Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (8 page)

“If I thought so, I wouldn’t let any of you stay here. I recommend, however, that you
know
as little as possible.”

“Because what I don’t know can’t hurt me.”

“Precisely. Ignorance is your shield at the present time. You’re going to have enough on your plate here; your mother, your sister, they all need your strength.”

“I know.” Barbara looked tired and I told her so. She nodded, a little absently. “I better take something or I’ll never sleep. My mind is so
crowded,
is the thing. Every time I feel tired, these images appear in my mind, these thoughts.… I can’t stop them.”

“I’m sure …”

“What was he thinking those last few seconds, what did he look like when he saw the gun, what was his exact expression, was he terribly frightened, did it hurt?” She took off her shoes. “It’s just so goddamn unfair, that’s what I can’t stop thinking about. Of all the people, my poor father….”

“It stinks, no question. But it happened, so we have to deal with it.” I walked to the door, hat in hand. “Get some rest.”

“You’ll keep me posted?”

“How long are you going to be around?” I asked her.

“Till you figure this out. No way I go back to school until you do.”

“Well, that’s an incentive for me, then. You gotta get your degree, right?”

She stood up, her shoes in her hand, a gesture that stirred both lust and longing: a woman, a home, a hearth.

“I suppose. College seems really irrelevant right now.”

“I’m sure, but that feeling won’t last forever. What are you, a senior, a junior?”

“A sophomore. I took a few years off after high school; there was a big world out there and I wanted to see it as soon as possible.” I had the feeling there were volumes left unsaid, with copious illustrations. “I was in a hurry, I suppose. I don’t regret it.”

“You were born in Germany, I take it?”

“Yeah. No accent, I know.”

“None. I never would have guessed.”

“I took acting lessons for a few years, got rid of whatever trace there was.” She pretended to yawn. “I’m awfully tired.”

“So get some rest. You need it. Your family needs it.”

“Yeah. I know.”

I opened the door and exited, taking one last look at Barbara as she turned and walked slowly toward her mother’s room, her stocking feet silent on the parquet floor. The apartment suddenly seemed as quiet as a museum. Which, in a way, it was.

FIVE

Fritz Stern’s funeral was
held a day later at the Riverside Chapel, a gray and suitably cheerless edifice on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. It was raining hard when I arrived, fast-moving streams backing up around sewers clogged by soda bottles, cracker boxes, and pages from yesterday’s newspapers. I hurried inside the chapel; the service was scheduled for eleven and I had cut it pretty close, thanks to a stalled moving van and resultant tie-up on the Queensboro Bridge. I followed some other stragglers toward a reception room, which was filled with guests waiting to embrace the family and offer empty words of hope and reassurance which at times like these somehow never seem empty at all. Each visitor is transformed into an emissary from the world of the living, a sentient and physical reminder of continuity. When my old man died, I was shocked by how poignant the smallest gestures of kindness became, how moved I was by the dressed-up and well-barbered appearance of even the most ill-tempered of his associates from the hat trade.

I hung my raincoat on a coatrack tightly packed with soaked foul-weather gear. The humidity in the room was at the saturation point and I could feel sweat starting to bead my extensive forehead. The Stern family was somewhere across the room, surrounded by dozens of crouched, whispering people. There was a great deal of hugging and crying. At one point I saw Barbara rise and nuzzle a white-haired woman who was leaning heavily on a pair of canes. I waved in Barbara’s direction, but she never saw me and I realized I was just a guy for hire with no real business in this room, so I walked out, grabbed a black yarmulke from a basket, and strolled into the chapel. It was a very large room, but already nearly filled by close to three hundred people, most of them looking as dazed and stricken as survivors of an air raid. They sat or stood, whispering in groups or just staring at the floor. I spotted Sidney Aaron seated about six rows in back of Fritz’s plain pine coffin. He was wearing a midnight-blue suit and a fancy embroidered yarmulke. He was speaking with great animation to a short, deeply tanned man to his immediate right, a man who looked like he’d never been anywhere near Riverside Chapel before. On Aaron’s left was a tall redhead in an ermine stole who looked like she’d been to a lot of places.

The short, tanned man turned around again and my aging brain started laboring. I knew this guy from somewhere, and it wasn’t anywhere good, but I couldn’t pin the name or face down. He had a slight facial tic, a nervous blinking of his left eye. Blinky somebody? Who the hell was he?

The short man turned back around and I began studying the other mourners, trying to ascertain who among them might be Fritz’s fellow musicians. It wasn’t difficult. Musicians are used to wearing either tuxedos or sports clothes, so I guessed that the middle-aged men in shiny or off-the-rack suits had to be them. Almost to a man, they appeared to be wary and disoriented. A colleague had been murdered, that was bizarre enough, but I wondered how many of them were also wondering if their Maestro had been snatched, and if he was dead or alive.

A door opened at the front of the room and we all stood up as the family entered, trailing a massive, pink-skinned rabbi who wore the imperious and implacable expression of a Jewish Mussolini. His name was Ludwig Strauss, seemingly past sixty and even balder than I was. As he marched toward the lectern, he gazed across the room as if daring anyone to speak or even relieve an itch in his august presence. The family walked in Rabbi Strauss’s wake like frightened ducklings: Hilde, Barbara, and Linda, followed by a peroxide blond and a plump gray-haired man whose hawklike features marked him as a likely brother of Hilde’s, only after a prefrontal lobotomy. He wore a terrible cocoa-brown jacket and even worse yellow checked pants and his movements were slow-motion and oddly abstracted. I didn’t think he was out of sync due to grief; this guy looked to be pretty much out of his skull. The bottle-blond held the poor slob by the arm until they reached his seat and then she sat him down very carefully and lovingly. There was no reason for me to have known that Hilde had a damaged sibling, but here he was and I found it totally unsettling. Then again, dealing with physical and mental disabilities has never been my strong suit; even that blind albino who plays the accordion outside of Macy’s makes me queasy.

Fritz’s family sat down, and we all followed obediently. The Rabbi silently surveyed the room for what seemed like a full minute, during which nobody moved a muscle or so much as coughed, then abruptly and loudly launched into a Hebrew prayer. My Hebrew was pretty rusty, but I knew he was talking about God and it didn’t sound like good news. The Reb vigilantly watched the crowd as he chanted; he was a mightily intimidating presence, a broad-shouldered six-footer who looked like he could crack walnuts with his bare rabbinical mitts. He finished the prayer and then opened a black loose-leaf binder.

“My dear ones,” he intoned, gazing down at the family like holy Moses himself. Strauss had a thick German accent, so I figured him for a refugee, but most definitely not of the submissive variety; this Reb was about as meek as Killer Kowalski. “We are told when we are growing up that there is time for every purpose unto heaven.” The rabbi spoke very deliberately and with enormous measured weight, enunciating each word as if it were worth its weight in platinum. “Today, as we say good-bye to our beloved Fritz, perhaps some of you might question what that purpose was, might question what
purpose unto heaven
did it serve to take this good and talented individual from us and from his family in such a sudden and horrible fashion.”

I stole a look at Sidney Aaron, who was surreptitiously unwrapping a Smith Brothers cough drop and slipping it into his mouth. His swarthy, blinking seatmate was staring down into his lap; I had the feeling that he was reading something, and I had the feeling that it wasn’t the Holy Bible.

“I wish I had a satisfactory answer to all our doubts and all our questions,” the rabbi continued. “I wish I could say that I understand why our dear Fritz, who managed, like so many of us, to escape Hitler and the Nazi terror, was unable to escape terror here in the adopted city and musical capital he had come to love so much.” Strauss gripped the lectern with both hands and gazed around the room. “I know that our Fritz was …”—and here he took a dramatic pause—
“a curious man.
”

Sidney Aaron just stared straight ahead. The redhead to his left was studying her left hand for a chipped nail, but the jockey-sized man shot Aaron a curious glance. The NBC veep didn’t even acknowledge the look; he just gave the slightest, tick-tock shake of his head.

“A curious man always,” Strauss continued. “Curious about music, curious about
world events,
curious about the many people and personalities and places he encountered here in the America he loved so much.”

Was the rabbi speaking in code? Had Stern told him his theory of the missing Maestro?

“Perhaps it was his curiosity that got the best of our Fritz,” the rabbi continued. “Perhaps he tried to help someone, someone in
danger,
that night he walked out of his home for the last time. Maybe it was this that brought about his terrible end.” The rabbi cast a slow look around the room, as if challenging the assembled mourners to come up with a better theory.

“I do not know,” he resumed in a lower voice. “He was always looking to aid his fellow man, this I know from the stories that his beloved Hilde and his dear Barbara and Linda have told me. He was always looking for a way to give. Maybe, as is often the case, we are looking to God for a quick and reasonable answer when there is no answer yet available. God is not an Answer Man, like on the radio. God is a scheme of nature, God is a spirit, God is a code of law and moral behavior. But God owes us nothing. We owe Him everything.” He raised his voice again. “Does this mean that what happened to Fritz was senseless, that there was no
purpose unto heaven
in his passing? No. It just means that we do not know it yet, or we just don’t
get it yet.
It just means that this purpose
has not yet been revealed to us.
But”—and here he looked again to the family—“I have no doubt that there is a divine plan, however mysterious and
aggravating
and heartbreaking it may seem at times, and I know that we did not lose our dear Fritz for no purpose unto heaven.”

Rabbi Strauss seemed to study each kisser in the room with his unblinking blue eyes, and the temperature seemed to drop about fifty degrees. There was enough coughing and clearing of throats to shame a TB ward, and then the rabbi introduced no less a dignitary than Jan Peerce to sing two songs by Schubert, favorites of the deceased. Peerce was a stocky tenor who looked more like a guy who sold sports jackets at Wallach’s than someone used to the opera spotlight. But he didn’t sing like a salesman; he sang like a portly angel. But as beautiful and melancholy as the music was, I’m not sure anyone was listening. I certainly wasn’t. I was thinking about a poor dead fiddler and the mess I knew I would get myself into before this was all over.

Outside the chapel, the rain had slowed to a faint drizzle, and the temperature was turning positively balmy. The sun was breaking through and the mourners looked slightly discomfited by the physical brightening of this appalling day. Just another reminder that God Held the Cards and that the hand one was dealt, however dismal, was never really surprising. Whatever happened in life was always somehow inevitable: cancer, twins, a flat tire, you name it. So the sun breaking through on this horrifying day seemed every bit as appropriate as the downpour had been before. I was smoking a Lucky and contemplating these cosmic issues when I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, I was in no way surprised to see Sidney Aaron standing before me.

“Jack … terrible tragedy. Terrible day. I looked at his poor wife, those girls…. What’s the oldest’s name?” he asked oh so casually.

“Barbara.”

“Beautiful kid.” Kid. You knew he had taken one look at Barbara Stern and had begun peeling off her clothes, layer by silken layer, visions of a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign dancing in his head. Just like your faithful correspondent, but at least I had the decency not to refer to her as a “kid.”