'How did I know it were him?' she repeated. 'For one thing she described him, and I knew right away it was him because wouldn't anybody else be mean enough to me to steal my furniture. He's always stealing something from me,' she added.
'So you started searching for Rufus. With a knife,' he said.
'Nawsuh, that ain't so,' she said. 'I first started looking for Sugar Stonewall. I hadn't seen him since just before it happened and-'
'Just before what happened?' he cut in.
'My religious trance,' she replied doggedly. 'I didn't know where he had gone or what had happened to him, and I needed him to help me look for Rufus, so I started looking for him first.'
He looked at the report again and conjectured, 'You must have gotten home at about five o'clock.'
'Nawsuh, not that soon. It were Sunday and the buses were slow, and it was nearer six o'clock when I got home. And then, after I found my furniture gone, it took me some time to get myself together. I had just got religion, and I didn't want to go and lose it the first thing. Then it must have taken me an hour to talk to Miz Teabone-she asked that many questions. So it must have been seven-thirty or eight o'clock when I started looking for Sugar.'
'And it was around ten-thirty when you wound up at Cassie's. You spent three hours looking for Sugar.'
'Yassuh. It took every bit of that long. I went everywhere I thought he might be at.'
'Where would all those places be?'
'Oh, around and about,' she said. 'If you don't know Harlem, it wouldn't be no use of telling you.'
'This is quite different from what you told before,' he pointed out.
'Yassuh, I'm telling the truth now,' she said.
'All right, when did you leave Cassie's?' he asked.
'I don't know exactly. I left there right after Dummy left. I happened to remember that Rufus was on the H.'
'Heroin?'
'Yassuh. And I asked Cassie where people bought that stuff. She told me there was a place in a house on 110th Street called Esther's, and I went there and sat on a bench in the park across the street where I could watch the door. I figured that after he had got the money for my furniture he would be going there sooner or later to buy some dope. And after that it were just like I said-I saw the patrol car pass and turn into Manhattan Avenue, and I had a premonition.'
'You needn't go into that again,' he said. 'It is all written down here.'
'It is?' she asked in surprise.
'Yes, everything you said has been taken down,' he told her. 'Now, tell me, just exactly what were these people looking for?' he asked. 'Had you come by some money recently?'
'Nawsuh,' she denied stolidly.
'Jewelry?'
'Nawsuh.'
'You mean to sit there and tell me that these two smart people went to all that trouble and got themselves killed just to get hold of your worn out furniture?'
'It weren't worn out,' she denied.
'Worn out or not,' he snapped. 'Do you want me to believe that was all they were after?'
'It looks like it,' she replied evasively.
'It doesn't look like it to me,' he said.
'Unless they had some other reasons I didn't know nothing about,' she added.
'Listen, Alberta, if you play square with me, I will play square with you,' he promised.
'Yassuh,' she said noncommittally.
'What did you have?'
'I done told you,' she said. 'I didn't have nothing but my furniture.'
'All right,' he said wearily. 'That's your story.'
She didn't say anything.
'Who were Rufus's friends?' he asked, trying another tactic.
'I didn't know them,' she said.
'Who was his girl friend? You would know that. He was your husband. You would certainly be curious enough to know who his girl friend was.'
'Nawsuh. I didn't care nothing about him nor his girl friend nor about anything he did-long as he left me alone,' she said.
'He stole your savings and ran away with a woman and you don't know who she is,' he said incredulously.
'Nawsuh, I never knew,' she said.
'And you didn't do anything about it,' he said sarcastically.
'Oh, I would have cut his throat at the time, if I could have found him,' she confessed. 'But he left town so I couldn't find him, and I got over it. That was what first turned me to Jesus.'
'That I believe,' he said. 'Now this is the last time I am going to ask you,' he went on. 'What did you have that was so valuable that two smart men got killed for stealing it?'
'They must have got killed for something else,' she said doggedly.
He wiped his face with the palm of his hand. 'Be reasonable, Alberta,' he pleaded with her. 'We have got to establish the motive.'
'I done told you all I know,' she maintained stubbornly.
'Well, since you won't tell me, you are going to have to tell the Grand Jury,' he said, getting to his feet.
15
At nine-nineteen o'clock Dummy was sitting on a stool behind a dilapidated wooden pushcart, watching the entrance of the hotel on 116th Street across from Sweet Prophet's Temple of Wonderful Prayer.
His friend, the pushcart proprietor, was carefully quartering watermelons and arranging the quarters on cracked ice in the bed of the pushcart, beneath the strip of faded tan canvas that would protect them from the sun.
Dummy saw the young man pause in the hotel entrance beneath the faded sign and case the street in both directions. But the young man did not see Dummy.
This young man was lucky that he was not wearing a tan jumper and a long-billed army cap, because all young men of his size and age wearing tan jumpers and long-billed army caps were being picked up by the police that morning.
Instead the young man was wearing a heavy tweed jacket with thick shoulder pads, a wide-brimmed beaver hat pulled low over his forehead and skintight mustard-colored corduroy pants tucked into black and white cowboy boots.
Dummy's little prostitute could have identified him as the one who had cheated her much earlier that morning, but she was not there.
Two dark buxom housewives in cotton shifts, carrying shopping bags loaded with assorted groceries, passed the hotel entrance. The young man raised his beaver hat and grinned at them with a suddenness that was startling. The women stiffened with offended dignity, passed him without a word and then, a few paces farther on, looked at one another and giggled.
Dummy knew instantly that the young man was sky high on marijuana. He grinned to himself. That was going to make it easy.
The young man stepped to the sidewalk and turned in the direction of Seventh Avenue. Dummy got from his stool and followed at about a ten-yard distance. The pushcart proprietor continued to fiddle with his watermelon display without giving him a glance.
The young man walked with an exaggerated swagger, tipping his beaver hat indiscriminately to all the
