flashy green sedan parked at the curb. There were blood splotches on the back of the driver's seat and on the steering wheel. The drops grew into heavy blobs on the sidewalk leading toward the darkness of a public lavatory and the black-dark jungle of the park beyond. The lavatory was closed and locked for the night, and the trail of blood led around it into the overgrown foliage. Police flashlights stabbed the pools of darkness in the dense undergrowth.
The usual Harlem crowd had collected on the sidewalk and the street, and the cops had difficulty keeping them back.
'Here it is!' a cop announced.
It was curled deep within a clump of shrubbery where it had crawled to hide.
'Stand back! Get back!' a police corporal ordered.
'I know him; I knows that man,' a big black man in working clothes said excitedly. 'He be George Clayborne.'
'And who be you?' the corporal asked.
'I be the janitor of that there house across the street. That there is where George Clayborne lives.'
'Take his name,' the corporal ordered; he seemed to have put himself in charge. 'Get a statement; and the rest of you get some statements from these other people. We can't do no more until the Medical Examiner and the Homicide men arrive.'
'That be his car there,' the janitor informed the young cop who was taking his statement.
The cop opened the front door and found what looked like bloodstains on the steering wheel and front seat.
He shouted for the corporal.
A skinny little black girl, with ribbon-tied braids sticking out from her head at all conceivable angles, looked about carefully until she found the biggest cop. She sidled up and tugged his sleeve.
He gave a start and clawed at his pistol. All these wild-looking colored people had set his nerves on edge. When he saw who had touched him, he turned bright red.
'What do you want?' he shouted angrily.
The little girl looked up at him through big brown solemn eyes. 'I seen who done it,' she said.
The big cop gave another start. 'What?' He wasn't sure he had heard right.
'It was a white lady. I seen her with the knife.'
'White lady!' The big white cop rejected that. 'Go home and go to bed; you don't know what you're talking about.'
'I seen her with the knife,' the little girl insisted. 'It had blood all over it, and she was all in white like a ghost.'
'What's that?' the big slow-witted cop barked. 'You mean dressed in white. Then she wasn't no white lady.'
'Nawsuh, she were just dressed in white, is all,' the little girl said stolidly. 'I seen which way she went.'
'Come on, we'll get after her,' the big cop said, all for action. 'We'll go in the car and you show us which way she went.'
He pushed his way through the crowd to his car, where his partner sat behind the wheel, smoking.
'This little girl saw the murderer,' he said. 'She's going to show us where she went.'
They put the little girl between them. She pointed down 112th Street toward Eighth Avenue.
The car roared down the long block with the siren wide open and burst into Eighth Avenue at sixty miles an hour.
The little girl craned her neck and pointed suddenly toward a white-clad figure walking rapidly down Eighth Avenue in the direction of 110th Street. 'There she!' she cried.
The patrol car was halfway across the avenue, traveling at the speed of one mile a minute. The driver stood on the brakes and wheeled the car at a sheer right angle as though piloting a supersonic jet plane in an open sky. The scream of tires blended with the scream of the siren, and a northbound car on Eighth Avenue sheered off to the left side of the street and crashed head on into a southbound car, which was sliding sidewise on locked brakes as a result of the patrol car crossing in front of it. The patrol car hit the curb broadside with the edges of its wheels, started turning over, scraped against an iron light post that knocked it back on four wheels, hit a row of garbage cans and knocked them across the wide sidewalk through the plate glass windows of a supermarket. The crash of metal on metal and tin against glass rended the night with ear-splitting sound, and people were seen to duck for cover as far away as Seventh Avenue.
Across the street the white-clad figure started to run, but the patrol car hadn't stopped moving. It slued across the street, the driver bleeding from a gash in his cheek caused by broken window glass, and shimmied to a shaky stop alongside the running woman.
The cops were out and on the street before the car stopped, and the big cop made a running tackle and brought the woman down. She landed on her right thigh, kicking back with her left heel, and caught the cop smack in the mouth. By the time the other cop had rounded the car, she was getting to her feet, and she greeted him with a backhanded blow in the eye.
She was a big strong woman, as quick as a cat, and she fought the two cops as though she had gone stark raving crazy.
The quick crowd gathered as usual, and they saw a good fight.
Finally the cops got her flat on her stomach with her hands crossed behind her. The big cop sat astride her legs and the driver knelt on her neck while they snapped on the handcuffs. Before letting her up, they searched her, to the delight of the spectators, and found two knives in her uniform pocket.
One of the knives was sticky with coagulated blood.
They released her and stood up, standing away at a respectful distance as she scrambled to her feet.
'Why did you do it?' the big cop barked.
'Do what?' she asked sullenly.
If evil looks could have killed, both cops would have dropped dead in their tracks.
'Kill him,' the big cop persisted.
'Kill who?' she said.
'This is the knife,' the driver stated.
'What knife?' she said.
'Give me the knife,' the big cop said to the driver. 'You're dripping your own blood on it.'
The driver passed him the knife. He wrapped it in his handkerchief.
Intense black faces watched this performance with profound interest.
The big cop decided on a new tactic. 'What did you run for, then?'
'Everybody was running,' she said. 'I thought the world was coming to an end.'
'Resisting arrest,' the big cop went on. 'Why did you do that if you're not guilty? The police are your friends.'
This got a well-deserved laugh from the appreciative audience, but both she and the cop were in dead earnest.
'How did I know you was the cops?' she said. 'I heard the noise and thought the judgment day was here; and somebody grabbed me by the legs. I thought it were the devil. You'd resist, too, if the devil had you by the legs on judgment day.'
'You're not that simple-minded,' the big cop said. 'Come on, let's take her in,' he said to the driver.
By then the patrol cars had moved over from Morningside Drive, and screaming people were running down the streets toward the scene of the new excitement.
'I doubt if this car will run,' the driver said.
'Here comes the wagon, anyway,' the big cop announced, pointing toward the Black Maria pushing through the crowd.
The drivers of the wrecked cars were complaining to the corporal.
'Sue the city,' he advised them.
Residents were helping themselves to provisions from the smashed showcase of the supermarket. The stone-blind cops didn't see a thing.
