"Hello."

"Are you Mrs. Pullen?" a muffled voice asked. It was so blurred she could scarcely distinguish the words.

"Yes."

"There's a dead man out in front of your house."

She could have sworn the voice held a note of laughter.

"Who are you?" she asked suspiciously.

"I ain't nobody."

"It ain't so goddam funny that you got to make a joke about it," she said roughly.

"I ain't joking. If you don't believe me, go to the window and take a look."

"Why the hell didn't you call the police?"

"I reckoned that maybe you wouldn't want them to know."

Suddenly the whole conversation stopped making sense to Mamie. She tried to collect her thoughts, but she was so tired her head buzzed. And all this monkey business of Reverend Short's, and then Val's getting stabbed to death with Big Joe lying dead there in the coffin, left her feeling as though she had stepped off the edge of sanity.

"Why the hell wouldn't I want the police to know?" she asked savagely.

"Because he came from your apartment."

"How do you know he came from my apartment? I ain't seen him in my house tonight."

"I did. I saw him fall out of your window."

"What? Oh, you're talking about Reverend Short. And you sure enough seen him fall?"

"That's what I'm telling you. And he's lying down on the sidewalk in the A amp;P bread basket, dead as all hell."

"That ain't Reverend Short. He didn't even get hurt. He come back upstairs."

The voice didn't say anything, so she went on. "It's Val. Valentine Haines. And he was stabbed to death."

She waited for an answer, but the voice still didn't speak.

"Hello," she said. "Hello! You still there! You're so goddam smart how come you didn't see that?"

She heard a very soft click.

"The bastard hung up," she mumbled to herself, then added, "Now if that ain't almighty strange-"