Fools Rush In (The Sam McCain Mysteries Book 7) Read Online Free PDF Page A

other goodies and then put on the other one. His ties must certainly violate some civil code somewhere, given the fact that they look like an artist’s palette. Except that the colors are stains of various kinds. The spaghetti and the mustard stains are the easiest to guess. The others are more obscure. His only known vice is bowling. As a vet, he spends most of his time at the Legion Lanes, where, upon occasion, he has been known to take home one of the bowling gals. He has a round, good-natured face that gets sort of wan whenever the subject of his wife comes up. She has yet to divorce him. She may just be test-driving this rodeo guy. We’re all afraid that she’ll come back to him someday. Nobody doubts that he’d build her a mansion if she did.
    I could only see the back of the woman Stan was talking to.
    I walked over to Stan and slid in next to him.
    “Sam, this is Marie Leeds. She’s David Leeds’s sister.”
    Marie Leeds possessed one of those faces so regular of feature you wanted to study it. Not great beauty, this face, but certainly pretty. She nodded. “I came out here from Chicago two days ago to spend some time with David.”
    “I’m sorry about your brother.”
    “If I start talking about him, I’ll cry. What I’d prefer to talk about is how serious this investigation is going to be.”
    “She talked to the chief of police,” Stan said, “and said that he was very polite and friendly but she sensed that he might be a little—”
    Marie’s smile surprised me. It was a little girl’s smile and it was a treasure. “‘Stupid’ was the word I used.”
    Her smile relaxed me and I sensed it had done the same for Stan. We were no longer representatives of the white race and she was no longer a representative of the Negro race. Not that we were such great grand friends but we were at least just human beings talking to each other.
    “All the information he gave me came from the newspaper on his desk. Turns out Stan wrote it. Doesn’t the chief file reports?”
    “Well, in his own way he does. He used to have a very bright deputy who did most of the work in that area. But then the deputy couldn’t take it anymore and got a job in Cedar Rapids.”
    “That deputy he has now—that Earle?—he just sat there with his arms folded the whole time I was talking to the chief. The only thing he said was, ‘This is a small town and your brother acted like it was a big town.’ A font of wisdom.” She looked directly at me. “By that I take it Earle meant that David was seeing a white girl.”
    “That’s what we’ve been told,” I said.
    Marie shook her head. “An ambitious young man like my brother, his good looks caused him a lot of trouble. He always said he preferred to live the way white people did. If you saw a job opening, no matter what it was, and you thought you could do it, go up and apply for it. And if you saw a girl you wanted to date, go up and ask her.” She looked at Stan now. “Not that he made a big thing out of dating white girls. Most of his girlfriends were Negro. But every once in a while he’d get serious about a white girl for a while—he always taught dance lessons because it was easy money and he sure met a lot of young women.” The wonderful girly smile again. “David was never much for staying with one girl long, whatever their color was. He liked variety.”
    “Marie raised him,” Stan said. “Her folks were killed in a fire.”
    “You don’t look much older than he was,” I said.
    “Seven years older. They died when I was seventeen.” This smile lacked the energy of the others. “Here I said I didn’t want to talk about him and that’s all I have been talking about.”
    Discreet tears filled the corners of her eyes. She dabbed at them with a piece of tissue.
    “I really don’t want to be emotional about this. I want to find out who killed him. And emotional won’t help me get there.” Another dab at her eyes. “I teach seventh grade and that’s