Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (31 page)

He let that sink in.

“They are serious men,” he finally said.

“Very,” I told him.

We drove the rest of the way to Salt Lake without incident. It took well over six hours and despite the tedium of the drive, I was unable to nap or relax or even take a deep breath; I never had a sense that we were in the clear. To distract myself, I took the wheel for a couple of hours, driving through the rocky beauty of Zion National Park and the spooky moonscape of the Diamond Valley Volcanoes. It was hard to believe that all this natural splendor existed on the same planet as Newark, New Jersey. While I drove, Toscanini dozed and Kim took the opportunity to chat with Barbara. During the time they were together, I adjusted the front mirror and checked it at depressingly regular intervals, like a jealous high school kid. Kim frequently touched Barbaras thigh—for rhetorical emphasis, I’m sure—but it didn’t get any more physical than that. At one point, Barbara tousled Kim’s hair and Kim turned and seemed to blush; shortly after that, she returned to relieve me of my driving duties.

“That was amazing,” she whispered to me, as I pulled the bus over to the shoulder of the road.

“She’s very bright, isn’t she?”

Kim looked at me with a kind of pity.

“Jack, when she touched my hair, I had an orgasm.” No one could accuse this gal of pulling her punches. “That never happened to me before, just like that.”

“Are congratulations in order?”

Kim climbed in behind the driver’s wheel. “Yeah. I think they are,” she said, and stepped on the gas.

We got to the Salt Lake airport a bit after five o’clock. The days were still long enough so that the sun had not yet dipped behind the mountains. We circled the terminal and I checked off the names of the airlines—American Air, National, Trans World, PSA, Frontier, Ozark, and then some smaller ones, like Utah Air, Salt Lake Air, Mountain Air, North Central Air. Barbara came up beside me.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Which one do we take?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” I told her.

“Where are we going exactly?”

“I’d like to get to St. Louis, then grab a car and drive to Chicago. From there we have other options—take the Limited, say. But first let’s just worry about St. Louis.”

“Figure American Air would go there, to St. Louis. Right?” Barbara bit her lip in a girlish and perplexed fashion. I had rarely seen her puzzled and it was very appealing.

“Or Trans World.” I thought about it. “What the hell.” I turned to Kim. “Go around again and we’ll get out at American Air.”

“Then I just put the bus in the lot?”

“Yeah. I’ll ring up the Flamingo and let them know where it’s parked. You can either spend the night here and rent a car in the morning, or go back tonight. Whatever you like.” I dug into my pocket. “In any case, here’s your five hundred.”

Kim shook her head. “Oh no. That was for New York.”

“I insist. You’ve been fantastic. Take it.”

“Geez.” The cabby took the money, looked at it with the wonder usually accorded a gold nugget, then stuck it in her jacket. “Gonna miss you, Lassie. You and your stimulating pals.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, too. I’m keeping your card.”

“Okay.” She ran a nervous hand through her hair, looked more than a little wistful. Barbara went over and put her hand on the cabby’s shoulder as she drove around the airport, and Kim’s eyes welled up a bit.

I walked back to the Maestro. He was watching Barbara and Kim with great interest.

“Lesbica
?” Toscanini’s eyes glittered as he whispered. “She is too beautiful, her bosom too fantastic just for men. Needs
tutti
!
” He lightly clapped his hands. “Is a lot for you, Boston Blackie.
Coraggio!
”

“Thanks,” I told him. “But I’m not principally concerned with my sex life at this moment. We have a hell of a trip to figure out.” I sat down beside the old man and explained my plan.

He sagged with fatigue.
“Mama mia,
” he said.

“I know.”

“But you think is important we go this way—plane and then drive.”

“I think if we can get to Chicago in one piece, we’ll be all right. We’ll be more visible.”

His ever-penetrating eyes measured me. “There you can say,
‘Ecco,
we have Toscanini.’”

“Something like that. Out here in the boondocks, it’s too scary. Too much space, too few people. The farther east we get, the tougher it gets for Lansky and Lucky to operate in the open.”

The old man patted my knee. “You go, I follow. Is not the usual for me, you know, Boston Blackie. My whole life I lead.”

“I know, but you’ve been a model client, I have to say. You listen a lot better than most of the furriers and garment monkeys I’ve worked for.” The Maestro smiled with childlike pride at his accomplishment. “Just hang in there for another couple of days. Then you can lead all you want again.”

He lightly banged my knee again.
“Molto bene,
Signor Detective.”

The bus slowed and I could see that we were nearing the terminal doors; they were marked
AMERICAN AIR
in blue lettering. My whole body tensed as Kim pulled the bus over to the curb.

“Okay, Maestro, let’s get your raincoat on,” I said to the old man. He rose somewhat shakily to his feet and I helped him slip into his Burberry. Barbara got her valise and pecked Kim on the cheek. Kim rose and embraced her, holding her for a long yearning moment.

“I know,” I thought I heard Barbara whisper.

“Yeah,” Kim said. Then she turned and kissed me, then Maestro.

“Brava,
” Toscanini told her.

“Thank you, sir,” she told him. “Would it be terribly rude if I asked for an autograph?”

“My honor,
signorina.
” Toscanini smiled and bowed.

Kim handed him the road map and the old man inscribed his name across the face of the friendly Esso man.
“Bona fortuna,
” Maestro told her, then kissed her sincerely and with no little force on the lips.

“You, too, handsome,” Kim told Toscanini, then pulled a metal handle and opened the bus doors, which is when I saw the man in the leather jacket step from behind a pillar in front of the terminal. He turned and walked away from us and began conversing with a porter, but my heart was pounding.

“Stay close to me,” I told Barbara and Maestro, “but not
on
me, okay? Keep a little air between us.”

“Why, sweetie?” Barbara asked.

“Just do it. And keep the old man between us.”

We stepped down off the bus, and my hand went snaking after the .38 in my jacket. While the Salt Lake airport was not exactly bustling, there were a fair number of citizens walking toward and away from the terminal portals, an even mix of businessmen and cowboy-hatted shit-kickers. I started in the direction of the terminal doors and threw a glance over my shoulder: The man in the leather jacket was still chatting amiably with the porter. The porter picked up a duffel bag and began to tie a tag around its cloth handle; the man in the leather jacket tossed him some change. My heart rate slowed back down. I turned and made sure that Toscanini and Barbara were just a breath behind me; past them I saw Kim take a step off the bus to record one last look at us, or rather, at Barbara, to memorize the image of her departing form. Then I saw Kim’s expression change and she opened her mouth to shout and then everything began happening in slow motion.

“Jack!” Kim cried out, at which point a man toting a briefcase and wearing a string tie blew her clever brains out with a single shot from a sawed-off shotgun. She stood for a terrible moment, already dead, before toppling backward into the bus. The gunman turned toward me and I unhesitatingly fired my .38, managing to put a hole right through his string tie. He dropped to his knees and then fell over, spritzing blood like the Trevi Fountain.

It had all happened in a double heartbeat, but now there were shouts and the beginnings of civic panic; I turned to Barbara and Maestro, who stood paralyzed behind me.

“Walk toward the doors!” I yelled. “Quickly, but no running!”

“Run?” asked Toscanini. He seemed to be in shock.

“No, no run!”

“What happened to Kim?” Barbara asked.

“She’s dead, sweetie. Let’s go.”

“You sure she’s dead?”

“Honey, we’ve gotta move.” I heard shouts and screams behind me, calls for help. Barbara and I hustled toward the American Air doors, holding Toscanini under his arms. I took the .38 and jammed it down my slacks, tucking it deep into my undershorts; the barrel was still piping hot but the effect was far from arousing. Not surprisingly, I began to sweat profusely.

We pushed through a revolving door into the terminal and walked with all deliberate speed toward the ticket counters, which were about a hundred yards away and on a diagonal to the right. The terminal was brightly lit and air-conditioned and I could feel the perspiration chilling to icy pellets on my forehead. Barbara was crying without making a sound and Toscanini was looking around for more shooters. People were walking toward the windows to see what was going on. I heard the distant whoop of a siren.

“Maestro, keep your head facing front, okay?” I told him. “I think we’re in the clear now.”

“Sì.
” The old man was badly frightened. “The girl …”

“Gone, Maestro.”

He pursed his lips and I could see them begin to tremble. I patted his shoulder.

“I know, sir.”

“
Vergogna
.”

“Yeah.” I observed a small newsstand standing in the middle of the floor and squeezed Barbara’s arm. “Sweetheart, go get a paper, then sit the old guy down, give it to him to read.”

“Okay.” She was wiping her tears with a hanky. “I feel numb.”

“I know,” I told her. “Believe me, it’s just as well.”

There was increasing commotion outside, but it was evident that no one had gotten a good look at me during the hysteria of the brief shoot-out. No one was pointing in my direction. Instead, people were running about in all directions.

I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Utah. I hadn’t been there very long, but I didn’t like it one little bit.

FIFTEEN

There was, thankfully
, no line at the American Air counter. A petite blond ticket agent with a twitchy left eye informed me that a nonstop flight to St. Louis was leaving in forty-five minutes and would be boarding in fifteen.

“Seats available?” I asked.

“Plenty,” she told me.

That was miraculously good news, because the prospect of hanging around the terminal and remaining incognito with Arturo Tos-canini and the most gorgeous woman in Judeo-Christendom was, to say the least, daunting. It was easier to hide Toscanini than Barbara, although when she returned from the newsstand I noticed that she had donned sunglasses and wrapped a scarf over her head. She got the old man seated and handed him the
Deseret Sun-Times;
Toscanini pretended to read the first section while she scanned the sports pages. While they performed their pantomime, I purchased three seats on American Air Flight 106 for the sum of one hundred and seventeen dollars.

“What happened out there?” the little blond agent asked me. “Were those shots?” She said it in a casual manner, as if asking about the weather.

“I think so,” I told her. “Happened just as we were walking in here.”

“Goodness. This place is so soundproofed, sometimes I think they could set off an atom bomb and I wouldn’t hear it.” It was true—the drone of the air conditioners totally deadened the noise outside. I dried my neck with a handkerchief while the blond painstakingly wrote out the tickets; she looked to be around forty and was semi-attractive in the manner of a downtown cocktail waitress, but that flickering eye was a major distraction.

“Guess it’s still the Wild West out here, huh?” she said, working ever so slowly.

At that moment, a very fat man in a plaid sports jacket pushed his way through the revolving door and started looking around the terminal. If he wasn’t a homicide dick, then I was J. Edgar Hoover. I didn’t want to rush the ticket agent, for fear of arousing her suspicions, but she was working at a maddening, arthritic pace. Like a pig sniffing a truffle, the homicide dick headed straight toward me, waddling past the seated Maestro and Barbara without so much as a glance.