Francis Nevins - Night and Fear

“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.