Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (6 page)

It wasn’t.

I picked up after the third ring. “Hello?”

“Mr. LeVine, I woke you up?”

“Actually, no.”

“No? You are not sleeping?” The accent came into focus, but the voice seemed disembodied.

It was Hilde Stern.

“Mrs. Stern? Is this Mrs. Stern, Hilde Stern?”

“He is killed.”

My blood cooled to an Arctic blue.

“Wait … Mr. Stern was killed?”

“The police, they came here, to the door, at half past one o’clock. Shot in the street. On the West Side, near the piers and the ocean liners. What is he doing there? I was worried to death, of course, where is he, he told me he had a late meeting with some of the other musicians, but by one o’clock, I said to myself, this is not Fritz, he would have called if it was going to be so late. My daughter Linda is here, of course; Barbara is coming down from Cornell, can you imagine, she is driving all night, she has wonderful friends and they drive her, so soon she is here, thanks God. You have children, Mr. LeVine?”

“No, I don’t.” She was in shock, talking to keep reality at bay, to keep the world in an eternal Present Minus Two Hours Ago. The ordinary speech of the average day—comings and goings, it isn’t like Fritz, he would have called, friends are driving her … Life goes on, keep the conversation going, please, and then comes the moment when Death walks in, takes off his coat and hat, begins unlacing his shoes, and makes himself comfy. But Mrs. Stern was still weeks, maybe months away from that devastating, final moment. She still lived in Two Hours Ago.

“You worry and worry about them, and then something like this. I don’t even know if it was musicians he was meeting with—”

“Mrs. Stern—”

“He got a phone call around nine-thirty and said he had to go out, a call from a colleague—”

“Did he say who, by any chance?”

“And then he puts on his jacket, it was still raining; I said to him, Fritz, you have to put on your raincoat, sometimes with him you don’t know what he’s thinking, it’s like the weather is for other people, not him—”

“Mrs. Stern—”

“And he leaves, it is almost ten, I say to him, Fritz, this can’t wait? He says it can’t wait, he’ll call if gets too late, but I should go to sleep. And then …” And then. It was all she could get out this time around.

“I’ll be right over. Are the police still there?”

“No. They left. It’s just us now. Just the family.”

*    *    *

Sunnyside, Queens, is a beautiful village at four-thirty in the morning. The buildings seem rooted in some cheerful domestic and commercial history, the streets are clean and quiet and without memory. I picked up a scalding container of coffee at the Bickford’s on Broadway and balanced it carefully between my legs as I headed toward the Queensboro Bridge. Cool air blew in through the window; trucks bearing milk and bread and the latest editions of the
News
and
Mirror
made their predawn journeys through the dense and varied neighborhoods of Queens. On the radio, Symphony Sid was playing Lester Young. Symphony Sid. What about Symphony Arturo? The sky began to lighten; there was no stopping this day, much as I would have liked to.

They were seated in the living room when I arrived—Hilde Stern and her two daughters, all wearing black dresses and the bewildered expressions of accident victims. Hilde arose and introduced her children.

“This is Barbara, the college student, she just got here … and our baby is Linda.” Linda was quite petite at age thirteen, maybe five feet tall, with curly black hair and a prepubescent body. She was pale and deeply sad and totally unapproachable. Barbara stood about five-eight in flat shoes, and her funereal duds could not conceal a body that Jane Russell would have been proud to call her own. She had thick black hair, brown, almond-shaped eyes, a beautifully sculpted nose, and a mouth you couldn’t look at for very long without becoming thoroughly ashamed of yourself. “And this is Mr. LeVine,” Mrs. Stern told her children, “who Papa had hired to help him.” I had been transformed from a Broadway shamus into an angel of mercy.

Barbara shook my hand. The warmth of her long fingers went through me like a low-voltage shock.

“I’m so terribly sorry,” I told her. And I was. Linda, the little one, turned away from me and began to cry. Hilde took her in her arms. Barbara just stared evenly at me.

“What’s going on?” she said quietly. “Who the hell would shoot my father?”

“I really have no idea.”

“He hired you to do what? The thing with Toscanini?” She looked back over her shoulder toward Hilde, who was now leading Linda out—of the room, presumably back to her bedroom.

“He told you about it?”

She stepped closer to me and lowered her voice.

“He could confide in me a lot more easily than he could in my mother.” I’ll bet he could. This was a girl you would confide the secret of the atom bomb to without a second thought. “My mother was always on him, castrating him, doubting him…. He told you his theory?”

“About?” I answered, Mr. Neutral.

“About.” She was not patient, this fabulous girl. “About Toscanini being missing. About the double conducting the orchestra.”

“Yes he did.”

“And do you think it’s a completely nutsy notion?”

“It appeared to be, at first blush.”

“What about second blush?”

“I just started on this yesterday. The first thing I find out about it is that your father’s been murdered.”

“Which means that it’s probably true. He wasn’t shot down like a dog for no reason.”

“I agree.”

“You do.”

“Yes. But that doesn’t necessarily confirm that Toscanini is among the missing.”

“So you think it’s a
coincidence
? Come on.”

“I didn’t say that. Listen, you’re an Ivy League girl—”

She rolled her eyes. “What does that mean? That I’m a goddamn prodigy? I’m not.”

“Okay, I stand corrected. You’re of average intelligence—”

“Mr. LeVine—”

“All I’m saying, Miss Stern, is that I’m sure you realize that while the death of your father is highly suspicious, it’s still a giant leap in logic to say that it necessarily follows that Toscaninis been snatched.”

“So you don’t think he’s missing? I don’t follow.”

“I have no idea. Right now I’m principally concerned with who killed your father.”

“I understand, but my father hired you to find out what happened to Toscanini. Maybe I’m just a chump, but in his memory”—her eyes teared up—“I’d like you to keep doing that….” Tears now flowed. “Shit.…”

“I can do both. It’s not an either-or situation. In fact, everything says that there is a connection. So if Toscanini is in fact missing, then figuring out what happened to your father will lead me to what Sherlock Holmes used to refer to as the final solution.”

“We don’t talk about final solutions in this house,” she said. “Too many dead relatives. And now this goddamn thing.” She wiped away more tears. “Jesus God, of all the people, my father.”

“I understand.”

Barbara dried her eyes and pointed to the pack of Luckies in my jacket pocket.

“May I?”

I handed her a cigarette and lit her up. She took a very deep drag, sighed, and walked toward the hallway, in the direction of her younger sister’s heart-rending wailing. I followed at a discreet and gentlemanly distance, until I could see Linda’s bedroom, still a very young girl’s bedroom, with photographs of Vaughn Monroe and Perry Como adorning the circus-themed wallpaper. Stern’s youngest daughter lay sobbing on her bed, her thin legs sticking storklike from her black dress, a helpless kid at the most exposed moment of her just-started life, knowing that her protector and keeper has been blasted out of the world forever. Hilde sat beside her daughter, stroking her hair and saying words I wasn’t able and didn’t need to hear. Barbara turned back toward me. Smoke streamed from that gorgeous nose.

“You’ll stay on this case, Mr. LeVine.”

“I will.”

“There will be a lot of pressure on you, as I’m sure you realize. There’s some very tough sonsofbitches over at NBC—”

“I said I will. That’s the end of it. And call me Jack.”

She managed a grim smile. “Not yet, Mr. LeVine. Not yet.”

We sat in the living room until around six
A.M.,
drinking coffee and exchanging fragments of conversation. Mrs. Stern made rye toast with butter and orange preserves and we ate it without thinking. Two neighbors had joined the vigil—Kurt and Ilse Weissman from apartment 3-C. Kurt Weissman was a dry cleaner in Washington Heights, a fact he repeated to me several times, along with the establishment’s precise address on St. Nicholas Avenue. Weissman was a pallid, heavyset man in his late thirties whose brains seemed to be receding along with his light brown hair. His blond, intense wife never took her eyes from me, even when contradicting her husband, which occurred nearly every time he opened his mouth.

“In this country I would never expect such a thing,” he said.

“What does that mean, Kurt?” she barked. “For God’s sakes. Such crap you talk. This is the Garden of Eden? Please. In this city the criminals run free like wild dogs. Has been true since we got here. I have no illusions about such things. Even in our store”—she looked to me—“you have to be careful.”

Barbara just stared at me, faintly amused. The Weissmans were a distraction from the numbing fact that at this moment her father’s body was laid out like a haunch of beef on a cold steel table in the police morgue. Hilde emerged from the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and tray full of butter cookies.

“Linda is sleeping, I am happy.”

“The best thing,” said the dry cleaner, then looked at me intently. “You agree with this?”

“Thousand percent,” I assured him.

“If she sleeps,” he added, “for a while at least, this horrible thing is out of her mind.”

Ilse instantly cracked her whip. “Kurt, for God’s sakes, it’s never going to be out of her mind. How can you say such an idiotic thing?” The dry cleaner cringed at her attack. Weissman was a major league nitwit, but still you had to feel for him.

I took another cup of coffee from Hilde Stern. As I was spooning in some sugar, the intercom buzzer sounded with the sudden force of an air raid siren. Hilde gasped.

“Even money it’s the cops,” I told her.

“They were here already,” Barbara said, straightening her dress. She went into the foyer and buzzed back.

“That was just to break the news. This time they’ll bring their paper and pencils.”

A voice could be heard squawking over the intercom. “All right,” Barbara said, then looked to me and nodded.

Kurt Weissman leapt to his feet; he looked ready to scurry into Anne Frank’s attic. “We should go, Ilse. Soon … now.”

And then the doorbell sounded.

They were plainclothes, Homicide. Lieutenant Eddie Breen and Sergeant Dick O’Malley. I figured Breen to be about forty, although his bland pockmarked kisser could have been ten years older or younger than that. It just didn’t matter. O’Malley thought he was a young blond dreamboat, and would have qualified but for a left eye that wandered and some persistent acne on his forehead. He wore a handkerchief in the pocket of his houndstooth jacket, which he straightened as soon as he got a good look at Barbara Stern.

Breen cleared his throat. “I apologize for the intrusion; I realize it’s terribly early in the morning and you folks have been through a great deal already.”

The Weissmans introduced themselves, Kurt again emphasizing his bona fides as a dry cleaner, his concern for the welfare of the Stern family, and his need to get adequate rest before another day of Martinizing. He and Use backed out of the apartment like Abbott and Costello in a ghost picture, Kurt never taking his eyes off the cops. Use shook her head at me as if we had a secret compact, then loudly shut the door. I could hear their footsteps echoing down the hallway, and then Use’s raised voice as she railed against her overmatched mate.

The two cops took their coats off and helped themselves to coffee, before seating themselves in a most gingerly fashion on the cane-backed chairs that flanked the couch. The chairs appeared fragile; the two homicide bulls did not. Hilde and Barbara huddled close to each other on the couch, and I remained standing, as I usually do in the presence of trained law enforcement professionals.

“We know this is a terrible ordeal for all of you,” O’Malley added. He and Breen were playing good-cop/good-cop. “So we don’t want to overstay our welcome. We’d just like to pull together a few facts to help us get started on our investigation and then we’ll be out of your hair and on our way as quickly as possible.”

Hilde shrugged. “Who can sleep anyhow? You ask what you ask.”

The cops didn’t quite know how to play that, so they simply nodded. O’Malley looked over at Barbara and nervously rubbed his wedding band, as if hoping it would disappear. Breen straightened the crease in his pants and eyeballed me.

“And you’re …?”

“Jack LeVine, capital
V.
Private investigator, 1630 Broadway. If you’d like my card …” I fished through my sports jacket.