The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery (15 page)

“All right,” Savage said, clearing his throat. “You are a private detective. From this moment on, consider yourself a top-secret detective. What I tell you is absolutely and strictly between you and me. If you talk in your sleep …”

“I get the point. You don’t want me to tell anybody.”

Miss Durham paraded out of the kitchen, holding a silver tray which held a silver coffeepot and exquisite china coffee cups.

“What does she know?” I asked.

“Everything,” Savage said. She poured the coffee and kissed Anne’s cheek, which started Anne bawling. “Mrs. Savage passed away when Anne was ten. Madge has always been like a mother to her.”

“When Annie ran away,” Madge started to say, before a look from the banker stopped her cold. “Excuse me.” She backed out of the room.

We sipped at our coffee in silence. Anne dried her tears and forced a smile in my direction.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. She just nodded.

Savage wiped his mouth with a linen napkin. “I’m ready.”

“So am I.”

“Fine. Here’s the story in a nutshell. The blackmailers used Anne to get at me. They threaten release of the films and a great embarrassment to a reputation the Savages have built in Philadelphia for two hundred years.”

“Unless you pay up?”

He permitted himself a chilly little excuse for a smile. “Quite the contrary, LeVine. Unless I
don’t
pay up—to the Republican Party. I’ve been a principal contributor to, and fund raiser for, the Dewey campaign. The convention started in Chicago this morning. I’ll fly there tomorrow—that’s the 27th—and we anticipate that Tom will be nominated on the first ballot Wednesday. After that we’ll be on the go, fighting all the way.” He punctuated the last four words by beating his fist on the table. “Three terms was bad enough; four is unthinkable. This isn’t a monarchy, this is a democracy.”

I looked around the private dining room. “Nice chandelier.”

Savage raised a bushy eyebrow. “Look, LeVine, I don’t care if you like my politics. This is just blackmail, pure and simple.”

“I agree one hundred percent. To tell you the truth, I don’t care for anybody’s politics very much. I do my fund raising strictly for Jack LeVine, the people’s choice. You back Dewey and that’s jake with me. If you were a vegetarian, likewise. Pay me and I’ll try and do a job.”

“I like that very much.” Savage was staring straight into my eyes. “I’m not asking you to love Dewey—God knows his manners could be better—but to give me some efficient detective work. If we understand that, I’m sure we’ll get along fine.”

“No doubt about it.”

“Excellent. As for payment, I will give you a retainer of one thousand dollars, with fifteen hundred more payable upon the completion of the job.”

That was nearly as much money as I’d made all last year. Bankers didn’t usually come my way.

“Tell you what, Mr. Savage, I travel pretty light, so how about three hundred now and hold the other twenty-two until it’s all over. Then maybe I’ll take the rest of my life off.”

“The fee’s too large?” he asked, eyes twinkling. A little banker’s humor.

“Not for this case. Your daughter gave me twenty and I almost got killed twice. The Savages owe me a little comfort.”

Anne smiled. Savage smiled. I smiled. Not grins, just a bit of polite fun among three strangers stuck on a life raft.

“They set any deadline for a decision, Mr. Savage?”

“Two weeks.”

“That’s not so bad. It gives me a little leeway to operate. I only have one question: what the hell do you want me to do?”

“Get the films,” Anne said.

“Perhaps,” Savage said, “if that’s possible. Mainly, I wish to avoid embarrassment and remain an active member of Mr. Dewey’s campaign. The possibility of a Cabinet post for me is not a remote one. I want to find out who’s in back of this and I wish them flushed out, scared off, or whatever. I’ve got a hunch about this, LeVine. Dewey made plenty of enemies when he was D.A. in New York and the Syndicate knows that if he were elected, the FBI would be on their trail night and day. I’m convinced organized crime is in back of this. Obviously, I don’t dare do anything by myself.”

“That’s very wise, Mr. Savage. But I’m not sure what I could do against the mob by myself.”

“You have friends, contacts. Use them.” Savage abruptly stood up. “Keep my name out of it and make it sticky for them, so sticky that they back out. Obviously, it is not a simple situation. If it were, I wouldn’t be paying you twenty-five hundred dollars to clear it up.” He extended his hand. “Now good luck, I think you’d better get started. I’ll be in Chicago starting tomorrow, at the Pioneer Hotel, room 1115, through Thursday. I want daily reports.”

He didn’t want much for his money, only that I commit suicide and keep his name out of it. That’s if his hunch was on the money. I wasn’t so sure.

“If I bring this off, tell Dewey to make me head of the FBI. Hoover’s getting too old for the job.”

Savage was thoughtful. “You have any ideas about this?”

I said yes and went out the door.

O
NE OF THEM
looked like Tony Galento after a week-long bender; the other was just a little smaller than a two-family house. Leaning against a long black Packard on my sleepy, tree-lined block in Sunnyside, they stuck out like hard-ons in a Turkish bath. I spotted them two blocks down, while still on the “el” platform. After staring at them through my pocket binoculars, I decided that I had neither the wit nor the energy to play with them. It had been too long a day. I looked a bit more. The squat one was yawning and cracking his knuckles; the big one was picking his nose. They were drawing all kinds of funny looks from my neighbors, regular Joes coming home from work with the papers under their arms.

I went to a pay phone next to the turnstile, called the precinct house and asked for a captain who owed me a favor, a guy by the name of Joe Egan.

“Joe, there’s some muscle hanging around outside my house. Be a nice lad and chase them for me.”

“Muscle? Outside your place? I didn’t know you were that important.” Cops have to pass some kind of humor quiz before they get on the force.

“Can you hear me laughing, Joe? People tell me that sometimes it’s hard to, over the phone. Listen, I don’t know what these mugs want and I don’t have the strength to find out, not right now.”

“What kind of a case is this?” he asked in his raspy growl of a voice.

“Beats me. Nothing I’m working on right now. Frankly, I’m baffled, Joe.”

“Sure you’re baffled. You don’t know what the hell is going on. What is it this time, Jack, hiding a witness? Working against us? You know I’d like to see you get your head broken, so you’d go back to the fur business where you belong. A Jew shamus can’t cut the mustard, Jack, I’ve always told you that.”

“You’ll get rid of them, then?”

Egan sighed. “I owe you a favor and I’m one of these big-hearted Irish assholes you always read about. I’ll send a couple of boys over. But if this case is anything important, I wish to hell you’d level with me.”

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t handle important cases, they make me cry. Now give me a break and hurry it up, Joe. I want to go home.”

“I’ll give you a break, a break on …” I hung up on him. It was a private joke. I always hung up on him. He was a good boy and proved it two minutes later when a nicely polished squad car came rolling up the street. The gorillas turned around to watch it and I dashed down the stairs, ran three blocks—one east, two south, cut through Roth’s hardware on Murray Street, out the back door, and into the basement entrance of my building. I took the elevator up and pushed the door open very slowly when I got to three. There was no one in the hall, no one outside my door. My door was locked. I didn’t smell smoke or gas and I didn’t hear screams, so I unlocked it. No one was waiting inside with a sap or a rod, no one floating in my bathtub. I was surprised. LeVine returns home after a day at the office.

Down on the street, the cops were walking away from the muscle, turning around and making with the big cop arm-waving gestures. The gorillas were laying on the wounded pride and the cops were smiling. Nobody was fooling anybody today: the cops even held the doors for the mugs when they got in their car. “Beat it, c’mon,” the patrolman said simply, and the two drove off.

The sergeant looked up at my window and I recognized him as a drinking chum of Egan’s. He saluted. I saluted back, fished a quarter out of my pocket and threw it down three stories. It pinged on the sidewalk. The cop laughed, but he also put the quarter in his pocket. A genuine lawman: laughing at the craziness of it all and keeping whatever he could get his mitts on.

I closed the white lace curtains, flopped on the couch, and dialed the Hotel Lava.

Dandruff answered and I asked for Toots Fellman. He was cranky about it, of course, and it took a while. Finally, a businesslike, “Fellman.”

“Toots, it’s LeVine.”

“Jack! I’ve tried calling you about five times. How’s that chorus girl case coming along?”

“I’m in over my head, Toots, and you’re the only person I’d tell that to.”

“Who’s involved and how bad is it?”

“Everybody, I think, starting with Hitler and working down to Fenton. How bad? Pretty bad.”

“You can’t figure it?”

“I
can
figure it, that’s what makes it so awful.”

He laughed and laughed. Private dicks and press agents enjoy trading disasters more than they enjoy swapping triumphs. I think it has something to do with cynicism.

“You can’t tell me anything, right Jack?”

“Right, but you’ve got to do me one more favor. If it’ll queer you with anyone, forget it, but if not, I’d appreciate it.”

“Cut the schmooze, Jack, what is it?”

“Shea at Homicide hates my guts and I don’t want to talk to him, but I’ve got a hunch he might be a weather vane on this case.”

“You want me to call him and test him?”

“Close, Toots, very close. Tell him LeVine thinks he has a big lead on the Fenton murder and that body they found up in Olive day before yesterday.”

“I heard it was a con named Rubine.”

“From who?”

“Friend of mine.”

“On the inside?”

“Sort of. He said Rubine was strictly a bum, a twelve-time loser with a record full of nickel-and-dime stuff.”

“He tell you anything else?”

“That was it. I pressed him a little and he made like a clam.”

That made me very happy. “I’m not surprised. Tell Shea I think the two murders are connected.”

“What if he wants to call you in?”

“Ten-to-one he doesn’t want any part of me, Toots. If you think he might, tell me and I’ll blow town for a few days.”

“But you’re sure he won’t?”

“Positive.”

“This is that big, huh?”

“Shea won’t touch it with rubber gloves, mark my words.”

“I’ll call you back soon as I know anything.”

LeVine showered. Soaping my armpits, my trademark dome, between my toes, my heels and knees, my nuts; then letting a nice warm stream wash away all the Philly fire escape dirt and all the rich odors of anxiety. The drain gurgled; the phone rang. I let it ring and it didn’t quit until after twenty tries. The hell with them: it couldn’t be Toots and nobody else mattered. Kitty Seymour? Probably not.

LeVine shaved, powdered, moved his bowels and read the
World-Telegram.
The Allies had cut off the Cherbourg peninsula and we were bouncing shells off the Japs’ heads in Saipan. The Republican Convention had opened in Chicago. Dewey was a shoe-in: he’d fly in from Albany when he got the nod. Looked like Governor Earl Warren for veep. And Eli W. Savage for Secretary of the Treasury? The father of Anne Brooke Savage, whose rounded breasts and ginger-spice
mons
passed before the public’s eye in
Hollywood Maidens
and
2 + 2
=
69
? Reading about the convention made my participation in the whole process seem even more implausible than it was. But facts were facts, and the chunky man taking a Sunny-side shit was a mover and shaker of world events.

And he didn’t know the half of it.