current of air from the open window, and the muzzles of their pistols leveled in that direction at the height of a man's heart.
The room was empty. They released their breath in a soft sigh and looked at each other again.
'Where do we go from here?' Coffin Ed asked.
Grave Digger nodded toward the kitchen door.
They crossed the room, and Grave Digger opened the door without caution. Their lights focused suddenly on a body lying on the floor.
'Too late,' Grave Digger said in a thick, cottony voice. 'Too late,' he repeated bitterly.
'Maybe not,' Coffin Ed said.
She lay doubled up on her side on the linoleum floor. She still wore the same uniform in which she had been baptized, but now it was black with dirt. Her hands were tied behind her with a cotton clothesline, which had been run down between her feet and wrapped about her ankles. Her feet had been drawn up to the level of her hands. She was gagged with a yellow bath towel, which was knotted at the back of her head. There was a large red stain on the underside, where blood had soaked into it from the corner of her mouth. Blood, seeping slowly from her greasy matted hair, came from a wound in the top of her head. Her eyes were closed, and her face looked peaceful. She looked like she was asleep.
Coffin Ed switched on the overhead light, and both detectives holstered their pistols. Grave Digger knelt beside the body and felt for the pulse. Coffin Ed unknotted the gag. She moaned suddenly when the gag was removed and swallowed her tongue. Coffin Ed reached two fingers down her throat and pulled it up, and blood that had collected there poured from her mouth. Grave Digger found a serving spoon in the cupboard drawer and bent the handle to form a hook. Coffin Ed eased his fingers from her mouth while Grave Digger inserted the spoon to hold her tongue in place and hooked the handle over her upper lip.
They found two small burns on each side of her mouth. There were cigarette butts and the stems of burned paper matches on the floor.
'I'll go and call for the ambulance,' Coffin Ed said, whispering.
'No need for silence now,' Grave Digger said.
He heard Coffin Ed thundering down the stairs as he cut the cotton rope binding her hands and feet and gently straightened out her legs. He found more of the small round burns on the back of her hand. His neck was swollen and corded until the flesh bulged over his collar, and he seemed to have difficulty with his breathing. He lifted her head slightly and inserted a flat pan under her so that it lay level. He didn't turn her over. He didn't touch the wound.
He poked at the cigarette butts with his fingertip. One was the butt of a marijuana cigarette. He didn't bother to pick them up. Finally he got to his feet and looked around, but there was nothing to see.
Coffin Ed returned.
'They're rushing an ambulance from Harlem Hospital,' he said, then after a moment added, 'Anderson said he'd telephone the Homicide Bureau to see what they wanted done.'
'They didn't get anything out of her, so they knocked her in the head,' Grave Digger said in a thick, cottony voice.
'They must have had a lookout staked and saw us coming,' Coffin Ed surmised.
'I don't dig this business,' Grave Digger admitted.
While waiting for the ambulance, they went over the apartment briefly. They saw the signs where Sugar had searched, but nothing to indicate that money had been hidden there. They raised the shade, went out through the bedroom window and climbed the fire escape to the roof. They saw nothing that told them anything. It was easy enough to get down to the street in a dozen places from the flat, adjoining roofs on both 118th and 119th Streets.
'Poking around like this is the long way,' Grave Digger said.
'Then it might not lead anywhere,' Coffin Ed agreed.
They went back into the kitchen and looked at the woman on the floor.
'Either Slick and his muscle boy, or Dummy alone, or all three together,' Coffin Ed said. 'Or else somebody we don't know about.'
Grave Digger didn't reply.
The sound of a siren came through the night.
'If they were hanging around, they're gone now,' Coffin Ed said.
Nothing more was said.
They heard the ambulance draw to a stop down on the street. Steps sounded on the stairs. Two white-clad colored interns came briskly through the front room, one carrying an instrument case. They were followed by a uniformed white driver carrying a rolled-up canvas stretcher.
The interns glanced once at the detectives, then knelt beside the woman and made a quick, cursory examination without opening the instrument case. One pressed the skull gently beside the wound. Alberta moaned.
'Is it bad?' Coffin Ed asked.
'Can't say with concussion,' the intern replied without looking up. 'Only the X rays will tell. Stretcher,' he said to the driver.
The driver unrolled the stretcher and laid it on the floor parallel to the body, and the interns worked the edge underneath her side. Then, while one intern held her head, the driver and the other intern rolled her over gently on her back onto the stretcher.
'You want something?' the intern asked Coffin Ed.
'Just get her to talk,' Grave Digger said in his thick, cottony voice.
'Talking is not good for a concussion case,' the intern said.
'Good or not,' Grave Digger said brutally.
All three of the ambulance crew looked at him.
The first intern said dispassionately, 'All you cops are heartless bastards.'
Grave Digger let out his breath. 'It's hard to say who's heartless and who isn't,' he said. 'There's a woman hurt, and there's a killer loose. She can tell us who he is before someone else gets it.'
No one answered him.
The driver and one of the interns picked up the stretcher and the other intern, carrying the instrument cases led the way out. The detectives followed.
With the arrival of the ambulance, the tenement had come alive. Tenants crowded into the hallways and peered from open doors.
'Get back into your holes and thank God it isn't you,' Coffin Ed said to a group of them.
The window-watcher was waiting in her doorway. Her red eyes peered from a gray face, on which there was a look of consternation.
'I don't see how she could have got in without me seeing her,' she said, clutching at Grave Digger's sleeve. 'I hardly left the window at all.'
He shook her off and passed without replying.
The ambulance was rolling when they got into their car.
'I got a hunch we're just getting started on this thing,' Grave Digger said as he unhooked the radio telephone and dialed the precinct station.
'We're going uptown to Five Fifty-five Edgecombe Drive, Slick Jenkins' apartment,' he told Lieutenant Anderson. 'If anything comes in, you know where to reach us.'
'No, wait where you are for the sergeant from Homicide,' Anderson directed. 'He wants to work this out.'
'There isn't time,' Grave Digger said.
'Wait anyway,' Anderson ordered.
Grave Digger cradled the telephone and started the motor.
'Heartless,' he repeated to himself as though it worried him.
