Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery by Andrew Bergman Page B

of the day.
    Throughout the evening, Aaron had maintained his peculiar reticence about the events that had brought us together—we were just two guys at a fight—so I was not surprised that when I offered him a ride back to Manhattan he readily accepted. I knew this had not been a casual invitation; Aaron knew hundreds of other people he could have brought to this fight and at least half of them had better legs than I did. At some point I knew he was finally going to get to the point: He would try to buy me off or, failing that, threaten me.
    I was ready, and, as usual, I was dead wrong.
    No sooner had I pulled the mighty Roadmaster onto Jerome Avenue than Sidney Aaron, vice president for special programming at NBC, put his head against the passenger-side window and began to cry. And these were not wistful tears; these were great, heaving, gulping sobs.
    “It’s so te …” he began, and then he dissolved, his shoulders shaking, his breath ragged. I hadn’t seen a grown man bawl so openly since my Uncle Irving had watched his button store go up in flames on Rivington Street, and even he hadn’t carried on like this. It was all I could do to keep my eyes on the road.
    “You okay, Sidney? Want to pull over somewhere, maybe get a drink?”
    He just shook his head, then blew his nose with considerable force into a monogrammed, snow-white handkerchief.
    “I’m so sorry,” he finally managed to say.
    “Hey,” was the best I could do.
    “It’s just …” Some more tears rolled down his cologne-scented cheeks.
    “Just …?”
    “Just so difficult.”
    A fire engine raced past, its sirens and horns at full cry, followed by an equally noisy hook and ladder, so I had an excuse to pull the car over and stop.
    Aaron dabbed at his cheeks and took deep noisy breaths. “I feel like such an idiot.”
    “Hey, even Lou Gehrig cried. Want a smoke?”
    “No.”
    I fired up a Lucky and rolled down my window. “You are going to tell me why you were crying, right?”
    Aaron honked his sizable nose one more time, then stuffed his handkerchief back into his pocket.
    “You can’t believe the pressure,” he said. “I haven’t slept in three weeks.”
    “Okay, let me take a wild guess—Toscanini really got snatched, didn’t he? And you’re the monkey in the middle.”
    Aaron stared at me for a few pregnant moments.
    “You must swear—”
    “I won’t tell a soul. That’s part of the package. I told Fritz that and technically I’m still working for him. His daughter wants me to stay on the case.”
    “I see. Would it be a conflict to work for me?”
    “Probably.”
    “Why?”
    “Because her interest is in finding out who killed her father. I don’t know what your interest is yet. Was he snatched? Let’s start there. A simple yes or no will suffice.”
    “Yes,” Sidney Aaron said. “He was snatched.”
    “Okay. Question two: Where was he snatched?”
    “Sun Valley.”
    “Sun Valley, Idaho?”
    “On May twelfth. Here. Look at this and then we’ll talk.”
    Aaron handed me a newspaper clipping. As the Woodlawn elevated train rattled above me, throwing sparks down onto the street, I studied the clipping. It was an Associated Press wire photo of Toscanini riding a chairlift, waving happily, jaunty in a beret.
    “I remember this shot,” I told him.
    “It was picked up everywhere.” Aaron dried the remaining tears from the corners of his eyes.
    “And this was taken in Sun Valley?”
    “Yes.”
    “And it’s him? In this picture, it’s him?”
    “I’m not completely sure. It was him going up the chairlift, but evidently it wasn’t him coming down. It was a double.”
    “He got snatched at the top of the lift?”
    “Yes.”
    “He was alone? How could this have happened without anybody noticing?”
    “There were orchestra members all over the place, but nobody saw a thing. The lift apparently goes into this little shedlike structure, where it turns around and then comes out the other side. That’s