Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery by Andrew Bergman Read Free Book Online Page A

Linda’s bedroom, still a very young girl’s bedroom, with photographs of Vaughn Monroe and Perry Como adorning the circus-themed wallpaper. Stern’s youngest daughter lay sobbing on her bed, her thin legs sticking storklike from her black dress, a helpless kid at the most exposed moment of her just-started life, knowing that her protector and keeper has been blasted out of the world forever. Hilde sat beside her daughter, stroking her hair and saying words I wasn’t able and didn’t need to hear. Barbara turned back toward me. Smoke streamed from that gorgeous nose.
    “You’ll stay on this case, Mr. LeVine.”
    “I will.”
    “There will be a lot of pressure on you, as I’m sure you realize. There’s some very tough sonsofbitches over at NBC—”
    “I said I will. That’s the end of it. And call me Jack.”
    She managed a grim smile. “Not yet, Mr. LeVine. Not yet.”
    We sat in the living room until around six A.M., drinking coffee and exchanging fragments of conversation. Mrs. Stern made rye toast with butter and orange preserves and we ate it without thinking. Two neighbors had joined the vigil—Kurt and Ilse Weissman from apartment 3-C. Kurt Weissman was a dry cleaner in Washington Heights, a fact he repeated to me several times, along with the establishment’s precise address on St. Nicholas Avenue. Weissman was a pallid, heavyset man in his late thirties whose brains seemed to be receding along with his light brown hair. His blond, intense wife never took her eyes from me, even when contradicting her husband, which occurred nearly every time he opened his mouth.
    “In this country I would never expect such a thing,” he said.
    “What does that mean, Kurt?” she barked. “For God’s sakes. Such crap you talk. This is the Garden of Eden? Please. In this city the criminals run free like wild dogs. Has been true since we got here. I have no illusions about such things. Even in our store”—she looked to me—“you have to be careful.”
    Barbara just stared at me, faintly amused. The Weissmans were a distraction from the numbing fact that at this moment her father’s body was laid out like a haunch of beef on a cold steel table in the police morgue. Hilde emerged from the kitchen with a fresh pot of coffee and tray full of butter cookies.
    “Linda is sleeping, I am happy.”
    “The best thing,” said the dry cleaner, then looked at me intently. “You agree with this?”
    “Thousand percent,” I assured him.
    “If she sleeps,” he added, “for a while at least, this horrible thing is out of her mind.”
    Ilse instantly cracked her whip. “Kurt, for God’s sakes, it’s never going to be out of her mind. How can you say such an idiotic thing?” The dry cleaner cringed at her attack. Weissman was a major league nitwit, but still you had to feel for him.
    I took another cup of coffee from Hilde Stern. As I was spooning in some sugar, the intercom buzzer sounded with the sudden force of an air raid siren. Hilde gasped.
    “Even money it’s the cops,” I told her.
    “They were here already,” Barbara said, straightening her dress. She went into the foyer and buzzed back.
    “That was just to break the news. This time they’ll bring their paper and pencils.”
    A voice could be heard squawking over the intercom. “All right,” Barbara said, then looked to me and nodded.
    Kurt Weissman leapt to his feet; he looked ready to scurry into Anne Frank’s attic. “We should go, Ilse. Soon … now.”
    And then the doorbell sounded.
    They were plainclothes, Homicide. Lieutenant Eddie Breen and Sergeant Dick O’Malley. I figured Breen to be about forty, although his bland pockmarked kisser could have been ten years older or younger than that. It just didn’t matter. O’Malley thought he was a young blond dreamboat, and would have qualified but for a left eye that wandered and some persistent acne on his forehead. He wore a handkerchief in the pocket of his houndstooth jacket, which he