The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery (5 page)

“Perhaps, and perhaps I’ll eventually take that chance, but for now I’d like to try and clear it up absolutely privately. The money isn’t any big problem. I just don’t want a mess.”

“Either do I, Mr. Butler. These things can get very sticky.” I didn’t like this at all. Two shakedown artists, one already dead, the other waiting out on Long Island.

“I’ll try and make it worth your while.” Butler got up and walked over to a photograph of him with his arms flung around George and Ira Gershwin. I squinted and was able to make out an inscription which started off: “To ‘Lucky’ Butler,” when Lucky pulled at the picture and it swung open on hinges. Behind it was a small wall safe which Butler opened with a few quick turns. He must have gone to it a lot.

“The Gershwins wrote ‘I’ve Got Plenty of Nothin,’ didn’t they, Mr. Butler?”

“I believe so,” he said, dry as dust. He closed the safe and pushed the photograph back on the wall. He was holding a wad of one-hundred-dollar bills.

“Do you think two hundred can hold you?” Butler said, thumping back in his chair. I got the feeling he was getting very bored with me and my jokes, just as I was getting interested. Very interested.

“I’ll take a hundred for now. I get nervous when my bank account starts getting respectable. I might get soft and indolent, spend all my time taking a Pullman to Palm Beach or Jersey City or something.”

“You’ve got a hell of a chip on your shoulder, Jack. This money didn’t come easy.”

I looked around the office, just for effect. “It must have been hell. By the way, I’d like to see
GI Canteen
this evening. Can you spare two tickets?”

“Doing research?” Butler smiled.

“Something like that.” I got up, holding my hat. “I figure one of the girls will take off her clothes, just out of habit, and then I’ve got a big clue. You’re sure you don’t know which one she is?”

Butler looked at me very hard and I was a little afraid. For all his goddamned airs, he was a very hard man. “You’re a real son of a bitch, Jack. The genuine article.” He pushed a button on his intercom. “Eileen, give Mr. LeVine two tickets to
Canteen
for tonight.”

“Fine, Mr. Butler,” crooned the redhead. I was looking forward to taking a look at her again.

Butler stood up. “Jack, I don’t like you one bit, but I don’t have to. All I want is honesty and I’m sure I’ll get that. Please come back here after you’ve been out to Smithtown tomorrow. I’ll be here until seven. Hope you like the show.”

On cue, his office door opened and Eileen was there with two long orange tickets, holding the door for my exit. I waved to Butler, “Warren sweetheart, you won’t be disappointed. I’ll be the greatest Hamlet you ever saw,” and went to the outer office. It suddenly looked small.

“You wanted two for tonight?” Eileen asked, her left hand fussing with the back of her neck.

“Yes, but I get vertigo in the balcony.”

“Then these shouldn’t give you any trouble.” She handed them to me, half-amused and half-bored by my little joke. She’d never heard of the balcony. The ducats were row C, center. I didn’t get that close at St. Nick’s on Monday nights, and ringside was only two and a half bucks, not five.

“I hope the girls don’t sweat too much.” The redhead’s reply was to look at a spot above and beyond my right shoulder. When you’re nobody, you’re nobody, and no one has to laugh at your half-assed jokes. So I put on my hat and went out the door and down the elevator and out of the Schubert Building into the late-afternoon heat, a shmendrick getting paid by big people to do ugly work. I felt invisible. I felt like a six-foot, two-hundred-pound nothing. But I also felt like a nothing who knew a little something: that no matter how much he insulted Warren Butler, he had the job. That was pretty interesting. At least I thought so.

I
WENT BACK TO MY OFFICE,
took the phone off its hook, put my new C-note in the wall safe, replaced the phone and left to take the elevated out to Sunnyside, Queens, where I live. I can’t afford Manhattan—can’t afford the rents or the noise or the sadness on most faces. So after fifteen, twenty minutes of straphanging on the Flushing “L,” where I lean against the vestibule doors and watch the backyards and factories and the easy flow of traffic and people, I’m home. People water their lawns in Sunnyside and the vegetable man says, “Jack, you’re a schmuck if you don’t buy the little tomatoes today,” so I live there. Also, I’ve got a four-room apartment which sets me back thirty-eight fifty a month and neighbors who play poker and come in to listen to the ball games and the fights. And I used to have a wife, until she decided she’d be better off married to someone who came home three nights out of five and had an even chance of making it past fifty. It was as amicable as those things can be and now she’s married to a sweet little guy in children’s ready-to-wear who’s home five nights out of five, at six sharp. We have lunch sometimes. My father and mother were upset but not shocked—with their only son doing such un-haimisheh work as being a detective. They would not be surprised if I turned Hindu and walked around New York wearing a white sheet.

The apartment smelled stale and close when I walked in. I opened a few windows and talked the cranky old Westing-house fan into doing me a favor and turning around for a while. Then I called a gal named Kitty Seymour, who used to be a crime reporter and now did public relations for the fire department, and who liked me.

“Kitty, you want to see
GI Canteen
tonight?”

“Since when do you go to the theater?”

“Since producers give me free tickets.”

“A producer who hired you to tail the leading lady?”

“Close, but no cigar. A producer who’s being blackmailed.”

“For what?”

“Do you know that’s the third question in three sentences? It’s a girl in his show who made some stag films once. He does family shows and doesn’t want it to get around. Doesn’t make much sense if you think too hard about it.”

“I’d think he’d just fire her.”

“He doesn’t know who it is.”

“But he’s willing to pay for the films?”

“Ten grand worth.”

Kitty whistled.

“Very strange case you’ve got there, Jack. Doesn’t sound nice at all.”

“It doesn’t sound, taste,
or
smell nice, Kitty. But the guy’s paying me in real money, a lot of it, so I’m pretending it’s on the up-and-up.”

“I’d get out of it.”

“And you have an income. Listen, meet me in front of the Booth Theater at a quarter past eight.”

“No dinner?”

“Post-theater snack, dear. The best people are doing it.”

She laughed, a fine, full, honest laugh that made me feel good all over.

“The best and the cheapest. Eight-fifteen, Booth. Thanks, Jack. I’ll be there, no questions.”

She gave me a little kiss over the phone and hung up. I went to the kitchen and opened up a Blatz when the phone got lonesome and started ringing. I ambled into the living room and got it on the fourth ring.

“Yeah?” I said.

“Mr. LeVine, this is Kerry Lane again. I hate to call you at home, but I felt I had to apologize for my outburst this afternoon. It was childish and I’m deeply sorry for it. I should realize that you are in a difficult position.”

“Well, right now I’ve got my feet up and there’s a cold bottle of beer in my hand. That’s not such a bad position, for openers. If you’re talking about the case, I have something of a lead that’s taking me out to Smithtown, Long Island, tomorrow. That ring any bells?”

“None. How did this come about?”

“I’ve been contacted by Fenton’s playmate.”

“He didn’t waste very much time.” She wasn’t dumb, this girl, not dumb at all.

“Not a hell of a lot, no.” I stared past my feet out the window. Some kids were shooting craps on the roof of the apartment building across the street. I wouldn’t have minded playing with them for a while, even if the oldest was fourteen. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have minded being fourteen.

“Do you think there are more of them?”

“Well, if you’ve told me everything I ought to know, it stands to reason that this punk will be the last in the chain. Supposing that he and Fenton were in business together and Fenton crossed him and got croaked for his trouble, the partner figuring nobody would mind very much, the partner takes the firm’s assets and makes it into a one-man business and that’s the whole story.”

“You’re probably right.” She sounded unconvinced. I waited for her to say something else. She didn’t.

“Miss Lane, if you have nothing more to say, I’m going to hang up, not because I don’t like chatting with you but because I have a beer to finish and a nap to take. Anything else?”

“No.” She sounded as distant as someone calling from the Ukraine.

“Have a stiff drink and put it out of your mind,” I told her. “In a day or two, the whole business will be wrapped up tight.”

“Perhaps. Good-bye, Mr. LeVine, and thank you.”

I hung up and discovered that something small and hard, something like fear, had found a comfortable spot in my stomach. Kerry Lane sounded terribly frightened, about something I was sure I knew nothing about. Maybe more than her budding career was on the line. Like her life. Like my life.

One of the kids shooting craps looked to have rolled up about thirty-five cents so far. He was doing better than LeVine, who stripped down to his powder blue shorts and curled up on the couch. You’ll like the dream I had: having just finished a performance of some kind, I am sitting in front of a dressing-room mirror, the kind that’s ringed with forty-watt bulbs, rubbing cold cream on my face. Butler walks in with Roosevelt, Stalin, and Pete Gray, who had one arm and played outfield for the St. Louis Browns. He was the guy who would catch the ball in his glove, pop it up in the air while whipping off his glove, catch it in his bare hand and throw it back to the infield. Butler says, “Gentlemen, Jack here is a consummate performer,” and then points a gun at my head, which is when I woke up. I thought maybe I’d try and figure it out, using my best City College Introduction to Psychology, but decided against it. I had better things to do, like open a can of Spam, fry an egg over it, and call it supper.

GI Canteen
reminded me of why I never went to the theater anymore. Chorus boys prancing around in army outfits until I felt like puking; a number called “That’s How We Do It in the U.S.A.” in which a girl with tremendous knockers spilling out of her red, white, and blue bathing suit shot down a couple of guys made up to look like Hitler and Tojo, except that they looked like the butcher and the laundryman. Kerry Lane was so pale, even through the makeup, that Kitty nudged me the minute she walked on stage. Five years as a crime reporter does wonders for the intuition. After eating at Sardi’s we went back to her place on East 68th Street.

Kitty’s apartment was a spacious one-bedroom affair with plants and vases and good taste radiating from every corner. She took my coat and asked if I’d care for some cognac. I said yes and went to the most comfortable-looking chair in the joint, where I lit a Lucky and thought about being in the apartment with Kitty. We’d had a funny kind of friendship over the past six months, a couple of divorced people making with the jokes and never really getting down to business. We had bedded down once, to nobody’s particular satisfaction. I was a little drunk and had pretended to be even drunker.

Kitty came over with the cognac in a snifter and sat on my lap.

“How tired are you, Jack?”

“Very.”

“I see.” She smiled and put her hand in my lap. Kitty’s rust-brown hair was piled high on her head and her green eyes shone with intelligence. “I had a wonderful time tonight, Jack. We seem to think very much alike.” She wasn’t making a pitch, just leveling. She emphasized her words by rubbing her hand, rolled into a small, loose fist, across my lap.

“I don’t think I’m that tired.”

She laughed. “I hate coy men, Jack.” Her hand continued its intent but unhurried dance around my body. The ride got bumpy.

“How sweet,” she said. Her hand stopped and flattened out against my fly. “No drunk act this time, Jack.”

“Absolutely not. You may ravish me at will.”

We stood up and headed for her bedroom, young and foolish, the private eye and his bimbo. Just like in the books.