Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) Read online

  Pipes, cigarettes, cigars are smoked. Dirty jokes are told. Gossip is exchanged. And politics are argued.

  I happened to need a haircut, so after visiting the morgue to learn what I could about Rachael Todd’s death, I spent part of the early morning sitting in a barber’s chair, soaking up not only the commentary but also the wonderful timeless scents of the barbershop—the hot foam for shaving, the aftershaves, the hair tonics, the powder, the smell of the bristles in the whisk broom when the barber is cleaning off your neck and shoulders.

  The talk itself this particular morning took a roundabout way of becoming political, traveling from the particular to the general—from the murders of Leeds and Neville to the civil rights struggle on the tube every night.

  The only thing that didn’t figure into the mix was Rachael Todd’s death. They’d heard about it but they didn’t know yet that it had some undetermined connection to the murders.

  “landed at an odd angle,” the new county medical examiner showed me after tugging out the drawer in which Rachael resided. “Broke her neck.”

  His name was Dr. Henry Renning and his duties were part time. He had his own practice to tend to the rest of the time. He was best known for wearing one of the most hilariously lousy toupees in town history and for driving a 1951 cherry MG that everybody, including me, envied the hell out of.

  I hadn’t seen Rachael much since handling her divorce. She’d put on considerable weight. In death, at least, she appeared to be much older than her calendar years. She looked sexless now, and she’d been one of those women who made up with an erotic air what she lacked in looks.

  “Her blood alcohol was nearly three times the legal limit. The way the accident looks to have happened, I’m not even sure the driver was sure he’d hit anybody. It’s pretty dark on that stretch of highway and she might just have lurched into his headlights.”

  “I didn’t know she was a drinker.”

  Renning nodded. His rug moved a half inch down his forehead. “The woman who identified her, her sister, said that Rachael here was in AA and had been up to that clinic for alcoholics in Mason City. Twice, in fact.”

  First her husband had beaten her up with his fists. Then she’d beaten herself up with liquor.

  I became aware of where I was. The bodies in the drawers. The terrible cold stench of the place. The hum of gurney wheels as corpses were moved around, the efficiency of it all as depressing as the sight of a man and woman weeping on the other side of a glass door as I’d come in. Weeping silently because I couldn’t hear them, a scene from an ancient silent movie.

  But mostly I was aware of poor Rachael, the left side of her face almost black with bruising from her accident. And various other bruises and small cuts up and down her body. Meat now. Just human meat. I wish Dylan Thomas had been right about death not having dominion. But that was just a poet’s fancy to put up against eternal darkness. Death has plenty of dominion. Plenty.

  “Got a suicide I need to check out,” Renning said, his toupee looking like a squirrel sprawled over his bald pate. “We about done here, Sam?”

  If there were a list of Top Ten Barbershop Topics over the past few years it would include the birth control pill (“Shit, why didn’t they have somethin’ like that when I was young; McCain, your generation’s got it knocked!”); the Berlin Wall (“Who gives a shit? After what the Krauts did, screw ’em!”); Ernest Hemingway (“All the money and all the broads that guy had and he kills himself?”); the recent trip by Rick Paulson to the Playboy Club in Chicago, the first of our townspeople to enter those sacred doors (“Hefner just walks around in his tuxedo with that damn pipe of his and the gals are all over him!”); and the recent murder of Medgar Evers (“I think the colored people are pushin’ it pretty hard these days but I don’t hold with no murder.”).

  “That wife of Williams’s didn’t look so snotty when I seen her at the post office yesterday, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “’Bout time we got a Democrat in there, anyway.”

  “I had a daughter seein’ a colored boy, I’d whip her ass good.”

  “I can tell you I’d take a couple of colored boys I used to serve with in Korea over some of the white boys around here.”

  “They say in France they treat Negroes just like white people.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the French. We had to save their ass in the big war and they never have thanked us.”

  “I don’t want to be nowhere around ’em. I don’t like lookin’ at them or talkin’ to them or even thinkin’ about them.”

  “Segregation’s good for them. They do better when they’re with their own.”

  “Ike was the one who named that son of a bitch Warren to head up the Supreme Court. He’s the one who started all this.”

  “My son in Des Moines says my grandkids go to school with colored kids and they all get along just fine.”

  “Look at Sammy Davis. He don’t care who knows he’s married to a white woman.”

  “Well, they fought in the war just like I did. They shouldn’t get shoved around the way they do. You see them little kids when they get them hoses turned on ’em? I went south one time and you can keep it. Didn’t care for one bit of it.”

  “I’ll take Nat ‘King’ Cole any day. He’s my kind of colored man. A gentleman.”

  “I hear a couple of those bikers really had it in for that Leeds kid.”

  Somehow, if you listened long enough and carefully enough, you heard the kind of prairie debate that was going on, in a more sophisticated way perhaps, all across the country. You heard the men good and true and the men confused and struggling and the men who hated, one or two of them who might even be capable of violence against Negroes in the great wrong moment.

  And once in a while, no matter what the subject was—and it could be anything from did Marilyn Monroe really commit suicide to why Roger Maris really was entitled to that home run record after all—once in a while you really learned something specific and useful.

  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.

  TWELVE

  “SO 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.”

  Th
e 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 firs
t 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.