Mickey Spillane - The Deep

“Keep going, Deep. You’re doing great.”

“Thanks, baby. I’ll keep on trying. I want you to be overjoyed when I get killed. Our friend Pedro here is an important man in the scheme of things. That right, Pedro?”

“I don’t know how you talk.” He held his hands bunched into fists close to his belly.

“What are you doing to him, Deep?”

I shrugged noncommittally. “Nothing. It’s just that Pedro is going to tell me a story. You know the one, Pedro?”

He shook his head nervously.

“So I’ll clue you, Pedro. I want to hear about how you found Bennett when he was killed.”

Helen’s cup stopped halfway to her mouth. Pedro’s hand began to twitch so hard he had to hold it with the other. He shot a quick glance toward the door and when I shook my head his eyes rolled piteously and he seemed to shrink down inside his clothes.

“I...”

“Go on, Pedro.”

“I don’t know this thing you are saying. I don’t know...”

“Okay, man. Then we stop playing. Suppose I put it this way. Feel in your left-hand pocket.”

Instinctively his hand dropped to his side, felt the contents of his coat and in that one second he got the picture and tried to jerk away. I grabbed his arms, made him hold the edge of the bar and watched him while he shook.

Helen said, “What happened to him?”

I grinned nastily so Pedro could see it. “Nothing special. I just put our buddy in the path of law and order. He’s a junkie, so I dropped a few days’ poppilng in his pocket with the gimmicks and if he gets picked up he goes cold turkey downtown. In five minutes a cop’ll walk in here and off this laddie goes. Unless he talks, of course. In that case he can even keep what’s in his pocket.”

The distaste of it made Helen slide away from me. “There are names for people like you,” she said.

I nodded. “So I hear. Now let’s listen to a speech. You got maybe four minutes left, Pedro. You can have it any way you want it.”

“You no tell?”

“I don’t have to tell, friend”

“This one... Bennett. I did not keel him. He was already there. You understand?”

I nodded again.

“He was already very dead. This you know? I did not keel him. He had one very big hole here...” he tapped his throat where the neck joined the body. “I take his watch. It was not a very good watch. For it I got one dollar. I take his wallet. He has twenty dollars. In his pocket he has ten dollars. That is all I take. I sell the watch. That is all. I run away. I do not think anybody knows this.”

“Where’s his wallet?”

“I throw it someplace.”

“Like where.”

“I think I know.”

“You get it, Pedro. You find it and bring it to where you live and keep it there until I come by. You understand this?”

His head bobbed again. “Si. I understand. You know...” he hesitated.

“I know where you live,” I said.

He started to say something else, stopped and slid off the stool. His departure was noiseless, like a shadow leaving. When the door closed Helen looked into her cup, the puzzle plain on her face. “Bennett was found dead in his room,” she said.

“That wasn’t the first time he was found dead.”

“How did you know?”

It was the same question Pedro almost asked.

“Only one person in the world could get close enough to Bennett to shoot him in his own house,” I said.

“Who?”

“Me, sugar. He always had a pathological fear of relaxing his eternal vigilance in his own place and getting creamed on his Persian rug. It was one of his little foibles.”

“You called it real smart, Deep.” Her tongue ran lightly over her lower lip. “You had an inside track?”

“No... just a reputation. The watch had an engraving on the back and he sold it to a Scorp who knew what it meant.”

Her hand stopped me. “What?”

I said, “I boosted that watch from a department store in ’32 and engraved the back To Ben from Deep . It was a cheap job, but he always liked it. The Scorpions are a punk club on the other side of Amsterdam Avenue, but they knew what those words meant. The kids are on it all the way. Junkies have a bad habit of blowing off at the mouth when they’re flying and he let the bit leak out. Like I said, it reached me fast.”

“How did you hear of it?”

My eyes started to squint up. “The ties that bind,” I said. “Even the punks have their heroes. Bennett was one. I was a dark horse, but still running.”

“But never the police. They didn’t know about this,” she said sarcastically.

I looked at her disgustedly, “You’re forgetting your early upbringing, kiddo. You weren’t hothouse raised. That block was your block as well as it was mine and you had your fingers in a few pockets for pennies. Don’t make me recite times and places. Those punk kids wouldn’t give the cops the right time and you know it. To their own personal heroes they’d run off, maybe, but not to cops.”

“Who was your hero?”

“Dillinger,” I said.

“It figures,” she said seriously.

The bartender came down and emptied the Silex in our cups. He fingered the change out of the pile and went back to the other end, those funny wise eyes of his a little too all-knowing.

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?”