Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (9 page)

“How are they all holding up?” he asked with heartfelt concern.

“Like you’d imagine,” I said helpfully.

“Makes me sick to my stomach, the whole goddamn thing….”

The redhead stood a couple of feet behind him. He turned gallantly to her.

“Sweetheart, this is Jack LeVine. A really sensational private investigator. Jack, this is Carol DeAngelis. She works for Texaco.”

“Texaco, no kidding,” I told her. “You ever work at the station on Northern Boulevard and Forty-sixth Street?”

Aaron pretended to laugh, but the redhead didn’t bother. Carol DeAngelis appeared to be in her late thirties, with the exquisite facial bones and long legs of a model. My guess was that under the right circumstances she could be plenty of fun, but it would take a lot of work and a lot of money.

“I’m in cultural affairs,” she told me with no irony.

“Which is where Sidney comes in, I guess.”

“Texaco’s spent millions on opera and symphony broadcasts over the years, Jack,” Aaron told me. “They’ve been fantastic.” He put his arm through mine, and turned to Miss DeAngelis.

“Sweetheart, I need a couple of seconds with Jack,” he said, then led me toward the street, away from the mourners crowding the sidewalk.

“In answer to the question playing on your full firm lips,” I told him, “I don’t know a thing about his murder.”

“You’re sure it’s murder?”

“I believe we just attended his funeral.”

“You know what I mean. There’s no chance it was some sort of bizarre accident?”

“I can’t say no chance, but I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“No.” I flipped my spent Lucky toward the gutter. “Now I get to play: Why the hell would you bring a monkey like that to the funeral?”

“What are you talking about?” He looked back over his shoulder. Carol DeAngelis had flipped open her compact and was freshening her lipstick. “You can’t be referring …”

“Not her, obviously; I mean the chimpanzee who was sitting beside you. Small, swarthy guy; built like a jockey.”

Aaron’s expression remained blank.

“The man on my immediate right? Him?”

“Him.”

“I have no idea. I sat down and five minutes later he came in, looked around, and took the space next to me.”

“You never met him before?”

“No. Why?” Aaron bit his lip, pretended to think about it. “He seemed a little out of place, didn’t he?”

“I would say he’d be out of place in many of our finer establishments and institutions.”

“Well, who the hell is he?” The NBC veep feigned agitation “You seem to act like you know.”

“His name escapes me at present, but I believe it’s Italian in origin and if I’m not mistaken, he worked for Lucky Luciano before Lucky got deported.”

Aaron brushed his hand across his eyes, as if a bug had just flown into them. “You’re joking,” he then said. “Worked for Luciano?” He was playing this pretty well. Not Academy Award quality, but I’d seen a lot worse.

Carol DeAngelis tapped Aaron’s arm.

“Sweetheart, I have to get back.”

“We’re going,” Aaron reassured her, then turned back to me. “You like the fights, Jack?”

“The fights? Sure.”

“Any interest in the one tonight?”

He was being oh so coy. “The one tonight” was nothing less than the aging Joe Louis defending his heavyweight title against Ezzard Charles up at Yankee Stadium. The odds had been moving against Louis; Charles was a smart if unimaginative heavyweight with quick hands and feet, and there was a growing feeling that the older man might not be able to keep up with him. The prospect of witnessing Louis’s demise gave me heartache, but nothing on this earth made the blood race like a heavyweight title fight. The last one I had attended was in 1941; both Louis and I had been a great deal younger and I stood and hollered as he pounded fat Tony Galento’s kisser into steak tartar.

“They’re ringside,” Aaron told me.

“I would expect nothing else, and I’d love to go. But why me?”

The NBC honcho just shrugged.

“Carol has an aversion to grown men bleeding in public, and I’m sick of going to sports events with these corporate stiffs. You strike me as the kind of guy who would enjoy the evening. Prelims start at eight, main fight at ten. You need a ride up to the stadium?” He was heading for the street, his arm out, flagging down a green Checker cab.

“No. I’ll drive myself.”

“Then meet me at the press gate at half past eight.” He held the cab door open for Miss DeAngelis and waved cheerily, then got in. The Checker pulled out of sight. I turned around and observed a hearse slowly backing up on Amsterdam Avenue and then Fritz’s coffin rolling out of the chapel like a very impractical and cumbersome piece of furniture. Four black-suited men guided the coffin over the irregular sidewalk, as if worrying about the bumps disturbing the fiddler’s slumber. Then Linda Stern appeared, taking the smallest steps imaginable, her little face buried in her mothers coat, following the coffin and her own uncertain future, and then I just couldn’t watch anymore.

One hour later, I found myself seated in the
Daily News
clipping morgue, sorting through a huge pile of photographs and yellowing articles dealing with that much-beloved dope dealer, smuggler, and all-around player known as Lucky Luciano. The
News’s
clipping morgue was a long and dingy room up on the twelfth floor of the
News
building on east 42nd Street; it had the sour smell of disintegrating newsprint, stale cigarette smoke, and hours of wasted time. I was there courtesy of my old comrade Toots Fellman, formerly the house dick at a Broadway fleabag called the Hotel Lava. When the Lava was mercifully torn down to make way for a parking lot, Toots decided, at age forty-five, to dye his hair brown and try his luck as a crime reporter. He had made countless friends and done numerous favors, most relevantly for a married editor at the
News
who had stashed a Copa girl at the Lava for a passionate year and a half, during which he had occasionally been spotted wearing the Copa girl’s lingerie. When Toots decided to change careers, the editor in question—not surprisingly—hired him on the spot. Toots surprised everyone except me by becoming an ace reporter, befriending every cop in Midtown and having a gift for the terse written word. And he was a generous and lonely soul, always available when I needed assistance, which was most of the time. In this case, what I needed was the opportunity to do some free research.

Toots unearthed the
News
clipping file on Luciano and rolled it over to me on a kind of shopping cart. It was that extensive. Toots was about five-foot-eight and weighed close to two hundred pounds. But he carried it well, as they say, with the broad shoulders and muscled arms that had served him well in his years as a house dick. He was still dying his hair a kind of otter-brown, but his features were freckled and boyish, so the dye job wasn’t that hard to take.

“Twenty folders’ worth,” he announced, dumping half the folders on a metal table before me. “Truman’s file is probably bigger, but not by much. You want to tell me what you’re looking for?”

“A short guy with dark hair and a blinking left eye. Looked mob, looked familiar, like from the Luciano era. Ring a bell?”

“No.” Toots lit his pipe and headed for the door. “But let me think about it.”

It took two and a half hours and a dozen folders, but I finally found what I was looking for. It was a photo taken in 1936 at Lucky’s trial for pimping, which was a small-potatoes charge, but the feds had been so determined to jail him that pandering was good enough. After all, they had managed to put Al Capone in the slammer for tax evasion, which was like nailing Hitler for running a stop sign. In the photo I held in my sweaty paws, Lucky was walking into a Manhattan courtroom looking as modest and utterly middle-class as a Queens barber. Five steps behind him, younger but no better-looking, was the mug I had spotted at Stern’s funeral. The caption did not identify him, except as one of many “friends and supporters of Mr. Luciano.”

I put the clipping into a manila envelope and hotfooted it downstairs to Toots, who was seated in the bullpen of the city room, pounding a Remington typewriter with so much force I thought Pearl Harbor had gotten bombed again. He had his pipe in his mouth and his hat on his head and looked just like one of those motormouthed reporters from the movies.

I handed him the clipping. “You have any idea who this is? The guy five steps behind Lucky.”

Toots gave it a glance. “Frank Sinatra.”

“Sinatra’s taller. Seriously.”

“Seriously you want,” Toots said. “Then seriously you’ll get.”

He put the clipping on his desk and stared at it. Smoke plumed up from his pipe and he contemplatively scratched his bare arms; Toots was the kind of guy who would wear a short-sleeved shirt in Antarctica.

“The suspense is killing me,” I told him.

“Shh.” He took his hat off and placed it on his desk, then studied at the photo for another three minutes—I counted—before turning to me and saying, “Giuseppe LaMarca, alias Joey Little, alias Joey Big, alias Joey Blinks.”

“You’re sure?”

He looked at me with something like pity.

“Sorry I asked,” I said.

“What do you want to know about him?”

“Anything. I know zip.”

“I know slightly more than zip, but not much. I know that after Lucky got deported, LaMarca got involved exclusively with the Brooklyn docks.”

“He had an abiding interest in the sea?”

“He had an abiding interest in extortion, shylocking, and smuggling of all kinds. He worked for Anastasia, but the word was that he always stayed close to Lucky.”

“Lot of drugs go into that port.”

“I would say drugs would also be of great interest to him. He was never a boss, never wanted to be. He stayed a couple of levels below the captains, but just above the button men.”

“A utility guy.”

“Exactly. More of a go-between, a fixer. Lucky liked and trusted him, which accounts for his long-term survival.” Toots picked up his hat and twirled it in his hand. “Now would you like to tell your Uncle Toots why you’re interested in this scumbag? Off the record, of course.”

“Because I just saw him at the funeral of a German refugee violinist who was a client of mine for about a day and a half, and I can’t imagine what he was doing there.”

“The guy shot on Tuesday night? Guy who played for Toscanini? He was your client?”

“Yes, yes, and yes. Not only was LaMarca at the funeral, he was seated next to an NBC vice president.”

“Named?”

“Sidney Aaron. That do anything for you?”

Toots shook his head. “I’ve heard the name, that’s about it. No matter what the connection, hard to figure LaMarca showing at the funeral.”

“I’m totally mystified. Aaron said he just sat down next to him and he had no clue who he was.”

“Which is horseshit.”

“Which is probably horseshit. But he’s taking me to the fight tonight, so I’m feeling a little charitable toward the guy.”

“Aaron, not LaMarca.”

“Correct.”

“Big fight.” Toots relit his pipe. “That’s not a casual invitation, Jack.”

“He did it casually—‘my girl friend can’t go …’”

Toots shook his head.

“No. He wants to talk.”

“I agree.”

“What was your client like?”

“German refugee. Quiet, shy. But troubled.”

“About?”

“That I can’t tell you yet.”

“Something he got killed over.”

“Probably. This one could go very deep.”

“You always like the deep ones. Nothing light for you.”

“True, but this one is special. And no fun at all. Poor bastard left two kids, one of them thirteen years old.”

Toots sighed.

“Stinks.” He looked away, then back at me. “Okay, back to work.” He tore a sheet of paper out of his typewriter, inserted another. “Who do you like in the fight?”

“I have a really bad feeling about Louis,” I told him. “I think my glorious youth ends tonight.”

Toots shook his head. “Charles doesn’t have enough meat on his bones. I say the old guy puts him away before the sixth. You’ll buy me lunch tomorrow and tell me all about it.” He turned back to his afternoons work, resuming his rapid-fire typing. I took the elevator back upstairs and returned the file to the morgue, then took my leave of the
News
building and strolled across town on 42nd Street. It was four o’clock and the temperature had climbed to near seventy degrees; a beautiful early autumn afternoon, one that should have made me cherish all the pleasures and promises of daily life. All the sunlight and warmth in the world, however, couldn’t make me stop thinking about that little girl with her face buried in her mother’s coat, following her dead father and clouded future out onto Amsterdam Avenue.

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