The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery (18 page)

I
T WAS A MORNING
to go through mail and sort things out. I had gotten a bad case of the shakes after walking out of the Waldorf and had hailed a cab to get me to the office. Being cheeky was one thing, but telling three-star generals, admirals, and FDR’s top errand boy to take a jump was something out of an opium dream. I didn’t have much choice, the way I figured it; I was the man in the middle, a pawn in the biggest crap game going. When I added things up, it meant I could decide the outcome of the 1944 presidential election unless I kept everybody at a stalemate. I had to keep the Democrats too scared to lean on Savage, and keep Savage in the dark as to who was behind it—or else the blackmail would get turned around. It would be my all-time juggling act, maybe anyone’s all-time juggling act, and there was a good chance that all the oranges would bounce off my head. I had to hold my ground against pressures that weren’t going to be pretty. If those pressures were sustained over a span of months, chances were I’d end up walking around Creedmore in a bathrobe and slippers, trying to crap on the ceiling.

So as I opened a letter from the Handwriting Institute of America, dedicated to the “scientific analysis of penmanship,” I decided to get everybody off my back by mid-July. I didn’t know how to do it, but just making the decision stopped my knees from knocking together. After calling Savage’s Chicago hotel and leaving word that I’d be out all afternoon, I rang up Toots Fellman and made a date to spend the afternoon holding hands at the Yankee-Browns game.

Toots and I got up to the Bronx an hour or so early, to get a head start on the Ballantine and to settle back to enjoy a thoroughly ridiculous ball game. In return for his many favors, I treated Toots to boxes in the mezzanine, along the first-base line. Very nice seats, because we could make side bets on leg hits. The guy would start down the line and Toots or I would yell “safe” or “out,” always for a quarter. There was an okay crowd—the papers said 11,500—to check out the Browns, who were in first place for the first time since the War of 1812. To me they looked like the same old Brownies, kicking the ball around and chalking up three errors. Atley Donald went all the way for the Yanks, scattering eight hits. The St. Louis centerfielder, a guy named Byrnes who apparently suffered from glaucoma, dropped a fly ball in the third, and we scored three. In the fourth, Mike Milosevich walked and Stirnweiss hit a line drive to left, between Byrnes and a Brownie named Gene Moore, a victim of cataracts. Moore played soccer with the ball and Snuffy had an inside-the-park homer. New York finished on top 7–2, which put them 3½ behind and nobody could care less. My personal hero, Big Ed Levy, went hitless.

The game was kind of a bore after the fifth and a lot of people left early, but we stayed and so did a skinny and obvious tail-job specialist who had arrived about a half an hour after we did, just so we wouldn’t get the idea he was following us. You hire somebody to tail two private dicks, you got to have your head up your ass. It was typical enough of the way the Waldorf Towers crowd had handled things to convince me immediately of what was happening. Toots had picked up on the guy as early as the third.

“The guy in the suit isn’t too interested in the game,” he said, looking down at his scorecard. “He went to get a couple of dogs right after Lindell doubled last inning.”

I turned around and gave him a look. A sallow, black-haired number in his twenties. When I turned around, he looked at his watch. Amateur night.

“He definitely has the look, Toots.”

“How do you lose somebody in Yankee Stadium?”

“You don’t. And I don’t want to.”

“He got a reason to follow you?” asked Toots, his bushy eyebrows twitching.

“C’mon Etten, you slob!” I yelled at old Nick, after he took a hanging curve that DiMaggio would have knocked into Jersey. “He wants to test me on something, Toots, and I feel like obliging the guy.”

Toots and I stood up slowly after the final out. The shadow was going out the ramp and chances were he’d pull an Elisha Cook, Jr., and stand just inside the ramp with a newspaper over his face. He fooled me: no newspaper, but rather, a complicated cigarette-lighting maneuver. Toots and I laughed out loud. He stayed about fifty feet behind us as we climbed the stairs to take the Woodlawn IRT back into Manhattan, then jumped into the crowded car with us as the doors were closing.

“We take this to Grand Central,” I told Toots.

“Then what?”

“Then we go to the
Daily News
Building, which is where our friend is going to break down and cry.”

The shadow intently read his scorecard all the way into the city. Toots and I stood in the vestibule, looked out over the Bronx until the train went underground, and then we just looked into the darkness, thinking our own dull and private thoughts. When we got out at Grand Central, our pal casually went out after us—yawning, that’s how bored he was—and tailed us into the daylight. I turned back and observed his consternation as we stayed on 42nd and crossed Third Avenue. He started to speed up, as if to catch us, then abruptly slowed down again. As we turned into the
News
Building, near Second, Toots said, “He’s running.” We pushed through the revolving doors into the lobby and headed past the giant globe and war map toward the elevators.

“Wait for this guy,” I told the operator, as the shadow came hurtling through the lobby.

He entered the elevator, pale and sweating.

“City desk,” I told the operator. The shadow’s jaw dropped.

“Don’t do it,” he said hoarsely.

“Do what?”

“City room, city desk. Don’t tell them.”

I got very close to him, close enough so that I felt sorry for him.

“Then you just stay away from me and tell our mutual friends that the next time I’m followed anywhere at all, I’ll blow the whistle so loud their eardrums will pop.”

“Okay, sure,” he said. His light blue suit was stained and salt-marked under the armpits. “I didn’t ask for this. Sounded like a dumb idea to me, but I don’t have any say.”

“They said to tail me and stop me if I walked into a newspaper or wire service?”

“That’s right.”

“Number twelve. City room,” the elevator man said.

“Take us back to the lobby please,” Toots told him. He said something to himself in Italian and slammed the doors shut.

We bid adieu to the tail. Toots went back to the Lava. I went home.

I listened to the Republican Convention for a while. H.V. Kaltenborn said it was wrapped for Dewey on Wednesday. First ballot for sure. The only question was the second spot: either Governor Earl Warren of California or Governor Bricker of Ohio. Then Warren himself came on to deliver the “keynote” address. Strictly craperoo: the GOP would “get the boys back home again—victorious and with all speed.” I had trouble keeping my eyes open and missed entire sentences, and just managed to switch off the radio before rolling over on the couch.

When I awoke I could hear plates being scraped in other apartments and that post-dinner, pre-darkness sound of kids roller-skating in the street. I rubbed my eyes until I could make out the numbers on the hall clock. It was seven-thirty. I had been out for nearly two hours and it took ten minutes more to get off the couch and into a bent position over the sink. Cold water didn’t help. I went to the kitchen and got a can of Chase and Sanborn out of the icebox. It dropped from my hands like a lead weight.

“Son of a bitch,” I said to the floor. I picked the can up, put it back and walked into the bedroom. I had never felt so tired. I sat down and turned over, fully dressed, and slept until ten o’clock the next morning.

“I
LET SOMEBODY INTO THE OFFICE
,” Eddie told me.

The elevator jockey has a set of keys to my outer office. If anyone gets there before I do, he lets him in.

“What kind of somebody?”

“Little guy with deepset eyes and a big kind of Hebe nose. Like yours.”

“Thanks. He have bushy hair?”

“He’d break the comb, Mr. LeVine. Nine, all out.”

It sounded like Factor and was. He was sitting in my outer office with a briefcase held tightly between his feet on the floor. A raincoat was thrown over the other chair. He was going through the morning papers—all of them.

“Hope you haven’t been waiting too long.”

He smiled and stood up, putting the papers aside on the little table with the pelican lamp.

“Not too long. I have to go through the papers for the chief anyhow.”

I unlocked the inner office door and threw my hat on the moose head. Factor followed me in carrying his briefcase.

“I’ve been leading a rugged kind of life,” I told Factor, sitting behind my desk and gesturing toward the easy chair. “Last night my body called a strike and I slept for thirteen hours.
After
a two-hour nap.” I lit up a Lucky and offered him the pack. He shook his head and pulled out some Chesterfields. “I haven’t slept like that since I was four.”

“Since I went to work for the chief, oh, it’s fourteen years now, I’ve averaged four hours a night. Once a month my body gives up too and then I conk out for the weekend. It recharges the batteries.”

I smiled, he smiled, we smiled.

Factor and I blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. It caught the dusty sunlight I get for fifteen minutes a day. I didn’t know what was going on, but it was kind of peaceful.

“They said it was going to rain,” Factor said. “But you wouldn’t know it.”

I looked toward the window. “Looks nice enough.”

“It’s a crazy world,” he said, giving me a long look, what they call
significant
in the better magazines.

“Guess so,” I answered, if that’s an answer. “I’ll make some coffee.”

“That would be fine.”

I ran some water into my little kettle and put it on the hot plate, then spooned some drip-grind into the pot. When I turned back to my desk, Factor was closing his briefcase.

And there was twenty-five thousand dollars on my desk. In ten packets. Twenty-five C-notes to a packet.

All for me.

“It is twenty-five thousand dollars,” Factor announced, “and every cent of it is yours if you join our cause.”

I picked up a packet and went through it. All hundreds.

“You may rest assured that this money is tax-free.”

“But of course,” I said, lifting a few more packets and methodically flipping through the bills.

“It’s all there, LeVine.”

I winked at him. He smiled.

“In fact, LeVine,” Factor said, warming to the job, “I think I may say confidentially that as long as this Administration holds the reins of power you won’t have many problems with Internal Revenue.”

I picked up some more packets.

“You’re telling me I don’t have to pay any more taxes?”

“I’m saying you won’t be bothered by the IRS if, say, your returns are pegged a little low.”

“How low?”

“Well,” he smiled a tight little smile and crossed his legs, “as low as you want to make them.”

“That’s quite an offer. What’s the expiration date?”

“The offer expires, obviously, when the Democrats fall from power.”

I kept counting. Factor looked encouraged.

“You’re right. It’s all here.”