Mickey Spillane - The 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.