'Oh Johnny, I don't think no such thing that you killed him,' she said in a wailing voice.
'That ain't what I'm talking about, Aunt Mamie,' he said. 'I want to know what reason you think I'd have for killing him. Whether you think I killed him or not don't bother me. I just want to know what reason you think I'd do it for.'
She looked him straight in the eyes. 'There ain't any reason for you to have killed him, Johnny,' she said. 'And that's the gospel truth.'
'Then why'd you start off pleading for me to trust Dulcy so much and then the next thing you're figuring she's done give me reason enough to kill Val. That's what I want to know,' he persisted. 'What kind of reasoning is that?'
'Johnny, in this game of life, you got to give her as much as you ask to get from her,' she said. 'You can't win without risking.'
'I know,' he admitted. 'That's a gambler's rule. But I got to put in eight hours every day in my club. It's as much for her as it is for me. But that means she's got all the chances in the world to play me for a sucker.'
Mamie reached her gnarled old hand over and tried to take his hard long-fingered hand, but he drew it back.
'I ain't asking for mercy,' he said harshly. 'I don't want to hurt nobody, either. If she wants him, all I want her to do is walk out and go to him. I ain't gonna hurt her. If she don't want him, I ain't gonna have him pressing her. I don't mind losing. Every gambler got to lose sometime. But I ain't gonna be cheated.'
'I know how you feel, Johnny,' Mamie said. 'But you got to learn to trust her. A jealous man can't win.'
'A working man can't gamble and a jealous man can't win,' said Johnny, quoting the old gambler's adage. After a moment he added, 'If it's like you said, ain't nobody going to get hurt.'
'I'm going up and get some sleep,' she said, getting slowly to the sidewalk. Then she paused with her hand on the door and added, 'Somebody's got to preach his funeral. Do you know any preacher who'd do it?'
'Get your own preacher,' he said. 'That's what he likes best, to preach somebody's funeral.'
'You talk to him,' she said.
'I don't want to talk to that man,' he said. 'Not after what he said today.'
'You got to talk to him,' she insisted. 'Do it for Dulcy's sake.'
He didn't say anything, and she didn't say any more. When she vanished within the entrance he started the motor and drove slowly through the idling traffic up to the store-front Church of the Holy Rollers on Eighth Avenue.
Reverend Short lived in a room at the back that had once been a storeroom. The street door was unlocked. Johnny entered without knocking and walked down the aisle between the broken benches. The door leading to Reverend Short's bedroom was cracked open a couple of inches. The plate glass windows at the front were painted black on the inside three-quarters high, but enough twilight filtered through the dingy glass overtop to glint on Reverend Short's spectacles as he peered through the narrow opening of the door.
The spectacles withdrew and the door closed as Johnny skirted the soapbox pulpit, and he heard the lock click shut as he approached.
He knocked and waited. Silence greeted him.
'It's Johnny Perry, Reverend; I want to talk to you,' he said.
There was a rustling sound like rats scurrying about inside, and Reverend Short spoke abruptly in his croaking voice. 'Don't think I haven't been expecting you.'
'Good,' Johnny said. 'Then you know it's about the funeral.'
'I know why you've come and I'm prepared for you,' Reverend Short croaked.
Johnny had had a long hard day, and his nerves were on edge. He tried the door and found it locked.
'Open this door,' he said roughly. 'How the hell you expect to do business through a locked door?'
'Aha, do you think you're deceiving me,' Reverend Short croaked.
Johnny rattled the door knob. 'Listen, preacher,' he said. 'Mamie Pullen sent me and I'm going to pay you for it, so what the hell's the matter with you.'
'You expect me to believe that a holy Christian like Mamie Pullen sent you to-' Reverend Short began croaking when all of a sudden Johnny grabbed the knob in a fit of rage and started to break in the door.
As though reading his thoughts, Reverend Short warned in a thin dry voice as dangerous as the rattle of a rattlesnake, 'Don't you break down that door!'
Johnny snatched his hand back as though a snake had struck at him. 'What's wrong with you, preacher, you got a woman in there with you?' he asked suspiciously.
'So that's what you're after?' Reverend Short said. 'You think that murderess is hiding in here.'
'Jesus Christ, man, are you stone raving crazy?' Johnny said, losing control of his temper. 'Just open this mother-raping door. I ain't got all night to stand out here and listen to that loony stuff.'
'Drop that gun!' Reverend Short warned.
'I ain't got no gun, preacher-are you jagged?'
Johnny heard the click of some sort of weapon being cocked.
'I warn you! Drop that gun!' Reverend Short repeated. 'To hell with you,' Johnny said disgustedly, and started to turn away.
But his sixth sense warned him of imminent danger, and he dropped flat to the floor just before a double blast from a twelve-gauge shotgun blew a hole the size of a dinner plate through the upper panel of the wooden door.
Johnny came up from the floor as though he were made of rubber. He hit the door with a driving shoulder- block that had so much force it broke the lock and flung the door back against the wall with a bang loud enough to be an echo to the shotgun blast.
Reverend Short dropped the gun and whipped a knife from his side pants-pocket, so quick the blade was open in his hand before the shotgun clattered on the floor.
Johnny was charging head first so fast he couldn't stop, so he stuck out his left hand and grabbed the wrist of Reverend Short's knife hand and butted him in the solar plexus. Reverend Short's glasses flew from his face like a bird taking wing, and he fell backwards across an unmade bed with a white-painted iron frame. Johnny landed on top of him, muscle-free as a cat landing on four feet, and in the same instant twisted the knife from Reverend Short's grip with one hand and began throttling him with the other.
His knees were locked about Reverend Short's middle as he put the pressure on his throat. Reverend Short's nearsighted eyes began bulging like bananas being squeezed from their skins, and all they could see was the livid scar on Johnny's blood-purple forehead, puffing and wriggling like a maddened octopus.
But he showed no signs of fear.
Just short of breaking the skinny neck Johnny caught himself. He took a deep breath, and his whole body shuddered as though from an electric shock to his brain. Then he took his hands from Reverend Short's throat and straightened up, still straddling him, and looked down soberly at the blue-tinted face beneath him on the bed.
'Preacher,' he said slowly. 'You're going to make me kill you.'
Reverend Short returned his stare as he gasped for breath. When finally he could speak, he said in a defiant voice, 'Go ahead and kill me. But you can't save her. They're going to get her anyway.'
Johnny backed from the bed and got to his feet, stepping on Reverend Short's spectacles. He kicked them angrily from underfoot and looked down at Reverend Short lying supine in the same position.
'Listen, I want to ask you just one question,' he said in his toneless, gambler's voice. 'Why would she want to kill her own brother?'
Reverend Short returned his look with malevolence.
'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.'
