Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery

by Andrew Bergman

  I sat Toscanini down in a chair near the back. The temperature inside the bus had to be over a hundred and the old gent was starting to wilt. He had taken off his raincoat, but was still wearing his Old World black smoking jacket. He mopped his beautiful head with a silk handkerchief.

  “We’ll try to get moving as quickly as possible,” I told him, then looked out the window. The three large individuals, led by the redhead, had now emerged from the Flamingo’s service entrance and were looking anxiously but blankly around the parking lot. I raced to the front of the bus and tapped emphatically on the windshield. Barbara looked up and I flashed her the hurry-up sign. She in turn whispered to Kim, who gazed up at me and gave me a thumbs-up and at that instant I heard the bus engine turn over with a roar of well-tuned combustion. Kim slammed the hood shut and never took her eyes off Barbara as the two of them climbed the stairs onto the bus.

  I checked out the three gorillas and, as I had feared, the noise of the bus had drawn their undivided attention.

  “Let’s go!” I yelled.

  The thugs had taken revolvers out of their pockets. They began jogging toward the bus.

  “Is like Wild West,” Toscanini shouted. He was glued to the window, watching the action as happily as a nine-year-old perched in the balcony of the RKO Keiths.

  “Maestro, hit the floor.”

  He shook his head. “Is too exciting.”

  “It’s too dangerous, sir.”

  He didn’t budge, so I started racing toward his seat. Kim ran on board and enthroned herself behind the wheel. I could feel the interior of the bus begin to cool.

  “This thing has air-conditioning?” I yelled back at her.

  Kim surveyed the controls. “It has everything but wings.” She put her foot down hard on the gas pedal and I staggered backward into a seat; this bus had significant acceleration. We went thundering out of the lot as Lucky’s and Meyers boys took a few potshots at us, but it’s difficult to aim and run at the same time and their bullets sailed harmlessly over and past the bus.

  They stopped and started hustling back toward the hotel, presumably in the direction of their car, but Kim had the band bus moving very fast. God knows what kind of engine had been custom-fitted into this baby, but it was moving a lot quicker than any bus I had ever stepped into in New York.

  I pulled myself out of the seat I had tumbled into and sat down next to the Maestro. I was a little exasperated at his blithe disregard of danger.

  “Sir, it is not, repeat not, a good idea to stare out the window while people are firing loaded revolvers, okay? Just a little bit of friendly advice, because I’m afraid this may not be the last time it happens.”

  “Boston Blackie”—he patted my arm—“I am Toscanini. Is all right.”

  “What does that mean? You think you’re immortal, Maestro?”

  He shrugged and stuffed his handkerchief back into his breast pocket. “I am fatalista. What happens, it happens.” He fiddled with a button on his chair and it reclined. The great man smiled with childlike glee. “Un miracolo! Molto bene!” He rested his head and yawned. “Boston Blackie?”

  “What, sir?”

  “We are going home?”

  “That’s my intention. It may be a sort of roundabout route and I believe we’ll have to switch modes of transportation quite frequently—”

  “Because is dangerous.”

  “Yes. But we’ll get there. I’m confident.”

  “Sì. You are acuto. Smart.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ve been around the track a few times. But this particular track is very, very fast.”

  “Sì.” He looked out the window. We were heading out of the center of this strange city-resort and into the desert. Kim had the bus doing about seventy. “Is not fascisti. For sure now I know this.”

  “No, it’s not, Maestro. They have a double of you they’re running around with.”

  “Double?”

  “Yes, who they’re passing off as you. And NBC is in on it. It’s all about the hotel business.”

  Toscanini shook his head. I knew he did not completely get it, but there was just so much information I wished to burden him with. “And Signore Aaron?” he asked. “I was in bathroom…. hear him shout, yes? And then …”

  “Then they threw him out the window.”

  Toscanini nodded and looked both sad and mystified. “I did not so much like him, Signore Aaron, was insincero, but to throw out window … Is like fascisti, but also like banditi, gangster. This whole place, this Las Vegas … molto bizarro.”

  “I agree. Bizarro and very depressing. All those poor rubes pissing their money away day and night.”

  Toscanini shook his head to affirm his own thoughts. “Sì. Molto bizarro, but now we go home.” He raised those thick dark eyebrows. “Will be adventure, yes?”

  “Yes. These are serious people after us, with serious intentions.”

  “Banditi.”

  “It’s Lucky Luciano, sir, and Meyer Lansky.”

  And now the old man looked impressed. He folded his hands in his lap, pursed his lips.

  “E’ vero?”

  “Yes it’s true.”

  For one instant, Toscanini’s eyes seemed to glaze over and he appeared to age ten years, but then he wrapped his unlined and very white hand around my wrist and gave it a vigorous squeeze. His eyes brightened. “But you are smarter, Boston Blackie. You are number one detective,” he said, and then he exhaled mightily and sat back in his seat. He looked toward Barbara and raised his eyebrows.

  “Why you want to sit with old man? Go.” I hesitated. “Cretino,” he said. “Go!”

  I got up and took a seat next to Barbara. Kim had settled in behind the wheel and had us doing about eighty. This was some high-class machine. I kept expecting a pursuit car to appear in the rearview mirror, but either we were going too fast or our pursuers had encountered car problems. Or there were other options I couldn’t or didn’t want to imagine at this early hour in the desert.

  We turned off Las Vegas Boulevard and followed a sign directing us toward Route 91. “Want to check out a map?” she called to me over her shoulder.

  I told her that I did, so she extracted an Esso road map that was stuffed behind the visor over the driver’s seat and tossed it in my direction. I caught it and observed that next to a drawing of the friendly Esso man washing some happy Christian’s windshield was block lettering reading WESTERN UNITED STATES. That was a helpful start, because Nevada and Utah were about as familiar to me as the plains of Africa. I unfolded the map, while Barbara leaned over and rested her head on my shoulder. I had been divorced in 1941 and this moment, studying a road map with Barbara’s glowing cheek on my shoulder, was the first time since then that I had felt stirrings of husbandship, or husbandry, or whatever you call that strange, oddly prideful feeling of mingled manliness and helplessness.

  “So where are we going?” Barbara asked.

  “Yeah,” Kim echoed. “I was sort of wondering the same thing because it’ll greatly affect how I turn the steering wheel.”

  “Very amusing,” I grumbled like the beleaguered head of a raucous household. “Hang on.” I studied the map and the most cursory glance indicated that our options were less than limitless. We were in the new and undeveloped American West and its highways and byways were few and far between. This map was as unlined as a baby’s tush.

  “We’re heading toward Route 91, correct?” I asked.

  “Correct, mein führer.” Kim took a cigarette from her pocket and lit up. “Although the complete sentence would be, ‘Heading toward Route 91 in a stolen bus worth more than the Taj Mahal.”

  “Well, if we ditch this fabulous bus, what’ll we do?” Barbara asked. “We’ll just have to steal another vehicle, right? That seems completely nuts.” She smiled at Kim. “I mean, doesn’t it?”

  Kim smiled back at Barbara. I could just imagine the slide show running in the back room of Kim’s mind and wondered if similar visions of entwined sapphic bliss
were taking shape in Barbara’s fecund imagination. She was so entirely sexual that I didn’t doubt the possibility for a second.

  “I agree,” I said quickly. “We have to keep moving in this baby, and moving fast. I suggest we head straight for Salt Lake and hope we don’t run into any more unfriendly fire.”

  “Salt Lake is a real hike, Lassie,” Kim said. “Close to three hundred miles.”

  I looked down at the map once again and traced the route, calculating distances with my PS 84 arithmetic skills.

  “Looks to be three hundred almost exactly. But there’s no place between here and there that looks like a better means to a route east.”

  “Which means what exactly?” Barbara asked.

  I put down the map. “There’s no way we can drive this Ferris wheel all the way to New York without getting picked up.”

  “You don’t think so?” she asked. “It goes really fast, doesn’t it, or am I missing the point?” She picked a little lint off my jacket, which moved me much more than it should have. “I am, right? Missing the point?”

  I looked over my shoulder: Toscanini was staring out the window, seemingly enthralled with the landscape. He had donned a pair of sunglasses.

  “I mean,” Barbara continued, “what I’m thinking is, isn’t the idea to get home as quickly as possible?”

  “The idea is to get home alive, period. There’s a chance Meyer could convince Luciano to keep you alive, but the rest of us, including the old man, we’re dead meat if we’re caught.”

  “Even her?” She pointed at Kim, who was happily smoking her Lucky and looking as butch as could be with both her strong hands gripping the steering wheel.

  I nodded. “Especially her. She means zip to them and she knows too much already. And maybe even you’re vulnerable, sweetie. This is a very big and very delicate game they’re playing. People with information are a big threat. Lucky doesn’t want to get locked up again. That’s why I say we go to Salt Lake, dump this bus, and grab a plane.”

  Barbara thought it over. “I’ve always had a gift for survival, Jack. Not that I treasure or respect it all that much right now. It’s about my body, basically. Men want to keep my body alive, not me.”

  “I understand. But the point I’m belaboring is that no matter what they ultimately do with you, this bus is like a giant blinking sign. It’s going to draw way too much attention. Once it’s reported stolen, which could be any minute, its going to be a snap to track down. Fortunately, it’s so unpopulated around here that there aren’t many cops. I’m also banking on the fact that nobody with the Monroe band gets up much before noon, so maybe we get a decent head start. But we can’t know that for sure.” I looked out the window; we were getting onto Route 91. It was a wide two-lane road and we appeared to be the only vehicle on it.

  “Salt Lake or bust,” Kim announced, winking at Barbara. Barbara smiled back at her, then turned to me.

  “Jack, if the cops do pick us up, would that necessarily be so terrible? With the old man and all. They’d protect us, yes?”

  “We can’t risk it. First of all, I would hazard a guess that highway patrolmen in Nevada and Utah don’t know Toscanini from Elmer Fudd. Second, you know better than anyone how wired Lucky and Meyer are. They might own half the troopers out here; the cops could do their dirty work for them, or maybe just bump me and Kim off, leaving you and the old man to be picked up later.”

  “So we’re sitting ducks if we stick with this bus.”

  “Totally. At some point we have to ditch it. Hopefully not before Salt Lake, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t make it that far.”

  Barbara took my hand. “I don’t scare easily, but I have to tell you—I’m definitely fearful.”

  “Good,” I told her. “I was starting to worry about you.”

  She put her head on my shoulder and within five minutes, Barbara Stern had shut her eyes and was breathing rhythmically, a young girl’s smile on her face. Some happy and faraway dream. I suddenly felt very much like a stranger, an old stranger at that, so I decided to stop looking.

  FOURTEEN

  I joined Kim at the front of the bus. She looked back toward her two passengers: Toscanini had tilted his head back and appeared to be catching a few winks, Barbara had shifted in her seat and now she slept facing the aisle, backlit by the morning sun. Kim watched her recumbent form with almost palpable longing.

  “She’s yours?” Kim’s gaze returned to the empty road.

  “She’s nobody’s.”

  “Figures.”

  “Can’t imagine she ever will be, either,” I told her.

  “She’s what my father used to call a ‘humdinger.’” Kim brushed a stray hair back behind her ear. “My heart actually goes pitty-pat when I look at her.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and slowly dug a cigarette out of my pocket.

  “That’s all you have to say on the subject?” Kim asked.

  “Her old man was killed. That’s how this whole mess began.”

  “Really.”

  “Sweet little guy. A fiddler.”

  “Which is how Toscanini fits in?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Amazing. Me driving Toscanini around.” She looked back at the sleeping beauty. “Look at her. The way the light hits her arm, the swell of her ass.”

  “I get the point.” I lit up my Lucky.

  She smiled. “Maybe you do. Not to tell you more than you want to know, but I’ve been sort of soaked ever since I laid eyes on her.”

  “That’s plenty more than I want to know.”

  “I’m sure. But God, what a work of art she is.” She looked at the dashboard. “I should distract myself. Think anybody’d wake up if I switched on the radio?”

  “Not if you keep it low enough.”

  She turned the radio knob and we began to hear an oleaginous male voice crooning a tender ballad about the Lord Jesus Christ. Kim changed stations and we were treated to a feed report from Lubbock, Texas. Corn was evidently in for a very rough day.

  “No real choice so far, is it?” Kim muttered, and turned the dial farther to the right. Now some old cowpoke was singing softly about corrals and doggies.

  “Can you stand this, Jack, or should I keep looking?” Kim asked.

  “I can stand plenty. It’s fine.” I stood and watched the desert fly past, my feet planted firmly on the floor, one hand on a chrome bar mounted to the rear of the driver’s seat. The sky was a deep blue I had only seen in Westerns.

  “This is a dazzling part of the world,” I said, inhaling my Lucky. “But it doesn’t seem real to me.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “To the unreality?”

  “Yep,” Kim said. “It just sort of seeps into your consciousness and then it becomes normal.”

  “Gives me the willies. I feel like I’m traveling across the moon. We’ve seen, what, four cars in an hour?”

  “It’s early yet.” Kim smiled. “We might see five or six more.”

  “There’s just nothing here. Red rocks, some bluffs, a few evil-looking birds.”

  “That’s why Vegas is going to keep growing. Fills a vacuum out in these parts. Once the big shots figured out how to air-condition large spaces, Vegas was inevitable.” She fell silent, considering something. “Toscanini himself,” she finally said. “Goddamn.”

  “Can you see him leading an orchestra in Vegas?”

  Kim looked at me with some amusement. “For real?”

  “That was the general idea.”

  “Can I ask you something that you don’t have to answer?”

  I pulled a bit of tobacco from my lip. “Go ahead.”

  “Someone swore to me they saw Lucky Luciano walking through the casino at the Inn. Is that possible? Wasn’t he deported, like forever?”

  I nodded. “It’s more than possible.”

  “Holy shit,” she said. “Is that in any way related to this old guy leading an orchestra on the strip?”

  “You’re two for two.”
I cocked my ear. There was an increasingly loud engine noise of unknown origins. I listened and it only got louder. “Is that coming from this bus?” I asked Kim.

  She listened. The noise deepened and widened. It had a different dynamic than the bus or the odd passing car or truck.

  In point of fact, it was at a different altitude.

  Kim stared into her side mirror. “Jesus …” I leaned over her shoulder and saw what she did: a single-engine plane about two hundred yards behind us traveling maybe four hundred feet off the ground.

  “What the fuck is this, Jack, pardon my Italian?”

  “Get off the road.”

  “What?”

  “Get off the road. Now.”

  The plane was, not surprisingly, gaining on us.

  “Get off where?” Kim asked.

  “Right up there.”

  We were passing a bluff; a dirt road marked MOAPA TRAIL loomed a hundred yards ahead.

  “There?” she shouted. The plane was really loud now. “The dirt road?”

  “Yeah.” Our airborne stalkers were closing the gap with comical ease. The dirt trail was ten yards away. Out the window I saw a small metallic object land on the road beside us and roll to a stop.

  “Now! Now!” I bellowed at Kim. She yanked the wheel hard to the left and we went barreling off the road and onto the dirt path. Two seconds later, there was a deafening explosion.

  “Holy Christ,” I said to Kim.

  “What was that?” She’d gone white under the gills.

  “A hand grenade.”

  “You shitting me?

  “No ma’am.”

  Barbara woke up. “What’s happening?” she mumbled.

  “A small detour, ladies and gentlemen,” I told her.

  We were raising a thundercloud of dust as we sped down the dirt trail. The single-engine prop had gone past us on the highway and was now skimming the air virtually on its side, beginning a slow turn to double back in our direction.

  “Stay close to the bluff,” I hollered at Kim.

  “A grenade,” Kim said. “Holy motherfucker …”