Read Online 4 - Stranger Room: Ike Schwartz Mystery 4 by Frederick Ramsay - Free Book Online Page B

well enough to stay on the team, ride the bench, to keep the scholarship.”
    “If you had gone with those other guys and practiced what then?”
    “Who knows? I might have made it. Might have been picked in the late rounds and then…there was this guy, Ducky, from my old neighborhood and he—”
    “Ducky?”
    “Yeah, he walked funny, waddled, so we called Duck, Ducky. Well, he was a couple of years ahead of me and he was drafted in a late round. His agent worked a deal for him and all of a sudden, Ducky is a millionaire. Or so he thinks. He goes out and buys a pimped out Beemer, two carat diamond ear studs, and girls. He played for five years in the NBA for four different teams. He was good, but not quite good enough, see. There are thousands of kids who can shoot and play and who are hungry. One percent will make it to the NBA and stay there. One percent. You have to be better than all of the hungry kids who show up every summer and try to take your job away. Ducky had too much, too soon. You don’t come out of the south side with ten cents in your pocket and a pair of one hundred dollar basketball shoes you got ‘from a friend’ and then land a million or two, guaranteed, and not screw up somewhere along the way. If you can recover and fend off the hungry kids, you’ll be okay. But Ducky…”
    “He couldn’t?”
    “Out on his rear end, owed child support to three different women, and had a thousand dollar a day coke habit.”
    “But the money?”
    “Gone. No play, no pay. He’s doing time in Joliet.”
    The conversation had drifted away from where Sam had hoped it would go. Karl pushed his plate away and signaled the waiter.
    “I’d like dessert,” she said. She couldn’t be sure if he would be asking for the check and she wasn’t finished.
    “Oh? Well, sure.” The waiter brought them dessert menus.
    “So, if Ike asked you to stay on as a deputy sheriff, to take Whaite Billingsley’s place, would you do it?” Whaite Billingsley, Ike’s former second in command, had been run off the road by an idiot in a snow storm. A good man, a fair, hard-working cop, gone but not forgotten. His slot had not yet been filled.
    “Well, he hasn’t asked and he won’t.”
    “Won’t? Why?”
    “Sam, you are a sweet thing. But you come from another world, I think.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Look at me, Sam. What do you see?”
    “I see a man who is good and loyal…”
    “And black.”
    “You’re not…well, I mean…”
    Karl smiled. “I know what you mean, Honey. You’re wonderfully color blind, though there are days when I wonder if I was really black, instead of what…beige…? Whether you’d ever have looked at me twice.”
    “I would have.”
    “Yeah, I think you would. But everybody else in this town don’t see it the same way. We are south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Sam. Folks around here are still not quite past Brown vs. the Board of Education.”
    “I don’t believe that.”
    “You see that old couple get up and leave when we walked in?”
    “No. Well, maybe they were finished.”
    “I don’t think they had even ordered, and then there are the notes I get with the mail.”
    “What notes? I don’t remember any notes.”
    “That’s because I intercept them. They’re not nice. They want me to know that some of the good people in the town do not approve of you and me, and they intend to save you, a nice white girl, from this black devil.”
    “That’s what they say?”
    “That’s the nice version. See, even if Ike were foolish enough to offer, what kind of life would I have as a black sheriff? You should have seen that guy, Lydell. He about called me boy. When Ike said I would be leading the investigation, he near fainted on the spot.”
    Sam’s heart fell. She had never even considered the possibility that he wouldn’t stay if the circumstances were right. She had planned to urge Ike to keep Karl and thought the only obstacle would be his FBI career. Now, all that seemed