“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.
Blue Is for Bravery
He was on late duty that week, which was why his face was so long as he came down the steps of the precinct house in the middle of all his shift-mates a quarter of an hour before midnight. He hated that late racket — couldn’t get used to it. Midnight to 8:00 A.M. The dregs of time. You had to sleep in broad daylight — try to, you mean, around where he lived. Loaf around all afternoon when other people worked. Didn’t know whether to call it breakfast he ate before he reported in at 11:30 P.M. or midnight-lunch or what.
And such a totally-forsaken beat: Lincoln to Main, Halsted to Spring. Trying store-fronts to make sure they were locked up. Picking them up and putting them down. Ringing the House twice an hour. Then you came off, went home to bed when the rest of the world was waking up. Got up at noon and the whole thing started over once more.
“Cheer up,” Dinty Falvey said at his elbow, “think of all the nice fresh air you get.”
“Every dog has his day,” O’Dare answered. “I’ll be having mine — one of these fine nights!”
They formed a double column on the sidewalk, tramping along two by two. Not in drill-formation by any means, just roughly symmetrical, to avoid ganging up. The two green lamps dwindled to the size of peas behind them, lost themselves in the night-murk. They started thinning out, dropping off one by one to relieve the men going off duty. O’Dare’s beat was the farthest out of them all. “S’long, Danny, see you tomorrow!”
“Right,” said Danny O’Dare, and went on alone. Just a cop. Just a cog in a machine. He reached his beat, opened the call-box, phoned in: