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

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