The detectives stared at him. Neither bothered to answer.
After a moment Slick added sardonically, 'I got a soft heart.'
Grave Digger slapped him with the open palm of his right hand with such force that he spun three feet, straight into Coffin Ed's short right to his belly. They beat him until the doorbell rang, one slapping and the other punching-not hard enough to bruise, just hard enough to hurt.
The room was beginning to empty. For a time it had been crowded.
The ambulance had come and taken Dummy.
An assistant Medical Examiner had arrived and examined the body. He had written on the tag that was later tied to the right big toe:
NAME: Susie Green
AGE: apprx. 26
NATIONALITY: colored
ADDRESS: unknown
DIED: murdered by two gunshot wounds penetrating the back of the thorax, one penetrating the heart
The body had begun its lonely journey to the morgue.
Sergeant Frick had arrived with two assistant detectives. They remained.
A table bad been dragged to the center of the floor, and Sergeant Frick sat behind it. One of the detectives sat beside him with a pad and stylo to take down the preliminary statements.
'I'll talk to the woman first and get her out of the way,' Frick said.
'I had better tell you, she's blind,' Grave Digger said.
The woman pulled her knees beneath her and hunched forward on the chaise longue.
'I'm blind, but I can hear,' she said.
The five policemen stared at her with varying emotions.
Slick, sprawled in an armchair against the inner wall, said menacingly, 'Just keep your mouth shut, bitch.'
His face was swollen, as though he had run into a nest of hornets, and his discolored eyes were almost shut.
Coffin Ed reached over and slapped him across the mouth. Slick didn't move.
'No more of that,' Sergeant Frick said sharply.
Grave Digger leaned against the wall, looking into the distance.
'I want to make a statement,' the woman said in a tired, dead voice. 'Slick killed the Jew.'
Grave Digger pushed from the wall, and his body tensed. The other four policemen froze.
Slick sat forward in his chair. 'Bitch, if you try to frame me, I'll kill you, if it takes all my life to do it,' he threatened in a deadly voice.
'Take him out,' Frick said.
Grave Digger reached down, clamped Slick back of the neck and yanked him to his feet Coffin Ed took him by the arm.
'Let Haines take him-I want you two here,' Frick said.
The second white detective from the Homicide Bureau handcuffed Slick's hands behind him and marched him down the hall toward the kitchen.
'Go on,' Frick told the woman.
'Slick knew that a woman named Alberta Wright hit the numbers for thirty-six thousand dollars,' the woman said.
The detective scratched rapidly on his pad.
'He propositioned Susie to rob her on a half-and-half basis,' she went on. 'He told Susie where she lived and gave him the setup. Susie went down to rob her, but he didn't get a chance. Her man was hanging around outside her window all night. But Susie got a chance to see her hide the money in her mattress before he was chased away. When he got back on Sunday and looked through the window, he saw Rufus there. He went down the street to wait for Rufus to leave, but the Jew came with his moving van and started taking away all of her furniture. So he stole the mattress from the van. But the money wasn't in the mattress.
'He came here Sunday afternoon and told Slick what had happened. Slick thought that either Rufus or the Jew had found the money; he didn't know which. He and Susie left the house and were gone for about an hour. I heard them talking when they came back. They had found out where Rufus lived, but they weren't sure he had found the money, and they didn't know where the Jew had taken the furniture. Slick decided he'd watch Rufus. He told Susie to wait here for a telephone call in case he would need him. He telephoned here Sunday night, sometime between ten-thirty and eleven o'clock. When I heard the phone ring I went to the kitchen and listened in on the extension.
'Slick told Susie that the Jew had searched the furniture and had found the money. He said he had followed Rufus to the Jew's place in the Bronx and had seen the Jew find the money. He said he had trapped the Jew and killed him; he didn't say how he had done it; but he said the Jew had given the money to Rufus and that Rufus had got away. Susie asked him how he had let Rufus get away, and he said Rufus had stabbed him in the shoulder. He told Susie to go to Rufus's place on Manhattan Avenue and get the money from him before he could get into his house and hide it.
'When Slick came home he gave me the clothes he was wearing and told me to get rid of them. Then he went into the bathroom, and bandaged his shoulder and had me fix him three pipes of opium. Before he went to sleep, he told me to wake him up when Susie called. Susie didn't call at all that night, and it was morning when Slick woke up. He thought that Susie had doublecrossed him. He had dressed and had started out to look for Susie when Susie came here. Susie told him he had got the money from Rufus, but it was only Confederate money. Slick didn't believe him.
'Susie had some plan of using the money for a confidence game to beat Sweet Prophet, and Slick agreed. They went out together and came back a couple of hours later with the money they had made. But Slick wasn't satisfied; he still thought Susie was trying to trick him. They left again when Slick went to work-he was a payoff man for the Tia Juana house-and when they came back they brought Dummy. There was a fight, and Slick drew his pistol on Dummy.
'Later on Slick called up a bail-bondsman and had him go Alberta Wright's bail. When the bondsman phoned around eight o'clock to say that Alberta Wright was out, they left the house. They got back a few minutes before the policemen arrived.
She stopped talking suddenly and waited for someone else to speak.
Frick looked from Grave Digger to Coffin Ed.
'Do you believe it?' he asked them.
The detectives exchanged looks.
'I believe it,' Grave Digger said. 'It figures all around.'
'It's just her word,' Frick said. 'She hasn't offered any substantiating evidence.'
'You'll find the clothes he was wearing in my overnight case in the bedroom clothes closet,' she said. 'There's a pocketbook in one of the pockets that might mean something. And you ought to be able to find some kind of evidence in his car-maybe he stepped in some blood or something.'
'Get the bag,' Frick said, but Coffin Ed had already moved.
It contained the suit, with the blood splotch around a small cut on the left shoulder, just as she had said. In the inside coat pocket was an old worn billfold with half a dozen cellophane card holders containing licenses and identifications made out to Abraham Finkelstein.
'This might do it,' Frick said. 'But, as his wife, she won't be allowed to testify against him, and we will need her statement to make it stick.'
'I'm not his wife,' she said in that tired, dead voice. 'I'm just a woman he blinded, beating me with his fists.'
During the embarrassed silence that followed, no one looked at anybody else.
