The Cleveland Creep: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (Milan Jacovich Mysteries, 15) - Softcover

Roberts, Les

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598510606 ISBN 13: 9781598510607

Publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers, 2012

Synopsis

#15 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . .

A simple missing-person case gets complicated when Milan Jacovich (pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich) discovers that 28-year-old Earl Dacey left behind a strange collection of voyeuristic videos in his mother’s West Side Cleveland house. Was Earl just a pervert shadowing Catholic schoolgirls in Northeast Ohio shopping malls with his hidden camera . . . or had he become entangled with unsavory characters in the local adult film business?

When Milan uncovers a possible link to organized crime, the FBI gets interested―and Milan’s “well connected” friend Victor Gaimari gets angry. After a dead body turns up, the Cleveland Police take over, and Milan figures he’s off the case. So why does crusty Lieutenant McHargue ask him to lend a hand?

Still feeling the effects of a recent concussion and well aware of his aging body, Milan takes the advice of a colleague and hires an assistant. Kevin O’Bannion is young and eager to learn the P.I. business. An Army veteran with combat experience and a juvenile-crime record, he definitely won’t shy away from a fight. But will he be able to control his volatile temper and help get the job done? Milan finds out soon enough―with his own life on the line.

About this title

About the Author:

Les Roberts is the author of 16 mystery novels featuring Cleveland detective Milan Jacovich, as well as 11 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, a teacher, and a film critic. In 2003 he received the Sherwood Anderson Literary Award. A native of Chicago, he now lives in Northeast Ohio.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

When a child goes missing, there is nothing more frightening, tragic, or terror-inducing for the distraught parent. Most never give up hoping. That’s how it was for my new client, Savannah Dacey―even though her “child” was a grown man in his twenties.

Savannah is one of the most atmospheric cities in America, on the Atlantic coast in Georgia―full of beautiful old buildings, hanging moss, eccentric natives, and weeping willows. Its summertime humidity can knock you off your feet, and it’s been the subject of a series of books, including one that wound up a Clint Eastwood movie. A river with the same name, Savannah, runs nearby. Additionally, Savannah is the name of a woman who does stand-up news at the White House for NBC television, Savannah Guthrie. Like her, most women named Savannah are attractive and as tropical-looking as their names―or at least they seem more that way than if they’d been christened Sadie or Gertrude.

But Savannah Dacey didn’t fit the name in any way. She’d sounded like a sad sack when she made the phone appointment, and whiny to boot, and she looked like a sad sack, too. She was close to fifty, and looked ten years older. Her fingers were thick as bratwursts, fingernails polished the vivid crimson women stopped wearing in 1972. Her hair had been “done” and dyed an improbable red by someone in a low-rent beauty shop. Her eyeglasses, also of a long-gone era, were bright green, shaped like cat’s eyes, with ungainly rhinestones twinkling in each corner. Her forehead and upper lip were shiny with perspiration, and half-moon sweat stains appeared at the underarms of her short-sleeved white blouse. Her wrinkled, inexpensive peasant skirt made her appear as if she’d walked in the heat and humidity from her West Park home all the way to my office on the west bank of the Flats.

How anyone named “Savannah” wound up in Cleveland is anyone’s guess; it’s not a Savannah kind of town. But I’ve met women with even more exotic names, as you’ll learn.

“It’s kind of you to see me on such short notice, Mr. Jacovich,” she said. She’d phoned me the day before and had mispronounced my last name. If it gives you trouble, just sound it out properly with the J sounding like a Y―Yock-o-vitch. It’s hard to say, I think, which is why I christened my private investigation business Milan Securities after my first name. Put the American slant on it―My-lan―and don’t say it the way you’d pronounce the name of an Eastern European, or the Italian city noted for its fashion shows and its opera house. I’d gently corrected her on the phone, and now Savannah said my name carefully, as if she’d been practicing.

Her son, twenty-eight-year-old Earl Dacey, was missing. He had left the house six days earlier and hadn’t been heard from since. Now his mother wanted to know what had become of him. “He never stayed out all night in his life,” she moaned. “If he’s ever half an hour late getting home, he always calls me. Always. He’s a good boy.”

“Does he have a car?”

“An old, crappy car,” she said. “A two-door, blue Dodge from around 1985. He bought it himself last fall. I never axed him where he got the money.”

Axed him: fingernails on a blackboard. I’d been on the edge of the Earl Dacey disappearance for less than five minutes, and he was already an albatross around my neck. I said, “Is he someplace with a―” I paused, not wanting to say “woman.” I had no right to assume Earl’s sexual preferences. “With a lover?”

“He don’t date girls. He don’t have men friends, either. The best friend he has in the whole world is me.” Savannah said it proudly.

“Where does he work?”

“He don’t have a job right now.” She shifted her spreading backside in my visitor’s chair. “He never had a proper job. He don’t get along with people he don’t know. He’s shy.” Her eyes twinkled behind the cat’s-eye glasses. Maybe she was flirting with me; I hoped not.

“Does Earl have any hobbies?”

“No―he watches TV, an’ plays on his computer for hours at a time. He likes watching baseball.” Her round whey-face lit up as she glanced out my full-length windows across the Cuyahoga River to where the Indians play―Progressive Field is its official name now, although almost everyone in Cleveland still refers to it as what they called it when it opened in 1994, Jacobs Field, or more familiarly, “The Jake.” The ballpark and my office are on opposite sides of a peculiar, sometimes dangerous kink in the river known as Collision Bend―I’m always amazed that few Clevelanders know what it’s called.

“Does Earl play baseball?”

“Lord, no! He’s not very athletic.”

“Nothing else he likes?”

“Eating―spaghetti a couple times a week, or pizza or cheeseburgers. And he likes taking pitchers, too.”

The start of a headache thrummed against my eyeballs. Pitchers! I couldn’t correct my prospective client. Not only isn’t it my job, but half the people in Cleveland call a photograph or a painting a “pitcher,” not realizing a pitcher is a guy on the mound who accurately throws a ball ninety miles an hour at another guy with a big stick in his hand and dares him to hit it. “Pitcher” is also a vessel from which to pour milk, water, or Kool-Aid. But Savannah and lots of other people don’t even know how to pronounce “picture.”

I wasn’t overjoyed about my headache, either. I was getting lots of them―more than I used to. They weren’t blinding migraines that put me out of commission; they were more the essence of a headache. Maybe I was getting old. Sixty is the new forty, or so they say―and sixty was still almost a year ahead of me. I rubbed the back of my neck. “He likes taking pictures?”

“He never goes anywhere without his camera―or his videocam.”

“He has a videocam?”

She nodded. “I dunno what he films with it, but I guess he’s having a good time so I don’t even ask.”

“Did you contact the police?”

“Fer sure,” she said―another expression that quietly died in the late sixties. “I told them he was gone, but they didn’t have much interest.”

“He’s an adult. They assumed he’d left of his own accord.” I cleared my throat. “Maybe he has.”

“No way!” There was real emotion behind her whine. “He wouldn’t worry me like that unless he’s got to.”

I nodded. “It’s a hot morning, Ms. Dacey,” I said, more out of pity than anything else. “How about something cold to drink? A Pepsi, or a Mountain Dew?”

She was immediately interested. “Regular or diet?”

“Regular Mountain Dew, Diet Pepsi.”

“Eew, no diet anything. But I wouldn’t say no to a Mountain Dew,” she simpered. I got a Dew from my office-size refrigerator, painted to look like an old-fashioned Wells Fargo safe, and she poured it into a plastic glass I gave her from my bottom desk drawer.

I said, “Does Earl belong to a photography group or a camera club?”

She shook her head.

“Who does he take pictures of, then?”

“I don’t know. People? Maybe just buildings―or dogs or squirrels. He don’t show me his pitchers very often.”

“And he has no friends―even casual ones?”

“Earl isn’t so at ease with strangers. They scare him.” She examined me with an admiring frankness that weirded me out. “You’re a big guy―I bet you’ll scare him, too.”

“I’ll try not to,” I said. “So he doesn’t have a job or a girlfriend, he doesn’t spend time with friends. Where do I start looking for him, Ms. Dacey?”

“If I knew, I’d look there myself. That’s why I want to hire you.”

“That brings us around to money.” I told her how much I charged, half expecting her to turn pale and scurry from my office, because the whole country was struggling against a recession―but when someone has an important reason to want a private investigator on the job, they somehow get the money they need. Savannah took my quoted prices in stride. Her late husband, Earl’s father, had died eight years earlier, leaving her a handsome pension from his long career on the line at the Ford plant. Shortly thereafter she hired on as night manager of a family restaurant on Detroit Avenue, so it didn’t bother her to whip out her checkbook and write me a retainer.

“I want to start by looking at your house first,” I said.

“Earl’s not at my house.”

“No, but maybe I could find information that will help show me where I might look for him.”

She looked dubious but said it was okay.

“Will you be home in about an hour and a half? At noon?”

“Yeah, but I have to work tonight―I’ll leave at about four thirty,” she said, sneaking another fond glance out the windows. “This is a lovely office―such a nice view of downtown.”

It is a nice view of downtown. It makes me feel good just looking at it. The familiar downtown skyline is my town―or I’ve always thought so. Born and bred, and though I’ve traveled―two years in Vietnam being a military policeman was a large part of it―I’ve never wanted to move anywhere else. “Thank you, Ms. Dacey.”

She fluttered her eyelashes at me. “You can call me Savannah―um―Milan.”

Now we were on a first-name basis―in moments we would become lifelong buddies.

Her high heels clattered down the steps. I didn’t move until I heard her car start up and pull out of the lot. Then I breathed more freely.

I’m never comfortable with my clients. People at the end of their rope wouldn’t hire me if they weren’t under great stress. Still, I had sympathy for a mother whose son vanished, even if he was nearly thirty.

I created a new Earl Dacey file on my computer and typed in all his mother had told me. It didn’t even fill up one page. I feared this would be a long haul, because I had other active jobs on my calendar, the main one an assignment from a large warehouse on the East Side in which brand-new refrigerators, stoves, air conditioners, and giant TV sets were kept until the retail store called for them to be delivered. One of the warehouse employees was claiming workers’ comp and had been staying home from his job for the past six weeks, nursing what he swore was a very badly injured back from wrestling those heavy appliances out to a delivery truck. His bosses wanted to know if he really was disabled―so my assignment was to follow him around and see whether those supposedly misaligned vertebrae were truly keeping him from going back to work. I’d already seen him lug his heavy trash cans from his back door to the curb on garbage days, heft two cases of beer from his shopping cart to the back of his pickup at a Dave’s supermarket, and even struggle with a gigantic watermelon.

I had more written about him than I did about Earl Dacey―but with Earl I was just getting started. I wish I didn’t have to take Savannah’s case.

I guess I’m just a sucker for mothers who tremble on the edge of crying.

* * *

It was still early for lunch, but I found my way to Stone Mad, a little bar-restaurant on West 65th Street. It’s in an ancient building with naked bricks inside, and elegant old wood―something to look at if you happened to be dining alone, like me. I’ve been eating by myself for far too long, but Stone Mad serves a fast lunch when there’s no one to talk to. After twenty minutes I headed south and west to the Dacey house, about a hundred blocks from downtown Cleveland.

In the West Park neighborhood, most of the homes are neatly cared for but old and tired. If Savannah repainted her house something other than faded gray, the upgrade would make all the rest of the homes on her block look even worse. The wooden steps up to a small front porch were swaybacked, and the swing seat, covered in sickly apple-green and bilious pink plastic, sported a coat of dust.

I pushed the doorbell, but didn’t hear it ring. I waited twenty seconds, then knocked firmly. When Savannah let me in, I noticed she wore a dark blue sundress with extra-large white polka dots, and she’d redone her makeup, apparently for my benefit. She wore too much orangey base and green eye shadow, and she’d rushed applying a new coat of lipstick, which crept out from the outline of her lips like something drawn by a first grader trying to crayon a picture in his coloring book.

In her living room the air conditioner didn’t work hard enough. The house was a modest, not-nice and not-crappy place you’d forget about as soon as you left. The furniture was either from Value City a decade ago or bought used from one of a dozen gritty resale stores on Lorain Avenue calling themselves antique shops. At both ends of the sofa were matching lamps, their bases made out of small tin pails painted bright yellow and then adorned with drawings―a contented-looking cow on one and a hog on the other. My taste in furniture has never been high class, but someone would have to shoot me before I allowed them to put those two lamps in my living room.

There were no paintings or decorations on Savannah’s walls save for a star-shaped 1960s-era clock, but every flat surface was dotted with framed photographs, mostly of her child Earl―and I use the word “child” advisedly, because every picture was of a kid under the age of ten.

The chairs, side tables, and sofa in the living room were all outdated. I lowered myself slowly onto the least-uncomfortable-looking chair, feeling a broken spring inside the cushion. The most expensive thing in the room was a fifty-two-inch plasma TV playing a daytime drama. Embarrassed, Savannah muted the sound. “I got hooked on soap operas,” she said as if confessing to a string of serial murders. “I work nights, so I never get to look at good TV shows. That’s when I started watching soaps in the daytime and―well, I’m hooked.”

“That’s okay,” I said. I’d never watched more than five minutes of any soap opera in my life. On the screen two impossibly good-looking actors were lying in bed under a sheet, hoping their audience believed they’d just had a wild sex moment, though neither of them had messed up their stiffly gelled hair even a little bit. I decided to look at Savannah instead.

Bad idea.

“So, Milan―now that you’re in my house, can I return the favor?” She batted her false eyelashes at me and crinkled up her nose. “Do you want a Mountain Dew?”

“Nothing, thanks. I just had lunch.”

Her mouth took on one of those teasing, “your-loss” looks. “I wish I knew you were going to eat before you came. Maybe we could have had lunch together.” She sat across from me on her flowered sofa, crossing her legs and hoping I’d notice them. “So,” she said, “what should I tell you about Earl?”

“Everything you can. Let’s start with a photograph, if you have one.”

“Hmmm,” she cooed, cocking her head at what she believed to be an adorable angle, “there’s lots a pitchers right here in this room. Take your pick.”

“I’d prefer one a little more current.”

“Earl likes taking pitchers, but hates having his pitcher took. I’ll go look for one.”

She disappeared down the hall and into what I assumed was her bedroom. The two drop-dead-beautiful soap opera people in bed had been replaced with two different drop-dead beautiful people, this time having an intense conversation in somebody’s living room. Neither was a good enough actor to indicate a scintilla of sexual tension between them. On those daytime dramas they usually shoot everyone in ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1598510606
• ISBN 13: 9781598510607
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264