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

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