The World's Finest Mystery Part 89

"I don't want to see anybody dead, Mr. Ruttenberg. But if the whole world was on the t.i.tanic and I was in charge of the lifeboats, I don't think you'd get one of the first seats."

He laughed; he had a yuk-yuk-yuk kind of laugh that grated on my nerves almost as much as his racial att.i.tudes. The T-s.h.i.+rt muscle boys guffawed, too, but I don't believe they got the humor; they were programmed to laugh when the Grand Dragon did.

"You seem as if you're pretty well protected already," I said.

"Oh, Ozzie and Jay are great for the everyday stuff. But I know that our being here on Sunday has caused a lot of controversy, and I was hoping to find someone who really was plugged in to Cleveland, who knew the crazies to look out for."

"From where I stand, it seems to me that the crazy we have to look out for is you."

"Ah-ha-ha," he said, but it wasn't a laugh this time. "I'm a crazy who's prepared to pay you very well, though."

"If I tried to spend your kind of money, Mr. Ruttenberg, I'm afraid I'd disappear in a puff of sulfurous smoke."

"You'd druther see some wild-eyed funky n.i.g.g.e.r with a razor cut my throat?"

I glanced out my office window at the Cuyahoga River, which ran past the building. As a big guy who used to play defensive tackle on the Kent State football team, I figured that with a good enough throw I could probably toss Ruttenberg into it with ease. "Say that word again in here, Mr. Ruttenberg, and you're going to have to swim home." The muscle guys stirred uneasily at the threat. "And the same goes for Ozzie and Harriet over there, too. Try me if you think I'm kidding." I fantasized the scenario for a few seconds and added, "Please try me." Hope springs eternal.

"I am truly sorry I offended you, Mr. Jacovich," Ruttenberg said. "It's just a word, after all."

"It's an ugly, hate-filled word that I never allow in my presence. I can't fault you for being stupid, because you probably can't help it. I can, however, blame you for being rude. Remember that. Or don't bother, you're leaving anyway."

"I think you owe me the courtesy of a hearing, at least."

"I don't owe bigots the sweat off my a.s.s."

"Looky here," he said. "We're ent.i.tled to our b'liefs just like anyone else. And I can a.s.sure you that my people are completely under control and will cause no trouble at all unless they are physically provoked. Physically provoked, you understand. We've been called names by the best of them; that doesn't bother us."

"Then you won't have any trouble and you won't need me. Besides, this city is going to great expense to make sure n.o.body offs your sorry a.s.s when you put on your clown costumes and wave the flag."

"They are at that, and I appreciate it." He said the next-to-last word like Andy Griffith used to, without the first syllable. "It's the time leading up to the rally that has me worried.

"We don't want any riots. That'd run counter to our purposes. But d'you have any idea what might transpire here if anything happens to me? Or to anyone? Chaos," he intoned, p.r.o.nouncing both the C and the H like he would if he were saying "chicken." He leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs. "People will get hurt, maybe innocent people, maybe some of your tippytoe-dancing liberal and black friends. You see the truth in that?"

I did, but I didn't tell him so.

"You want that happening here in your city? I don't b'lieve you do, do ya?"

Once again, I wouldn't give him the satisfaction of answering a question that was, after all, rhetorical.

"So here's the deal. The city of Cleveland is providing security at the rally, but before that we're on our own. Now, we're gonna check into our hotel on Sat-tidy afternoon. We want you there just to make sure there isn't any trouble. We eat dinner, you join us- dinner is on me, of course- and at nine o'clock we turn in. We're country people, we go to bed early. Sunday morning you meet us at the hotel, you escort us to the rally, and then the Cleveland po-lice take over and pertect us from those people who don't like what we have to say and wanna deny us our right to free speech under the First Amendment of the Const.i.tution of the United States. You're free to leave then. You don't even have to stay and listen to the speeches." He gave me what he thought was a winning smile. "Although you really oughta, you might learn somethin'."

"I could learn the same things from the wall of a truck stop men's room."

His mean little eyes got even smaller; he didn't like that. He didn't like me. I could live with it.

He was a gamer, though, I had to grant him that. He didn't give up. "So you gonna he'p us out here? Or are you willin' to jus' sit back and maybe watch your hometown burn?"

Now, I am not possessed of sufficient hubris to think that the safety of Cleveland's citizenry depended on me. But the son of a b.i.t.c.h did have a point. American cities today are as volatile as gasoline fumes, and it wouldn't take much of a spark at a public breast-beating where one group disses another in the ugliest of racial terms to set off a conflagration for which Cleveland would have to apologize for the next thirty years.

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 n.o.body 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 c.r.a.p 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 h.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.termilk.

"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 f.u.c.king 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 mayors.h.i.+p 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 inc.u.mbent, 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.

"h.e.l.lo, Clifford," Ed said.

"Stahl, don't you 'h.e.l.lo-Clifford' me, you race-baiting son of a b.i.t.c.h." 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 circ.u.mstances, "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 p.r.o.nounced 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 b.i.t.c.h who's actually gonna protect those sc.u.m."

"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 s.h.i.+t list."

Ed laughed. "Welcome to the club. His s.h.i.+t 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 a.s.sociate and the other from someone I had heard about but never met.

The business a.s.sociate 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 relations.h.i.+p 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-t.i.thing, 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 going 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 G.o.d'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 d.i.n.ky 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 G.o.d'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 relations.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sured 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 tarnis.h.i.+ng 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 sanct.i.ty 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body seemed to notice that. Maybe sitting in the lobby heeled was the Pine Rest's dress code.