Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (10 page)

According to the newspapers
the following day, the crowd at Yankee Stadium for the Louis-Charles fight was just over twenty-two thousand, but I thought it was smaller than that, and God knows how many tickets had been given away by the promoters. While the ringside was packed and the bleachers had partially filled up with the plebeians, the upper deck was nearly empty and the mezzanine only about half filled. It was depressing and somehow ominous to behold all those ghostly seats in the big ballpark.

“It’s being carried live on CBS, that’s the problem,” Aaron shouted over to me during a prelim between two clumsy heavyweights—Elkin Brothers, which sounded like a moving company, and Dutch Culbertson, which sounded like Dutch Culbertson. Both pugilists were pretty awful, but Brothers was stronger and the Dutchman was en route to a quick demise. “We’ve created a monster with television. I hope it doesn’t kill live sports.” Aaron was wearing a brown hounds-tooth jacket, dark wool slacks, a white monogrammed shirt, and a silk necktie from Sulka featuring pheasants in flight that alone cost more than my suit. But he sipped his Ballantine ale from a bottle, just like a regular working stiff.

“I don’t think television’s the whole story,” I replied. “I think a lot of people stayed away out of fear. The possibility of Louis falling on his ass is just too goddamn depressing. Like Bing Crosby singing flat or Fred Astaire stumbling over his shoelaces. Each one is another milepost on the way to the cemetery.”

“Cheery thought, Jack.”

“I have my dark side.”

Aaron took another slug of beer.

“Well, the hell with it,” he said. “Too bad for everybody who didn’t show. It’s a gorgeous evening for a fight.”

It was in fact gorgeous, a perfect autumn night to be seated three scant rows from the brilliantly lit ring, watching various luminaries file in as the time for the main event approached. Governor Dewey waltzed by, shaking every hairy hand in sight, followed by Acting Mayor Impelliteri, Judge Pecora, and a gaggle of city councilmen, commissioners, and other assorted parasites. A heavyweight title fight was a force field of power, and it drew politicians as irresistibly as Mecca draws Muslims.

“So you really don’t know Joey Blinks?” I said without warning to Aaron, half a hot dog stuffed in my mouth.

My calculated remark didn’t get the anticipated result. The NBC exec appeared to draw an actual blank.

“Who?”

“Your seatmate at the funeral. Giuseppe LaMarca. He runs with two other aliases, Joey Little and Joey Big. Take your pick.”

“He introduced himself as Joe Lane.”

“That makes four aliases. Do I hear five?”

“What’s his real name again?” If Aaron was faking, he was doing an absolutely first-rate job of it.

“Giuseppe—” I began, but then a sound began to arise from above and behind me, a mounting, agitated roar, and I knew without even turning my head that the gladiators had appeared. Aaron and I stood up and gawked like everyone else as Louis and Charles emerged from the stadium dugouts, Charles dancing nervously and Louis as stolid as ever, walking slowly and tapping his gloves together as tentatively as if he had never worn them before. As I watched the two men approach the ring, my heart began to sink into my Florsheims. The champ looked closer to forty than thirty-five: there were bags beneath his eyes, his face looked sallow and puffy, his dark hair was thinning into lonely patches. What he retained, however, was that implacable, impenetrable stare, devoid of anger or fear. Charles, on the other hand, appeared skittish and eager, fairly racing toward the ring. He was jet-black handsome, with bright eyes and marcelled hair, and looked like a flush busboy out for a night on the town.

Sidney Aaron groaned,
“Oy vay,
” as Louis climbed gingerly into the ring. “He isn’t getting any younger, is he, Jack?”

“If I was Catholic, I’d say a Hail Mary for him. What do Jews say, a Hail Murray?”

“He’ll be okay if he can get rid of this guy fast.”

He didn’t.

In the first round, Charles sped out of his corner like an Olympic sprinter and immediately began belting Joe with a series of disrespectful lefts and rights to the body, including a solid and inadvertent hook to Joe’s nuts that made me clench my teeth and cross my legs. Joe tried to stalk him in that familiar, deliberate style, but his jab kept missing; his thought processes were unchanged, but not his reflexes. In the second round, Joe managed to knock Charles back on his heels with a straight left and the crowd stood as one and started screaming for blood, but the blood never came. Charles danced around the ring until his head cleared, and then started banging the old man’s ribs again.

And so the fight unfolded, round by round; it wasn’t a massacre, but it wasn’t close. Charles was outweighed by thirty pounds, but his speed more than compensated for his lack of bulk; he insouciantly flicked his jab into Joe’s kisser, and moved the older man around the ring like a housepainter walking a ladder across a room. When Louis made the younger man’s knees buckle in the tenth with a short left to the jaw, Charles gathered himself smartly and foxtrotted out of danger. When the bell rang ending the round, Aaron and I just looked at each other.

“It’s over,” I said. “That was his best shot.”

Aaron nodded. “Makes me want to cry. We all used to be so young, Jack. The world lay before us like presents under a Christmas tree.”

“We didn’t have a Christmas tree in our house.”

“You know what I mean.”

I did know; we were witnessing the end of the era that had ignited all of our youthful dreams.

In the fourteenth round, Charles simply kicked Joe’s ass around the block; by the fifteenth, both fighters were pretty well spent and when the final bell sounded Joe looked like a man who had just lost his wallet. The decision was unanimous and one-sided. The ref, Mark Conn, had it ten-five Charles, but he was just being polite. The judges really stuck it to the champ—thirteen-two and twelve-three. The two men shook hands politely and left the ring. People applauded Joe, but he kept his head down all the way back to the dugout. Then the lights came up in the big ballpark and we all filed out.

The silence was deafening.

I felt like I had attended my second funeral of the day.

Throughout the evening, Aaron had maintained his peculiar reticence about the events that had brought us together—we were just two guys at a fight—so I was not surprised that when I offered him a ride back to Manhattan he readily accepted. I knew this had not been a casual invitation; Aaron knew hundreds of other people he could have brought to this fight and at least half of them had better legs than I did. At some point I knew he was finally going to get to the point: He would try to buy me off or, failing that, threaten me.

I was ready, and, as usual, I was dead wrong.

No sooner had I pulled the mighty Roadmaster onto Jerome Avenue than Sidney Aaron, vice president for special programming at NBC, put his head against the passenger-side window and began to cry. And these were not wistful tears; these were great, heaving, gulping sobs.

“It’s so te …” he began, and then he dissolved, his shoulders shaking, his breath ragged. I hadn’t seen a grown man bawl so openly since my Uncle Irving had watched his button store go up in flames on Rivington Street, and even he hadn’t carried on like this. It was all I could do to keep my eyes on the road.

“You okay, Sidney? Want to pull over somewhere, maybe get a drink?”

He just shook his head, then blew his nose with considerable force into a monogrammed, snow-white handkerchief.

“I’m so sorry,” he finally managed to say.

“Hey,” was the best I could do.

“It’s just …” Some more tears rolled down his cologne-scented cheeks.

“Just …?”

“Just so difficult.”

A fire engine raced past, its sirens and horns at full cry, followed by an equally noisy hook and ladder, so I had an excuse to pull the car over and stop.

Aaron dabbed at his cheeks and took deep noisy breaths. “I feel like such an idiot.”

“Hey, even Lou Gehrig cried. Want a smoke?”

“No.”

I fired up a Lucky and rolled down my window. “You are going to tell me why you were crying, right?”

Aaron honked his sizable nose one more time, then stuffed his handkerchief back into his pocket.

“You can’t believe the pressure,” he said. “I haven’t slept in three weeks.”

“Okay, let me take a wild guess—Toscanini really got snatched, didn’t he? And you’re the monkey in the middle.”

Aaron stared at me for a few pregnant moments.

“You must swear—”

“I won’t tell a soul. That’s part of the package. I told Fritz that and technically I’m still working for him. His daughter wants me to stay on the case.”

“I see. Would it be a conflict to work for me?”

“Probably.”

“Why?”

“Because her interest is in finding out who killed her father. I don’t know what your interest is yet. Was he snatched? Let’s start there. A simple yes or no will suffice.”

“Yes,” Sidney Aaron said. “He was snatched.”

“Okay. Question two: Where was he snatched?”

“Sun Valley.”

“Sun Valley, Idaho?”

“On May twelfth. Here. Look at this and then we’ll talk.”

Aaron handed me a newspaper clipping. As the Woodlawn elevated train rattled above me, throwing sparks down onto the street, I studied the clipping. It was an Associated Press wire photo of Toscanini riding a chairlift, waving happily, jaunty in a beret.

“I remember this shot,” I told him.

“It was picked up everywhere.” Aaron dried the remaining tears from the corners of his eyes.

“And this was taken in Sun Valley?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s him? In this picture, it’s him?”

“I’m not completely sure. It was him going up the chairlift, but evidently it wasn’t him coming down. It was a double.”

“He got snatched at the top of the lift?”

“Yes.”

“He was alone? How could this have happened without anybody noticing?”

“There were orchestra members all over the place, but nobody saw a thing. The lift apparently goes into this little shedlike structure, where it turns around and then comes out the other side. That’s where it must have happened.”

“In a flash.”

“In a flash. He’s a very strong man, but, Christ, he’s eighty-three and quite diminutive, actually. No more than five-foot-three.”

“Makes no difference how strong or how short. This is a world-class professional snatch, a top-shelf operation all the way. This double they got, there’s gotta be significant plastic surgery involved; this is something that gets planned for at least a year, maybe two.” I checked the picture again. “How do you know for sure that Sun Valley is where it happened? You guys played over a dozen cities.”

Aaron took the clipping back.

“That’s our information.”

I pulled the car back into traffic and turned on the radio. Kay Starr was singing about lost love. I pretended to listen and drove in silence for five blocks before Aaron spoke up.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“You’re jerking me around.”

“What are you talking about? I just told you—”

“You just told me something I suspected, something you figured I already knew. So you didn’t tell me anything, maybe you bullshitted me entirely.”

“Jack …”

I killed the radio and turned up my own volume.

“Here’s what you can’t do. You can’t tell me you know it happened in Sun Valley and then say ‘That’s our information’ when I ask you how come you’re sure. Doesn’t work that way. You want to do business with me, you have to give me straight answers, because if you don’t, I’m going to wind up like Fritz Stern and I promised my mother I’d never let anybody shoot me dead. So if you tell me ‘That’s our information,’ I assume you’ve been in touch with the kidnappers, maybe there’s ransom involved. And why, then, I ask myself, do you need me except to play me for some kind of sucker, which I have no intention of being played for? Now, I’m not sure that’s actually an English sentence, but I think you get my point.”

Aaron sighed.

“Yes I do. This is unbelievably complicated.”

“Spare me the horseshit.”

“You have no idea….”

“I can’t believe NBC doesn’t have their own security. This guy was snatched over three months ago. What the hell’s been going on all that time? And then you say you need me? For what? There’s no logic to it except Stern got to me first and now you’re trying to keep me in the room by feeding me these little cocktail weiners of information, one at a time.”

“I can understand your paranoia….”

“Mrs. LeVine, who is actually Mrs. Levine, didn’t raise any paranoids. I’m just a run-of-the-mill scared Jew.”

“Well, so am I, in case you didn’t guess.” Aaron allowed himself a smile. “Jack, obviously NBC has its own security, but the problem goes much deeper than that, and it’s why I need to go outside the company.”

“What’s the problem?”