Night and Fear

“Gee, the coffee in this dump is sure rank!” Tom Keogh thought to himself, putting down the cup and running a dubious tongue about the lining of his mouth. The stuff tasted as if they’d lowered one bean on a thread into the whole boiler, held it there a minute, then pulled it out again. And if he didn’t like it he could leave it there and go somewhere else. They didn’t care.

Which was why he sat there nursing it, with both hands around the hot cup. There wasn’t any place else he could go, whether he liked it or not. This mug of so-called java had taken his last nickel. The jitney was still in his pocket, the etiquette of cafeterias being what it is, but that punched-out 5 on his check meant it didn’t belong to him any more.

Outside it was raw and drizzling. In here there was steam heat — a little of it over in the corner by the radiator, where he was. As long as he could make the coffee last he could stay.

He took another gulp, and this time the flavor was that of an old inner-tube soaked in boiling water. It was scalding hot, which was all you could say.

“That guy over there,” he told himself dully, “doesn’t seem to mind it. He’s going back for more.”

The only other customer in the place looked too well-dressed to be drinking terrible coffee in a joint like this. But he had emptied his first cup hastily and gone back to the counter for another. He left the first one where it was, wet spoon sticking up out of the hefty sugar bowl that each greasy table was provided with. When he came back again with the fresh cup he sat down at a different table.

Keogh, watching idly, saw him plunge his spoon into the new sugar bowl, stir it around vigorously, and bring up a little.

“He wants his sugar from underneath, to be sure no dust has gotten on it,” Keogh thought, and quit watching for a while. He had his own troubles to think about.

An abrupt movement brought his eyes back that way again in less than two minutes. The guy was on his way back to the counter for a third cup! The second one stayed on the table, still about a quarter full, to judge by the steam threading up from it.

“Maybe his sense of taste is shot!” Tom Keogh thought. On the way back to a table, the fellow shot a glance over him, as if to see whether he was being watched or not. Keogh dropped his eyes. He wasn’t afraid to be caught watching, but people don’t like to be stared at. He didn’t himself.

When he looked again, the other had chosen still a third table to go to with his new cup. Again he stirred up the contents of the sugar bowl until it threatened to overflow the edges.

This time Keogh watched him closely when he put the cup to his lips. He gulped as though he couldn’t get rid of it quickly enough, but there was no real enjoyment on his face. A wry expression, like there had been on Keogh’s own, accompanied the act.

“Why, he doesn’t really want to drink it; he’s only pretending to!” Keogh exclaimed to himself. And in addition, he saw, the man was beginning to look worried, tense.

A minute later he saw this peculiar coffee fiend move his cup out beyond the edge of the table, look to see if the counterman was watching, and then deliberately tilt it and let most of the liquid trickle noiselessly to the floor. The counterman went back behind the steam kitchen just then. The night manager, up front by the cash register, had his face buried in a paper and wasn’t giving attention to anybody unless they tried to get out the door without paying.

The man with the coffee cup slipped quickly out of his seat and moved to a fourth table, cup and all, this time without getting a refill. Again he churned the sugar bowl hectically, as though he had a gnawing sweet tooth. But the worry on his face was beginning to look like dismay.

Keogh got it finally, just about as quickly as any one else would have, barring a professional detective.

“He isn’t interested in drinking coffee!” he told himself knowingly. “He’s looking for something in those sugar bowls, working his way around the room table by table!”

He didn’t care much for sugar himself. He’d only been interested in getting something warm inside him when he first sat down. He’d just scraped a little sugar lightly off the top of the bowl. Now he picked up his spoon second time and gripped it purposefully. No reason why he shouldn’t join in the treasure hunt himself, and try to find out what the fellow was after.

Maybe it was only a love note left for him by some sweetie with a jealous husband, using a sugar bowl for a post office. The other customer didn’t look like a ladies’ man, though, and there were better ways than that.

Maybe it was something else, something that wouldn’t be any use to him, Keogh, even if he did find it — a little packet of cocaine, for instance. The guy didn’t have that pasty look, though. Ugly and tough and healthy described him better. And then again, maybe it wasn’t even in here, whatever it was. Maybe this wasn’t the place where it was hid at all. Still, there was nothing like taking a crack at it for oneself.

He folded back the metal flap in the lid of the bowl. Waiting until he was sure the other guy wasn’t looking at him, he spaded his spoon deeply in. It hit the bottom. He stirred surreptitiously, as he’d seen the other do. The grains of sugar swirled, coruscated under the light, gleamed, twinkled, all but sparkled. Wait — they had sparkled, here and there!

Little lumps showed up, a whole coil of them. He dredged one out with the tip of his spoon, and all the rest came after it. Sugar rolled off, the lumps caught fire one by one, and he was holding a necklace of priceless diamonds dangling in the air!

For just a split second the light got to it, in all its glory, and he forgot to breathe in or out. Then instinctively he whipped it out of sight into his lap and crouched protectively forward above it, hiding it with the upper part of his body.

He knew enough not to take time off even to stuff it into his pocket. He just had time to slap down the flap of the bowl, before the searching man looked over at him. Had he seen him fish the diamonds out? Keogh looked sleepily down at the floor, seemed to be drowsing over his coffee. The other fellow moved again. Now he was just one table away, facing Keogh.

“He has a gun on him,” Keogh thought. “Ten to one he has. He didn’t come after a thing like that without one. If he catches on I’ve already found it, he’ll use it on me first, and ask for his trinket back later. If I get up and try to walk out, he may suspect what happened. But if I wait, he’ll run out of tables — and then he’ll be sure!”

It was hot, of course. Either smuggled or stolen. And it was pretty easy to guess what must have happened. The other had had the necklace on him earlier in the day — no longer ago than that, for the sugar in these bowls was renewed about once every twenty-four hours.

He’d found out he was being shadowed by dicks along the mangy avenue outside. He had to get rid of the gems in a hurry, knowing he was apt to be pinched and caught red-handed with them at any moment. Afraid that if he jumped into a cab or car he’d be overhauled and searched before he could get to some place he’d be safe, he’d popped in here, the first doorway that offered itself, and cached the necklace in one of the sugar bowls in the instant he had before they sized him up through the glass front.

Then when they’d made their pinch and hauled him away, he was clean. They’d had no evidence on which they could hold him, so he’d gotten himself sprung almost at once. Making good and sure he wasn’t tailed a second time, he’d come back here to get his loot. It was a desperate expedient, but not as bad as dropping the diamonds down a sidewalk grating or letting them be found on him.

He’d had to hide the thing in such a hurry, with his eyes on the plate-glass front, that he probably wasn’t sure now just which table it had been. Or else he thought the bowls had gotten transposed during the course of the day’s hash-slinging. Right now he must be sweating blood!

But Keogh would be doing more than sweating it. He would be bleeding it from a couple of bullet punctures if he didn’t get out of here pretty fast, he knew. He’d located the bulge now, under the guy’s left arm. It was not very noticeable, but it wasn’t just made by a pack of old letters, either!

As for turning the necklace back, walking up to the guy and saying, “Here, I found this and you seem to be hunting for it. I’m hard up. Is it worth forty or fifty bucks to you—” He wasn’t that much of a fool.

He might get the fifty, sure, on loan for about five minutes. Then he’d get a couple of slugs in addition at the first dark corner he came to after leaving, just as insurance that he really kept his mouth shut. No, thanks!

The other man had finished dredging the tureen at the table where he was, and Keogh’s was the next in line. Fortunately, the counterman had showed up again, and the hunter didn’t seem to want to make the move without any excuse. It was easy to see the people in this place weren’t in on it with him, and he didn’t want to arouse their curiosity or suspicion.

By now he apparently couldn’t stomach any more of their putrid coffee, so this time for an excuse he got up and went over to the water filter. And when he came back, it was going to be to Keogh’s table.

The riskiest place to carry the diamonds would be the safest in the long run, Tom Keogh decided quickly. Pockets were a dead giveaway, and it would take too long to put them in his sock. The water ran out of that cooler into the glass awfully fast, and the outfit was some kind of polished metal that reflected the whole room behind the fellow’s back almost as well as a mirror. Keogh couldn’t make any suspicious moves. The necklace was bunched up in Keogh’s lap, and he had one hand sheltering it sidewise from observation. He gathered it into the hollow of that hand, then tucked it in and folded his fingers down over it without moving another muscle of his body.

Then he yawned, as if coming out of his lethargy. He brought his arms up, elbows out, and stretched in his chair. He kept the backs of his hands turned toward the gunman at the filter. Then he opened his clenched fingers a little, with his hands up in full sight. Not much, but enough to guide the string of jewels in the right direction.

His cuff was baggy and shapeless, as wide open as a firemen’s net. He felt the thing go wriggling down his wrist like a cold, rough-edged little snake, and his sleeve swallowed it. It fell all the way down to the crook of his arm, bringing up against his biceps.

He got a good grip on the bottom of his cuff with that same hand, doubling it back on itself and tucking it shut tight around his wrist. Then he brought his arms down again, and yawned.

The necklace dropped right back down his sleeve again, of course, but it couldn’t get out. There wasn’t any slack left in the cloth now, the way he was holding it. The jewels stayed in. The awkward position of his fingers was barely noticeable, and then only if you looked closely down at the hand. Most people carry their fingers curving loosely inward a bit anyway, not stretched out stiffly like an Egyptian bas-relief.

The hard guy was coming toward the table with his glass of water. Tom Keogh scraped his chair back, picked up his check with his free hand and sauntered aimlessly toward the cashier. He put the check down, reached in his pants and dug out his last nickel, dropping it on top of the slip of cardboard. The cashier, interrupted halfway down Walter Winchell’s column, gave him a dirty look for staying that long on a five-cent check and banged the coin into the till.

Out on the sidewalk, Keogh turned his head slightly and glanced back in. This time the guy was not messing the sugar bowl at the table Keogh had just left. Instead he was staring intently at it as if something about it seemed to show it had already been searched.

Keogh struck a quicker gait, but had hardly gotten started when the voice behind him stopped him with a sickening fear. He’d only gotten one doorway down the street, but luckily that was a good dark one.

“Just a minute, buddy! Hey, you! Take it easy!”

There was a feline softness about the voice, almost a purr, that was somehow more menacing than the loudest shout. The fellow stood revealed for a moment outside the lighted cafeteria doorway, as Keogh turned, then suddenly was standing next to him, without seeming to have moved at all.

“Trouble you for a light, buddy?” he asked, still purring.

Keogh knew better than to run for it. He tapped his pocket halfheartedly. “Didn’t they have one in there?”

“Couldn’t say, buddy, didn’t ask them,” was the answering drawl. “Lemme help you look, I’m good at finding things. Just move back a little closer to this doorway, out of the drafts.”

There was a maddening quality about that smooth, silky tone of voice. Perhaps it was intentional, to provoke men to their deaths. Keogh, goaded, would have grappled with him then and there, but the gun had come out.

“What is this, a holdup?” he asked bitterly. “I haven’t anything on me. Why don’tcha pick some one that—”

The other’s pronunciation became even slower and softer.

“Ju-ust relax, buddy. Don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for. There’s nothing to get excited about.”

Keogh didn’t argue the point. The other had him now with his back pressed flat against the closed doorway behind him. The gunman held his gun hand back a little, and hidden close up against his own body. You couldn’t have noticed what was going on from a yard away.

He threw a quick look up one way, then down the other, but too quickly for Keogh to take advantage of it. Keogh wasn’t in a chancey mood, anyway. Diamonds don’t cure bullet wounds.

With his free hand the guy started in at Keogh’s outside breast pocket and worked his way all over him. He didn’t miss a seam. Keogh was holding his cuff in now by no more than three fingers, letting the others hang stiffly downward. Every second the stones felt as though they were going to come slipping out of their own weight and clash to the pavement beside him. They were bunched there right at the mouth of his cuff, held in only by the slightest of pressure.

“Hunh!” the guy laughed shortly, when not even an Indian-head penny had shown up anywhere in Keogh’s clothes. “You’re sure flat, all right!” he said, with contempt.

He backed away a step. “Now bend down, undo your kicks, and step out of them!” he ordered.

Keogh did so, desperately hanging on to his cuff and only using two fingers of that hand to do the unlacing. The other didn’t seem to notice in the darkness. He snatched up one shoe, then the other, shook them out, tossed them back.

“All right, stick your leg up against the side of the doorway and hoist up the bottom of your pants!” he snapped, crisply now.

He examined the top of Keogh’s sock, feeling for bulges. Then he repeated with the other leg. He wasn’t missing a trick. The sweat stood out on Keogh’s forehead like raindrops.

The stick-up guy stood there for a full minute, swearing deep down in his throat. He searched every spot but the right one — Keogh’s bare left hand. Keogh took a chance, just to see if the other would give himself away.

“What is it y’ think I’ve got?” he asked querulously.

But the searcher was too cagey to be tripped. “I’m an anatomy student and I just wanted to see what makes you tick!” he snarled. He was probably remembering that there were still a couple of tables in there with sugar bowls he hadn’t searched. And somebody else might walk in while he was standing out here.

“Keep your mouth shut about this if you know what’s good for you,” he warned, and turned to go back to the cafeteria.

At that instant the laws of gravity finally had their way. The heavy jewelry at last found the outlet it had been looking for. There was a prismatic flash at Keogh’s wrist. The diamonds rolled down over his hand like a jet of water and fell at his feet, glittering even in the faint illumination from the corner arc light. Instantly he put one stockinged sole over the necklace and blotted it out.

The tough guy, still within arm’s length, turned and looked back over his shoulder. “Here, catch,” he said jeeringly. “Just to prove that wasn’t a holdup.” Then he flipped a quarter at Keogh. His own footstep just then must have covered the slight sound the necklace made in falling, for he seemed not to have heard it.

The coin, though, fell far more noisily, and went rolling out of reach. The other went back to the cafeteria without waiting to see Keogh pick it up. Which was a good thing, for Keogh couldn’t have moved without uncovering what lay under his foot.

Sweat dripped from his bent-down face onto the sidewalk as he crouched, shoveled on his shoes, scooped the stones into his pocket, and made tracks away from there, without bothering to look for the coin that only a few short minutes before would have been such a life-saver to him.

He was remembering that, although he’d gotten away with it just now, there were still those two other guys inside — the counterman and the cashier — either of whom might possibly have seen him take something out of the sugar bowl and might mention it if this guy asked them when he went in again. A thing that didn’t occur to him until too late was that the quarter he had left lying on the sidewalk would be a dead giveaway if the guy came out looking for him a second time, and spotted it there. Broke, without a red cent on him, and he left two-bits lying there without even stopping to pick it up? A sure sign he’d had those diamonds on him and wanted to get away in a hurry!

Keogh got away from that side of the street, cutting across it diagonally to the next corner. Just before turning up the nearest side street he looked back, from behind the shelter of an empty glass show case on the corner. The hard egg had already come outside again, much faster than he’d gone in.

So one of them had already told him! Maybe they’d only seen Keogh messing up the sugar in his bowl, but that was all the other needed to know.

Keogh saw him stoop and pick something up. The quarter! And now he knew that he’d betrayed himself after all, in spite of the marvelous run of luck he’d had until now. That quarter had been lying in full sight. Keogh couldn’t have helped finding it if he’d looked at all.

Now the man with the gun knew beyond the shadow of a doubt who had found those diamonds!

Keogh didn’t linger there to watch what his next move would be. He lit down the side street as if devils pursued him, hugging the shadow of the building line, his breath rattling like dry leaves, until he’d put blocks between them. His pursuer must have turned the other way for there wasn’t a sign of his being followed.

But the fellow knew what Keogh looked like now. That was the worst of it! He’d be on the look-out for him, and Keogh might run into him when he least expected it. From to-night on his life would be a hunted, haunted misery, with never a moment’s peace.

If he kept the necklace, they’d be after him until they got it back. And if he turned it over to the police, they’d still be after him anyway, until they got even with him. Asking the police for protection wouldn’t be any good. They didn’t worry their heads about drifters like him. Even if they offered it to him, he couldn’t spend the rest of his life sleeping in some precinct-house basement.

And furthermore, if he went near them with these jewels, they might implicate him in the theft. Certainly they’d never believe his story of finding a necklace like that in a hash-house sugar bowl. Nobody would. They’d take him for a go-between who was double-crossing the rest.

Without money, friends, influence, anything to back him up, he’d have a hell of a time clearing himself — and he might not be able to at all. He was beginning to wish he’d never found the thing. For a moment he was tempted to drop it in an ash can. But that wouldn’t do any good either. He was stuck with it, and he had to stay with it, come what might.

He trudged along, taking a precautionary look behind him at every crossing, skulking slowly Boweryward. Misguided people think that there is a sort of birdlike freedom of movement that goes with destitution and vagrancy. They’re entirely wrong. A man with a dollar or two in his pockets has the run of the entire city, no matter what the time of night. No cop can tell him where to go or where not to, provided he minds his business. But a down-and-outer is severely restricted to a few neighborhoods if he wants to avoid questioning and detention after dark.

The parks are closed to him, the police clearing them after midnight. Up on the better thoroughfares like Fifth, Madison and Park avenues, he is liable to be picked up for vagrancy or panhandling. Even on the less savory ones like Third, Sixth and Ninth he is apt to be run in as a suspicious character. There remain only a few refuges for the homeless in New York, in the early-morning hours. Those are the subways, the flop-houses for some who have the price, and the Bowery.

Keogh didn’t have a nickel to get into the subway. Anyway, helpers were being rounded up over there as an aftermath of several recent lush-murders. So there was only the Bowery left, and the Bowery was an old friend of his. He had tramped it many a night.

He knew just where to go, even at this hour, to raise two-bits on the metal links that joined these stones he had found — enough to enable him to hole up in a room in one of the twenty-five-cent “hotels.” That would get him off the streets before they caught up with him. He was sure the links must be silver, at the very least. Maybe they were even gold silvered over, or even platinum. He knew better than to show the stones themselves. That was asking for swift and sudden death, on the Bowery.

When Keogh was opposite City Hall Park, he cut across from the West Side, where the thing had happened, and plunged into the blackness under the sheltering El pillars of Park Row. A few blocks north was the Bowery. But he had to find some way of loosening the stones from their setting before he reached it. Too many prying eyes might be watching up there.

He stopped outside the wire-mesh grating of the powerhouse of the Third Avenue El, on the west side of Park Row. The attendant on the early-morning shift there knew him by sight and had exchanged a word or two with him before now, when he came close to the grating to get a moment’s breath of air and found Keogh standing on the other side of it watching the machinery.

Keogh called to him. “Say, Mac, have you got a small pair of pliers I could borrow for a minute? Give ’em right back to you.”

“What d’you want with ’em?” the machinist asked suspiciously.

Keogh thought fast. “There’s a nail in my shoe killing me,” he said. “I can’t stand it any more. Just gimme something so I can break it off short.”

The mechanic dug a small pair of wire-cutters out of his overalls and passed them through the grating. “Don’t walk off with them now,” he warned, “if that’s what you’re thinking of, because you won’t get anything on them.”

“I’ll be back with them in a jiffy.” Keogh limped artistically out of sight into the nearest doorway. He took out of his pocket a folded newspaper that he’d picked from a trash can, spreading it across his lap. There was hardly any light to see by, but he couldn’t risk doing this where it was any brighter.

He had to feel the links with the tips of his fingers, hardly able to see them. The stones were fortunately all hung from one main chain that fastened at the back of the neck. The metal, silver or whatever it was, was soft and the clippers severed it easily.

Even so, it was almost a half hour before he showed up in front of the lighted powerhouse grating once more to give them back. The machinist’s expression showed plainly that he’d been thinking the worst in the meantime.

“What’d you do, try to trade ’em in for a shot of ‘smoke’?” he wanted to know sullenly. “Now don’t come around here no more, understand?”

But Keogh didn’t intend to, if he could help it. All he wanted was a sanctuary, to get in out of the open for a while, where they couldn’t find him. Those denuded links of gleaming metal carefully collected in a scrap of newspaper in his pocket would be a means toward that. The loosened diamonds, wrapped up in another piece of paper, were in his other pocket. Once he got into some kind of a room, he could think of a better hiding place for them.

He went walking up Park Row with almost enough wealth in his shabby coat to have bought the street out, and went into the Federal Bar. Unfortunately the pawnshops weren’t open now, but they knew him there in the Federal. He wasn’t a drinker, but they’d let him sit in the back until closing time more than once on a cold night.

There were only two or three glassy-eyed barflies left at the bar at this hour, but he didn’t want even them for an audience. He went all the way to the end and signaled the barman.

The latter sensed a touch, or an attempt to promote a free drink. “Whaddya want?” he asked without moving.

“I wanna show you something,” Keogh answered in as low a voice as would serve his purpose. Even so, the three barflies, glassy-eyed though they were, turned and gandered down at him to see what it was.

Keogh turned his back to them when the barman had joined him and nervously took the wad of newspaper out of his pocket. He was under a strain, trying too hard not to let the barflies see, and worrying too much about whether the barman would let him have fifty cents on what he was going to show him. Without realizing what he was doing he had opened the wrong package! The barman, snapping from professional boredom to electrified incredulity, had a glimpse of fifteen or more loosely pressed diamonds in the hollow of the newspaper before Keogh quickly bunched it up again.

The barman’s eyes were like half moons. “Wait a minute; what was that again? Lemme see, don’t be in such a hurry!”

But Keogh, his face pale at the ghastly blunder, had already crammed them back in his pocket. He didn’t attempt to take the other package out now. The least spiffed of the barflies took a tentative step up toward him, to see what had made the bartender goggle so.

Keogh backed away toward the door. “Look real, don’t they?” he stammered. “Just glass — found ’em in an ash can just now. Well, so long!”

“Lemme have a closer look. I can tell you if they’re glass or not,” the barman said craftily. Then as Keogh turned and bolted out he called after him futilely, “C’mon, have a drink on the house! What’s your rush?” Trying to get him cockeyed and kill him if the stones turned out to be real!

Keogh hurried away from the place, cursing himself. Now he had to get off the streets in a hurry. He hadn’t kidded that barman any. Unlike pearls, it wasn’t very hard to tell real diamonds from glass, even at a brief glance. The fellow would talk his head off within the next few hours to any one that came into the place. And the wrong guy might just happen to come in!

Keogh plunged into the next dive, a block up, the Silver Flash. He was known in there, too. The place was empty under the pair of dismal, icy-white reflectors that gave it its name. This time he didn’t make any mistake in opening the right package, but his hands were shaking so he could hardly unfold the paper. A man could have all the wealth of Golconda on him and still remain as broke and homeless as ever, he was finding out.

The new barman studied the links and remained unimpressed. “What good are these to me?” he asked. And then, inevitably, “Where’d you get ’em?”

“A guy gave ’em to me,” Keogh improvised. “Lemme have fifty cents on ’em just until morning. They’re silver,” he added desperately.

“How do I know they’re silver? I ain’t in the loan business, anyway.” The barman handed the outspread paper back.

The owner had come out from the back while they were talking. He picked up one of the pieces now and looked at it, with a sort of remote professional interest, as though he had once been a jeweler himself or a jeweler’s assistant. Then he looked more closely, taking the whole paperful under the light to study them better.

When he came back he said to the bartender, with crafty casualness, “Naw, it’s not silver, but give him fifty cents anyway, Joe.” They exchanged a look, and the bartender punched the register. The owner had just seen 14K stamped on the back of one of the links and knew it was white gold.

Keogh, outside with money in his hand, took a deep breath. Now at last sanctuary was within reach! And none too soon. He was giving them — by them he meant the gang involved in the original theft, for, of course, there were more of them implicated than just that one tough who had held him up outside the cafeteria — credit for sense enough to know where to come looking for him.

He hadn’t had a cent on him, so the Bowery was the logical place to search for him. But now he could get in out of the open, until morning at least, so let them look! For thirty-five cents he could get a room all to himself.

He went into the nearest lighted doorway that had a sign, “Rooms for Men,” over it and got one. He wasn’t shown up, just handed a key and told where to find it. He climbed the stairs, the pounding of his heart slowly quieting. The lights were out in the second-floor “reading room,” with its long bare tables and benches, like a meeting house, and its two or three newspapers that passed from hand to hand through the dragging, hopeless hours of the day and evening. But he stepped in and found one of the papers, taking it up to his room to see if he could find any mention of the necklace in it.

The story would have been hard to miss. It was right on the front page — “Daring Jewel Robbery in Broad Daylight.” At nine yesterday, the day that had ended a few hours ago at midnight, a rich dame had been held up in her West End Avenue apartment, and she and her maid had been tied up and stacked in a closet.

But the details didn’t interest him as much as the words — “a diamond necklace valued at $25,000.” That was it, sure! But he nearly fell over at sight of the figures staring him in the face like that, in cold print.

Keogh suddenly got all weak and wobbly, his hands became cold and his knees started to shake. He’d thought vaguely until now in terms of a thousand or two dollars, but the realization that he’d been carrying around twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds half the night nearly paralyzed him with terror. For long minutes he just sat there on the edge of the crummy bed, panting and perspiring.

All his carefully built-up reasons for not turning the find over to the police collapsed. Let them implicate him. Anything was better than this suspense! The longer he held onto the jewels, the deeper they’d implicate him, anyway. He should have gone right to the nearest station house with them when he’d found them. Now he’d broken the necklace up and sold the settings. But maybe they wouldn’t be too hard on him as long as he gave the stones themselves back.

What good would keeping them do him, anyway? If he needed to sell them, he’d probably be arrested in the act, or within a few hours. And he couldn’t keep the things hidden around him indefinitely, skulking, afraid of every shadow. That bartender already knew he had them. Pretty soon half the Bowery would know.

With a sudden decision he jumped up, unlocked the door, and ran down the stairs. He had fifteen cents left. He’d tell the cops about it over the phone and then wait for them to come and get him. That took less courage than going to them himself.

There wasn’t any phone in the place, and he had to go out on the streets to look for one. That was his undoing. He failed to notice the long, ominous black car parked directly in front of the Federal, the first bar he’d gone into. The Federal’s customers didn’t usually drive up in cars like that. But his mind was now finding one of those little blue-and-white enamel disks that verify a pay station inside the premises, few and far between on the Bowery, and he missed the significance of the car’s presence.

He turned up the other way and finally found a phone in an all-night one-arm joint. It was just his luck it had to be on the open wall, not in a booth at all. And there were a couple of guys within earshot. But it was the only one for blocks around, and he had no choice. He shrank from the idea of hunting up a cop on the beat and telling him. It might be an hour before he located one, and then the cop might turn around and say that he’d caught Keogh with the stones and take all the credit to himself.

Keogh dropped his nickel in and made a protective funnel around the mouthpiece with his hand, to keep what he had to say from those in the room. He asked for Spring 7-3100. He supposed that was the way you did it; he’d never called the police before.

A voice answered, ‘“Police Headquarters,” and he took a deep breath, afraid to go on, but even more afraid not to, now that he’d gone this far. He said, “Uh... I wanted to tell you about that necklace that was stolen from that lady. You know — that diamond one worth twenty-five thousand dollars?”

Another voice got on the wire abruptly, a more authoritative voice. “What about it?” the new voice demanded brusquely, sapping the little self-confidence he had left.

“I... I think I got it,” he quavered.

“You think you’ve got it! Who are you?”

He had visions of cops taking off by plane to land on his neck, while he was kept talking at the phone and the call was being traced.

“My name’s Keogh.” He hadn’t used his given name in so long he actually forgot it for a moment in his excitement! “I— Has it got fifteen diamonds in it? I found it in a sugar bowl up on Eighth Avenue.”

He was sweating again, all over, profusely. That sounded terrible. They’d never believe it. They’d arrest him, sure!

“I’m... I mean, I’ll be in a room on the third floor front of the Little America Hotel, here on the Bowery.” And then, supreme inaninity, “Should I wait there for you?”

The voice grew crushingly ironic. “Maybe you’d better.”

He hung up and went out. He had forebodings of what his immediate future was going to be like, yet in one way he was strangely relieved. He’d gotten the damn thing off his mind at last. In five or ten minutes more he wouldn’t have to worry what to do with it or where to hide it, any more. Even if the cops held him for it, at least those others couldn’t get to him.

The inscrutable black car had moved when he got back in sight of his lodgings. It wasn’t in front of the Federal any more. Now it was outside the Silver Flash. But he hadn’t noticed its position clearly enough the first time to be aware of the change. It never occurred to him that he was in a position to watch himself being traced. To his harassed gaze it was just a car, maybe belonging to some slumming party going the rounds bar by bar.

He turned in at the lighted doorway and started climbing. The second-floor “reception desk” — a board across an open alcove — was vacant and dark now, but that wasn’t surprising, considering the hour. He went past it and on up to the third floor.

It was when he got outside the door of his room that something cold came over him. First it was just a sixth sense, with nothing to base it on. Then a couple of the other senses came quickly to support that feeling. His eyes saw a three-sided line of light outlining the warped door. He was sure he’d put the light out when he left just now, for they bawled you out in these places if you didn’t. And his ears caught a subdued murmur of voices that rose to a snarl.

“He wouldn’t leave it around in here any place. You could look all night and not find it. He must ’a’ lamped us coming and powdered with it all over again.”

“You heard what that bartender said, din’cha? He saw him come in here! He’ll be back. And then there are ways of finding out—”

But Keogh didn’t wait to hear any more. Those weren’t the cops in that room, and that was all he cared about! His decision to go out and phone them had saved him from immediate capture, but now he had to flee again. Was there to be no end to his hobgoblin nightmare?

He started backing down the stairs, his heart hammering in his chest, afraid at first even to turn and face the other way for fear of making the steps creak under him. His breath labored in his throat. He would have moaned aloud if he hadn’t known the least sound meant his death.

Halfway down he steadied himself against the wall and slowly pivoted, to finish the descent the natural way and get out. But at the turn of the stairs there seemed to be a deeper shadow than there had been the first time, and suddenly it moved, came out behind him, blocked him, spoke. That same soft, maddening purr fell again on his ears.

“Thought I saw you from the car. Reg’lar night owl, ain’t you? Well, come on back up. We’re gonna put you to bed!”

And the gun was out once more and urging him up ahead of it, boring into the middle of his back. This was the end, and Keogh knew it, and acted it, there in the dark. The first bartender had seen the stones, the second one the links, and now they had him dead to rights. As soon as they got the diamonds from him they’d shoot him.

Repeatedly, as he tottered up that short remaining flight to his room, Keogh clasped both hands to the lower part of his face in mortal terror, and his jaws moved convulsively as if with hopeless prayers for mercy that he knew it was useless to utter.

A few steps more and, “I’ve got him,” purred the silk-voiced killer outside the door. A sudden square of orange opened noiselessly to swallow the two of them, then was blotted out again.

The blast of gunfire that would signal Keogh’s end was a strangely long time coming. Eight minutes passed, and then ten, and the short, sharp, barking coughs of an automatic that would mean they had found the diamonds and had no more use for Keogh, alive, did not come. And then, when the gunfire did come at last, it seemed more prolonged and violent than was necessary to finish off just one helpless man.

One bullet, one muffled explosion from a gun muzzle jammed cruelly into his ear would have been enough for that. But there was more than one shot, many of them, and they didn’t come from within the room itself, but from up and down those long, narrow stairs, shattering the sleeping lodging house awake from top to bottom.

And the shots came from two directions simultaneously, streaking downward from the top of the stairs and hurtling upward from the bottom, while yellow flashes winked and blinked in the darkness and the booming echoes of the shots rolled back and forth along the corridors.

In the first burst of fiery venom a policeman crumpled in the street entryway, and seconds later the body of a man came hurtling, turning, twisting down from above to join it, like something dropped from the sky down a long chute. He was dead by the time he hit the last step.

There was a deep snarl from below, a sudden rush of heavy feet up the stairs, and the firing went up a flight, retreating along the corridor that led past the room Keogh had hired. The feet came after it, gaining on it. Not a door in the whole ramshackle building opened. Iron bedsteads clashed as bodies ducked blindly under them, and glass popped in one of the unseen front windows as some one sought out without waiting to open it the right way.

A detective suddenly flattened out at the very top of the stairs, as they went up that last flight one by one, but over his prostrate, bleeding form there passed such a withering hail of light flashes, all going the same way, that nothing could have lived in that dead-end corridor afterward.

The one they stumbled over hadn’t. Then they were outside Keogh’s room door, which was open again. But before the foremost of them could get to it, a soft feline voice on the other side of it caterwauled, “Y’ don’t get me!” and a single, final gunshot exploded somewhere inside the room.

The soft-voiced one was folded neatly across the foot of the bed, like a clothespin, when they came in and ringed up around him.

“He didn’t muff,” somebody said sourly. “He should ’a’ done it the day he was born!”

There was somebody else in the room, too — Keogh, his eyes pleading with them for release, lashed to the head of the bed with strips torn from a pillowcase. His shirt had been pulled down from his shoulders without being taken off. There were cigarette ashes all over one shoulder, as though he’d tried to smoke without the use of his hands. Somebody slashed the bonds with a pocketknife, and he folded up and groaned.

“Who are you?” a cop asked.

“I’m the guy that phoned you,” he said faintly.

They straightened him up again. “What’d they do to you?”

He winced, lifted one elbow, and a cigarette butt dropped out of his armpit, where it had adhered. It was out now.

“The works, huh?” some one commented.

“They held my arm down tight.” He showed them a blister the size of a quarter. But he kept writhing, doubling up and straightening out again like a concertina.

“It can’t hurt that much,” one of the detectives said skeptically.

An ambulance had come for the two of their own who had been hurt. The doctor came in to take a look at Keogh after he’d had them carried down.

Keogh kept squirming on the floor while they were trying to question him. One of the detectives was getting sore. “Will ya stay still a minute and answer?” he snarled. “Ya said ya had ’em! The insurance company’s offered a reward, and so has the woman they belonged to. You stand to collect § 5,000 if you hand ’em over of your own free will. Now don’t make me get rough with ya!”

“I wanna hand ’em over!” protested Keogh weakly, “but how can I? I had to hide ’em and I... oooh!” he groaned, unable to continue.

The doctor squatted down to examine him. Keogh groaned something into his ear. The doctor got up again.

“One of you run out and buy a bottle of citrate of magnesia,” he directed. “No wonder he’s got the bends! This man’s got fifteen assorted diamonds in his stomach!”

Afterword to “The Heavy Sugar”

“The Heavy Sugar” (Pocket Detective, January 1937) is a suspense masterpiece, full of tension and anguish and the look and feel of Depression-era New York, its hunted protagonist flailing through night’s empty canyons, unable to call the police or even to hide in the subways or a flophouse yet wealthier than almost anyone else in the city. It’s a perfect noir situation and, whether he read this particular tale or not, the kind of story that inspired the parallel sequences in Richard Wright’s classic novel Native Son (1940), where the doomed protagonist thrust into a similar urban nightmare is black.