The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery (6 page)

In the sack we made that sweetest of discoveries: that we really
were
friends, great and royal and generous friends. That stuff you don’t get in the books.

I
T’S A GOOD TWO
and a half hours out to Smithtown from Sunnyside, a terrible two and a half hours actually. I was tired to begin with and the ride in my aging Buick almost put me away: a vista of swampy lots, marshes, gas stations, and clumps of houses that looked like they didn’t know what they were doing on Long Island when they could be in Brooklyn or Queens. I rubbed so many mosquitoes and gnats out on my windshield that it began to look like an aerial view of a battlefield. After forty minutes of squinting through their little squashed bodies to see the road, I pulled into a dusty red-and-whitc Esso station. The grease monkey, a thin man in green overalls, was sitting on a stool outside the office, drinking a Nehi. He got up slowly and walked over to my car.

The monkey was wearing a little green cap with the name “Bert” sewn across the front in yellow thread. He had the comic-sad green eyes of a man who hasn’t had very much to laugh about, but has retained his sense of humor all the same. His nose was long and sharp and his teeth stained brown from years of chewing tobacco. I could see that Bert had stayed out in the sun too much: his skin had the texture of an old saddle. He leaned into the car and took a long look at my graveyard of a windshield.

“Bugs are just a bitch right now.” His voice was thin and sounded like it wasn’t used very often. Couldn’t be all that much business ten miles east of Mineola, with nothing but weeds and telephone poles for company. “Heat or damp must have brought them out, way I see it.”

“I think you’re right,” I told him, getting out of the Buick for a stretch. It was eleven o’clock and the sun was high and strong in the sky. By noon, everything would look shimmery. I took a deep breath and the air felt heavy and syrupy. I coughed.

“Hot enough for you?” asked Bert. “
Jee-sus
, ain’t this been a honey of a June for you. This damp is what’s bringing out all the bugs.” Including the one who had just gone from soup to mints on the back of my neck. I could feel the stinging and swelling already. This was going to be one hell of a day.

“Hey, Bert, you know your way around Smithtown?”

“I might, with my specs on.” He had the car door open and was leaning across the front seat, spraying the windshield and rubbing the bugs off with paper toweling, then spraying again to towel off the last traces of blood.

“How about a street called Edgefield Road?”

“I know it.” Bert climbed out of the car and went to work on the front of the windshield. “You’re still a good forty or so miles away, but when you hit Smithtown, go right through what they call the business district—which means just a couple more stores than usual—and go another half-mile till you pass a joint called Cookie’s Bar and Grill. If you got a minute, stop in and tell Cookie, Bert Little says hello. If not, keep going and you’ll hit a street called Salem. Take a left and follow it all the way to Edgefield.”

“You know it pretty well.”

“Born and raised there, as they say. That Edgefield section is pretty well run down now. Nothing too fancy. You just visiting?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, there’s better places to go. How ’bout some gas?”

I got out my ration book and filled the tank.

There were a lot better places to go. One hour later, drenched with sweat, feeling the dull ache of a possible cold and glowing with bug bites and sunstroke, I pulled up to Edgefield Road and parked on Salem, to grab a quick look-see. I turned off my motor, which was the only sound for miles, got out of the car and leaned against the door, reaching into my shirt pocket for a Lucky. It didn’t take much of a look to realize that Bert was right: Edgefield Road was nothing too fancy.

Both sides of the street were lined with white clapboard bungalow-style houses, probably no more than ten years old but already decrepit beyond repair. Shingles were cracking, drainpipes were rusting and breaking off, and the paint was peeling off in wild, jagged patterns, leaving dark outlines against the sides of the houses that resembled the body-shaped holes made by silent comedians when they ran through walls. The hinges on half of the screen doors were busted, so doors flapped open and shut whenever the wind changed its mind. A couple of houses had small flower beds out front; most were surrounded by dirt, crabgrass, and every kind of scrawny weed that thrived and multiplied in the gases and exhalations of poor people. Broken earthenware pots sat marooned on the porches, next to chipped garden chairs, fallen hammocks, dreaming dogs, and all the quilts and rain-ruined blankets that get dumped in a corner and are never moved again. A couple of children were playing with the ground. There were no trees to protect them from the sun. I felt as distant from Manhattan as if I were tailing someone across the Sahara.

A wiry, thin-lipped woman with what you might call brown hair came out of number twelve Edgefield and saw me leaning against my car. She stopped and folded her arms across her white blouse. A little boy was pulling at her dull and baggy gray slacks, but she ignored him and stared at me. The kid was about four, dirty, pale, and barefoot in blue shorts and a tee shirt. I decided to make my move over to number fourteen and walked toward it, nodding pleasantly at the lady.

“Afternoon.”

“Afternoon,” she echoed back, without too much emotion one way or the other. “If you’re going to number fourteen there, save your breath. Party living there left yesterday afternoon.”

There wasn’t any sign of life at fourteen and the driveway was empty. I stopped.

“Nobody home since yesterday?”

“That’s right, mister.” She looked about thirty and sounded closer to fifty, with a tired, uneven voice. Her eyes were gray and close together, separated by a good pert nose which was smudged with dirt. Her lips were thin and she gave off the look of a high school sweetie who had hit her peak at about sixteen and had been losing her looks, feature by feature, ever since.

“I was supposed to meet somebody there at noon today.”

“Well,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and pointing her head toward the house, “you’re out of luck.”

“It’s important that I find the party.”

“You a cop?” She was wary but not hostile. Not yet.

“Private cop.”

Surprisingly enough, she smiled, a kind of close-mouthed, vulnerable smile. It was the spontaneous but tentative grin of a poor woman talking to. a stranger, delighted about something but restrained by the fears that come from a lifetime of dependence on the whims of people with money.

“Like on the radio?” She looked down at her kid, who was gawking at the big bald stranger talking to his mother. “Paulie, this man’s a private eye, like Boston Blackie.” The kid kept staring at me, his arms hugging his mother’s left leg.

“Boston Blackie gets paid a lot more than I do.”

She laughed. “Yes, well he probably does at that.” She looked around. “I couldn’t tell you much about the people over at fourteen cause there was hardly anyone over there too much. I used to see two men walking around there occasionally. Sometimes they’d stay a few days, or a week. They looked a little rough, so I didn’t speak with them a whole lot and told Paulie not to bother with them. On Monday and Tuesday of this week, there was one of them there, but he left yesterday afternoon. Looked like he was leaving for a while.”

“How so, suitcases?”

“Only one suitcase that I could see, but he had some cartons that he was putting in the trunk of the car, which was a black Ford sedan. You want to know the car, I suppose, the way Boston Blackie always does. That’s always the first thing he asks about.” She smiled shyly, delicately.

“It is helpful. Anything else?”

“Like I said, he had these cartons in the trunk and I had the feeling he wasn’t coming back for a while, or somebody was after him or something, cause he really tore out of here.” She looked down. “Remember how fast the man in the car was going, Paulie?” The boy nodded and turned away, putting one hand in his mouth and keeping the other bunched around the folds of her slacks. From the way she spoke to him, I got the idea she didn’t have too many other people to talk to. She read my thoughts.

“My husband Earl is in the navy right now. Out in the Pacific Ocean.”

I nodded respectfully. “Well, he’ll be back pretty soon.”

“That’ll be great, won’t it, Paulie, when Daddy’s home?” She mussed the kid’s hair and he hid his face in her thigh. “Paulie’s shy with strangers.”

“He’s a nice boy. Would you mind telling me your name?”

“You going to call me to the witness stand?” She smiled again and I knew I was a big event in her life.

“Nope.” I smiled as nicely as I could. I was out of practice in dealing with real people.

“Well, then I’m Mrs. Earl Rogers,” and proud of it.

“Mrs. Rogers, if I broke into that house, would you be very upset?”

She kind of squinted at me. The wind picked up and we both turned our backs to it to avoid the dust. “Well sir,” she said, “I can’t see anything with this dust in my eyes, so I couldn’t tell whether you broke in or not.” The wind let up and we faced each other. I handed her five bucks.

“That’s very kind of you,” said Mrs. Earl Rogers, holding the bill very tight in her hand. “I appreciate it.” There were no histrionics and no hint that she wouldn’t accept it. “It’ll come in real handy these days.”

“You earned it.”

“Guess I did.” What she was thinking at that moment I’ll never know. Maybe nothing.

“You got a personal card?” she asked. “In case something comes up.” I handed her a card and she stared down at it. “Jack LeVine. Maybe you’ll be on the radio someday.” She put the card in her back pocket and stood silent for a moment, stroking the five like it was a baby chick. Then Mrs. Rogers turned and started walking back into her house. The kid was still staring at me, wondering who the hell I was. I couldn’t have told him.

“You come in here, Paulie. Leave the man alone.”

I watched the kid follow her into the house, turning around every other step to look at me. Then they were both inside. It was very hot. I undid the top button of my shirt and walked over to number fourteen Edgefield.

The driveway was empty except for a couple of beer bottles, gravel, and stray bits of tape and cardboard. I walked up three peeling white wooden steps and tried the door. Breaking in was going to be very easy because the door was ajar already. It required a push. I pushed and walked into a living room that had been cleared out in a big hurry. The linoleum floor was a garden of boxes, rope, wire, and tape, and the walls were bare except for a few pin-ups torn out of some sunbathing magazines and pasted up with their edges still ragged. Every hideout looks the same and, with one difference, this set-up fit the pattern. The same pulp magazines stashed in the corners, the same little metallic tables with stamped floral designs, the same beer bottles on those tables and, as always, cigarette butts floating in the beer. There was a couch covered in red corduroy and liberally sprinkled with ashes, playing cards—two jacks, a queen, and the six of hearts—some dirty argyle socks and a topping of crushed peanut shells.

Like I said there was a difference: the newspapers. Dozens of them covered the floor and the two chairs, swamped a glass-topped coffee table and ringed a torn-up black hassock. And these weren’t just the New York dailies. “Friend of the Arts” had them from Philly, Newark, and Boston, even a couple of Washington
Stars
were scattered beneath the couch. And these papers had obviously been read; their edges were bent back and dulled, their folds flattened out.

But going through the papers didn’t tell me a thing. The guy hadn’t paid much attention to the sports sections, so the bookie angle was out, not that I gave it any weight anyhow. It was the hard-news pages that were most smudged and pored over. I picked through them, looking for marginal notations or whatever, but I could have been reading tea leaves for all I learned.

Being a dutiful if not inspired dick, I searched the house, knowing full well that I wouldn’t find the films. Those cartons Mrs. Rogers had seen her neighbor carry out weren’t filled with linen and silver service, that was for goddamn sure. But I looked anyway. I swept the peanut shells from the couch cover and its corduroy folds yielded the empty foils of a condom. At least the guy had some company. There were Clark bar wrappers in the fireplace and also a ball of paper which turned out to be an envelope addressed to someone named Al Rubine. The name didn’t mean a thing to me.