The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery (4 page)

“Give me half an hour, maybe I’ll believe you. You welshing on that drink already?”

“You can pick it up early next week. Cleaned and pressed.”

“No starch,” he said. “If I hear anything else, I’ll let you know.”

At ten minutes past three, I picked my hat off the moose and sailed out the door. As always, Eddie took his goddamn sweet time cranking the elevator up to nine.

“Afternoon, Mr. LeVine.
Post
says there was a murder over at the Lava.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“You’re a hard case, Mr. LeVine. Guess you have to be, in your business. When you going to show me the ropes?”

“Soon as you turn thirteen.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Then what the hell are you doing over here?”

“Ah, don’t be a heel, Mr. LeVine. I’m sole support of my old lady. I’d go over if I could. Main floor.”

“Eddie, I’m a heel.”

“You’re really okay, Mr. LeVine, just a little cranky. I ain’t all bad neither. Just show me the ropes someday.”

When I hit the street, the air weighed a ton and everything that normally smelled bad on Broadway smelled a lot worse now. I’m a man of simple pleasures and all I wanted to do was play with the ducks in my bathtub and listen to a ball game. But I was too smart for that. I was going to play footsie with some mean pansy of a producer.

L
OBBIES IN THE
W
EST
F
ORTIES
can be classified in two ways: either they have a watery-eyed guy in khaki who sits on a chair and wouldn’t look up if you arrived in a tank, or there’s someone in a uniform who’s nice enough but won’t let you move a step unless he knows where you’re going. The man in the Schubert Building wanted to know where I was going. It made sense. The lobby reeked of prosperity. The black floor was spotless, the walls were light brown marble, and the lighting fixtures shot soft beams toward the ceiling, muting everything. But you could still read a paper while waiting for somebody. It wasn’t a bad place to hang out.

Neither was Warren Butler’s office—if you were Louis the Fourteenth. The carpeting was deep enough to hide in, and that went double for the receptionist, a redhead with the kind of skin that made you think of Victorian heroines. A little eye makeup and that was it: the rest was natural cream. Her hair was piled up and you had the feeling that when it got let down you were in for a very good time. Elegant behind the desk and a tigress between the sheets. She made me nervous.

“You’re probably Mr. LeVine.” The voice sounded even huskier than it had over the phone.

“Probably.”

She smiled, politely. “Won’t you have a seat?” I sat down and took a good look around. It was the kind of outer office that made you think hard about what you would say when you got to the inner office. Subtly lit and smelling of cash, with oil paintings of swells in red riding suits hung on dark oak walls. You could get a good night’s sleep in any of the chairs, which were set about twenty feet from the receptionist’s desk. I looked over at the table next to me: it was so highly polished I could have shaved by it. It might have been an English club room, except that English club rooms don’t have
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
lying all over the place. If Butler wanted you to think he was the king of show biz, he did a hell of a job. I lit a Lucky and smiled at the redhead; she smiled at the Lucky. I had taken off my hat. A door opened in back of her.

“Jack, how good to see you.” Warren Butler was a vision of loveliness, with a Miami tan and gray hair. His blue pinstriped suit looked like it had been made with him standing in it, as minions from Brooks Brothers swarmed about. His diamond tie-clip matched his diamond cufflinks. I wondered if he was going to lift his trouser leg and show me a diamond anklet. He had a large, bold nose, but it went well with big, piercing blue eyes, thick white eyebrows, full mouth, and a very tough jaw. Looking him in the eye was a lot harder than talking to him on the phone. Despite the snowy hair, he didn’t look much over fifty. I figured him for a son of a bitch right off the bat.

Butler put his arm around my shoulder and guided me into the inner sanctum, turning to say, “Absolutely no calls, Eileen. I don’t care if it’s the White House.” It was all so goddamn stagey that I expected his office to have footlights and an audience applauding my entrance. When I was through the door, I saw that there wasn’t an audience, but not for lack of space. You could have run the Kentucky Derby in Warren Butler’s office. It was forty feet from the door to his desk, forty feet of deep carpet, pool-table green, some couches the Yankees could have fit on comfortably, chairs in leather of deep burgundy, some colored jockeys holding ash trays, and the same King Arthur oak walls.

Lining those walls were rows and rows of photographs: Butler and Hepburn embracing, Butler giving roses to Katharine Cornell, Butler mock squaring-off with John Barrymore and toasting Noel Coward, Butler and Winchell in back of a microphone, Butler getting kissed by Carole Lombard. And I always liked Carole Lombard. Some other shots were of his torical interest: Butler and Jim Farley chatting on some dais, Herbert Lehman whispering in Butler’s ear, and one which I strolled over to with my hands behind my back: “To Warren, Thanks for a grand evening’s entertainment. You’re spoiling me terribly! Affectionately, Franklin Roosevelt.” I was not playing in the minor leagues.

“I heard Mussolini used to have an office like this, before his show folded.”

“Oh, no, mine is much larger,” Butler said pleasantly, almost absently, as if he had thoughtit all out long ago. He directed me to one of those burgundy chairs, a mere six feet from his—practically spitting distance. It was a rich man’s chair. Most people in this miserable world will die without ever sitting in something so firm and so soft, so supportive and so yielding. And there was a whole class of people who wouldn’t know what a bench felt like, whose whole lives were upholstered, who took absolute comfort at all moments completely for granted. The chair felt so good I almost got a little sick. It served Butler well, this chair; it made you conscious of the ease and power with which he moved through life.

He was reading my thoughts.

“You know I wasn’t born rich, Jack.”

“Oh, no?” I said in no tone of voice at all. Like a sheep going “baa.”

“Far from it. My father was a Polish mineworker from Scranton. My real family name would take you a week to pronounce.” He smiled very carefully. “Dad came home at night and washed his face for half an hour before you could see that he was a white man. He went down to those mines every day but Sunday and after twenty years you could have mined coal out of his lungs. One night my old man came home and started coughing and didn’t stop until he was dead. Forty-six years old.”

“And that’s when you turned to Communism.” I felt sorry enough for his old man, whether the story was true or not, but Butler’s life history was so rehearsed and polished that I felt like a Sunday feature writer for the Allentown
Picayune.
I don’t like to feel that way.

“No,” said Bulter, “that’s when I decided that I couldn’t stay in Scranton and have my own life mined away from me.” I didn’t doubt that he caught the edge of my remark; he just didn’t care. The story rolled on, a rotogravure special: Warren Butler, Broadway’s Mr. Lucky.

“I came to New York thirty-five years ago and gravitated to the theater right away. It had a kind of excitement then that I fear has long since faded, a kind of feeling between audience and performer. Jesus, those were grand days.” He leaned back and lit a cigarette with long fingers. Butler was the kind of guy who blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “I swept up the Academy of Music when 14th Street was class in this town. I ran errands and got my nails dirty and finally got a job working for Flo Ziegfeld in 1916. He promised to hold my job until after the war. I went to Europe and the heaviest action I saw was in some French bedrooms.” He laughed a “between us boys” laugh about as confidentially as if he were on the CBS radio network. I didn’t say anything.

“When I came back, Ziegfeld made me his right-hand man. That was 1919; I was twenty-five years old.”

“And the rest, like they say, is history.”

“You’re a cynical bastard, Jack,” Butler said evenly.

I leaned forward, pulling my pants legs down a bit.

“Mr. Butler, the fact is you called me up to your office on a matter you said couldn’t be discussed over the telephone. It’s a hot day, a very hot day, and I walked here. Imagine my surprise when the big secret turns out to be your life story.”

When he smiled, the temperature in the room dropped about forty degrees. Maybe he didn’t like me anymore.

“You want to get straight to business, Jack, that’s fine with me. I just thought a detective would profit by knowing something of his client’s background. If that doesn’t interest you, we’ll move on.”

“Your background interests me plenty, Mr. Butler, but clients have a very human tendency to tell that part of their history which they want the world to know about. It’s the parts they leave out that a private dick can use. Also, you’re not my client yet as far as I know.”

Butler stared at me bleakly and rubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray lifted from the Stork Club. It was the only human touch in the joint, except for the redhead outside. He then reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper.

“We’ll now discuss what I didn’t want to speak of over the phone. I’m sure you’ll understand why, Jack. I believe that a young girl performer in my show
GI Canteen
is being blackmailed, or, rather, I’m being blackmailed because of her. She might be getting shaken down as well. That I don’t know. What I do know is that I want it stopped. I want this man bought off or whatever one ordinarily does to chase away blackmailers.”

“This is your first experience with extortion?” I asked, all innocence.

“Obviously,” and now the temperature in the room was sufficient for the storage of meat. He definitely didn’t like me.

“So any way I can get the guy off your back is fine with you.”

Butler smiled. “Short of killing the man, I suppose. I don’t want this to get out of hand.”

“Mr. Butler, I’ve never had any dealings with you before. You’re a sophisticated man, you must have dealt with detectives before. Why did you call me?”

He didn’t look mystified, just bored and a little restless, like he wasn’t used to having five-minute appointments run five minutes too long. “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t had to deal with detectives, ‘sophisticated’ as I might appear. I asked one of my assistants to look up some respectable private eye in the phone book. He came up with you. Maybe it wasn’t that simple, maybe he asked around, maybe he knew somebody who had employed you in the past and been satisfied with your work. Whatever he did, he came into my office this morning and put your name on the desk. Period. That’s why I have assistants.”

“I always wondered how I got hired.”

“Now you know,” Butler said, and his smile was the sunshine of the Arctic. “I received this note yesterday.”

He handed over the sheet he had pulled out of his top drawer. It was written in the scrawly, five-year-old, untraceable hand of people who make a living out of hate mail, dirty mail and blackmail. I read:

Dear Mr. Butler:

You think “GI Canteen” is a patriotic show. I got some films made by one of your actresses a couple of years ago in L.A. They’re not so patriotic, although sailors might like them. It’ll cost you ten G’s to keep me from leaking the story and to get the negatives and prints. Come to 14 Edgefield Road, Smithtown, Long Island, and we’ll talk business. Friday, noon.

Friend of the Arts

“The handwriting is like a kindergarten reject, but that’s a blind,” I told Butler, handing back the letter. “This is a very sharp note, written by a pro.”

“Yes,” said Butler, smiling a little, “and not without a sense of humor. ‘Friend of the Arts,’ that’s really rather funny.” He stared down at the piece of paper. “Yes, he’s obviously no amateur and that’s why I have to have a pro on my side, Jack. If I attempted to handle this myself, I’d be in way over my head. If I went to the police, there’s too great a danger of the whole town finding out.”

That one I couldn’t figure out. “A guy in your position, Mr. Butler? Just give out a lot of theater tickets and you could buy a couple of captains in Vice. They’d keep it so quiet you could hear money being folded.”