The Deep Page 13

  Damn right, Deep, Bennett told me. These days you gotta look ahead. You gotta think big. Them other punks upstairs, they talk big but they all work for some other punk. Me, you, we’re gonna be top punks. Hell, not punks. Big shots. Just like that. I can smell it comin’.

  And nobody could think bigger than me. Sure. So why compete? There’s other cities and other places. We stay here and pretty soon we’re bumping heads. That good? Hell, no. So we split. We flip a coin and loser takes off and finds a new place to take over. That’s thinking sensible, pal. No blood being spilled in the family for us.

  It wasn’t new talk. We had planned it months ago and we knew every detail of it. Whoever goes, Deep, I’m sure gonna miss you. Remember how we said... like if anything happens to the other one, his buddy will get everything? Whatever I get if anything happens to me you can have and you’ll know where it’ll be. I’ll never change. K.O.’s ain’t like them other clubs. We signed it in blood.

  Damn right, Bennett!

  Okay, who’ll flip the coin?

  Wake up that wino Henny back there. Let him do it.

  He woke up Henny who tossed the coin. It came up tails. I lost. We shook hands solemnly and I walked out to find my own turf. I had never come back until now.

  Absently, I said, “Henny, do you remember flipping the coin?”

  Henny looked back just as absently. He didn’t even know what I was talking about. I gave him a fin for his trouble and stood on the street corner until a cab came by and gave him Batten’s address.

  A new Picasso had been added to the Gauguins on the wall. It was a smear of color and crooked forms and the signs of being expensive. Batten sat tilted back in his chair looking at it and when he turned his head the girl behind me said without apology, “He wouldn’t let me call, Mr. Batten.”

  Wilse nodded, the girl smiled at me and closed the door.

  “Don’t spend money you haven’t got yet, Batty.”

  “I can wait.” He rolled over to the desk and made himself comfortable. When I sat down he asked, “What’s on your mind?”

  “Bennett.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “Did he have a safe deposit box anywhere?”

  Batten let a sardonic smile twist the edges of his mouth. “Still looking, Deep?”

  “You got to dig to find gold.”

  “You find lead the same way.”

  “Don’t be so damned enigmatic, friend.”

  The smile came loose and his eyes narrowed. “I didn’t mean to be. I thought a blunt person like you would understand.”

  “It came through. Now let’s speak plainly.”

  He waved vaguely.

  “Did Bennett ever hint to you what he was holding over everybody’s head?”

  “Never.”

  “You were his only legal advisor?”

  “The only one.”

  “You were aware, of course, how Bennett operated.”

  The chair came forward and Batten leaned into his desk. “Let’s not be so specific. It was a conclusion I came to that was the basis of long examination. I see you came to the same one yourself.”

  “It wasn’t hard. It was hinted at pretty strongly.”

  “Well, it isn’t spoken of as general conversation, let’s say. When you discuss certain people it’s always quietly and in private and even then you can’t be sure who’s listening in. The best thing to do is keep quiet about it.”

  “I’m not the quiet type.”

  “You can be a dead type.”

  “But not until your connection has been definitely established.”

  “Like how, Batten?”

  “If you’re no threat you go out for talking too loudly. If you are a threat you get the ax taken away and get hit for trying to move in and wave it.”

  “Tell me about Bennett.”

  Batten nodded sagely, paused, then: “Unless you knew him well you would never realize that he was retarded.”

  “Retarded!” The word exploded out of me.

  “That’s right, retarded. He had more of a juvenile outlook on things than an adult one. You’ve been in his apartment. You know how he hung on to the past. Look at how he set things up for you if you came back. Your erstwhile friend was retarded.”

  I said, “He did pretty well for a backward child.”

  “No doubt about it. Like all juveniles he had a shrewdness an adult can hardly duplicate. He had a child’s callousness and a solid criminal bent that helped him right along. These are the attributes that put Bennett on top. He worked things from a wild angle that nobody but a juvenile would even consider and because he did he caught certain persons off guard and before they could recover Bennett had the ball.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a retarded action.”

  “It isn’t. I said he had a criminal bent. Bennett wasn’t a retarded juvenile ... he was a retarded adult. Along certain lines he still thought like an adult. A criminal adult. That, Deep, is a rough, unpolished, but accurate picture of Mr. Bennett as I see it. You should see it too.”

  “For me it’s harder,” I told him. “I only knew him as a juvenile.”

  “You were lucky.”

  I pulled a chair over and perched on the arm of it. “So Bennett picked up choice bits and pieces of people and held them over their heads. Now, the big question, where did he keep them?”

  Batten sat back and stared at the ceiling. “I wish I knew. I really do.”

  “What would you do with it?”

  Only his eyes moved back to me. “Simple. I’d make a lot of friends. I’d make a present of those choice bits and pieces as you call them to the parties concerned and sit back and enjoy their largesse. All legal, no trouble, everybody saying thank you and I would need no more.”

  Before I could answer the phone rang. Batten picked it up, frowned and handed it to me. It was Cat on the other end and he told me he still hadn’t run Lew James down but hadn’t checked out all the places he could be either. He had gotten to the Westhampton after the cops and made out a little better than they had. With the aid of a double sawbuck the desk clerk, who was an inveterate cop hater, thought he could remember a number that one of them had called. He couldn’t recall it then, but knew it would come back to him after a while because it had a certain rhyme to it. Meanwhile Charlie Bizz was hitting the medicos a guy could see without worrying about gunshot wound reports.

  Wilson Batten was waiting for me to clue him in but I didn’t bother. When I put the phone up I said, “Supposing you figure out where Bennett put the stuff before I do, Batten?”

  He meant it when he answered, “Then I’ll tell you all about it. You see, I figure you for a psychotic too, and like most psychotics, clever in certain fields. If I thought it out, then so would you and I’d rather not have you on my back with a gun than enjoy the profits such a discovery could bring me. Life, after all, is worth more than money.”

  “Keep it in mind, friend. You have it pegged exactly right except for the first part.”

  “About being psychotic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does the thought gnaw at you?”

  “Not the slightest.”

  “Time will tell.”

  I nodded. “You have any immediate plans?”

  “Nothing I can’t cancel.”

  “Good. Then you hold down that chair. I might want you in a hurry.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” he said.

  Chapter Eleven

  I dug out the piece of paper Helen had written her number on and called from a drugstore down the street from Batten’s office. Her place was an apartment hotel in the west seventies and she wanted me to come over as soon as I could. I told her to have something ready to eat and I’d be there in twenty minutes.

  She was more beautiful than ever, standing there in the doorway waiting for me. A black velvet housecoat accentuated the panther-black of her hair, the thin scarlet beading matched the moist redness of her lips.

  Big. Beautifully big. She stood with o
ne leg partially thrust out and the velvet molded itself around the fullness of her thigh in a manner more sensual than nakedness itself. She needed no open neckline to highlight the grandeur of her breasts. Their eloquence was evident in their proud thrusting, having motion and life of their own under the rich texture of the gown.

  “Do I pass?” she smiled.

  When I grinned back she took my arm and pulled me inside.

  “Didn’t mean to stare,” I said. “It’s just that I got a fetish for big lovely broads. Besides, black intrigues me.”

  “It’s supposed to. To intrigue you even further I might suggest that I haven’t got a damn thing on under it, either.”

  I tossed my hat on an end table and sat down. “Suggestions, suggestions, never any proof.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me, suddenly flipped open a button with the tip of her fingers and threw the housecoat open like a pair of great batwings. I had that one brief flash of an incredible combination of black and white sweeping through curves and planes into beautiful hollows and columns then just as quickly the batwings folded shut again. It was exactly like getting hit in the pit of the stomach when you weren’t expecting it and left sucking air and wondering what happened.

  I stood up feeling disjointed and said, “Damn it, Irish, don’t ever do that again!” My voice came out rough on the edges and I could feel the dryness in my mouth.

  She didn’t back off. She took a step nearer, then her hands were on my face. “Why shouldn’t I, Deep?”

  Having a shaky feeling when a dame was close was a new sensation to me. There had been many women and many times. There were other big ones and other beautiful ones, but never one like this.

  I didn’t dare touch her. I couldn’t take the chance. I wanted to push her away but I knew that if I touched her at all the moment would be too explosive and I couldn’t afford the resulting emotion.

  “Deep ...?”

  “You said it once, kitten. I’m poison. Nobody knows it better than you.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that.”

  When I finally could breathe right I sucked my gut in and stepped back. “Something just occurred to me, Irish.”

  She knew what I meant. She seemed to retreat inside herself for a second and when she turned her head away it was because her eyes were wet.

  “You mean that once I would have given anything to see you killed?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “You think this is part of that wanting?”

  “I don’t know. You’re an actress. I’m not a good critic. There are times when I don’t know what to think.”

  Helen turned, looked at me and there was no guile in her at all. She smiled gently. “You’re not fooling me at all, Deep. You know how I feel and I know how you feel. Shall I be direct?”

  I nodded.

  “I love you, Deep.”

  She said it quietly, with dignity, as though she had known about it and thought about it all her life. She stood there watching me, waiting patiently until I grinned at her because there was nothing I could say then because she knew it all anyhow.

  “Does it always happen this way, Irish?”

  “I don’t know. It never happened to me before this.”

  “We’ll have to talk about it some more,” I said. “Later.”

  Her face clouded somewhat and she folded her arms across her chest. “Will there be a later, Deep?”

  “Why?”

  “You’re out to kill. You know what will happen.”

  Once again I opened my coat. Like Hurd, her eyes went to my belt and when they came back to mine it was worth seeing. She came to me slowly, her hungry mouth reaching for mine, her arms possessive and demanding, the body warmth of her through the soft folds of her clothes. I could still taste her after she took her mouth away.

  “There’s a big chance for us yet, Deep. Can we make it?”

  “We’ll make it.”

  “There will be a later then?”

  “A long time of it.”

  “Hungry?”

  “For you.”

  “You came up here to eat,” she said. “Remember?”

  “You’ll do for a starter.”

  She laughed deeply and impishly. “Later.” She tipped her head back and kissed me again. “But not much later, darling.”

  There was a new domestic quality about that meal. Sitting opposite her, feeling her presence there like that, realizing that the unfulfilled desire we had for each other would not be a vain thing charged the room with a tingling, physical sensation.

  We talked and laughed and remembered back to days long ago when things were worse and at the same time better. She asked me why I hadn’t married and I told her I never had the time ... or the right woman. I asked her an identical question and the answer was substantially the same.

  Over coffee I said, “Tell me something, Helen... after all the time you’ve lived in this neighborhood, what made you come back?”

  “How?”

  “To be friends with a pig like Lenny Sobel.”

  She couldn’t meet my eyes for a second. She got up, took the coffee pot from the stove and poured herself another cup. “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, kid.”

  She put the pot back. “It’s nothing like you’re thinking.”

  “Look, Irish, I’ve never bothered to pry into your business and I won’t start now. You don’t know me and I don’t know you. There’s a twenty-five year gap in our lives and that, kid, is quite a while. It was your life. The only part I’m interested in is the future, so whatever you want to tell me or not tell me is fine with me.”

  Helen smiled, her eyes crinkling with pleasure. “I like you, Deep. But again, there was nothing like you’re thinking.”

  I shrugged and sipped at the coffee.

  A change drifted across her face then. She leaned back vacantly, deep in thought, and when she was finished she turned to me. “I don’t want to sound silly to you,” she said.

  I waited.

  “Crusades are funny things. You came here on one ready to shoot down your friend’s murderer. Roscoe has his, always being the conscience of the city, afraid of nothing and going all out to get rid of the things he hates most ... slums, poverty, crime ... the things he has lived with. And me, I had a crusade too.”

  “Had?”

  “It seems a little unrealistic now,” she said. “Betty Ann Lee and I were friends like you and Bennett. It’s hard to imagine that girls can actually be that close, but we were. Unfortunately, Betty Ann had problems she could solve only one way and every day took her a little farther downhill. I saw her hire herself out to every cheap punk in the area. She was a damn pretty girl and in the beginning she was exclusively for the big ones and Lenny Sobel had priority rights there. From him she graduated down through the ranks and reached Bennett.”

  I stopped her there. “Bennett was a big one.”

  “Not girl-wise. He couldn’t make a chick with a stick. Any girl he ever had he bought. No, he was big some ways, but with women, nothing.”

  What she said tied in with Wilson Batten’s observation. To me it was hard to picture, but then I never knew Bennett as a man.

  “Bennett always wanted Betty Ann. She would have nothing to do with him while there were the others, but when they were finished with her Bennett saw a way to get what he wanted. In Betty Ann’s condition it wasn’t too difficult to get her to try heroin. She had been smoking pot for years and this was just something else. Bennett hooked her, he kept her tied to him like that until one day she walked up on the roof of a building and jumped.”

  “Rough.”

  Helen shook her head. “Not for her. Death was a relief. But for me ... well, it hit me pretty hard. I wanted to ... to get even, I guess. I wanted to do something that would get vermin like Sobel and Bennett and the rest off the backs of people like Betty Ann and Tally. For me it wasn’t hard. I simply let Lenny Sobel
... cultivate me and took advantage of his friendship to wield a big club when I had to.”

  “For instance,” I prompted.

  “Tenant evictions for one. There have been old friends about to get tossed out by some rent-gouging landlord and a word from Lenny would suddenly make them kind and generous. There were kids in trouble, too. Lenny could pull strings that would make a conniving pimp trying to operate around here run for his life.”

  “At least your crusade had a noble motive.”

  “That was only the beginning. Actually it was Bennett I really wanted. It was he who was responsible for Betty’s death. At that time I thought Lenny Sobel was the big one and wanted him to do something about Bennett. I found out how wrong I was in a hurry. Lenny wasn’t about to touch Bennett. Neither was anybody else. In polite, but firm language, Lenny told me to stay away from Bennett and I saw then who held the reins.”

  “And Sobel was soft on you all this time,” I stated.

  Woman-pride flicked across her face. “He was in love with me.”

  “It figures.”

  “He kept his ground though. He was satisfied with my company because he knew there was no more to be had.” She stopped, frowned in concentration and leaned on the table, cupping her face in her hands. “Bennett, then, became a personal score. It was a simple thing to pick up old threads. I saw him intermittently at first, then later more often. He sent me presents, bought into the show and would drop anything if I wanted to see him.”

  “How’d he act?”

  Helen frowned again, biting her lower lip. “Strictly on the up-and-up. Girl-on-a-pedestal thing. All this time I was trying to find out what it was that made him such a big man.”

  I asked her the big one. “Did you?”

  “No. He dodged the issue nicely. It was going to be a waiting game. Then he died.”

  Softly, I said, “Who killed him, Helen?”

  She seemed to stare right through me. “It could have been anyone. He called the turn on everything in this town. That low-down snake of a man directed whatever he wanted in any manner he wanted.”

  “Think harder.”

  “One of the faceless ones.”

  “Uptown?”