The Deep (18 page)

 

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?”

“Yes.”

“I don't think so.”

The frown grew deeper and more puzzled. I said, “I keep thinking of something I saw when I first got here ... all the big boys ... the Hugh Peddles, the uptown crowd, the gray-flannel representatives of the syndicates themselves.”

“At the meeting?”

“That's right,” I nodded. “They were all sitting there listening to Benny Mattick proclaim himself king. The power boys, the money crowd, the mob reps ... all sat there and listened to half-ass Benny-from-Brooklyn take over the club and never said a thing.”

“But Benny ...”

“I know, a nothing,” I told her, “but the other night he was at a conference with Hugh Peddle and although Hurd claims to be one of the common men he doesn't sit in on supper conferences with hoods like Benny.”

“What are you getting at, Deep?”

“I think Benny let a very broad hint go out that he was the recipient of Bennett's personal power package that kept everybody in line.”

“You think he killed Bennett?”

“Benny was too cheap a punk to bother holding in line by the blackmail route. Hell, Bennett could have intimidated him any which way. Remember, Benny was part of the old gang. He'd have nothing to lose by knocking off Bennett especially if he knew where the stuff Bennett held was hidden. Even if he didn't know, he was in a position to make a threat stick. Nobody dared call his bluff since there was a good possibility that he did have Bennett's ear as an old K.O. member and was his benefactor in case of death. Bennett's so-called will left me, his old buddy, cash, etc., but made no mention of any fact file. That could well have been left to somebody else.

“So Benny tried for the big one. He could have killed Bennett then made the grab. Unfortunately, I showed up. I was the only one who could call his bluff. When I did, that left him with egg on his face Now I'm beginning to see how he could have arranged for a couple of boys to come in to knock me off. Cute. Very, very cute.”

The entire thought startled her. It was something she had never figured on. “Then ... you think ... it was Benny Mattick?”

“I don't know,” I said, “Let's go ask him.”

Bracing Benny without a rod to back things up shouldn't be too hard. As long as he didn't call the bluff.

 

Benny-from-Brooklyn had changed boroughs when he was ten but he had never lost his accent. We gave him the tag because we had two other Bennys in the club back then. They both died when they wrecked a stolen car, but Benny-from-Brooklyn stayed Benny-from-Brooklyn anyway.

Now he lived in a converted brownstone off Third Avenue in a fringe area that was scheduled for demolition within a few months. Six buildings from the east end of the block had already been evacuated and two razed into a pile of rubble. A bulldozer was shoving the brick and timbers into separate piles and two men with jackhammers were attacking a huge slab of concrete.

Like most bachelors, Benny had the ground-floor apartment. There were no names on the two other bells at all. I rang Benny's, waited and rang again. I tried the other two bells and had no luck there. When I went back outside I looked at the windows upstairs and they were blank, curtainless. Either Benny had the place to himself or the others evacuated ahead of the demolition.

Helen asked, “What shall we do now?”

“I won't waste the trip over, that's for sure.”

She watched me open the foyer door in a good old-fashioned way. I kicked the lock out and splintered the wood, but I wasn't worrying about what anyone would say. Benny's front apartment door was on the right and in case the bell didn't work outside, I knocked on it with my fist.

Except for the muffled sounds of the construction crew down the block, the place was totally quiet. I didn't fool around here either. I didn't mess around with any gimmicks to open the lock when a kick in the right place with two hundred pounds behind it would be faster.

Helen watched me nervously. To her, what I did was a criminal invasion of privacy and as cold-blooded as stepping on a cat. The motions came to me naturally and she could tell that it was a practiced movement and when she looked at me she knew I was enjoying myself and put out a hand to stop me.

But the door was open and I went inside, my hand automatically feeling for the rod that wasn't there any more.

I saw Benny and shoved her at the second the gun blasted out of the darkness from the comer of the room. Helen smashed into the wall, covered by the corner of it, but there was nothing there for me. I dove flat, rolled, felt my hand close on a small table and I threw it without stopping. There were two more shots that tore into the floor where I was then I heard a scramble from the other room, the slam of a door closing and I got back on my feet.

It was too damn dark. My eyes hadn't adjusted to the light. They still had a yellow spot in the center from the flash of the gun. I groped my way across the room, found the door and got through. A window stood open looking out into the growing dusk. I took a chance of getting my head blown off and looked out.

I knew what I'd see. Emptiness. An open court-yard exiting into a dozen other buildings. The backyard jungle.

There was no use going after him. I went back in the front room and found the light switch and threw it on. Helen was still crouched breathlessly against the wall. I gripped her hand, pulled her up, then she saw Benny Mattick.

Her eyes widened with the initial shock of seeing a dead man and her fingers bit into my wrist like talons.

She still couldn't believe it. “Is he ...”

“Very much so.” I stood over him, looking into those death-glazed eyes that were slitted open. There were two closely spaced holes in his chest right over the heart and he had died so quickly that little blood had spilled out and there was only a small stain on his shirt.

“Did you ... see who it was?”

I turned around. Helen was trembling now, her hand at her mouth. I said, “No, I missed him.”

“What will we do?” The shock was evident in the sound of her voice.

“Let me think a minute.”

“The police ...”

“No. Not yet. I need time. Damn it, we can't afford to get tied into another kill together!”

I thought back over the time element. Benny hadn't been dead but a few minutes, possibly shot just before we arrived. If the killer hadn't used a silencer the shots would have been muffled by the racket the demolition gang made down the street. At least the guy didn't have enough time in here to do much more than pump two slugs into Benny.

Without wasting time I went through the apartment hitting all the likely places Benny would have used to lay something away. Benny Mattick had never been overly imaginative and he wasn't smart enough to be devious. If he had hidden anything in that apartment I would have found it. There were two dusty Banker's Specials behind the phony fireplace and a Colt Cobra in an archaic shoulder holster lying on the catch bottom under the lower drawer of his dresser and three grand in hundred-dollar bills in a pocket of a suitcase.

But nothing like I was looking for. Nothing at all.

Helen had her back to the body, trying hard to keep herself in check. I said, “The place is clean.”

She didn't understand what I meant.

I said, “Nobody tried to shake the place down. Whoever it was came here for one reason... to knock him off.”

“Deep ...” her hands were bloodless as they squeezed each other, “they'll think it was you.”

“Relax. Nobody knows anything yet. This was a professional job, kid, and nobody's letting the cat out of the bag.”

“Could somebody outside ... have seen him? Or us?”

“People don't react to ordinary things. Besides, this block is half deserted. If we go out of here in a normal fashion chances are nobody will see us at all. Look, I have to make a phone call.”