He was Mister Louise, Mammy’s husband. He had been picking up a hot little brownskin waitress at the Fischer Cafeteria next to the 125th Street railroad station every Saturday night since the new year began.

But Mammy Louise had got a bulldog. It was a six-year-old bulldog of a dirty white color with a mouth big enough to let in full-grown cats. It sat on its haunches directly in front of Mister Louise’s shinily shod feet and stared up into his desperate face with a lidded, unblinking look. Its pink mouth was wide open as it panted in the steamy heat; its red tongue hung down its chest. There was a big wet spot on the floor where it had been drooling as though it would like nothing better than a hunk of Mister Louise’s fat black meat.

“He wants us to help him,” Coffin Ed whispered.

“And get ourselves chawed up by that dog instead of him.”

Mammy Louise looked up from the stove where she had been stirring a pot. She was fatter than Mister Louise, but not quite as tall. She wore an old woolen bathrobe over an old jersey dress, under which were layers of warm woolen underclothing. Over the bathrobe she wore a black knitted shawl; her head was protected by a man’s beaver hat with a turned-up brim, and her feet were encased in fur-lined woodsmen’s boots.

She was a Geechy, born and raised in the swamps south of Tater Patch, South Carolina. Geechies are a mélange of runaway African slaves and Seminole Indians, native to the Carolinas and Florida. Their mother tongue is a mixture of African dialects and the Seminole language; and she spoke English with a strange, indefinable accent that sounded somewhat similar to a conference of crows.

“What you two p’licemens whispering about so seriously?” she asked suspiciously.

It took a moment before they could piece together what she said.

“We got a bet,” Grave Digger replied with a straight face.

“Naw we haven’t,” Coffin Ed denied.

“You p’licemens,” she said scornfully. “Gamblin’ an’ carryin’ on an’ whippin’ innocent folkses’ heads with your big pistols.”

“Not if they’re innocent,” Grave Digger contradicted.

“Don’t tell me,” she said argumentatively. “I has seen you.” She curled her thick, sensuous lips. “Whippin’ grown men about as if they was children. Mister Louise wouldn’t stand for it,” she added, looking slyly from her husband’s desperate face to the slobbering bulldog. “Get up, Mister Louise, and show these p’licemens how you captured them train robbers that time.”

Mister Louise looked at her gratefully and started to his feet. The bulldog raised up and growled a warning; Mister Louise slumped back into his seat.

Mammy Louise winked her off eye at the detectives. “Mister Louise ain’t so pokey tonight,” she explained. “He just want to set here and keep me company.”

“So we noticed,” Coffin Ed said.

Mister Louise stared longingly at the long-barreled, nickel-plated .38 caliber revolvers sticking from the two detectives’ shoulder holsters.

They heard the front door to the store open and bang shut. Feet stamped. A whisky-thick voice called, “Hey, Mammy Louise, come out here and give me a pot of them frozen chitterlings.”