The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery (16 page)

The phone started ringing again, but I wasn’t going anywhere. Major Hoople told Martha that he had been instrumental in bringing the Hun to his knees during the first war. Nobody believed him. Some kids were tying cans to a cat’s tail in “Out Our Way” and Alley Oop was running around with a club in his hand. “Believe It Or Not” informed me that an Australian tribe wore live cobras as jewelry and that one Frank W. Bludgeon of Mackinac, Michigan, was born with a hand full of thumbs—“ALL THUMBS” said the headline. I chose to believe neither story. Yanks versus Browns tomorrow at the Stadium; Browns, incredibly enough, in first place by 4½ over the Yanks. Atley Donald against Bob Muncrief, and the phone was ringing again. Enough was enough.

When I picked up, I got a very official-sounding lady who asked me if I was Mr. Jack LeVine, the private investigator.

“Correct.”

“Please hold for General Redlin.”

General Redlin? The army General Redlin, the “Gray Eagle”? Hero of the Kuriles, all three stars worth?

“Is this a gag?” but I was speaking to the mouthpiece. Not for long.

“Hello,” came a rich baritone, “this is General Redlin. Am I addressing a private investigator by the name of …” I could hear him shuffling through some papers, “of Jack Levine?”

“LeVine, like Hollywood and Vine. Is this really General Redlin I’m speaking to?”

“Himself. The Gray Eagle.” He laughed. I liked that. “You’re obviously surprised, Mr. LeVine.”

“Not really. FDR told me you’d call.”

“What!” The laughter drained from his voice like water from a tub. “The president has contacted you himself?”

“No, no. Calm down, general. It was just a little banter. I’m known for my light touch.”

And for fainting. I sat down heavily, my ears ringing. It was all over my head, the whole deal. Getting fired on in Philly, working for Savage, now coming home to be called by a three-star general who seriously thought I had Roosevelt on hold.

“He hasn’t called, then?” Redlin still wasn’t sure.

“No, general. Not yet.”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “It would be very premature for him to …” He trailed off. I took a potshot.

“To get involved at this level.”

“Exactly. I was told you were a sharp fellow, LeVine. I can see that already.”

“Yes.” I trailed off this time.

“Well.” There was an awkward silence. “Uhm … things have gotten a bit snafued on this side, LeVine, and we’d like to speak with you.”

“That’s fine with me. I’ve got a cozy little office at 1651 Broadway. Room 914. Come in anytime.”

“We’ve got to speak with you tomorrow at 8:00
A.M.,
room 3521, Waldorf Towers. Breakfast will be served.”

“Delightful. I like my eggs scrambled well-done, and easy with the butter on my toast.”

I was treading water with the jokes, but Redlin didn’t know that. He thought I was trying to be a wiseass.

“If you served under me, sir, I would have you court-martialled for insolence.” His voice was very, very hard.

“Okay, the hell with it,” I said, and hung up. I sat by the phone. My hands were trembling. It rang again.

“You
will
be there tomorrow?”

“What about my insolence? And why should I be there?”

“It’s extremely complicated, LeVine, but we’ll try and explain tomorrow. Let me just say that we feel your employ by Eli W. Savage is not in the interests of national security.”

“Now I’m a traitor.” It was my turn to get testy.

“No, no, certainly not,” he crooned. “You’ll understand after the meeting.”

“Who exactly am I meeting with?”

“Top personnel, LeVine.”

“What does that mean: Churchill and Stalin? Or just Eisenhower?”

“You’re very flip, but I don’t think you’ll stay that way,” he sounded more sure of himself. “Now, would you like to be picked up by limousine?”

“No. They haven’t seen a limo in Sunnyside since Capone visited a speakeasy he used to own on 45th Street. My neighbors would bother me.”

“We’d like to be certain that you’ll be there.”

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world, general. Now why don’t you tell me who’s going to be there?”

“The front pages will be there, Mr. LeVine.”

“I’m used to the funny pages, but maybe it’s the same thing. I’d sure love to meet Moon Mullins, though.”

He laughed again, this three-star general. “So would I, LeVine. So would I.” He waited for me to say something else. I didn’t. He cleared his throat, said, “Fine, then,” for no reason at all and hung up.

I mixed a very fat drink and then another and was half in the bag when Toots called back. By this time, what he had to say was superfluous. Of course, Shea told him that he was off the case. Toots asked why and was told to go take a walk, who was he to bother Homicide with questions, did he want to lose his license, et cetera?

“When was the last time Shea was pulled off a case, Jack?”

“McKinley’s assassination, I think. It’s too big for him, Toots. They’d pull the Shadow, Mister Keen, and Boston Blackie off this one.”

“I won’t ask why.”

“Go ahead and ask. I’ll answer you next year. Right now it’s all I can do to keep from finishing off a fifth of Johnnie Walker.”

He just whistled. “I look through keyholes and the best I ever got was a vice-president of Corning getting his glass blown by a two-dollar blonde, knees down.”

“I don’t know what hit me, Toots. I could go for some keyhole stuff; it’s easier on the nerves. And look, thanks for playing it straight with me.”

“Maybe I like you, Jack.”

“Yes, but do you love me?”

He laughed and I laughed, a couple of nice little guys. When I got off the phone, I was giddy and scared.

The fact was I couldn’t wait for 8:00
A.M.
at the Waldorf Towers.

Y
OU’VE NEVER BEEN THERE
and you haven’t missed anything. The Waldorf Towers, not so surprisingly, is just a lot of chandeliers, crystal, and ass-kissing by monkeys in red jackets; just a lucky break away from toasting frankfurter buns at Nedick’s. The brass and silver is highly polished and so are the manners—if you’re rich. Some of the worst people in the world stay there. They get treated very well.

Unless you have an appointment with the Allied High Command, it’s hardly worth the trip.

After a restless night of thin sleep broken by tense gray periods of waking—pawing at the alarm clock, wrapping the sheets around my aching legs—I called it quits at five-thirty and brewed enough coffee to keep Luxembourg awake for a week. I was out of the house at six-thirty, like the other men and women of the day shift. I saw them drifting toward the “el” station, in ones and twos, off to the factory districts of Long Island City and Astoria. There was a light drizzle, a rain so light it hardly seemed to fall.

I walked for fifteen minutes or so, nodding at storekeepers I knew, as they swept sidewalks and unloaded cartons from trucks. I walked until some of the knots were out of my guts and then took the slow way into Manhattan, a number eleven bus that goes over the bridge to East 59th Street after winding around Sunnyside and Long Island City, stopping every other block and missing all the lights. I sat in the back and looked out the window, fiddling with my tie and brushing lint off my brown summer suit. The city looked tired and tense. Maybe it was me.

The bus finished its run at East 59th Street. It was a quarter to eight. I hoofed it over to Park and 50th in ten minutes and noticed an armada of limos double-parked outside the Towers. I leaned against one of them and lit up a Lucky and finally got up the nerve to walk inside. Once inside, the tension was thick enough to eat. Uniformed military aides and plainclothesmen were all over the place. They started eyeing me and eyeing each other, until a Waldorf minor domo came scurrying across the huge oriental carpet to ask if he could be of any help.

“I have a tryst with Omar Bradley.”

He smiled a little. The domo was about 5’8” and a muscle-bound 180. Not even the little mustache could cover up the fact that he was a bouncer.

“May I be of service or I’ll have to …”

“You’re not asking me to leave, because I’m supposed to get a free plate of scrambled eggs up in 3521.”

He whipped a list out of an inside jacket pocket.

“Your name please? And rank, if any?”

“Jack LeVine. Rank: second-generation American citizen.”

He scanned the list and nodded.

“I’m entitled to the eggs?”

He just clapped his hands and two burly plainclothesmen came over and flanked me.

“Take him up, please,” said the minor domo, and walked away. One of the plainclothes guys grunted “okay” and pointed to a waiting elevator car. I strode across the lobby, as the two men fell into step behind me and followed me into the elevator. They nodded to the jockey, a short man with a two-dollar toupee and a great sense of importance. He slammed the doors shut as crisply as a Prussian stationmaster and took us on an ear-popping flight up to thirty-five. There he rocketed the doors open, stepped aside and bowed. The plainclothesmen gestured for me to get out first—nobody was actually speaking—and I padded up the silent corridor wondering if maybe a lot of people had died and I was now the President of the United States.

As we reached 3521, the taller plainclothesman, a swarthy guy with two inches on me, picked up his stride and took me under the arm, while the other stepped ahead and knocked on the door three times: knock, pause, knock-knock. The door flew open instantly and I was practically carried into a small sitting room. A wiry man in a uniform that had three stars on it bounded from his chair as I entered. A colored guy closed the door in back of me and the plainclothesmen melted into the corridor.

“Mr. LeVine, I’m General Redlin,” said the wiry man. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

I nodded and shook his hand dumbly, all out of smart things to say. It was going way too fast, and maybe everybody—Kerry/Anne, Butler, Savage, this general—maybe they had me confused with some LeVine who really made things happen: a macher, a doer. I followed people around for a living, I looked for used condoms in the trash. What the hell did they want from me?

“Let’s go inside,” Redlin said. The Negro stepped across the room and stood by another door. He nodded inquisitively at Redlin, who did the same to me.

“Ready, Mr. LeVine?”

“Fine with me,” I croaked, my voice filtered through sandpaper, cheesecloth, and broken glass. My heart was pounding so hard and so fast that I was sure Redlin could hear it. He smiled knowingly, like he had this smartass dick figured right: all bluff on the phone and jelly at the Waldorf. So I got a little boiled about that, which helped when the door was opened and I walked into a living room full of hard-looking big shots in uniform. They were already eating breakfast around a huge circular table, as men in white jackets flitted about with trays and platters.

Navy uniforms, army uniforms, RAF uniforms. Blues, whites, and greens: everything starched and stiff and clean. Manicured hands precisely carved pieces of melon. Sunburned faces were stuffed with eggs and toast. Modulated voices, used to command, whispered, buzzed, but rarely rose. Silverware clattered against plates. The waiters were silent and watched, watched, in turn, by a nervous hotel exec who snapped his fingers, pointed and raised his eyebrows to set his staff in motion. Every sound and motion stopped when I entered with Redlin. The men in uniform stopped talking and chewing; the waiters, as attuned as bats to the frequencies in the air, waited.

“Gentlemen,” Redlin said, holding out his arm like an emcee, “may I have the pleasure of introducing Mr. Jack LeVine, private detective extraordinary.”

I bowed and some of the men smiled, amused or intrigued. Most of them did not smile. Redlin went around the room: General This, Colonel That, Admiral Whosis, Brigadier General Whatsis. I recognized a lot of them: nobody up there with Ike, Mac, Bradley, Halsy, or Nimitz, but a good sampling of army and navy brass was in attendance; people whom I read about every day, men I genuinely admired for the job they had done in taking the Axis to the cleaners. I hadn’t heard of the British colonel or the frog admiral, so I figured they might be in Intelligence.