He jumped up in exasperation. 'You are a religious fanatic, woman,' he charged. 'I don't want to talk to you any more. You're crazy.'
'He's the crazy one,' she said, 'if he thinks I'm going to split half with him because I'm here in jail for something I ain't never done.'
He snatched up his cream-colored straw hat with the fancy red-and-blue polka dot band and left.
The matron took her back to her cell.
At eight-three, Sugar reappeared in front of the house by way of the main entrance just as the janitor was turning into the alleyway beside the house. They saw each other at the same instant. Sugar noticed that the janitor was again decently clad in his overalls. Then he took off, running.
The janitor turned and gave chase.
After they had run about half a block, the janitor called, 'Hey, doc! Hey, doc!' They ran another half block and the janitor shouted again, 'It worked, doc! It worked!'
Sugar couldn't figure that out. If the janitor hadn't discovered he had been tricked, then why had he chased the girl? That took some deep figuring. But he didn't have the time for it. And what was more, he wasn't taking any chances on stopping and demanding an explanation. He turned the corner into 112th Street running on the edges of his soles and ducked into the first tenement doorway. He hid on the stairs, looking around the banister, and saw the janitor run past. But he didn't leave until he saw the janitor come walking back.
Then he slipped from the building and kept on over to Eighth Avenue, went up to 117th Street, turned back toward Manhattan Avenue and entered a building in the middle of the block. It was a walk-up in fairly good repair; the tiled floors were clean, and the walls were painted.
He walked up to the third-floor front and pushed a buzzer beside a bright red lacquered door. A respectable- looking buxom brown-skinned woman wearing gold-rimmed glasses opened the door onto a chain and asked through the crack, 'Who you want to see?'
'Mabel,' he said.
The woman smoothed her gray-streaked hair and looked at him appraisingly.
'She ain't in,' she decided to say.
'When will she be in?' he asked.
'It's hard to tell,' she said. 'Who shall I tell her called?'
'She don't know me,' he said. 'Just tell her I've come from Rufus and I'll be back.'
'You say you come from Rufus!' she echoed. Her eyes popped behind the glittering spectacles. 'And you say you is coming back. Naw, you ain't, neither!' she concluded, and slammed the door in his face.
'I shouldn't have told her that,' he admitted to himself. 'She must know that Rufus is dead.'
It was eight-twenty-nine.
'Well, well,' Sergeant Ratigan from Homicide said. 'You are the woman who started all this business. And it looks from here as if you finished it off, too.'
Alberta remained silent and sullen.
He was questioning her in the same room where the shyster had propositioned her less than an hour previously.
'Tell me,' he said. 'Just between us friends, why were you playing dead?'
'I wasn't playing dead,' she denied stolidly.
He crossed his legs and strapped his hands about one of his bony knees. 'What were you doing then?' he asked. 'Playing a joke?'
'I don't know what I was doing,' she said.
'Just so,' he said, and took time out to reread the long report turned in by Grave Digger and Coffin Ed.
'Everyone is convinced you are not guilty, it seems,' he said on finishing. He showed her the front rows of his tobaccostained teeth in what he thought was a sympathetic grin, inviting confidence. 'Now! All you have to do is tell me who did it and you can go.'
'Go home?' she asked.
'Right,' he said.
'I don't know who did it, and that's the God's truth,' she said.
He sighed and took a cheap cigar from his pocket. He cut the cellophane band with a small penknife, snipped off the end of the cigar and punctured it with the point of the knife. He lit it with a paper match, spinning it between thumb and forefinger until it was burning evenly.
'All right, Alberta, you can't get away with playing stupid,' he said. 'Now I want you to tell me what happened from the time you drank the water at the baptism until you were arrested with the bloodstained knife.'
'The last thing I remember was feeling the Spirit creeping all through me after I had drunk the water Sweet Prophet blessed and then seeing visions-'
'What kind of visions?' he interrupted with quickened interest.
'Visions of heaven,' she said.
His interest faded.
'The air looked like it was full of stars and bubbles, and then it seemed like I fell down and all around me was the faces of angels,' she went on.
'What kind of angels?'
'Colored angels. They looked just like ordinary people, but I knew they were angels. I thought I was dying and going straight to heaven. I was that happy!' she stated.
'The prophet said you had a religious trance,' he informed her. 'Do you believe that?'
'He's a prophet-he ought to know,' she said. Then suddenly she was struck by the realization of what he had said. 'Oh, you mean a religious trance! ' The weariness and sullenness were wiped from her face, and her smooth, dark, immature features lit with ecstasy. 'A religious trance,' she echoed wonderingly. 'Me, Alberta Peavine Wright. I had myself a religious trance. What do you know about that!'
'All I know about it is what I'm told,' he said drily, and then suddenly asked, 'What did the water taste like?'
'Taste like?' she repeated. 'It tasted just like holy water.'
'What does holy water taste like? I have never tasted any.'
'It tastes just like water what has been made holy,' she said. 'What do you want me to say?'
'I just want you to say what is true.'
'Well, that is true.'
'That you drank the water and went into a religious trance?'
'Yassuh.' Not the slightest hint of a doubt showed in her face. 'Ain't I the lucky one,' she exulted. 'I'm going to write home and tell Ma so she can tell Reverend Tree, who is always bellyaching about us living in sin up here in Harlem.'
'All right, come down to Earth and let the Lord rest for a moment,' he said peevishly. 'You were taken to the morgue by a mistake, and you were still there when you regained consciousness. You know all about that?'
'Yassuh.'
'You were released from the morgue at four-twenty-six o'clock-so the record states. What did you do?'
'I went home,' she said.
'Just that?' he persisted.
'Well, I didn't know then that I had had a religious trance,' she elaborated. 'The man in the morgue said I had fainted probably from a sunstroke or else being too excited. So I just caught a bus and went home. When I found my furniture had been stolen, I went downstairs and asked Miz Teabone had she seen anybody suspicious about the house. She lives on the first floor and has a window on the street, and she sees nearmost everything that happens around there-'
'I don't doubt it,' he muttered.
'She told me what she had seen, and I knew it was some of Rufus's doings,' she continued.
He pounced on her. 'How did you know it was Rufus?'
