The Deep (20 page)

When I came down I was a full block away and headed toward Cat's hole in the wall.

I wanted my gun back.

 

The Westhampton was a hotel for the nothing people. They came and went, sometimes stayed a while, sometimes even died there. It was an inexpensive and indifferent kind of hotel where you could find people who lived dangling from a thread. Struggling actors and out-of-town hopefuls used the place until their economy moved them down to squalid flea bags or up to the next notch.

I pushed through the door and scanned the lobby quickly. Two young girls in trench coats talked too loudly about some show while they waited for the elevator and by the front windows an old man in a smock dusted the backs of the chairs. Behind the desk the clerk was sorting mail out, whistling aimlessly while a transistor radio chatted at his elbow.

He nodded carelessly when I reached him, finished with the mail and said, “Room?”

“Cat told me to see you.”

He was one of the nothing people too. He had lived too long among them and taken on all their characteristics. Any expression that touched his face was unreal. Long ago he had discarded emotion for unconcern and now he just stood there playing the game.

“Cat?”

There were two ways of playing the game. I showed him the first way that generally everyone knew and laid a twenty-dollar bill on top of the counter. “That's right, Cat,” I said.

He eyed the bill and I knew what he was thinking, but his face stayed impassive.

“Cat,” he stated, as if he were trying to remember the name.

So I showed him the other way to play the game and let my coat come open deliberately so he could see the rod in the belt holster and when I grinned at him he knew the game was over. “My name is Deep,” I said.

Deftly, his fingers snapped up the bill and tucked it away. His eyes swept the lobby behind me with a practiced glance and he fiddled with the card holder in front of him.

“Cat said you thought you could remember a number. The Wagner boys made it.”

“Yes.” He licked his dry lips. “But they ...”

“Don't worry about them,” I said coldly. “They're both dead.”

He walked his eyes from the pad, up my front until he was drawn to my own. He had read a lot of faces in his time. He knew what kind of people were that kind who could stand behind a gun and use it, and now he was seeing it in me.

“I won't ... get rapped for this, will I?”

“You never saw me in your life before if anybody asks.”

“That Cat, I wish he didn't ask. You tell him ...”

“He's dead too, buddy.”

“Cripes!” he said softly.

“What number was it!”

“Two-oh-two-oh-two. It rhymed. Sort of like a song. That's how I remembered it.”

“Good. You remember the exchange!”

He said no with a quick shake of his head. But it was enough. I left him, walked across the room to the row of empty pay phones, climbed in the booth and shut the door. I got my party on the second try, gave him the number and asked for a listing of all exchanges that carried the number and the names to go with them. He asked for my number, told me to wait and hung up.

From across the room the desk clerk watched me like a mouse peering out of a hole.

Ten minutes later the phone rang and when I answered my informant said, “Ready?” and when I said I was, began to rattle off numbers and names. I took them all down on the back of an envelope and when he reached the sixth one I said, “Hold it,” told him thanks and cradled the phone. A little mistake in judgment had come home to roost.

I remembered what Cat had told me. Two killers had been given a contract to rub me out. Later somebody had gone even higher to delay the execution. The killers called their original employer for further orders and were told to go ahead. That call was the mistake.

They had called Hugh Peddle, the sixth name on the list.

The old Dutch district had undergone a face change when they tore down the tenements ten years ago. They built a new housing development in the middle of it, moved the people back in and now they had a real, up-to-date tenement section. The people had never changed; they talked the same, they acted the same, they did the same. They voted as a bloc for whoever offered the most for their vote and cared little about what happened afterwards.

Hugh Peddle had bought their votes with no trouble at all. He was basically a machine politician, but lately had been pretty independent because he controlled a section big enough to be a critical factor in any election.

And the people loved him. He was a local Santa Claus who took care of his own even to living among them where he was right at hand to solve their immediate problems, which were his problems too. Hugh lived in a quiet corner apartment house that had, thirty years before, been a well thought of address. But times and conditions change and the block the building faced was scrubbed by a better section an eighth of a mile away and gradually blended into the rest of the environment and was accepted as part of the Dutch district.

The bartender thought Hugh owned the entire building. He lived, with a valet and a part-time maid, in what could be called a penthouse apartment if such a thing were possible in the neighborhood and had a private elevator to an entrance on the street. Below, the tenants were people well respected ... two families employed by Con Ed, a city fireman, the manager of the grocery chain on the north corner and a wild red-headed artist who did a syndicated comic strip that was actually a biography of his own life.

I had a few more beers, paid the tab and walked out. It was exactly ten o'clock. Overhead a high overcast threw back the diffused glow of the city lights and there was a smell of rain in the air. It was like the night we had that rumble with the Delrays and Bennett and Augie had stopped the action when they fired a round from the zips Augie had fashioned in school that past week.

And I had that feeling again as if I thought of something and just as fast forgot it. A key thought. Damn. I put it away and walked toward Hugh Peddle's building.

The lobby was small, walled with mirrors to make it seem larger. To one side a door with an EXIT sign above it led upstairs. Directly opposite the street doors was a self-service elevator.

I chose the stairway.

Each landing opened into a miniature foyer that had access to the elevator. The elevator itself was opened and empty at the final floor it served, but the stairway continued another flight. I followed it up, opened the door to a small flagstone terrace that ran around the penthouse and eased it closed behind me.

This side of the penthouse was flanked by curtained French windows facing the south. A pair of them seemed to be the type that swung out but I wanted to go around the place before I tried an entry. There was a door on the north side that evidently led into the kitchen area and on the west a rather elaborate entrance that opened onto a mock patio that held three fancy wrought-iron, marble-topped tables and matching chairs.

From there I could see a dull glow of light inside that would come from a night light or a small table lamp. It was too early to assume Peddle was there and asleep. The only conclusion was that he had gone out and given the servants the night off too.

The French doors on the south side were the easiest to open. A knife blade forced the simple drop catch up and I opened the doors, stepped inside and pulled them closed behind me.

From what I could see there was no simplicity in Peddle's way of life. The neighborhood might be in that slow state of decay on the avenue below, but here there was no awareness of it. He was forced by political expediency to live where he made it, but he didn't have to live like the others. Some things still could be bought no matter where you were.

Luxury, for instance.

I eased by the grand piano, followed the sweep of the room to the archway and paused. The light came from a room to my right and when I stepped into the hallway I saw what it was, a small table lamp in the far comer. I let the .38 drop back in the holster and walked quietly toward the light.

It was a library of a sort. Two walls were shelved with books, a TV stood at one end and heavy overstuffed leather chairs threw bulky shadows into the dim reaches of the room. I circled it, not touching anything, then crossed to the other side.

A polished mahogany bar curved out from the wall there, in back of it a blue tinted mirror and twin rows of bottles and glasses. One empty glass still rested there and when I picked it up the ice in the bottom clinked.

I had the gun out ahead of me when I reached the bedroom. The door was open and I could half see the bed. Somebody was lying on top of it unmoving and I took a step inside, feeling for the switch. In the sudden glare of the light I felt my heart slam against my ribs and knew I had mousetrapped myself like a damn fool sucker because the guy on the bed was tied down tight with a gag in his mouth and the snout of a gun was in my back against my spine.

A voice said coldly, “Drop it,” and I let the gun go.

The guy behind me prodded harder and I took two steps farther into the room.

“Turn around.”

I did.

I said, “Hello, Tony,” and the slack-faced killer who worked for the uptown crowd nodded distantly, not caring one way or another. There was another one, a few feet behind him and to his left and he had a small hammerless automatic in his hand and looked at me anxiously as though he hoped I was going to break in and run for it.

Then Lenny Sobel came in smiling, picked my gun off the floor, hefted it and put it in his pocket. He looked at me, his eyes deadly. “You carry a nice piece, Deep. That's the one you took off the cop, isn't it?”

“The same,” I said. He could drop dead before I'd take his jazz. “You should remember it, Lenny. I shot you twice with it. Both times in the same place.”

Tony let out a snicker but when Lenny glanced at him, cut it short. “I've been looking forward to this, Deep.”

“I bet you have.”

“Big mouth.”

“Always,” I told him.

Before Lenny could answer Tony said, “We better get outa here.”

“I'll tell you when,” Lenny scowled.

The little hood did a Cagney with his shoulders. “Like hell. You work for the same guys I do. They said make it snappy and we're making it snappy. We missed Peddle but we saved ourselves a trip and got this one so we're halfway home. Let's get back there.”

Lenny didn't like to be reminded that he was under orders. His face was hard and black and every ounce of his hate was poured out at me. I wanted a bigger picture than I got so I made a motion toward the bed with the back of my head and said, “The butler'll talk, Lenny.”

Tony spoke for him. “He never knew what hit him or who. It don't matter.”

It didn't make him mad at all. He half circled me and stood there a few seconds, then finally said, “You were looking for something, Deep?”

“Same thing you were, punk.”

He ignored the sarcasm. “If you were, then you knew Peddle would be away, and consequently probably knew where he was going.”

I knew the next step and got there ahead of him. “You can beat my head all day,” I said, “but it won't do any good. I was here after Peddle. If you missed him, so did I.”

Lenny let the black hate seep out of him. “But I'm luckier than you. After Peddle we were going to find you. Peddle can't hide, at least for long. We'll have him quickly enough. Now you ... that would have been another matter, but you made it easy for us.”

“I'm glad for you,” I said.

“You have two choices.”

“Oh?”

“You walk out of here quietly, and into a car quietly, and where we take you quietly.”

“Or?”

“Don't be stupid. Not you, tough boy. Or we carry you out with a hole in your gut in the right place to slow you down some.”

There really wasn't any choice at all. “I'll walk,” I said. “Quietly.”

We all went down the private elevator to the street, walked fifty feet to the new tan Pontiac and got in like a bunch of old friends. Every move was professionally perfect and no one would ever have caught wise. If they had they would have died on the spot, but with the new regime of hoods it's better not to have trouble.

I sat between the two hoods with my arms folded across my chest, feeling the blunt noses of the two rods against my side. In front, Lenny sat with the driver, his arm across the seat, looking back at me. He was enjoying every moment of it, getting rid of the dirty taste he had whenever he thought of the things I had done to him in the past.

The driver cut crosstown, picked up the West Side Drive and went up the ramp into traffic. They made no attempt to cover their route and that meant only one thing. I was going someplace ... but I wasn't coming back. I could hurry it or I could wait it out. They really didn't care. The choice was still a singular one. I'd wait it out.

What were the odds? Augie was gone, Cat was gone. Nobody else knew where I was or what I had in mind. This time the mistake was mine for going it solo and it could be the last one I'd make. These were strictly pros now. They did only one thing. They were assigned to kill, that was all they knew and nothing could talk them out of it. They'd shoot as soon as talk and have a hot lunch after they dropped you in the river somewhere. They didn't think, they didn't want to think, and to them it was just one more job and one more dollar.

Lenny turned and smiled placidly. He was happy. I said, “Hurt, Lenny?”