Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (5 page)

“My wife Hilde,” he said in barely audible tones, as though speaking louder would set her off like a guard dog. Hilde Stern had thin lips and worried blue eyes; her features were delicate but ravaged by anxiety. Her hair was black, but her face was gray.

“So this is the private detective.” Her voice was huskier than I had expected. Not quite Marlene Dietrich, but throaty all the same.

“That’s right.” I looked around the apartment, if only to escape her unwavering and semi-hostile gaze. “Terrific place,” I told her. It wasn’t. The Sterns had five rooms and furniture enough for ten. Sofas, chairs, hassocks, and breakfronts were jammed together like the treasures in Charles Foster Kane’s warehouse. There were numerous places to be seated, but no place to sit down. The blinds were drawn behind closed draperies, so there wasn’t a ray of natural light in the joint. To make things even more oppressive, the upholstery on the couches and chairs ranged from St. Louis brown to mustard-gas yellow.

Mrs. Stern watched me check the place out. “The furniture is all from Germany.”

“It’s very impressive. Solid.”

“In this country I don’t think they are made this well.”

“You may be right,” I told her. “But there are a few things we do better over here, cheeseburgers and free speech for openers.”

Stern was having trouble standing still. I could hardly blame him. His bride was not a relaxing presence.

“We should go,” he said.

Frau Stern kept eyeballing me, then turned and swept a pair of framed photographs from a side table.

“My daughters,” she said, as if challenging me to an arm-wrestling match. She handed me the tinted “poses.”

“Beautiful girls,” said Ambassador LeVine. The younger daughter was frail and bespectacled and already looked, at age thirteen, like she was going to marry a guy with a heart condition; the older daughter (“twenty-two next month”) was dark and complicated and a one-round knockout. I stared at her picture for about five seconds too long.

“We should go,” Stern repeated.

Hilde Stern turned to her husband.

“And you’ll be back when?”

“Soon.”

“Soon is when?” She was really murder.

“When we’re done, Hilde. I really can’t say this for sure.” Stern turned and walked out the door.

I turned to Mrs. Stern. “A pleasure to meet you.”

“I don’t understand this at all,” she said, looking past me to the door.

“Well …”

“He is paid to play the violin, not to hire detectives.”

“I understand your feelings—”

Stern reappeared in the doorway. “Enough,” he shouted. “Enough with your doubting! Mr. LeVine!”

“We won’t be long, ma’am,” I said to Mrs. Stern, then sped out the door before the happy couple started hurling
weisswurst
at each other.

Stern said next to nothing during the fifteen-minute drive to Tosca-nini’s residence. He offered laconic directions—“left here,” “at the light, right”—but otherwise listened mutely as I described my meeting with Sidney Aaron.

“He has a lot of power,” Stern said, gazing out the window of my ’48 Buick Roadmaster. Although the day had begun on a promising note, with blue skies and an engaging mugginess, it was turning gray and the breeze out of the north hinted at the shorter and colder days to come.

“It certainly appeared that way to me,” I told Stern, one hand on the Roadmaster’s faux-ivory steering wheel. “Swanky office, English secretary. All the comforts of home.”

“Oh yes. And he enjoys the power. Too much.”

“No such thing as too much, Mr. Stern. Power to those guys is like oxygen to a fire.”

Stern sighed. He seemed genuinely troubled. “It’s funny … maybe not so funny, actually, but I thought that Mr. Aaron, Mr. Sarnoff, the chairman, that they were
landsmen,
you know, Jews, and therefore they’d be what in German we call
simpatisch,
which is like both sympathetic and empathetic, but …” Stern shook his head.

“Forget it. Over a certain price range, they’re all killers.”

“You said it. Here you bear right.” Stern leaned forward, rubbing his hands as nervously as a squirrel.

“You ought to relax.”

“Maestro’s house.”

“Not again.”

“No,” Stern said. “This is it.”

The Villa Pauline was not quite the Mediterranean-style palazzo I had anticipated, but rather a large Tudor-style house, badly in need of a paint job and surrounded by five lush acres of lawn and very well established plantings. It wasn’t hard to figure out why a European émigré would feel very much at home here. In the distance one could see the cliffs of the Jersey Palisades and a suggestion—just by the valley of light—of the venerable and mighty Hudson River.

I stopped the car. We were on the corner of Independence Avenue and 254th Street.

“Nice setup the old man has here,” I said to Stern.

He wasn’t listening.

“Look,” he said, pointing out his window.

Two men were crossing the grounds. They walked swiftly in our direction.

“Friends of yours?” I asked Stern.

“No. Of course not.”

I stepped on the accelerator and headed toward the Villa Pauline. Stern was appalled.

“What are you doing?”

“Relax.”

I drove onto a long graveled driveway that led to a porte cochere on the south side of the house.

Stern gripped his door handle.

“Mr. LeVine, please …”

“What’s to lose?” I told him.

The two men picked up their pace. They were now running toward the car. And the closer they got, the larger they appeared. Neither of them resembled Jascha Heifetz.

“
Lieber Gott
,” said Stern.

They reached the driveway and held up hands the size of porterhouse steaks, signaling me to stop the car. I did so and poked my head out the window.

“What’s up, fellas?” I asked, friendly as a pup.

The larger of the two men—the one who was six-foot-five rather than six-foot-one—approached the car, walking very deliberately. His blond hair was cut short, very Aryan, and he wore sunglasses and a brown suit that looked to be the only one he had ever owned. “This guy isn’t Toscanini, is he?” I asked Stern. “Maestro’s a smaller man with better clothes, right?”

“
Lieber
—”

The big man bent over and peered into the car, like King Kong gazing into the windows of the Third Avenue El.

“What do you want?” he asked in a surprisingly thin and disembodied voice.

“We’re here to see Toscanini,” I told him. “A private matter.”

The Aryan stared at me, then at Stern. He wheeled around and addressed his partner.

“They’re here to see the old man.”

His partner had bent over and was filling his fists with gravel. He stood up, let the gravel fall to the ground, and patted his hands clean. The partner had shaggy black hair, wore corduroy pants, a leather jacket, and a tweed cap.

“What do they want with him?” he asked.

The giant turned back to us.

“Why do you want to see Mr. Toscanini?”

“We’re with the American Baton Company. We understand the Maestro is in the market for our new Excalibur model, which is extremely lightweight.”

The giant examined us again. God only knows what he was looking for.

“He’s asleep,” he finally said.

“Really.” I made a big show of checking my watch. “It’s ten-thirty. You might want to think about getting him up.”

“Can’t be disturbed.”

“He’s gonna be pissed when he finds out that you shooed away the guys from the baton company.”

“Maybe we should be going,” Stern mumbled, but I kept yapping away.

“This is a really first-class piece of goods we’re talking about. It’s not just a stick, you understand?”

The big man shook his big head.

“Sorry. We got orders from Walter Toscanini. His father is not to be disturbed.”

“The old guy feeling all right?” I asked.

“Orders from Walter,” the giant repeated. “No visitors. So beat it.”

His partner started walking toward us; now I could see that he had a glass eye and a scar than ran the length of his left cheek.

“Mr. LeVine …,” Stern muttered.

“What do you think?” I said cheerily to Stern. “Ready to go?”

“Please …”

I threw the Buick into reverse. “A pleasure meeting you fellas,” I said to the two large men. The partner was waving at something off in the distance. “Let’s all have lunch sometime soon.”

“Please,” Stern said again.

“We’re gone.” I backed the car out of the driveway onto 254th Street and then turned onto Independence Avenue, which is where the blue Chrysler began to follow us. I wasn’t surprised. Not even a little.

“So what do you think, Mr. Stern, was the Maestro sleeping?”

Stern was wiping his face with a bright yellow handkerchief that looked suspiciously like a linen napkin.

“Those men,” he said. “
Shrecklich.
”

“Not the musical type. He wasn’t there, I’d bet my life on it.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Oh, you got me into a doozy, Mr. Stern. I’ve handled doozies before, but they always crept up on me. This one appears to be an immediate, direct-hit doozy.” I lit up a Lucky and rolled my window all the way down. “By the way, just as a point of interest, we’re being followed.”

Stern started to turn around.

“We don’t turn around. That’s rule number one,” I told him.

“
Lieber, lieber
.”

“No reason to fret; I’ll lose them before you can say Johann Sebastian Bach. For twenty-five a day, you get the deluxe package.”

I slowed the Buick down to about ten miles an hour.

“You go slowly?” Stern started to turn in his seat again. “Why do you do this?”

“I repeat—don’t turn around.” I checked the rearview mirror. The Chrysler was trying to blend into the scenery and slipped in behind a taxi. When the taxi stopped to pick up an elderly couple with shopping bags, I immediately accelerated and crossed the double yellow line to get around a pair of buses that were lumbering down Independence Avenue in tandem.

“Lieber!
” Stern crouched down in his seat.

“Here we go,” said Captain Jack. I completed the maneuver by running a red light, hooking a left on 252nd Street, and then beating a garbage truck that was backing into the middle of the block. I sped down to Broadway, catching a green light, took a right, and sailed off unencumbered. There was no way the Chrysler could make it up, but I ran two more reds just to play it safe.

“Now you can look around.”

Stern straightened up and peered out the back window.

“This is like one of those gangster pictures,” he said.

“Like? It is a gangster picture, but unfortunately we’re not the gangsters.”

I got Stern home in about ten minutes. He got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk, understandably reluctant to go back into his apartment.

“I probably don’t tell Hilde what happened.”

“I would say that’s an extremely sensible idea.”

“Yes.” He fidgeted. A light rain had started to fall. “So what do you do next?”

“That’s an excellent question, Mr. Stern. I guess I play detective. That’s always a start.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks. To you, too.”

I pulled away. In the rearview mirror, I could see Stern watching my car. Finally, he stared up at the rain as if for a sign, then turned and walked into his building. As for me, I had a slightly queasy feeling.

No. Make that a very queasy feeling.

FOUR

The telephone began to
ring at three-thirty in the morning. I recall the precise time because it didn’t wake me up. I was seated in my living room, wearing a seersucker robe and reading an Ellery Queen mystery, my stomach on the blink after a midnight bowl of canned chili. I looked at the phone and checked my watch. If there is anything worse than being awakened at three-thirty in the morning by a call, it is being wide awake at that hour and hearing your phone begin to ring. There is no way on earth that it can be good news.