body. 'You think I'd bury him if he was alive?'
'I saw it happen,' Reverend Short continued as though she hadn't spoken.
She stared at him in perplexity. 'Oh, you mean Val.'
'A woman filled with the sin of lust and adultery came from the pit of hell and stabbed him in the heart.'
His words sunk slowly into Mamie's clogged thoughts.
'A woman?'
' And I gave her space to repent of her fornication, and she repented not.'
'You saw her do it?'
' For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.'
Mamie saw the room tilt.
'May the Lord have mercy,' she said.
She saw Big Joe in his coffin, the grand piano and the console radio-television set begin a slow ascent toward heaven. Then the dark maroon carpet rose slowly until it spread out before her eyes like a sea of dark, congealed blood into which she buried her face.
'Sin and lust and abomination in the sight of the Lord,' Reverend Short croaked, then added in a small dry whisper, 'She ain't nothing but a whore, O Lord.'
5
The automatic elevator was on the ground floor, and most of the curious mourners chose to run down the stairs rather than wait for it. But they were not the first to arrive.
Dulcy and Chink stood facing each other across the basket of bread containing the body. He was a big yellow man, young but going to fat, dressed in a beige summer suit. He leaned over tensely.
The first to approach heard Dulcy exclaiming, 'Jesus Christ, you didn't have to kill him!' and Chink replying in a voice choked with sudden passion, 'Not even for you-' Then he broke off and cautioned in a tense whisper, speaking between set lips, 'Shut up and play it dumb.'
She didn't speak again until all the mourners from the wake had gathered and had their look and said their say.
'It's Val, and he's dead all right.'
'If he ain't, Saint Peter's going to be mighty surprised.' Alamena had wormed close enough to get a clear view of the body. She heard a dining-car waiter say, 'You reckon he was stabbed where he's at?'
A voice behind her replied, 'Must have been-there ain't no blood nowhere else.'
The body lay at full length on the mattress of soft wrapped loaves of bread as though the basket had been fitted to its measure. The left hand, exhibiting the band of a single gold ring, lay palm upward across a heavy, black silk knitted tie knotted about the collar of a soft sandcolored linen silk shirt; the right hand lay palm downward across the center button of the jacket of an olive drab sheen gabardine suit. The feet pointed straight up, exposing the slightly worn crepe-rubber soles of lightweight Cordovan English-made shoes.
The knife protruded from the jacket just beneath the breast pocket, which was adorned with a quarter-inch stripe of white handkerchief. It was a stag-handle knife with a push-button opener and handguard, such as used by hunters to skin game.
Blood made irregular patterns over the jacket, shirt and tie. Splotches were on the waxed-paper wrappings of the loaves of bread, and on one side of the woven rattan basket. There was none on the sidewalk.
The face was set in a fixed expression of utter disbelief; the eyes, widened into protruding white-rimmed balls, stared fixedly at some point above and beyond the feet.
It was a handsome face, with smooth brown skin and features bearing a close resemblance to Dulcy's. The head was bare, revealing curly black hair, thickly plastered with pomade.
An odd moment of silence followed the last speaker's statement as the fact sunk in that the murder had been committed on the spot.
Dulcy said into the silence, 'He looks so surprised.'
'You'd look surprised, too, if some one stuck a knife in your heart,' Alamena said grimly.
With a startling abruptness, Dulcy became hysterical.
'Val!' she screamed. 'I'll get him, Val, sugar, oh God-'
She would have thrown herself atop Val's body, but Alamena quickly wrenched her away, and several of the mourners closed in and held her.
She struggled furiously and screamed, 'Turn me loose, you mother-rapers! He's my brother and some mother-raper's going to pay-'
'For Jesus sake, shut up!' Alamena shouted.
Chink stared at her, his big yellow face distorted with rage. She shut up and got herself under control.
A colored patrolman came from the doorway of the adjoining building. When he saw the crowd he drew himself up and began adjusting his uniform.
'What's happened here?' he asked in a loud self-conscious voice. 'Somebody get hurt?'
'You can call it that,' some one replied.
The patrolman pushed in close and looked down at the body. The collar of his blue uniform was open, and he smelled like sweat.
'Who stabbed him?' he asked.
Pigmeat replied in a high falsetto voice, 'Don't you wish you knew.'
The patrolman blinked his eyes, then suddenly grinned, showing rows of big yellow teeth.
'What minstrel you with, sonny-o?'
Everyone stared at him, waiting to see what he would do. Their faces took dark shape in the graying light of dawn.
He stood there grinning, doing nothing. He didn't know what to do, but he wasn't perturbed by it.
The distant sound of a siren floated in the humid air. The crowd began to scatter.
'Don't nobody leave the scene,' the patrolman ordered. The red eye of a patrol car came north up Seventh Avenue. The patrol car made a screaming U-turn around the park dividing the traffic lanes and dragged to a stop, double-parking beside the cars at the curb. Another red eye was coming south down the dark street in a screaming fury. A third turned the corner of 132nd Street, almost coffiding with it. A fourth turned in from 129th Street and screamed north on the wrong side of the avenue.
The white precinct sergeant arrived in the fifth patrol car.
'Keep everybody here,' he ordered in a loud voice.
By then half-clad people were hanging from every front window in the block, and others began collecting in the street.
The sergeant noticed a white man clad in a shortsleeved white sport shirt and khaki trousers standing apart, and asked him, 'Do you work in this A amp;P store?'
'I'm the manager.'
'Open it up. We're going to put these suspects inside.'
'I object,' the white man said. 'I've been robbed once tonight by a shine, right under my eyes, and the cop hasn't even caught the thief.'
The sergeant looked at the colored cop.
'It was his buddy,' the A amp;P manager said. 'Where is he now?' the sergeant asked. 'How in the hell do I know?' the store manager replied. 'I had to leave and come back to open the store.'
'Well, go ahead and open it,' the colored cop said. 'I'll be responsible if anything is stolen,' the sergeant said.
The manager went to unlock the door without replying. An inconspicuous black sedan pulled to the curb and parked at the end of the block unnoticed, and two tall, lanky colored men dressed in black mohair suits that looked as though they'd been slept in got out and walked back toward the scene. Their wrinkled coats bulged beneath their left shoulders. The shiny straps of their shoulder holsters showed across the fronts of their blue cotton shirts.
