by Ron Goulart
Easy got out of the Triumph without opening the door, brushed sports car dust off his trousers and walked off to retrieve his Volkswagen.
X
THE HOUSES IN THIS block of Burbank were the same color as the late afternoon sky, a dirty tan. The lawns had great dry patches which echoed the murky brown shade. Thick, warm air pressed down on everything, and trees looked as though they’d had a hard time getting completely up out of the ground. Clusters of tiny children ran across lawns and between the low houses, circling fallen tricycles and upturned wagons. Dropped plastic toys, yellow and red, made zigzag trails over the dry grass.
Easy stepped over a lime green hula hoop and turned in at the third house from the corner. Below the bell button a small white on black sign said: Ott, DBA Ottstuff Enterprises. Easy pushed the button and a dog barked inside.
After a moment, the inner door opened wide and a tall, 185-pound woman stood facing Easy, filtered by a rusty screen door. “Hi, I’m Sonya.” Her hair was taffy color, worn long. She was wearing a rayon happy coat that hit her well above her enormous plump knees and she hugged a bristly little terrier tight against her low-hanging breasts. The dog made a yapping sound and Sonya stroked his muzzle. “Be still, Trummy.” She smiled, a plump, dimpled smile at Easy. “I get the impression you haven’t heard of me. Sonya?”
“No,” Easy admitted. “I’m John Easy. Would you be Mrs. Ott?”
“My married name.” She pushed the screen door toward him. “Come on in. Dum Dum is expecting you. He’s back in his studio.”
Trummy, the frizzled dog, snapped tiny teeth at the elbow of Easy’s $150 dollar sport coat, giving off an evil-sounding gargle.
The walls of the hallway were completely covered with framed photos. Mrs. Ott stood back-dropped by dozens of glossy photos of herself. She was naked in all of them. “The reason I asked if you’d heard of me is, Mr. Easy, I have something of a rep in the girlie mag field. One of Dum Dum’s lines is the girlie publishing business. That’s part of what it means about Doing Business As Ottstuff Enterprises. You don’t appear to be the sort of man who reads our mags. Black Lace Panties, Sharp-Heeled Black Shoes, Naked Home Companion, Black Lace Panties Annual and so on.” She dimpled and jabbed an enormous, plump thumb in the direction of the nude photos. “I have what girlie photogs refer to, technically, as a zoftig figure. That’s Jewish for ample. I’m also acrobatic. See the row of pics there? Except for the feather duster those are classic yoga positions. Then down there are some of my favorites. One of Dum Dum’s pictorial fellation essays. But then I guess you didn’t come to admire my work.” She reclutched the bristly Trummy and started down the dim hall, her bare feet flapping on the worn hardwood. “We were into the American Indian thing in our pics long before they became a fashionable minority.” Mrs. Ott gestured at six pictures of her atop a naked man with a feather in his hair.
They passed through a kitchen smelling of several kinds of Campbell’s soup and out into a utility room filled with tied bundles of paperback books. Latex Lady was the title of the novel showing at the top of each bundle. Out in the back yard was a windowless hut surrounded by wild grass and dying creeper vines.
Mrs. Ott stooped, still holding tight to Trummy, and picked a red vinyl boomerang off the dry grass. Flinging it over a raw wood fence in the direction of another low dirty tan house, she said, “One of our major regrets is that we’re childless so far. Of course if we had kids I suppose I’d have to hide the glossies.” She trotted up and banged an enormous, plump fist on the tin door of the hut. “Hey, Dum Dum. Company.”
A thin, gray face showed as the door opened. Lee Ott was a small man of thirty-two with the look and shuffle of a senior citizen. His hair was graying, and he gave the impression he’d spent several long years sitting in a dark corner of a veteran’s hospital. “Easy?” he asked.
“Dum Dum is very sensitive about callers,” Mrs. Ott explained to Easy. “Because the DA and the Burbank pigs don’t like us. You’d think this would be a state where artists like Dum Dum could thrive. Do you want Trummy in there while you talk?”
“No,” said Ott. “How are you …” The felt marker he’d held in his left hand slipped out of his grip and bounced in the dry grass. “Sorry. I got it. How are you, Easy?” He banged his head against the metal door on the way up from his bend. “Sorry.”
“Dum Dum is always nervous around company,” said Mrs. Ott. “Most artists are. Well, I’ll leave you two boys. Can I get you a snort, Mr. Easy?”
“No, thanks.”
Inside the musty hut Ott said, “Sorry,” as he tripped over a footstool. He got himself upright. “I suppose I am nervous. This is nothing serious, is it? Your secretary said routine.”
“There’s nothing to get nervous about,” said Easy. “Is there?”
Ott’s left foot tangled with his right and the small, old-looking young man fell sideways into a fat, purple sofa chair. “No, nothing.”
The little office was low-ceilinged and the air was flecked with dust. Piles of books and magazines rose up everywhere. Sprawls of nude photos, of Mrs. Ott and other naked girls, spread over most of the tables and chairs. Setting a portfolio of pictures of plump Mrs. Ott wrestling with a stuffed snake onto the cement floor, Easy sat on a canvas chair. “You knew Jackie McCleary?”
“Knew, yes. Knew, past tense,” said Ott. “She’s dead. We were friends years ago, a gang of us. We bummed around San Amaro … say, you haven’t read my books by any chance?”
“No.”
Ott reached out and knocked over a gooseneck lamp. “Sorry. Here, I got it.” He picked up a paperback book from his desk top. “This is my prestige line of books, the Ott House imprint. Sort of borderline porno. More good writing and less tits and ass. I write the line myself under the pen name George C. Brand.” Ott held the book toward Easy, and it slid from his hand and fell into a cardboard box full of color photos of a nude Japanese girl being painted blue by a man wearing a blond gorilla suit. Ott snatched up the book. “Die, Lorna, Die is the title of this particular one. As you can see. Others in the series have been Die, Margo, Die and Die, Melinda, Die. It’s a private eye series and the format is in each caper the op knocks off a different broad.”
“Oh, so?”
“I was wondering, being a private eye yourself, if you’d give me your opinion of Jack Shott,” said Ott. “Jack Shott is my tough dick character. I’ve been selling 10,000 copies of each title, which isn’t bad for a hole-in-the-wall light porn operation.” He tossed the book to Easy.
Easy said, “I’ll put it on my bedside reading table. Now …”
Ott grabbed up another copy of Die, Lorna, Die, and he bent it open. “I don’t often get a chance to check my accuracy out on a real pro. Here, listen to this: ‘My gold-handled roscoes screamed death at her exquisite unclothed body in .45 caliber chunks. My slugs danced a tattoo of death across her lovely, milk white body.’ Does that sound authentic?”
“Yep, the last time I shot a naked girl it went about like that.”
Ott chuckled. “No, seriously. I really respect the opinion of an operative like yourself. I even have clippings about you in my swipe files.” He selected a new spot in the book. “Listen. ‘I detached the flimsy wisp of bra from her momentous twin breasts and carefully preserved it for the fingerprint boys.’ Does that ring true? Could you get prints off a bra?”
“If you put your mind to it.” Easy rested his palms on his knees and looked directly at the frail Ott. “What happened on that yachting trip?”
“What trip?”
“The trip to Enseñada.”
“Jackie jumped overboard while we were at sea. It happened in the night,” said Ott, looking down at the pictures of the spread-eagle Japanese girl. “She left a note. It was a crazy thing.”
“What about Booth Graither?”
“He didn’t jump.”
Easy said, “He was on board, though?”
Ott cleared his throat. “No, not … Gaither was it?”
&
nbsp; “Graither,” said Easy. “You know he’s dead, too, don’t you?”
“Well, yes. I have the story clippings in my file on bizarre deaths,” said Ott. “Easy, five years ago I was a different person. Shortly after that terrible thing happened to Jackie I changed, settled down. I went into Ottstuff Enterprises and I married Sonya.”
“Who financed you?”
“An uncle gave me a little help,” said Ott. “I’d done pretty well selling porn books to other publishers. Why?”
“Then Graither wasn’t killed on the yacht?”
“I don’t know where he was killed,” said the frail Ott. “He was some guy Jackie was sleeping with. I’m not responsible for every jerk she slept with.”
“Jackie didn’t kill him, did she?”
Ott dropped his book off his knee. “How could that be?”
“Before she took her own life,” said Easy. “Did she kill Graither and then herself?”
“I have no way of knowing. She didn’t put that in her suicide note. It was a very tragic thing.” Ott left his chair and banged his ankle against a filing cabinet. “This isn’t pleasant, digging up the past.”
“Is this the past you’re telling me about?” asked Easy. “Is this really what happened that night on the boat?”
Ott said, “What were you hired for, to shovel up ancient history?”
“I was hired by Frederic McCleary to find out why Jackie wrote him a letter earlier this month.”
Ott cleared his throat. “She did?”
“Somebody did.”
“Well, what did she say? Did she talk about the yacht, about the yacht incident?”
“I can’t tell you what was in the letter,” said Easy. “You can understand the professional ethics of a private investigator.”
Ott said, “I don’t know. How could she be alive?” He stumbled and landed once more in the purple chair. “What did Jackie say about the yacht incident?”
“I can’t tell you until I investigate further.” Ott touched his fingertips together, sneaked a look at the big, wide Easy. “Well, I don’t think there’s any more I have to tell you, Easy. I have an awful lot of editorial work to get on with.”
Easy reached inside his jacket and drew out his wallet. He took out a business card. “Why don’t you call me?”
“About what?”
“About anything you’d care to discuss.” Easy rose and moved to the half-open door.
“Easy,” began Ott.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe I will call you later on, in a day or so.” He stayed in the chair. “Maybe I’ll have some more technical questions. You never can tell.”
Easy said, “Thanks for the complimentary copy,” and left.
XI
THE RETIREMENT TOWN HAD been built to look like a cozy Midwest town of the 1890’s. And it did, except there were no children in its narrow clean streets, no young people, only one dog, and he was a poodle. Instead of buggies and surreys the old residents of Home Town Acres traveled in electric go-carts and the sidewalks had been built to accommodate them, with gentle slopes at each intersection.
It was ten in the morning when Easy parked in the visitors’ lot but a rooster was still crowing someplace. Stretching up out of his little car, Easy spotted the bird on a fence railing across the sunny lot. It was screwed to the wood, a mechanical rooster. Walking into the old people’s town, Easy heard the crack of plastic horseshoes and saw a half-dozen, slow-moving old men playing the game on a sawdust field.
He was walking along a tree-lined street of the shopping section when someone hailed him. A small, old man with close-cropped, white hair was sitting up on the wooden porch of a store named Walton’s Old Fashion General Store & Superette. He was in tan shorts and a candy-striped shirt, leaning back in a wicker bottom rocker. “You’d be Easy, wouldn’t you?”
“You’re Bjornsen?” Easy waited at the bottom of the store’s wooden steps.
“I am,” answered the old man. “I figured you must be John Easy, the private investigator. Not much of a deduction, since you’re the only guy under sixty been by all morning.”
“I was on my way over to your cottage to keep our appointment.”
“That dump,” said Bjornsen. “They got it looking like a little, red schoolhouse on the outside. My daughter and two sons helped me pick out this hole to retire to. There’s a good health care setup here in Home Town Acres, and if I fall down again with another heart attack my daughter and two sons figure these are the people to pick me up.” He rubbed his chest under the peppermint-striped shirt. “Got some plastic junk inside here already.” He left the rocker. “Stay there.”
When the old man was next to him on the clean sidewalk, Easy said, “Carlos Denny, the attorney, helped me locate you. He’ll vouch for me.”
“I’ll vouch for you,” said the old man. “I used to hear about you when I was still with the Nolan Detective Agency in LA. Read an article about you in the Los Angeles Times awhile back, too.” He took Easy across a street and into a block square park. “Come on, we’ll enjoy Town Square Park. Watch out some old broad in a souped up wheelchair doesn’t knock you on your ass.”
After they’d taken seats on a white park bench near a white latticework bandstand, Easy asked, “You worked on the disappearance of Booth Graither back in 1964?”
“The Nolan Agency handled the thing in LA, when it looked like the boy had headed this way,” said Bjornsen. “You know, the finding of what was left of that boy out on San Obito has brightened my life. I had a nice talk with two simpleminded sheriff’s deputies a few days back. Raised my prestige in Home Town Acres, those guys in uniform paying a call. There were a few who expected I’d be hauled off for some dark crime, but a lot of the old broads around here think a guy who mingles with the law must be romantic.”
Easy unbuttoned the coat of his $200 tan suit and asked, “Do you remember the suicide in 1965 of a girl named Jackie McCleary?”
The old detective said, “Movie writer’s daughter. Jumped off a boat on the way down to Mexico.”
“Did you tie her in with Booth Graither in any way?”
The old man sat up. “No, I didn’t.” He scratched his chin, which had a faint white stubble. “Who are you working for in this?”
“Frederic McCleary, the girl’s father.”
“Why now?”
“He got a couple of letters signed by his daughter.”
“She’s not dead?”
Easy told the old detective what he thought, then asked, “How far did you trace Graither?”
“You’re certain he was involved with the McCleary girl?”
Easy showed him the picture of the San Amaro gang. “There he is, standing next to her.”
Bjornsen took the photo, nodding. “There’s our baby-faced boy, sure enough.” He checked the back of the picture. “When was this taken?”
“Summer of 1965.”
“God damn it,” said the old detective. “You mean this moon-faced idiot was sunbathing all over Southern California for six months and I couldn’t find him?”
“You lost him in 1964, didn’t you?”
“I never found the bastard,” said Bjornsen. “As I recollect I was only officially on the thing for a week or so. His old man’s agency back in Chicago sent word he’d supposedly headed out this way and would we see if we could collar him. He’d been away from home too long and the old man was pulling in the leash. The best I could do was place him in Union Station on December 12, 1964. So I could notify Chicago the boy had definitely come to Los Angeles.” He nodded his head from side to side. “After Booth Graither left the train station he simply vanished. I kept my file open on him. Any time the cops pulled in somebody fitting his description, alive or dead, they’d let me know. None of them was ever him.” He returned the photo to Easy. “Summer of 1965. I had my first heart attack then, in August. Damn it, so he was here all along.”
“He was here in the summer of ’65 to get killed,” said Easy. “And
long enough before that to get to know Jackie McCleary.”
“Well, you can’t find everybody,” said Bjornsen. “Though I suppose if I’d found him, he’d still be alive. Well, that’s his God damn problem.”
“What,” asked Easy, “about the money he was supposed to have?”
“$120,000 in cash, unlisted bills,” said Bjornsen. “His old man was up to his ass in dough, still is. Kept the stuff all over the house, in safes mostly. He and the baby-faced boy played some kind of wacky game. Booth would borrow a suitcase full of cash and run away, to become independent maybe. He’d always come back. Except the last time.”
“Whoever killed him then,” said Easy, “probably got the money.”
“The sheriff’s boys say they didn’t find any hundred thou in the cave with the poor guy,” said the old detective. “They didn’t find the stones either.”
“Stones?”
“Diamonds, brilliant cut diamonds in a platinum setting,” said Bjornsen. “Worth roughly $200,000. The boy grabbed them from his mother, a little extra something to pack in with the cash. Did I mention they were something of a wacky family?”
“I didn’t see anything about diamonds in the paper.”
“The newspapers don’t know,” replied the old detective. “You know and the sheriff’s boys know, because I’m telling you. The family wanted the diamonds kept quiet. This was something new for the boy to do, and they didn’t want any word spread until they saw what exactly he was up to. One reason why his old man was especially anxious was those diamonds. That added to his parental concern, added about $200,000.”
“And the stones have never shown up?”
“Not from what I’ve heard.”
“Booth Graither had never borrowed jewelry before?”
“First time,” said Bjornsen. “What I figure is, that last runaway he was hoping to stay clear of home for good, wanted a bigger nut to operate on.”
“Was there any special reason for his coming to California?”
“Nothing the Chicago agency men knew of,” said Bjornsen. “Maybe he knew he was going to die. That’s what most of the old farts around here came for, to die in the sunshine.”
