“Nice setup the old man has here,” I said to Stern.
He wasn’t listening.
“Look,” he said, pointing out his window.
Two men were crossing the grounds. They walked swiftly in our direction.
“Friends of yours?” I asked Stern.
“No. Of course not.”
I stepped on the accelerator and headed toward the Villa Pauline. Stern was appalled.
“What are you doing?”
“Relax.”
I drove onto a long graveled driveway that led to a porte cochere on the south side of the house.
Stern gripped his door handle.
“Mr. LeVine, please …”
“What’s to lose?” I told him.
The two men picked up their pace. They were now running toward the car. And the closer they got, the larger they appeared. Neither of them resembled Jascha Heifetz.
“Lieber Gott,” said Stern.
They reached the driveway and held up hands the size of porterhouse steaks, signaling me to stop the car. I did so and poked my head out the window.
“What’s up, fellas?” I asked, friendly as a pup.
The larger of the two men—the one who was six-foot-five rather than six-foot-one—approached the car, walking very deliberately. His blond hair was cut short, very Aryan, and he wore sunglasses and a brown suit that looked to be the only one he had ever owned. “This guy isn’t Toscanini, is he?” I asked Stern. “Maestro’s a smaller man with better clothes, right?”
“Lieber—”
The big man bent over and peered into the car, like King Kong gazing into the windows of the Third Avenue El.
“What do you want?” he asked in a surprisingly thin and disembodied voice.
“We’re here to see Toscanini,” I told him. “A private matter.”
The Aryan stared at me, then at Stern. He wheeled around and addressed his partner.
“They’re here to see the old man.”
His partner had bent over and was filling his fists with gravel. He stood up, let the gravel fall to the ground, and patted his hands clean. The partner had shaggy black hair, wore corduroy pants, a leather jacket, and a tweed cap.
“What do they want with him?” he asked.
The giant turned back to us.
“Why do you want to see Mr. Toscanini?”
“We’re with the American Baton Company. We understand the Maestro is in the market for our new Excalibur model, which is extremely lightweight.”
The giant examined us again. God only knows what he was looking for.
“He’s asleep,” he finally said.
“Really.” I made a big show of checking my watch. “It’s ten-thirty. You might want to think about getting him up.”
“Can’t be disturbed.”
“He’s gonna be pissed when he finds out that you shooed away the guys from the baton company.”
“Maybe we should be going,” Stern mumbled, but I kept yapping away.
“This is a really first-class piece of goods we’re talking about. It’s not just a stick, you understand?”
The big man shook his big head.
“Sorry. We got orders from Walter Toscanini. His father is not to be disturbed.”
“The old guy feeling all right?” I asked.
“Orders from Walter,” the giant repeated. “No visitors. So beat it.”
His partner started walking toward us; now I could see that he had a glass eye and a scar than ran the length of his left cheek.
“Mr. LeVine …,” Stern muttered.
“What do you think?” I said cheerily to Stern. “Ready to go?”
“Please …”
I threw the Buick into reverse. “A pleasure meeting you fellas,” I said to the two large men. The partner was waving at something off in the distance. “Let’s all have lunch sometime soon.”
“Please,” Stern said again.
“We’re gone.” I backed the car out of the driveway onto 254th Street and then turned onto Independence Avenue, which is where the blue Chrysler began to follow us. I wasn’t surprised. Not even a little.
“So what do you think, Mr. Stern, was the Maestro sleeping?”
Stern was wiping his face with a bright yellow handkerchief that looked suspiciously like a linen napkin.
“Those men,” he said. “Shrecklich.”
“Not the musical type. He wasn’t there, I’d bet my life on it.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Oh, you got me into a doozy, Mr. Stern. I’ve handled doozies before, but they always crept up on me. This one appears to be an immediate, direct-hit doozy.” I lit up a Lucky and rolled my window all the way down. “By the way, just as a point of interest, we’re being followed.”
Stern started to turn around.
“We don’t turn around. That’s rule number one,” I told him.
“Lieber, lieber.”
“No reason to fret; I’ll lose them before you can say Johann Sebastian Bach. For twenty-five a day, you get the deluxe package.”
I slowed the Buick down to about ten miles an hour.
“You go slowly?” Stern started to turn in his seat again. “Why do you do this?”
“I repeat—don’t turn around.” I checked the rearview mirror. The Chrysler was trying to blend into the scenery and slipped in behind a taxi. When the taxi stopped to pick up an elderly couple with shopping bags, I immediately accelerated and crossed the double yellow line to get around a pair of buses that were lumbering down Independence Avenue in tandem.
“Lieber!” Stern crouched down in his seat.
“Here we go,” said Captain Jack. I completed the maneuver by running a red light, hooking a left on 252nd Street, and then beating a garbage truck that was backing into the middle of the block. I sped down to Broadway, catching a green light, took a right, and sailed off unencumbered. There was no way the Chrysler could make it up, but I ran two more reds just to play it safe.
“Now you can look around.”
Stern straightened up and peered out the back window.
“This is like one of those gangster pictures,” he said.
“Like? It is a gangster picture, but unfortunately we’re not the gangsters.”
I got Stern home in about ten minutes. He got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk, understandably reluctant to go back into his apartment.
“I probably don’t tell Hilde what happened.”
“I would say that’s an extremely sensible idea.”
“Yes.” He fidgeted. A light rain had started to fall. “So what do you do next?”
“That’s an excellent question, Mr. Stern. I guess I play detective. That’s always a start.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks. To you, too.”
I pulled away. In the rearview mirror, I could see Stern watching my car. Finally, he stared up at the rain as if for a sign, then turned and walked into his building. As for me, I had a slightly queasy feeling.
No. Make that a very queasy feeling.
FOUR
The telephone began to ring at three-thirty in the morning. I recall the precise time because it didn’t wake me up. I was seated in my living room, wearing a seersucker robe and reading an Ellery Queen mystery, my stomach on the blink after a midnight bowl of canned chili. I looked at the phone and checked my watch. If there is anything worse than being awakened at three-thirty in the morning by a call, it is being wide awake at that hour and hearing your phone begin to ring. There is no way on earth that it can be good news.
It wasn’t.
I picked up after the third ring. “Hello?”
“Mr. LeVine, I woke you up?”
“Actually, no.”
“No? You are not sleeping?” The accent came into focus, but the voice seemed disembodied.
It was Hilde Stern.
“Mrs. Stern? Is this Mrs. Stern, Hilde Stern?”
“He is killed.”
My blood cooled to an A
rctic blue.
“Wait … Mr. Stern was killed?”
“The police, they came here, to the door, at half past one o’clock. Shot in the street. On the West Side, near the piers and the ocean liners. What is he doing there? I was worried to death, of course, where is he, he told me he had a late meeting with some of the other musicians, but by one o’clock, I said to myself, this is not Fritz, he would have called if it was going to be so late. My daughter Linda is here, of course; Barbara is coming down from Cornell, can you imagine, she is driving all night, she has wonderful friends and they drive her, so soon she is here, thanks God. You have children, Mr. LeVine?”
“No, I don’t.” She was in shock, talking to keep reality at bay, to keep the world in an eternal Present Minus Two Hours Ago. The ordinary speech of the average day—comings and goings, it isn’t like Fritz, he would have called, friends are driving her … Life goes on, keep the conversation going, please, and then comes the moment when Death walks in, takes off his coat and hat, begins unlacing his shoes, and makes himself comfy. But Mrs. Stern was still weeks, maybe months away from that devastating, final moment. She still lived in Two Hours Ago.
“You worry and worry about them, and then something like this. I don’t even know if it was musicians he was meeting with—”
“Mrs. Stern—”
“He got a phone call around nine-thirty and said he had to go out, a call from a colleague—”
“Did he say who, by any chance?”
“And then he puts on his jacket, it was still raining; I said to him, Fritz, you have to put on your raincoat, sometimes with him you don’t know what he’s thinking, it’s like the weather is for other people, not him—”
“Mrs. Stern—”
“And he leaves, it is almost ten, I say to him, Fritz, this can’t wait? He says it can’t wait, he’ll call if gets too late, but I should go to sleep. And then …” And then. It was all she could get out this time around.
“I’ll be right over. Are the police still there?”
“No. They left. It’s just us now. Just the family.”
* * *
Sunnyside, Queens, is a beautiful village at four-thirty in the morning. The buildings seem rooted in some cheerful domestic and commercial history, the streets are clean and quiet and without memory. I picked up a scalding container of coffee at the Bickford’s on Broadway and balanced it carefully between my legs as I headed toward the Queensboro Bridge. Cool air blew in through the window; trucks bearing milk and bread and the latest editions of the News and Mirror made their predawn journeys through the dense and varied neighborhoods of Queens. On the radio, Symphony Sid was playing Lester Young. Symphony Sid. What about Symphony Arturo? The sky began to lighten; there was no stopping this day, much as I would have liked to.
They were seated in the living room when I arrived—Hilde Stern and her two daughters, all wearing black dresses and the bewildered expressions of accident victims. Hilde arose and introduced her children.
“This is Barbara, the college student, she just got here … and our baby is Linda.” Linda was quite petite at age thirteen, maybe five feet tall, with curly black hair and a prepubescent body. She was pale and deeply sad and totally unapproachable. Barbara stood about five-eight in flat shoes, and her funereal duds could not conceal a body that Jane Russell would have been proud to call her own. She had thick black hair, brown, almond-shaped eyes, a beautifully sculpted nose, and a mouth you couldn’t look at for very long without becoming thoroughly ashamed of yourself. “And this is Mr. LeVine,” Mrs. Stern told her children, “who Papa had hired to help him.” I had been transformed from a Broadway shamus into an angel of mercy.
Barbara shook my hand. The warmth of her long fingers went through me like a low-voltage shock.
“I’m so terribly sorry,” I told her. And I was. Linda, the little one, turned away from me and began to cry. Hilde took her in her arms. Barbara just stared evenly at me.
“What’s going on?” she said quietly. “Who the hell would shoot my father?”
“I really have no idea.”
“He hired you to do what? The thing with Toscanini?” She looked back over her shoulder toward Hilde, who was now leading Linda out—of the room, presumably back to her bedroom.
“He told you about it?”
She stepped closer to me and lowered her voice.
“He could confide in me a lot more easily than he could in my mother.” I’ll bet he could. This was a girl you would confide the secret of the atom bomb to without a second thought. “My mother was always on him, castrating him, doubting him…. He told you his theory?”
“About?” I answered, Mr. Neutral.
“About.” She was not patient, this fabulous girl. “About Toscanini being missing. About the double conducting the orchestra.”
“Yes he did.”
“And do you think it’s a completely nutsy notion?”
“It appeared to be, at first blush.”
“What about second blush?”
“I just started on this yesterday. The first thing I find out about it is that your father’s been murdered.”
“Which means that it’s probably true. He wasn’t shot down like a dog for no reason.”
“I agree.”
“You do.”
“Yes. But that doesn’t necessarily confirm that Toscanini is among the missing.”
“So you think it’s a coincidence? Come on.”
“I didn’t say that. Listen, you’re an Ivy League girl—”
She rolled her eyes. “What does that mean? That I’m a goddamn prodigy? I’m not.”
“Okay, I stand corrected. You’re of average intelligence—”
“Mr. LeVine—”
“All I’m saying, Miss Stern, is that I’m sure you realize that while the death of your father is highly suspicious, it’s still a giant leap in logic to say that it necessarily follows that Toscaninis been snatched.”
“So you don’t think he’s missing? I don’t follow.”
“I have no idea. Right now I’m principally concerned with who killed your father.”
“I understand, but my father hired you to find out what happened to Toscanini. Maybe I’m just a chump, but in his memory”—her eyes teared up—“I’d like you to keep doing that….” Tears now flowed. “Shit.…”
“I can do both. It’s not an either-or situation. In fact, everything says that there is a connection. So if Toscanini is in fact missing, then figuring out what happened to your father will lead me to what Sherlock Holmes used to refer to as the final solution.”
“We don’t talk about final solutions in this house,” she said. “Too many dead relatives. And now this goddamn thing.” She wiped away more tears. “Jesus God, of all the people, my father.”
“I understand.”
Barbara dried her eyes and pointed to the pack of Luckies in my jacket pocket.
“May I?”
I handed her a cigarette and lit her up. She took a very deep drag, sighed, and walked toward the hallway, in the direction of her younger sister’s heart-rending wailing. I followed at a discreet and gentlemanly distance, until I could see Linda’s bedroom, still a very young girl’s bedroom, with photographs of Vaughn Monroe and Perry Como adorning the circus-themed wallpaper. Stern’s youngest daughter lay sobbing on her bed, her thin legs sticking storklike from her black dress, a helpless kid at the most exposed moment of her just-started life, knowing that her protector and keeper has been blasted out of the world forever. Hilde sat beside her daughter, stroking her hair and saying words I wasn’t able and didn’t need to hear. Barbara turned back toward me. Smoke streamed from that gorgeous nose.
“You’ll stay on this case, Mr. LeVine.”
“I will.”
“There will be a lot of pressure on you, as I’m sure you realize. There’s some very tough sonsofbitches over at NBC—”
“I said I will. That’s the end of it. And call me Jack.”
She mana
ged a grim smile. “Not yet, Mr. LeVine. Not yet.”
We sat in the living room until around six A.M., drinking coffee and exchanging fragments of conversation. Mrs. Stern made rye toast with butter and orange preserves and we ate it without thinking. Two neighbors had joined the vigil—Kurt and Ilse Weissman from apartment 3-C. Kurt Weissman was a dry cleaner in Washington Heights, a fact he repeated to me several times, along with the establishment’s precise address on St. Nicholas Avenue. Weissman was a pallid, heavyset man in his late thirties whose brains seemed to be receding along with his light brown hair. His blond, intense wife never took her eyes from me, even when contradicting her husband, which occurred nearly every time he opened his mouth.
“In this country I would never expect such a thing,” he said.
“What does that mean, Kurt?” she barked. “For God’s sakes. Such crap you talk. This is the Garden of Eden? Please. In this city the criminals run free like wild dogs. Has been true since we got here. I have no illusions about such things. Even in our store”—she looked to me—“you have to be careful.”
Barbara just stared at me, faintly amused. The Weissmans were a distraction from the numbing fact that at this moment her father’s body was laid out like a haunch of beef on a cold steel table in the police morgue. Hilde emerged from the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and tray full of butter cookies.
“Linda is sleeping, I am happy.”
“The best thing,” said the dry cleaner, then looked at me intently. “You agree with this?”
“Thousand percent,” I assured him.
“If she sleeps,” he added, “for a while at least, this horrible thing is out of her mind.”
Ilse instantly cracked her whip. “Kurt, for God’s sakes, it’s never going to be out of her mind. How can you say such an idiotic thing?” The dry cleaner cringed at her attack. Weissman was a major league nitwit, but still you had to feel for him.
I took another cup of coffee from Hilde Stern. As I was spooning in some sugar, the intercom buzzer sounded with the sudden force of an air raid siren. Hilde gasped.
“Even money it’s the cops,” I told her.
“They were here already,” Barbara said, straightening her dress. She went into the foyer and buzzed back.
Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery Page 4
