Milan Jacovich Mysteries

Virginia Carville was, as usual, right between my bare feet.
That’s because she was the special reporter and sometime coanchor on the eleven o’clock news on Channel 12, and I’m generally lying on my bed when I watch her.
I met her once or twice several years ago when she was an eager college intern at the station and still known as Ginger. It wasn’t until after she’d progressed to newswriter and then to full-fledged reporter that she began insisting everyone call her Virginia because it was more dignified.

The wonderful thing about art, I suppose, is that it doesn’t really have to do anything. Like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Mona Lisa or Rodin’s The Kiss—all that is asked of it is that it be beautiful.
It doesn’t work that way with people.

I owed Victor Gaimari a favor. Favor being a broad, all-purpose word subject to many interpretations, you might think I’d be picking up his dry cleaning or driving him to the airport or taking his homely visiting cousin to dinner and a show. But it wasn’t that kind of a favor.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Joe Bradac was the last guy I’d expect to see standing on the threshold of my apartment at nine o’clock on a Monday morning. A cop at the door wouldn’t have surprised me. It could have been my landlord—I try to pay my rent by the fifth of the month, but occasionally I forget. Maybe a Jehovah’s Witness. Once in a while even a dissatisfied client shows up at the door—things happen, after all. But not Joe Bradac …

Like me, Matt Baznik is Slovenian, a big solid guy with a receding hairline, a roll of fat around his middle. 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?”

In blue-collar towns such as Cleveland you don’t often run into guys with names like Richardson Hippsley-Tate. It isn’t the norm. There are plenty of people named Annunzio Napolitano or Bernie Feinberg or Leroy Washington Jr. Or even names like mine, Milan Jacovich. That’s Yugoslavian—Slovenian, to be more precise—and in my old neighborhood on the East Side, or in Bernie’s or Leroy’s or Nunzio’s neighborhoods, a guy with a hyphen in his name had better be either pretty good with his fists or damn fast on his feet.