Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery

by Andrew Bergman

  Fatso looked over at my party. You could see him almost shudder with lust when he got a gander at Barbara, and he instinctively straightened his tie.

  “That’s his nurse?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Douglas nodded and kept staring. “Maybe it’s time I got myself sick.”

  The ticket agent giggled. “She’s a stunner, isn’t she?” she said, her left eye blinking.

  “How’d you get to the airport?” the dick asked me.

  “Took a taxi.”

  “You stay in town last night?”

  “A motel about an hour from here.” My mind searched for the names of places we had zipped past en route. “They all look alike to me. Mt. Zion Inn, maybe? About twenty units?”

  “Yes, that’d be one,” the fat homicide dick said, and glommed another peep at Barbara and Maestro. The longer he stared at Tos-canini, the antsier I got.

  “Here you go,” Mrs. Barber said, and handed me my tickets. “Gate Two to St. Louis. It’ll be boarding in just a few minutes.”

  “Thanks a lot.” I turned to the Salt Lake gumshoe. “Well, my dad doesn’t walk all that quickly. Better get a move-on.” I was getting really good at this folksy chatter.

  Douglas mopped his brow and nodded at me. “Yeah. Guess I better get back outside,” the dick said. “Got two dead.”

  “Anybody you know?” I asked cautiously.

  “Nope.” The fat man turned his gaze from Toscanini and Barbara back to me. “Got a woman dead, looked to be driving a band bus of some sort. The other one seemed to be a professional shooter, judging by his weaponry.”

  “Well, good luck to you.” I looked over to Toscanini. He waved at me feebly “Take your time, Dad,” I yelled to him, then turned back to the homicide dick. “He’s nervous, not used to flying.”

  “Yeah.” Douglas was clearly unconvinced, but there was no direction he could go with me. Except one.

  “You wouldn’t have a problem if I patted you down, would you?” he suddenly asked.

  “Not at all,” I said, having a big problem, but not really having a choice. If I showed the slightest hesitation, I knew it would mean spending the rest of the day perched under a hot lamp like a rotisserie chicken, inhaling the cop’s sour breath. I turned around and raised my hands in the air; Douglas began laboriously searching my exquisitely sculpted body. Barbara raised a quizzical eyebrow and I shrugged back like a helpless chump. Then she turned and started whispering to Tos-canini, as if in explanation. She really was appallingly good at this.

  Douglas patted my pockets, my legs, my shoes. Like ninety-nine percent of the manly cops on this planet, he never made a move for my pecker. After gripping my ankles, the homicide dick rose slowly out of his crouch, as breathless as if he had just carried a sofa up five flights of stairs.

  “Sorry for the inconvenience,” he wheezed.

  “I understand,” I told him. “You’ve got a job to do.” I walked over to join my traveling group. “Good luck to you.” I took Toscanini under one arm, Barbara clutched the other, and we started off toward Gate Two. The detective watched us go and then drifted back across the terminal, lumbering toward the growing assemblage of cops and curious travelers outside the doors.

  “You had pistola by testicolos?” Toscanini whispered to me.

  “Yeah. It’s a safe place, usually.”

  The old man smiled. “Bravo, Boston Blackie.”

  Barbara leaned back and spoke to me over the top of the Maestro’s head. “Anything get singed?” she asked in a low voice.

  “Want to check?”

  “I’ll do a thorough inspection later,” she whispered, inciting a small riot in my slacks.

  Forty minutes later, we were in the air over Salt Lake City, climbing above the mountains and heading east in a DC-3 only slightly quieter than a pneumatic drill. Toscanini was parked by the window, and Barbara had the seat beside him; I had settled in across the aisle. The old man was gazing out over the clouds and Barbara looked morosely up toward the ceiling.

  “Kim?” I asked.

  She nodded. “When that fat slob was bracing you, all this adrenaline took over and I suppose I stopped thinking about what had just happened.” Barbara’s voice got very small; she took a red silk handkerchief from her bag and dabbed at her eyes. “Now it’s sinking in and I realize that this person I was talking to and getting to know and ‘let’s write’ and all of that, from one second to the next, she’s just blown to kingdom come.”

  “It’s a nightmare, but we’re dealing in a very big-stakes game.”

  “Nothings worth this.” She was barely audible.

  “It is to your old boyfriend.”

  She looked at me pretty hard and her voice regained its strength.

  “Don’t call him that anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it, Jack. Never again.”

  “I promise.” She took my hand and kissed it. Her breath was moist and tropical. I squeezed her hand, then laid my head back against the seat and shut my eyes, trying to sort out the havoc I had just barely lived through. There must have been other gunmen in the airport, but they had likely panicked at the bloody demise of Kim’s killer, or had been frightened away by the crowds and the impossibility of getting a clean shot at me or at the old man.

  But I had no illusions that this was the end of the hunt.

  It was breezy and cloudless when we deplaned in St. Louis at just past eight o’clock in the evening. The three of us crossed the tarmac with nervous haste, Barbara holding Maestro’s arm, Maestro keeping his head lowered; in the distance, one could see the lights of the city in this flattest, plainest section of the USA. It was eerily quiet and the air was mild and smelled of soot. I looked around for a sign of any suspicious thing or body, but the people at the airport were polite and welcoming; nobody looked remotely ready to kill or kidnap any of us. It was all tranquil and low-pressure and easy, yet I had a large knot in my gut that wouldn’t go away.

  Arrayed in the drab lower concourse of the St. Louis airport were a series of counters fronting various outfits that rented cars to bewildered incoming travelers like myself. Most of the counters were quiet; in fact, more than half of them were shut down tight. St. Louis was obviously not a late-night kind of town.

  I deposited the Maestro and Barbara on a bench and headed for one of the few open establishments, an outfit that called itself Prairie Rent-A-Car. The Prairie rental agent wasn’t a day over twenty and wore a candy-red company blazer with a plastic name tag on the breast pocket that identified him as Buck. Young Buck had combed sufficient Vitalis into his hair to withstand typhoon winds and was afflicted with rampaging postadolescent acne. Looking into his mirror every morning must have been a cause of monumental heartache and anxiety; I decided to be very nice to him.

  “Evening, Buck,” I said like his favorite uncle. “I need a car pronto.”

  “Let me see what we can do for you.” Buck automatically raised one hand over his face as he spoke; with his free hand, he leafed through some sheets of paper. “How long you need the vehicle for?”

  “I’ve got to go to Chicago. As long as that takes.”

  “It’s just under three hundred miles to Chicago, sir. About an eight- or nine-hour drive in normal traffic.” Buck looked up from his sheets. “You’ll be returning the vehicle when?”

  “I have to leave it in Chicago.”

  The rental jockey’s eyes went as wide as if I had asked permission to launch the car into outer space.

  “Leave it in Chicago?”

  “Can’t be the first time that’s ever been done.”

  He shook his head thoughtfully. “No sir, but it gets pretty darn expensive that way.”

  “How expensive is ‘pretty darn expensive’?” I said in my most homespun fashion.

  Buck checked his sheets again; when he lifted his head, his eyes seemed to bug an inch out of their sockets and I knew that Barbara must have slipped in behind me. “Just taking Dad to the men’s room,
” she whispered, then smiled at Buck. “Hi. You have a nice shiny car for us?”

  Buck blushed so deeply that his pimples seemed to rise up like tiny cities on a topographic map.

  “I’m trying, ma’am. But your …”

  “Fiancé.”

  “Your fiancé wants to leave it in Chicago.”

  “He tells me it’s very expensive, honey,” I told Barbara.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Buck, his right hand now covering his right cheek. “That will be an additional …” He squinted at his sheet. “An additional seventeen dollars to drop it in Chicago.”

  “Really,” I said. “And the daily rental is what?”

  “I can give you a brand-new Mercury for seven dollars a day, plus sixty cents additional for your insurance. But it’s expensive for us to bring the vehicles back, gotta send two men and a car, so we lose an additional car, you understand.” The kid was explaining the seventeen bucks like it was a king’s ransom. “We generally discourage it,” he said to Barbara.

  Barbara nodded as if she were giving the matter considerable and beauteous thought. “I’m sure you do, and it is costly, but we really have to get my dad to Chicago by morning.” She squeezed my arm. “Let’s go for it, darling,” she said, then headed back toward Toscanini. Buck watched her every step of the way.

  “Gol-ly,” he said, like it was two words.

  “I know what you mean.”

  He studied me, more than a little baffled, trying to match my kisser with hers.

  “She’s your fiancée?”

  “There’s hope for us all, Buck.”

  The clerk took his hand away from his face and smiled with genuine happiness.

  “Gol-ly,” he said again.

  The Mercury was forest-green and had a burgundy roof. It was a very nice piece of goods. Buck walked me to the car and told me exactly where to drop it in Chicago, that being the Central States Garage, some three blocks from Union Station. He stole a last lingering look at Barbara and said a polite good-bye to me and to Toscanini, whom he didn’t know from Harpo Marx, then handed me a map upon which he had kindly highlighted a direct route to Chicago in thick blue pencil.

  “Thanks a bunch,” I told him. “You’ve been a real prince.”

  He blushed again. “Well, that’s why I’m here.”

  “’Bye, Buck,” Barbara fairly sang, as if it were the first line of a cowboy ditty. “Till the next time.”

  “Whenever you need a car in St. Louis, ma’am.” He waved at her and was still waving as we drove out of the parking lot. For all I know, he stood there waving for the rest of the night.

  “Is in love,” Toscanini announced from the rear seat. “We are all in love, bella signorina.”

  Barbara dimpled her features into the most demure of Mona Lisa smiles. Why deny the obvious?

  The path outlined by honest Buck was fairly simple: Route 67 to Route 340 and on to Route 66, which would take us directly to Chicago. It was a fabulous plan, except that I immediately got stuck behind an arthritic lumber truck on 67 and stayed in his wake as he creaked along at thirty miles an hour. There was too much oncoming traffic to even think about passing.

  “This is going to be some fun,” I told Barbara. The old man had fallen asleep within fifteen minutes and was sprawled across the backseat. His mouth was open and he didn’t look anything like the world’s most famous musician. He just looked like an old guy.

  “We can admire the scenery,” Barbara said, studying the passing landscape of used car lots, bowling alleys, and liquor stores.

  “Long as I’m trapped behind Paul Bunyan here, maybe I should pull over and make a couple of calls.”

  “Call who?” Barbara said with some alarm. “I don’t really feature sitting alone in a car with Maestro. Not after Salt Lake. I don’t want to be alone, period.”

  “I just need to find out about train schedules going out of Chicago and I have to call New York.”

  “Who in New York?”

  “Are we playing Miss Marple all of sudden?” I said brainlessly.

  “Not funny.” She pulled her jacket tighter. She had put on a nifty little aqua jacket with a fur collar. “I’m getting cold.”

  “It’s nerves.”

  “Stop knowing everything, Jack. It gets tiresome.” I turned my head; Barbara was weary and cross and I realized that with all her experiences of life and lust, this was a twenty-one-year-old girl who had just witnessed a slaughter.

  I spotted a pay booth right off the highway.

  “Okay. Right over there,” I said in my most conciliatory tone of voice.

  The booth was located outside a boarded-up Sunoco station, beneath a flickering street lamp that cast a circle of sickly yellowish light. The scene resembled something painted by Edward Hoppers evil twin. I pulled over and stopped; Toscanini barely stirred when the car stopped. Barbara got out and attempted to make the old man comfortable, putting her coat under his head; he muttered something in Italian and licked his lips, then folded his arms across his chest. We watched him sleep, like adoring parents poised over a newborn’s crib.

  “Wish I had a camera,” Barbara said softly, and then she climbed back into the front seat, while I approached the abandoned gas station. The wind blew the ghostly Sunoco sign back and forth in a rasping, blackboard-screeching rhythm. I pushed open the rusting doors of the wretched pay booth. It reeked of old and new pissings and was carpeted wall to wall with blackened newspapers and cigarette butts; bottle caps and smashed beer bottles crunched under my shoes. The urinous stench seemed to get worse as I picked up the phone, as if some drunk had peed all over the receiver. I started breathing through my mouth and fed enough nickels into the phone to call Shanghai. The first information I got pertained to the train schedule. It was pretty simple. The Twentieth Century Limited left Chicago for New York at eight o’clock in the morning. Another train departed at two in the afternoon. It was now nine-thirty and regardless of how quickly I drove, there was no way we were going to arrive in Chicago before five in the morning. I felt that for the sake of his health, it was important that we get the old man into a bed, no matter how much he snoozed in the car, and book the afternoon train. We could stop in a motel somewhere between here and Chicago—say, Springfield—get a couple of rooms, rest up, and then cruise into the Windy City as quietly as possible. I’d book a Pullman for the old man under a phony name and another for me and Barbara, settle in, and coast triumphantly into New York.

  It was a thoughtful, well-considered plan and it remained in effect for precisely three minutes, when I called Toots Fellman at the Daily News and found out that I was in far worse trouble than I had ever imagined.

  “You’re where?” he hollered into the phone. The connection was patchy and shot with intermittent high-pitched crackling.

  “Just outside St. Louis.”

  “St. Louis? Why the hell …?”

  “Long story. I need a major favor—”

  Toots cut me off. “Nice, what happened to your friend, huh?” he asked suddenly.

  “What friend?” I said, and the knot in my stomach tightened exponentially.

  “The NBC guy. Whatisface …”

  “Sidney Aaron? What about him?”

  “Offed himself in Las Vegas. Came over the AP wire couple hours ago. Guess he had a bad day at the tables, huh?”

  “He got pushed, Toots.”

  There was a thoughtful, static-filled silence at his end. A yellow school bus from a Negro church rolled by, with kids leaning out the windows and waving. I felt like running down the road and jumping on the bus with them.

  Toots finally spoke. “Jack, you know that for a fact?”

  “I vas dere, Charlie….”

  “You were in Las Vegas this morning? And now you’re in St. Louis?” Toots asked wonderingly. “You got a rocket up your ass?”

  “It’s the modern age of transportation. And here’s the reason I’m calling—”

  “Wait a minute, I want to know what the hell happe
ned with this NBC guy. You’re saying it’s murder?”

  “Listen to me … remember the fiddler who got killed?”

  “The refugee? There’s a connection?”

  “I’m in a pay booth! Let me talk.”

  “Then make it collect, putz!” Toots hollered. “Call me back!”

  I hung up and dialed the operator, who put me through to the Murray Hill number of the News. Toots picked up precisely where he had left off, except this time we had a somewhat clearer signal.

  “You’re telling me that Aaron was murdered in Vegas and it’s connected to your fiddler getting iced?” Toots asked.

  “It gets better; what would you say if I told you Toscanini himself is sitting in the back of a rented Mercury fifteen feet from where I’m making this call?”

  “I’d say you should be fitted for a clean white jacket with numerous buckles and straps.”

  “It’s true. I brought him back from Vegas. He was snatched; that’s what all of this is about.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? He had a heart attack, which they never told anybody about. When’s the last time you read a paper, Jack? It’s in all the afternoon editions. He’s due back tomorrow; Sarnoff himself is meeting him at the airport.”

  I could feel the blood pounding in my ears.

  “A heart attack?”

  “Here, I’ll read it you. The Telegram—”

  “How big a play?”

  “Bottom of the front page. Not as big as you might think, but still plenty big. Three columns. ‘Toscanini Comes Home After Heart Scare.’”

  “‘Scare.’ Not ‘attack.’”

  “You going to let me finish?”

  Barbara looked at me quizzically from the front seat of the car. I waved at her encouragingly, but I could tell that she sensed my agitation.

  “‘Arturo Toscanini, musical titan and conductor of the NBC Symphony,’” Toots began, “‘is scheduled to arrive at Idlewild Airport via private plane tomorrow afternoon at approximately four o’clock, having survived what NBC spokesmen described as “an extremely mild heart attack,” quote unquote. The eighty-three-year-old Maestro was reportedly feeling extremely fit and was anxious to return to conduct this fall’s slate of concerts with the orchestra. In a statement released this afternoon, RCA President David Sarnoff said that “Maestro Toscanini’s doctors have given him a clean bill of health and we look forward to many years of great music-making.”’ There’s a little more, but that’s the gist. So tell me, who’s sitting in your car, Jack, some barber who can carry a tune?”