Too Sweet to Die

by Ron Goulart

  CHAPTER 7

  EASY SAT UP, SHATTERING the fog that had settled down on him. Fuzzy pain circled his head. His eyes felt like they were trying to pucker up. Inhaling through his dry-tasting mouth, he said, “I didn’t catch your last question.”

  Bending over him was the pretty brunet Dr. Newborn, wearing a tan carcoat now. “Are you all right?”

  Across Easy’s lap, like, a collapsed bird, lay his open wallet. The five hundred dollars was gone. “I suppose that’s only fair,” he said.

  “What happened to you, Mr. Easy?” She put one hand on his shoulder, felt at his shaggy head with the other.

  “Are you always this concerned over people you set up?”

  The girl located the place where he’d been hit with the pistol grip. “Not too serious. How’s your vision?”

  “Fine. I saw both of Cullen Montez’s buddies perfectly while they worked me over.” He got hold of her arm, pulling himself up from the ground. “I know they didn’t follow me here. So someone had to phone in.”

  “It’s difficult for you to accept help, isn’t it? There’s a wall of hostility built around you.”

  “It’s a side effect of getting whacked on the head and dumped by the roadside,” Easy told her as he moved toward his car. The black VW was frosted with dew. Easy checked his watch. “Almost midnight, huh.”

  “I noticed you as I was leaving,” said the pretty Dr. Newborn. Her three-year-old Triumph was parked across the road among scrub, its headlight beams nearly swallowed by the heavy fog. “Have you been sprawled out here all this time?”

  “To the best of my knowledge.” Easy grabbed hold of his door handle. “At the risk of being hostile, did you phone the Nordlin estate?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Did Dr. Ingraham?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Easy felt an odd swirling in his stomach and his right leg seemed to shrink for a moment, “Um,” he said, getting his balance.

  “Stay right here a moment, Mr. Easy.” The girl left him and ran through the swirling mist to her car. She turned it around and parked near the gates of Ingraham’s sanitarium. After turning off the motor and lights she returned to Easy’s side. “Go around to the passenger side of your car and get in.”

  “Is this to test my motor reflexes?”

  “It’s to get you off your feet and let me drive.” Easy looked at the pretty dark girl. “Okay.” He gave her the keys.

  Behind the wheel the girl said, “I live not too far from here, on Butterfly Hill Road. I’ll take you there and see what I can do for you and your head. Unless there’s some place else you have to go.”

  “No,” replied Easy. “I usually knock off work at midnight.”

  The girl started the VW and headed it uphill into the fog.

  “I don’t know what you’re going to think of me,” said Marlys Newborn.

  “I like your bedside manner.”

  Thin sunlight came through the bamboo curtains of her bedroom and made thin gold lines down her bare tan back. “And you with an injured head. You should have spent the night resting quietly.” She spread one warm palm on Easy’s stomach. “I guess you have a strong constitution.”

  “I jog a lot.” He moved her hand a bit lower.

  “I hope now,” said Marlys, “you still don’t think I called those goons down on you.”

  “I’m convinced it was just one of those wild coincidences you’re always reading about,” grinned Easy.

  Giving his penis an angry twist, Marlys stood up away from the bed. “Honestly, Johnny, I don’t …”

  “Whoa,” said Easy, sitting up. “I don’t mind what you do to my private parts, but don’t call me Johnny.”

  “Oh, screw you,” said Marlys. “You … you big flatfoot.” She turned her naked back to him, grabbed a short yellow terry robe off a bedpost. She tugged it on, then faced him. “I’ll fix you breakfast anyway. Unless you think I might poison you.”

  Easy kept grinning, not replying.

  “You could certainly benefit from a few sessions of Howl Therapy,” the still angry girl told him.

  Giving a howl Easy got out of bed and took hold of the dark girl by her shoulders. He opened the robe, rested both palms on her warm smooth back. He kissed her, then said, “I’d like whole wheat toast and orange juice, and scrambled eggs if you’ve got them. No coffee, I’m trying to give it up.”

  “Too bad. It’s easier to hide strychnine in coffee than in orange juice.” She eased slowly away from him.

  “And I want to use your phone.”

  “At the bedside.” She dropped out of the robe. “I’ll take a shower first. You call.” She bobbed forward once, kissing him.

  Easy waited until the naked girl was in the bathroom with the water running. He found the small pink phone on a shelf of the bedside table and made a collect call to his office. It was 9:15.

  Nan Alonzo answered, accepted the call and asked him, “How’s Carmel?”

  “There is quite a fad among the locals for bashing visiting detectives over the skull, but outside of that everyone is very friendly. I haven’t located Jill Jeffers,” he said into the little pink phone. “What do you know?”

  “Jill Jeffers was in San Francisco over the weekend,” said Nan. “Or at least her car was.”

  “Good. Where?”

  “The Kearny detective bunch up there in SF found a garage which serviced her Porsche Saturday morning. Battery trouble.”

  “Where’s the garage?”

  “On O’Farrell Street.”

  “Whereabouts on O’Farrell?”

  Nan gave him the number and added, “That’s around the corner from Mitzi Levin’s duty movie house.”

  “I guess I’ll go up to San Francisco.”

  “That’s what Marco Killespie would like.”

  “He’s been in touch again?”

  “Thrice,” replied Nan. “Hold on a second, I’ll get my notes so I can give you the full rich details. Here. He says to spare no expense. His gorilla man has an offer to play a bear on a new variety hour.”

  “Won’t people notice the difference?”

  “He has a bear suit, too. Anyway, the gorilla won’t be available beyond this week if he accepts the bear job, so things are more urgent than ever, for Christ sake. That last is a direct quote.”

  “Okay,” said Easy. “I should hit San Francisco some time after lunch. Whatever else comes up, call it to the Kearny people and I’ll check in with them. Anything more?”

  “Hagopian was by on his way to have his Jaguar fumigated, though that has nothing to do with this case.”

  “Fumigated?”

  “It turns out the girl he loaned it to was letting a mortician friend of hers use her car for funeral processions.”

  “You can’t fit a coffin in a Jag.”

  “The fellow in Oxnard is a pet mortician. You know, dogs and cats and …”

  “Goodbye, Nan.”

  “Bye.”

  Easy put the little pink phone away, glanced at his watch. “I guess I have time for a shower,” he said. He went in and joined Marlys.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE CHUBBY GIRL IN the leather jumper was carrying a cardboard nude man under her arm. She stopped in the blue tile foyer of the small movie house, tugging at her long straight hair.

  Easy walked past the closed ticket booth and tapped on the locked glass doors of the Cinema Azul Dirty Movie House with his middle finger. “Mitzi Levin?” he said to the girl on the other side of the blue-tinted glass.

  “Box office opens at one forty-five,” called the chubby girl. “You’ve got a half hour to wait nearly.”

  Taking one of his business cards out, Easy held it up to the glass. “I’m John Easy, up from LA,” he said at the locked door. “I’m looking for Jill Jeffers.”

  To his left a purple and gold hand-painted poster announced: A Bad Day for Hot Rocks …Starring NADA! “A sincere work of art … an honest depiction of the deplorable working conditions in
your average massage parlor … I was enchanted.” MacQuarrie, San Francisco Examiner. Several photos of naked girls framed the text.

  Chubby Mitzi Levin tugged at her long hair while squinting at Easy. She propped her naked man against a soft-drink machine, came up to the glass door. “What?”

  “I’m looking for Jill Jeffers,” he repeated.

  The door opened a few inches and one chubby hand pulled his card inside. “John Easy & Associates, Detective Services,” she read. “That’s interesting. How do you get to be a private detective?”

  “You have to pass a written test.” Easy pushed against the door with one shoulder.

  Mitzi backed. “I talked to you on the phone. I told you I didn’t know anything.”

  Inside the blue lobby now, Easy said, “Did you know Jill’s car was worked on right around the corner, at Piet’s German Car Garage, last Saturday?”

  Mitzi shrugged, returning to the naked cardboard man. “Her car isn’t her.”

  “Piet himself says she picked the car up in person at about one-thirty Saturday. He stayed open an extra half hour waiting for her.”

  “He would,” said Mitzi. “His brains are in his balls, if you’ll excuse the expression.” She carried the figure over and placed it next to a coming attractions poster. “How does he look here?”

  “It brightens up the room,” said Easy. “What about Jill?”

  The chubby girl hitched up her short leather jumper, adjusted an arm bracelet. “Do you like blintzes?”

  “I’m from Los Angeles. I have to.”

  “I’m about to fix lunch. I just have time before this whore house, if you’ll pardon the expression, opens for the matinee. I live up above. Come along.”

  Easy followed the chubby girl up a carpeted stairway, along a linoleum corridor, through an iron door, up a corkscrewing metal staircase and through another metal door.

  Mitzi spread out her plump arms. “Dis is da place.”

  The long low living room had one big high window that let in the early afternoon sunlight and street noise. The wood floors were rugless, cluttered with cardboard boxes, film cans, piles of photos and posters. An opened-out sofa bed sat, unmade directly beneath the round window. Scattered across the pale blue sheets were tangles of knotted thread and unstrung beads.

  “I wasn’t expecting company,” explained Mitzi. “Not suit and tie straight company at least. These are frozen blintzes, is that okay by you?”

  Nodding, Easy walked in her wake, through the lanes between boxes and toward the alcove kitchen.

  One opened carton was brimful of glossy photos of a nude girl in bed with a horse. Easy asked, “Jill was here?”

  Mitzi adjusted a copper wrist bracelet, then opened a dented blue refrigerator. “Yes, she was.”

  The kitchen table was strewn with cut-up Victorian prints of match girls, wild flowers, obscure animals. An open pair of scissors and a pot of paste sat on a breakfast plate next to the remnants of Canadian bacon and eggs.

  Stepping around the table, Easy said, “You didn’t admit that before, Mitzi. Not to me, not to Jill’s agent. Why?”

  Mitzi located a frying pan under one of the kitchen chairs. “I’m not the best housekeeper in the world.”

  Easy moved to her, took hold of one chubby arm. “You’ve got enough stuff in here to distract you all day,” he said. “Stop sidetracking and tell me.”

  “I thought I was helping her.” Mitzi twisted free and slammed the pan on a sooty stove burner.

  “Helping her how?”

  “I figured she has a good reason for dropping out of sight.” Mitzi poured cloudy peanut oil in the skillet.

  “What would a good reason be?”

  “Some guy probably,” said Mitzi.

  “Do you know who?”

  “No.”

  Easy leaned against the blue refrigerator, arms folded, watching the chubby girl. “Why’d you tell me she was in Carmel?”

  Mitzi concentrated on slicing the frozen blintz package open with a rusty butcher knife. “I ought to wear glasses,” she said, squinting. “I was only trying to stall you.”

  “Then Jill didn’t really phone you from there?”

  “Have you checked in Carmel already? I suppose you have, if you’re here.”

  “Yes,” said Easy. “Nobody admits seeing her.”

  “You talked to her father?”

  “I saw his private secretary. Old Nordlin is supposed to be too sick to talk to the outside world.”

  Oil sputtered up at Mitzi when she dropped the blintzes into the pan. “Shit, if you’ll pardon the expression,” she said, wiping at her cheek. She exhaled, turned to squint at Easy. “I really don’t know where she is. I haven’t seen her since Saturday night. Covering for her is an old habit, a hard one to break. That’s the only reason I lied to you.”

  Arms still folded, Easy said, “You were hoping she was in Carmel, though, weren’t you?”

  Mitzi shook her head, her long straight hair flickering. “No. I made up Carmel. Because of her father and all. I’m not shitting you, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “What about Saturday night?”

  “Where’s my mother humping, if you’ll forgive the expression, spatula?” Mitzi shook a silverware drawer, jabbing chubby fingers into it. “You ought to go talk to Dean.”

  “Dean who?”

  “Dean Constance. Maybe his fame hasn’t reached your part of Los Angeles yet. He’s one of our leading dirty movie makers. He’s richer than shit, if you’ll pardon the expression.” She located a bent-handled spatula and turned the sizzling blintzes. “Dean lives in an enormous mother of a place over in Ross. You know where Ross is? You go across the Golden Gate Bridge and instead of turning off to Sausalito you keep on straight for a while. A very rich town.”

  “Is that where you and Jill were Saturday night?”

  “Dean has a continuous party going,” said the chubby girl. “Jill and I looked in Saturday.”

  “Who’d she leave with?”

  “It’s who I left with that pertains,” said Mitzi. “Can you believe at a party with over a hundred freaky people in attendance I end up with a nice young clean-cut Jewish lawyer. I did and left with him. I never saw Jill after that.” She sniffed, noticed smoke spinning up from the skillet and jerked it up off the burner. “Julia Child I’m not.”

  Easy unfolded his arms, flexed his wrists and his knuckles made a crackling sound. “You’re still not telling me everything.”

  “Yes, I am,” insisted the chubby girl. “I really am.”

  “You’re worried about something.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Easy asked, “Are you afraid somebody’s done something to Jill?”

  “No,” said Mitzi. “Good sweet Jesus, if you’ll pardon the expression, this is the waning of the twentieth century. Girls do odder things than dropping out of sight for a few days.” She dropped the skillet on top of the flower prints on the table.

  “What about suicide?”

  Mitzi turned away, walked to a wall cabinet. Finally, her back to him, she said, “For who? Me.”

  “You know Jill,” said Easy. “I only know her secondhand. People tell me she’s been depressed lately, upset. Do you think suicide’s a possibility?”

  Mitzi faced him, holding two chipped plates. “I don’t think suicide is hereditary, though maybe Jill’s father would like her to think so. She’s not likely to do what …” She stopped, closed her eyes for a second.

  “You had an unpleasant thought just then,” suggested Easy.

  Mitzi side-handed a pile of prints off the table and set a plate down on his side of it. “A mind reader you aren’t. I was only thinking if I don’t stop shooting the shit, you should pardon the expression, and start eating lunch I’m going to be late opening the box office. I don’t want a bunch of impatient deadbeats smashing down my doors.”

  “I thought you only got cinema buffs.”

  “In San Francisco it’s hard to tell one
from the other.” She slapped two charred yellow blintzes down on his plate.

  CHAPTER 9

  FROM THE SECOND-STORY WINDOW of the Kearny Detective Agency office Easy could see the Star of Manila pool hall and a narrow barber shop down on Columbus Avenue. The Filipino barber was sitting in his own chair with a guitar across his lap. A beautiful blonde call girl in a leopard-spotted dynel maxi walked by the shop on the arm of a black pimp in a yellow midi-length double-breasted coat. Fog was beginning to drop down out of the afternoon sky.

  “Quite a panorama, isn’t it?” said the stalky dark man who came into the office where Easy had been waiting. “Kearny is down in Palo Alto de-bugging somebody, John. Can I help you?”

  “Thought I’d stop in before I head over to Ross,” said Easy. “Anything new for me, Joe?”

  Joe Cruz put his tongue over his upper teeth, shaking his head. “Nothing else on Jill Jeffers, alias Jillian Nordlin, or her car. Who’s in Ross?”

  “Dean Constance,” said Easy.

  “The C. B. De Mille of porn.” Cruz moved behind his wooden desk, dropped into his swivel chair.

  “Know anything about him?”

  “He grossed eight hundred thousand last year,” said Cruz. “The citizens of Ross are not too happy with him in their midst. Over there they think culture is something that’s done at the Art & Garden Center. People who make blue movies about Swedish nymphets being balled by motorcycle heavies they consider vulgar. You know how conservatives are.”

  Easy rested his buttocks on the window sill. “That reminds me,” he said. “I may want you to watch somebody for me.”

  “Who?” Cruz eased a memo pad over.

  “Mitzi Levin,” said Easy. “She’s given me several interesting variations on the truth. I think she may know where Jill Jeffers really is.”

  “Can’t you lean on her a little harder than you have?” asked the stalky detective as he wrote Mitzi’s name on the pad.

  “I will,” answered Easy. “She tells me she left Jill at a party of Dean Constance’s on Saturday. We’ll see what Constance has to say.”

  “Want me to put somebody on the Levin broad now?”

  “Not yet,” said Easy.

  Cruz left his chair, wandering to a bookcase. The top shelf contained not books but silver and gold loving cups. “I wonder if any of this business with your Jill has something to do with the Nordlin stash.”