Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) by Ed Gorman

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
    “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