He sleeved his mouth again. "I suppose you intend to take the briefcase straight to her."
"You suppose right.
"I could stop you," he said, as if he were trying to convince himself. "I'm as big as you, younger— I could take it away from you."
I repocketed the recorder. I could have showed him the .38, but I grinned at him instead. "Go ahead and try. Or else move away from the door. You've got five seconds to make up your mind."
He moved in three, as I started toward him. Sideways, clear of both me and the door. Annette Byers let out a sharp, scornful laugh, and he whirled on her— somebody his own size to face off against. "Shut your stupid mouth!" he yelled at her.
"Shut yours, big man. You and your brilliant ideas."
"Goddamn you…"
I went out and closed the door against their vicious, whining voices.
Outside, the fog had thickened to a near drizzle, slicking the pavement and turning the lines of parked cars along both curbs into two-dimensional black shapes. Parking was at such a premium in this neighborhood, there was now a car, dark and silent, double-parked across the street. I walked quickly to California. Nobody, police included, had bothered my wheels in the bus zone. I locked the briefcase in the trunk, let myself inside. A quick call to Carolyn Cohalan to let her know I was coming, a short ride out to her house by the zoo to deliver the fifty thousand, and I'd finished for the night.
Only she didn't answer her phone.
Funny. When I'd called her earlier from the park, she'd said she would wait for my next call. No reason for her to leave the house in the interim. Unless—
Christ!
I heaved out of the car and ran back down Locust Street. The darkened vehicle was still double-parked across from Annette Byers' building. I swung into the foyer, jammed my finger against the bell button for 2-C and left it there. No response. I rattled the door— latched tight— and then began jabbing buttons on all the other mailboxes. The intercom crackled; somebody's voice said, "Who the hell is that?" I said, "Police emergency, buzz me in." Nothing, nothing, and then finally the door release sounded; I hit the door hard and lunged into the lobby.
I was at the foot of the stairs when the first shot echoed from above. Two more in swift succession, a fourth as I was pounding up to the second-floor landing.
Querulous voices, the sound of a door banging open somewhere, and I was at 2-C. The door there was shut but not latched; I kicked it open, hanging back with the .38 in my hand for self-protection. But there was no need. It was over by then. Too late and all over.
All three of them were on the floor. Cohalan on his back next to the couch, blood obscuring his face, not moving. Annette Byers sprawled bloody and moaning by the dinette table. And Carolyn Cohalan sitting with her back against a wall, a long-barreled .22 on the carpet nearby, weeping in deep, broken sobs.
I leaned hard on the doorjamb, the stink of cordite in my nostrils, my throat full of bile. Telling myself it was not my fault, there was no way I could have known it wasn't the money but paying them back that mattered to her— the big payoff, the biggest bite there is. Telling myself I could've done nothing to prevent this, and remembering what I'd been thinking in the car earlier about how I lived for cases like this, how I liked this one a whole lot…
Les Roberts
The Gathering of the Klan
LES ROBERTS
has had several careers, both as Hollywood producer (the original producer of
Hollywood Squares
), screenwriter (
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
), restaurant critic, and now full-time crime novelist. From the critical and public acclaim he's received, it's doubtful he'll be changing careers anytime soon. His latest Milan Jacovich novel was cited by
People
magazine as "the page-turner of the week" and offers further evidence that the Milan novels are among the most unique and important in contemporary crime fiction. Roberts is equally good in the shorter form, as "The Gathering of the Klan," first published in
The Shamus Game
, illustrates.
The Gathering of the Klan
Les Roberts
J
ust about the biggest controversy to hit Cleveland since the old Browns released Bernie Kozar in mid-season back in the early nineties was the announcement that our African American mayor had granted a permit for a rally outside the Cleveland Convention Center on a Sunday afternoon in August to an out-of-town contingent of the Ku Klux Klan.
Probably no one was as surprised as the klunks, klowns and kleagles themselves; their usual M.O. was to apply for a permit in some northern city and then sue for the right to free speech when the permit was denied. They had accumulated quite a comfortable little nest egg from collecting such judgments in towns in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Minnesota over the last several years, and they were probably planning on collecting big from liberal and heavily black-populated Cleveland.
Everyone was mad at the mayor. The police department's union, the black community, the city council and the county commissioners, all of his many political enemies and rivals, and most of the media had taken the opportunity to try to shoot him down. Everyone was terrified that Cleveland would once again become a national laughingstock, to say nothing of the genuine fear that one hastily hurled racial slur or one thrown beer can could set off a riot that would see the city go up in flames.
The mayor pleaded that his hands were tied and talked a lot about the First Amendment, and begged the citizenry to behave itself and not give the national media any sound bites with which to tarnish the image that Cleveland had taken such pains to rebuild and polish over the past twenty years.
I try to stay out of politics; as the sole owner of a small business— Milan Security, which I christened after my own first name, Milan, since my surname is almost impossible for many people to pronounce— supplying industrial security and private investigations, I have enough to do just trying to keep solvent. My natural dislike and loathing for anyone promoting racial hatred made me follow the story closely in the newspapers, but I had no intention of getting involved in it one way or the other.
Until Earl Roy Ruttenberg, the regional president and exalted Grand Dragon of a southern Ohio branch of the Klan, walked into my office five days before the rally, wanting to hire me as his personal bodyguard for the weekend of the rally.
He was close to fifty, some forty pounds overweight, slightly balding, and had a complexion like four-day-old cottage cheese. He came in flanked by two over-muscled young men who were twenty years younger; both had bad hair and Elvis sideburns and UP WITH WHITE PEOPLE T-shirts, and looked as though they were totally ignorant of even the whereabouts of the nearest dentist. One of them had a girlish, soulful look like Paul McCartney. Ruttenberg sat in one of my client's chairs, but his two trained orangutans positioned themselves on either side of the door.
I listened to his offer of a two-day job as his bodyguard and turned him down flat.
"I'm truly sorry to hear that, Mr. Jacovich," he said, his accent that blend of Southern and Midwestern that you hear down near the Kentucky-Ohio border and which is referred to as "briar," after the somewhat disdainful sobriquet "briarhopper."
"Sorry," I said.
"I've asked around, believe me, gotten lots of recommendations, and you're definitely my first choice."
"I can't imagine why," I said. "First of all, I'm Catholic, and secondly, I despise everything you stand for and I have nothing but contempt for the line of shit you're trying to sell."
Ruttenberg smiled easily. "A lot of people feel that way."
"Maybe you should go find a bodyguard that doesn't."
"You're not saying that you'd like to see me dead, are you?"
"I don't want to see anybody dead, Mr. Ruttenberg. But if the whole world was on the
Titanic
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 attitudes. The T-shirt 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 nigger 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 ass."
"Looky here," he said. "We're entitled to our b'liefs just like anyone else. And I can assure 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 nobody offs your sorry ass 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, pronouncing 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 Constitution 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 bitch 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.