Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (12 page)

Barbara got up from her chair, jumpy, suddenly not totally comfortable in her own wondrous skin.

“So what have we found out?” She walked in back of me and stared across the air shaft; the clerks at Fidelity Insurance were sipping their morning coffees and beginning their actuarial tasks.

“We?”

“You. Come on, you know what I mean.”

She sat down at the edge of my desk, thought better of it, went back to the window.

“Well, I know next to nothing about your father’s death, but a little more than that about the Toscanini business.”

“What do you know?”

I lit up a Lucky.

“Jesus, this is just like the movies, isn’t it?” she said. “The cigarette, the whole goddamn bit.”

“I’m a walking cliché,” I told her happily. “And proud of it. Okay.” I blew out the match, took a dramatic pause. “He’s missing.”

“Toscanini.”

“He was snatched in Sun Valley. Your father had it right on the button.”

“Jesus Christ.” She sat back down in the chair and pointed to my pack of Luckies. I extracted one and lit it up for her. Who walked off with him?” she asked. “Any idea?”

“No, not yet, but this is where it gets really dicey.” I handed her the lit cigarette. “Between us, and when I say, ‘between us,’ Barbara—”

“You’re still working for my family, correct?”

“Yes I am, but what I’m going to tell you now can’t go anywhere, including your mother’s ears, and if it does, I’m going to quit the case immediately. Is that understood?”

Barbara looked at me with something resembling pity. “Yes. It’s understood.”

“I’m serious.”

“
Okay
.”

“Fine. Here’s the curveball: I’m not sure that NBC really wants Toscanini back. They may let him get knocked off, save the ransom, and reap some sort of public relations wave of pity.”

She stared at me without moving a muscle. “What are you talking about?”

“The orchestra costs the company a fortune every year and apparently there are some in the top brass who think television is going to totally kill public interest in longhair music.”

“You must be joking.”

“That’s what I’m told. You can believe it or not.”

“
They would let Toscanini get killed
?”

“There are evidently some powerful individuals who don’t want to pay the ransom.”

“Which is?”

“Three million. They may also believe they can call the kidnappers’ bluff. Toscaninis been missing for three months and, as far as we know, he’s still alive. Maybe they’re on to something; the old man’s no good to the kidnappers dead.”

“No, but if he does get killed and anyone gets wind that NBC did anything but move heaven and earth to save him …”

“It would be a catastrophe. I understand. That’s why they’re trying to handle this as carefully as possible, which is where my bald head figures in. I’m as low-profile as they come.”

“Where did you get all your information?”

“I believe it’s reliable.”

She took a long draw on her Lucky. “You’re not going to tell me.”

“There’s no reason to tell you.”

She bounced out of her chair again.

“Mr. LeVine, I don’t know if you think I’m just some innocent coed, but let me assure you that I’m not. I’ve seen a lot already in my life, too much.” She paced across the room. “I left Germany with my parents when I was ten years old and I’d already had my fill of Nazis parading outside our house and my little schoolmates throwing stones at me during recess—”

“Listen, I understand.”

“You can’t understand.”

“Of course I can understand! I don’t want to hear that crap that because I wasn’t running around Dusseldorf or whatever—”

“Essen.”

“Fine, Essen. Because I wasn’t running around Essen wearing a yellow star, I can’t understand what went on. I do. The reason I’m not telling you who told me is I don’t see the point of endangering you. Knowledge is, as you know—”

“A dangerous thing,” she fairly moaned. “Please.”

“It’s the truth. It won’t help you to know who told me these things and might, in fact, hurt you at some point. This is what I do for a living. Trust me. Plus, it’s just raw information at this point, and totally uncorroborated. Now let me ask you something—two things, in fact.”

“Shoot.” And now she did sit on the edge of the desk. “Do I look like Lauren Bacall?” she asked with a smile.

“Better,” I told her in all honesty. “First question: What’s the story with … is it your uncle? At the funeral he seemed …”

“That’s my mother’s brother Otto.”

“Last name?”

“Feuerberg. He was a lawyer, very brilliant. One night he’s on the East River Drive, going way too fast, loses control of his beautiful black Chrysler, and smashes into the wall of an underpass. You know the one, beneath Gracie Mansion?”

“Very well. That’s a nasty curve.”

“Nasty curve and Otto always drove in a fairly reckless manner and this particular night he might have had a couple of cocktails, which was pretty unusual for him. He was in a coma for two weeks; when he came out of it he had, as they say, ‘reduced brain function.’ That was 1947, and they’ve had a nurse living in ever since, he and my Aunt Gretl.”

“Live-in nurse? That’s pretty expensive.”

“It certainly is. What’s the other question? You said you had two.”

“Question number two is—and just think about it for a second before you start ranting and raving …”

“What?”

“Does anybody in your family or in the circle of your father’s acquaintances have any connection to the mob, or familiarity with people involved in organized crime? That may seem like a nutso question, I know….”

Barbara Stern slid off the desk very slowly, keeping a hand on it to retain her balance. She looked a little green.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“Yes. Fine.” She sat back down in the chair. “Little too much stress right now.” She stubbed the cigarette out. “And smoking’s no help, that’s for sure. Gives me this buzz sometimes. So, gangsters in our family, is that the question?” She tried to smile, but it was a near-miss. “Let me think.”

“I don’t necessarily mean in your immediate family, you understand. I mean people who might have run into situations—”

“Relatives who might have had ties, because of business or whatnot. I understand.”

The dead man’s daughter gazed at the wall behind me, put a graceful hand to her chin. I didn’t want to be thinking what I was thinking, but I was thinking it all the same—she was stalling.

“I mean, I can’t account for everybody,” she said. “Obviously I’m just limited to what I’m told, but I don’t think anybody was ever involved with anyone, you know, nefarious or anything. Certainly not that I can remember, but I’m trying to think, you know, of all our family and even acquaintances, what they did for a living …” She was talking way too much. I tried to chalk it up to shock.

“So the answer is no?”

“As they say, to the best of my knowledge. Now let me ask you: Why in the world would you even think that? I mean, my family? They’re all scared of their shadows.” Some color was returning to her face.

“Because a man named Giuseppe LaMarca attended your father’s funeral and I can’t figure why.”

Barbara shook her head. “LaMarca? That name I’ve never heard. Who is he, like a mobster?”

“Used to work for, maybe still works for, Lucky Luciano, which makes him a mobster in my book.”

“Indeed it does. Giuseppe LaMarca …”

“Alias Joey Big, alias Joey Little, Alias Joey Blinks, alias Joe Lane. A regular basketball team all in one, except he’s about five-foot-two.”

She didn’t bat an eye. “Doesn’t ring a bell, by any of those names.” She stood up. “I really should go; I promised my mother I’d be home by lunch.”

“Sure.” I arose with her. “Anything else you want to tell me, Barbara? Anything at all?”

For an instant, something like a wild, uncontrollable fear flew into those big brown eyes, but then flew right out again, like a barn swallow.

“No, Jack. Not right now.” Then she turned and left the office.

She called me “Jack.”

I noticed them the instant I left my building. They were standing a half a block down Broadway, feigning interest in the menu displayed outside Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant. One was looking over the other’s shoulder, which wasn’t all that easy because the guy closer to the menu stood about six-foot-five. No big surprise—they were the same pair of bookends who had chased Stern and me from the missing Maestro’s villa up in Riverdale.

I started walking in their direction, which momentarily threw them for a loss; they backed up, at which point I turned and began hotfooting it south down Broadway. They started right after me. I glanced over my shoulder; they were double-timing it down the sidewalk. This was no tail; they were after me. I started running; they started running.

They were faster.

I reached 50th Street and already my heart was pounding. Frick and Frack were about thirty yards behind me and gaining, pushing civilians freely out of their way. When the light turned against me on Broadway, I crossed, the traffic bearing down on me. I dodged a cab.

“Hey, fuckface!” the cabby screamed at me. I looked around; the two apes were stepping off the curb onto Broadway. One held up his beefy paw, bringing a
Daily Mirror
truck to a rubber-burning halt. I stood in the middle of the street. A bus was about fifteen yards from me and accelerating. The bus driver honked; I faked indecision, headed back toward the two mugs, who came racing toward me. I stood my ground, then backed up in the center of the street, into the path of the speeding bus. The bus driver honked frantically. I turned, saw the bus ten feet away, and put on a burst of speed, racing toward the east side of Broadway. The two apes came right after me, their vision blocked by a double-parked parcel van, and stepped directly into the path of the oncoming bus. After that, the laws of physics were in play.

I had reached the sidewalk when I heard the awful thud. I turned around to see the larger of my two pursuers flying through the air like a punted football before landing on the roof of a Silvercup bread truck. He wasn’t bleeding much more than a slaughtered cow. The smaller of the two was attempting to crawl back to the sidewalk when he got hit once again, this time by a blue Packard. People were racing toward the scene of the accident; the bus had stopped and the driver was getting out, his hat in his large Irish hand. I felt badly for the poor slob, but I wasn’t about to hang around; I straightened my tie and made my way to Sidney Aaron’s office.

“Jesus Christ,” said Aaron.

“Yeah.” I was seated on the couch in his office. Miss Elizabeth Hamilton had led me in with the hushed respect usually accorded a British viceroy in India; when I informed her that I had just witnessed a tragic pedestrian accident, she scurried off to fetch me a cup of herbal tea that smelled better than the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

“Very good for the nerves,” she told me, and then retreated back into the outer sanctum.

Aaron watched the door close. “You think they’re both dead?” he asked.

“The ape who landed on the Silvercup truck, if he wasn’t dead when I left, will be within ten minutes. The way he was bleeding—”

Aaron held up a hand.

“Please … I have a weak stomach.”

“No you don’t, but I’ll spare the details because that’s the kind of guy I am. Now, the other thug, I don’t know. That was like a two-cushion shot—the bus, then a Packard with tired brakes. If he’s alive, I’d say his gun-slinging days are certainly over. He must’ve broken half the bones in his body.”

“And you’re sure they were after you.”

“No. They could have been training for some Olympic event—a human steeplechase through live traffic.”

Aaron sat back in his chair. “Jesus Christ,” he said again.

“Yeah. Ditto.”

“And you say these same two characters had pursued you up at Villa Pauline?”

“Correct. But I don’t believe they’re going to represent much of a problem in the future, like I said, due to the fact that they’re both either dead or disabled.”

Aaron got up and went over to his desk. “If I was a drinker, I’d start drinking now,” he said.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

“Just joking.” Aaron looked as a grim as a funeral director—grimmer, actually; funeral directors are by and large a cheerful bunch. He opened the top drawer of his desk and extracted a sheet of paper, then walked back to me holding the sheet between his thumb and forefinger as if it were radioactive.

“The most recent demand,” he told me. “As of yesterday.” I took the sheet of paper from his two fingers and held it about a foot and a half away from my eyes. Sooner or later, I would have to invest in either a well-trained baboon or a pair of reading glasses.

The document, once it swam into focus, was a typed letter on the stationery of the Hotel Nacional in Havana, Cuba. The letterhead art depicted a large double-winged hotel surrounded by tropical flora and high-rollers of all ages. A sunny gamblers’ paradise. The terse note read: