same time, one in front and one on each side so I’d have to keep turning my head to answer. One would fire a question at me and before I could get my mouth open there’d be two more.
“Where’d you go the night before the fire?”
“How do I know? To the movies, I think.”
“Your landlady said she heard you come in around two a.m.
“Where’d you go last night before they picked you up?”
“I told you—“
“Do a lot of running; around at night, don’t you?”
“In a hell of a hurry to get to that fire, weren’t you? Gulick says you took off from there like a ruptured duck. But just why was it you never did even go near the first one?”
And then, after about an hour, there was an abrupt change in the attack. Buck left the room, and when he came back he had two more men with him. They were prisoners, because I remembered seeing them upstairs in the cells. He lined the three of us up about four feet apart in a row and then got in the line himself. Tate and the man I didn’t know sat in chairs along the other wall, not saying anything and just watching intently. I kept my eye on the Sheriff. He was up to something, and I’d seen enough of him by this time to know it would be dangerous.
“All right, not a word out of any of you,” he said, and went over and opened the door. I could feel the tension building up.
“We’re ready,” he said to somebody in the hall. He stepped outside. I watched the door, conscious of the sweat breaking out on my face. Then he came back, leading someone by the arm. It was the old blind Negro, Uncle Mort.
You could feel the whole room tighten up. The two prisoners were watching the Negro, not knowing what it was all about but scared. I watched him and the Sheriff, feeling all the eyes on me and trying to guess what was coming. The Sheriff led him down the line, stopping him in front of each man about three feet away and facing him.
It was the stillness that made it bad. Nobody said a word. They stood for maybe a minute in front of the first man, and then moved to the next one. It was completely fantastic. It was a police line-up for a blind man.
I was third in line, after the two prisoners. I watched the expressionless black face and the sightless eyes behind the glasses. What was he doing? Listening? Smelling? Or could he actually see? I remembered the way he had tracked me there in the bank. And then I began to get it. It was the silence which tipped me off. He was listening to the breathing of each man when the Sheriff stopped him.
He stopped in front of me. We were facing each other in exactly the same way we had in the bank, and from the same arm’s-length distance. It was insane. It would make you scream if you didn’t have good nerves. They were trying to prove I had held up the bank, and I was standing right there in the midst of them facing the very man who’d watched me do it—except that he couldn’t see. But was there something characteristic about my breathing that would identify me? My nose was broken; was that it? I waited, sweating. He moved on to Buck.
Then they were coming back to me again, and I could see it. They weren’t trying to identify my—they were trying to make me break. It was just psychology. A thing like that wouldn’t hold up in court, but if they could crack my nerve and make me confess, that would. There’d be any one of a hundred signals he could give the Negro to tip him when he was in front of the right man.
They stopped in front of me. The Negro’s face was blank as death. “Hit sound like him,” he said then.
“You sure, Uncle Mort?” the Sheriff asked.
“Suah sound like him. Got a kind of bleep, like a teakettle.”
“You’ve heard it before?”
“Heered it twice befoah. One day about three weeks back, befoah the bank got held up, an’ then the next time whilst I’m a-standin’ there an’ the man holdin’ up the bank right in front of me.”
“And that first time, there was a fire that day too, wasn’t there? And nobody in the bank except this man?”
“Yessuh. That right.