The Deep Read online

  When the guy came back he carried the two strands of ropes that had held me to the chair, knelt on the floor beside me and tied my hands behind my back. He finished that, threw a few loops around my feet, knotted them and got up and laid down in bed as though nothing had happened at all.

  Outside Lenny was making himself another drink. He had two more within a few minutes and between them mouthed a few curses at the world in general.

  On the bed the guy began to breathe slowly, but lightly. He wasn’t quite asleep yet and I couldn’t afford to disturb him now. My hands were still tingling, and though bound, were coming back to normal. There was nothing professional in the rope job the boy did on me and the slight amount of pressure I managed against his efforts was enough to allow me the slightest bit of slack.

  I had to wait. I had to lie there and wait while I wanted to explode.

  To take the tension off I forced myself to think. I tried to put the whole thing together in my mind and cull out the loose ends and eliminate the mistakes.

  Why did Bennett die?

  Now there was a poser. Alive, he was a threat. He wielded a power that could line up forces the way he wanted them, both political and illegal. Sure, even Holiday admitted that and Peddle proved it by being in the club. There were others involved to make that much certain.

  But Holiday had said a peculiar thing. The syndicate didn’t really mind Bennett. It was easier to take him than knock him over. Why?

  Back to Wilson Batten then. He laid a finger on Bennett that Helen had known too. Immaturity. Bennett hadn’t really wanted much at all! His idea of bigness was really so small they could afford to let him have his way ... but what he had was big enough so that they played it his way all the way and without reservation.

  No, the mob wanted him alive. They couldn’t afford him dead at all.

  Benny? Could Benny have killed him? Unlikely. Benny just didn’t measure up to that kind of courage. He would have showed signs of what he had in mind and Bennett would have gotten there first. Or the mob. They’d hit Benny if they knew he was going after Bennett. With a power package, Benny would be more dangerous to them than Bennett by far.

  Then there was Tally’s death. Hers was the forgotten one.

  And there was something else I almost forgot. Whoever killed Tally had killed Bennett and had tried to kill me.

  The weapons?

  Not a heavy caliber gun and a few well placed, immediately fatal shots the way it had happened to Augie and Lew James and Cat. Not the signs of an experienced pro.

  A zip gun and a bottle. A kid’s trick. A lousy kid’s trick that screwed up the works and started a chain of death that still wasn’t over.

  Sure, from the beginning it went like that. Take it the way a kid would ... he figured a guy like Bennett would have cash around and cased his place until he knew the routine. When he knew only Bennett and Dixie were in the house he waited and when Dixie went out, he went in. Bennett answered the door thinking it was Dixie back and there stood the kid.

  The kid’s first hit, maybe. He pulled the trigger and that’s all he had, that one shot. He got Bennett in the neck ... maybe Bennett staggered and fell, but he wasn’t dead. The kid saw that and panicked. While Bennett lay there he got in the elevator and took it down, forgetting to grab any loot.

  I could feel the excitement rising in me. I tried to follow Bennett’s actions and the kid’s at the same time and it began to come out clear.

  Naturally, it would have been a local punk, one of the neighborhood gang members. Bennett recognized him and knew where he’d run to and tried to cut him off. He went down the fire escape and through the yards behind the buildings the way I had followed Morrie Reeves after he killed Augie. Bennett had headed for that same alley Morrie had hoping to cut the kid off, all that time holding his hand over the hole in his neck.

  And that was as far as he got. The internal hemorrhage killed him right there.

  That was where the night people came in. Was Tally coming home from a drunk when she saw him? He must have been close to the mouth of the alley to be that easily seen from the street. I could see Tally in my mind, watch her take in the dead man with one grand look of pleasure, spit on him and walk away knowing that now the fun would begin.

  Then Pedro ... he robbed the body and got off the scene.

  But because of these two the picture had changed.

  Where was the killer all this time?

  Why didn’t he run? Could it be that he was seen in the area by Tally or at least thought he had been seen? He shouldn’t have killed her; Tally would never have spoken against him. Or maybe that the body was almost lying in the killer’s back yard and its very presence would mean an unnecessary danger if anybody put two and two together. A zip gun meant a kid gang. The Scorps?

  So the killer carried Bennett back. Bennett was no lightweight, but even a panicky old lady can do remarkable things. He got him back through the rear, took him up the fire escape, dumped him in his own living room and left.

  A cute detail had fooled the police. Bennett had bled a lot when he was first hit and messed the room up just right. Who would have thought that he had gone out and been returned to the same spot again?

  A zip gun. A kid’s kick. A simple stupid kill and all hell cuts loose.

  Lenny broke a bottle outside. He cursed too loudly to be sober and stumbled into the living room. My head was turned so I could see him through the doorway and when he stopped, cursed again and walked into the darkened bedroom I thought it was over.

  “That stinking Knight Owl Club. That whole bunch of stinking jerks!” He took another pull of his drink and yanked the door shut after him.

  It was funny, in a way. Just a cellar club from years ago, but the repercussions never ended. They just could-n’ t get it out of their heads. The K.O.’s dominated their lives, everyone who was touched by it.

  Nostalgia? Sentimentality? Environment?

  It was like I told Helen ... it was all tied up with the club.

  And then the sudden truth came at me like a bomb that grew and grew in size as you watched it and the whole thing burst open in a wild sheet of flame that left you too stunned to do more than gasp.

  It was all there. It fell right in place. I had pieces and Helen had pieces and Batten had pieces and Roscoe had pieces and Lenny had pieces and Holiday had pieces and now it was one big whole and it could be too late at any moment to pull the cork.

  On the bed the guy’s breathing was deep and regular. I tried the ropes, being as quiet as I could. I let my hands hang lifelessly so that no muscular activity would swell them, then began the slow process of stretching and loosening my bonds.

  Twice, the man on the bed turned, saying something in his half-sleep, then drifted off again. Each time I waited until I was sure he wouldn’t hear the small noises I made, then went back to work on the ropes.

  One hand came loose, taking skin with it and I unwound the length of rope from my other and freed my feet. When it was done I lay there until I knew I was all right again, then got up quietly and did what I had to do to the guy on the bed.

  He was no trouble at all.

  He lay there unconscious, a gag in his mouth, breathing heavily through his nose while I tied him hands-to-feet with a single strand of rope that he wasn’t about to loosen. As I finished I heard the phone ring and Lenny move to answer it. He said, “Yeah ... yeah. I got it,” then tapped the receiver bar down, held it and dialed a number. When it answered he said, “Dave? How many you got there? Yeah, six will do it. Holiday call? Okay, then you know you take orders from me this trip. No stay there. I want in on this so don’t move without me. Stay in the neighborhood and when I drive up you can move in. Hit Peddle and take the girl alive. We’ll do the whole thing inside there where nobody will hear a thing. No, you’ll know me. I’ll drive the red and white panel truck that belongs to the restaurant. When you see it, start moving in. Just you wait until I get there, understand?” He grunted and slammed the phone back, then
let out a little laugh, swirled the ice in his drink, finished it and set the glass down. I heard him walk toward the door. I got behind it. He still had my gun.

  The liquor and the light had blurred his sense and his eyes. He must have thought it was me on the bed and supposed the other guy was in a chair asleep. He stood in the doorway chuckling.

  “You’ve had it, Deep. You know why I let you live this long? Because I wanted to let you know what happened to Helen. You know where Peddle took her? To the old K.O. building. You know why? Because she knows that someplace in there is the stuff and Peddle is going to make her come across with it. Only Peddle won’t live long enough to use it and neither will the broad.”

  He had my gun in his hand now and thumbed the hammer back.

  I wanted to tell him before I moved that Helen didn’t know anything. She took Peddle there because he had already squeezed something out of her. She remembered the last thing I had said ... that it was all tied up in that damn K.O. Club.

  She had a small choice... if I had said it then I had meant it. There was a remote possibility that I might show up there in time.

  Time.

  The gun went off into the ceiling when Lenny’s broken trigger finger pulled against it, then his shoulder joint dislodged and the scream he started choked off into a total faint and there was no trouble at all in doing the same thing to him I did to the one on the bed. I immobilized him with the other strand of rope, picked up my gun, reloaded the one chamber and stuck it in the holster.

  Feet sounded in the corridor outside and the door swung open. When Tony saw me crouched in the doorway with the .38 leveled right at his nose he shrugged resignedly and said, “I told Holiday he shoulda bumped ya.”

  “Drop your piece, Tony. Carefully.”

  He didn’t argue. His gun hit the floor, he kicked it aside without being asked and stood there. “You bump the others?” When I didn’t answer he added sourly, “Well, I guess that’s that. Do it like quick, huh?”

  “They’re inside,” I said.

  Tony grinned. “Thanks, pal,” he said. It was one pro talking to another. He turned around and waited and when I hit him, folded up neatly. I used his belt and some of the TV antenna wire to keep him put.

  The truck was behind the building where it had been backed in from the street. The keys were in it and it started easily. I checked the time on my watch and knew it could be a fast run if I caught the lights most of the way. At that hour traffic was at its lowest ebb and speed could be had, not with the throttle pedal, but by staying in time with the stop lights where neither cops nor cross-town cabs were likely to nail you.

  I let the clutch out and eased down the narrow drive-way, the headlights like twin fingers leading the way. I switched them to dim. It started to rain and I fumbled for the wipers until I found them and they swept methodically in front of my face.

  Time? How much of it was left?

  I turned down The Street.

  The Street.

  That’s what we always called it. We still did.

  In the middle of The Street was The Club.

  For so many, like a womb. The mother. They came from it, they went back to it. I remembered the key word that had evaded me even though it had been spoken so often by so many people.

  Sentimental.

  I drove slowly so those watching would see the truck. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there.

  How often I live in the shadows myself, I thought. How many times in all those years I have buried myself in the night shrouds of a building, waiting, fingering the butt of a gun to make sure it was ready. In the early days I used to want to vomit but couldn’t, so spat out cotton wads and sweated, but that was when the gun was new in my hand and still had that cop’s imprint on it.

  Sentimentality. It was part of me too. I had kept that gun for twenty-six years. In its own way it was a symbol, a reminder. The cop who had worn it got shot down trying to stop a heist artist about a year later and I never had to worry after that about him trying to run me down and take his piece back. It was my first piece of iron and the only one I ever had or needed. That .38 had been around the track and back again and had pulled me out of plenty of tight spots so that we were close friends now. I could feel it next to me, warm with body heat. The action smooth. Ready again.

  As I passed the building I peered through the rain at the front. No light showed at all in any of the windows, but that was no indication of what went on inside. I reached the end of the block, turned the corner and parked. I cut the engine, sat a minute and waited, and saw the guy dart across the street like a wraith and sidle up to the cab of the truck.

  He wrenched open the door, shaking the water from his head and said without looking up, “Them two gunnies of his went in there about ten minutes ago. You want to ...” He stopped, sudden shock on his face when he saw me.

  That was all he had time for. I smashed the butt of the .38 across his temple, dragged him in the cab and let him lie there. It would be hours before he’d wake up. Six, Lenny had said. Now there’d be five. They’d think I had him stay with me and they would start moving in.

  This part I liked. I felt myself grinning when nothing was funny at all.

  Henny had done his job well. The back door was nailed permanently shut in the face of fire regulations, convenience and common sense, but it did the job. There wasn’t time to force it and if I tried each nail would have sounded a separate alarm.

  But there was another way. When the old man used to lock us out for not coming up with the three dollars rent in the days before we were big enough to climb his frame, we used the coal chute window. It was bigger than the others and always unlocked.

  And times hadn’t changed since.

  I slid in feet first on top of a fresh pile of coal, closed the window and got out of the pile with as little noise as possible. My fingers reached for the latch on the bin door, lifted it and I stepped out. It was absolutely pitch dark but I knew every inch of the way.

  The light overhead was sticky with dirt and it lit when you screwed it all the way in. I turned the bulb and turned back the years in one second. There was the massive, squat furnace, the asbestos outer skin hanging from it in shreds, but still serviceable. Across the small room were shelves littered with years of accumulation of junk.

  Dust had laid a blanket down over everything... except in one place. It was where you could get a hand in the bank of shelves and pull them away from the wall.

  They still moved easily, the castors under them retaining the age-old grease and not succumbing to rust. The hollow in the wall behind the shelves was the old arsenal of the K.O. members. A butcher knife, two pipe billies and a zip gun with a tape-wrapped frame and four boxes of .22 shorts were still there, mementoes of years past.

  But you could see where there had been another gun and somebody had split open a box of shells just to get one out to fit the piece. Somebody in a hurry.

  Nostalgia?

  The old K.O. Club had something for everybody. Nostalgia was the word. Something always brought them back.

  Like, for instance, a person in need of a gun. You just don’t pick them up anywhere in New York and if you don’t want anybody to know at all, there’s always the old K.O. arsenal.

  Somebody had remembered.

  Nostalgia? The answer again. Buddy Bennett and the way he thought, only with him it was that he never quite grew up. He was still back there in the clubroom days, a man grown and important, but in one respect still a child who couldn’t give up the womb. It was his life. It had been his only home. When he had the loot he still couldn’t give it up and unconsciously duplicated the womb as closely as he could where he could live as he wished.

  But the real thing kept dragging him back. After all, it was the only real thing he ever had, his only true woman, the one who birthed and nurtured him and in his mind she had birthed and nurtured me too. We were, in effect, brothers from the same mother.

  It was to her that he came to plac
e his offering in her womb where he knew only I would look since we both had the same mother.

  He was wrong, but he didn’t know that then.

  I found the place we had used, just the two of us, to secrete our most precious things, the things we considered important then. I kept my rod there, the metal and leather oiled and wrapped so it was always nearly perfect. He had kept his things there too.

  You took the cement block out. You reached down in the hollow.

  And there it was.

  Something like a lover’s packet of letters. Some were letters. Some were pictures. Some were photostats of documents and some were the documents themselves.

  Not much, but enough.

  He could run an empire on them.

  He had.

  I put them back for the moment, then went out into the main room of the old club. Just one big room with a curtained alcove at one end spotted by a jumble of chairs and boxes with a radio in a special place because at one time it had been a status symbol.

  In the comer a phone. The ultimate status symbol for a clubhouse.

  Had Bennett recognized the symbolism?

  Overhead the floor creaked. I paused, thinking the faint strains of a scream marked the quiet.

  Easy. Don’t rush it. It has to be done right. I repeated it to myself. There can’t be any chances. The odds are wrong and the cost too high to pay.

  I picked the phone up, dialed Information and asked for Roscoe Tate in a whisper. She gave me the number, I dialed it and when it had rung a few times the ringing stopped.

  Quietly, I said, “Roscoe?”

  “Yes?”

  “Deep.”

  There was no smart talk now. He had seen the carnage at the rooming house and without having seen the papers I knew he had made the most of it.

  “Another scoop, friend.”

  “I told you I don’t need any favors.”

  “You’ll like this one.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s over, little man. The gang is all busted up. In five minutes they’ll be taking each other apart and the ones who are left over will be on hind tit because I have the works. I found Bennett’s power package and I’m going to wrap those miserable pigs up like in the old days and watch them cry.”