Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery

by Andrew Bergman

  “So get some rest. You need it. Your family needs it.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  I opened the door and exited, taking one last look at Barbara as she turned and walked slowly toward her mother’s room, her stocking feet silent on the parquet floor. The apartment suddenly seemed as quiet as a museum. Which, in a way, it was.

  FIVE

  Fritz Stern’s funeral was held a day later at the Riverside Chapel, a gray and suitably cheerless edifice on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. It was raining hard when I arrived, fast-moving streams backing up around sewers clogged by soda bottles, cracker boxes, and pages from yesterday’s newspapers. I hurried inside the chapel; the service was scheduled for eleven and I had cut it pretty close, thanks to a stalled moving van and resultant tie-up on the Queensboro Bridge. I followed some other stragglers toward a reception room, which was filled with guests waiting to embrace the family and offer empty words of hope and reassurance which at times like these somehow never seem empty at all. Each visitor is transformed into an emissary from the world of the living, a sentient and physical reminder of continuity. When my old man died, I was shocked by how poignant the smallest gestures of kindness became, how moved I was by the dressed-up and well-barbered appearance of even the most ill-tempered of his associates from the hat trade.

  I hung my raincoat on a coatrack tightly packed with soaked foul-weather gear. The humidity in the room was at the saturation point and I could feel sweat starting to bead my extensive forehead. The Stern family was somewhere across the room, surrounded by dozens of crouched, whispering people. There was a great deal of hugging and crying. At one point I saw Barbara rise and nuzzle a white-haired woman who was leaning heavily on a pair of canes. I waved in Barbara’s direction, but she never saw me and I realized I was just a guy for hire with no real business in this room, so I walked out, grabbed a black yarmulke from a basket, and strolled into the chapel. It was a very large room, but already nearly filled by close to three hundred people, most of them looking as dazed and stricken as survivors of an air raid. They sat or stood, whispering in groups or just staring at the floor. I spotted Sidney Aaron seated about six rows in back of Fritz’s plain pine coffin. He was wearing a midnight-blue suit and a fancy embroidered yarmulke. He was speaking with great animation to a short, deeply tanned man to his immediate right, a man who looked like he’d never been anywhere near Riverside Chapel before. On Aaron’s left was a tall redhead in an ermine stole who looked like she’d been to a lot of places.

  The short, tanned man turned around again and my aging brain started laboring. I knew this guy from somewhere, and it wasn’t anywhere good, but I couldn’t pin the name or face down. He had a slight facial tic, a nervous blinking of his left eye. Blinky somebody? Who the hell was he?

  The short man turned back around and I began studying the other mourners, trying to ascertain who among them might be Fritz’s fellow musicians. It wasn’t difficult. Musicians are used to wearing either tuxedos or sports clothes, so I guessed that the middle-aged men in shiny or off-the-rack suits had to be them. Almost to a man, they appeared to be wary and disoriented. A colleague had been murdered, that was bizarre enough, but I wondered how many of them were also wondering if their Maestro had been snatched, and if he was dead or alive.

  A door opened at the front of the room and we all stood up as the family entered, trailing a massive, pink-skinned rabbi who wore the imperious and implacable expression of a Jewish Mussolini. His name was Ludwig Strauss, seemingly past sixty and even balder than I was. As he marched toward the lectern, he gazed across the room as if daring anyone to speak or even relieve an itch in his august presence. The family walked in Rabbi Strauss’s wake like frightened ducklings: Hilde, Barbara, and Linda, followed by a peroxide blond and a plump gray-haired man whose hawklike features marked him as a likely brother of Hilde’s, only after a prefrontal lobotomy. He wore a terrible cocoa-brown jacket and even worse yellow checked pants and his movements were slow-motion and oddly abstracted. I didn’t think he was out of sync due to grief; this guy looked to be pretty much out of his skull. The bottle-blond held the poor slob by the arm until they reached his seat and then she sat him down very carefully and lovingly. There was no reason for me to have known that Hilde had a damaged sibling, but here he was and I found it totally unsettling. Then again, dealing with physical and mental disabilities has never been my strong suit; even that blind albino who plays the accordion outside of Macy’s makes me queasy.

  Fritz’s family sat down, and we all followed obediently. The Rabbi silently surveyed the room for what seemed like a full minute, during which nobody moved a muscle or so much as coughed, then abruptly and loudly launched into a Hebrew prayer. My Hebrew was pretty rusty, but I knew he was talking about God and it didn’t sound like good news. The Reb vigilantly watched the crowd as he chanted; he was a mightily intimidating presence, a broad-shouldered six-footer who looked like he could crack walnuts with his bare rabbinical mitts. He finished the prayer and then opened a black loose-leaf binder.

  “My dear ones,” he intoned, gazing down at the family like holy Moses himself. Strauss had a thick German accent, so I figured him for a refugee, but most definitely not of the submissive variety; this Reb was about as meek as Killer Kowalski. “We are told when we are growing up that there is time for every purpose unto heaven.” The rabbi spoke very deliberately and with enormous measured weight, enunciating each word as if it were worth its weight in platinum. “Today, as we say good-bye to our beloved Fritz, perhaps some of you might question what that purpose was, might question what purpose unto heaven did it serve to take this good and talented individual from us and from his family in such a sudden and horrible fashion.”

  I stole a look at Sidney Aaron, who was surreptitiously unwrapping a Smith Brothers cough drop and slipping it into his mouth. His swarthy, blinking seatmate was staring down into his lap; I had the feeling that he was reading something, and I had the feeling that it wasn’t the Holy Bible.

  “I wish I had a satisfactory answer to all our doubts and all our questions,” the rabbi continued. “I wish I could say that I understand why our dear Fritz, who managed, like so many of us, to escape Hitler and the Nazi terror, was unable to escape terror here in the adopted city and musical capital he had come to love so much.” Strauss gripped the lectern with both hands and gazed around the room. “I know that our Fritz was …”—and here he took a dramatic pause—“a curious man.”

  Sidney Aaron just stared straight ahead. The redhead to his left was studying her left hand for a chipped nail, but the jockey-sized man shot Aaron a curious glance. The NBC veep didn’t even acknowledge the look; he just gave the slightest, tick-tock shake of his head.

  “A curious man always,” Strauss continued. “Curious about music, curious about world events, curious about the many people and personalities and places he encountered here in the America he loved so much.”

  Was the rabbi speaking in code? Had Stern told him his theory of the missing Maestro?

  “Perhaps it was his curiosity that got the best of our Fritz,” the rabbi continued. “Perhaps he tried to help someone, someone in danger, that night he walked out of his home for the last time. Maybe it was this that brought about his terrible end.” The rabbi cast a slow look around the room, as if challenging the assembled mourners to come up with a better theory.

  “I do not know,” he resumed in a lower voice. “He was always looking to aid his fellow man, this I know from the stories that his beloved Hilde and his dear Barbara and Linda have told me. He was always looking for a way to give. Maybe, as is often the case, we are looking to God for a quick and reasonable answer when there is no answer yet available. God is not an Answer Man, like on the radio. God is a scheme of nature, God is a spirit, God is a code of law and moral behavior. But God owes us nothing. We owe Him everything.” He raised his voice again. “Does this mean that what happened to Fritz was senseless, that there was no purpose unto heaven in his passing? N
o. It just means that we do not know it yet, or we just don’t get it yet. It just means that this purpose has not yet been revealed to us. But”—and here he looked again to the family—“I have no doubt that there is a divine plan, however mysterious and aggravating and heartbreaking it may seem at times, and I know that we did not lose our dear Fritz for no purpose unto heaven.”

  Rabbi Strauss seemed to study each kisser in the room with his unblinking blue eyes, and the temperature seemed to drop about fifty degrees. There was enough coughing and clearing of throats to shame a TB ward, and then the rabbi introduced no less a dignitary than Jan Peerce to sing two songs by Schubert, favorites of the deceased. Peerce was a stocky tenor who looked more like a guy who sold sports jackets at Wallach’s than someone used to the opera spotlight. But he didn’t sing like a salesman; he sang like a portly angel. But as beautiful and melancholy as the music was, I’m not sure anyone was listening. I certainly wasn’t. I was thinking about a poor dead fiddler and the mess I knew I would get myself into before this was all over.

  Outside the chapel, the rain had slowed to a faint drizzle, and the temperature was turning positively balmy. The sun was breaking through and the mourners looked slightly discomfited by the physical brightening of this appalling day. Just another reminder that God Held the Cards and that the hand one was dealt, however dismal, was never really surprising. Whatever happened in life was always somehow inevitable: cancer, twins, a flat tire, you name it. So the sun breaking through on this horrifying day seemed every bit as appropriate as the downpour had been before. I was smoking a Lucky and contemplating these cosmic issues when I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, I was in no way surprised to see Sidney Aaron standing before me.

  “Jack … terrible tragedy. Terrible day. I looked at his poor wife, those girls…. What’s the oldest’s name?” he asked oh so casually.

  “Barbara.”

  “Beautiful kid.” Kid. You knew he had taken one look at Barbara Stern and had begun peeling off her clothes, layer by silken layer, visions of a DO NOT DISTURB sign dancing in his head. Just like your faithful correspondent, but at least I had the decency not to refer to her as a “kid.”

  “How are they all holding up?” he asked with heartfelt concern.

  “Like you’d imagine,” I said helpfully.

  “Makes me sick to my stomach, the whole goddamn thing….”

  The redhead stood a couple of feet behind him. He turned gallantly to her.

  “Sweetheart, this is Jack LeVine. A really sensational private investigator. Jack, this is Carol DeAngelis. She works for Texaco.”

  “Texaco, no kidding,” I told her. “You ever work at the station on Northern Boulevard and Forty-sixth Street?”

  Aaron pretended to laugh, but the redhead didn’t bother. Carol DeAngelis appeared to be in her late thirties, with the exquisite facial bones and long legs of a model. My guess was that under the right circumstances she could be plenty of fun, but it would take a lot of work and a lot of money.

  “I’m in cultural affairs,” she told me with no irony.

  “Which is where Sidney comes in, I guess.”

  “Texaco’s spent millions on opera and symphony broadcasts over the years, Jack,” Aaron told me. “They’ve been fantastic.” He put his arm through mine, and turned to Miss DeAngelis.

  “Sweetheart, I need a couple of seconds with Jack,” he said, then led me toward the street, away from the mourners crowding the sidewalk.

  “In answer to the question playing on your full firm lips,” I told him, “I don’t know a thing about his murder.”

  “You’re sure it’s murder?”

  “I believe we just attended his funeral.”

  “You know what I mean. There’s no chance it was some sort of bizarre accident?”

  “I can’t say no chance, but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “No.” I flipped my spent Lucky toward the gutter. “Now I get to play: Why the hell would you bring a monkey like that to the funeral?”

  “What are you talking about?” He looked back over his shoulder. Carol DeAngelis had flipped open her compact and was freshening her lipstick. “You can’t be referring …”

  “Not her, obviously; I mean the chimpanzee who was sitting beside you. Small, swarthy guy; built like a jockey.”

  Aaron’s expression remained blank.

  “The man on my immediate right? Him?”

  “Him.”

  “I have no idea. I sat down and five minutes later he came in, looked around, and took the space next to me.”

  “You never met him before?”

  “No. Why?” Aaron bit his lip, pretended to think about it. “He seemed a little out of place, didn’t he?”

  “I would say he’d be out of place in many of our finer establishments and institutions.”

  “Well, who the hell is he?” The NBC veep feigned agitation “You seem to act like you know.”

  “His name escapes me at present, but I believe it’s Italian in origin and if I’m not mistaken, he worked for Lucky Luciano before Lucky got deported.”

  Aaron brushed his hand across his eyes, as if a bug had just flown into them. “You’re joking,” he then said. “Worked for Luciano?” He was playing this pretty well. Not Academy Award quality, but I’d seen a lot worse.

  Carol DeAngelis tapped Aaron’s arm.

  “Sweetheart, I have to get back.”

  “We’re going,” Aaron reassured her, then turned back to me. “You like the fights, Jack?”

  “The fights? Sure.”

  “Any interest in the one tonight?”

  He was being oh so coy. “The one tonight” was nothing less than the aging Joe Louis defending his heavyweight title against Ezzard Charles up at Yankee Stadium. The odds had been moving against Louis; Charles was a smart if unimaginative heavyweight with quick hands and feet, and there was a growing feeling that the older man might not be able to keep up with him. The prospect of witnessing Louis’s demise gave me heartache, but nothing on this earth made the blood race like a heavyweight title fight. The last one I had attended was in 1941; both Louis and I had been a great deal younger and I stood and hollered as he pounded fat Tony Galento’s kisser into steak tartar.

  “They’re ringside,” Aaron told me.

  “I would expect nothing else, and I’d love to go. But why me?”

  The NBC honcho just shrugged.

  “Carol has an aversion to grown men bleeding in public, and I’m sick of going to sports events with these corporate stiffs. You strike me as the kind of guy who would enjoy the evening. Prelims start at eight, main fight at ten. You need a ride up to the stadium?” He was heading for the street, his arm out, flagging down a green Checker cab.

  “No. I’ll drive myself.”

  “Then meet me at the press gate at half past eight.” He held the cab door open for Miss DeAngelis and waved cheerily, then got in. The Checker pulled out of sight. I turned around and observed a hearse slowly backing up on Amsterdam Avenue and then Fritz’s coffin rolling out of the chapel like a very impractical and cumbersome piece of furniture. Four black-suited men guided the coffin over the irregular sidewalk, as if worrying about the bumps disturbing the fiddler’s slumber. Then Linda Stern appeared, taking the smallest steps imaginable, her little face buried in her mothers coat, following the coffin and her own uncertain future, and then I just couldn’t watch anymore.

  One hour later, I found myself seated in the Daily News clipping morgue, sorting through a huge pile of photographs and yellowing articles dealing with that much-beloved dope dealer, smuggler, and all-around player known as Lucky Luciano. The News’s clipping morgue was a long and dingy room up on the twelfth floor of the News building on east 42nd Street; it had the sour smell of disintegrating newsprint, stale cigarette smoke, and hours of wasted time. I was there courtesy of my old comrade Toots Fellman, formerly the house dick at a Broadway fleabag called the Hotel Lava. When th
e Lava was mercifully torn down to make way for a parking lot, Toots decided, at age forty-five, to dye his hair brown and try his luck as a crime reporter. He had made countless friends and done numerous favors, most relevantly for a married editor at the News who had stashed a Copa girl at the Lava for a passionate year and a half, during which he had occasionally been spotted wearing the Copa girl’s lingerie. When Toots decided to change careers, the editor in question—not surprisingly—hired him on the spot. Toots surprised everyone except me by becoming an ace reporter, befriending every cop in Midtown and having a gift for the terse written word. And he was a generous and lonely soul, always available when I needed assistance, which was most of the time. In this case, what I needed was the opportunity to do some free research.

  Toots unearthed the News clipping file on Luciano and rolled it over to me on a kind of shopping cart. It was that extensive. Toots was about five-foot-eight and weighed close to two hundred pounds. But he carried it well, as they say, with the broad shoulders and muscled arms that had served him well in his years as a house dick. He was still dying his hair a kind of otter-brown, but his features were freckled and boyish, so the dye job wasn’t that hard to take.

  “Twenty folders’ worth,” he announced, dumping half the folders on a metal table before me. “Truman’s file is probably bigger, but not by much. You want to tell me what you’re looking for?”

  “A short guy with dark hair and a blinking left eye. Looked mob, looked familiar, like from the Luciano era. Ring a bell?”

  “No.” Toots lit his pipe and headed for the door. “But let me think about it.”

  It took two and a half hours and a dozen folders, but I finally found what I was looking for. It was a photo taken in 1936 at Lucky’s trial for pimping, which was a small-potatoes charge, but the feds had been so determined to jail him that pandering was good enough. After all, they had managed to put Al Capone in the slammer for tax evasion, which was like nailing Hitler for running a stop sign. In the photo I held in my sweaty paws, Lucky was walking into a Manhattan courtroom looking as modest and utterly middle-class as a Queens barber. Five steps behind him, younger but no better-looking, was the mug I had spotted at Stern’s funeral. The caption did not identify him, except as one of many “friends and supporters of Mr. Luciano.”