Grady took the glass and slowly, very slowly, he raised it toward his lips, all the while gazing unwinkingly at the woman. Just at his lips the glass stopped and the woman could not avoid a shudder, she covered her eyes and Grady, used to reading people's minds, read hers. He let the glass fall and shouted:
"So, it's murder you want—well, murder it shall be, but I'll do the murdering."
She saw death in his eyes as he seized her arm but before death he would first have his way with her. She screamed and, pulling with the strength of despair, twisted the arm out of Grady's grasp, leaving half her sleeve in his hand.
Still, there could surely be no hope for her, and yet at that very instant when he poised himself to plunge after her again, his eyes turned glassy; paralysis seized him, and he sank slowly into his chair while the fainting woman tottered out of the door.
The next day, it so happened, Shevelin, the watchman, confessed to his connection with the Manhattan Bank robbery. The police were just taking up the trail that led to Grady's connection with the affair when the news came to headquarters that Grady was dead.
He was found with the sleeve of a woman's dress grasped convulsively in his hand. On the table were a bottle of wine and a cup. A broken glass and spilled wine on the floor showed traces of poison.
CREED OF THE "FENCES"
An autopsy performed on Grady's body showed no sign of poison. His death had been caused by apoplexy. The woman who meant to kill him by poison had actually done so by means of the furious emotions she had aroused. She could have taken the diamonds had she only dared to wait.
Thus died Grady, still free from the law, and with his great fortune in diamonds in his pocket. Yet he died in an agony of furious disappointment as miserably as it is the lot of man to die. For him, as for "Mother" Mandelbaum, it was destined that the lesson should be finally but tragically impressed—that crime does not pay!
As a general thing the receiver of stolen goods is the greediest, tightest-fisted individual who ever squeezed a dollar. The bargains he drives are so one-sided that unless the thief is unusually shrewd he will find his profits dwindling to almost nothing by the time he has disposed of his plunder. The margin between what the thief gets for his stealings and the price they finally bring is enormous, and even with only a few thieves working regularly for him the "fence" finds it easy to get rich in a very short time.