The Deep

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 one 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?”

“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.”

“Please... hurry. I don’t want to be here with... that.”

“Wait out in the vestibule. I’ll only be a minute.”

The phone was on a table beside a corner chair. I called Wilson Batten and asked him if Cat had called in. He said he had and gave me a number to call. When he hung up I found the directory, looked up Hymie’s Delicatessen and asked for Roscoe to come to the phone.

“Yeah, Tate here.”

“Deep, friend. I have a story for you.”

“Don’t do me any favors.”

“You’ll appreciate this one. Benny-from-Brooklyn has been killed. I’m at his place now.”

Incredulously, he asked, “You, Deep?”

“Don’t be an idiot. I found him this way.”

Roscoe’s excitement mounted. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. They all fall sooner or later when you come around. Hurd’ll be happy to hear about this. I don’t suppose you called him?”

“No, and I wouldn’t either if I were you. Irish is here with me and unless you want the heat on her you’ll play this one real cool.”

“You miserable bastard,” he said.

“Save it.”

“Okay, let’s hear your suggestion. I know you have one.”

“Natch. We need the body discovered. You can say you came to get a statement from Benny and found him this way. Don’t worry, nobody will spot us. And you keep your big mouth shut.”

Roscoe cut the connection without another word.

I wiped the phone clean, checked the floor where I had rolled and had shoved Helen, saw nothing that could possibly have identified us and went out to Helen.

The street was quiet now, the crew finished for the day. The first edge of darkness was folding in around the city and as though nothing at all had happened, Helen and I went down the steps, turned west to Third and walked six blocks before I flagged down a cab.

Helen couldn’t stop shaking. She fought to control it but couldn’t get the thought of Benny lying there dead and the guy shooting at us out of the darkness of the room out of her head. I tapped the cabbie, gave Helen’s address to him and got back to the building.

Upstairs I made her take a couple of aspirins and lie down and told her to stay there until I called. I threw a blanket over her, kissed her lightly and ran my fingers through the black silk of her hair.

Half chokingly she said, “Please, Deep... don’t do... anything.”

“Don’t worry, kid.”

“No matter what you do... it can spoil things.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Her hair tumbled about her face when she shook her head with easy desperation. “Do nothing at all. Please, Deep. We have so much now. Don’t go spoil it for us. Don’t ruin it all. We can get out of this place... if you’ll only do nothing.”

“Honey...”

She could read the expression on my face. “All you need is a gun in your hand and you’ll use it. We’ll both be finished then. You know that, don’t you?”

There wasn’t anything I could say.

She said, “You have something in mind, haven’t you?”

“Yes. The whole thing’s tied up in the damn K.O. Club.”

“Can’t you... leave it to the police.”

Some things you can’t explain to women. I didn’t try now. I told her I’d call or come back when I had a few more answers and would know then how I’d handle the situation.

At least it satisfied her. She let go my hand reluctantly and turned her face into the pillow.

You can bring them up tough and hard and even keep them that way, but when they see dead eyes and bullet holes punched in a guy’s chest the horror of it is always brand new. That is, if they’re normal.

I called the number Cat had given Batten and the receiver was lifted after a partial ring. I asked, “Cat?”

Cat seemed to be half out of breath. “Jeez, Deep, where you been?”

“Pretty busy. Where are you calling from?”

“You know the Welshman’s Bar?”

I said I did. It was a midblock spot on Lexington in the Forties.

“I been waiting, man. You want Lew James, you better get down here.”

“Where’d you find him, Cat?” I sensed the edge in my voice now.

“Wasn’t me. Charlie Bizz ran him down. You put a big hole through the muscle where the neck joins the shoulder and he had to get to a doc. Charlie Bizz got the word out and found out who. It was Anders. You remember Anders? Doc Anders. He’s the one they tried to nail a narcotics rap on five years ago and couldn’t make it stick.”

“I know who you mean.”

“Well, he was guilty, all right. He was strictly a syndicate man. So Lew James knew who to go to and you know what that means?”

“Yeah, a syndicate hit. It’s big. Where is he now?”

“Right around the corner in a rooming house. Number two twenty-four. He came right from Doc Anders’ place to here so it must be a joint Anders keeps handy for something like this. Bizz stayed behind him all the way and I took it up after we made contact. You get down here and we’ll take the guy.”

“Give me twenty minutes. And listen... things are popping fast. Benny Mattick has been knocked off.”

“Benny?” He couldn’t believe it. “Jeez, Deep, who...”

“It looks like mob action now. Benny couldn’t make his bluff work when he tried to take over the club. It makes sense now, at least in some ways. Remember the meet in Bimmy’s? You know who those boys were.”

“Sure. Them’s the big ones. Front men for the organization.”

“Chances are Benny was trying to pull a power play. He still could have convinced them, then we came in. When Benny crapped out there he had it.”

On the other end Cat let out a chuckle. “Can’t say we don’t go all the way. No more kid stuff. Right to the top. Jeez, Deep, when I think of all the times we scrounged apples off pushcarts... and now this.” He laughed right out and rasped into a cough. When it subsided he said, “If I live through this it’ll be somethin’.”

“Lay off the butts and you’ll make it. Now hang on, I’ll be there as fast as I can. I won’t even stop off to pick up my rod, so play it cool, understand?”

The bartender said yes, he saw the guy I described, all right. He kept coming in and going out, having a small beer each time and looking like he was waiting for somebody. But he had gone out ten minutes ago and hadn’t come back yet.

I knew what had happened. Cat was keeping a running check on the rooming house to make sure it just wasn’t a blind where Lew James might have switched to another track. I’d give him another five minutes anyway.

But even then he didn’t show.

I could smell it again. The wrongness. Something got screwed up and you could feel it in the air. I threw a buck on the bar for the beer and didn’t wait for any change. Two twenty-four he had said, a rooming house right around the corner.

Which comer, damn it!

South was closest and I tried that and there was no two twenty-four close by. I ran, retracing my steps, feeling the eyes of the curious follow me. I rounded the comer, followed the numbers down but I was on the wrong side of the street. Two twenty-four was directly across from me, a faceless house in a faceless neighborhood. There was a pale yellow glow coming from a front basement window and the vague outline of a woman reading a paper showed through the curtains. Upstairs was blacked out.

Nowhere could I see Cat. The only thing I could think of was that Lew James had left and Cat had followed him. But I had to be sure. I had to check. I took the six porch steps in one bound, stopped in the outside foyer and knew that inside something was going hot.

Cat’s shoes were there by the door, side by side.

Then the shots tore the night apart and a man’s scream was cut off in the middle.

I went through the door with no attempt at being quiet. I let out a hoarsely shouted, “Cat!” and from upstairs he answered, “Here, Deep!”

Something smashed against the wall above me and splintered. Glass shattered with an exploding sound and then there was a single shot as I reached the landing and dove into the darkness of the doorway in front of me.

He moaned softly from a few feet away. I said, “Cat?”

“Up on... the roof. Back way. Get... him, Deep.”

I mouthed some wild kind of curse and rammed through the rooms. I caught a table across my thighs and threw it into kindling against a chair. My eyes were adjusted to what little light there was and I spotted the open door that led to the stairway. Most houses had only one staircase, but this had ben renovated. I went up the last flight and paused in the doorway. Nobody was making a sucker of me on a rooftop. I peeled off my coat, threw it through and as I did a shot boomed out from one side and the coat was hit in midair.

That’s all I gave him time for. I went out the kiosk, cut to the left and stopped where I was covered by a corner of the exit and listened.

Downstairs somebody was yelling his head off, but up here it was dead quiet. I slipped my shoes off and put them down, then circled behind the sloping back of the rooftop exit. The gravel bit into the soles of my feet like small knives but I was past feeling it.

I stayed in the deepest shadows and when I found the position I wanted, squatted down until my eyes were level with the dividers that separated the buildings. In the background the far lights of midtown Manhattan winked at me, rows and rows of lights unbroken in their pattern.

Then the pattern broke. Just the slightest motion blurred the lowest row of lights in the Lever Building and I grinned and followed the shadows to the divider, bellied across and got behind him. He couldn’t afford to be too patient. Time was running out on him too. Those shots had been heard and he only had minutes to make his break in, but even then, minutes are enough.

I came up fast, but I wasn’t any Cat. He heard me when I was ten feet away, gasped, swung and fired in the same motion and the slug crackled past my head and ricocheted off something behind me. He never had time for a second shot because I dove in under his gun hand and slammed him against the parapet with every bit of my weight and strength. I saw his gun go up and over to the street and heard him swear as he clawed at me with a crazy determination and for a second he almost broke away.

My foot kicked his legs out from under him and we came up at the same time. The guy was good. He didn’t rush. He let me come in, feinted and threw a fast right into my head. I deliberately dropped my guard, started to bring back my right for a roundhouse and he thought he had me. He started a jab that would have taken my head off, only my head wasn’t there. It went over me and I came up with a jolting upper-cut that lifted him to his toes. I had the other one ready, but he grappled, hung on, and laid his face almost against mine.

I knew him then. His right name was Artie Hull and he was an enforcer for the syndicate and the pieces began dropping into the right slots.

Before he could recover I shoved him away, cocked my hand, but the tricky bastard brought his shoe down on my foot, I went to my knees and without trying for the kill he spun and ran for the parapet to jump the four-foot air shaft to the other building.

Somebody had left an antenna wire stretched out right by the edge. His foot caught it, he tumbled three stories down too surprised to even scream.

I got my shoes back on, picked up my coat and climbed back into it as I ran down the stairs. No sirens yet, but they could come up quietly. This time I found a lamp and snapped it on.

Cat looked up at me from the floor, smiling. “You... get him?”

“He’s dead. What happened?”

He nodded toward the doorway on the other side of the room. I looked in, flicked the light on and off quickly. The guy on the bed had a bandaged neck and two fresh holes in his chest.

Cat didn’t want me to touch him. He held his hands across him and his breath came in burbling gasps. I said, “I’ll get a doctor, kid.”

“No.”

“Nuts, you’ll be all right.”

He stopped me with a feeble gesture. “I had it. Why fight it. You... scram, Deep.”

“Tell me, what happened?”

“I was watching... saw this guy come right up... go inside. I knew... who he was. Mob boy. Torpedo.”

“Artie Hull. I made him too.”

“Syndicate... you know?”

I nodded.

He coughed, the pain of it racking his body. Flecks of blood spewed from his mouth; he choked, got it up and a steady trickle flowed down his chin. “Tried to... stop him only I ain’t the same old... Cat.” It hurt him to do it, but he grinned.

“Deep...”

“Here, kid.”

“See clerk... Westhampton... Morrie called...”

“Don’t talk, Cat. I get it.”

Like a cold wind in the eaves, the sirens whined up the street. Cat heard it too. “Beat it, Deep. Roof... like old times. Scram.”

“I hate to do it.”

“’S okay.” He smiled once more. “I know. Real... blood brothers, us. Old Knight... Owls. K.O. Really wasn’t so... much fun. Alla time trouble. Still... that way. Now no more trouble.”

He did a funny little thing with his fingers I hadn’t thought of for twenty-five years. He gave me the old K.O. high sign. I grinned and gave it back. “You sentimental jerk you,” I said.

“Blow, joe.”

We gripped hands once. It was enough. It was what he wanted.

The sirens were turning the comer and time had run out. I went back to the roof, falling into old-time patterns and thoughts and the run was as if I had never left the rooftops at all. It was like being a kid again.

When I came down I was a full block away and headed toward Cat’s hole in the wall.

I wanted my gun back.

The Westhampton was a hotel for the nothing people. They came and went, sometimes stayed a while, sometimes even died there. It was an inexpensive and indifferent kind of hotel where you could find people who lived dangling from a thread. Struggling actors and out-of-town hopefuls used the place until their economy moved them down to squalid flea bags or up to the next notch.

I pushed through the door and scanned the lobby quickly. Two young girls in trench coats talked too loudly about some show while they waited for the elevator and by the front windows an old man in a smock dusted the backs of the chairs. Behind the desk the clerk was sorting mail out, whistling aimlessly while a transistor radio chatted at his elbow.

He nodded carelessly when I reached him, finished with the mail and said, “Room?”

“Cat told me to see you.”

He was one of the nothing people too. He had lived too long among them and taken on all their characteristics. Any expression that touched his face was unreal. Long ago he had discarded emotion for unconcern and now he just stood there playing the game.

“Cat?”

There were two ways of playing the game. I showed him the first way that generally everyone knew and laid a twenty-dollar bill on top of the counter. “That’s right, Cat,” I said.

He eyed the bill and I knew what he was thinking, but his face stayed impassive.

“Cat,” he stated, as if he were trying to remember the name.

So I showed him the other way to play the game and let my coat come open deliberately so he could see the rod in the belt holster and when I grinned at him he knew the game was over. “My name is Deep,” I said.

Deftly, his fingers snapped up the bill and tucked it away. His eyes swept the lobby behind me with a practiced glance and he fiddled with the card holder in front of him.

“Cat said you thought you could remember a number. The Wagner boys made it.”

“Yes.” He licked his dry lips. “But they...”

“Don’t worry about them,” I said coldly. “They’re both dead.”

He walked his eyes from the pad, up my front until he was drawn to my own. He had read a lot of faces in his time. He knew what kind of people were that kind who could stand behind a gun and use it, and now he was seeing it in me.

“I won’t... get rapped for this, will I?”

“You never saw me in your life before if anybody asks.”

“That Cat, I wish he didn’t ask. You tell him...”

“He’s dead too, buddy.”

“Cripes!” he said softly.

“What number was it!”

“Two-oh-two-oh-two. It rhymed. Sort of like a song. That’s how I remembered it.”

“Good. You remember the exchange!”

He said no with a quick shake of his head. But it was enough. I left him, walked across the room to the row of empty pay phones, climbed in the booth and shut the door. I got my party on the second try, gave him the number and asked for a listing of all exchanges that carried the number and the names to go with them. He asked for my number, told me to wait and hung up.

From across the room the desk clerk watched me like a mouse peering out of a hole.

Ten minutes later the phone rang and when I answered my informant said, “Ready?” and when I said I was, began to rattle off numbers and names. I took them all down on the back of an envelope and when he reached the sixth one I said, “Hold it,” told him thanks and cradled the phone. A little mistake in judgment had come home to roost.

I remembered what Cat had told me. Two killers had been given a contract to rub me out. Later somebody had gone even higher to delay the execution. The killers called their original employer for further orders and were told to go ahead. That call was the mistake.

They had called Hugh Peddle, the sixth name on the list.