Murder on Location (7 page)

Linda Levin was a slender woman about six feet tall. She shivered. Her dark hair was cut in bangs across her forehead, and the rest, in two even plaits, fell to her shoulders. She was dressed in a black cocktail dress with a peek-a-boo, low-cut top, covered by dark net. Her lips were very red, her earrings very green. She didn't look as though she'd been closer to New York than the North Pole. She smiled a nervous smile of recognition and shook hands with my father, who half-lifted himself from his over-stuffed chair. I could still see in her the skinny girl who crouched with me on the rabbi's cellar stairs.

“How are you, Linda?” I asked, and pulled a newspaper from the chair for her. My mother excused herself in order to complete her serving arrangements upstairs and warm the canned peas.

“Just fine, Benny. You're looking well.” She smoothed her hem at the knees as she sat between my father and me. It was an awkward grouping now that Ma had broken up the composition. “Wilfred ran into your mother and she invited me. Wonderful to see you after such a long time.” I could see that she was nervous. I don't think I've ever seen knees pressed so tightly together. I'll bet she had bruises. And I found that I was sweating a little too.

“So, how are things in New York?” Pa asked, not much liking the whole business, but trying to be polite. After all, although Linda was one of Ma's ideas, she was also a person in her own right. Pa saw that.

“Very busy,” she said. “Traffic, muggings, hold-ups, looting, you name it. We didn't go into Manhattan much. Just for dinner and a show. The last time, Benny, we were caught by a blizzard and had to find a hotel.”

“So you didn't live in New York?” Pa looked disappointed.

“Hightown is just a short drive, except in a snow storm. And it's close to Trenton and Philadelphia too. Do you know the States, Benny?”

“Some. I was in New York on a case a year ago.”

“And he didn't look up my brother, his own uncle.”

“Princeton's miles from Manhattan, Pa.”

“You could have phoned.”

“He's right. I could have. Tell you what, Pa, let's phone him right now. I mean it.”

“What are you suddenly crazy or something?”

“I have this urge to hear Uncle Max's voice.”

“You could do with some of his class, believe me.”

“Do you know the street number? I'll get it from Information.”

“Sit down. Don't talk foolishness. A long-distance call you can make on your own phone.”

“But your own brother, my Uncle …”

“À table, à table!”
my mother shouted from the top of the stairs. On the way up, Pa gave me a wounded look. I guess I'd laid it on a bit thick. Linda went into the kitchen to ask if there was anything she could do, and was returned promptly to the table. I pulled out a chair for her, and took the one opposite for myself. Ma brought in the soup.

The meal went without incident as far as I can recall. All the little family rituals were observed: Pa asked where my mother's soup was, and she explained to the company and to my father, as though for the first time, that she never ate soup. Pa quizzed me about brands, bottles, sizes and temperatures of wine until I wanted to sit the next course out in front of the TV. Linda kept her eyes on her plate and smiled at everything. Ma kept rolling her eyes in Linda's direction, so I wouldn't miss my last chance this side the grave to have a well-rounded family life.

“Pa, you were telling me about the mob before supper. What else do you know about it?”

“Suddenly I'm an authority.”

“Such a subject for the table,” said my mother.

“I've got a case,” I explained to the three of them, “and the mob might be involved.”

“Paolo Nigri used to hang around with them, I remember. He disappeared just after the war.”

“Benny,” Ma said leaning toward me, “why don't you take part in plays any more? Remember when you did Shakespeare in the park?” And then she added to Linda: “He was wonderful in my green hat and the gold belt from my Paris Star suit. I couldn't take my eyes off him.”

“From what I hear,” my father said, “there are two mobs: the Italian mob and the Jewish mob. They used to fight all the time. Now things are more businesslike. But it's not just gambling, drugs and prostitution—excuse me, Linda—it's loansharking and …”

“More pie, Benny? Linda?”

“Thank you.”

“Today, the mob dress in business suits and put up money for charity. Diversified, that's what they've become. They take an interest in politics, they are big in real estate, property development, telephone-answering services, soft drinks, ice cream, fruit juice …”

“Import-export.”

The last contribution had come from Linda, who was looking at her pie plate. When she became aware, because of the silence, that we were all staring at her, she
looked up and gave each of us a share of the same wan smile. “That's why I left Jason. I couldn't go on living like that: not knowing anything, not being able to find out where he was, or when he was coming home. That's why I took Paul-David and caught a plane out of there. You asked about the mob, Benny. They are wonderful, friendly, family people. And then suddenly you don't see someone anymore, and your husband tells you to shut up when you ask why. I left, Mr. Cooperman. I just up and left everything.”

It took a minute for my tongue to recover. Ma was rubbing crumbs into the tablecloth. Pa looked at Linda like she'd dropped out of the crystal chandelier. “What about real estate?” I asked playing it calmly as I could.

“In New Jersey a lot of them are into fast-food chains. You know the ones that specialize in breast of turkey sandwiches. They also get someone very low in the ranks to buy up a lot of property cheap, then sell it to the mob, under one of their front corporations, at a much higher price. That way the can clean up some of the dirty money that they can't declare as income.”

“The call that laundering,” my mother added, getting into the act at last. “They do it all the time on television.”

“The mob is made up of all kinds: Italian, Jewish, even English. They're all trying to move into more respectable lines, as Mr. Cooperman was saying. I know of an amusement pier near Atlantic City, some apartment buildings there, and a few weeks ago I heard that one of
them was investing in a movie being shot at the Falls. They get into all kinds of things.

I spilled my brandy, and Pa poured salt on the spreading stain. Ma made Nescafé and served it in her silver tea-service, which usually lives under a tent of Saranwrap. Pa and I lit up cigars. I like a good cigar after a big meal although not well enough to keep a supply of my own. Linda looked a little happier. She took out a package of Egyptian cigarettes and offered one to my mother, who I'm sure rejected it thinking that it contained either opium or marijuana. The night had been heady enough as it was.

We retired downstairs again to watch television. After an hour of this, I drove Linda back to her brother Wilfred's house, and thanked her for a very unusual evening.

SIX

“My old man was a stunt man. He could do anythin' with a horse or on a horse. In his heyday, if they couldn't get Bud Sayre to do the shot, they changed the shot. I had a stunt man's point of view on Hollywood from the cradle.” Jim Sayre was leaning back in his chair in a dark corner of the roof-top bar at the Colonel John Butler. For about the last half hour he'd been telling me about his early days in the movies. I was slowly sipping Jack Daniels he'd insisted on buying me. He was on his third since I'd arrived. To hear him talk, you could see that he was still in love with the movies. His stories were lightning fast and I often missed the point because some name slipped through my fingers. He liked stories about his father.

“… Hell, he pulled all the leather there was to pull, and she nearly throwed him. When they got back to the corral he found a burr as big as your fist under the blanket!” He told me that he had played in a few westerns before trying his hand at doctoring bad scripts. “I showed them how they could make a few changes and turn two scripts into four. Same dialogue, practically, same actors and locations. Hell, I don't know what they thought of
my writin', but they sure as hell liked my economics …” He was wearing a checkered Viyella shirt with a string tie in a tooled silver clasp. His head was large, senatorial, with sparse white thatch on top and heavy glacier tracks down both sides of his pug nose. The nose, and the cowlick, helped touch everything he said with humorous irony.

The waiter hovered near. “Excuse me, Mr. Sayre. I don't mean to interrupt, but I've got a collection of autograph books back at the bar, and I wonder if—I don't mean now—but if sometime you could see your way clear to …”

“Sure thing, Walter. Just hold on to them until I get a spare minute.” Walter agreed with a nod, but was prevented from turning by one of Sayre's big hands on Walter's near elbow. “Tell me, Walter, what's that all about?” Sayre tipped his head in the direction of a clutch of photographers at the door.

“Them. They'll be here every night you're here, I guess. You want I should get them to shove off?”

“No, Walter. Won't be necessary. We all have to make a livin'. Some of us are horses and some of us are sparrows.” Sayre ordered two more drinks like he was ordering a seven-course dinner. His precise instructions were relayed to the bartender, who shot a glance under his eyebrows in our direction. Jim had been going on about Fields and Chaplin and about how he'd been called an “oh-toor” by the French film critics. I never caught up with that one. The waiter poured my old drink into my
new one without comment. For a minute Sayre and I sipped quietly. From where I was sitting, I could see the outline of the nearest of the tourist towers overlooking the falls. There were several of them, but this was the Pagoda, and I looked at it in the rising mist with new meaning.

“Damn it, Ben, look at the way that man's pawin' that poor girl. You'd think he'd get her home first.” I shifted to see what he was looking at. The man was probably a branch sales manager on a toot, and she looked like she knew all about sales managers. This was a funny quirk in the battered old director; a bit of the white-hatted cowboy hero left over.

I sipped my drink between my teeth, wondering where Billie Mason might be and why wasn't I out looking for her. Sayre was in the middle of another of his stories. He was a good host, but he took a lot of listening to.

“… so he came from New York and we shot the scene twice. It was terrible. So I went over to him, put my arm around his shoulder, and told him: ‘Clyde you just say the lines. We put the acting in later.'” I smiled on cue, and he enjoyed his umpteenth telling of the story.

“But I don't have to go into the manure pile to dig up funny stories. When I picked up the phone this morning, it was the mayor of Niagara Falls, New York. Somebody'd told him that a body gets swept over the falls in
Ice Bridge
. I told him, ‘That's right.' And he wanted me to promise him that any bodies that go over the falls will go over the Canadian falls. I told him I'd look into it.
This afternoon I got a call from the head of the Chamber of Commerce on this side. He wanted me to keep any evil-doing on the American side.” Sayre drained his glass and stretched expansively.

“Ben, I want to thank you for recommending that masseur. He's a first-rate fellow. You know, I get these knots between my shoulders and they can tie me up all day.” For a minute, I thought he was going to pull his shirt off to let me see, but before he got the chance, the face I'd seen in the papers for the last couple of days pushed its way into the conversation.

“Neil! Sit yourself down, boy!” Neil Furlong, the writer. Neil Furlong, the big success story of the Falls.

The man who joined us wore a generous boyish grin under a shock of wild uncut, or at least uncombed, dark hair. It was a calculated effect but he got away with it in spades. He was a lean man of medium height, about forty-five or a little younger. As he leaned over to shake Sayre's big hand, I could see that his face was as smooth as a painting. There were no warts, moles, or freckles. Not even wrinkles. He looked like an actor standing in the wings in his pancake make-up waiting for his cue to go on.

Jim Sayre introduced me as a friend and Furlong took my hand and looked me in the eye. After that he called me by name and seemed to remember what I said. I don't ask much of friendship and Furlong made me feel that I wasn't keeping the chair warm for the next comer. Maybe he took his lead from Sayre, who was easy to be with.
Furlong was wearing a leisure suit that made him look like the great white hunter. It was beige, with a belted twill jacket over similar trousers. There was a key on a thong hanging around his neck, and a gold bracelet with flat chunky links which he waved into the air to attract the waiter.

By the time one came, and Sayre had ordered one of his meticulous rounds, Neil Furling was telling us about Port Richmond, where he'd been born. Port, as we called it, was Grantham's look at Lake Ontario, the “Port Said of the Great Lakes,” as Neil Furlong described it. “But,” he said, holding a tanned finger in the air, “Port is the home of the only merry-go-round in the world that still charges a nickel a ride.” When I told him that I was from Grantham, the old inter-city rivalry was reflected in a mock-angry frown. “Port is like Anaheim or Encino to someone from L.A. I won't say the harbour is polluted, but you don't have to be a believer to walk across the water in mid-summer. There's a risk of bubonic plague, of course.” We all laughed. I was a real Granthamite where Port was concerned. “So, you're from Grantham.” Furlong shook his head in disbelief, as though nobody in this day and age could be from Grantham. “When I was in my early twenties, and still working in a garage greasing cars, I met Monty Blair who pulled me away from the gas pumps. I owe Monty everything. And Ned Evans? Is he still around?” He told a funny story about Ned and Monty. Sayre had slipped into his one-sided sleepy smile, which creased his face from his hairline down.