Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) (9 page)

In this case, it had to do with David Leeds.

“Hey, Karl, where’d you hear that?” I asked just as Mike was using the whisk broom on me.

“About the bikers and the Leeds kid?”

“Yeah.”

“Out to Savio’s, getting a tune-up. One of the bikers was in there. The one wears the bandana around his head like an Indian? Name’s De Ruse, you know the one I mean? After he left, Savio told me that when De Ruse was drunk he talked a lot about killing Leeds. He doesn’t go for white gals and Negroes gettin’ together. Savio said he saw De Ruse out in that area near those cabins when he was driving home around the time Neville and Leeds got killed.”

“He really said that about De Ruse wanting to kill him?”

“He sure did.”

One of the old gents laughed. “You’re forgetting you’re talkin’ to a private investigator, Karl.” And then the inevitable: “I always thought Mike Hammer was taller’n you, McCain.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I’m a lot handsomer.”

That got the kind of laughs and smiles a wise man uses as his exit line. Old vaudeville truism.

“Hey, McCain, didn’t one of them bikers get arrested already?”

“Yeah, but as usual Cliffie arrested the wrong one.”

I got another laugh at that one.

“S
O WHAT’LL IT BE?”
the cutie in the pink ruffled blouse and matching pink Capri pants asked me when I was two steps across the threshold of Gotta Dance Studio! She had dimples you could hide quarters in and happy little breasts that said, “Glad to see you.” You could tell she hadn’t worked here long. Chick Curtis hadn’t been able to browbeat all happiness out of her yet.

She asked her question while she was still walking across the shining hardwood floor where instructors and students came together.

“You can see our list right up there on the wall. You can learn any three dances today for only nineteen ninety-five. I’m Glory, by the way.”

The list was long if nothing else, and carefully hand-lettered on a white length of cardboard.

The Stroll

The Twist

The Monkey

The Jerk

The Watusi

The Mashed Potato

The Shimmy-Shimmy

The Dog

The Pony

“You look like you’d be a good dancer,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

“Oh, you know, just the way you move.” She seemed flustered, as if nobody had ever questioned her ability to spot good dancers. I could see why Chick had hired her. Even in her early twenties she’d retained a bit of the innocence and freshness of a much younger girl. How anybody as seedy as Chick had ever come by her, I was afraid to guess. (WHITE SEX SLAVERY IN AMERICA! the supermarket tabloid had cried last week.)

“And there’re a lot more dances, too, on a sheet I can give you.” Then: “Oh, darn!”

She ran over to a bulletin board filled with black-and-white Polaroids of couples who’d become Chick’s Cool Ones. The odd thing was that most of the Cool Ones appeared to be in their forties and fifties. Well-dressed, middle-class folks clearly trying to capture the Kennedy mystique, Jackie Kennedy having been filmed on dozens of chi-chi dance floors twisting the night away with movie stars, political figures, and various members of the Kennedy clan. So now the Lincoln and Cadillac doctors and CEOs and real estate rich of the Midwest were rushing to grab a little bit of that Camelot luster for themselves.

I tried not to stare at her friendly little bottom as she bent to right a photo that was falling off the bulletin board. I would learn anything she cared to teach me, even, God forbid, the shimmy-shimmy.

“There,” she said, pushing the red thumbtack in, “Mr. and Mrs. Winnans sure wouldn’t like to see their picture on the floor.”

A sexy version of Sandra Dee, she turned back to me. I probably wasn’t more than seven years older than she was. But there was a chasm separating us. “So have you decided?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sort of here on business.”

“Well, we’re a business.”

“I know. But I’m here on a different kind of business. I need to see Chick.”

“Oh, you can’t!”

“I can’t?”

“I mean, my dad’s been out of town for a week and won’t be back until the weekend.”

“Your dad is Chick Curtis?” I tried to keep the shock out of my voice.

“Uh-huh. Isn’t that cool? He’d always teach all the kids at my parties how to dance. Are you a friend of his?”

“Well, we’ve done business together on occasion.” Meaning I’d been able to blackmail him into giving me information from time to time. I’d had several clients who’d had problems with Chick and had learned a whole lot about him. He was the forward flank of the Quad Cities mob, which was, of course, the forward flank of the Chicago mob. With two wartime boot camps to prey on, they’d been able to take over all the prostitution and gentler kinds of drugs. They still hadn’t touched heroin. Once you started playing with heroin, the feds took special note of you. Why bother with smack when you could make just as much with your other enterprises, including, of late, some mighty fine counterfeiting that extended all the way to Denver. Chick himself stuck to laundering mob money through dance studios, dry cleaners, roller rinks, construction companies, even, one hears, a group of religious bookstores throughout the Midwest.

“My name’s Sam McCain.”

“Oh. I think maybe he’s mentioned you.”

“Maybe you could help me.”

“Me?” she said, as if nobody had ever asked anything of her before but to look fetching and just a wee bit dense.

“Did you hear about David Leeds being murdered?”

That little face reflected grief as well as happiness. “I’m trying not to think about it until I get off work because I don’t want to be crying in front of customers all day.”

“He worked here.”

“Yes. Everybody liked him. Even my dad who doesn’t like—you know, colored people all that much. But David needed money for college so he came in three nights a week. He was very personable and he knew all the dances. I think it was kind of a lark for him, you know? Except for all the jokes about how Negroes have natural rhythm and all that.”

“That made him angry?”

“Not angry so much as—hurt. You could see it in his eyes then. The people who come in here are usually very nice and they were careful about what they said to David. But every once in a while somebody would make a joke like that and he’d kind of freeze up and just get this look on his face.”

“Sad.”

“Yes, sad. More than angry.”

“So nobody really picked on him?”

The phone rang. It sat inside a glassed-in office. “Just a sec.”

I hadn’t thought about that. Teaching all those
American Bandstand
dances to white people, you’d just be setting yourself up for mean jokes. But Leeds seemed to be a serious young man who wanted a good future, so he did what he had to to get money. And a lot of folks would probably think they were just making friendly jokes, not intending to hurt his feelings at all. But it was hard to watch Sammy Davis Jr. on TV for exactly that reason. The only things people seemed capable of saying to him were race jokes. Very few were really ugly jokes, but they made it clear that to them Sammy wasn’t of the same species—separate and apart. Only occasionally when you were watching him would you see that split second of pain, of humiliation. Hard to enjoy his act when you sensed that there was so much grief under all that showbiz laughter.

“Mrs. Paulson,” Glory said when she came back. “Listen, why don’t we sit down over at that table? I’ll be on my feet for the rest of the day and night.”

Once we were seated, once I’d declined her offer of either coffee or soda pop, she said, “I didn’t mean to give you the impression that there wasn’t any trouble. There was. Just not with our dancing people.”

“There was trouble?”

“The bikers would sit outside and roar their engines and call him names as soon as we killed the lights for the night. I was always afraid for him. And then there was a guy whose girlfriend was taking lessons here and he waited for David one night and jumped him because David had taught the guy’s girlfriend the pony. I mean, they didn’t even touch or anything. David wasn’t much of a fighter but my dad sure is. I screamed for him to come out and he really roughed up the guy pretty bad. Broke his nose and two of his fingers.”

Chick Curtis came from the South Side of Chicago, back when a lot of it was still white. I’d seen him work over a guy in a tavern one night when the drunk had started ragging on Chick for being mobbed up. I don’t think the whole encounter took a minute. Chick grabbed the drunk by the hair, slammed his forehead against the bar three or four times and then he stood him up straight and put one punch into the drunk’s face and another to the guy’s belly. There was blood everywhere. The guy was going to sue in civil court for damages, but then one of Chick’s more sinister employees had a talk with him. No lawsuit was forthcoming.

“The bikers knew better. They only came around when my dad wasn’t here.” She frowned. “Then Rob Anderson and Nick Hannity used to come in. They’d pay for dance lessons and I’d lead one of them out to the floor but then they’d say, No, they wanted to dance with David. Really embarrass him like that. They thought it was really funny, of course. The people who were here to learn the dances really hated them. I was sort of afraid of what my dad would do to them if I ever told on them. But finally it got so bad with how they were picking on David that I didn’t have any choice.

“He waited until they came in one night and then he took them out into the parking lot. I went out to try and stop him from really hurting them. There were a lot of their friends outside. They were all pretty drunk. My dad knew he’d get in trouble if he hurt them, so what he did was walk up to both of them and spit in their faces. Then he dared them to take the first swing. It was sort of funny because you know how short my dad is. Then he spit on them again. Their friends kept yelling for them to hit him. But they knew what would happen to them if they did. They finally just went away.”

The door opened and a gentleman who had to be seventy-five walked in carefully. Glory jumped up and said, “Here, Mr. Winthrop, let me give you a hand.”

“I’m gonna learn to mambo yet,” the old man said and winked at me. “I’m taking the widow Harper to our class reunion and she says that’s the only dance she likes.”

Glory turned away from him momentarily and said to me, “I hope they find whoever killed him. I just wish they hadn’t repealed the death penalty. I told Dad about David when he called in this morning and he said the same thing. He really liked David.”

The hospital was on the way back to my office, so I stopped in to inquire about the condition of my friend in the white Valiant. The one who liked to play in traffic. “His condition is listed as fair,” said the pleasant woman at the switchboard. She was the mother of one of my high school friends. She was legendary for her cheeseburgers, which she fixed every few weeks during the summer in the backyard whose lawn we all took turns mowing to keep her happy. “I’m afraid he can’t have any visitors, Sam. Well, except for that new district attorney. She’s up there now.”

“She is?”

She smiled. “I can tell you’ve met her. She’s a looker, isn’t she?”

“Oh, she’s all right if you like that much intelligence mixed with that much beauty.”

“Same old Sam. You should settle down and get married like Bill did last year. She’s already pregnant.”

“How’s he like St. Louis?”

“Oh, he’s still adjusting. It’s quite a change from our little town.”

Jane Sykes was outside room 301 talking to a uniformed police officer.

No smile when she saw me approach. Just a barely perceptible nod. A yellow summer dress and a matching yellow straw hat. I was alive to other women and grateful to her for that. But I was also scared as hell, as I always was when I knew I’d already loosened my grip on the self-control handle.

When I reached her, she said, “So if you hear him even so much as mumble, be sure to get in there and try to catch what he’s saying. Even if it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure, Miss Sykes.” His eyes dazzled with fondness for the beautiful, stylish lady in front of him.

She didn’t say anything to me, just nodded at the elevator. The doors were open, so we stepped inside.

“I know you can talk,” I said, “I heard you just now telling that cop something.”

“I’m saving it till we get to the cafeteria. I’m starving.”

The typical hospital cafeteria. The nonmedical staffers sitting together enjoying leisurely lunches. The doctors and the nurses seeming in a bit more of a hurry.

Just once I’d like to play doctor. Walk around with a stethoscope dangling around my neck. In my high school days I’d been convinced that that was the easiest way of all to attract girls. While all the other boys were making fools of themselves trying to attract the most unattainable of girls, there I’d be walking up and down the ol’ high school corridors, very cool in my white medical jacket and ’scope, a perfect combination of raw male sexuality and deep medical seriousness. Dr. Sam McCain, M.D.

She didn’t order as if she were starving. Fruit cocktail, a bowl of chicken-rice soup, and a 7UP. I had a burger and a Pepsi.

“Now can we talk?”

“Sure.”

“Have we found out his name yet?”

“‘We’ certainly have, Sam. James Neville.”

“The same Neville as Richie Neville?”

“Half brother. They share a father.”

“Any kind of record?”

“A long one. The biggest rap was for extortion. Served six years in Joliet. Armed robbery as a juvenile.”

Will Neville, the man who blamed David Leeds for the murder of his brother, hadn’t bothered to mention any James Neville. I’d have to talk to him again.

A doctor interrupted us. Young. Nice-looking. No wedding ring. Leaning unnaturally close to Jane as he spoke. “I hope you got my invitation.”

“I did, Dr. Higham. And I appreciate it.”

“And even more, I hope you’ll consider joining me.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

He glanced at me and said, “I didn’t know that DAs trafficked with defense attorneys.”