The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery (11 page)

“Mrs. Fenton?”

At the far end of the long porch, another door opened and a huge blond boy-man, maybe twenty, maybe forty, came slowly out, majestically turning his head from me to the angry little woman, then back again.

“Berl, search!”

Berl eased himself down the stairs and walked slowly across the grass in my direction. I didn’t know that the Flat-iron Building could walk. Standing on ground level with Berl was humbling: if he didn’t measure out to 6′8″, 250, then I was Mighty Manuel, the Cuban midget.

He stopped a foot away and looked quizzically at me, his eyes so dull they could have been glass. He searched me. Rather, his hands searched me, big pale paws flopping mechanically but not without force, up and down my body. He found my gun and tossed it aside like a book of matches. Berl spoke:

“Okay search, Rose.”

“Mrs. Fenton,” I started.

“Shut up!” She came down the stairs, her rifle pointed roughly at a point equidistant from my left and right eyes.

“The gun isn’t necessary,” I tried, getting really worried.

“Berl, hit!” she screeched.

“Ah,” he said and I was relieved until a fist the size of a melon came in a blur toward my stomach. I blocked it with my elbow and he chopped the back of my head—a spot already well-softened. I saw blue and green again and sat down in a heap. Berl moved very fast for a moron.

“Git up, Jewboy,” said Aunt Rose.

I looked up at her raisin of a face and she smiled for the first time. A gracious and lovely woman.

“I can always tell a Jewboy. Always.”

“The Germans could use you.”

She stopped smiling. “Stand the hell up.”

I got up and my head throbbed. A day in the country. “I was a friend of your nephew, Duke,” I said lamely. It was the best I could do with my brains fast turning into Farina.

She laughed it off. “Duke was smart. He didn’t have no friends, specially no Jewboys.”

“If he’s so smart, how come he’s dead?”

“Got stabbed in the back. You know so much, you know that.”

“By Al Rubine?”

She just stared at me. “Who? Listen, what are you, a cop?”

I shook my head. “I represent some people who were being shaken down by your beloved late nephew. There’s a few things stored here that I’d like. Films. You’ll be well paid.”

“Get lost, mister. Whatever Duke left here, stays here. I got other irons in the fire; meantime, I’ll sit on what I’ve got.”

“Five thousand dollars wouldn’t change your mind?”

“Show me five thousand dollars and I’ll think about it.”

“I can get it in twenty-four hours.”

“You get it. We’ll talk then.”

I said it very fast: “About the Kerry Lane films.”

“The what? …” she tried to stop herself.

“The films.”

Her eyes betrayed her. She just nodded.

“Mrs. Fenton, are there any films here or not?”

Berl spoke. “Pictures, naked.”

“Shut up,” she spat.

“Still photos or movies, Berl, pictures that move?”

“Don’t answer him, Berl.”

“Mrs. Fenton, when’s the last time Duke came up here?”

“A month ago,” she said defensively. “He visit me regular, like a son.”

A month ago didn’t check at all. I had the crawly feeling that Rubine had been duped in more ways than one. Led up here on a blind and put away for keeps. Lied to by Fenton, lied to by everybody. Poor scared stupid little bastard.

“You want Berl again or you goin’ to leave?”

“I’m leaving of my own volition, sweetheart.”

“Hit?” asked Berl, a boy of simple pleasures.

“No, he’s goin’.”

I walked away and got into my car. My head hurt. Mrs. Fenton and Berl were staring at me and I was staring at them, trying to figure out what the hell was going on up here in New Kingston. Aunt Rose said something to Berl and he shouted, “No. No touch,” stamped his feet and plodded back to the house, shaking his head heavily from side to side. I turned the key and the Buick gratefully took me away, first to tell the gang at Christian’s that Mrs. Fenton was definitely a peculiar kind of broad and then to chew on a couple of poached eggs with potatoes, Canadian bacon, and four cups of coffee at a place outside Margaretville. It was nearing eleven and Rubine had walked in at three: eight hours that seemed like eight weeks. Country road workers were having an early lunch, while I finished breakfast at the end of my day, on my own clock in my own world, an alien visitor carrying out assignments on earth.

Four hours later, I was lazily floating in a Sunnyside bathtub filled with darkening water, a Blatz loyally standing next to the tub. Mel Allen’s honeyed tones wafted from the Philco, my phone was off its hook, and the Yanks were up 3–0 on the Athletics, scoring their runs off an eighteen-year-old 4-F southpaw who had two glass eyes and a mechanical leg. God was in his heaven. LeVine felt like a person for the first time in three days. After an hour of soaking, I arose, streaming, to shave and talcum myself, then called Kitty Seymour to explain my recent whereabouts and shyly ask if she would tolerate having dinner with me.

“Your place or mine?” she asked.

“I thought I’d spring for it.”

“You pay for it? Must be some case, Jack.”

“It’s rotting my mind. How about it?”

“Fact is I’m having some people over tonight and I made enough stew for the Russian front. Why not grace our table?”

“What kind of people?”

“Couple of War Information guys, very bright, one failed-nightclub-chanteuse-turned-dress-shop-owner, a housewife or two. A higher grade of person than you usually run into.”

“That’s inconceivable, but I’ll come anyhow. What time?”

“Seven-thirty. They’re not a late crowd so the place will be ours by midnight.”

“I’ll probably be pretty tired but I could stay awake with encouragement.”

“You’ll get so much encouragement you won’t know where to hide. See you.”

I dressed slowly, as Mel Allen’s voice grew cranky, less buoyant. In the bottom of the eighth, a four-fingered left fielder for the A’s hit a grand slammer off a palsied Yank reliever. The A’s, in turn, wheeled out a seventy-year-old southpaw who put the Yanks away nice and easy in the top of the ninth, and what sounded like two hundred people filed peacefully out of Shibe Park.

So when does DiMaggio get home already? Where he’s needed.

The stew was delicious, the company stimulating, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open and was happy when the last bye-byes went sailing past the closing doors. Kitty turned and smiled, her back to the door.

“Now, they weren’t
that
boring!”

“Not in the least. I’ve just been up since three o’clock this morning, drove up and down from the country—five hours each way, got slugged twice, once with a sap, had a traveling companion killed, and was threatened myself.”

“So you’re tired.”

“So I’m tired.”

Kitty stepped toward me. Her lipstick was very red and her brown hair was pulled back. She looked very beautiful, like Ann Sheridan, for whom I was keeping myself. Kitty put her hands on my rosy cheeks and stretched her long fingers so that they smoothed my scalp.

“I love running my fingers through your hair,” she said.

“Last dame made a crack about my dome went to bed with a T-bone pressed to her eye.”

“Tough guy.” Kitty stepped even closer so that all I could see was her. It made the world a very pretty place. I softly kissed her eyes and her nose, then landed on her warm and fragrant mouth.

“Kitty, you’re all right,” I told her ear.

It was a fine, sweet night, the nicest since my divorce, maybe the nicest since the middle of my marriage. There was energy, softness, grace, and laughter. I even took my socks off. In my circle, that means class.

I
’M CRAZY FOR DICK TRACY.
I think he’s a hell of a guy who does his job the way I’ve always wanted to do mine: square-jawed and full steam ahead, undeterred by extraneous difficulties. I’m not like that. In 1938, for instance, I was following a pretty important guy around, an actor (you’d know the name) whose wife was trying to nail him pants down for a divorce suit. I ate some bad potato salad for lunch, got the runs, and repeatedly lost the guy. No sooner would he turn into an apartment building, push a buzzer, and go inside than a familiar pang would shiver through my kishkas and I’d be streaking into a luncheonette or a barbershop, racing toward the back. I’ve never, ever, seen that happen to Tracy, or to B.O. and Sparkle Plenty, who also do their bits. As for Tracy’s sidekick, Pat Patton, I wish he worked with me; I could use a tough Irishman on my side. And his eyes seem to twinkle. Especially on Sundays, in color.

Especially this Sunday. Kitty and I enjoyed a sleepy, giggly kind of breakfast, poring over the
News
and
Mirror.
She made breakfast; I insisted on doing the dishes. She came up behind me as I faced the sink, and wrapped her arms around me and held me very tight. I dried my hands and we went off to the bedroom once again. At about noon, I left.

“Now that you’ve compromised me yet again, Jack, I expect you’ll call,” Kitty told me at the door.

I pinched her cheek, a happy guy.

“You’ll get flowers and candy by the carload.”

It was a drizzly Sunday and the streets were empty. I splurged and took a cab to Sunnyside, studying the closed stores, the gray East River, and my contented visage as reflected in driver Meyer Domoff’s rear-view mirror.

A peaceful Sunday afternoon. Lots of time to peruse the papers, sip more coffee and enjoy the easy warmth of my limbs, the post-lovemaking glow. An item in the
News
caught my eye, if not my fancy.

BODY FOUND

Olive, N.Y. June 23 (AP)—Police here report the discovery of an unidentified body late this afternoon, near Esopus Creek in Olive. Sheriff Walter Runstead said the body of a forty-year-old white male was discovered jammed into a wide section of drainpipe northwest of the creek. “We’ve ascertained that death occurred within the past twenty-four hours,” Runstead reported. Cause of death was not disclosed. The Kingston Police Department promised later details.

So long, Al.

I turned my radio on and let some Mozart into the morning. Which is when I got my first treat of the day. The phone rang and I answered with a mouth full of toast.

“Hello?”

“LeVine?”

“Uh-hmm.”

“Get the hell off this case or you’ll join your friend Rubine. It wasn’t nice what they did to him. Be smart.” The voice was a hoarse rasp.

“It wasn’t nice what they did to me. My head still aches.”

“They was nice to you, LeVine. Believe me.”

The connection wasn’t too good—there was a lot of crackle over the wire. “You calling long-distance?”

“Get off the case, buster. Or it’ll hurt.” He hung up.

I leafed through the Entertainment section of the
News.
There was a new Betty Grable film,
Pin-Up Girl.
Maybe I’d go see it for a couple of months. They have bathrooms in theaters. I decided to call Butler at home. If they wanted me off the case, chances were he’d been told the same thing. Or would be, so I could warn him. A young man answered.

“You can be a star, good morning.”

“Let me talk to Butler, sweetie.”

“The master is indisposed. Who shall I say?”

“Say Jack LeVine.”

“The
dick?
” he asked. His hand was either on his hip or sweeping across his bangs. He sounded adorable.

“
The
dick.”

I heard him calling Butler: “Warren, your dick is on the phone.” The young man covered the mouthpiece, and I heard dulled shouts; then he spoke again.

“He’s been a perfect bitch all morning.”

“Happens in the best of marriages.”

“How very true.”

Butler grabbed the phone, sounding upset. “Jack, I’m glad you called.”