by Ron Goulart
“I can come back when you’re alone.”
“I’m alone,” said Hagopian. “I was only explaining why I’m not bursting forth to greet you. Come on in.”
The enormous warehouse was cool inside, filled with long high rows of green metal file cabinets. In a clearing among the cabinets was a scatter of Victorian furniture and a small refrigerator.
Hagopian was a dark middle-sized man a few months from forty. His black hair was curly, his nose hooked, his dark eyes underscored with thin-fine circles. He was wearing a cotton paisley shirt and a pair of candy-stripe shorts. Slumped over the arm of the bentwood rocker he nodded Easy toward where a cable-stitch white sweater and a brand new pair of tennis shorts. “Like a beer?”
“I guess it’s close enough to noon.” Easy bundled the tennis clothes and threw them to the dark TV Look writer. “Taking up tennis?”
“Taking up with a girl who plays tennis,” said Hagopian. “Correction. She not only plays, she eats, breathes and shits tennis. This is the only way I can see her by day. Her name is Jem and she’s got the most terrific healthy tits you’ve ever seen. If they had an Olympic event just for nice-looking tits she’d take it.” He hopped, pulling on the tennis shorts.
“It’s raining,” said Easy.
Pointing a thumb toward the ceiling, Hagopian said, “So I heard, but it’s nice to have a private investigator friend who can confirm these things by astute first-hand observation.”
“Meaning you can’t play tennis in the rain.” Easy got up out of the rocker and walked to the little white refrigerator.
“Jem can play in rain, sleet, hail, falls of toads, meteor showers … she’s very keen on the sport,” said Hagopian. He pulled off his shirt, replacing it with the tennis sweater. “I don’t have to meet her until 1:30 so I can help you out until then.”
“At least,” said Easy as he fetched two bottles of dark ale out, “a girl who spends all her waking hours on the courts won’t be borrowing your Jaguar, the way some of your ladies have.”
Hagopian blinked, causing new wrinkles to ripple across his forehead. “My car. As a matter of fact, John, she loaned the Jag to the tennis pro at one of her clubs,” he said. “But that’s enough about my day-to-day struggles in the wacko capital of the world. What are you working on?”
“A missing girl again.” Easy frowned. He located a bottle opener on the floor behind the refrigerator and opened the two ales.
Hagopian dropped down onto a striped loveseat to tug on bulky white socks. “You don’t seem to be glowing with your usual zeal, John. After all, you met Jill during a missing girl case … how is she, by the way?”
“Splendid,” said Easy. “It’s a friend of Jill’s who hired me to find his wife, guy named Jim Benning.”
Hagopian dropped the tennis shoe he’d picked up. “Hey, John, you aren’t looking for Joanna?”
Easy walked over to hand his writer friend one of the dark ales. “Yes. You know where she is?”
The dark Hagopian shook his head. “No, and I’m not surprised her husband doesn’t.” He took a sip from the chill bottle, swished the ale once from cheek to cheek before swallowing it, then shook his head again. “A lovely girl, but wacky as a fruitbar.” He sipped once more. “Sooner or later they all come here, John. To the wackiness center of the universe, like pilgrims drawn to Mecca. And a goodly lot of them find their way to poor lovable Hagopian. I’m sort of a lodestone for wacky broads.”
Back in the rocker, rocking slightly, Easy said, “So you know Joanna Benning.”
Hagopian laughed. “Her name then, among others, was Joanna Feyer. I rarely fool around with them after they marry and pretend to settle down. A normal everyday wacky relationship is plenty enough of a strain, without adding a crazed husband.”
Easy stopped rocking. “What do you mean about her name? Was she using other names when you knew her?”
“This was four years ago.” Hagopian leaned back against the carved headrest. “I met her at a cocktail party up at the TV Look offices, around Christmas. She introduced herself as Judy … Judy Fain. Then when she found out I was a writer for the mag, she gave me her rightful name. Joanna was figuring to expand out of modeling into television acting. Would you care to guess how many girl models have that ambition?”
“102%,” said Easy. “Why’d she use a fake name with you?”
Hagopian set his bottle of ale down and clapped his hands on his bare knees. “She’s a very guarded girl, John. I got the feeling sometimes when she was over at my place that I was harboring a fugitive.”
“From what?”
“Life in general.” New rings danced under his eyes. “I don’t know exactly what they did to her when she was a kid, but it fucked her up pretty good. She’s, you know, a mixture of very open and very secret. Naturally I’m drawn to a broad like that. Armenians make good uncles to lost souls. Joanna could be mean as hell, but you always felt she was vulnerable. That somebody had to pay attention to her, take care of her … and you were that person. I only dated her for about three months and then she went off on a new tangent.”
“She ever use the name Joan St. John when you knew her?”
“No,” answered the writer. “The thing with names … she told me it was an added protection, so she wouldn’t get too involved with anybody. I remember her telling me she used to go to rotten rundown bars around LA—and you can find some exceptionally good rotten rundown bars in these parts—and get some schlunk to pick her up. The fun was in giving him a fake name and a fake bio.” He sighed. “So she’s still hiding?”
“Benning hasn’t seen her in six days,” said Easy. “Apparently she’s been wandering off during most of their marriage. Never for this long before.”
Hagopian nodded. “Guys put up with a lot from Joanna, because, she’s always pleasant when she comes back to you. She can be very loving and contrite. But, boy, to ride that merry-go-round full-time … Benning’s got more patience than I had.” He reached the ale off the floor and drank again. “You didn’t know I knew her. What did you want out of the famous Hagopian morgue?” He stood, walking in between two rows of green metal cabinets.
“You’ve already given me some of it. I want background on Joanna Benning, anything which might tell me where she’d be likely to go,” said Easy. “I’ll be checking out a lot of people, but I like to have as much extra background stuff as I can get first.”
“Maybe she’s in Mexico.”
“Why Mexico?”
The dark writer grinned. “A private joke, John. Joanna was always suggesting she and I go away, run away, and live a quiet and untroubled life in Mexico.”
“Did she name a specific place?”
“You can build a castle in the air without buying a lot first.” He stopped halfway down the aisle, reached up to pull out a chest-high drawer. “Actually I don’t have too much in my private information files on Joanna.” He drew out a manila folder. “Some composites from her modeling days, two or three clippings from when she opened a boat show or handed out oranges at a supermarket premiere.”
Easy took the thin folder and flipped through it. “Smaller breasts than most of your girls.” Finally he closed the folder and handed it back.
“Most vulnerable girls have small tits.” Hagopian refiled the material on the missing Joanna. “Anything else? You know I have the largest private clipping collection in greater Los Angeles.”
“Know anything about a psychiatrist named Gill Jacobs?”
Hagopian’s left eye narrowed as he thought. “Nope.” He walked to the end of the row, turned right. “I’ll check for you, but I think not. I’m sure he hasn’t written a book or been on any talk shows. He hasn’t invented a new therapy.” He turned down a new aisle of cabinets, stopping at a J drawer. “Is he someone Joanna may have run off with?”
“It’s possible,” said Easy. “Except I have an appointment to see him over in Santa Monica late this afternoon. I think Joanna may be further away than Santa Monica.”
>
“Not a good hideout town, no.” Hagopian gave his head a negative shake. “Nothing on Dr. Jacobs. What does her husband think, by the way?”
“He thinks he needs me to find her,” answered Easy. “He says he has no notion about where she is, or who she’s with. Though he did give me a few leads on people and places.”
Hagopian shut the J drawer. “I apologize for my morgue’s blankness on this Jacobs guy. Anything else?”
“There’s a possibility she’s been spending time over in San Ignacio, at a place called the Maybe Club.”
“Ah,” said Hagopian. “Joanna’s hitting a better-class rotten and rundown dive these days. The Maybe Club is a high-class sewer.” He trotted off, still in sweatsocks and no shoes, to a new row of files. “Here. A write-up from the San Ignacio Pilot weekend section a couple months back.” He unfolded a full tabloid page and gave it to Easy.
“ ‘Controversial Club’s Owner Defends Liberal Views,’ ” Easy read the headline. “Is he in politics, too?”
“He thinks it’s okay to screw other peoples’ mates,” explained Hagopian. “In San Ignacio that’s a pretty liberal view.”
Easy looked at the photo of the Maybe proprietor leaning against the bar in his club. “This is Sunny Boy Sadler. …”
“Right, onetime singing cowboy of the B movies,” said Hagopian. “I spent many happy afternoons in the Forties with his films. Little did I realize then that Sunny Boy was usually so juiced they had to practically glue him to his horse.”
Easy refolded the clipping and rubbed it against his chin. “Despite his denials, the Maybe Club is a swingers’ hangout, isn’t it?”
“A wife swappers’ enclave, sure.”
“According to the rules of the game, Joanna would have to have a mate to swap, wouldn’t she?”
“Yeah, somebody besides poor Jim sitting at home with a light burning in the window.”
“I’ll have to find out who that was,” said Easy. He asked his friend to look up Darrel Skane, the psychodrama therapist Joanna was supposed to have seen, and a couple of friends whose names her husband had provided. Hagopian came up with one news story on Skane, nothing on the others.
After refiling the Skane clip, Hagopian said, “You’re probably going to have to spend some time in San Ignacio.” He walked Easy back to the parlor area of his warehouse.
“Yeah. Why?”
Hagopian sat, reaching again for his tennis shoes: “No town is goofier than our own beloved LA, John, but San Ignacio runs a close second. They don’t say this in the guide books, but San Ignacio is a good town to stay out of,” he said. “And be careful you don’t step in any corruption.”
“Corruption? I hadn’t heard anything about that.”
“I listen in at more places than you do,” replied the dark writer, tugging the second white shoe on. “All the information I have doesn’t come from press clippings. The local government of San Ignacio, up to and including the mayor, may not be as wholesome and upright as it could be. I mention this because I hear the cops over there are on the take, too. So maybe you ought to play it careful, take along a little bribe money.”
Easy said, “Police officers who take bribes? What’s law and order coming to?”
“I guess I’m being redundant,” said Hagopian, grinning.
Easy grinned back at him and headed for the door.
IV
EASY SHIELDED HIS EYES with one big knobby hand and looked through the glass wall of the small private theater. Inside the dim place, crouched on the low bare stage, a lean man was holding a skillet over a hot plate. Easy rapped hard on the rain-smeared glass, caught the crouching man’s attention and pointed to the locked door to his right.
The man inside didn’t do anything for nearly a minute, then he rose up and made a come-around-back gesture.
Circling Darrel Skane’s private psychodrama theater, Easy was walking along a cliff edge. The gray choppy Pacific was three hundred feet straight down, ribboned by a gray stretch of San Ignacio beach. As Easy caught the knob of the rear door a warm wind, thick with rain, swept around him.
Skane was kneeling at the hot plate, shaking something out of a cruet into the skillet. He didn’t look at Easy.
Easy walked to the front row of folding chairs, unbuttoned his damp $250 sport coat and sat. “Am I interrupting one of your private psychodramas?” he asked after a few seconds.
“Patience, sport,” said Skane. “This is my lunch hour.” He was as tall as Easy, only half as heavy. After flicking more dark fluid out of the cruet, he felt the dusty stage until his hand hit a spatula.
While Skane flipped whatever it was he was frying, Easy reached into his coat to get out a small copy he’d had made of one of the pictures of Joanna Benning. He leaned back, the photo resting on his knee, watching Skane. The hollow-beamed ceiling of the theater amplified the sound of rain.
Skane placed a patty on a slice of dark bread, spread an offwhite substance on it, slapped another slice of dark bread on it and took a bite. “Yuck,” he said.
Easy waited until Skane had swallowed. He stood and walked to the stage edge. “I’m looking for this girl.”
The lean gap-toothed Skane ignored the photo, holding his homemade sandwich up toward Easy. “A soyburger, with soy sauce and soy mayonnaise,” he said. “Yuck.” He dropped the sandwich off to one side, then swung his legs over the rim of the stage. “My wife thinks I ought to be on a high-protein diet. If I could just once get that woman out here to participate in one of our psychodrama sessions … we’d find out what it is that’s gnawing at her. First she decides I ought to fatten up, then I ought to slim down. My weight fluctuates more than the Dow Jones averages.”
“What about this woman?” Easy held out the photo.
Skane took it. “Oops, got soy sauce on it. Sorry, there, all wiped off.” He frowned over Joanna Benning’s picture. “Listen, sport, I’ve got a good idea.”
“Yeah?”
“Suppose we switch roles. You be Darrel Skane and I’ll be … what is it? … John Easy,” suggested Skane. “It should provide us both with some interesting and valuable insights into ourselves. Want to try that?”
“No.”
Skane poked his tongue into the slot between his two front teeth. “Uh huh,” he said. “Lots of people are reluctant to give the psychodrama concept a try … my wife, to name one. You’d be surprised what getting outside yourself can do, Easy.”
“While I’m still inside myself, let me ask you again if you know Joanna Benning.”
“I don’t know Joanna Benning.” The lean therapist was watching the sandwich at his right. “You know, I better go ahead and eat that thing. Otherwise it gives trouble.” Reluctantly he retrieved his soyburger and tried a small bite. “You know, sport, I’ve been doing some heavy thinking since your secretary called and made this appointment for you.”
Easy rested one hand on the stage, waiting for Skane to go on.
“Simply because a man doesn’t have an actual medical degree, a fancy piece of high-grade paper in a black frame, he tends to be treated in a second-class way.” Skane paused to sadly chew. “Why shouldn’t those of us on the frontiers of psychotherapy have the same rights as our more tradition-bound brothers? An MD doesn’t have to talk about his patients.”
Easy said, “You don’t have to talk to me, Skane. You can save your information for the police.”
“What do the police have to do with it?”
“This girl has been missing for a week,” Easy told him. “She told her husband she was coming to see you. If I don’t find her soon, the cops will have to join in.”
“Coming to see me? I haven’t laid eyes on her for two long months or more, sport.”
“You do know her then?”
“Not as Joanna Benning.”
“As Joan St. John?”
His eyes on the picture, Skane answered, “Yes, that’s who she said she was.”
“Do you have an address on her?”
�
�No. She made a point of paying for each session on the spot. I told her I’d put her on my mailing list for pamphlets and such, but she preferred to pick them up here.” He took another few mournful bites of the sandwich. “A very attractive woman, whatever her name is. She radiated a sort of upbeat intensity, yet at the same time she seemed very … I don’t know …”
“Vulnerable?”
“As good a word as any,” said Skane. “The two occasions when she took part in an actual drama situation, it was quite illuminating. It seems when she was about eleven her father …”
Easy cut in. “Was she friendly with anyone else who came here?”
Skane put the soy sandwich down again. “I can’t eat this damn thing, I’ll have to face my wife’s wrath.” He glanced up at the shadowy ceiling before meeting Easy’s eyes. “Yes, there was somebody. I suppose that’s why I really agreed to talk to you in the first place, Easy.”
“She came here with someone?”
“Not at first. At first she was alone, very much solitary. After a few weekly sessions she became friendly with one of the guys.”
“What’s his name?”
“I think what attracted her to him was the fact he had a similar fouled-up childhood,” said Skane. “Then so many of us do.”
“His name?”
“Moseson,” answered Skane. “Phil Moseson.”
Easy wrote the name on one of the small file cards from his breast pocket. “Can you give me his address?”
“I can,” said Skane slowly. “It’s not likely to do you much good, though.”
“Why?”
“Phil Moseson was found dead last week.”
V
SUNNY BOY SADLER WAS sitting alone on a high stool in front of his bar. The Maybe Club consisted of two long low rooms which made an L around a corner in downtown San Ignacio. The ocean was a block away. Sadler was five and a half feet tall and weighed slightly over two hundred pounds. He was wearing white levis and a black fringed shirt, leaning on the polished wood bar with his chunky hands ringing a martini glass. To the left of his glass rested a cassette player.
