If Dying Was All

by Ron Goulart

  “Paid in advance?”

  “No. She put down a twenty dollar deposit.”

  “In cash?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “These people who run the Golden Apple,” said Easy. “Are they the same people who operated the inn when you and your wife and daughter used to stay there?”

  McCleary shook his head. “No, this couple has only owned the inn for the past three years as I understand it. You want to know how they can be sure it was really Jackie?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have their description of the girl who made the reservation,” said the old man. “A tall, slender brunette in her late twenties. Jackie would be … Jackie is twenty-seven. Her twenty-seventh birthday was last July 8th.”

  “This girl was alone?”

  “She was alone.”

  “After the 21st she never came back to the Golden Apple Inn or called?”

  “No,” said McCleary. “When I arrived on the 24th, I took a room near hers and waited. I was surprised she wasn’t yet there, but I assumed she soon would be. She never appeared. I waited nearly two days, then drove back here. I felt something must have gone wrong and Jackie didn’t feel it was safe yet to contact me there in Manzana.” The old man reached again into his coat and produced a new envelope. “This was waiting in the mailbox.”

  “Also signed by your daughter?”

  “Yes.” McCleary took the letter out with stiff fingers. He flashed the envelope briefly toward Easy. “Postmarked Los Angeles. The 24th. Mailed while I was waiting out there.”

  “What does this one say?”

  McCleary’s lips compressed and he slapped the letter on his leg a few times, then unfolded it. “‘Dearest Daddy Fred—Please, please forgive me. It’s simply not safe for me to see you right now. Forgive me for thinking it was. And, dear Dad, be patient. I hope we’ll be able to meet soon, so soon. Please, if you love me, don’t try to look for me. Don’t tell anyone I’ve written you. Love, your little girl.’” The old man began to crumple the letter, caught himself. “I do love Jackie and that’s why I intend to ignore her request. She was never very good at making her own decisions. No, I humored her and went out and cooled my heels in the desert. Now, though, well, I think it best to ignore Jackie’s wishes. I don’t want to wait any more, any longer. I want you to find her. She’s in trouble and the best thing is to have me get her out of it.”

  Easy watched the autumn-colored rug at his feet for a few seconds. “The trouble mentioned in the letters. What do you know about that? Did something happen before your daughter disappeared in 1965?”

  “I have no idea what she means. If I did, I could have done something about it,” answered McCleary. “Something about it then and Jackie wouldn’t have had to go away.”

  Easy asked, “You have no servants? No one to look after the house or grounds?”

  “No one. Since Jackie disappeared I haven’t felt the need of anyone around. I can look after myself, cook when I have to. As for the grounds, well, as you’ve seen, nature has reclaimed them. I don’t feel like having a gardener around.”

  “Did you tell anyone to look after your house while you were away? Neighbors or the police?”

  “I don’t know the neighbors anymore. I already told you I didn’t want the police involved in any way.”

  “There was no letter when you got back?”

  “No, no word and there hasn’t been since.”

  The cat was on the narrow mantel over the empty fireplace, stalking now one of McCleary’s Academy Award statues.

  Easy said, “Any sign someone had been here in your absence?”

  McCleary blinked his puffy eyes. “You think Jackie may have returned to the house?”

  “Anyone might have,” said Easy. The Oscar was swatted off the mantel and fell with a clang into an empty copper woodbin. Easy crossed and retrieved it. “Did you notice that anyone had been in the house?”

  “No, no evidence of that,” said the old man. “Of course, I don’t pay the keenest attention to my surroundings these days.”

  Before putting the Academy Award statue back in place, Easy thwacked Tuffy lightly over the skull with it. “What about your daughter’s friends? Have any of them heard from her?”

  “Let him play with it,” said the old man. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  Easy gave the Oscar back to the cat and repeated, “Your daughter’s friends?”

  The golden statue clanged once more into the woodbin.

  “They’ve scattered in five years,” said McCleary. “I still keep in touch with a few of them. I suppose they all think my belief that Jackie is still alive is simply an obsession. By now a boring one at that. To answer your question, Easy, none of Jackie’s friends whom I’ve contacted have received any communication from her at all.”

  “You can give me their names?”

  “Most of them,” said the old man. “I’ll take you out to Jackie’s cottage. There are photos of her and most of the San Amaro gang.” He rose slowly from the sofa.

  “San Amaro gang?”

  “Jackie’s closest friends in the last year or two before she disappeared,” said McCleary, breathing with a faint wheeze as he began to walk toward the wide arched doorway. “A half dozen or so kids who hung around the beach down at San Amaro. Jackie had a notion she might want to model, do television commercials. Most of these kids were on the fringes of show business in one way or another.” He went up the three mosaic tile steps that led to the red tile hallway. “I had the contacts then to help Jackie, but she’d have none of it. She was a very independent girl. Still is I imagine. She lived by herself in a beach apartment in San Amaro those last two years.”

  The fat, gray cat sailed from the mantel to the sofa to the rug. He hustled up the tile stairs and tangled himself in McCleary’s long legs. The old man tripped, fell back against Easy.

  Easy caught him. “Most of these San Amaro kids were with her, were on that yacht when she disappeared?”

  “With one or two exceptions,” said McCleary, regaining his balance. “Although they were in their twenties, they were still very much like a gang of grammar school kids. You know, with blood oaths and fierce loyalties.”

  Easy quietly booted Tuffy over into a white plaster wall of the long hallway.

  Cupboards and tables lined the walls, holding small bronze sculptures, wrought iron candlesticks, Mexican straw figures. On one cupboard shelf sat a half-finished wedge of cherry pie, now beginning to go green with mold, and on a claw-footed table a nearly full tumbler of milk was already sour.

  “Jackie had her own private cottage out back,” said the old man over his bent shoulder, “from the time she was sixteen. She loved to sketch in charcoal and she wrote some very fine, though youthful, poetry.” He stopped to face Easy. “She had such great potential. I expected so much.” He turned and moved slowly on to the rear door of the corridor. From a side pocket in his tweed jacket he took a ring of tarnished keys and unlocked the door.

  The thick door opened onto the glaring, yellow day. The sky was blurred with smog, and even here you could smell the burning in the valley. There was a good half acre of grounds to cross. Only a narrow flagstone path showed clear, cutting through the weeds and overgrown plants and tangled wild flowers. “Did your daughter come here often after she moved to San Amaro?” asked Easy.

  Pronged leaves and drying seedpods brushed the old man’s puffy face. The afternoon heat had brought out an immediate wash of perspiration on his pale forehead. “Not often, but now and then. Jackie was never completely alienated from me. Sometimes, though, she’d show up for a day or two and not even come over to the big house at all. A very fragile, sensitive girl. I hate to think of her still in trouble.”

  Near a high, whitewashed stucco wall stood a small two room cottage. It didn’t match the main house. It was like a miniature English inn or coach house, crisscrossed with beams. The big, gray cat came rustling out of the brush when McCleary inserted a key in the lock of the
cottage door. “No, this is the one place Tuffy isn’t allowed. Would you see he doesn’t sneak in, Easy?”

  Catching Tuffy by the scruff, Easy carefully threw him into a far clump of high milkweed. He followed the old man into the shadowy cottage and closed the door. This room was small and had a beamed ceiling. The walls were nearly all given over to bookcases, and all the books were bright and fresh dusted. “You still come out here?”

  “Yes, I like to spend time here. I visit most every day.” McCleary leaned down over a low spool-legged table and picked up a thick, black photo album. “I can give you a few pictures of Jackie. You’ll no doubt need them in your work.”

  Easy was crossing over the two hook rugs and looking at a patch of wall that was free of bookshelves. It held a dozen framed photos. Easy tapped one with a forefinger. The photo showed several young people standing side by side, wearing bathing suits, smiling in front of a clear ocean sky. “Is this the San Amaro gang?”

  McCleary had been painstakingly easing snapshots out of their black hinges. “What?”

  Easy’s blunt finger tapped the glass again. “The San Amaro gang?”

  The old man rested the photos on his palm and looked over. “Yes, that’s them, Jackie’s own wild bunch.”

  Unhooking the picture from the wall, Easy said, I’ll borrow this. And I want the names of these people and the addresses of the ones you’re still in contact with.”

  McCleary hesitated, then said, “Yes, very well.”

  “I’m going to have to have,” said Easy, “copies of the two letters you were sent. Plus a letter or two she wrote before she disappeared five years ago.”

  “These are the only words I’ve had from Jackie in all that time,” said the old man, touching again the pocket that held the letters.

  “Make me a photocopy.”

  “I’m not planning to go out.”

  “Let me have some made then.”

  “I assure you, Easy, that this is my daughter’s handwriting.”

  Easy said, “I want to be sure, too.”

  The old man nodded finally. “Yes, you’re right. Very well.”

  There was a crash from behind a half-closed door, a glass bottle smashing. Then out of the cottage’s bathroom came the big shaggy cat, chasing a fluffy powder puff.

  “How’d he get in?” asked Easy.

  “I don’t know,” said McCleary. “I always keep all the windows and doors shut tight and locked.”

  III

  THE MAN IN THE white cape said, “It’s not the fires we have to worry about, my friends.” He was a scruffy, bearded man, standing on the corner of Hollywood and Cherokee. “No, it’s the earthquakes.”

  Easy passed him and crossed the hot, late afternoon street in the wake of two silver-haired prostitutes in lavender bellbottoms and spike heel shoes.

  “Wow! We just had another earth tremor right this very minute,” shouted the bearded man in the cape. “The Lord doesn’t plan to give you Angelinos much more time.”

  A sick character actor and three sailors went by Easy. A dwarf was standing on the opposite corner and threatening to expose himself to a cluster of broad, sweating motorcycle riders, who were sitting and standing around the curb. The dwarf ran through Easy’s legs and planted a kick on the front tire of a death’s-head-decorated Harley. “Screw your motorcycle,” the dwarf said.

  Easy walked on. The sky over this part of Hollywood had cinders and soot dancing in it. A female impersonator came out of a drugstore, stopped to dab just bought talcum under his red wig. “Ninety-two in the shade,” he smiled at Easy.

  “Yes, ma’am,” replied Easy, walking on down Cherokee. When he came to the only remaining palm tree on this block, he turned toward an alley. At the head of the alley was a narrow store called The Hollywood Memory Shop. A paper banner in the dusty window asked: Whatever Happened To Everybody? At the alley’s end was a large brownstone warehouse. It had a brand new oak door with a small brass nameplate near the brass doorknob. Hagopian was the name on the plate. Easy knocked on the door, taking a paper parcel from under his arm and swinging it by the string.

  The door opened inward. “John Easy,” grinned the middle-sized, dark man in the doorway. He had a hawk nose, tightly curling black hair and wide, ring-rimmed eyes. He was thirty-nine years old. “Enter. Working on a case?”

  “Hi, Hagopian,” said Easy. “Yeah, I want some background information and you’re easier to get along with than the LA Times.”

  The warehouse was air-conditioned and filled with long, high rows of green metal filing cabinets. There was a room size clearing in among the cabinets, furnished like a Victorian parlor. Hagopian led Easy down a cool lane and gestured at a rocker. “Sit down. How’s Marina?”

  “Over at UCLA registering.”

  “Isn’t she working at the Greek restaurant anymore, the Hungry Junta?”

  “You’re two dumps behind.” Easy sat on the edge of the rocker and rested the parcel on his big knees. “She’s decided to go back to school.”

  Hagopian moved to a low refrigerator. “Beer?”

  “Okay.”

  “I wish Pam would do something like that.” Hagopian took two green bottles of German beer out. “She’s much too restless.”

  “Who’s Pam?”

  “Oh, that’s right. I haven’t seen you in a month.” Hagopian’s eyes widened and new wrinkles formed around them. “I cured myself of Kim.”

  “Probably for the best.” Easy took the opened bottle the dark Hagopian handed him.

  “Then I met Pam,” said Hagopian, stopping to try his beer. “She turns out to be even more restless than Kim was.”

  “How restless?”

  Hagopian sighed. “She’s sleeping around with firemen.”

  “A bunch of them at once?”

  “No, she’s not quirky,” said Hagopian. “One at a time, on different nights.” He drank his beer, swished foam around in his mouth, while new circles grew under his dark eyes. “I think now I shouldn’t have loaned Pam my Jaguar.”

  “You let her borrow the XKE?”

  “You know what a lousy bus system we have in LA. Pam is a nude model and she needed a way to get from one photographer to another.” He sighed once more. “Such a pretty girl, John. Five feet ten with eyes like a fawn and hair the color of roasting chestnuts and the consistency of spun flax. And breasts. Breasts like … what do you call those melons that aren’t cantaloupes?”

  “Honeydews?”

  “Those are green, aren’t they?”

  “Muskmelons? Casabas?”

  “Let’s just say she’s got nice tits,” said Hagopian. “It really unsettles me about those firemen.”

  “Pam comes back and tells you about them, huh?”

  “Sure, same as Kim,” said Hagopian. “It’s something I bring out in women. Even when I interview these nitwit broads for TV Look they break down and tell me things like that. Last week some sweet virginal spade chick who plays a lady surgeon in a children’s hospital on television was compelled to confess to me she’s been balling a Swedish muffler shop man on the sly.” He finished his beer and got himself a second. “Now Pam is even loaning my Jaguar to firemen.”

  “Oh, so?”

  “What’s worse, some of them have taken to driving it to their fires,” said Hagopian. “I don’t know, John, this is a goofy town. Be thankful you’ve got a girl friend who’s only mildly crazy. How can I help you?”

  Easy said, “I want to check out a few things in your morgue.”

  “Okay, tell me what you need,” said Hagopian. “At first I figured with Pam things would go a little different. Because she’s the first girl who was really interested in my private clipping files. Most broads don’t care. They want to borrow my car so they can drive out and ball some washing machine salesman in Downey. They don’t care to know that their very own Hagopian has the largest private collection of facts and research material in Los Angeles. They don’t appreciate the way of life I’m plugged into. Pam, though
, actually liked to riffle through the cabinets. That was lovely to watch, that tall bimbo stretching up and pulling out these drawers and her breasts would dance like … what were those melons again?”

  “Casabas.”

  “Like casabas they’d dance,” said Hagopian. “Have you ever seen a casaba dance?”

  “No, but I don’t watch much television.”

  Hagopian grinned. “Okay, I’m going on too long about Pam. She’ll come back today probably. All the firemen are busy.”

  Easy unwrapped the packet of pictures he’d gotten from his client, Frederic McCleary, telling something about the case. He concluded, “First, I want to see the clippings about Jackie McCleary’s suicide.”

  “You think maybe she’s still alive?”

  “No,” replied Easy. “When I was out talking to McCleary this afternoon he showed me the cottage where his daughter used to live. Somebody had pried open a window in the john.”

  “Anything swiped?”

  “McCleary says no, though he hasn’t gone thoroughly over the whole place.”

  Hagopian left the parlor area and headed down an aisle of filing cabinets. “Somebody decoying the old guy out of there, John, isn’t that kind of elaborate?”

  “Depends on what they were looking for.” Easy followed Hagopian. “McCleary has hardly left his estate since the girl died. If you wanted to get him away from there for any length of time you’d have to have a pretty good lure.”

  “It’s a cruel thing to do.”

  “Not as cruel as breaking in while he’s there and maybe having to kill him.”

  “A point, yes.” Hagopian halted at a filing cabinet. “July, 1965, wasn’t it? Yes.” He slid out a waist-high metal drawer. “They pulled McCleary out of the way and off the premises for two whole days. Why so long?”

  Easy said, “Could be several reasons. If they were after something hidden in the cottage or main house it may be they didn’t exactly know where it was and so they gave themselves plenty of time to search.”

  “Did somebody break into the main house, too?”

  “I couldn’t find any evidence of it.”

  “What does the old guy say? Is there anything worth stealing, something his daughter left with him?”