The Deep (7 page)

Ten minutes later the big guy came in. There was a stiffness in his walk and the way he held his hands. To keep them busy he opened his raincoat and shoved them in his pants pocket. The steel glint from the twisters and handcuffs at his belt showed briefly, spelling out what he was if you couldn't already tell from his face. He didn't look at her when he said, “Beat it, lady.”

Without a word she got up and went down the length of the bar to the ladies' room.

I said, “You got it?”

His fingers flipped two folded sheets from his jacket pocket, handed them to me, then snapped together impatiently.

“Easy, buster. Relax.” I opened the sheets, took my time about scanning them, deliberating over each word, then when I was finished reached in my coat and slipped a C note from the roll. I handed it to him long-wise and his fingers ate it up, but not fast enough for Helen to miss the business before she sat down again.

She held her breath until he had gone, then let it out with a tiny hiss and cut me to pieces with those eyes again. She said, “Pay-off,” very softly and all the hate for the putrid system of things was in her voice.

My voice had an edge on it too. “Sure, kitten, but that's the way things get done. You want to know something, you force it or buy it. I can do a little of each, but one way or another I get what I want.”

“Always?”

“All the time, Irish, and don't damn well forget it.”

“What was it this time?” The comers of her eyes had that Asian look again.

“Very little. Just an official police report on Bennett's death.” I slid off the stool, stood up and buckled my coat. The bartender eyed the change I left on the bar, nodded his thanks and I took Helen's arm and led her outside.

While we stood in the doorway waiting for a cab I could feel her watch me, feeling for words. She said, “Deep ... where did you come from?”

“Why?”

“Because you're part of this mess and rotten clear through. You know all the angles, all the answers. Filth and nastiness are too familiar with you. You walk down the street and every eye that sees you knows you're not like other people. You're big and mean and lousy and have death written all over you. I wonder who you are and where you came from.”

“Yeah?”

A sneer touched her mouth, spoiling its lushness. “I heard about Bennett's will too. You had to arrive within two weeks. His death made national headlines so you would have heard about it right away. Still, it took you four days to get here. Where is four days away from here, Deep?”

I waved a cab down instead of answering her. When I closed the door I told her to check on Tally and stay there until I called her. Just as the cab started to pull away I had one second to see her eyes go crazy wide and snapped my head to one side so that my shoulder took the full impact of the sap that would have torn my head open.

My whole right arm was totally paralyzed, but I didn't need it at all. He had the sap up for another shot when I kicked him into a sprawling mass.

Down the street Helen's face was a white oval in the back window of the cab, so I waved at her, stepped on Al's working hand so the fingers snapped and walked across the corner to an empty cab waiting for the light to change.

Behind me a woman let a scream wail out and started yelling for the police.

The apartment building where Bennett died belonged to me. Provisionally. It was far from the best that he had owned, but sentiment had kept him chained to the street and he had gotten some strange kick from re-modeling the shabby tenement so that on the inside it had all the earmarks of Park Avenue.

While I waited for Augie I looked down the block that had spawned Bennett and me and the others and wondered why it was that it never seemed to change. The smells were the same and the sounds were the same. Diagonally across the street was the place I had been born and the guy hunched in the doorway nursing a bottle of beer could have been my old man. I looked up at the roof and the niche was still there in the parapet where Bennett and I had pried up the bricks to throw into the middle of the Crowns when they came up from Columbus Avenue looking for trouble. Almost automatically I glanced down to the base of the street lamp where two of them had fallen, smashed senseless, their blood staining the sidewalk, remembering the police cars and the ambulance and the wild, heady flight across the rooftops. It was a very special night because it was the first time we had ever been fired on and it made us pretty big men on the block. George Elcursio who had run with the Vernon mob in Chi had seen us the next day and gave us the big buddy wink for our brashness. A week later he had us doing odd jobs for Sig Musco's end of the syndicate operation and we had our first taste of what power meant and what money could do.

Augie didn't interrupt the brief reflection. He waited, patiently. When I turned around he handed me a set of keys in a wallet. “Mr. Batten was rather reluctant about letting me have them, Mr. Deep.”

“You talked to him?”

His smile was faint. “I talked to him. I'm afraid you have him pretty badly upset.”

“The worst is yet to come, Augie lad.” I started across the street to the apartment, aware of the fact that we were far from unseen. Little would ever happen on this block that went entirely unobserved. Here for hundreds of eyes was a macadam stage, lit by day and night, where an unending living drama unfolded against a backdrop of stark reality. Here the play was a timeless tragedy, life realistically portrayed, death always an impending thing ready to step from the wings on a gunshot or knife-slash scream cue. And always in their places, watching intently so as not to miss one facet of the show, was the audience. Sometime they came so close as to be a part of it themselves.

At the stoop Augie said, “They held a police guard on the place until yesterday. Two patrolmen, one upstairs and one here.”

“Routine,” I said and he nodded agreement.

We went up the worn flight of stone steps to the door and I opened the lock, went in and switched on the light. Even though I knew what to expect it came as a surprise. There was nothing of the tenement squalor left. Even the outlines of poverty had been altered and you felt as if you had been transplanted suddenly to a place downtown with the park or the river outside your door. The walls and ceiling were gleaming white, touched faintly with gold trim, original contemporary oils framed in wormy chestnut lending color to the whiteness.

The stairway was gone completely. In its place to the rear was a small self-service elevator. It was a cute trick, I thought, like a modem style tree house where you could pull your ladder up after you. I wondered how he got past the building inspectors.

Augie showed me the way in, holding the door open to the lower front room. Again, the decorator's touch was evident. The room was striking, comfortable, but not lavish in the taste that Bennett would demand if he intended to use it often. Evidently this was the place where certain persons could be met, briefly entertained and kissed off without introducing them to the privacy of personal quarters. Bennett had gone a long way. A real long way.

I said, “What's the general layout, Augie?”

He took in the room with a sweep of his hand. “This is nothing here. Three rooms used mainly for business. He kept a bartender and a maid here more or less permanently. Mr. Batten let them go when ... it happened.”

Before I said it Augie shook his head.

“They could tell you nothing. They were sister and brother. Both congenital deaf mutes. It was one of Mr. Bennett's precautions.”

“Smart. I didn't think he was that smart.”

“A lot of people made that same mistake, that's why they lost out to Mr. Bennett.”

“Really?” I swung around and grinned at him with a touch of sneer thrown in. “How come you didn't attach yourself to Ben, Augie?”

It didn't ruffle him at all. “When Mr. Bennett was fighting his way up it would have been a good deal. But when he reached the top he wasn't at his best trying to hold on.”

“He did it quite a while.”

“As I mentioned ... only because he was smart.”

“What did Batten have?”

“Mr. Batten is shrewd. At this stage he had an edge.”

“There are tough ones around, Augie, who could take old Wilse as easy as spitting.”

“Perhaps, but those will wind up dead too soon. Calculating the odds and including life expectancy, Mr. Batten was by far the best opportunity for me.”

“Until I came along, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

“Now let's have the straight pitch, Augie.”

He knew what I meant and smiled, his hands behind his back rocking gently on his toes. “You'll take the tough ones, Deep,” and this time there was no Mr. “You'll edge out the shrewd ones and do just like you and Ben planned twenty-five years ago. You'll have it all in your hand for just a little while and then it will be gone. If you were just going after the king's throne you could do it, but your primary cause is to find a killer. You'll get him, Deep, but in getting him you'll die too. If the state doesn't get you a bullet will.”

“You think you could take me, Augie?”

He shook his head and smiled broadly. “I won't have to.”

“And after I get it?”

“Then I'll take over. When you get finished there won't be anyone left to oppose the move. I'll be the only one left who knows the entire operation by then anyway.”

It was such cool thinking that you would never imagine this guy to have clawed his way out of the sewer slums to make it this far.

I said, “Supposing I can hold it after I get it, Augie?”

His smile broadened. “That's all right too. I still can't lose. I'll be close enough to the top and you'll be the target.”

“You have it all figured out.”

“That's right. I have it all figured out.”

“Meantime you're my boy so show me the rest of this layout.”

At the elevator the signs of the Homicide Division were plain. The obvious places a person might touch showed traces of print dust, and areas of activity were marked by clusters of cigarette butts ground into the floor.

At the first landing we went through a poolroom, a well stocked bar and a library. The police hadn't bothered to conceal the obvious fact that they had gone through the place. All the signs were there. Nothing had been missed and whatever they were looking for hadn't been found or never had been there at all. Even the pool table had been moved to search the sections under the feet.

It was on the third floor that Bennett had lived. And died. It was here that the stamp of his own personality was evident. The decorators had had a different thought in mind in the beginning, but it was a thought Bennett couldn't live with. The touch of the tenement was here, not that it was introduced, but that it had never left. The garish plush furniture in tasteless maroon was Bennett's choice. The two imitation ebony lamp bases had an erotic motif and nearly every piece of furniture had an autographed nude photograph, suitably framed, decorating it. The bar was overly mahagonied and overly chromed. The combination TV and record player was outsized and scarred at the edge from carelessly laid cigarettes. I studied it from every angle, a strange feeling of familiarity touching me. I shrugged it off and walked across to the desk.

Beside it part of a body outline in chalk marred the polished flooring. I said flatly for no reason, “The police found him here.”

Augie sensed something. “He died there.”

“Not here,” I told him. “They just found him here.”

He frowned at me, then his eyes went to the dark brown stains that matted the rug and the mess by the door and the bloodied handprint on the wall.

I took the copy of the police report from my pocket, went over it carefully, then handed it to Augie. “They think he got it inside here. He thrashed around while he was dying and messed the place up. Their opinion is that a guest was responsible.”

He never took his eyes from the sheet. “Nobody could get that close to him. Besides, any entertaining he did never took place up here.”

“You've been here, Augie. You aren't new to this room.”

He still didn't look up. “Twice when Mr. Bennett had an illness he needed legal work done. I was the liaison agent between him and Mr. Batten. He had a gun beside him all the while.” He finished the report and handed it back.

“Bennett died in an alley up the street,” I said. I filled in the details except for saying who Pedro was and watched him while he thought it over.

It didn't make sense to him, either.

I said, “Augie ... why did they want him dead?”

“They...”

I cut him off with, “Not who, Augie. Why. Why did Bennett die?”

“He was pretty big, Mr. Deep.”

“I know.”

“The big guy is always the target.”

“Why, Augie?”

“I can only guess,” he said.

“So guess.”

His hands folded together again. “Talk has it the syndicate is growing.”

“Bennett was in.”

“Mr. Bennett was a scared man. The syndicate seemed to find it ... impossible to deal with scared men.”

“You're reaching for it but you're not hitting it, kid.”

He teetered on his toes again and stared down the empty expanse of the room. “Suppose I give you my opinion in an illustration. Mr. Bennett was one, who instead of controlling the team with a slight touch of the reins, preferred, instead, to jerk them whichever way he wanted to go.” He stared at me steadily a moment, then added, “It's only an opinion, of course.”