Full Cleveland: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (#2) (Milan Jacovich Mysteries, Band 2) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Les Roberts is the author of 13 mystery novels featuring Cleveland detective Milan Jacovich, as well as 9 other books of fiction. The past president of both the Private Eye Writers of America and the American Crime Writer’s League, he came to mystery writing after a 24-year career in Hollywood. He was the first producer and head writer of the Hollywood Squares and wrote for the Andy Griffith Show, the Jackie Gleason Show, and the Man from U.N.C.L.E., among others. He has been a professional actor, a singer, a jazz musician, and a teacher. In 2003 he received the Sherwood Anderson Literary Award. A native of Chicago, he currently lives in his adopted home town of Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

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Polyester leisure suit, white patent leather shoes, matching white belt—that 1970s fashion statement was once unkindly dubbed the “full Cleveland.” And no one wears it with more flair and panache than Buddy Bustamente. Buddy (“he was medium-sized if you happened to be talking about Cape buffaloes”) is the hulking flunky assigned by mob kingpin Victor Gaimari to shadow Cleveland private eye Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced My-lan Yock-ovich). Milan has been hired to find the perpetrator of a low-level scam who is selling local businessmen ads in a magazine that doesn’t exist. But the modest amount of money involved hardly seems worth the string of bodies he soon turns up. And why does it interest a mobster like Victor and his sugar-addict bird dog, Buddy? Milan starts liking Buddy in spite of himself. But he’s not easily fooled; Buddy is a recent ex-con, and Milan knows that behind the childlike façade and dubious fashion, he is potentially lethal.

Aus dem Klappentext

Polyester leisure suit, white patent leather shoes, matching white belt that 1970s fashion statement was once unkindly dubbed the full Cleveland. And no one wears it with more flair and panache than Buddy Bustamente. Buddy ( he was medium-sized if you happened to be talking about Cape buffaloes ) is the hulking flunky assigned by mob kingpin Victor Gaimari to shadow Cleveland private eye Milan Jacovich (it s pronounced My-lan Yock-ovich). Milan has been hired to find the perpetrator of a low-level scam who is selling local businessmen ads in a magazine that doesn t exist. But the modest amount of money involved hardly seems worth the string of bodies he soon turns up. And why does it interest a mobster like Victor and his sugar-addict bird dog, Buddy? Milan starts liking Buddy in spite of himself. But he s not easily fooled; Buddy is a recent ex-con, and Milan knows that behind the childlike façade and dubious fashion, he is potentially lethal.

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Chapter One

In blue-collar towns such as Cleveland you don’t often run into guys with names like Richardson Hippsley-Tate. It isn’t the norm. There are plenty of people named Annunzio Napolitano or Bernie Feinberg or Leroy Washington Jr. Or even names like mine, Milan Jacovich. That’s Yugoslavian—Slovenian, to be more precise—and in my old neighborhood on the East Side, or in Bernie’s or Leroy’s or Nunzio’s neighborhoods, a guy with a hyphen in his name had better be either pretty good with his fists or damn fast on his feet.

On this particular afternoon, one of those oppressive August days in Cleveland when the air clings like wet cotton and beer sales hit an annual high, I had just finished a big job for an electronics firm in the eastern suburbs and written them a thirty-six-page report on implementing security procedures, preventing industrial espionage, and keeping the ribbon clerks from stealing paper clips. It’s not the most exciting type of job I get, but it was a nice change from spying on errant husbands and wives, or having guys with bent noses try to make mine look like theirs. The president of the electronics company had given me a little bonus and a glowing letter of reference, my bank account was healthier than it had been in a while, and I was feeling pretty satisfied with myself and with life in general. From past experience, I should have known that someone was going to rain all over the picnic—someone always does. But even if I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have figured it to happen that day. It was just too hot and muggy to start stirring up any shit. That’s when my telephone rang and I first heard of Richardson Hippsley-Tate.

You’d expect a fellow with a hyphen to have a stuffy British accent, but this guy sounded more like New York than New Hyde Park. He was the general manager of the Lake Shore Hotel, a huge new resort-and-convention-center complex that had been completed just the past spring, with all the attendant hoopla, grand opening visits by show business and sports celebrities, and a ribbon cutting by Governor Kinnick capping a boring and windy speech. The Lake Shore had been built, after an internal battle in the city council chambers that had left several members either politically dead or mortally wounded, atop a landfill on the West Side overlooking Lake Erie. It catered to fast-track business executives, Fortune 500 corporations, the local fat cats, and the out-of-town idle rich who were perverse enough to want to spend their precious vacation time in Cleveland.

When Hippsley-Tate called, he told me he needed to see me on “a matter of great urgency.” That’s what he said, a matter of great urgency.

“Could you be a little more specific, Mr. Hippsley-Tate?”

“It’s not something I can talk about on the phone,” he answered, “but this hotel has been ripped off for a great deal of money, and I need you to help me get it back.”

I run a private security agency from my apartment in Cleveland Heights, so I assumed he’d gotten my name from the classified directory. For someone like myself with an independent bent, self-employment seems to work out a lot better than punching a time clock and trying to look busy when the boss walks in. I never bitch about the boss, because I am he; I never have to worry about layoffs, because I am the sole employee of Milan Security, as well as the entrepreneur. So I didn’t have to check with anyone before arranging a meeting with Hippsley-Tate that evening. And since I get to the West Side all too infrequently, I decided not to waste the trip. I invited my lady, Mary Soderberg, to join me for the evening and dinner at Johnny’s.

I picked her up at her place in Shaker Heights, and we headed out the Shoreway to the West Side. In a pair of black slacks and a shiny green blouse that did funny things to the normal blue of her eyes, she looked merely sensational, causing heads to turn everywhere we went. She knew the outfit was one of my favorites, and I was touched that she wanted to wear it for me. In fact, just about everything Mary did touched me one way or another. I was getting scared about Mary—she was beginning to mean too much to me.

Mary regarded the rough-hewn scenic wonders of downtown Cleveland as we swung by Municipal Stadium and approached the bridge. “This isn’t going to be one of those deals where you get hurt again, is it, Milan?” she said. “I hate it when you get hurt.”

“I’m not real fond of it myself,” I told her. “When it comes to that, the whole idea is to hurt the other guy.”

“Didn’t General Patton say something like that?”

“He never said it to me.”

The big-shouldered silhouette of the Lake Shore Hotel rose against the darkening sky on our right as I pulled off the Shoreway and started down the access road. It was a beautiful hotel, some fourteen stories high, covering almost two hundred acres of prime lake frontage. Beautiful, that is, if you like stark modern architecture done in grays and muted pinks. Me, I prefer the solid buildings that have been around for a while—the ones that proudly announce they’re from the Midwest: Terminal Tower, Gray’s Armory, St. John’s Cathedral, and the old Deming Mansion, which climbs the bluff just a few blocks from my apartment at the intersection of Cedar Road and Fairmount Boulevard. Then again, I like big band music and American cars and Beeman’s gum and day baseball on grass, so you can’t go by my tastes.

The entire effect was as cold and emotionless as the eyes of a doll. Glass elevators climbed up the outside of the building like glossy-backed beetles, mirrored glass reflected the colors of the evening sky as though bent on improving them, and there was a too noisy waterfall in the lobby. For the life of me I couldn’t find a ninety-degree angle anywhere in the hotel. The walls of the lobby were covered with a kind of carpeting, and curved, as if they had been photographed with a fish-eye lens. The only thing square was the Muzak chirping merrily from hidden speakers all over the place. I asked at the desk for Mr. Hippsley-Tate. The clerk, a perky nineteen-year-old girl wearing a gray blazer with the hotel’s name and crest on the pocket, pointed me across the lobby to the executive offices.

Mary said, “I’ll meet you in the cocktail lounge, or whatever they call that place with the tables by the waterfall. I don’t want to sit there in the office like a camp follower while you play detective.”

“I hate to tell you this,” I said, “but I’m not playing.”

Mary didn’t understand about my work sometimes. Our relationship, now six months old, was basically hassle free. We hardly ever argued about anything, and when we did it was more of a spirited discussion than an argument. But she didn’t always understand about my work, and it troubled me. One of these days I felt it would cause a problem.

Richardson Hippsley-Tate’s secretary was supercilious and curt, as if I were a pencil salesman come to foist some low-priced soft-lead specials on her boss. I guess when your hairspray is laid on as thick as hers was it cuts off circulation to your head, and you tend to snap at people as a matter of course. Eventually she relented, performed some sort of mystical ritual with the intercom system, and the man himself came out of his office to greet me. Hippsley-Tate was a stocky five foot eleven, and affected a dashing Continental-style Vandyke that matched his sandy hair. His expensive three-piece suit was of the same shade of gray as the carpeted walls. It must...