"Give me half an hour," he said.

She had unhooked the extension in the bedroom and was talking from the extension in the kitchen. When she hung up she said to herself, "You asked for it."

Dulcy was watching from the peephole and opened the door before he rang. She wore her robe with nothing underneath.

"Come on in, honey," she said. "The place is ours."

"I knew I'd get you," he said, making a grab at her, but she slipped neatly out of his arms and said, "All right then, don't make me wait."

He looked into the kitchen.

"If you're scared, search the house," she said.

"Who's scared?" he said belligerently.

The bedroom which Val had used was directly acrosS from the kitchen and the master bedroom beyond the bathroom, adjoining the sitting room.

She started to lead c.h.i.n.k into Val's room, but he went up to the front and looked into the sitting room, then he hesitated before the door to the master bedroom. J)ulcy had padlocked it with the heavy Yale lock Johnny had used to lock her in.

"What's in there?" c.h.i.n.k asked.

"That was Val's room," Dulcy said.

"What's it doing locked?" he wanted to know.

"The police locked it," she said. "If you want it open, go ahead and break down the door."

He laughed, then looked into the bathroom. The water was running in the tub.

"I'm going to take a bath first," she said. "Do you mind?"

He kept on laughing to himself with a crazy sort of exultation.

"You're a real b.i.t.c.h," he said, taking her by the arms and pushing her into Val's bedroom and back across the bed. "I knew you were a b.i.t.c.h, but I didn't know how much b.i.t.c.h you really are."

He began kissing her.

"Let me take a bath first," she said. "I stink."

He laughed jubilantly, as though laughing to himself at his own private joke.

"A real solid-gold b.i.t.c.h," he said as though talking to himself. Then suddenly he sat up straight. "Where's the money?"

"Where's the knife?" she countered.

He took it from his pocket and held it in his hand.

She pointed to an envelope on the dressing table.

He picked it up, opened it with one hand while holding onto the knife with the other and shook hundred dollar bills onto the bedspread. She eased the knife from his hand and slipped it into the pocket of her robe, but he didn't notice. He was rooting his face in the money like a hog in swill.

"Put it away and undress," she said.

He stood up, laughing crazily to himself, and began stripping off his clothes.

"I'll just leave it there and look at it," he said.

She sat at the dressing table and ma.s.saged her face with cream until he'd finished undressing.

But instead of getting beneath the covers he lay on top of the coverlet, and he kept picking up the brand-new money and letting it rain down over his naked body like falling leaves.

"Have a good time," she said, going into the bathroom. She heard him laughing crazily to himself as she closed the adjoining door.

She quickly stepped across the bathroom, opened the opposite door and stepped into the other bedroom.

Johnny slept on his back with one arm flung out across the cover and the other folded loosely across his stomach. He snored lightly.

She closed the bathroom door behind her, crossed the room quietly, and set the radio to alarm within five minutes. Then she dressed quickly in a slack suit without stopping to put on underwear, slipped into the robe again, and went back into the bathroom.

The water had been running all the while and had reached the overflow outlet. She turned off the faucet, turned on the shower and pulled the drain stopper.

Then she went quickly into the hail, turned into the kitchen, took her saddle-leather shoulder handbag from one of the cabinet shelves and went out through the service doorway.

She was crying so hard as she ran down the stairs she b.u.mped into two uniformed white cops coming up. They stood aside to let her pa.s.s.

20.

The radio came on with a blast.

Some big bra.s.sy band was beating out a rock and roll rhythm.

Johnny came awake as though he'd been bitten by a snake, leaped out of the bed and grabbed for the pistol underneath his pillow.

Then he realized it was only the radio. He grunted sheepishly and noticed that Dulcy was out of bed. He felt his inside coat pocket with his free hand, still holding the pistol in his right hand, and discovered the ten thousand dollars were gone.

He patted the coat absently where it lay on the chair beside the bed, but he was looking at the empty bed. His breath came shallowly, but his face was expressionless.

"Sevened out," he said to himself. "You lost that bet."

The radio was playing so loudly he didn't hear the door to the bathroom open. He merely caught a ificker of movement from the corner of his eye and turned.

c.h.i.n.k stood naked, with his eyes dilated and his mouth wide open, in the doorway.

They stared at each other until the moment ran out.

Suddenly the veins popped out in Johnny's temples as though they were about to explode. The scar ballooned out from his forehead and the tentacles wriggled as though trying to free themselves from his head. Then a blinding flash went off inside of his skull as though his brains had been dynamited.

His brain made no record of his next actions.

He squeezed the trigger of his .38 automatic until it had pumped all its slugs into c.h.i.n.k's stomach, lungs, heart and head. Then he leaped across the floor and stomped c.h.i.n.k's dying b.l.o.o.d.y body with his bare feet until two of c.h.i.n.k's teeth were stuck into his calloused heel. After that he leaned over and clubbed c.h.i.n.k's head into a b.l.o.o.d.y pulp with his pistol b.u.t.t.

But he didn't know he had done it.

The next thing he knew consciously after having first caught sight of c.h.i.n.k was that he was being held forcibly by two white uniformed cops and c.h.i.n.k's b.l.o.o.d.y corpse lay on the floor in the doorway, half in the bedroom and half in the bathroom, and the shower was pouring down into an empty tub.

"Turn me loose so I can dress," he said in his toneless voice. "You can't take me to jail buck naked."

The cops freed him and he began to dress.

"We've called precinct and they're sending over some jokers from Homicide," one of them said. "You want to buzz your mouthpiece before they get here?"

"What for?" Johnny said, without stopping dressing.

"We heard the shots and the back door was open, so we came on in," the other cop said half apologetically. We thought maybe it was her you'd shot."

Johnny said nothing. He was dressed before the men from Homicide arrived.

They held him there until Detective Sergeant Brody came.

"Well, you killed him," Brody said.

"There's all the evidence," Johnny said.

They took him back to the 116th Street Precinct station for questioning because Grave Digger and Coffin Ed were on the case and they worked out of that station.

Brody sat as before behind the desk in the Pigeon Nest. Grave Digger was perched on the edge of the desk, and Coffin Ed stood in the shadow in the corner.

It was 8:37 o'clock and still light outside, but it didn't make any difference to them because the room didn't have any windows.

Johnny sat in the spifi of light on the stool in the center of the room, facing Brody. The vertical light made grotesque patterns of the scar on his forehead and the veins swelling from his temples, but his big muscular body was relaxed and his face was expressionless. He looked like a man who'd gotten a load from his shoulders.

"Why don't you just let me tell you what I know," he said in his toneless voice. "If you don't buy it, you can question me afterwards."

"Okay, shoot," Brody said.

"Let's begin with the knife, and get that cleared up with," Johnny said. "I found the knife in her drawer on a Tuesday afternoon a little over two weeks ago. I just thought she'd bought it to protect herself from me. I put it in my pocket and took it to the club. Then I got to thinking about it and I was going to put it back, but Big Joe seen it. If she was so scared of me she needed to keep a skinner's knife hidden in the drawer where she kept her underwear, I was going to let her keep it. But I was handling it and Big Joe said he'd like to have a knife like that, and I gave it to him. That's the last I seen it or even thought about it until you showed it to me here on that desk and said it was the knife that killed Val, and that the preacher had said he'd seen c.h.i.n.k when he gave it to her."

"You don't know what Big Joe did with it?" Brody asked.

"No, he never said. All he ever said was that if he carried it around he was scared he might get mad some day and cut somebody with it, and it was the kind of knife that would cut a man's head off when all you were trying to do was mark him."

"Did you ever see another knife like it?" Brody asked.

"Not exactly like it," Johnny said. "I've seen knives what look kind of like it, but none what look exactly like it."

Brody took the knife from the desk drawer as he had done the first time and pushed it across the desk.

"Is this the knife?"

Johnny leaned forward and picked it up.