Read The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery for Free Online

account starts getting respectable. I might get soft and indolent, spend all my time taking a Pullman to Palm Beach or Jersey City or something.”
    “You’ve got a hell of a chip on your shoulder, Jack. This money didn’t come easy.”
    I looked around the office, just for effect. “It must have been hell. By the way, I’d like to see GI Canteen this evening. Can you spare two tickets?”
    “Doing research?” Butler smiled.
    “Something like that.” I got up, holding my hat. “I figure one of the girls will take off her clothes, just out of habit, and then I’ve got a big clue. You’re sure you don’t know which one she is?”
    Butler looked at me very hard and I was a little afraid. For all his goddamned airs, he was a very hard man. “You’re a real son of a bitch, Jack. The genuine article.” He pushed a button on his intercom. “Eileen, give Mr. LeVine two tickets to Canteen for tonight.”
    “Fine, Mr. Butler,” crooned the redhead. I was looking forward to taking a look at her again.
    Butler stood up. “Jack, I don’t like you one bit, but I don’t have to. All I want is honesty and I’m sure I’ll get that. Please come back here after you’ve been out to Smithtown tomorrow. I’ll be here until seven. Hope you like the show.”
    On cue, his office door opened and Eileen was there with two long orange tickets, holding the door for my exit. I waved to Butler, “Warren sweetheart, you won’t be disappointed. I’ll be the greatest Hamlet you ever saw,” and went to the outer office. It suddenly looked small.
    “You wanted two for tonight?” Eileen asked, her left hand fussing with the back of her neck.
    “Yes, but I get vertigo in the balcony.”
    “Then these shouldn’t give you any trouble.” She handed them to me, half-amused and half-bored by my little joke. She’d never heard of the balcony. The ducats were row C, center. I didn’t get that close at St. Nick’s on Monday nights, and ringside was only two and a half bucks, not five.
    “I hope the girls don’t sweat too much.” The redhead’s reply was to look at a spot above and beyond my right shoulder. When you’re nobody, you’re nobody, and no one has to laugh at your half-assed jokes. So I put on my hat and went out the door and down the elevator and out of the Schubert Building into the late-afternoon heat, a shmendrick getting paid by big people to do ugly work. I felt invisible. I felt like a six-foot, two-hundred-pound nothing. But I also felt like a nothing who knew a little something: that no matter how much he insulted Warren Butler, he had the job. That was pretty interesting. At least I thought so.

 
    I WENT BACK TO MY OFFICE, took the phone off its hook, put my new C-note in the wall safe, replaced the phone and left to take the elevated out to Sunnyside, Queens, where I live. I can’t afford Manhattan—can’t afford the rents or the noise or the sadness on most faces. So after fifteen, twenty minutes of straphanging on the Flushing “L,” where I lean against the vestibule doors and watch the backyards and factories and the easy flow of traffic and people, I’m home. People water their lawns in Sunnyside and the vegetable man says, “Jack, you’re a schmuck if you don’t buy the little tomatoes today,” so I live there. Also, I’ve got a four-room apartment which sets me back thirty-eight fifty a month and neighbors who play poker and come in to listen to the ball games and the fights. And I used to have a wife, until she decided she’d be better off married to someone who came home three nights out of five and had an even chance of making it past fifty. It was as amicable as those things can be and now she’s married to a sweet little guy in children’s ready-to-wear who’s home five nights out of five, at six sharp. We have lunch sometimes. My father and mother were upset but not shocked—with their only son doing such un-haimisheh work as being a detective. They would not be surprised if I