If Dying Was All

by Ron Goulart

  If Dying Was All

  A John Easy Mystery

  Ron Goulart

  A MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM BOOK

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVII

  XIX

  I

  THE TALL, NAKED GIRL held up the portable typewriter at arm’s length, gripping the case handle with long tan fingers, and asked, “How about this?”

  John Easy sat up in bed, wide awake at once, and automatically reached his hand into his bare armpit. He shook his head once, yawned and coughed at the same time, frowned up at the long, slender, auburn-haired girl. “Very good, Marina,” he said. “Keep lifting bigger and bigger objects everyday and by Christmas you can pick up the refrigerator.”

  “No. I mean as something to salvage.” Marina Harley set the pale green typewriter case down on one of the round straw mats circling the low bed. She bent from the waist, knees unbending, and her tan breasts slapped gently together.

  Easy watched her. He was a tall wide-shouldered man, two years over thirty, dark and knocked-about looking. His hair was a mahogany brown, short cropped and yet shaggy. He reached over to the barrel-shaped night stand and got his leather-banded watch. “Salvage from what?”

  “You always put your watch on first,” observed Marina, upright again. “Before anything else.”

  Easy put on his wristwatch. “Salvage from what?”

  “From the fire,” replied the lovely girl.

  “Fire?” Easy swung out of bed and hopped over round straw mats to the balcony windows. He pulled the drapes open. Everything was still there, the pines and oaks and the one other house on Marina’s hilly road. The early morning light was yellow and faintly smoky. “Is the San Fernando fire expected to jump over here into San Ninguno Canyon?”

  “No, not yet,” replied Marina. “But there’s still a possibility it might, according to the news. You can’t really predict with fires. I woke up early and I’ve been trying to decide what to save from the cottage if I have to run for it.”

  In the flower garden of the house down the hill a plump old woman in a smock and straw hat waved a trowel at Easy and smiled. He closed the drapes. “Mrs. Ferguson seems used to seeing naked men up on your balcony,” said Easy.

  “She’s very nearsighted, probably assumes you’re fully clothed. Notice how she squints at the tulips.”

  “It’s too late in the year for tulips.”

  “Well, whatever she’s digging at down there,” said the tall, pretty girl. She placed her left palm high on her bare left buttock. “Don’t start playing detective with me, John.”

  Easy said, “No jokes about my profession.”

  The girl twisted the ends of her long auburn hair around her right forefinger. “You’re getting class conscious now. You think you’ve got a profession and all I’ve got is a job.”

  “You quit your job day before yesterday, didn’t you?”

  “Now you’re being a male chauvinist,” said Marina. “You think it’s silly for a girl to go back to school for a master’s degree. You’d like to see me stay a cocktail waitress at the Tin Guru forever.”

  “I thought you’ve been working at the Downhome Soul Shack.”

  “The Panthers blew up the Soul Shack three weeks ago,” said the naked girl. “You’ve been too busy hiding under beds and taking poor people’s cars away from them to pay attention to me. I haven’t even seen you since Labor Day.”

  “Not cars. I don’t do repo work.” Easy, scratching his pubic hair, asked, “What kind of place is the Tin Guru?”

  “An eastern food automat with a cocktail lounge attached, down at the ocean end of Santa Monica Boulevard.”

  “You mean you can put a quarter in and chutney comes out a slot?”

  “Fifty cents,” said Marina. “But don’t start sidetracking me. I’m angry with you.”

  He stepped two mats closer to the girl. “Okay. About what?”

  Marina turned her slim straight back on him, kicked out angrily at a cane-backed rocker. The chair began flapping back and forth and two bald-headed Raggedy Ann dolls fell off it and landed in a bushel basket full of antique doorknobs. “Oh shit,” said the lovely girl. “I don’t remember now.” She spun around to face him, left hand still on left buttock. “I guess I’m upset and worried about going back to UCLA, John. I’m too old.”

  “At twenty-four?”

  “I’m twenty-five. My birthday was last week,” said Marina. “See, you don’t pay enough attention to me. And I’m worried about the fires in the valley and in some of the canyons and down in San Diego. I like to collect stuff, in a pretty eclectic way, and I’m fond of it all. I can’t even decide what to gather up and run with if the holocaust comes.”

  “As long as you got yourself gathered up it wouldn’t matter,” Easy told her. “The holocaust isn’t likely to reach here to San Ninguno.” He was near enough to reach out and touch her, which he did.

  Marina asked, “I don’t suppose you could get the anchor in your Volkswagen?”

  “Anchor?”

  “My marine salvage anchor, that I have down in the patio.”

  “No.”

  “I’d like to put a couple of things in your car when you leave,” said Marina. “Plus me, to be dropped at UCLA.”

  “Sure, but no anchors.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t get a bigger car. Or a more impressive one.”

  “Because I don’t like cars.” He put his right on top of her left hand.

  “I guess my whatnot won’t fit either.”

  “Ha,” said Easy.

  “When do you have to be back at your gumshoe works?” Both her nipples poked against his chest.

  “By ten.”

  “Well, that’ll give me time to decide what I want you to put in safe keeping.” She glanced downward. “How can you get an erection when we’re probably on the brink of a holocaust?”

  “Male chauvinism,” Easy told her.

  She frowned at him for a moment, then smiled and edged around him toward the bed.

  Easy’s short, broad-shouldered, thirty-six-year-old, blonde secretary asked, “What’s that in the back seat of your car?” She was standing over the air conditioner of his private office, fiddling with a silver dial and looking out at the small gray parking lot.

  “A bushel basket full of doorknobs.” Easy unbuttoned his jacket, loosened his tie and sat down behind his metal desk.

  Nan Alonzo let go of the air conditioner and rubbed at her short, broad nose. “A basket of doorknobs?”

  “Be thankful it’s not an anchor,” Easy said. “Why aren’t you wearing your glasses?”

  “I switched to contact lenses, remember?”

  “You don’t seem able to see too well.”

  “Somebody in my group therapy session last night slapped me on the back and my contact lenses both popped out and we only found one,” explained his secretary. “How’s Marina?”

  “Fine. Except she has the idea that the fire over in the valley is going to jump into her canyon.”

  “These winds,” said the heavyset Nan. “It could. I heard on the news this morning there’s even a fire on Catalina Island, and there was a bad one on San Obito a couple weeks ago. I don’t blame Marina for worrying. Is she still working at that Arabian restaurant—what was it?—the Gourmet Commando?”

  “No, she’s decided to go back to school.”

  His secretary said, “That’s what Sandsto
ne says he’d like to do.”

  “I thought you were dating somebody in show business, a magician.”

  “Sandstone is a magician,” said Nan. “Except he’s not the same one I was dating before. You’re thinking of the Great Nabo.”

  “You have a fondness for magicians.” Easy reached a handful of messages out of his in-box.

  “Yes, and I had an insight about that last night at the group therapy session. That’s why the fellow slapped me on the back, to congratulate me.”

  Easy nodded, cleared his throat, hunched his wide shoulders. He began leafing through his blue memos. Each had Easy & Associates, Detective Services printed in the upper left-hand corner. “The MacQuarrie trial’s been postponed again?”

  “The defense attorney had a stroke.”

  “I thought he had a stroke last month.”

  “That was the judge.”

  Easy leaned back in his swivel chair, which squeaked once, and fanned himself with the pack of memos. “Security checks, divorces. Maybe this isn’t a profession.”

  Nan suggested, “Look at the bottom memo.”

  Easy did. “What’s this? ‘Frederic Clay McCleary says his daughter has come back to life.’”

  “He called a half hour ago. Says his attorneys, Lumbard, Bockman, Arnold & Denny, suggested you.”

  “Remind me to take Carlos Denny to lunch sometime. When is this McCleary coming in?”

  “He won’t be in. You have to go out there.”

  “Why can’t he come to us?”

  “He’s a recluse.”

  “That’s right, they don’t get out much.” Easy frowned at the McCleary memo. “Wait now. Frederic McCleary the screenwriter. He won a couple Oscars twenty years ago.”

  “That he did.” Nan walked around the desk and sat in the client’s chair. “He lives right up in Beverly Hills, off Sunset. Not far from us. Has an enormous 1920’s sort of pseudo-Moroccan, semi-Spanish rancho of a place, with lots of palm trees and imported foliage.”

  “What about his daughter?”

  “She committed suicide five years ago.”

  “And now?”

  “She just wrote her father a letter.”

  II

  THE BIG ROOM WAS dark and sour. The bright yellow afternoon outside showed only as thin gold lines between the heavy drapes. Frederic McCleary sat, hunched, in the exact middle of a wide autumn-colored sofa. He was a puffy, pale man in his middle sixties, with thinning white hair and a prickly moustache. Reaching into a breast pocket of his tweed jacket, he drew out a letter. “I’ve never believed she was dead,” he said across the shadows to Easy.

  Easy was deep in a morris chair, next to a grand piano with a Spanish shawl atop it. A lamp with a rearing iron horse for its base rested near the fringe end of the shawl, and next to it a partly eaten tuna sandwich on a white china plate. The sandwich was several days old. “Now you have proof she’s alive?” he asked the old screenwriter.

  McCleary rested the envelope on one sharp knee and picked up his glass from the pedestal table to his right. “She wrote and asked me to come and see her.”

  “When are you supposed to meet her?”

  “The rendezvous date has already passed,” said the old man. He sipped at his glass of Scotch. “Jackie didn’t keep our date. We were to have met three days ago. She never showed up. I’ve had one further communication, which I’ll come to shortly. I’ve made up my mind I need some help.”

  “You haven’t talked to the police?”

  “I have little use for them,” replied the hunched, old man. “Besides, Jackie’s in some kind of trouble. No, a reliable private investigator is what I need. I should have hired one then, five years ago. But I went on a binge instead. A lost weekend that lasted for a year or more. After that I didn’t care about anything much for a long while.” He ran a finger along the side of his face. “The youngest of my lawyers, Carlos Denny, suggested you.”

  Easy asked, “May I see the letter?”

  McCleary drank a little more Scotch. “I’ll read it to you.”

  Turning the postmark side of the envelope toward himself without actually looking at it, the old man announced, “Manzana, California. You’ll see why in a minute.” He rested his drink on the round table, next to a bowl of spoiling fruit, and eased a sheet of thin blue paper out of the envelope. He coughed twice. “The letter is dated September 21st. ‘Dear Daddy Fred—Please don’t be upset. I’m so sorry you’ve had to worry this long, long time. Now that’s all over. All over. I know you’ve been very hurt by what I had to do. Maybe, maybe when we meet you’ll understand. I know you’ve been lonely and I’ve been unhappy so much, too. Don’t worry, please, Dad, when I tell you that I’m still in some trouble. Nothing big, though I simply can’t come back into the open yet. I must see you. Please come to me, Dad. I’ll be in Manzana, at the place you and Mother and I used to visit when I was so much younger. I’ll have a room there under the name of Hollis, which you’ll understand. Don’t phone me because I can’t risk accepting any calls. Until Thursday, then. Oh, I forgot to say earlier, Thursday is the day when I’ll be there and expecting you so impatiently. Love, Little Iodine.’”

  Easy shifted in his chair. “All the pet names ring true?”

  “Well, of course. My wife, my late wife, and I always called Jackie ‘Little Iodine’ when she was a child,” said McCleary. “After the brat in the comic strip. Jackie was a very high-strung little girl, very bright, but very quick to anger.”

  “What about the name Hollis?”

  “My wife’s maiden name.”

  “The handwriting is your daughter’s?”

  “Yes. I know Jackie’s writing. She wrote me many letters. Whenever I was on location with a picture, back when I did a little directing. Later she wrote me regularly the two years she was away at school in Connecticut. This letter is certainly from her.”

  “You have those old letters?”

  “I have everything of Jackie’s I could get hold of, all preserved.” The old man folded the letter and carefully inserted it back into its envelope. “I know what you’re leading up to, Easy. Let me tell you you needn’t go any further in that direction.”

  Easy said, “Mr. McCleary, it’s the most obvious direction to go. Your daughter killed herself over five years ago and now she writes you a letter and asks you to come out and visit her in some remote spot in San Bernardino County.”

  “You haven’t yet looked into the circumstances of her disappearance, have you?”

  “No, not yet,” said Easy. “I remember the event, though. Your daughter jumped into the Pacific Ocean.”

  McCleary made his puffy hands into fists. “Don’t be so God damn blunt, Easy.”

  Easy said, “Don’t get the idea you can hire me to raise the dead.”

  “I want my daughter located,” said the old man. “While I don’t necessarily expect sympathy, I won’t pay for flippancy.”

  “She left a note,” said Easy. “A suicide note, in her own writing. She went over the side of a yacht in the middle of the night. That was five years ago.”

  “They never found a body,” said McCleary. He was sipping from his glass again.

  “That happens sometimes.” The fringed shawl began suddenly to spill down over Easy’s wide shoulders. He stood rapidly, spun.

  The horse lamp and the stale sandwich went skidding over the edge of the piano. The heavy lamp bounced once on the thick brown and orange rug. “It’s only Tuffy,” said McCleary.

  A fat, gray cat was bellying over the now clear top of the grand piano. He jumped by Easy and attacked the fish sandwich. Easy picked up the shawl and the lamp and replaced them. He sat again. “Tell me what happened out in Manzana.”

  The old man was watching the big shaggy cat. “He’s twelve years old and still kittenish. Jackie loved him.” The old man looked at Easy, touching puffy fingers to the pocket in his coat where he’d put the letter. “You don’t seem the right person to help me.”

  “Okay.
” Easy left the chair.

  “What would you charge to find Jackie?”

  Easy said, “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll charge you $100 a day to find out who sent you that letter and, maybe, why,” Easy told him. “If that turns out to be your daughter, fine. I won’t promise.”

  The big cat, with a crust of bread in its teeth, leaped up into the old man’s lap. Absently stroking the animal, McCleary said, “I spend most of my time here, inside. In fact, that trip to Manzana was the first time I’ve been out of the house for more than an hour or two since Jackie disappeared.” He paused. “Still I try not to be too narrow in my outlook. Like some old eccentric hermit. No, I suppose I really can’t expect you to share my point of view, Easy. Very well, I’ll hire you on your terms.”

  The cat climbed up the front of the old man, stepped on his head and from there jumped up to a dusty bookshelf.

  Easy said, “How’d you get out to Manzana?”

  “I drove,” answered the old man. I’ve kept my Mercedes in good order. Actually I believe my driver’s license has lapsed. I didn’t expect anyone would notice.”

  “Where’d you go once you got to Manzana?”

  “I went directly to the Golden Apple Inn.”

  “That’s the place the letter mentioned?”

  “Yes. We all used to vacation there years ago. Manzana is one of the quieter desert towns, a more relaxed place than Apple Valley.”

  “There was no sign of your daughter in Manzana?”

  The shaggy, gray cat slithered along the bookshelf, knocking down small crystal figures with its tail. The figures fell on the old man and he absently swatted at them. “No, but she had been there,” said McCleary. “She never showed up during the two days I waited there, though.”

  “How do you know she was there at all?”

  “Jackie made a room reservation in person,” replied the old man. “She was there at the Golden Apple on the 21st.”

  “Who saw her?”

  “The people who manage the inn. They told me Jackie was there Monday morning and made a reservation, under the name of Hollis, for the 24th and 25th.”