Эд Горман - Fools Rush In

“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.”