Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery (11 page)

Aaron looked into my eyes with as much soulfulness as he could muster. I felt like I was on a date that was about to get really dramatic.

“The problem is, Jack, and this is why it’s all gone on so long …” He paused and sighed. “The problem is, I’m not sure NBC wants the Maestro back.”

I started to move my lips, but for once I was speechless.

“Holy shit.”

“Yes,” Aaron said. “Holy shit.”

I drove over the 155th Street Bridge and then down the Harlem River Drive, the radio off, my brains starting to overheat.

“When you say you’re ‘not sure …’” I began.

“Running the NBC Symphony costs a bloody fortune,” Aaron began. “Our chairman, General Sarnoff, while a visionary, is also a deeply conservative man, concerned, naturally, with profit and loss. The whole business is in flux, Jack; it looks like television could really be the end of radio. Nobody’s sure yet, but it seems like a strong possibility. At the very least, radio is going to be greatly diminished. The audience will never, ever be the same. We expect dramatic decreases in its size over the next five years.”

“And what’s watching an orchestra on television compared to watching a wrestling match?”

“Exactly. Or even compared to watching a good drama. So do we continue spending millions on something that’s geared for radio? It’s a real issue. When the orchestra was put together in 1937 it was a tool to sell radios and phonograph records and record players. But things are changing. Even before this happened there were discussions about the efficacy of keeping the orchestra in a television age. People aren’t going to run home at night to watch a hundred middle-aged men playing fiddles. That’s just reality; we’ve done studies. Television is the future, period. We have to deal with the changes it’s going to bring.”

“Is there ransom involved?”

Aaron reflexively straightened his tie. “Yes.”

“How much?”

“Three million bucks.”

“Yikes. And General Sarnoff doesn’t want to pay?”

“I’ve gotten mixed signals.”

“What does that mean?”

“Exactly that. I’m not sure. The ransom was at five million this summer. It’s down to three.”

“Sarnoff thinks he can just work them down to nothing?”

“I don’t know what he thinks. He’s devoted to the Maestro, there’s no question about that, but he’s been getting more and more heat from stockholders and some of our big advertisers about the cost of this orchestra. NBC isn’t just Sarnoff’s candy store. Before he writes a ransom check for that kind of money, there’s people he has to deal with.”

“Don’t you guys carry insurance on the old man?”

“Sure, but then what happens? The insurance company gets its investigators involved, and if you think our guys are knuckleheads … Maestro would be dead in twenty-four hours.”

“I agree. Too risky.”

“And then there’s the factor of precedent,” Aaron continued. “What does it say to the world if we submit to this kind of blackmail? Do people get ideas? What happens if Jack Benny or Bob Hope gets snatched? We just open the treasury? You see where this could lead, Jack.”

“But NBC knows that these people will kill the old guy eventually. You can’t dick around forever.”

“We all know that, Jack.” And then Aaron shrugged, indicating that it was out of his hands.

“Holy Christ,” I said. “You mean there’s people who wouldn’t mind? You guys really play some hardball….”

“It’s not as simple or as crude as that. Like I said, there is serious concern about the issue of setting a precedent.”

“I understand that, Sidney. But correct me if I’m wrong—I’m hearing that there’s people at NBC who feel if Toscanini gets croaked, what the hell, he’s eighty-three and he’s costing the company a fortune anyhow—”

“Drop me here,” Aaron said suddenly. We were on Park Avenue in the eighties.

“Which is your building?”

“Down two blocks between Park and Madison. But it’s probably better if I get out here.”

“They’re watching your apartment?”

“I think so.”

I stopped the car. Aaron looked out at Park Avenue. Two couples paraded past in formal clothes, the men looking more than a little drunk, puffing cigars and laughing much too loud.

Aaron turned and faced me. “Can you be in my office tomorrow at noon?”

“Sure. You don’t mind if I’m seen there?”

“It’s widely known that Fritz hired you. That’s no problem.” Aaron got out of the car. “One other thing,” he said before slamming the door shut. “You have a valid passport?”

“Yeah. Why?

“I think you’re going to need it.”

SEVEN

When I got into
the elevator at 1630 Broadway on Friday morning, José, the new elevator jockey, gave me a big wink. José was a forty-year-old hunchback who sported a thin mustache and wore cowboy boots under his gray elevator togs. I thought he added real style to the building.

“Nice,” he said, and winked again for emphasis. Subtlety was not his strong suit.

“Nice? What’s nice?” I was holding a cardboard container of coffee that wasn’t any hotter than molten steel.

“You’ll see.” He stopped the elevator at nine. “Have a good day, Señor Detective.” He laughed and opened the door.

José was still chuckling when I stepped out of the elevator and saw Barbara Stern leaning against the wall outside my office. She was wearing a black beret, a dark skirt, and a black cotton sweater—casual mourning attire.

“Good morning.” She waved as I ambled down the hall, my hand beginning to melt like an object in a Dali painting.

“Good morning.” I placed the coffee container on the floor and fumbled for my keys. “You want some coffee? I’ll put on my asbestos mittens and go get another cup.”

“No thanks.”

I opened up the office and turned on a couple of lights. She followed me in without being asked, which I liked very much. I’m a person who thrives on female companionship and the past year had been spent entirely too much without it. Various old flames, like Kitty Seymour, had gotten married and weren’t available even for social dinners; a fiery romance with a funny and hot-blooded English professor named Susan Handelman went kaput after three exhausting months because she couldn’t believe she was actually banging a private detective and decided to return to her husband, a humorless but successful pediatrician named Ronnie. She continued to call from time to time, complaining about Ronnie’s long hours, and the sound of her voice still made me adjust my slacks, but if 1 have learned one thing in my chosen profession, it is this: Sleeping with married women is not, in the long run, a worthwhile endeavor. But I sure as hell missed the short run.

So despite my awareness of her tender years and recent tragedy, it gave me a warm and cuddly feeling to watch Barbara Stern unhesitatingly enter my renovated headquarters. She looked around and sniffed the still-pungent aroma of Little Dutch Boy.

“It’s spiffier than I thought it would be,” she said. “I was expecting more of a Sam Spade kind of deal. Fresh paint?”

“I redecorated a bit this past summer. The end of a crisis of confidence.”

I unlocked the inner office and she followed me in.

“Crisis of confidence? Like a breakdown?” Scary, when someone twenty-one years of age can look inside you with the speed and accuracy of an X-ray machine.

“I would refer to it as a breakdownette.” I pulled the window open and sat down behind my desk.

“Occasioned by middle age?” She made herself comfortable in the red leather chair that faces my desk. “Am I being incredibly nosy? Just tell me. I have that tendency.”

“Doesn’t bother me. Nosy is what I do for a living.” I carefully opened the coffee lid and a volcanic cloud of steam billowed out. “Yes, my breakdownette was occasioned, in a general sense, by middle age, divorce, a general uncertainty as to the meaning and purpose of my life. The immediate trigger, you may be interested to know, was the death of my father.”

“Really.” She crossed her legs as I blew into my coffee.

“Yeah.”

“Of natural causes, I take it.”

“Listening to Jack Benny, which is about as natural as it gets in the twentieth century. His heart just stopped. There was a glass of seltzer next to him, the radio was on, and his head was back in his favorite chair. A Jewish still life.”

She nodded. “Very well put. And you loved him?”

“How much time do you have?”

“I understand,” she said. “It’s always complicated.”

“I did love him. He was a brusque little guy, but his heart was in the right place. Started working when he was like thirteen, spent his life in the hat trade, made a buck or two, enough to rise to the very bottom of the middle class. Not an amazing story, you won’t find a biography of him in your school library, but good enough. He didn’t have a lot of free time. He worked, he retired, he died. It’s very simple, then again nothing’s so simple. There’s misunderstandings, things you never said that you should have, things you did say that you didn’t mean. But, add it all up, and I loved him, yes. That’s the short version.”

“He was your pop, what the hell, it hurts. Hurts a lot.” Her eyes got misty, then she sighed and sat up, straightening her sweater across her lovely chest. This was a girl I could easily get tired of after forty or fifty years.

“But that’s old news. How are you doing?” I asked.

She looked at me for a long beat, as if wondering whether she trusted me enough to really talk; then I saw something switch off in her.

“I’m doing,” she finally said, and reached into her purse. “I found this on my father’s desk last night and I thought, you know, that you should take a look at it.”

She slid a slip of paper across the desk. When I picked it up, it appeared blank; a closer examination revealed the tracing of an address scrawled across it.

“I couldn’t quite make it out, but it looks like, what, eleventh …” She leaned across the desk toward me and our faces were mere inches apart. I could feel the heat radiating off her.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. Stern had written down an address, then torn off the top sheet. It looked like, “11th Ave., 46.”

“Eleventh Avenue and 46th Street?” I said. “That ring a bell?”

“No,” she said. “That’s near the piers.”

“Yeah. Your father was found a block away.”

“His body, you mean.” She took the slip of paper and sat back in her chair. I missed her already.

“Yes.”

“You don’t have to be delicate with me.”

“I’m delicate with everyone,” I told her. “So he gets a call, your mother says from a colleague, goes to the piers at nine-thirty at night.”

“Peculiar behavior for anyone, isn’t it? But especially for my father; he was about as impulsive as a clock.”

“Which of his colleagues was he really close to? Who would call him and tell him to go down to the piers that he would listen to?”

“He didn’t really have any close friends in the orchestra.”

“He didn’t? He told me he’d been with the symphony since 1940.”

“You have to understand that my father, like most refugees, basically had no real buddies in the American sense. No ‘pals.’ His social life was built around his family. Whoever called him up was obviously one of the musicians in on this Toscanini thing.”

“But you don’t know who that might be.”

“I could guess, maybe. He hung out with a bassoonist named Frank Rosenberg, a violist named Georg Lukas, another refugee, a Hungarian, but I really have no idea if they were among those who thought Toscanini was missing.”

“Okay. You also might consider this—the fact that he told your mother it was a colleague on the phone doesn’t necessarily mean that it was.”

Barbara Stern thought that one over.

“My father was compulsively honest.”

“Yeah, but I’m sure he wanted to protect your mother and maybe protect himself: She was certainly less than enthusiastic about his hiring me, or getting involved at all in this mess.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And as it turned out …”

“She was right.”