out what the killer looked like.'
Dummy shook his head earnestly.
'All right-you didn't see his face, but you saw his back,' Grave Digger said.
Dummy wrote quickly: i saw his arm risin and fallin with the blade.
'You saw more than that,' Coffin Ed said. 'What did he look like? What was he wearing? What size was he?'
Dummy scribbled frantically: big man built like a heavyweight had on a tan jumper and long bil army cap he was young strong fast all i saw.
'Was there anyone else in sight?' Grave Digger asked. i didn see nobody.
As Dummy filled the pages with his answers, Grave Digger tore them from the pad and stuffed them into his pocket.
'What did you do?' he asked. i ran up the hill i couldn call the cops i didn want tangle with big strong starker and his knife i couldn tell nobody what i saw i wait to tell you.
'You know Sugar Stonewall?' Coffin Ed asked.
Dummy nodded.
'Was it him?'
Dummy shook his head.
'We'd better get the lieutenant in on this,' Grave Digger said. Dummy's mouth flew open, and choking sounds issued from the gruesome cavity.
'It's all right,' Grave Digger reassured him. 'Take it easy. We have to take a statement.'
Beads of sweat came out suddenly on Dummy's scarred, knotty face.
'Who around here talks sign language?' Grave Digger asked his partner.
'The lieutenant, I think,' Coffin Ed said. 'I've seen him playing with it.'
'All right, Dummy, you just sit and take it easy,' Grave Digger said, getting to his feet. 'We're not going to hold you unless we have to.'
Coffin Ed followed, and they went out and locked the door.
Lieutenant Anderson was in command of the night shift. He was a student of dactylology. He took over the questioning of Dummy, translating Dummy's replies for the detectives and a police stenographer, who sat at the desk and recorded the interrogation in shorthand.
Dummy stated that Alberta Wright had visited Cassie in her flat on 112th Street at about ten-thirty o'clock the previous night. She had come alone. He had been absent when she arrived. When he returned home Alberta was sitting at the kitchen table across from Cassie. Cassie was eating watermelon seasoned with black pepper and drinking salted beer.
'Where had you been?' Anderson interrupted to ask.
'I was watching out for my girls,' Dummy replied.
'Your girls?'
'He's got two chippy whores,' Grave Digger explained. 'He's trying to teach them how to hustle. He wants to be a pimp.'
Lieutenant Anderson had been on night duty in Harlem for over a year. During that time he had come to know his two ace colored detectives well, and he depended on them. He knew they had their own personal interpretation of law enforcement. Some people they never touched-such as madames of orderly houses of prostitution, operators of orderly gambling games, people connected with the numbers racket, streetwalkers who stayed in their district. But they were rough on criminals of violence and confidence men. And he had always thought they were rough on dope peddlers and pimps, too. So Grave Digger's casual explanation of Dummy's pimping surprised him.
'And you let him go about breaking in young girls to hustle?' he asked.
'If he didn't do that he would do something worse,' Grave Digger said. 'He would be a mugger or a cat burglar or a stickup man. He can't talk and he can't hear. He probably could get a job as a porter or a dishwasher; but he won't do that. He has been in the chips, and he figures those jobs are degrading. He used to be one of the greatest welterweights in the business, but the racketeers who owned him sent him to the tank so often he got both his eardrums burst. When he was no longer useful to them, they kicked him out of the profession. Then the dogooders got hold of him and primed him to spill before the state committee investigating boxing, and the gangsters kidnaped him one night and cut his tongue out. They unloaded him from a car in Foley Square in front of the state building where the investigation was being conducted and it was just luck a patrol car passed in time to get him to hospital to save his life. Since then he has tried his hand at the usual occupations of an expug-writing numbers, gambling, bodyguarding. Some big boxer gave him some money to open a shoe-shine parlor, but he used it to buy a new Cadillac, and the first night he had it he got it smashed up because he couldn't hear the horn of a truck. Now he's trying to pimp. If these chippies don't work for him, they will work for some other pimp. At least he treats them better than most pimps would; he protects them and doesn't beat them up. And when a chippy makes up her mind to be a whore, there is no stopping her. So we let him go. What would you do?'
'God knows,' Lieutenant Anderson said. 'Let's get back to the story. You live with this woman, Cassie?'
Dummy nodded. 'She's my old lady,' he said.
'She lets him stay in her house and does what she can to take care of him,' Grave Digger explained once more. 'But she's just a cook and a liquor-head to boot, so she doesn't have much money. He doesn't make much pimping either, but it keeps him in small change.'
'Yeah,' the lieutenant said. Then to Dummy, 'What did you go home for?'
'To get ten bucks,' Dummy confessed. 'Tricks weren't walking.'
'And Alberta Wright was there when you arrived?'
'Yes, sir,' Dummy said.
He told them that Alberta had told Cassie that Rufus had stolen her furniture while she was in a religious trance. She had stopped by to see if she could find out where Rufus lived from Dummy. She and Rufus had worked together for five years after their marriage as a domestic couple-he as the butler-chauffeur and she as the maid- cook. Then he had stolen their savings and had run away with another woman. She hadn't seen him for more than two years, and didn't know where he lived or what name he had taken.
When Dummy came, he had told Alberta the setup. Rufus had been working with the Jew for more than a year in a furniture-stealing racket. Abie had an outlet second-hand furniture store on Third Avenue near 125th Street in Harlem, and another place on Third Avenue in the Bronx, where he kept the hot stuff to cool off. Rufus entered apartments of people who were out of town on visits or business and sold the furnishings to the Jew in the role of proprietor. The Jew was covered; he demanded a statement of ownership from Rufus and gave a signed and witnessed receipt.
Dummy had told Alberta that if she wanted her furniture back, the Jew would return it for what he had paid Rufus, plus twenty per cent handling charges, and ten dollars an hour for its removal and return-no questions asked on either side.
'A slick little racket,' Lieutenant Anderson commented.
'I saw her furniture,' Grave Digger put in. 'It wasn't worth that kind of deal.'
'That's what Cassie said,' Dummy told them. 'I told Alberta I would handle it for her, but she just wanted to find Rufus.'
'All right, Dummy, quit beating around the bush,' Grave Digger said. 'What did she have hidden in her furniture that made it worth while to steal?'
'She said it was just mojos and potions and charms,' Dummy said. 'African and Haitian stuff. Witch doctor bones that had been dried on the equator and special voodoos from the West Indies; hearts' blood from Mexico and dried snake bites from East India. All kinds of magic stuff, she said.'
Grave Digger and Coffin Ed looked at one another and then at Lieutenant Anderson. The lieutenant looked nonplused.
'Let's get this straight,' the lieutenant said. 'She told you she had this stuff hidden in her furniture.'
'Yes, sir, that's what she said.'
'And you believed it?'
'No, sir, but that's what she said.'
Grave Digger chuckled. 'Can you imagine the Jew going to all that trouble stripping her furniture looking for a
