I got another laugh at that one.
12
“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.”
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 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.