8
Half an hour later they had searched her flat and found it empty. They started to leave the building, on their way back to question her again.
'Pssst!' the big fat lady who lived on the first floor of the tenement on 118th Street hissed from her front window.
It was past one o'clock, and the street was deserted. Not a window was lit. Only the rats were in evidence, scavenging among the loaded garbage cans; and the hunting cats watching them from dark corners with baleful eyes.
Grave Digger jerked his thumb toward a vaguely visible outline of a female half filling the lower part of a black-dark window. Coffin Ed nodded.
'Come inside,' the woman whispered. 'I got something to tell you.'
They turned and re-entered the dimly lit hall.
'Never look a stool pigeon in the mouth,' Grave Digger said in a low voice.
Coffin Ed loosened his long-barreled, nickel-plated. 38 caliber revolver in its oiled shoulder holster. Grave Digger noticed the gesture and thought, A burned child fears fire. He tightened with trepidation. He wondered if Coffin Ed would ever get over the memory of the acid splashing into his face. It had left him trigger-happy; and a trigger-happy detective was as dangerous as a blind rattlesnake.
To the right, a door opened cautiously a crack and then opened fully into a black-dark room.
'Get some light on,' Coffin Ed grated, the revolver flashing suddenly in his hand.
'Easy does it,' Grave Digger said.
A gasp was heard from the darkness, and a light came on suddenly. 'Lord God, you scared me,' the big fat black woman moaned. 'I just didn't want nobody to see me talking to the cops.'
They stepped inside, and Coffin Ed kicked the door shut behind him, holding the revolver loosely at his side. The fat lady rushed to the front window and drew the shades.
They were standing in the parlor. She offered them whiskey, which they declined.
She said with an air of secrecy, 'I saw you when you came, and I knew you were going up to Alberta Wright's.'
'What's happened up there?' Grave Digger asked.
The fat lady's eyes widened. 'Don't you know? Her furniture was stolen while she was away at the baptism.'
The detectives became suddenly alert.
'I bet you were sitting in your window with a grandstand seat,' Coffin Ed said.
'I didn't see them take it away, but I saw them when they come with the moving van,' she admitted.
'All right, let's have it,' Grave Digger said. 'And, if you are a friend of Alberta's, you'll give it to us straight.'
'Lord, that child is just like a daughter to me,' she said, then went on to tell with great relish the events leading up to the theft of the furniture.
'What did this Rufus Wright look like?' Grave Digger asked.
She described him as though she had been his valet.
'And Alberta knew who he was when you told her?'
'Oh, she knew him all right,' the fat lady said. 'Do you reckon they is relations?' She licked her lips as though it tasted good. 'Maybe he's her husband; I know that other nigger ain't.'
'Maybe,' Grave Digger said. 'You keep on watching, and if you see anything else, you call the precinct station and ask for one of us. You know who we are, don't you?'
'Lord, if I didn't know, I could guess,' she said, watching Coffin Ed slip the long-barreled revolver back into its oiled shoulder holster.
She was back in her front window before the small, battered, black sedan, with Grave Digger at the wheel and Coffin Ed beside him, pulled away from the curb.
They returned to the precinct station and got on the telephones.
Coffin Ed called the morgue and got a description of the corpse and the clothes it had been wearing at the time of death. He then called the downtown Homicide Bureau, got Sergeant Frick on the phone and asked him to send up a photograph of the corpse; but he knew he wouldn't need it. Now he knew the corpse's other name was Rufus Wright.
Grave Digger telephoned the Bronx police to get a line on the location of the Jew's warehouse. He got more than he had expected.
After they had pooled their information, they reached an unspoken accord.
'We had better slip her out the back way,' Coffin Ed said. 'The lieutenant won't like it.'
Grave Digger smiled. 'Her and her private God.'
They drove, with Alberta between them, crosstown toward the Harlem River. In that section of Park Avenue in back of the 125th Street Station, prostitutes and muggers lurked in the dark shadows of the stanchions of the railway trestle, waiting to take some sucker's money-or his life.
'Where are you taking me?' Alberta asked finally.
'To get your furniture that Rufus stole,' Grave Digger replied.
She didn't say another word.
They crossed over on the Ellis Street Bridge and picked up Third Avenue in the Bronx at the subway junction at 149th Street.
When they came to the Jew's warehouse, the moving van was parked at the curb and the wooden gate had been leaned against the iron grille of the store front.
Two uniformed cops were on duty, and a patrol car was parked across the street.
'We're from Harlem,' Grave Digger said.
'Yeah, the inspector telephoned us you were coming,' one of the harness bulls said.
They took Alberta round to the back door and down into the basement room.
'There was more than this,' she said.
'Look around,' Coffin Ed suggested.
They turned on all the lights and watched her search the basement, then the whole main floor. She seemed more interested in mattresses than in anything else. When she had finished she asked, 'Ain't there no place else?'
'This is all,' Grave Digger said.
Tears welled up in her eyes.
'What is it you're looking for?' Coffin Ed asked.
But she didn't say. All she said was, 'The Lord is going to make them pay for this.'
'If they haven't paid now, they never will,' Grave Digger said. 'The Jew has been murdered, too.'
Her dark face turned slowly gray.
'The Lord struck them dead,' she said.
'Not The Lord,' Grave Digger corrected. 'Somebody down here. Do you want to tell us about it now?'
'I want to talk to my preacher,' she said.
'Well, you had better have him get in touch with your friend, The Lord,' Grave Digger suggested. 'You are going to need Him.'
They took her back to the precinct station and had her transferred downtown to the city jail.
9
Sugar stood beside a felt-covered kidney-shaped table in a room back of a grocery store on Lenox Avenue near 118th Street, watching the stud poker game.
