The Deep
- Автор: Спиллейн Микки
- Год: 1961
- Язык: английский
- Год: E. P. Dutton & Company
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Deep». Краткое содержание книги:
Deep was back in town after a twenty-five year exile — to inherit an empire and avenge a death. He and Bennett had made the inheritance pact when they were kids — blood brothers in crime. They had known then that even New York was too small for them both to share, and so they had tossed a coin to determine who would stay and who would build his organization in another town. Deep had lost and gone.
But now Bennett has lost — been murdered in his own home — and Deep is ready to prove lie is strong enough to take over. Deep wants Bennett’s killer; the others want Bennett’s job. And all too many of them — including the beautiful Irish — want Deep dead.
The Deep is the mastermind in one of the most exciting stories Spillane has ever written — a breathtaking tale of violence in action.
“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.