The World's Finest Mystery...

by Ed Gorman

  Maybe I could make a very small contribution toward keeping a spark from striking.

  "All right, Mr. Ruttenberg, I'll do it. As long as we completely understand each other."

  "What's there to understand?" Ruttenberg asked, taking a checkbook out of the breast pocket of his discount-store suit.

  "That I despise everything about you," I said.

  * * *

  My pal at The Plain Dealer, Ed Stahl, whose column used to grace page two every morning but, due to the paper's new format, was now buried deep inside where nobody could find it, was frankly appalled. Over the past three weeks since the rally was announced, he had filed several scathing columns excoriating the Klan and the mayor for granting them access to public space, along with the mayor's political enemies who protested that he was coddling bigots and racists who were using the opportunity to savage him for their own aggrandizement, and just about everyone else in town, too. Ed had received several ugly and even threatening voice mails for his pains, most of them from gravel-voiced men who sounded, he said, like refugees from Deliverance.

  "I think you're making a mistake, Milan," he told me over pasta at a table by the window in the front room of Piccolo Mondo on West Sixth Street. "Those people are pigs. You know what happens when you lie down with pigs."

  "I do," I said. "But it seems preferable to a riot."

  "That Earl Ruttenberg is bad paper."

  "He's a fat clown, Ed. And the only people who will listen to his crap are the morons who think like he does in the first place. He's preaching to the choir."

  "If that's true, Milan, you win. So why are you worried about rioting?"

  "Because there's a hell of a lot of people in this town, of all colors, who think Ruttenberg and his people should be used as garden fertilizer. If rocks and bottles and bullets start flying, there won't be any winners."

  He gulped down a slug of his favorite poison, Jim Beam on the rocks, and grimaced. Ed has an ulcer, and has no business drinking anything stronger than buttermilk.

  "Is the money enough that you can live with yourself afterward?"

  "I'll let you know Monday morning," I said.

  He glanced up at the door and his shoulders grew rigid. "Oh my," he said. "Oh my fucking stars…"

  I followed his gaze. Entering the restaurant was one of the most familiar faces— and loudest voices— on the local scene. After a long tenure as de facto leader of Cleveland's African American community, Clifford Andrews had been elected to a lively and volatile mayorship for four years that were characterized by violent temper tantrums and black-power rhetoric, before losing City Hall in a close election seven years ago to the current two-term incumbent, a setback for which he had never forgiven his former friend, and had been not-so-subtly trying to undermine his successor ever since. Now forced into the private practice of law on Cleveland's largely black east side, Andrews had made enough political hay out of the issuance of the KKK permit to last the farmers of Kansas several lifetimes.

  He bore down on us, eyes lasering into Ed Stahl, his cocoa-brown face glistening with perspiration, flanked by two very large black men one might be forgiven for mistaking as Cleveland Browns offensive linemen, and stopped at our table.

  "Hello, Clifford," Ed said.

  "Stahl, don't you 'hello-Clifford' me, you race-baiting son of a bitch." Andrews was enough of a presence that most people look up when he enters a room, but the volume of his voice made sure that anyone who had missed his grand entrance at first corrected their oversight.

  Ed just smiled up at him with the innocence of a Christmas-card cherub. "I'm glad to know you're still reading my column, Clifford. Although only you would call it race baiting."

  "You say I'm trying to start a riot in this city just to make myself look good? I ought to crack you across the face."

  I shifted uneasily in my chair. Clifford Andrews was sixty-three-years-old and suffered from arthritis, but was not beyond the bar-fight stage, not by a long shot. During his administration he had been known to throw ashtrays, crockery, and on one occasion, a folding chair at people who angered or disagreed with him. He also outweighed Ed Stahl by about eighty pounds.

  "Clifford," Ed said, remarkably calm under the circumstances, "if I only wrote my column so that no one ever got their feelings hurt, I'd wind up selling ties at Dillard's. I think you acted irresponsibly, and whether you like it or not, it's my job to say so. Nothing personal."

  "We'll see about that," Andrews said. Then he looked at me and his eyes blazed even more. "You're Jacovich, right?"

  "Close enough, Mr. Andrews," I said. He had incorrectly pronounced the J; the correct way is YOCK-o-vitch. But I sensed Clifford Andrews didn't care one way or the other.

  "I hear that you're the son of a bitch who's actually gonna protect those scum."

  "Word gets around."

  "How can you even look in the mirror?" He sneered. It was almost funny coming from him, the man who'd fanned media fever and street anger over the triple-K hate hoedown from a warm coal to a white-hot ember.

  Almost.

  "I guess from time to time we all have trouble looking in mirrors, Mr. Andrews," I said.

  His dark skin grew even darker as the blood rushed to his face. Then his lips tightened into a smile that could best be described as satanic. "You'll get what's coming to you, too. You and your honky racist employer, too. I'll see to it," he promised, and stalked off into the inner dining room. His two companions gave me a lingering look before they followed him.

  Everybody else in Piccolo Mondo was giving us the looks. I just ignored them, but Ed boldly stared them down until they went back to their pizza and pasta.

  "Move over, Ed. I guess I've just joined you on Clifford Andrews's shit list."

  Ed laughed. "Welcome to the club. His shit list is longer than the one that tells who's naughty and nice." He took a carbon-crusted briar pipe out of his pocket and stuck the well-chewed stem between his teeth. No smoking was allowed in the dining room, but there was no law against pretending to. "I have to say that as mad as Clifford has ever been at me, he's never threatened me before, Milan."

  "That bothered me, too," I said. "Well, look on the bright side— he didn't throw any furniture."

  * * *

  But Andrews did hurl a good bit of invective my way when he spoke to the Channel 12 news anchor, Vivian Truscott, on the six o'clock news that evening, calling me an even worse racist than Earl Ruttenberg, who, in Andrews' words, "at least has the guts to be up-front about it." I've been called dirtier names, I suppose, although rarely with less justification, but I still had to hope that my two sons didn't hear it.

  Those particular three of my allotted fifteen minutes of fame on the news show did prompt two unexpected office visits the next morning, one from a longtime business associate and the other from someone I had heard about but never met.

  The business associate was Willard Dante, who ran the largest manufacturing company of residential and security devices in Ohio, in the not-too-close exurb of Twinsburg. He garnered national recognition a few years ago with his development of a stun belt that had civil libertarians picketing outside his factory, but my relationship with him was based more on the alarm systems, surveillance cameras and security paraphernalia which I purchased from him on occasion for my more paranoid industrial clients. He was the kind of church-tithing, flag-waving super patriot I didn't have anything to do with socially, but our business dealings had always been cordial.

  "I was on one of my rare trips downtown anyway today, Milan," he said heartily after I'd poured him a cup of coffee, "so I thought I'd pop in and tell you in person that I thought what Cliff Andrews said about you on TV last night really stinks the big stink. You deserve better."

  I shook his outstretched hand. "Thanks, Will, I appreciate it. But I can't say it really bothered me. Andrews rants and raves all the time. Not that many people listen to him anyway."

  "Well, I think you're doing the right thing. Somebody somewhere is goin
g to blow Ruttenberg away for his sins one of these days, but I'd just as soon it didn't happen here. I'm glad you're on board to see it doesn't happen."

  "The police are going to baby-sit him in public on Sunday," I said. "There's more security planned than if the pope was going to show up."

  "I know," he said. "The mayor is breaking out the tear gas, and I heard a rumor there would be snipers up on the rooftops. Snipers, for God's sake, In Ohio! So what does Ruttenberg want you to do for him?"

  "Make sure he and his Keystone Klunks check into their hotel with no problem, for one thing. And then I have to eat dinner with them. The next morning I drive him downtown to his slimefest, and then I'm through."

  "I'd think that they would be staying at a downtown hotel, for the sake of convenience," Dante said.

  "They're too cheap for that, Will. They've booked twenty-five rooms at a dinky little motel out by the airport."

  "My stars," he said. He was the only person I'd ever met who said "my stars" as an exclamation and didn't sound like somebody's grandmother. "That's tacky. Where are you going to eat with them? McDonald's?"

  "No, they picked this little low-end steak house close to their motel, a place called Red's, for God's sake. I think I'm going to eat before I go."

  He laughed. "Anything I can do to help out? Want to rent some security cams?"

  "I don't think we'll need them, Will."

  He nodded, looking a little disappointed. "Well, listen, pal, I just wanted to let you know that I'm with you a hundred and ten percent on this one, and that what old windbag Andrews said about you last night is not going to affect our business relationship in the slightest."

  "I appreciate the support, Will."

  "What are friends for?" he said.

  Well, it was nice to get an attaboy when the rest of the world seemed ready to hang me on the wall. A few of my friends had called me at home the previous evening to complain about Andrews' vilification of me on television, but no one had dropped in except Willard Dante. I had visited his Twinsburg plant several times, but I don't think he'd ever been in my office before.

  About five minutes after he left, my second visitor arrived, and I wondered if they had crossed paths in the parking lot. I'd seen him on television, seen his photo in the newspaper countless times, and had even heard him speak once when he made an unsuccessful run for the office of county commissioner a few years earlier. The Reverend Alvin Quest of the Mount Gilead Baptist Church on Cleveland's east side was a moral and spiritual leader in the black community who had also made a brief and spectacularly unsuccessful run for a U.S. Senate nomination a few years earlier. He was a consistent voice of reason and, when the occasion called for it, of fire.

  In my office, however, he spoke with warmth and courtesy in a soft and well-modulated voice, his dark eyes sparkling behind his small, thick-lensed spectacles.

  "It's a pleasure meeting you, Reverend Quest," I said. "I've been an admirer of yours."

  He smiled. "Thank you," he said. "That's good to hear."

  "So I hope you haven't come up here to give me a spanking about this Klan thing."

  "Just the opposite," he assured me. "To be sure, Clifford Andrews and I share the same goals, but we usually differ sharply in how we want to accomplish them. I apologize for his rashness on the news last night."

  "No harm, no foul."

  "Actually I came here to offer you any help I can."

  That one brought me up short. "Help?"

  He nodded. "It would be very destructive to what our people have tried to accomplish in Cleveland if anything untoward were to happen to Mr. Ruttenberg or any of his minions. To say nothing of tarnishing the name of a city that has come so far in the last twenty years. So it is vitally important to me that Earl Ruttenberg stay safe as long as he is in our city. I'm more than happy to dispatch some of our people to help you with your security."

  "You think that's such a good idea, Reverend? Letting the world see black men actually protecting the head of the KKK?"

  "Oh, we'll be there having our say as well. The city of Cleveland has set aside a special area for protesters, just like they have for the Klan supporters. I'm sure you read that in the papers."

  I nodded.

  "But it will be a peaceful, quiet, dignified protest. I want to let everyone know that there are other avenues besides violence, that we defy those sad, silly, misguided fools in their sheets and hoods. That there is sanctity in human life, and that under the skin, people are all the same. Isn't that what Martin Luther King preached?"

  "Martin Luther King," I said, "never met Earl Roy Ruttenberg."

  Not knowing, of course, that soon Dr. King was to have his chance.

  * * *

  It was Saturday afternoon and I was sitting in the so-called lobby of the Pine Rest Motel on Brookpark Road near the Cleveland Airport. I don't know why they had named it that; there wasn't a pine tree within ten miles, and if the lobby furniture was of the same quality as the beds in the rooms, it wasn't very restful, either. It wasn't the kind of hot-pillow joint where hookers plied their trade in cubicle rooms and pushers passed dime bags down by the ice machine, but it wasn't exactly the Ritz Carlton, either.

  I was wearing a .357 Magnum in a shoulder harness under my sports jacket, but nobody seemed to notice that. Maybe sitting in the lobby heeled was the Pine Rest's dress code.

  For the past hour there had been a trickle of rough-looking white males with one piece of luggage apiece checking in at the desk; a few of them gave me suspicious glances bordering on hostile, but I suppose when your main source of recreation is running around wearing sheets and hoods and foaming at the mouth about blacks and Jews and Catholics, suspicion and hostility are your daily portion.

  Finally, at a few minutes after four, a vintage Cadillac pulled up in front of the motel office. Earl Roy Ruttenberg got out of the backseat, and Ozzie and Jay exited from the front. I walked out of the lobby into the heat of August.

  "I see you got here all right," I said to Ruttenberg. I made no effort to shake hands, nor was he expecting me to do so.

  "So far, so good. Kind of a boring trip up from Medina, with all that highway construction. All quiet around here? Any suspicious-looking characters?"

  "A bunch of them," I said, "but they're all with your group."

  "Heh-heh," he said. "No, I was thinking of those folks of the Negro persuasion."

  I assured him that no "folks of the Negro persuasion" were in evidence except the room maids, walked him in to the front desk, followed by Ozzie and Jay, who today were sporting mirrored sunglasses in a pathetic attempt at looking cool, macho and bad-ass. I watched while they checked in. It had been prearranged that the boys of bummer would share a room next to Ruttenberg's, which turned out to be a suite, a sitting room with a bedroom attached.

  I sat on the sofa and watched him unpack. He had brought a brown suit, white shirt and an ugly tie, which he put in the closet, extra socks and underwear and a pair of brown shoes that went in the dresser drawer, and a sports jacket, gray slacks and a bilious green polo shirt, which he laid out on the bed. Then I watched in amazement as he lovingly unpacked and hung up his white robe and hood. It was almost funny.

  Almost.

  "Tell me," I said, "do you have those sheets laundered commercially, or does your wife wash and iron them for you?"

  "Go ahead and have your fun, Mr. Jacovich," he said good-naturedly. This time he pronounced it correctly.

  "Where did you learn the correct pronunciation of my name?"

  "Oh, I heard some loud-mouthed boogie talking about you on television the other night."

  I started to get up from the sofa, but he raised a hand like a traffic cop stopping a line of cars. "Take it easy, now. You just told me I couldn't use the N-word; you didn't say nothing about boogie."

  I just sighed. When he's right, he's right.

  From his briefcase he took several stacks of flyers and brochures of racial filth and put them on the table near the window. I
avoided them the way I would a pile of rancid garbage.

  He pulled a silver hip flask from his pocket and unscrewed the top. "Join me?"

  "No thanks."

  He laughed. "Fussy who you drink with, huh?"

  "Something like that."

  "Don't be that way. No reason we can't be friends, is there?"

  "There are a thousand reasons. I'm here to see no one takes a shot at you or sticks a knife in your eye, and I'll do that to the best of my ability. If you were looking to hire a friend, you dialed the wrong number."