Deep Shaker: A Milan Jacovich Mystery (Milan Jacovich Mysteries, Band 3) - Softcover

Roberts, Les

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1598510037 ISBN 13: 9781598510034

Verlag: Gray & Company, Publishers, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

#3 in the Milan Jacovich mystery series . . .

“Roberts combines a strong character and a clever plot with the ethnic diversity that Cleveland provides. He proves that Midwest private eyes can hold their own with the best ones from either coast.” — Des Moines Register

No one is as loyal to old friends as Cleveland private investigator Milan Jacovich (pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovich). So when a grade school chum worries his son Paulie might be selling drugs, Milan has no choice but to help.

Milan turn up Paulie’s connection, a handsome Jamaican named Deshon who pals around with two baseball-bat wielding thugs and a German shepherd dog who looks like he’s all business.

The narcotics business makes curious bedfellows, as Milan discovers during his investigation of a particularly brutal murder; he butts heads with a wily realtor named Christmas, a flamboyant automobile dealer with lofty political ambitions, an edgy street pusher, and his old friends from the Little Italy mob, Don Giancarlo D’Allessandro and Victor Gaimari.

Milan also encounters a drug gang unparalleled in their savagery, and unearths a relic from every Clevelander’s childhood that proves to be deadly.

“Moves with all the skill and economy of prose that is fast becoming Roberts' trademark.” — Booklist

“Another smooth page-turner from Roberts, who keeps the action moving and still fits in some wry observations on parenthood, teenagers, and marriage.” — Kirkus Reviews

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Les Roberts is the author of 19 mystery novels featuring Cleveland private eye 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 Writers League, he came to mystery writing after a 24-year career in Hollywood writing and producing television shows. He has been a professional actor, a singer, a jazz musician, and a teacher. A native of Chicago, he now lives in Northeast Ohio.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

No one is as loyal to old friends as Cleveland private investigator Milan Jacovich (it’s pronounced My-lan Yock-ovich). So when a grade school chum worries his son Paulie might be selling drugs, Milan has no choice but to help.Milan turn up Paulie’s connection, a handsome Jamaican named Deshon who pals around with two baseball-bat wielding thugs and a German shepherd dog who looks like he’s all business. The narcotics business makes curious bedfellows, as Milan discovers during his investigation of a particularly brutal murder; he butts heads with a wily realtor named Christmas, a flamboyant automobile dealer with lofty political ambitions, an edgy street pusher, and his old friends from the Little Italy mob, Don Giancarlo D’Allessandro and Victor Gaimari.Milan also encounters a drug gang unparalleled in their savagery, and unearths a relic from every Clevelander’s childhood that proves to be deadly.

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Chapter One

The sprawling mass that is Cleveland Municipal Stadium can be cold and uncomfortable at the best of times. In the winter—not the best of times—being there constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. On this particular November Sunday a freezing rain was drubbing the faithful football fans of northern Ohio, those small hard drops that sting your face and eyes, falling at a forty-five-degree angle, and most of it was finding its way down my collar. The temperature was about twenty-six above zero, and the wind howling in off Lake Erie sounded like an avenging Mongol horde. The Browns were in the process of blowing out the hated Pittsburgh Steelers, and for all intents and purposes the game had been decided at the end of the first quarter.

Matt Baznik and I had been friends since high school. He’d managed to snag thirty-yard-line tickets, one of the perks of his civil service job at the Department of Public Works, and when he’d called and begged me to join him, I couldn’t think of a single reason to say no. So I had dragged myself out of bed—or out of my girlfriend Mary’s bed, to be more precise—and met him at his house for the drive to the stadium. Mary’s bed had been more fun—and warmer. Mary is the sales manager for Channel Twelve, a local TV station, and someone had offered her tickets to a Willie Nelson concert that Saturday night, but we’d spent the evening watching an old movie on the VCR and cuddling instead. Why should I waste an evening seeing someone who dresses worse than I do?

Like me, Matt Baznik is Slovenian, a big solid guy with a receding hairline, a roll of fat around his middle, and blue eyes that he squints as a result of the myopia that kept him off the school football team and out of the service. He was huddled in frigid misery in his car coat, draining his sixth beer, which undoubtedly added to his chill, cheering listlessly every time the Steelers fumbled or had a kick blocked, which seemed to be every few minutes or so. He didn’t appear to be having a very good time.

“You want another beer, Milan?” he said. “Or maybe a sausage sangwidge?”

“I’m okay, Matt,” I said. But I wasn’t. I wished that pro football teams occasionally conceded games so we could go home, where it was warm and dry. But then the impossible happened—the Browns’ offensive line grew suddenly porous and Bernie Kosar got sacked. The capacity crowd let out an outraged roar. In Cleveland it’s unforgivable to lay unfriendly hands on our quarterback. Bernie Kosar is more than a popular sports figure or a mere celebrity; he is a local hero, an icon, a shining example of young American manhood. And at home, when Bernie gets sacked, it is simply not tolerated. A yellow penalty flag sailed through the soggy air and landed in the backfield, but none of us had to wait for the crime to be identified. No matter what they called it officially, we all knew it was fifteen yards for roughing the Deity.

While the referee paced off the penalty, Matt said to me, “Milan, I think I’m in trouble.”

He was peering through his Coke-bottle-bottom glasses at the nonaction on the field, but from his distracted expression I doubted if he could have told anyone the score. The corners of his mouth were pulled down by invisible five-pound weights.

“What’s the matter?”

He shrugged. “I can’t talk here.”

“Then let’s go someplace where we can.”

“Naw. You want to watch the game.”

“There’ll be other games. Come on.” The weather had gotten steadily wetter and colder, and I felt as though I’d just been paroled.

We made our way through the crowd, which was screaming in delight at the gift first down, and I was glad when we reached the shelter of the stadium’s overhang, out of the pelting rain. The loonies who paint their faces brown and orange and sit bare-chested in defiance of the elements each week in that enclave near the end zone known as “the Dawg Pound” were barking like fox hounds.

We got into Matt’s Plymouth after about ten minutes of wet and silent walking. When the engine warmed up, the blast of the car’s heater was a benediction. Matt drove out of the jammed parking lot and onto the street.

“You want to go for a beer?” I said.

“Let’s just drive around a little, okay?”

He turned east, the lake a roiling gray mud soup on our left, out the Shoreway and then along Lake Shore Boulevard, past the high-rise apartments that now stood on the old site of Euclid Beach Park, that magical place of amusement known to seven decades of Clevelanders as simply “the Beach,” where Matt and I and our friends had gone to meet girls and ride the Thriller and Flying Turns and Laff-in-the-Dark, where I had encountered my first real fistfight and copped my first real feel. There isn’t much left of the park now—a cement bridge from one of the old thrill rides is now part of the entryway to an apartment building—but it has long been rumored that some optimistic and sentimental citizens bought up the components of the old rides when the park closed in 1969 and stored them somewhere, in the hopes that someday there would be another Euclid Beach Park. The memories got to both Matt and me at the same time, and he turned and gave me one of his few smiles of the day.

Our original plan was to repair back to Matt’s house after the game to have dinner with his family. He seemed distracted, a million miles away, but at least he was headed in the right direction. He chewed on his lower lip and peered out at the rain-slick streets through the rhythmic sweep of the wipers, and swung west again. He didn’t seem to have a destination.

“What’s up, Doc?” I said.

“I don’t know what to do anymore. About Paulie.”

Matt’s son Paul was a year younger than my fifteen-year-old, and they had been playmates, combatants, and friends to one degree or another since before they could walk. At times when they were in grade school, Paulie had been over at our house so much I almost wondered which one was Milan Jacovich Jr.

“What’s the matter with Paulie?”

Matt steered through the madness that passed for a traffic pattern at University Circle, and past the various departments of Case Western Reserve University, past Severance Hall, the Newton E. Baker Memorial, the Art Museum, and the breathtakingly beautiful gothic Church of the Covenant, and headed up Mayfield Road through Little Italy. “He hardly ever comes home anymore, and he never tells us where he’s going or who he’s with. He’s gotten really fresh to his mother, and me he won’t talk to at all. He just grunts. He won’t come out of his room, and if Rita Marie goes in there to clean he gets like a crazy man. He won’t take out the garbage or dry the dishes. He’s more like a boarder than our kid. It’s real bad, Milan.”

“It’s just the age,” I said. “They all do it. They start getting hair under their arms and think they can walk on the water. He’ll grow out of it.”

He shook his head forcefully. “It’s more than that. Like he don’t give a damn for anything anymore. You remember his dog?”

Once you’d seen him, you’d always remember the dog. For Paulie’s tenth birthday, Matt had bought him a rottweiler puppy, which they’d named Croat in honor of the centuries-old friction between the Croatians and the Slovenians, with the expectation that he’d grow big and mean and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Gray & Company, Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1598510037
• ISBN 13: 9781598510034
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.de/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxemburg