he wasn't intending to get corralled by no gal.'
'Tell me one thing, Mrs. Pullen-didn't you notice anything strange about the body?'
'Well-' She knitted her brows. 'Not as I recollect. I didn't get to see him close up, of course. I just saw him from my window. But I didn't notice nothing strange.'
The sergeant stared at her.
'Wouldn't you call a knife sticking in his heart strange?'
'Oh, you mean him being stabbed. Yes, sir, I thought that was strange. I couldn't imagine nobody wanting to kill Val.'
The sergeant kept staring at her though he didn't quite know what to make of that statement.
'If it had been Johnny there instead of Val it wouldn't have struck you as strange.'
'No, sir.'
'But didn't it strike you as strange how he came to be lying there in that bread basket just a few minutes after Reverend Short had fallen from your window into the same bread basket?'
For the first time her face took on a look of fear.
'Yes, sir,' she replied in a whisper, leaning on the desk for support. 'Powerful strange. Only the Lord knows how he came there.'
'No, the murderer knows, too.'
'Yes, sir. But there's one thing, Mr. Brody. Johnny didn't do it. He might not have had no burning love for his brother-in-law, but he tolerated him on account of Dulcy, and he wouldn't have let nobody hurt a hair on his head, much less have done it hisself.'
Brody took the murder knife from a drawer and laid it on the desk top. 'Have you ever seen this before?'
She stared at it, more out of curiosity than horror. 'No, sir.'
He let it drop. 'When is the funeral to be held?'
'This afternoon at two o'clock.'
'All right, you may go now. You've been a great help to us.'
She arose slowly, bracing her hands on the desk top, and extended her hand to Sergeant Brody with Southern-bred courtesy.
Sergeant Brody wasn't used to it. He was the law. People on the other side of this desk were generally on the other side of the law. He found himself so confused that he clambered to his feet, knocking over his chair, and pumped her hand up and down, his face glowing like a freshly boiled lobster.
'I hope your funeral goes well, Mrs. Pullen-that is, I mean, your husband's funeral.'
'Thank you, sir. All we can do is put him in the ground and hope.'
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed stepped forward and escorted her with deference to the door, holding it open for her to pass through. Her black satin dress dragged on the floor, sweeping dust over her straight-last shoes.
Sergeant Brody didn't sigh. He prided himself on the fact that he never sighed. But, as he glanced at his watch again, he looked as though he would have loved to.
'It's ten-twenty. Think we can finish before lunch?'
'Let's get it over with,' Coffin Ed said harshly. 'I haven't had any sleep and I'm hungry enough to eat dog.'
'Let's have the preacher, then.'
On catching sight of the shiny wooden stool sitting in the spill of glaring light, Reverend Short drew up just inside the door and shuddered like a stuck sheep.
'No!' he croaked, trying to back out into the corridor. 'I won't go in there.'
The two uniformed cops who'd brought him from the detention block gripped his arms and forced him inside.
He struggled in their grip, performing exercises like an adagio dancer. Veins roped in his bony temples. His eyes protruded behind his gold-rimmed spectacles like a bug's under a microscope, and his Adam's apple bobbed like a float on a fishing line.
'No! No! It's haunted with the souls of tortured Christians,' he screamed.
'Come on, buddy boy, quit performing,' one of the cops said, handling him rough. 'Ain't no Christians been in here.'
'Yes! Yes!' he screamed in his croaking voice. 'I hear their cries. It's the chamber of the Inquisition. I smell the blood of the martyred.'
'You must be having a nosebleed,' the other cop said, trying to be funny.
They lifted him bodily, feet and legs dangling grotesquely like a puppet's from a gibbet, carried him across the floor and deposited him on the stool.
The three inquisitors stared at him without moving. The chair in which Mamie Pullen had sat once more served Grave Digger as a footstool. Coffin Ed had retired to his dark corner.
'Caesars!' he croaked.
The cops stood flanking him, a hand on each shoulder.
'Cardinals!' he screamed. 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not fear.'
His eyes glinted insanely.
Sergeant Brody's face remained impassive, but he said, 'Ain't nobody here but us chickens, Reverend.'
Reverend Short leaned forward and peered into the shadow as though trying to make out a blurred figure in a thick fog.
'If you're a police officer then I want to report that Chink Charlie pushed me out of the window to my death, but God placed the body of Christ on the ground to break my fall.'
'It was a basket of bread,' the sergeant corrected.
'The body of Christ,' Reverend Short maintained.
'All right, Reverend, let's cut the comedy,' Brody said. 'If you're trying to build a plea of insanity, you're jumping the gun. No one is accusing you of anything.'
'It was that Jezebel Dulcy Perry who stabbed him with the knife Chink Charlie gave her to commit the murder.'
Brody leaned forward slightly.
'You saw him give her the knife?'
'Yes.'
'When?'
'The day after Christmas. She was sitting in her car outside my church and thought there wasn't nobody looking. He came up and got into the seat beside her, gave her the knife and showed her how to use it.'
'Where were you?'
'I was watching through a crack in the window. I knew there was something fishy about her coming to my church to give me some old clothes for charity.'
'Were she and Johnny members of your church?'
'They called themselves members just 'cause Big Joe Pullen was a member, but they never come 'cause they don't like to roll.'
Grave Digger saw that Brody didn't get it, so he explained. 'It's a Holy Roller church. When the members get happy they roll about on the floor.'
'With one another's wives,' Coffin Ed added.
Brody's face went sort of slack, and the police reporter stopped writing to stare open-mouthed.
'They keep their clothes on,' Grave Digger amended. 'They just roll about on the floor and have convulsions, singly and in pairs.'
The reporter looked disappointed.
'Ahem,' Brody said, clearing his throat. 'So when you first looked out of the window you saw Val's body lying in the bread basket with the knife sticking in it. And you recognized the knife as the same knife you had seen Chink Charlie give to Dulcy Perry?'
'There wasn't any bread there then,' Reverend Short stated.
Sergeant Brody blinked. 'What was there if there wasn't any bread?'
'There was a colored cop and a white man chasing a thief.'
