The apartment smelled stale and close when I walked in. I opened a few windows and talked the cranky old Westing-house fan into doing me a favor and turning around for a while. Then I called a gal named Kitty Seymour, who used to be a crime reporter and now did public relations for the fire department, and who liked me.
“Kitty, you want to see GI Canteen tonight?”
“Since when do you go to the theater?”
“Since producers give me free tickets.”
“A producer who hired you to tail the leading lady?”
“Close, but no cigar. A producer who’s being blackmailed.”
“For what?”
“Do you know that’s the third question in three sentences? It’s a girl in his show who made some stag films once. He does family shows and doesn’t want it to get around. Doesn’t make much sense if you think too hard about it.”
“I’d think he’d just fire her.”
“He doesn’t know who it is.”
“But he’s willing to pay for the films?”
“Ten grand worth.”
Kitty whistled.
“Very strange case you’ve got there, Jack. Doesn’t sound nice at all.”
“It doesn’t sound, taste, or smell nice, Kitty. But the guy’s paying me in real money, a lot of it, so I’m pretending it’s on the up-and-up.”
“I’d get out of it.”
“And you have an income. Listen, meet me in front of the Booth Theater at a quarter past eight.”
“No dinner?”
“Post-theater snack, dear. The best people are doing it.”
She laughed, a fine, full, honest laugh that made me feel good all over.
“The best and the cheapest. Eight-fifteen, Booth. Thanks, Jack. I’ll be there, no questions.”
She gave me a little kiss over the phone and hung up. I went to the kitchen and opened up a Blatz when the phone got lonesome and started ringing. I ambled into the living room and got it on the fourth ring.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Mr. LeVine, this is Kerry Lane again. I hate to call you at home, but I felt I had to apologize for my outburst this afternoon. It was childish and I’m deeply sorry for it. I should realize that you are in a difficult position.”
“Well, right now I’ve got my feet up and there’s a cold bottle of beer in my hand. That’s not such a bad position, for openers. If you’re talking about the case, I have something of a lead that’s taking me out to Smithtown, Long Island, tomorrow. That ring any bells?”
“None. How did this come about?”
“I’ve been contacted by Fenton’s playmate.”
“He didn’t waste very much time.” She wasn’t dumb, this girl, not dumb at all.
“Not a hell of a lot, no.” I stared past my feet out the window. Some kids were shooting craps on the roof of the apartment building across the street. I wouldn’t have minded playing with them for a while, even if the oldest was fourteen. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have minded being fourteen.
“Do you think there are more of them?”
“Well, if you’ve told me everything I ought to know, it stands to reason that this punk will be the last in the chain. Supposing that he and Fenton were in business together and Fenton crossed him and got croaked for his trouble, the partner figuring nobody would mind very much, the partner takes the firm’s assets and makes it into a one-man business and that’s the whole story.”
“You’re probably right.” She sounded unconvinced. I waited for her to say something else. She didn’t.
“Miss Lane, if you have nothing more to say, I’m going to hang up, not because I don’t like chatting with you but because I have a beer to finish and a nap to take. Anything else?”
“No.” She sounded as distant as someone calling from the Ukraine.
“Have a stiff drink and put it out of your mind,” I told her. “In a day or two, the whole business will be wrapped up tight.”
“Perhaps. Good-bye, Mr. LeVine, and thank you.”
I hung up and discovered that something small and hard, something like fear, had found a comfortable spot in my stomach. Kerry Lane sounded terribly frightened, about something I was sure I knew nothing about. Maybe more than her budding career was on the line. Like her life. Like my life.
One of the kids shooting craps looked to have rolled up about thirty-five cents so far. He was doing better than LeVine, who stripped down to his powder blue shorts and curled up on the couch. You’ll like the dream I had: having just finished a performance of some kind, I am sitting in front of a dressing-room mirror, the kind that’s ringed with forty-watt bulbs, rubbing cold cream on my face. Butler walks in with Roosevelt, Stalin, and Pete Gray, who had one arm and played outfield for the St. Louis Browns. He was the guy who would catch the ball in his glove, pop it up in the air while whipping off his glove, catch it in his bare hand and throw it back to the infield. Butler says, “Gentlemen, Jack here is a consummate performer,” and then points a gun at my head, which is when I woke up. I thought maybe I’d try and figure it out, using my best City College Introduction to Psychology, but decided against it. I had better things to do, like open a can of Spam, fry an egg over it, and call it supper.
GI Canteen reminded me of why I never went to the theater anymore. Chorus boys prancing around in army outfits until I felt like puking; a number called “That’s How We Do It in the U.S.A.” in which a girl with tremendous knockers spilling out of her red, white, and blue bathing suit shot down a couple of guys made up to look like Hitler and Tojo, except that they looked like the butcher and the laundryman. Kerry Lane was so pale, even through the makeup, that Kitty nudged me the minute she walked on stage. Five years as a crime reporter does wonders for the intuition. After eating at Sardi’s we went back to her place on East 68th Street.
Kitty’s apartment was a spacious one-bedroom affair with plants and vases and good taste radiating from every corner. She took my coat and asked if I’d care for some cognac. I said yes and went to the most comfortable-looking chair in the joint, where I lit a Lucky and thought about being in the apartment with Kitty. We’d had a funny kind of friendship over the past six months, a couple of divorced people making with the jokes and never really getting down to business. We had bedded down once, to nobody’s particular satisfaction. I was a little drunk and had pretended to be even drunker.
Kitty came over with the cognac in a snifter and sat on my lap.
“How tired are you, Jack?”
“Very.”
“I see.” She smiled and put her hand in my lap. Kitty’s rust-brown hair was piled high on her head and her green eyes shone with intelligence. “I had a wonderful time tonight, Jack. We seem to think very much alike.” She wasn’t making a pitch, just leveling. She emphasized her words by rubbing her hand, rolled into a small, loose fist, across my lap.
“I don’t think I’m that tired.”
She laughed. “I hate coy men, Jack.” Her hand continued its intent but unhurried dance around my body. The ride got bumpy.
“How sweet,” she said. Her hand stopped and flattened out against my fly. “No drunk act this time, Jack.”
“Absolutely not. You may ravish me at will.”
We stood up and headed for her bedroom, young and foolish, the private eye and his bimbo. Just like in the books.
In the sack we made that sweetest of discoveries: that we really were friends, great and royal and generous friends. That stuff you don’t get in the books.
IT’S A GOOD TWO and a half hours out to Smithtown from Sunnyside, a terrible two and a half hours actually. I was tired to begin with and the ride in my aging Buick almost put me away: a vista of swampy lots, marshes, gas stations, and clumps of houses that looked like they didn’t know what they were doing on Long Island when they could be in Brooklyn or Queens. I rubbed so many mosquitoes and gnats out on my windshield that it began to look like an aerial view of a battlefield. After forty minutes of squinting through their little squashed bod
ies to see the road, I pulled into a dusty red-and-whitc Esso station. The grease monkey, a thin man in green overalls, was sitting on a stool outside the office, drinking a Nehi. He got up slowly and walked over to my car.
The monkey was wearing a little green cap with the name “Bert” sewn across the front in yellow thread. He had the comic-sad green eyes of a man who hasn’t had very much to laugh about, but has retained his sense of humor all the same. His nose was long and sharp and his teeth stained brown from years of chewing tobacco. I could see that Bert had stayed out in the sun too much: his skin had the texture of an old saddle. He leaned into the car and took a long look at my graveyard of a windshield.
“Bugs are just a bitch right now.” His voice was thin and sounded like it wasn’t used very often. Couldn’t be all that much business ten miles east of Mineola, with nothing but weeds and telephone poles for company. “Heat or damp must have brought them out, way I see it.”
“I think you’re right,” I told him, getting out of the Buick for a stretch. It was eleven o’clock and the sun was high and strong in the sky. By noon, everything would look shimmery. I took a deep breath and the air felt heavy and syrupy. I coughed.
“Hot enough for you?” asked Bert. “Jee-sus, ain’t this been a honey of a June for you. This damp is what’s bringing out all the bugs.” Including the one who had just gone from soup to mints on the back of my neck. I could feel the stinging and swelling already. This was going to be one hell of a day.
“Hey, Bert, you know your way around Smithtown?”
“I might, with my specs on.” He had the car door open and was leaning across the front seat, spraying the windshield and rubbing the bugs off with paper toweling, then spraying again to towel off the last traces of blood.
“How about a street called Edgefield Road?”
“I know it.” Bert climbed out of the car and went to work on the front of the windshield. “You’re still a good forty or so miles away, but when you hit Smithtown, go right through what they call the business district—which means just a couple more stores than usual—and go another half-mile till you pass a joint called Cookie’s Bar and Grill. If you got a minute, stop in and tell Cookie, Bert Little says hello. If not, keep going and you’ll hit a street called Salem. Take a left and follow it all the way to Edgefield.”
“You know it pretty well.”
“Born and raised there, as they say. That Edgefield section is pretty well run down now. Nothing too fancy. You just visiting?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, there’s better places to go. How ’bout some gas?”
I got out my ration book and filled the tank.
There were a lot better places to go. One hour later, drenched with sweat, feeling the dull ache of a possible cold and glowing with bug bites and sunstroke, I pulled up to Edgefield Road and parked on Salem, to grab a quick look-see. I turned off my motor, which was the only sound for miles, got out of the car and leaned against the door, reaching into my shirt pocket for a Lucky. It didn’t take much of a look to realize that Bert was right: Edgefield Road was nothing too fancy.
Both sides of the street were lined with white clapboard bungalow-style houses, probably no more than ten years old but already decrepit beyond repair. Shingles were cracking, drainpipes were rusting and breaking off, and the paint was peeling off in wild, jagged patterns, leaving dark outlines against the sides of the houses that resembled the body-shaped holes made by silent comedians when they ran through walls. The hinges on half of the screen doors were busted, so doors flapped open and shut whenever the wind changed its mind. A couple of houses had small flower beds out front; most were surrounded by dirt, crabgrass, and every kind of scrawny weed that thrived and multiplied in the gases and exhalations of poor people. Broken earthenware pots sat marooned on the porches, next to chipped garden chairs, fallen hammocks, dreaming dogs, and all the quilts and rain-ruined blankets that get dumped in a corner and are never moved again. A couple of children were playing with the ground. There were no trees to protect them from the sun. I felt as distant from Manhattan as if I were tailing someone across the Sahara.
A wiry, thin-lipped woman with what you might call brown hair came out of number twelve Edgefield and saw me leaning against my car. She stopped and folded her arms across her white blouse. A little boy was pulling at her dull and baggy gray slacks, but she ignored him and stared at me. The kid was about four, dirty, pale, and barefoot in blue shorts and a tee shirt. I decided to make my move over to number fourteen and walked toward it, nodding pleasantly at the lady.
“Afternoon.”
“Afternoon,” she echoed back, without too much emotion one way or the other. “If you’re going to number fourteen there, save your breath. Party living there left yesterday afternoon.”
There wasn’t any sign of life at fourteen and the driveway was empty. I stopped.
“Nobody home since yesterday?”
“That’s right, mister.” She looked about thirty and sounded closer to fifty, with a tired, uneven voice. Her eyes were gray and close together, separated by a good pert nose which was smudged with dirt. Her lips were thin and she gave off the look of a high school sweetie who had hit her peak at about sixteen and had been losing her looks, feature by feature, ever since.
“I was supposed to meet somebody there at noon today.”
“Well,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and pointing her head toward the house, “you’re out of luck.”
“It’s important that I find the party.”
“You a cop?” She was wary but not hostile. Not yet.
“Private cop.”
Surprisingly enough, she smiled, a kind of close-mouthed, vulnerable smile. It was the spontaneous but tentative grin of a poor woman talking to. a stranger, delighted about something but restrained by the fears that come from a lifetime of dependence on the whims of people with money.
“Like on the radio?” She looked down at her kid, who was gawking at the big bald stranger talking to his mother. “Paulie, this man’s a private eye, like Boston Blackie.” The kid kept staring at me, his arms hugging his mother’s left leg.
“Boston Blackie gets paid a lot more than I do.”
She laughed. “Yes, well he probably does at that.” She looked around. “I couldn’t tell you much about the people over at fourteen cause there was hardly anyone over there too much. I used to see two men walking around there occasionally. Sometimes they’d stay a few days, or a week. They looked a little rough, so I didn’t speak with them a whole lot and told Paulie not to bother with them. On Monday and Tuesday of this week, there was one of them there, but he left yesterday afternoon. Looked like he was leaving for a while.”
“How so, suitcases?”
“Only one suitcase that I could see, but he had some cartons that he was putting in the trunk of the car, which was a black Ford sedan. You want to know the car, I suppose, the way Boston Blackie always does. That’s always the first thing he asks about.” She smiled shyly, delicately.
“It is helpful. Anything else?”
“Like I said, he had these cartons in the trunk and I had the feeling he wasn’t coming back for a while, or somebody was after him or something, cause he really tore out of here.” She looked down. “Remember how fast the man in the car was going, Paulie?” The boy nodded and turned away, putting one hand in his mouth and keeping the other bunched around the folds of her slacks. From the way she spoke to him, I got the idea she didn’t have too many other people to talk to. She read my thoughts.
“My husband Earl is in the navy right now. Out in the Pacific Ocean.”
I nodded respectfully. “Well, he’ll be back pretty soon.”
“That’ll be great, won’t it, Paulie, when Daddy’s home?” She mussed the kid’s hair and he hid his face in her thigh. “Paulie’s shy with strangers.”
“He’s a nice boy. Would you mind telling me your name?”
“You going to call me to the witness stand?”
She smiled again and I knew I was a big event in her life.
“Nope.” I smiled as nicely as I could. I was out of practice in dealing with real people.
“Well, then I’m Mrs. Earl Rogers,” and proud of it.
“Mrs. Rogers, if I broke into that house, would you be very upset?”
She kind of squinted at me. The wind picked up and we both turned our backs to it to avoid the dust. “Well sir,” she said, “I can’t see anything with this dust in my eyes, so I couldn’t tell whether you broke in or not.” The wind let up and we faced each other. I handed her five bucks.
“That’s very kind of you,” said Mrs. Earl Rogers, holding the bill very tight in her hand. “I appreciate it.” There were no histrionics and no hint that she wouldn’t accept it. “It’ll come in real handy these days.”
“You earned it.”
“Guess I did.” What she was thinking at that moment I’ll never know. Maybe nothing.
“You got a personal card?” she asked. “In case something comes up.” I handed her a card and she stared down at it. “Jack LeVine. Maybe you’ll be on the radio someday.” She put the card in her back pocket and stood silent for a moment, stroking the five like it was a baby chick. Then Mrs. Rogers turned and started walking back into her house. The kid was still staring at me, wondering who the hell I was. I couldn’t have told him.
The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery Page 4
